Chapter Two—Professor Time Travel

Chapter Two—Professor Time Travel

The phrase reached her first as a joke, which was how most true things reached her, dressed as something not worth keeping.

She was at the reference desk on a Tuesday, covering Edith’s lunch, when a historian named Pewsey came up to renew a box of trustees’ correspondence he had been mining for a book about the university’s first century. He was a genial, overcommitted man who treated the reading room as a place to think aloud, and while Claudia filled out the renewal he told her, apropos of a closed grant file he had run into, that the institution had a long and unbroken tradition of funding nonsense and then pretending it never had. She made the noise that kept people talking, because the things people said while they thought they were making conversation were frequently more useful than the things they came to the desk to ask for.

“The best of them,” Pewsey said, “was the pharmacologist. You won’t have heard. Before your time, and they tidied it up fast. Brilliant by all accounts, and then he started telling people his compound could put a person back into a previous era. Not remember it. Not dream it. Be there.” He pushed his glasses up. “Send you to the past, bodily, for the afternoon. They cut his funding so quietly you’d think they were ashamed of having given it to him in the first place, which they were. Professor Time Travel, the graduate students called him. Still call him, the ones who know he’s down there somewhere. He never left, apparently. Just stopped being on anything.”

He took his renewed box and went back to his table, and Claudia finished out Edith’s lunch hour thinking about the phrase just stopped being on anything, which was a very precise description of a kind of death that left the body walking around.

She did not decide to look into it. That was not how it worked with her, and she would have been the last person to recognize the moment as a beginning. She simply found, over the following days, that the man Pewsey had described had taken up the small persistent space in her attention that a misfiled document took up, the low itch of a thing in the wrong place. A faculty member did not stop being on anything by accident. Somebody had unfunded him, reassigned his space, struck his unit from the rolls, and somebody else had filed the paperwork that made all of that official, and paperwork was the one thing in the world Claudia could follow in the dark.

She gave it the hours she would have given a provenance problem, which was to say she gave it more hours than it strictly deserved and enjoyed every one of them.

The university kept its administrative records in the archive she ran, which meant that the institution’s attempts to forget things passed, eventually, across her own accession tables, and she knew better than almost anyone how badly the place forgot. It did not erase. Erasing took intention and follow-through, and bureaucracies had neither past the first meeting. What they did instead was decline to connect. They closed a file here and opened a different one there and never drew the line between them, so that the truth survived in pieces that no longer knew they belonged together.

She found the rescinded grant first, because Pewsey had as good as handed it to her, a three-year award in pharmacological research terminated at the end of its first year with a reason code that meant, in the registrar’s flat dialect, that the money had been withdrawn rather than spent out. The award named a principal investigator. The name was E. Strand. She had expected to feel something at having a name, and was mildly annoyed to find that she did.

The termination itself, when she found the letter that carried it out, was a small masterpiece of a form she had read a thousand times, three sentences that rescinded three years of a man’s work without once describing what the work had been. The award was discontinued. The committee thanked Professor Strand for his service. The committee wished him well in his future endeavors, the phrase the university kept for people it had resolved no longer to have. No reason was given, because a reason could be argued with, and the institution had not wanted an argument. It had wanted the matter closed, and the surest way to close a matter was to decline, in writing, to say what the matter had been.

She could see the shape of it regardless. Behind the three polite sentences was an event the university had found embarrassing enough to spend money ending, and embarrassment, in an institution, did not come from failure. Failure was cheap and ordinary and forgiven daily. Embarrassment came from a success that had arrived in the wrong form, the result no one had authorized, the finding that could not be published without first admitting it had been paid for. She did not yet know what Strand had done. She knew only that the care taken to forget him was proportional to the size of what he had done, because a genuinely worthless thing did not need this much smoothing to disappear, and the smoothing here had been considerable.

The name took her into the space records, where a laboratory in the old pharmacology building had been reassigned that same year from Strand, E. to general storage, and then, two years later, to nothing at all, the room simply dropping out of the active inventory as the bricked rooms in the oldest buildings had, long before her time. She noted the pattern without weighting it. Rooms left the inventory for ordinary reasons, and the old pharmacology building was three-quarters condemned, kept on only because demolishing it cost more than ignoring it.

It was the personnel side that told her he was still there. A man who had truly gone would have generated the small bright flare of paperwork that departures generated, the final-salary notice and the emeritus listing and the forwarding address. Strand, E. had generated none of it. He had no emeritus standing, no current appointment, no listed office, no campus extension that the directory would admit to. He had, on paper, achieved the condition Pewsey had described with such accuracy. He had stopped being on anything, and yet nothing recorded him as having stopped being. He was the negative space in a set of records, the gap that all the surrounding documents leaned toward without naming, and Claudia had spent her whole working life learning to read exactly that, a person present only as the shape of what had closed around where he used to be.

She knew the building. She found, on a maintenance ledger that the old building still generated because somebody had to be charged for the heat it leaked, that the sub-basement of the west wing drew power on a meter the rest of the dark floors did not. It was the most expensive thing she had ever read, that meter. It was a man refusing to finish disappearing.

She told herself, on the evenings she caught herself thinking about it, that she was only finishing the trace. The notebook on the chair by her window said otherwise. It had a date at the top of its first page and almost nothing beneath the date, two weeks of evenings and a scatter of entries so thin they embarrassed her, a man who let his dog finish at a lamppost, a child who gave up a seat on the bus to no one in particular, scraps that proved her thesis and starved it in the same motion. She had set out to assemble an archive of the undocumented good and had learned in two weeks that the undocumented good was, true to its name, almost impossible to catch in the act of happening. And here, in the sub-basement of a condemned building, was a man the whole campus laughed at who claimed he could set a person down bodily in the part of the past that no record had ever reached. She did not let herself finish the thought. She did not need to. It finished itself, quietly, each time she returned to it, and what it came to was that she was going to go down there and see.

She went on a Thursday, after the archive closed, when going would cost her nothing she would have to explain.

The old pharmacology building let her in through a service door that the same maintenance ledger had told her would be unlocked, and the inside was colder than the air outside and smelled of the mineral dust of plaster left to give up slowly. The upper floors were sealed behind plywood whose notices gave dates of closure years in the past, and a clock on the first landing had stopped at an hour no longer of interest to anyone. She did not want the upper floors. She found the stairs at the back and went down past the ground level to the sub-basement, where a single corridor ran the length of the wing under a string of working lights that someone had cared enough to keep working. At the end of the corridor a door stood open a hand’s width with light coming out of it, real light, warm and electric and alive in a building the university had agreed to consider empty.

She had not planned what she would say. She had assumed that the situation would supply the words, and that her part was mainly to arrive.

The young man came out before she reached the door, fast, as though he had heard her on the stairs and meant to meet whatever was coming before it got inside, and he stopped short when he saw that the intruder was a woman in an archivist’s cardigan holding a printout, and his whole posture changed in the space of a breath from interception to apology.

“You are lost,” he said. He had an accent, Italian under careful English, and he said it kindly, offering her the exit as if it were a courtesy. “This building, it is closed. The door upstairs should not—” He stopped, because she had not moved, and looked at her again, and this time he looked properly, the way few people bothered to, taking in the printout and the cardigan and whatever was in her face, and what he saw there made him think again. “You are not lost,” he said, more quietly.

“I’m looking for Professor Strand,” Claudia said.

It was the wrong thing, or the right one, she could not tell which. There was a protectiveness in the young man’s face that she did not have a category for, one that arrived before he had decided whether she was a threat, and she filed it without understanding it. He did not ask who she was. He seemed to be doing a calculation whose terms had nothing to do with her, and reaching, reluctantly, an answer he did not like.

“He does not see people,” the young man said. “I am sorry. There is no one to see. You have the wrong—”

“I found him in the heat bill,” Claudia said.

The young man stopped.

“The sub-basement meter,” she said. “Somebody is paying to keep one corridor warm in a building that isn’t supposed to exist anymore. The rest of him is gone, the grant, the lab assignment, the directory. But not the meter. You can’t switch off a man’s heat without generating a record, and nobody generated it, so he’s still here. I followed the part nobody thought to erase.”

She was not trying to persuade him. She was simply telling him how she had come to be standing in the corridor, because he had asked, more or less, and she answered questions when they were asked of her. But she watched the answer do something to him that her name and her purpose had not, watched him hear that she had found the Professor not through the gossip that mocked him but through the one thread of evidence that the institution’s forgetting had left intact, and watched him decide, on the strength of it, to do what he had come into the corridor to prevent.

“Wait here,” he said, and went back through the door, and she heard him say something low in the lit room beyond, and a voice answer him, sharp and old and immediately suspicious, and the young man say something else, and the old voice go quiet in a way that quiet sometimes does when it has been struck from a direction it was not braced for.

The room was a laboratory that had become a person’s whole life, which is a particular thing to walk into and not the same as a laboratory.

There was equipment she had no names for, and there were books in stacks that had outgrown their shelving and become furniture, and there was a cot against the far wall with a blanket folded on it with a precision that told her the man slept here and was ashamed of it and managed the shame by making the bed like a soldier. The warmth she had read about in the ledger was real and close and came from a space heater glowing orange near the cot. And there was the Professor, on his feet behind a long bench, both hands flat on the surface of it as though he needed the bench to be sure of where he was. An old man, narrow, with a head of gray hair that had not been cut by anyone who cared about it in some time. He was looking at her with an expression she recognized because she had seen it on the faces in the Hartshorn intake photographs, the held look of a person who had learned to expect that being noticed meant being harmed.

“Roberto says you read the meter,” the Professor said. No greeting. The accent under his English was older than Roberto’s and from somewhere else, worn down by more years of speaking around it. “He says you didn’t come for the story.”

“I didn’t know there was a story,” Claudia said. “I came for the gap.”

“The gap.” He said it as if testing whether the word would hold weight. “And what is your interest in gaps, that you would come down here in the dark to stand in one.”

“I’m an archivist,” she said. “Gaps are the only part of the job that’s interesting. Anyone can describe what’s there.”

The Professor looked at her for a long moment, and she let him, because she was used to being looked at by people deciding whether to trust her with their records, and she had learned that the looking went better when you did not perform anything during it. Behind her, near the door, Roberto had not left. She was aware of him as she was aware of the space heater, a source of attention in the room keeping it warmer than it would otherwise have been, and she did not turn around.

“They send people sometimes,” the Professor said. “Not many. A journalist, years ago, who wanted me to be mad in an entertaining way and was disappointed that I was only mad in a boring one. A student with a recording device he thought I wouldn’t notice. An administrator, once, to confirm that I was not using more electricity than I was entitled to, which I was, and which I have continued to do, because they did not have the courage to put it in writing and a thing that is not in writing did not happen.” He had not moved his hands from the bench. “I assume you are one of those. I have been assuming it since Roberto came in. He thinks you are not. Roberto is young and believes that people arrive for the reasons they give.”

“What does it cost you,” Claudia said, “to find out which one I am?”

“Time,” the Professor said. “Of which, contrary to the campus’s opinion of my research, I have a finite and dwindling supply.”

It was the first joke he had made, dry and bitter and clearly old, a thing he had said before to rooms that did not laugh, and Claudia did not laugh either, but she registered it as the place where a person lived who had not yet entirely stopped being on anything, and she found she did not want him to.

“You haven’t asked me the question,” the Professor said.

“Which question.”

“The one they all ask. Within a minute, most of them. They cannot help it.” He took a beaker off a rack and set it down six inches to the left for no reason she could identify, the busywork of a man who needed his hands occupied in order to keep speaking. “They ask whether it is like a dream. They believe they are being generous when they ask it. It is the kindest word available for what they have already decided I am, and so I have learned to wait for it, because the instant a person reaches for the word dream I know that nothing I show them afterward will land, that they have filed me under the heading they carried down the stairs in their pocket, and that I am spending heat I cannot spare.”

The word had tightened his voice on its way out, and she heard it before she could name it, the specific fury of a man who has been called the same wrong thing so often that the word itself has become the injury.

“I wasn’t going to ask that,” Claudia said.

“No,” the Professor said, and the tightening released his voice as abruptly as it had seized it. “You are going to ask me what I do, in a little while, once you have satisfied yourself that I can be trusted with the asking. Nobody asks me what I do. They ask me what it is like, which is a question about them, about what they imagine they would feel. What I do is a question about the world.” The held, harmed look was still there, but underneath it a curiosity had come up, squinting at the light. “No one has asked me a question about the world in a long time.”

He said it without any self-pity, as a measurement, as he might have read a value off a dial, and that was what gave it weight. Self-pity she could have stepped around. A man who stated the size of his own isolation as a plain fact and then set it down and went on, as though it did not oblige her to do anything about it, was harder to step around, and she did not try.

She was aware, standing in the warm wreckage of his life’s work, of a thought that had been assembling itself since Pewsey said the words be there across the reference desk, and that now stood up in her fully formed and would not sit down. A man who claimed he could put a person into a past era, bodily, to witness it. Not the documented past. The whole of it, the part that had happened and left no grid behind, the ten thousand crossings a day that no one had ever been assigned to write down.

“Tell me what you actually do,” she said, “and I’ll tell you why I came, and then you can decide whether I’m an administrator. That’s a better test than looking at me.”

The Professor’s hands came off the bench at last. He straightened, by degrees, and the suspicion in his face was joined by an older look, one that had been underground so long it no longer knew how to show itself.

“Roberto,” the Professor said, without taking his eyes off her, “put the kettle on. And bring the woman a chair. She is going to be here a while, and I will not have it said that I made her stand.”

Behind her, already, Roberto was moving, and the chair arrived at the backs of her knees before she had thought to want it, set down by hands that were careful not to touch her, and she sat without thanking him because her attention was full of the old man and the impossible thing he had not yet said. Roberto stepped back toward the wall, and after a moment went to fill the kettle.

The Professor lowered himself onto a stool on his side of the bench, slowly, with the care of a man who had learned over years which of his joints to trust, and folded his hands on the wood, and waited. It occurred to her that she had not, in the end, prepared what she had come to say any more than she had prepared the rest of it, and that she would have to say it plainly or not say it.

“I catalog cruelty,” she said. “That’s the job, if you describe it honestly. The records that survive are nearly all records of harm. I’ve spent ten years describing the worst afternoons of strangers’ lives.”

“There are headings for charity,” the Professor said.

“Charity is a list of who paid.” She had not said any of it aloud before, and hearing it in the warm air of the ruined lab she did not soften it. “I went looking, in the whole language my profession built to make the past findable, for a heading I could put an ordinary kindness under, and there isn’t one. The kindness has one dark heading with nothing underneath. I want to keep the part that was never kept. And you’re standing in front of me telling me you can put a person into the place where it happened, while it was still happening.”

For a moment the Professor said nothing. When he answered he did not answer to her, but to the room, to the orange glow of the heater and the stacks of books gone to furniture and the whole warm ruined heart of what he had given his life to and been mocked for across a campus that had agreed to consider him gone.

“You hear that, Roberto,” he said. “She is not an administrator.”

And Roberto, filling the kettle at the far sink with his back to them both so that neither of them would see his face, said that yes, he had heard her, he had heard her perfectly well.