The Gate of Ivory

By Lewis E. Birdseye

GATE OF IVORY is a novel part one of a two volume series, the second work called GATE OF HORN that could easily appear in tomorrows New York Times as a front-page news story. It deals with events we read about every day and watch talking heads spout plumes of verbiage nightly concerning the losing battle current governments all over the world are fighting against the pernicious appeal of dangerous and illicit drugs and the pervasive presence and growing power of demagogic right-wing idealogues who mask their plans for complete control of business and government and the citizenry with New Speak rhetoric about freedom and liberty. It presents the reader as well with a small group of people who are unwittingly and unwillingly brought face to face with these potentially catastrophic situations and made to realize that their actions alone may be all that can return the world to sanity and at least a measure of safety. For the characters in the novels theirs is an epic struggle, the means at their disposal no more than intelligence, courage, and the realization that they have no choice but to act, and act well. Their task is clearly beyond their ability. But they act nevertheless and in their actions tell the reader a little about life lived with value and excellence at its center.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499054576

Lewis E. Birdseye

Lewis E. Birdseye earned a PhD from Columbia and has been an educator for much of his life. In addition, he has worked as a high-rise construction worker, a professional river guide on the Chatooga River, has run fifteen marathons and several ultra marathons, and has toured by bicycle much of Europe—from above the Arctic Circle in Norway to the islands of the Aegean Sea. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, with his hospitalist wife, and together they tend to their organic garden. He is the author of five works of fiction: Vastation, The Unsubdued Forest, In My Beginning, The Gate of Ivory, and The Gate of Horn. His lifelong wish has been to be a poet or a river otter living on a wild and scenic river far from the madding crowd.

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Copyright © 2014 by Lewis E. Birdseye.

Cover photo by Michael Farruggia Where the Volcano Meets the Lake

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4990-5458-3

                eBook          978-1-4990-5457-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Cover Photo by Michael Farruggia

Rev. date: 09/30/2014

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Dreams are hard to unravel, wayward drifting things –

not all we glimpse in them will come to pass… .

Two gates there are for our evanescent dreams,

one is made of ivory, the other made of horn.

Those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved

are will-o’-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit.

The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn

are fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them.

HOMER, THE ODYSSEY, BOOK 19, LINES 631-638

Robert Fagles, translator

CHAPTER ONE

Rarely, if ever, do ordinary people have adventures. They have their share of accidents and on occasion an unusual or even bizarre event will occur in their lives, but it simply is not the lot of common mortals to experience an undertaking in which fortune, chance, or luck permits them to act boldly, take great risks, and be in real peril. Life is the great adventure, moralists are fond of saying, but life more often than not is merely, for most of us, a rather tedious repetition of activities the purpose of which we rarely take time to fathom and which have on us the cumulative effect of leaving us permanently desensitized to the possibility that life may indeed have, or offer, a multiplicity of meanings. To put it another way, we are bored by and with life. Which is why adventure sells so well in bookstores and in the movie theaters. Willingly, happily, suspending our disbelief, we lose ourselves in the lives of adventurers, aggrandizing our lives with events from theirs, until sufficiently satisfied, we close the book, leave the theater, and return, content, to the ordinary round of our ordinary lives. This is a curious thing, that our lives should be so dull, for the very word adventure tells us that it is the proper activity of our lives. It comes, in a fairly direct route, from the future participle of the Latin verb advenire, which means to arrive. By the time it began to appear fairly commonly in Middle English, sometime in the thirteenth century, it had come to mean something like what must happen, the notion being that life is, or is meant to be, adventure, and adventure is what happens in life. Advenire also yielded the word Advent, not only the coming of Christ into the world, but the idea that things come into place, arrive, happen – those things being adventures.

But time and chance happen to words as well as people, and adventure has become in the mechanized, computerized, homogenized days of the modern era one more commodity, a genre, to be experienced, consumed, at our leisure, ourselves resting from our jobs, which we hate, but could not imagine living without – and which are, of course, totally without adventure. Or so Nickolas Edwards would have thought or said had he been talking to his students in one of his classrooms in the university where he taught, and loved saying he hated to do so. His life, of course was well removed from even the possibility of adventure. For real and proper academics the life of the mind is the only one that counts.

For that reason it was indeed curious that three days before Christmas break was to begin, Nickolas awoke experiencing a feeling he had not had for so long that he could not remember the last time he’d had it. He was excited; he was genuinely looking forward to a vacation he’d planned to be unlike any he had ever had before. He couldn’t wait for the next couple of days to pass, to board the plane and be on his way to Miami and then to San Jose, Costa Rica, a city which up until a few weeks before he wasn’t sure he’d even heard of, and which if he had, had certainly never expected to visit.

Eminently a practical man, Nickolas had realized that in order to remain on the faculty of Emory University, a small pulse of prideful academe beating only slightly out of tune with the larger more powerful throb of Atlanta, he had to give evidence of being a productive scholar. Consequently he had during his first five years of teaching Modern Literature at Emory written half a dozen papers which he’d had the good fortune to have published and which, more importantly, had been well received by the recognized experts in his field. He’d been given tenure after three years in the department, earlier than anyone ever before him, and was regarded by his department chairman, Raoul Buntler, a balding, slightly rotund man, nearing retirement age, as a strong candidate for the chairmanship when it opened. He was, and had reason to be, content with his life and with the direction he had, he was sure, quite consciously set it on.

The trip he was about to take was a perfect example of this. Several weeks before he had received a small packet of books from a publishing house he wasn’t sure he had ever heard of. One of the perks of his job was that he frequently was sent books by publishers, hoping that he would adopt them for one of his courses or at least recommend them to students and other scholars. They were his to keep and as a consequence of this practice he had built up an impressive library of books many of which he hadn’t even taken the time to open. With but a few moments to spare before his next class, he had opened the slim package, planning to shelve the volumes according to his latest cataloging scheme, by color. Author and category had proven too tiresome a system to maintain; it required too much thought, and he’d given up size as a method after he’d found himself shelving the prurient confessions of Henry Miller next to the pious ones of St. Augustine.

The name Conrad jumped out at him from one of the three books in the package, and without glancing at the others, or even checking the author’s or editor’s name of the one he picked up, he had hastily, almost greedily, opened it and begun to read. It was a collection of Joseph Conrad’s letters, and for the next 45 minutes he had happily immersed himself in the life of the Polish seaman, forgetting entirely about his class. Nickolas’s closest association to adventure had been the novels of Conrad. He had fallen in love with his sea tales as an adolescent, spending the hours other boys his age used to play baseball or football to read about the Far East, the Malay Archipelago, acts of courage and desperation at sea, and in places wonderfully foreign and exotic. His interest became something of an obsession, and before he had graduated from high school he had read all the short stories, novellas, and novels Conrad had written. His senior thesis in college had involved the theme of isolation in the novels of Conrad, and his doctoral dissertation, written five years later, had examined existential angst in several major characters of his more important works. In short he knew Conrad and his work better than he knew the history of his own family and liked it a good deal better.

Nickolas knew that before he had begun to produce his great novels Conrad had spent years of his life as a merchant seaman, and he had always wondered what had turned this preeminent man of action, a gun-runner for the Spanish pretender, a fighter of duels, a lover of noble, if not beautiful, women, into an introspective man of words. Unconsciously there dwelt in Nickolas the smallest wisp of a hope that somehow he too might learn to emulate his hero. So it had been with great delight that he had read the letters of his hero, his secret sharer. And before he put the book down, remembering with an unpleasant shock that he had a class to teach, with even greater interest he had carefully noted a reference in what appeared to be an otherwise unimportant note Conrad had penned to his uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, to a place Nickolas had never heard of before, Cabuta.

In Cabuta my eyes were opened to many extraordinary things I had never seen or thought about before, the note had read and curiously there was only one inconsequential footnote on this strange sounding place, the location of which Nickolas hadn’t the vaguest idea. Ordinarily references to people, or things, that are even only slightly out of the range of experience of the common man are researched exhaustively by scholars and bristle with footnotes, supplying frequently the most amazingly inane kinds of information. When he read the word Cabuta, followed by an asterisk, Nickolas immediately lowered his eyes to the bottom of the page. The note merely read, A small village in Portuguese West Africa visited by Conrad on his way to Matadi in the Congo.

It was in the Congo that Conrad had learned the bitter lessons of imperialism by observing the ruthless exploitation of the Congolese by their white Belgian overlords, anxious to strip the land of its wealth. He had contracted diseases there too, tropical fevers which brought him close to his own mortality and which left him only marginally well for the rest of his life. And it was there that he had made the decision to leave the sea, though for many years afterwards Conrad had flirted with the idea of returning to it. The Congo had completed his education and sharpened the vision he was to share with his readers in the great works that were to follow. It was an important part, in some ways the most important part, Nickolas, like most Conrad scholars believed, of the writer’s life.

The note, therefore, struck him as curiously unenlightening, considering Cabuta might in fact have been the site of some event or the location of something that had shaped or at least had had an influence on the quality and power of his imagination. Certainly Conrad’s own words suggested the location had had some major importance to him.

Almost unconsciously he flipped to the bibliographical information at the front of the book, which he had skipped over in his haste to begin reading. On the title page was the reason for the note being so unhelpful, so vague. In print larger than that used for Conrad’s name, were the letters that spelled Doyle Hallford, the editor, a shabby scholar, really something of a fraud, who could be counted on in Nickolas’s judgment to do a poor job at something if he were given the chance.

Nickolas had worked with Hallford at a Modern Language Convention seminar on seminal modern writers, among them Conrad, along with Proust, Joyce, Mann, Kafka and some others he couldn’t now remember. He’d been appalled at the man’s ignorance and disgusted by his arrogance. Hallford had a ready smile, a quick and firm handshake, and invariably looked people directly in the eyes, almost as if throwing down a challenge, when he spoke with them. He was a big man, though now in his mid-forties he was beginning to run to fat, and used his size as many big men do to intimidate smaller people, standing as close to them as he could, crowding them almost, so that they could not avoid feeling small, diminished, an admission apparently to Hallford of his superiority. Nickolas, himself a tall man, an inch or two over six feet, and with the lithe, athletic build of a distance runner, which he’d been in college, noted wryly that most academics were not very large men. So Hallford had thrived, a predator, in a field of mild-mannered grazers who were content, for the most part, to nibble at small, digestible bits of scholarship. His books were numerous, broad canvasses upon which he’d expended little paint, but they had garnered him the chairmanship of a fairly respectable university. In front of Nickolas now was an example of Hallford’s flawed scholarship.

Nickolas shook his head, dismissing Hallford at the same time from his thoughts. If this Cabuta had opened Conrad’s eyes to something important about life, then it might indeed be important enough to do some research on. The date of the letter, he noted, was March 26, 1890, indeed the year that Conrad had traveled to Africa where his experiences were, in words Nickolas liked to quote to his students when they studied Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to change him from a mere animal to a fully conscious, thinking human. He was sure Cabuta was some place in Africa though for all he knew it might have been the name of some village in Poland or in Russia, so little did he trust Hallford’s note. Then again the name might have been a complete mistake, some place entirely different, altered in print unwittingly by the sloppiness of the editor, a slip of his own pen, or an error by the typesetter, of course uncorrected by the inefficient, incompetent, editorial eye of Doyle Hallford. He would, in any case, check the name in the Dictionary of Place Names, a supplement to the huge atlas at the school library next time his work took him there. He was curious but felt no sense of urgency. He certainly did not feel that he was on the edge of a discovery that was to set him on the path of real adventure. It was the comforting, eminently civilized, pulse of scholarship that moved him, not the vibrant throb, the pulse-pounding excitement of real adventure. He would write his article, if indeed he was so moved to do so, when the time came, an article that would skillfully and cleverly reveal the man’s obvious short-comings as a scholar.

When, a number of days later, the need to look at some material on a writer he was considering adding to his syllabus for the next year brought him to the library, he had almost forgotten Cabuta and the brief surge of interest it had generated in him. He might have forgotten it completely, in fact, had he not, as he was making his way out of the main catalogue room, the information he had come for entered neatly into his notebook, almost run into the large, magisterial form of Doyle Hallford, deep in conversation with Raoul Buntler who had his hand resting on Hallford’s shoulder and who was regarding him with a fond, almost avuncular, smile.

Nickolas masked his surprise at seeing the two men together – Hallford’s school, Harvey Mudd, after all was 3,000 miles distant –with a cordial hello to Buntler and a firm handshake. As he nodded to Hallford and tentatively shook his outthrust hand, he noticed that Buntler suddenly looked a bit uncomfortable. To hide what appeared to be embarrassment, Buntler ducked his head and coughed to one side discretely. Hallford retained Nickolas’s hand and, looking steadily into his eyes, the challenge unquestioned and unaccepted, said a bit too heartily to be sincere, It’s going to be a great pleasure working with you again.

The silence that followed, Hallford’s smile showing his strong, white teeth, any one of which, Nickolas felt, might serve a jungle animal well, was broken by Raoul’s explanation.

Yes, he said, regaining his composure, I’ve decided to retire at the end of the year, and I’ve been talking to Doyle about the chairmanship. I’m delighted to say he’s keen on the idea. Of course the final decision is up to the faculty senate, which meets, you know, some time in late January; but with a man of Doyle’s reputation and fine credentials, I can’t imagine there’ll be any problem.

He looked at Nickolas and smiled a bit defensively.

I’m sure, he added, his eyes locking on Nickolas’s for less than a second, you’re as delighted as I am.

Nickolas was, however, too shocked to do more than nod. He realized in an instant that he had indeed wanted the chairmanship of the department, had expected it, and felt profoundly betrayed by Raoul, whose gaze seemed to be assessing him, attempting, he felt, to determine whether the news had converted Nickolas into an enemy.

Just as quickly as his desire for the chairmanship had become known to him, a plan formed in Nickolas’s mind to regain a chance for it and at the same time to expose Hallford, eliminating him thereby from consideration. He would prove the sloppiness of Hallford’s scholarship: Cabuta, he was sure, was the place to start. But first he would have to disarm the doubt and suspicion of the two men standing before him, show them that he felt no rancor, that he was indeed a comfortable kind of scholar to work with. The wrong word to the faculty senate from Raoul at this point, before he had a chance to shape his case against Hallford, might mean he would never get a chance to present it. The men on the senate, many of them good friends of his, were not malicious, but they valued loyalty and would no doubt regard a negative sign from Nickolas at this time as a sign of professional jealousy, disloyalty in the academic world that was not to be tolerated.

The smile that spread across his face felt awkward, but he was sure it would be sufficient to check any concern either Raoul or Hallford might feel about him. That and a renewed firmness to the hand that Hallford still retained and a manly pat on the shoulder with the other hand for Raoul.

Delighted, indeed, he grinned, only slightly baring his teeth. It will be good to have another man in the department interested in the Moderns, and one who’s done such fine work.

Nickolas suppressed a laugh at his lie. Hallford nodded and bowed his head in acknowledgment.

In the brief exchange of small talk that followed, mostly about the weather and Hallford’s plane flight from California, Nickolas noted that Raoul’s concern seemed to have abated. Hallford, unconscious to everything but his own considerable presence, of course had detected nothing untoward in Nickolas’s behavior and smiled at him in a distant, vaguely paternalistic fashion, already in his mind the chairman. Minutes later, when Nickolas found himself alone again, he headed directly for the map room, Cabuta his destination.

Several hours later, dusty from the long-unused volumes he had poured over and a bit drawn from squinting at impossibly fine print, he emerged into the bright warmth of a late autumn day in Atlanta with a wide and genuine grin on his face. I’ve got the bastard, he said, passing through the doors and by a startled coed, who looked at him, after carefully checking with a perfectly manicured hand the shape and tightness of her perfectly curled hair, with mild alarm and unconscious disdain. He was obviously one of those who read books and actually allowed themselves to be disturbed by them. The perfect Emory coed, she hurried off to her date, but not so quickly that she might perspire and put to ruin the hours she had spent preparing herself to be seen.

What Nickolas had found had excited him for two reasons. He was quite sure he had ample proof to demonstrate that Hallford was a poor scholar, clearly unfit for the chairmanship, and equally positive he had uncovered a clue that might help to explain some of the particular genius of what Nickolas considered Conrad’s greatest novel, the only work of his set in the Americas, Nostromo. For several years he had wanted to examine the work at length, to reveal to the critical reader its full depth and breadth. He thought of it as an almost prophetic piece that made clear, in Nickolas’s judgment, all the pitfalls of the twentieth century and explained as well why man had so blindly fallen into all of them. He had lacked an entry point into the work, however, and now felt fully confident that he had what had been missing, Cabuya, not Cabuta.

In the whole of Africa there was only one Cabuta, located in what in Conrad’s day was known as Portuguese West Africa, today called Angola. It is an obscure village nearly 150 miles from the port city of Luanda. However it is nearly 300 miles from Boma, at the mouth of the Congo River, where Conrad disembarked from the Ville de France, the ship that had carried him from Bordeaux, and on which he had sailed down the coast of Africa, visiting such places as Gran’ Bassan and Little Popo. After an hour or two of frustrating search through ancient Atlases and obscure entries in long out of date geographical journals, Nickolas had come to the conclusion that those 300 miles represented an almost impassable barrier, 300 miles on a direct line from Boma to Cabuta, but which would have involved perhaps as many as 500 in real traveling distance, considering topography, a distance that would have required months and months at that time to traverse. Besides, there was no reason on earth for Conrad to have visited Cabuta, nor would he have had in all likelihood permission to have entered the area, the Portuguese at that time, he discovered, being on not particularly friendly terms with the Belgians who controlled the Congo; which of course was Conrad’s destination in the first place. It seemed on the face of it that Conrad had probably never visited Cabuta. But there was still the matter of the reference in the letter, which did specifically mention a place called Cabuta. There was a problem, an error somewhere, and Nickolas was sure it was not to be traced to Conrad. He had Hallford, had him in a trap, but he hadn’t yet the key to locking it.

When he’d pulled out the letter to read it for perhaps the twentieth time since he’d entered the map room, he’d been carrying a copy in his brief case for several days, he suddenly gasped. He felt short of breath, dizzy almost, and began to shake. He dropped the letter on the table and jumped to his feet, almost overturning his chair and practically terrifying the only other person who occupied the room with him, a rather fossilized looking old man who had been sunk deep in a scholarly stupor, his face only inches from an opened book of which, Nickolas noted more than once, he hadn’t turned a page in several hours.

That’s it, Nickolas hissed loudly, observing some degree of propriety, though nevertheless adding considerably to the old man’s concern. He shot an imploring look at Nickolas, begging him for silence and at the same time for mercy. The answer, the key, was right in front of Nickolas – on the letter, the date March 26, 1890.

He’s mine, he gloated, silently, in deference to the old man, the smile on his face intended to disarm his fear, but which flashed forth so feral a delight that the fossil buried his head more deeply into his book, apparently fearing for the very worst.

Scholars pride themselves on their ability to unearth the obscure fact; it is the obvious fact that frequently takes a bit longer to see and understand. In the early part of 1890 Conrad, grown weary with his search in England and on the continent for a ship to command, had finally grown desperate enough for employment to seek out a distant relative, his Aunt Marguerite Poradowski, and she had put him in touch with people who secured for him the position as captain of a river steamer on the Congo. Conrad had left for Africa in the spring of 1890, but he hadn’t arrived until May. The first letters he wrote back to friends and relatives in Europe were sent from Sierra Leone, over a thousand sea miles and several hundred land miles from Cabuta. And the dates of all of those letters were from the month of May. Conrad arrived in Matadi, the highest navigable point on the Congo for an ocean-going vessel, on June 13, 1890. It was a simple piece of observation and deduction. Conrad simply couldn’t have been in Cabuta on or before March 26, 1890.

Either Hallford had the date and the chronology of the letter wrong, or the name Cabuta was wrong, or the letter was a forgery. Any one of these possibilities would be enough, Nickolas felt, to cause a faculty committee to give Hallford a very careful examination, one which, Nickolas was even more convinced, he could not possibly pass.

Another matter about the letter bothered Nickolas, and before he left the library he intended to resolve it if he could. Ordinarily scholars are very fastidious people, fussing over details, getting their facts straight, insisting on proper form and protocol, positively Teutonic, Nickolas often thought, in making sure things were as they should be before publication took place. Nickolas respected that compulsiveness and exhibited his share of it while doing his own research. It was for him a foregone conclusion that Hallford had no more than the dilettante’s interest in scholarship – hence the error he had found – but what of the general editor of the publishing firm which had put out the volume of letters? Editors, in Nickolas’s experience, were genuinely fanatical about details – facts, dates, places, names – so attentive to ensuring their correctness that Nickolas often wondered, only partially in jest, whether they all shared in common some terrible, traumatizing toilet-training experience that had left them marked for life, perpetual compulsive anal retentives, desperate to make the world a neater, cleaner, more orderly place. In any case, why hadn’t the general editor of Hallford’s publishing firm caught the error?

The fact that other scholars hadn’t didn’t surprise him. The great surge of scholarly interest in the Polish seaman-turned-British novelist had peaked in the 70’s, a time when dozens of dissertations on Conrad were being ground out each year by enthusiastic young academics in both major and minor universities. He wasn’t a hot item any more and hence it was likely that the book had not had thus far too many readers. Even Nickolas, who prided himself on possessing a sharp eye for errors, hadn’t noticed the mistake in the date. But the general editor should have, and Nickolas intended to find out why. A quick trip to the office of the university press, located a floor below the map room, gave Nickolas the answer.

The general editor of Emory University Press, Mark Manning, had been a good friend of his for several years. A former member of the English department, he had shared a faculty office with him during Nickolas’s first year at Emory. Twenty years his senior and possessed of a keen, dry wit, Mark had taken Nickolas under his wing and had made that first year, often an awkward one for new scholars, pleasant and interesting with his insights into the workings of the department and into the foibles of each of its members. Wishing to disprove, as he told Nickolas, the truth of Aldous Huxley’s assertion, that teaching is the last refuge of feeble wits possessed of a classical education, he had left teaching, fled from it, in his own words, at the end of that first year to take the job of acquisitions editor of the press. His wit had apparently served him well, for only a couple of years later he had become general editor. Dropping in to see Mark was always a pleasant experience for Nickolas. He genuinely liked him, his humor, his vitality, and always left his office having learned something he hadn’t known before, Mark Manning being a man of great and general knowledge.

He found Mark in his office, bent over a manuscript, a nub of a red pencil in his right hand. He looked up and smiled as Nickolas walked into his office without knocking, a privilege he extended to very few people. Mark was a tall man, broad-shouldered and powerfully built. He looked as if he might be more comfortable ensconced in the chair of the school’s athletic director, or drawing X’s and O’s on a chalkboard in a steamy locker room, but the squint in his eye had come not from watching the flight of a perfectly thrown spiral, but from hours spent with manuscripts dealing with the most abstruse and arcane subjects imaginable.

There’s nothing to be surprised at, Mark had smiled at him wryly from behind his desk, after Nickolas had explained to him the matter that had brought him into the office.

Armageddon Press hired Hallford as editorial advisor a couple of years ago. They offered me the job, for a lot more money than I’m making here, I might add, but they have a reputation for slip-shod work, weak scholarship, sloppy editorial practices, that sort of thing. But they pay big money, and they spread it around the right kinds of people, so nobody complains much about their work. Armageddon was founded, rumor has it, by some Texas billionaire who never got beyond third grade. Though no one knows a thing about him, tales are told about how the man made his money wildcatting in Venezuela and Africa. The press, which he gave to a small fundamentalist college in West Texas near the community of Possum Kingdom, a place called Possum Christian College, was his way to get respectable. They do a lot of wacko Bible research. Noah’s ark kind of stuff, finding pieces of it in unlikely places. Last I heard they’d unearthed one of its timbers in downtown Waco. Sold it to a contractor who put up a Piggly Wiggly on the site. It’s on display right next to the canned hams, I believe.

Nickolas laughed out loud, amused as always by his friend’s wit, though this time he suspected there was more than a trace of truth in what Mark had said. Nickolas knew that Possum Christian also published the journal THE RIGHT WAY, an instrument of the religious right that made Pat Robertson and his crew look like liberal fellow travelers, but he’d never given the school or its activities much thought. The world was filled with strange people who held even stranger beliefs. That was as much thought as he cared to give to that matter. A much more important piece of business had brought him to Mark’s office, and he listened carefully to what he had to say as his friend returned to the subject of Hallford’s editorial skills.

It’s Hallford’s responsibility, Mark resumed, a faint smile playing at the edge of his lips, to oversee such matters as the veracity or authenticity of what gets published. However, since the time Hallford took over, Armageddon’s reputation has been sinking steadily, at least among us pressman. It’s mostly little things, dates, names, places, the sort of thing you picked up on, the sort of thing scholars are supposed to be interested in. And their editors. I suspect the only person who had editorial control over Hallford’s book was Hallford himself – and when you put a poor scholar together with a bad editor, there are going to be problems. But you know, Nickolas, Mark added, looking at the pile of papers on his desk, manuscripts which bore on their open pages the visible marks of his careful editing, "the bastard’s so well connected, he knows so many of the right people, that none of the mistakes he makes, and some of those gaffes are whoppers, seem to have any negative affect on him.

"Last year, for example, he submitted a monograph to us that purported to prove that James Joyce’s wife, Norah Barnacle, had really written Finnegans Wake, Joyce being too blind by then to write. He also argued, really tipping his hand as to his literary taste and sensibility, that Norah had to be the writer, because, as he put it, ‘only an unlettered Irish peasant could write such drivel.’ He told me that he had access to private, unpublished letters from Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses for Joyce in Paris in 1925, to prove his contention. Of course he wouldn’t produce the documents, couldn’t he said, because the people who owned them wouldn’t release them for publication. Buntler put a lot of pressure on me to publish the work. ‘Think of the publicity it will bring to the press,’ he said, but I can well do without that kind of publicity, or publicity, damn it, of any kind. Jesus, we’re running a press here, a scholar’s press, not a public relations firm. In any case, I fought Buntler, rejected the manuscript, and consequently made a few enemies. Damned small price to pay. But the man does have powerful friends. I even received some anonymous threatening letters, ‘Publish Hallford’s work, if you know what’s good for you,’ that sort of thing. Last I heard Columbia was looking at it. They used to be a Joyce factory. Maybe they’ll publish it as a joke."

Turning then to the matter that had brought Nickolas to see him, Mark shot him a quizzical look. Cabuta, you say. Only one such place in Africa, you say. Hmm. Did it ever occur to you, he began to ask, reaching for a large desk atlas which apparently doubled as a food tray, its brown book jacket littered with crumbs and apple cores, that there might be more than one Cabuta in the world?

Nickolas mumbled in embarrassment that the idea hadn’t occurred to him, kicking himself mentally for again missing the obvious. He watched as Mark expertly checked the index, mumbling inaudibly to himself. All that Nickolas could make out was something that sounded like One Cabuta, one Cabuta, as if Mark were making up some kind of nursery rhyme. His finger suddenly stopped moving down the list of names and he tapped what he had found, a grin spreading itself over his face. He then flipped the book open to the map section and slid it across the desk to Nickolas. Spread across two pages was the map of Central America.

Nine point thirty six north latitude by eighty five point zero six west longitude, was all Mark said to Nickolas.

And there it was, CABUYA, at the mouth of the Golfo de Nicoya in the province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica.

I don’t know that much about Conrad, Mark added, looking faintly pleased with himself at the ease with which he’d apparently solved the riddle that had perplexed Nickolas, but I do remember that he made at least one sailing voyage to South America as a young man. And I certainly know that it wouldn’t be hard for someone as sloppy as Hallford, so little concerned with fact, to confuse Cabuta with Cabuya.

For a moment Nickolas stared at the tiny point on the map, feeling positively light-headed. The first sentence of the work he knew he had to write began to form in his head, "Contrary to what scholars have believed about the setting for Conrad’s great novel, Nostromo, it can now be stated definitively that the proper location for the book is Costa Rica, more specifically Cabuya in the province of Guanacaste." Not only would he blow Hallford out of the water, sink him without a struggle, in a couple of months he’d have an article, perhaps a book, that would make him justifiably the proper candidate for Buntler’s job. He reached across the desk and clasped Mark’s hand warmly.

It all makes so much sense now, he smiled at his friend.

The look Mark shot back at him, however, had none of Nickolas’s enthusiasm.

I don’t know what the hell Cabuya might mean to you, Mark said, but you’re welcome to it. Just be careful, he added, rising, indicating that he’d spent enough time with Nickolas and now had to return to his work. Hallford may be an egotistical son of a bitch, but he’s not stupid. If he thinks you’re coming after him, he’ll do all he can to get you first.

Sitting down again as Nickolas, feeling almost dizzy with joy, practically danced toward the door of Mark’s office, he shook his head and said, looking straight at him, if you guys ever learned how to think as well as you can talk, I’d be in danger of losing my job. That’s not likely to happen, though, is it.

Nickolas smiled all the way down the stairs, which he took two at a time. It was that wolfish grin as well as the words he had spoken that had so startled the coed as he had exited the library. He’d rarely in his life felt so good, so full of power. He intended to use that power to destroy Doyle Hallford.

The three weeks that followed afforded Nickolas barely enough time to organize the strategy that would discredit Hallford and launch his own study of Nostromo. It had always intrigued Nickolas that Conrad had chosen South America as the setting for Nostromo. In fact it had never really made sense to him, since from what was known about Conrad everything formative in his life had occurred either in Europe or in the more exotic waters of the Eastern world. It was well known, of course, that Conrad had voyaged, as an able-bodied seaman, several times to South America between 1874 and 1878, but beyond glancing at the coast line of Venezuela, the location most scholars (for no reason Nickolas had ever felt comfortable with) assumed served as the setting for Nostromo, Conrad apparently did nothing of any real importance there. But the reference to Cabuya, which Nickolas alone among the world’s Conrad scholars now understood, made it clear that something significant had happened to the young Polish seaman in a tiny Central American port that had had a special, shaping effect on his life. A trip to Costa Rica was, therefore, clearly essential. He intended to compare the topography of Cabuya and the area around it to Conrad’s descriptions of Costaguana, the curious fictional name he had given to the province the book is set in. He was sure he would find remarkable and significant similarities. He also intended to scrupulously examine all the public records in the port office to check the names of all the ships that had entered for any amount of time between 1874 and 1878. In addition to bills of lading, some port registries kept records of ship’s crews, largely so that citizens of those towns, lodging complaints against sailors whose ships had already left port, could receive some redress from the law. None of that research of course could be done by mail or phone. The incompetence of ordinary minor bureaucrats everywhere is astonishing. In Latin American countries he knew it would be impenetrable. He would himself have to turn the pages, and would need to be there to bribe the proper officials to gain the right to do so. It would, however, be a small price in labor to pay for the the delight he’d feel when he saw Conrad’s name on the registry of some long-forgotten sailing ship. And no one would be able to see Cabuya the way he could.

For Nickolas Cabuya would be like one of those children’s anatomy texts, with organ systems and bones printed on layers of acetate that you lift up to see what’s underneath. Knowing Nostromo as well as he did, he would be able to lift the current houses and streets and parks piece by piece to see beneath them Conrad’s country. And if he looked hard enough he might discover as well what it was in Costa Rica, in the port of Cabuya, that had opened Conrad’s eyes to things he’d never before considered. In the next few days, he promised himself, he’d get all the books about Costa Rica he could lay his hands on and begin learning about the tiny country that up till now he couldn’t ever remember having given a moment of serious reflection to. And there was also the matter of the letters he needed to secure, all the letters Conrad had written to his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, including the one he had found in Hallford’s book. There would be nothing shabby about his research. He would scour all of those letters, searching for what Hallford hadn’t been able, or hadn’t taken the time, to see, what it was in Cabuya that had impacted Conrad’s life.

The problem was, however, that most of these letters were housed in special collections in half a dozen universities in the United States and Great Britain. Some of them, in fact, he knew were in Poland and a small collection had been tucked away in an archive in Moscow. Getting them copied and sent to him, he decided, was a matter he would delegate to Mark. He’d promise him a lengthy note of thanks in the introduction to his book, usually payment enough for most academics when they were willing to help out on a project.

After his morning class the next day, therefore, Nickolas headed again for the library to see Mark. As he made his way across the campus, noting with approval how lovely it looked without students, many of them having left to start their Christmas break early, he felt particularly elated. His lecture had gone well, though he couldn’t remember a thing he’d said, the sun was shining, and his plan was progressing.

Entering the library, he skipped past the elevator, taking the three flights of stairs to Mark’s office two steps at a time. His mood lasted only for a moment or two, however, as Mark brought him quickly and not at all gently back to reality.

After Nickolas had explained what he intended to do, particularly how he hoped his actions would affect Hallford, Mark had looked a bit dubious and had questioned Nickolas at some length about the nature of his research. Only after he had been convinced that what he was going to do for Nickolas was not part of a plot specifically designed to discredit Hallford would he agree to help.

I don’t mind legitimate research sinking that fraudulent bastard, he frowned at Nickolas, but I do draw the line at gratuitous attacks. I like my job, and I’d like to keep it for a few more years.

When Nickolas looked at Mark questioningly, his friend nodded with his head at a copy of the NEW YORK TIMES on the corner of his desk. I take it you didn’t read this morning’s paper. Look at it.

Nickolas picked up the paper, already folded open to the literary section and ran his eyes over the page. It wasn’t hard to find what Mark was referring to. Heavy yellow marking scored the column entitled, Scholarly World Turned On Its Ear.

The story that followed told how Possum Christian College had challenged the traditional halls of academe by publishing a shocking study proving that James Joyce had not written Finnegans Wake. In an unprecedented move, Possum Christian had taken the responsibility to publish the work, citing no author for it, crediting instead the devoted and dedicated work of a handful of untiring scholars whose only interest in the project was that truth be served. These scholars chose, according to the story, to be known collectively by the name ARETE, the Greek word for excellence, abjuring the common practice of attaching their names to their work. Instead, declaring it a more truly democratic practice, giving credit to the demos, the people whose knowledge and sensibilities they represented, they had simply put the names of the schools where they taught. Prominent among them was Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, and Possum Christian. Shaking his head in disbelief at what he was reading, Nickolas noted that these putative scholars had scoured all the Joyce archives for all the work reputed to be his. They’d collected all the letters he had ever written, compiled even the marginalia in books that were known to be his. They’d submitted all this writing, minus of course Finnegans Wake, to rigorous computer analysis. They’d done the same for the few extant pieces of writing of Norah Barnacle, Joyce’s wife. They then did an exhaustive computer analysis of Finnegans Wake and compared the results to their findings for Joyce and Norah. The evidence was clear and irrefutable: it was Norah who had written the book. What the computer had analyzed, irrefutably, of course, was not mentioned, the simple fact that a computer was involved, was indeed the sole tool of investigation, proof in itself that objective truth had been arrived at.

The team of scholars, the article went on to say, was so pleased with their results they planned to examine Ulysses in the same manner, this time not to prove Norah the authoress, but one of Joyce’s Berlitz language pupils, a demented young Czech, one G. Samsa, who had spent the last twenty years of his life in a mental institution in Trieste, swearing alternately that he was James Joyce, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, and George Sand. They had already collected over 2,000 of his letters and were about to submit them to computer investigation. Unfortunately, the article added, many of them were in a language unknown to any human being.

Nickolas put the newspaper down and looked at Mark. This is absurd! It’s laughable.

Keep reading, Mark replied, no trace of a smile on his face. The really interesting part is on the next page.

Nickolas turned the page, skimming details his mind simply could not take seriously. When asked how their system worked, William Sessions, the spokesman for the Possum Christian group had said, "Words are less important than letter placement. The number of times an N is placed next to a T, for example, can tell you a great deal about a writer, about what he means. With our system of analysis, not only can we verify authorship, but we can reduce any piece of writing to simple terms for the ordinary reader. We’ve done a preliminary study of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and we can say with some confidence, after studying the ‘IA’ combination and the predominance of ‘TS’ that the play’s essential meaning is that married love is best and that people are happiest when they obey authority. It’s only a beginning, but when we get a bit more expert we’ll try something truly challenging, like Hamlet. I’m quite sure we can bring the play into line with what people can handle. We’re very excited, especially since we’re really just beginning."

My God, Nickolas exploded, this is madness.

Madness, to be sure, Mark agreed, but the method behind it is even more mad, and dangerous.

How can such manifest drivel be dangerous? protested Nickolas. You’ve got to be joking. This whole thing is a joke, isn’t it? You had this thing, here Nickolas shook the newspaper at Mark, printed at the press. Jesus, you had me going for a minute.

I only wish I could say you were right, Nickolas, Mark replied, a look on his face his friend had never seen before. Anger and worry were written all over it, and something else Nickolas at first couldn’t place, something that he saw at exam time on the face of his weaker students when they opened the exam booklet and realized they couldn’t answer the question. It was fear. Mark was frightened of something.

What in God’s name are you talking about, Mark? What does all this mean?

I’m not sure, but I’ve got an idea. Hold on a second. Mark rose from his desk and walked quickly to the entrance of his office. He stepped out into the hall, looking in both directions to see if anyone were loitering outside. When he reentered, he carefully closed the door behind him and locked it.

I don’t know if this is necessary, but I think it best to take no chances from now on.

Christ Almighty, man, Nickolas exploded, rising to his feet to face Mark, what in hell is going on? You’re acting as if we’re involved in some kind of conspiracy to commit a crime. All I’m asking you to do is call some of your friends to fax the Conrad correspondence in their collection. I don’t know what all this, Nickolas shook the paper, means, and I don’t care. Just get in touch with your friends, or if you won’t, I will. I need some fresh air. Nickolas attempted to brush by his friend, but Mark grabbed his arm tightly and steered him back to his chair.

Sit down, Nickolas, and listen to what I have to say. I think this does involve you, though as yet only indirectly. When I’m finished, you’ll understand why I checked the door.

Nickolas sat down again, rubbing his arm. Mark’s grip had been like steel. It conveyed an urgency and degree of seriousness his words only hinted at. Looking carefully at him, Nickolas noted tiny lines between Mark’s eyes he’d never noticed before, as if he’d begun recently to squint a lot or contract his brows in serious thought. And there were beads of sweat on his forehead. Feeling a curious pang in the pit of his stomach, a sensation he couldn’t then explain but which soon he would learn to recognize as the apprehension which yields rapidly to genuine fear, he sat back and listened to what Mark began to say.

What is the motive force, he began, looking towards Nickolas, but not at him, focusing instead on a spot a foot or two above and beyond his head, behind a university? He paused a moment, but Nickolas knew he wasn’t expected to answer.

It’s commitment, a deep, abiding commitment, to ever higher levels of understanding, to knowledge, to wisdom, and above all to truth. The best schools have never lost sight of that commitment; through the years they have housed and produced scholars who have kept faith with it and labored to spread it. It’s never been an easy job, nor has it been one that many people have taken any time to understand. What teacher hasn’t heard from his students the question, ‘If you’re so smart, how come you aren’t rich?’ Or the equally ill informed comment, ‘Those who can do, those who can’t teach’? Words like these are the reflection of a perception of the university and its function. In the eyes of many people, most I sometimes think, the university is no more than a training school, one that confers upon its students a special opportunity, and a right, certified by the diploma, to take advantage of others who have not been certified in the same fashion. In other words, they see the university as a place to learn the skills that will permit them to be successful in business, in the commercial world, usually by outsmarting other people. A diploma is a ticket to make money. Beauty and truth and justice and ideas, what you and I value most, somehow get overlooked in the educational process most people experience, an education by reduction, I must say. Most schools have become these reduction mills, grinding out graduates with diplomas stamped ‘BUSINESS,’ or PRE-something or other that has little to do with what traditional education has meant. All this bickering about what it has become fashionable to call ‘DWEM’s,’ Dead White European Males, is part of the reductive process. Plato, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Cervantes, Mozart, Rembrandt, all nothing more, in modern parlance than DWEM’s. And DWEM’s, so they say, have got to go, replaced by material that is more relevant, more meaningful to the students’ needs. Which means replaced by some business course or by some remedial-skill course that will make students able to count their money with fewer mistakes. My God, what could be more relevant to them than life, which is what Shakespeare and Goethe and Dante are all about?

Mark paused a moment, and looked squarely at Nickolas. With alarm he noted that there were tears in Mark’s eyes.

Christ, I’m sorry Nickolas. What’s going on has really got me upset. I didn’t mean to ride the damned horse so hard.

What Mark was referring to was his particular hobby, the history of education. He was an expert on the development of the Western University, having written several first-rate articles on the subject, which formed the basis of a major study he had been working on for a number of years. His research had given him the encyclopedic knowledge Nickolas often marveled at.

What I want to tell you about, Mark began again, ducking his head and rubbing his face with the back of his hand, "is something that goes beyond the natural erosive force of stupidity. Universities have been fighting for their lives ever since they were founded, always against the same people, the ones who don’t want to know anything more than what is essential to secure for themselves the most meaningless kind of success. What I’m talking about, Nickolas, is something far more threatening to the university, to education as a whole. The, shall we say, ‘materialists’ have secured for themselves, and are well served by, the vast majority of schools, of colleges and universities, third rate places, mostly state run, that rarely if ever challenge their students to think creatively or independently. I don’t like that situation, and have to laugh when one of their graduates claims to be educated. Certificated, that’s what he is, merely certificated. The great universities, places like Stanford and Princeton, Columbia and Yale, even small schools like Emory, though under a constant state of siege because of their adherence to traditional forms and practices of education, have remained essentially safe havens for scholarship, the truly educated, and those desirous of real education. The enemy has always been outside the walls, clamoring to get in, hungry for rapine and pillage. Professors, courses, books, all of them would be the victims. But the enemy has changed today, Nickolas. He’s become one of us and is attacking, subtly, oh so subtly, from within.

"You see, the very best way to bring down the university is not to burn it down, tear it down. That’s just a bit too damned obvious, wouldn’t you say? The best way is to transform it after making it helpless to resist transformation. I know I’m mixing metaphors but the university is at the moment like some kind of giant insect being stung in a dozen or more places by tiny wasps. The cumulative effect of these stings is to paralyze the insect and then the wasps lay their eggs inside it. As the larvae grow, they eat the insides of the insect, leaving the shell intact. What I’m talking about, Nickolas, is all these stupid errors in scholarship you’ve only now begun to notice but which I’ve been aware of for quite some time, but couldn’t imagine them being purposive, part of a plan to discredit scholarship by sowing seeds of doubt among scholars.

"There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t receive a manuscript with genuine and serious errors in it. I don’t mean the kind you expect from weak scholars who simply haven’t done their homework. I mean works that ‘prove’ that justifiably famous writers stole work from unknown hacks, biographies that ‘clearly demonstrate’ that major novelists and poets were child molesters and forgers and arsonists. It’s certainly true that writers and artists aren’t for the most part any better as human beings and at the business of living than anyone else, but most of them live pretty damned ordinary lives. Whatever seems eccentric to the average reader is the consequence usually of the writer having to live a pretty rotten life because he or she can’t make any money to live on.

"But these manuscript writers, it’s as if they’re working from a plan, one they’ve adopted from politicians, or I should say political advisors. If you paint enough candidates running for office with a black enough brush, eventually you’ll get people to believe that all candidates are dishonest and not to be trusted. It’s certainly worked in the electoral process in this country. I doubt if there is a single person running for any office in this country who isn’t considered dishonest, or in some way seriously flawed, by the vast majority of voters. That’s probably not too bad a thing in the political realm, but in the world of scholarship it’s almost fatal. Scholarship survives by means of a tenuous bond of faith that holds the reader to the scholar. Sever that bond and the university falls.

Do you remember what happened at Rockefeller University a couple of years ago? The faulty research, the plagiarism? And at the N.I.H., essentially the same thing? It’s happening everywhere, Nickolas, these little stings of malevolent stupidity, and the effect is that fewer people each day have the same degree of confidence in the work of all scholars. The universities look the same, they seem to be doing what they’ve always done, but they’re being paralyzed, Nickolas, rendered impotent, by errors and the doubt they’re beginning to generate. And they’re being infiltrated, Nickolas, the larvae are being inserted. Hallford here at Emory, Reggie McClelland last year at Yale, following the Yeats scandal, remember, when their press published his monograph about Yeats being a transvestite and a male prostitute? Quesenberry, who’d been chairman for God knows how long, a really brilliant scholar, had his arm bent by members of the Yale board to publish that piece and then quit because of it. McClelland came in, from some Bible-thumping school, Oral Roberts I believe. And Hallford’s got connections, you know, with Possum Christian. Before you say anything, though, look at the last page of the literary section. I’ve marked the column. Just look at it.

Nickolas was indeed about to say something, to suggest that Mark was experiencing an unhealthy bout of paranoia, that he needed rest, perhaps a vacation, but he dutifully leafed through the paper until he came to the back page. On the bottom, in the last column, was a small headline. Nickolas snapped upright in his seat as he read it.

TOM MCHANEY LET GO AS COLUMBIA PRESS HEAD. For failing to consider a study of FINNEGANS WAKE worthy of publication, the story said, Tom McHaney, for over twenty years the editor-in-chief of Columbia University Press, was being let go. No explanation was forthcoming from the administration other than the comment that All areas of scholarship need to be considered and Dr. McHaney seemed to prefer only one kind. His replacement had