Last Semester

By Michael Johnson

Assistant Lecturer Meredith Winters is fired and almost lynched during the most violent period of the Education Revolution on campus. When the mob settles down to a more pacific form of permanent revolution, the ex-Lecturer has found shelter as a housekeeper in the employ of his friend, the world famous and widely published Nobel Prize winner, Professor Arnold Fezwig. But when his friend and patron, the aged Professor Fezwig, is coaxed by a young faculty friend into joining the Passive Action Toilet Tour (PATT), a crusade for earth friendly, highly technological and sewer disconnected toilets, Meredith faces the loss of job, home and scholarly opportunities. He must sabotage the faculty favored Toilet Revolution. But how?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669822936

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Copyright © 2022 by Michael Johnson.

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 Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 07/08/2022

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CONTENTS

Last Semester

Fourteen Years Ago

Fourteen Years Later

Three Day Notice to Pay Rent or to Quit

Last Semester

"No, no! Go back! Go back, I say. It is not time." Through the half open door of Fezwig’s bedroom Meredith could see the old man’s head, his long white hair blending with the white of the pillow. Meredith stood holding a bottle of medicine, a spoon and a glass of fruit juice. Trying not to spill the juice, he rotated his wrist just enough to check his watch. Nine minutes early. It was nine minutes short of the four-hour interval ordered by the doctor. Fezwig disliked taking his medicine. He disliked it almost as much as the disease itself. The disease meant pain, disability and a reminder of age—fairly advanced age—and so was detested by Fezwig, who had never been a valetudinarian or hypochondriac; he clung to the spirit of youth. A sense of the drama, the tragedy of his illness was apparent in his voice, his gestures, his expression. The medicine was a memento mori.

Meredith did not the relish the role of private nurse, being ordered back and forth at whim by a man who was once not exactly a peer, but at least a colleague. He acquiesced because it was now his only job opportunity. Fezwig’s face showed suffering, mainly intellectual suffering, it was true, because the bottle of codeine tablets allowed by the doctor in case of real need was pretty much untouched. The long, pale, cavalier face shook against the pillow. No. Wrinkles deepened in revulsion and disgust. No. Then Fezwig turned his face from view, closing the matter.

Professor Arnold A. Fezwig, Emeritus, of Berkeley University, Chairman of the History Department, currently on leave, as he had been for the past several years. The walls of Arnold’s study, which connected directly to his bedroom, were hung with sheepskins and awards and historic photographs. Fezwig with Adlai Stevenson, Fezwig with President Kennedy’s Secretary of Education, Fezwig with his wife, a professor of sociology. A tough young Fezwig in leather jacket just back from a trip to Moscow in 1932. Fezwig with adoring and adorable female grad students. All of the Fezwig past was present in that suffering face, now bolstered on a pillow in a room adjoining his tastefully and expensively furnished study. Fezwig was a man of history, a man who understood history, who had made history. The Fezwig doctrine of alternate valid versions to be judged by social effect had remade history departments in dozens of large universities. Tall darkwood bookshelves containing the classics, all significant contemporary work in the areas of history, politics, psychology and, of course, a complete set of hardback editions of his own prolific output, took up most of the wallspace of the study. But Fezwig also valued life, as distinct from books, the material as distinct from the merely intellectual. In his later years Fezwig had become less idealistic and more materialistic in outlook. More and more he recognized the claims of man the body and was contemptuous of the claims of man’s mind per se. His present suffering was rooted, as much as in anything else, in the idea of physical invalidity. Life is the life of the body was a current aphorism. Fezwig.

If his study was an artefact of Fezwig’s career as thinker and teacher, the living room through which Meredith passed on his way back to the kitchen was a monument to Fezwig the aesthete, the connoisseur, the collector. It was beautifully and expensively furnished. Seventeenth and eighteenth century French and English furniture, large vases from ancient Chinese dynasties, Japanese screens and swords from before Perry. Impressionist paintings. A small drawing by Picasso. A Jackson Pollock. A Brancusi covered by glass on a low table. The effect was something between a very posh hotel lobby and a museum. That was what Meredith thought. Not that he did not admire the pieces that Fezwig had brought together. He did, and envied them. But, despite Fez’s aphorism, it was a room in which you hardly dared to sit. You could not relax in it. In the whole apartment the only room that testified to demotic living was Meredith’s bedroom, with its unmade bed, its litter of wine bottles, banana peels, dirty plates and undumped ashtrays. Meredith’s was the smallest bedroom of the four, with a door that opened into the kitchen through a short hallway. It was a service bedroom.

In the kitchen, Meredith deposited Fezwig’s medicine and glass on the sink draining board. This, too, was a room closely managed for effect. The dominant motif was tubular, plastic and ultra-modern. Fezwig had bought all the latest appliances for food preparation. Tables and chairs were of metal and plastic. A breakfast nook alcove included a window that overlooked the neighboring park. The kitchen walls were pastel orange. Above the sink: an enlarged daguerreotype of Paris in the eighteen sixties. Fezwig’s kitchen. Although it was he, Meredith, who used it to produce the older man’s meals and to provide food for his frequent guests. Fezwig’s kitchen and Fezwig’s apartment. Fourteen years ago, at the beginning of their relationship, they had been roommates. Meredith, at that time Assistant Lecturer in the University department of which Fezwig was already chairman, could afford to pay his share of the rent. They had been roommates and friends, sometimes not exactly passionate lovers, then …

The current form of their relationship was unclear. It embodied elements of the second phase, that of friends, but there had been significant changes over the years. The lover phase, such as it was, had essentially decomposed. They had discussed the question at great length. Meredith was himself a person of fair verbal ability. He had been a Lecturer. But Fezwig beat all the competition out of bounds. To talk of a serious matter with Fezwig was to have it analyzed, historicized, defined, re-defined, philosophized, validated, dismissed and ultimately left hanging with the admission that language was futile. Fezwig made everything completely transparent and completely opaque at the same time. He himself admitted this tendency and explained it by the latest linguistic theories. The friends had originally shared the rent. Then, after considerably less than a year, Meredith had lost his Lectureship. He had been, in fact, fired. He blamed Fezwig. Oh yes! Fezwig had not stood by him when The Committee started its criticisms and its investigation. They had voted to terminate on the grounds that his intellect, and consequently his writings and lectures, were permeated with retrograde and insensitive, in fact frankly reactionary ideas (more properly called mere notions), and that he had attempted to impose these notions upon his students. Others acts of misbehavior were alleged. Fezwig had recalled a hundred times that he would have voted for retention of the roommate-Lecturer had he not recused himself, but explained that it would have been inappropriate, in fact unethical, for him as Chairman of the Department to work to influence Committee opinion regarding a Department member who was a personal friend and, at least to some degree, formerly involved with him in a romantic sense, even if such phrasing exaggerated the case. Conflict of interest. Academic Freedom, Departmental Autonomy. The Sanctity of Faculty Opinion.

But, no Lectureship, no income. Dismissed, Meredith could no longer afford his share of the rent of the Fezwig apartment, which could certainly not be classified as low-income housing. With great nobility Fezwig had demurred to any alteration in their arrangements. Money had validity only as part of an exploitative social and economic system, one that was now increasingly moribund (Eastern Europe, Eurasia and Southeast Asia had fallen. Latin America was restive). Forget money. Anyway, besides a six-figure salary from the University, Fezwig enjoyed a private income that derived from his comfortable family origins. There was no need to discuss money. Fez even offered a small stipend for Meredith’s personal needs. There would be no change in their relationship, forged more than a decade ago during a quick faculty romance but long decayed into insignificance. Fezwig had been barely sixty then and well preserved (hair black, cheeks taut, wiry build). He was now rather differently articulated. Disarticulated might be a more accurate description. Heroic in spirit at their first acquaintance, Fezwig continued heroic. He was a man of national professional standing who had flaunted convention and possible sanctions by taking up with a young Lecturer (Meredith had been thirty) in a form of involvement that invited contempt even from the highly progressive Berkeley faculty.

After the loss of Meredith’s Lectureship, things inevitably changed. With more time on his hands, Meredith gradually began to take on more of the tasks of shopping, cooking and cleaning. He used a large part of his time to continue work on a thesis that they would never publish, would never accept, would doubtless refuse even to read and would struggle against to the last degree, but which represented the intellectual continuation of his ill-fated Lectureship. Fezwig was sympathetic but not in agreement as to the content and form of the thesis.

As semester followed semester, household duties absorbed ever more of Meredith’s time. The thesis, so full of intellectual difficulties and editorial dangers, was put on the back burner. Fezwig let Maria, the thrice-weekly Guatemalan duster and cleaner, go down to one day a week. The apartment per se became Meredith’s job. From lectureship to maidship. In the course of time nursing duties were added. Fezwig, confined at least part time to the horizontal, did not make demands for care and attention. He made no claims at all on Meredith, either as partner, housekeeper or nurse. He faced a possibly short future with intellectual courage. The solitude of existence required the individual to confront a solitary end. Man alone, awaiting the termination of his brief career as a conscious entity. Struggle, defiance, laughter at a harsh fate, but never a weakening of the resolve to see clearly the conditions of existence. Fezwig was engaged in a dialogue with his own end. The question of who brought his meal trays and medicine was a very minor point.

Meredith had some doubts about the severity of his friend’s affliction. There had been that sudden collapse in front of a lecture group of notable and influential persons, and a bedridden period that had lasted more than a month. The doctor had alluded to a vague condition involving heart, arthritis, perhaps allergies. Something very like it had happened seven years before. Fezwig himself was skeptical of doctors. They were unreliable. Their skill as healers was dubious. They sought to remove from a man threatened with mortality his autonomy, his existential validity. They, hardly less than priests, attempted to veil reality from man, whose quest to be aware of the fatal terms of existence was perhaps ultimately his only triumph.

Yesterday, Fezwig had gone for a walk in the park. It had lasted for three hours as he made his rounds, stopping for long Socratic conversations with the street people camped there, and meeting friends at a nearby café, even taking part in a demonstration against park authorities. He overdid it. Now he was back in bed. The doctor had come that morning, had chided, lectured and ordered some new tests.

At exactly twenty seconds later than four hours, Meredith picked up the medicine, the spoon and the fruit juice and went back to Fezwig’s bedroom. Fez was staring at the ceiling.

How much of our lives are passed in inconsequentialities, in the meaningless drudgery of menials? It is only when our moments are counted that we regret the waste even of seconds. He sighed. He sat up and took the medicine bottle and spoon from Meredith.

David called. David Pettibone, a Professor at the University, English Department, currently a protégé of Fezwig. Meredith suspected a crush on Fezwig’s part. He hopes you will be better soon. You were asleep.

Ah. Fezwig spooned the dark, viscous fluid into his mouth. A certain amount dribbled onto his white-stubbled chin. Ah. He lay back and stared again at the ceiling. Dear David. He pronounced it the French way, da-veed. Sometimes I imagine that he alone of all my friends will be truly aggrieved by my demise—oh, not that I blame you others. I, too, you see, feel very frequently that the end will come as a kindness, an alleviation of the imposition of my presence upon this earth. One frail old man of hideous countenance and deformed body, a burden to his acquaintance and a drain on the collective resources.

This self-deprecation was a call for denial, for sympathy. Meredith knew it. Could he break through the chronic resentment he harbored against the great man? Could he at least fain affection? Could he hide his actual indifference? Perhaps his jealousy? He said he’d call back later.

Fez blinked, sniffled. Perhaps, at last, all of life is only a blight. ‘Do not weep, gentle maiden/ Death is kind’.

He said it wasn’t really important. Meredith recognized the quotation. Stephen Crane.

Fez began to say something else, perhaps another quotation, or a philosophical aphorism, but his eyes closed, then his mouth. A sense of futility had again overwhelmed him. Then he rallied once more. Do not go gentle into that good night, he recited.

Just about some article he was writing. Meredith recognized the well known quote from Dylan Thomas.

Fez portrayed a mask of death.

He didn’t say about what. Probably Emily Dickinson and the labor movement. That’s what it usually is. David Pettibone’s area of specialty in English literature was Emily Dickinson and her influence on the early feminist and working class movements.

Fez’s lips moved, but no sound issued. He might have been mouthing an ancient Egyptian prayer intended to accompany the soul on its journey to the afterlife.

Well, if you want me, just buzz. An intercom connected the master bedroom with the kitchen.

Meredith sat down at the kitchen table and returned to his research. He did research during the moments spared from his maid/nurseship duties. He was seeking to expand the evidence for his thesis, that nefarious idea which, more than anything else, had ended his University career. He read, checked, argued across books that he located in used bookstores, at the University Library, in Fezwig’s large and expanding collection. At the moment he was searching the text of A History of Portuguese Imperialism in Ethiopia in the Sixteenth Century. His copy was a worn and dog-eared paperback. He had assembled the scholarly tools necessary for his work: books, a notebook, a pen, a glass of rum. The rum was now as necessary as ink to the scholar’s purpose. It was four-thirty, almost a legitimate cocktail hour, but Meredith knew he would be using scholar’s ink well into the night.

From Fezwig’s bedroom came the sound of snoring. His medicine often had that effect. It put Sinuhe out of commission for twenty, forty minutes at a time. Or maybe it put him into commission, sending his ka soul to reconnoiter the astral planes. Only a few years ago Fezwig had begun to believe that the ancient Egyptian religion held the solution, the key to man’s spiritual and intellectual dilemma. But that phase had led to a struggle with Fez’s more deeply rooted materialism. Egyptian now only emerged in moments of weakened consciousness.

The telephone rang. Meredith took a gulp of rum and answered. Of course, it was Da-veed. I’m sorry, David, Fez is still asleep … Yes, as soon as he wakes … I know it’s important … I have never done anything of the sort! You know damn well Emily Dickinson had nothing to do with labor of either kind. That’s just party line stuff. Screw you too! He hung up.

David had this suspicion that Meredith used his intimate position with Professor Fezwig to isolate the aged mandarin from contact with the avant-garde of social theory, just because he, Meredith, held opposing views. Opposing innovation, opposing progress, opposing just about everything that had come down the pike since the early Middle Ages. Which was false, utterly false, because one of Meredith’s favorite movements, the baroque, was a product of the seventeenth century. In fact, his intimate position with the great man now amounted to little more than saving him the wages formerly paid to full time maid and homecare assistant Maria de Guatemala. Not that he had deprived Maria of bucks. As well as continuing to work in the profession, she now had her own successful consulting firm. She was being spoken of as a candidate in the next state assembly elections and she wasn’t even a citizen yet. It was possible that she didn’t even have a green card. David hadn’t considered any of this, naturally. He was one of the new breed of English literature professors who believed that Shakepeare was a transsexual, or if not, that he should have been.

Meredith tightened his grip on the tumbler of rum. He swigged. The enemies. They had combined to thwart him fourteen years ago and now they (he thought chiefly of David) were traveling a broad, excellently paved highway to academic success. Ha! Let them do their worst. Despite their career attainments and high emoluments and his own total and ignominious failure in those areas, he knew what he knew. They were the cheerleaders of a centuries-long cultural slide into the pits of total decadence. There were even prophecies. Not that he was paranoid. Not that he … even gave a good damn after all this time. He drained the tumbler and went to the cupboard. Despite his health faddism, Fezwig maintained an adequate liquor supply. Cheers to him!

He flipped the pages of a book, read a paragraph, looked at the engravings again. The main thorn in his side, as he saw it, was Professor David Pettibone. Not that David was a bad person. No. He didn’t believe that. David wasn’t vicious, or, at least, he didn’t realize that he was vicious, and he was intelligent, if you ignored the most ridiculous theory ever made about Emily Dickinson, and that went a considerable distance. But David was ambitious and he was woefully deluded. Right now his big move was a plan to suppress all new sewer construction on the grounds that it was harmful to the public health, environmentally damaging, and a form of corporate domination. All new buildings, if they must be built, should be required to install the Pettibone approved dry evaporator, the so-called Passive Action Toilet, a device that required almost no water. It fermented, evaporated and then assimilated human waste. The resulting liquid could be drunk, although typically it was neither clear in color nor tasteless. David was so concerned about the harmful effects of outmoded sewers that he had founded the Passive Action Movement (PAM) to promote the new toilet. He sought Fezwig’s support. The article on Emily Dickinson and the CIO was a red herring, merely an opportunity for increased contact with the famous scholar. The Passive Action Movement was just the sort of thing that would appeal to Fezwig. Exactly the right blend of goodism and practical, science-based issues. David had in mind a yearlong organizing tour (PATT, the Passive Action Toilet Tour) that Meredith suspected to be a plot to remove the great man from his, Meredith’s, reactionary influence and to bring prestige to Pettibonapartism. Not that Meredith really cared. Ha! Let them take old Fez on their toilet tour! The longer, the better. Only he feared that this scheme would cut him off from his last, tenuous link with the world of influential academics. Even though he and Fezwig usually saw things from diametric ends of the spectrum, Fez sometimes vouchsafed a formal hearing for his opinions and even facilitated their expression.

Meredith read the book in his hands, sipped, read. He was working out an idea about how the Ethiopian-Portuguese alliance of the sixteenth century had been an early example of fruitful anti-Pettibonism when the intercom sounded its loud, unnerving buzz. Meredith punched the speak button.

Goddammit! I’m busy! Can’t you wait two seconds?

In reply there was an incoherent nasal drone lasting several minutes. Fezwig could never remember to speak clearly into the intercom.

What did he want now? Screw him. Meredith went back to his reading and thinking and drinking. He called it research.

The intercom again. Louder, more insistent, followed by a droning that was longer and sounded more purposeful. Meredith stood up, slammed his glass on the table and stomped cursing toward the master bedroom.

Yes, yes! What now? Can I have no rest at all? Meredith articulated these remarks before walking into the bedroom. Inside he merely stared at Fez.

It is curious how the approach of man’s end, while not granting a solution or surcease to his existential problems, yet purveys an almost crystalline understanding of their terms.

Curt, precise. Yes, isn’t it?

One also understands how the notion of a soul that survives physical death could have been of such great appeal in the past. You see, essence attempts to escape form. Essence reaches toward a purity made impossible by the limitations of material existence.

Quite.

On the other hand, it is obvious to me that as long as the material was considered the bane of man’s true existential concerns, improvements that would alleviate actual existential suffering were rendered all the more difficult of attainment.

Is there something you want, Fez? Small, hurt, suffering voice.

Bedpan.

Meredith fetched the implement and delivered it. Again, I will be within call.

In the kitchen, he reloaded his glass, sat down, studied. The Portuguese delivered material and military assistance and tried to gain Ethiopian allegiance to the central tenets of their culture. The Ethiopians promised auxiliary support within the region. It was a relationship that they (the mass of history faculty flunkies) called imperialism. It limited an autonomy that Meredith defined as anarchic and retrograde. In his theory, though, only advanced cultures, while maintaining their own absolute autonomy, could beneficially exert hegemonism. For others to do so would be barbarism. However, if … A blast of nerve-shattering electronic sound broke in on his thoughts. At once, obedient but angry, he trod back to the bedroom.

Fezwig indicated removal of the implement.

Man’s state, Fezwig mused. I sometimes wonder if the demands and impediments of corporeal existence are a block to the free development of the spirit, or if the intellect is only a souring of what ought to be a purely physical being. In any case, our lives come to ruin as surely as elections in November and taxes in April.

Okay. Dinner in an hour. Meredith prepared their frozen dinners in a microwave oven. What else?

A burden. Fezwig spoke slowly, sadly. After our achievements, our deeds in life and work and love, we come inevitably to be only a burden to others and to ourselves. Time, that brings hope, also brings ruin. Despite the cranky religiosity of the ancient author, I find myself entirely at one with Solomon. ‘The best would be never to have been born’. I have truly come to Lamentations.

David called again. You were napping.

Ah! He searched for the bedroom telephone. His article. A brilliant thesis. I have a few points to suggest. … He dialed. Meredith retreated.

Meri?

Yes?

I think not the Chicken Ranchero again tonight.

Not the Chicken Ranchero, Meredith rehearsed in his mind. Fine, I’ll bring him a big burrito meal heaping with hot sauce. Maybe I’ll be treated to a disquisition on Latin American foreign policy. I’ll have to keep the implement close by.

Bitterness. He recognized the cankering odor. Meredith, not even past the middle of his fifth decade, was bitter, actually more bitter in all probability than Professor Fezwig, now invalided in his decade number eight. You could have done something with your life. You had talent, you had ability, you had an education that cost your father forty thousand dollars! And what are you? A goddamn concierge for your important friend! That was his mother in their last telephone conversation. She usually called from Florida every two weeks, as well as sending frequent letters. Meredith had made the mistake of filling her in on the current details of his relationship with Professor Fezwig. Concierge. She had used that term. No longer even a catamite. His mother, on her own account, was prospering. The move from Marion, Ohio to Tampa had agreed with her. She grew stronger, more influential, more dominant with each passing year. She was president of the Tampa Republican Women’s Auxiliary Aid Society (TRWAAS). They organized knit and bake sales and other fund-raising events. Just last year they had raised six hundred dollars for a senate reelection campaign. It failed. She was a smoker. Two packs a day for life.

Mildred had come to terms with her son’s irregularities, as she called it. To Meredith this sounded like an ad for a laxative and he cringed whenever he heard it. But at least she now recognized that he was an intellectual. She was contemptuous, yes, but she knew that intellectuals were not to be judged by the standards of ordinary mortals. They were like artists. There was an aura of uncomprehending respect. Besides, in some ways at least, he left the Republicans absolutely in the dirt when it came to conservative philosophies. This she understood in her way, although in general she comprehended nothing about ideas. Meredith was of a different breed. She had finally twigged to this after years, decades, of equating him with child molesters and the retarded. So they had established a modus vivendi that worked fairly well over the phone at a continental distance. She knew about Professor Arnold A. Fezwig and was proud of her son’s association with him, even if she was unsure whether he was supposed to be some sort of spouse or just a special kind of friend. But her latest pronouncement had hurt. Concierge. She had turned his complaints about Fezwig against him, blaming him for the degradation of his personal relationship as well as his career. Blaming the victim was what they called it.

Professor Fezwig was now telecommunicating with Professor Pettibone. Doubtless it was heavy stuff. Meredith gently cradled the kitchen telephone receiver off its hook. He was as curious as he was suspicious. The old Professor was breathing heavily into the receiver as he spoke. He was excited. And … despite this end-game pallor that covers my last days, I look, yes, forward in anticipation … to so many … so much beneficial work that is being done, and not least by your brilliant articles.

Thank you Professor Fezwig. I am gratified that you have discovered something of value in my little thing. It is …

"You have an eye for the truth, David. I said that I looked forward, but I should also have said that I look back. To me, life is now largely a glance backward. It is as if I stood on the peak of an immense mountain and surveyed the shifting weather from above the clouds. No, no, I claim no great wisdom. Wisdom is an illusion and age certainly has less of it than youth. But age does provide a different perspective. I see visions of earthly action that strike me as uncommonly strange and yet so familiar at the same time. A fossil view of life. The Piltdown man at a movie premiere. Oh, do not misunderstand me, my dear David. I speak of feelings rather than of ideas, of the subjective, not the objective.

But this is a digression. Forgive the vagaries of a doddering fool. I hardly know what I am saying these days. My mind is a shambles, as is my syntax. Physiology tells us that the brain shrivels with advancing years. This must be true of the intellect as well. Senility, not wisdom, is the wages of long experience.

Your mind is crystalline, Professor. If you have a fault, it is too great humility.

David. You have my gratitude. Yet I know myself. Perhaps it is all that I do know. Myself. Confound it! Let us forget ‘myself’! Unimportant. Your article concerns a minor topic, but in minors we may see majors. I see in it a manifesto for the future. By identifying Emily Dickinson as the spiritual forefather of the AFL-CIO you have shown how to re-validate literature. Literature becomes not the dead monument of a dead age but a signpost of tomorrow. The poems, which were once seen as the closet exercises of a reclusive and odd lady are discovered to have a taut connection with the struggles of working people. Brilliant, David. You did not write; you have engraved.

The Professor is pleased to flatter. David’s voice was smaller, more precious.

"No, David. This professor abhors flattery, to give or to receive. My speech to the American College of Academics in 1984 exhorted to a harsher, truer dialogue. My 1987 article in Mental revisited my entire university career and cried out for desperate honesty. Only truth, David. Let us speak of experiences and visions, but I call for nakedness as the only candor."

Professor Fezwig, please let me at least admit to the great intellectual debt that I owe you. I only follow your footprints. What I found was …

Arnold. Once again, call me Arnold, David. All this ‘profing’ is absurd.

Arnold. You have erected the structure. We only tack on a few shingles.

Aaagh! No, David. This is painful to me. I have done nothing. But let us leave the credit and praise factor. Fezwig coughed, gasped, breathed heavily. (Meredith, cupping the speaker of the kitchen phone with his hand, shouted that it served the old bastard right, he should choke. The two of them were so full of it they could easily provide the entire Midwest with fertilizer.) I … have … but little time left. If my ideas are ever to achieve reality, it is to your generation that I look. You know my work, how I have been thwarted.

Mm. I am glad you have referred to it, Professor. It was on my tongue, but I did not know how to express it. For the last two years your discoveries in the social sciences have been given virtually no attention by publishing academics. The fault is yours. I mean, Arnold, Professor, not yours, but you seem to have withdrawn from the struggle that we all serve.

A sort of croaking sound. Guilty. Guilty, David, with no plea of extenuating circumstances. I have failed, abandoned responsibility, sunk to an abject, purely physical existence. You have not been fooled. You understood. I stand—or rather, I lie, being prevented from leaving the horizontal—convicted. If there is one thing I can say, it is this. I do not live alone. I am not wholly my own master.

Meredith cupped again, cursed. This is what he expected. They had got around to blaming him for Arnold’s low print production of recent years. A lie. The old man had simply got slow and lazy. He would rather wander in the park, visit cafes and hold forth among admirers than crank out more of his articles, his abstruse and preachy articles. At one time his output had been large, all of it twaddle in Meredith’s estimation.

Your health is our first concern, Arnold. I do feel, however, that you have allowed your domestic situation to impact your work negatively.

Let’s be frank. Vagueness for politeness’ sake is not called for. You refer to Mr. Winters. Fezwig sounded grave and responsible. Doubtless you are …

He wants you to cancel the speaking tour! David was suddenly angry. He has advised you to cut your work to a minimum!

Meredith actually had tried to dissuade Fez from accepting an invitation to join the Passive Action Toilet Tour for health reasons, although he was also thinking of the harmful effect Professor Fezwig’s talks might have on weak, borderline minds, perverting them into a support for David’s absurd faecal preoccupations. The part about lobbying to cut Fez’s work to a minimum was a lie. There was no need. It already was.

Fezwig blew a sighing, exhausted breath into the telephone speaker. Winters is a difficult man. He is a frustrated man. I think you know why, or at least part of it. Meredith burned behind his cupped speaker. How dare they scuttlebutt about him! It was unforgivable. Especially from Fezwig. It was adding insult to a festering old injury.

How can you allow him to harm your mission? David queried. I can’t understand this. Surely his personal problems might be better handled through analysis, therapy. Send him to a clinic for psychological therapy, somewhere in the Sierras, perhaps.

Meredith’s his reaction was direct, visceral. He removed his hand and shouted into the phone speaker.

Fuck you! Fuck both of you blabbermouth bitches! As far as therapy, David, you ought to be on hormone therapy. They could cut off your little weenie in a dentist’s office with no need for Novocain! Fez, you’re not half as dead as you pretend! You’re still a hyper-verbalizing, over-theoretizing freak. Fuck you! He hung up the kitchen receiver. He slammed his Portuguese-Ethiopian book against Fez’s Paris print.

That did it! The low down, no-account snake of an intellectual fraud! Okay, let him go on his rabble-rousing tour. Let him attend the New Hampshire Conventicle of world toilet enthusiasts! Let him go on a gurney! He would certainly come back on one or in a box.

Meredith banged and rattled until his anger subsided, then he refilled his glass, collected his book and returned to study. He regretted that he had compromised his dignity by a raw outburst, however justified. And that he had revealed himself as an eavesdropper. It was distinctly infra dig. His revenge must be in his work, not in brusque displays. When he was published—and he had already received a guarded but generally favorable reply from a small academic press in eastern Mississippi—they would be vexed worse than by any amount of telephone comments, no matter how crude. He flipped through pages. The evidence from Ethiopia was clear. Imperial contact provided technological progress tending to mutual advantage and the diffusion of a single nexus of high civilization. He wrote the reference and a quotation on an index card. Another acquisition.

For dinner he selected a South-of-the-Border Beef Deluxe for Fez and, with no apologies, a Chicken Ranchero plate for himself. He carried both trays to the master bedroom. They always dined together. Fezwig was examining the ceiling. He read little these days, although he would often fall asleep with a volume in his hands. Perhaps he had already got through everything important. Certainly he was a very fast reader. He could devour a four hundred page social sciences treatise in one bite.

Thank you, Meredith. He hoisted himself onto his pillow and received the enchilada plate on his lap. Meredith knew that he would not to refer to the telephone incident that was hardly more than an hour distant. It was too trivial to merit a second of the great man’s time; besides, Fezwig held that all individual behavior was determined by social environment, so it was useless to expostulate or to condemn the doer. Change the social environment and you change the behavior. And Fez had long passed the stage of susceptibility to personal resentments. He existed on a much higher plane of being.

Meredith took his place on a stool near the bed. He forked a few shriveled, tasteless peas. Fezwig cut off about twenty-five percent of his enchilada and ferried it to his mouth. He always took big bites. Maybe his concern with large ideas and great movements influenced his eating habits. Or maybe his instinct was to get over quickly a merely physical function so as to get on with thinking and talking. Meredith remembered that his orgasms, too, when they had existed, had usually been undelayed. Fez loosed an umph. A favorable gastronomic critique.

Tasty. In fact, quite excellent in its way. These simple foods, more than complex culinary productions, are capable of pleasing the palate and satisfying dietary needs. We make a mistake in not appreciating the achievements from south of what should not even be a border. In fact this very state of California was robbed from its original owners.

Okay. Why don’t ‘we’ give it back? You could start with your considerable real estate holdings. Fezwig owned three thousand acres of agricultural land in the Imperial Valley, bought as an investment. It was managed by an agricultural conglomerate and yielded a good return.

Fezwig slowed down as he worked on his rice and beans. Meredith. I have always thought that one of your principal weaknesses was an over literalism. Please try to understand that genuine restitution does not necessarily involve a change of flags or even of real estate titles.

Meredith was gnawing a chicken leg. He spat out a pip of gristle. Ole. By the way, if David wants to send me to a loony bin, I’m willing to go. I think I’d enjoy the change of scenery, even if the change of atmosphere would be minimal.

Fezwig became thoughtful as he wiped up the red sauce with a scrap of tortilla. No doubt you find my ravings oppressive. Very well, I am oppressive. Perhaps to be assertive, life must at times be lived as an exercise in oppression. Although, to my mind at least, the final purpose of life is social action to lessen oppression.

Meredith was using his fork to chase corn kernels around a compartment of the aluminum TV dinner platter. When he alluded to their philosophical differences, Fezwig invariably set up a dichotomy of freedom/oppression. He was in favor of the first; he claimed that Meredith’s allegiance was to the second. Meredith held to an opposing interpretation. I think you’re feeling better, Fez. Health-wise, that is. An increase of cantankerousness is often the first sign of recovery.

Fezwig laid his empty plate on the side of the bed. He lay back on his pillow. He was tired. His eyes closed.

Meredith was halfway to the bedroom door when he heard, Freedom is the prolegomena of life. It forces and limits our choices. It is freedom that makes us reject the somnolence of history.

The next day was market day for Meredith. Besides caring for Professor Fezwig in his illness and needs, and cleaning the apartment with the aid of a single part-time Central American lady helper, it was Meredith’s job to shop for groceries and other household supplies. He left the apartment at noon. Fezwig was still sleeping. Besides the effects of his illness, Fezwig tended to sleep late because of his habit of staying awake until early morning, occupied not so much in reading as in contemplating and writing in his notebooks. He kept a yellow notepad near his bed and there were always plentiful