During Honey’s nap I discover that if I bring the Institute computer out onto the very end of the deck toward the back of the house, I can latch on to the ass-end of someone’s unsecured wireless network, maybe Cindy Cooper’s. This is excellent news because it allows me to smoke while I check e-mails. I try Skype and the connection is too weak to sustain video, although this gives me more time to figure out what I am going to say to Engin when I finally reach him. His response to my WhatsApp is short, or terse, I can’t tell which. “Call me.” I check the Check Visa Status portal and it’s At NVC, the same the same the same the same it’s been for five goddamn months. I see how far down I can draw my cigarette with one drag.
I e-mail Hugo and Meredith to say I am sick. Mercifully my work e-mail does not yet reflect my absence from the Institute, although my body does; I blow my nose and big green slabs streaked with blood shoot out onto the Kleenex. You can’t feel the altitude here right away, it comes on days two and three with the dramatic boogers and the cracked skin of your hands and the blistering sunburn you’ll get if you aren’t careful. I open the least threatening-seeming e-mail, which is from the head of the Social Sciences and Humanities Diversity Committee and informs me that the meeting to discuss our Diversity Action Plan is postponed indefinitely due to the Vice Provost’s recent resignation for sexual misconduct. My task for the Action Plan was to survey existing Action Plans on campus and summarize them for the group.
Ted sent me an e-mail too. I assume this would be some characteristically poky and roundabout Ted message about my stealing the Institute laptop, but it is only a reminder to do the overdue software patch on my office machine by clicking the “Agree” button instead of the “Snooze” button when the window pops up. This means he doesn’t yet know that I’m gone. Moreover, I’m fairly certain no one knows how many laptops the Institute has. The last person the University sent around to do an inventory was a hapless work-study asking about mystery machines no one had seen in years. “On whose authority are you conducting this survey?” Hugo had asked in his imperious way, and the boy stammered and went away with his clipboard hanging low. In addition to Ted’s e-mail there is a letter of recommendation portal login e-mail of the type that Hugo reflexively forwards to me, which means, importantly, that Hugo doesn’t know I’m gone either. I’ve gotten good at these letters over the last couple of years; I like to think that several highly desirable teaching positions and postdocs were secured for his students through my efforts. Ironically Hugo himself doesn’t have a Ph.D., although you would never ever know from the way he is lavished with lecture invitations and NPR appearances. But he was the last noncredentialed person into the academy and he barred the door on his way in. Meredith of course has one from Princeton but as Hugo never tires of reminding her she has no publications.
We at the Institute are nesting dolls: Karen the admin assistant who has no M.A., then me who has an M.A. but dropped out of the Ph.D., then Meredith with her Ph.D., with Hugo encircling us all. Meredith is sensitive to slights from Hugo; I am sensitive to slights from Meredith and Hugo; Karen is sensitive to slights from everyone. The hierarchy is all we have. We are all publicly rather flirtatious with Hugo, privately disdainful, and occasionally afraid. I have spent so much time with these people that I can’t tell whether I hate them or whether I can’t live without them.
