Chapter 1
I got my own office the fall of 2000; before then I had shared a 7'x10' with four other busy bees and the only windows were to be found on the dusty and clicking tower computers that still had flip-down locks for the 5.25" floppy drives. The 3.5" on the one closest to the door was broken; the button you would push in stayed in, as did any disk you inserted, forever eaten, doomed to spin whenever the computer started to that light blue beveled Windows 3.11 welcome screen.
We didn't even get For Workgroups. Our boss, my adviser, had her office across the hall, considerably more cluttered than ours, and it seemed her door was permanently closed lest piles of photocopies and fading mimeograph. manilla folders, and tattered but dusty textbooks and manuals spill into the hallway, leading to a fire hazard, a blocked exit, and a concussion for whichever unsuspecting undergraduate was walking by when the avalanche began its collapse. And then she, Dr. Carla P-, recently tenured, recently divorced, and recently a new mother, took a one year research grant at the National Ethnographic Museum in Osaka. We, her disciples and research assistants were left mildly but only temporarily funded, and directionless as the new term began.
She left us her PowerMac 7600; we played Jeopardy, and marveled at how much one of the characters resembled Ted Danson. We named him "Sam." Before the Sims he was our virtual friend and helped us defeat the Asian female and the bearded old white male. Nobody played the black woman; she had as little luck in our game of Jeopardy as her demographic subgroup did in the dating world. When we grew tired of the same questions we alternated turns at Tetris Max, a shareware game that nobody registered; we valued our privacy and our limited funds.
Dr. Carla P- returned, the PowerMac returned to her, our games of Jeopardy and Tetris ceased, she ordered a newer, sleeker Powerbook, and the ancient 7600 was recycled. We kept our 486 boxen and their grinding drives and the ever-buzzing-with-static 14" monitors that had been obsolete when new in 1992. The keyboards lost more keycaps; finger grease encased the rest. We tip-toed when we typed. Then a new project came, and I graduated to more money, a new boss, a new office, and piles of debris to sort before I could call the new, windowless, 7'x10" home.
I had saved generations of email joke lists -- the history of the world as written by high schoolers; 51 absurd laws; 1993 fan-fiction devoted to Disney's The Little Mermaid; 101 more ways to prank your coworkers; You Might Be a Redneck if ... -- and printed out one or two of the less raunchy to adorn my door, just below my brown rectangular name plate embossed with white capital letters. Dilbert was passé.
"Feeling lost?" someone asked in the hall. I didn't turn in time to see who it was; I didn't recognize the voice.
Chapter 2
Robin stopped by the first day of the semester as I hauled my folders and reports out of our office, around the front of the elevators, around another corner, past the women's restroom, and to my new office, which shared an inner wall with the old. I heard chattering and giggling. She just stood in the door, awkward but settled, asymmetric but blocky and solid, her square head a tad too close to her right shoulder, the left breast triangular while the right was more of a trapezoid, and the knee-length skirt more of a kilt, or a schoolgirl uniform for bearish cross-dressers. Through her glasses her eyes receded to the and looked in different directions, at me and at something else, then at something else and me. I moved boxes, cleared the desk, blew dust from a cabinet, and pulled out a drawer, which revealed a tan rotary telephone but no cord. "Happy to have your own office."
She had never posed a question as a question.
I nodded, handed her a box of journals twenty years past their prime and Robin set them in front of the elevators, but did not return.
Eric showed his face later in the day as I dusted some more, arranged my pencils like a picket fence, and piled unnecessary books and papers near the door for later deletion from my space. "Whatcha doin'?" It was a Fargo accent by way of Austin, which meant exactly nothing here in Manhattan.
Kansas.
I nodded at the door, at the desk and at the recently cleared filing cabinet. Satisfied, Eric moved on. Dr. Carla P-, stopping for the day, her son at her knees and she, on her way out of this remnant of European Brutalism as applied to Middle America, prepared to move two blocks down the street to the administration building and her new job as Dean of Students, College of Letters and Sciences. It paid better, but she didn't say that. "You're making progress." Dr. Carla P- had a way with words, just not a particularly elegant one, nor one that stretched beyond the obvious.
Her research papers and her monograph on the role of traditional Chinese geomancy in late Imperial Japan were noted by reviewers for their clarity.
When the last of my former colleagues made their way past my door to mourn my advancement in the world I found peace in my time alone and took what pleasure I could in the a clean space. Every extraneous item but one had belonged to a class and had thus had neighbors or siblings: dozens of journals, boxes of administrative reports and departmental minutes, two cabinets of student records, and a drawer of antiquated office supplies.
That one stood singular, enfolded in a white, slightly faded envelop, hard and sturdy, as if made for the postal service. Room for a return address, complete with three lines in the upper left corner, had been made but the middle was blank, as if the sender was expected to affix a sticker. I fumbled with the lip and slid it open. Squeezing the sides and causing it to bow I shook it and out slid a photograph.
Chapter 3
Robin and Eric and Dr. Carla P- ceased their visits, but I could complete our conversations in my head. I was Alex T., Eric was Sam and I didn't know behind which podiums Robin and Dr. Carla P- stood, but they all failed at Final Jeopardy. So I stopped playing. In my head.
And then it was just silence, a closed door, like Dr. Carla P-'s old abode, and with no computer but my own secondhand laptop, no windows, and no posters that would stick to the slick gloss walls, I settled on framing that lone photograph and standing it across from me, slightly to the right, on my desk.
"Wyoming," I would have told Eric, had he come to visit. "Nevada," Robin might have heard. "I'm not certain, Dr. P-," I'm certain to have said, "but it looks a bit like the Alaskan tundra, does it not?" The grassy, snow-patched plain was vast and bounded by a solid ridge of granite and basalt mountains, jagged at points, smooth and graceful in descent elsewhere. Few trees peppered the landscape, but shrub and scrub abounded. The sky was baby blue and cloudless, and dominated the upper half of the image.
At first I attempted to return it to its rightful owner; I looked in the envelop and found only a strip of negatives, golden brown with hints of red, and almost brittle. All frames but one were overexposed, though I took them to a specialist in any case.
I got back a package of black prints. $0.40/print, 4"x6". The original -- if I may call it that -- print was closer to 6"x9", something that seemed not quite standard to me, but once matted and framed it appealed to my geometric instincts.
My window to the world was the West, free, outside, and belonging to somebody else. No name, either penciled or inked, could be found on the back of the first print. I took it around the department and asked my former colleagues, Dr. Carla P-, and even the departmental secretaries, the Weird Sisters we called them, the three, though one was a man, and to a one they scratched their heads upon viewing the photograph, pursed their lips, apologized, said no, and returned to whatever work I was distracting them from.
"Look at what you found," Robin told me, Eric told me, and Dr. Carla P- told me when I visited her and the other deans. I didn't need to be told.
Chapter 4
Winter came; spring followed, albeit belatedly. Summer could not be far removed, I told my vast western landscape. I'd cleared more space, cleared all the bookcases, all the shelves. The cabinets were empty, even of my research; my boss checked in so infrequently that the work was not missed.
When I heard footsteps approaching I would open the door, peek out, and hand the passerby a pencil.
After three weeks my desk was empty, so I threw away the pencil sharpener, the gum eraser, and my notepads, lined and yellow and imprinted at the top with the university's logo. Upon the hook on the door I would hang my coat, upon the desk I would set my briefcase, and after opening it and withdrawing my laptop I would sit at my desk, peruse a handful of commercial sites, put the laptop away, and stare at my photograph, attempting to gain the nerve.
I painted a window on the main broad wall and added a trompe l'oeil flower box, curtains, and vista. A similarly styled bird feeder adorned the door, but could only be seen from the inside. My aloe vera enjoyed the low light and perhaps the fake landscape pleased them, too. I thought of adding a mirror, perhaps just painted, but I didn't need to see more of me, my ruddy nose or broad hips, different colored blue and green eyes, or lips that concealed a dime-wide gap in my front teeth. But I could tell my western view had brightened.
May arrived, finals came and went, and my funding ran out. Dr. Nicola D-, who now resided in Dr. Carla P-'s old office, stopped by one day as I was clearing my things, which meant packing my laptop and placing a new set of stationary on the desk, and inquired: "I hear you're looking for funding next year. The RA-ship I can office is only for the semester, but offers the potential for extension." This was a summary of her words, though it might have been them precisely; she was known for precision and conciseness.
I shook my head and smiled. The trompe l'oeils would remain, but I pocked the frame and the photo. I patted Dr. Nicola D- on the shoulder as I walked by, a gesture that unnerved her more than it did me.
Chapter 5
Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska or Siberia; my photograph was no longer lonely as we traveled, visiting its siblings, its cousins. Not at first, only at the end, did I realized that it was not my object, but that it had found me.