It's just a short walk to the main building. With its Doric columns and great sandstone gargoyles it looks not unlike a cathedral, smells of incense and candle wax, echoes with the imagined sound of vows yet to be broken. Because its small lead glass windows face west, the building is for most of the day encased in a kind of pre-dawn gloom one might expect inside a medieval cloister.
She climbs the creaking stairs to the sixth floor and fumbles against the wall until she finds the light switch. The sound of a hundred fluorescent bulbs buzz like things alive, agitated, angry, seconds away from showering her in white dust that stings and burns, choking her with a cloud of argon and mercury. The hallway becomes a long tunnel of flickering light. Someone once told her that florescent lights cause certain people to have seizures. Saint Paul, they say, was afflicted in just such a way and had intermittent episodes ever since his blinding vision while on the road to Damascus. Strange that god would prefer fluorescent lights to some other, but then god afflicts his creatures in the unlikeliest of ways.
She, for instance, is afflicted by the spectacle of dozens—maybe an even hundred, who knows, she never bothers to count them—World War II army soldiers, plastic men in green fatigues lobbing grenades, firing howitzers, hoisting bazookas on their shoulders. Some crawl on their bellies, others shout into walkie-talkies. All are assembled in a wide arc around her door so that she is forced to tiptoe around them like Gulliver among a maniacal horde of Lilliputians. They look as though they might storm her office, pillage her shelves, pin her to the wall, and one by one commit vile acts upon her before filling her torso with a million rounds of tiny ammunition.
She has never been the victim of a prank, not on a scale like this, and she feels somewhat unsettled by its immaturity. Perhaps she's made the mistake of being too political in class, of having said some disparaging things about war, the ridiculous myth of manifest destiny, upsetting the more unendurably ideological and reactionary students. "Mind you," she tells them as they shift restlessly in their chairs, "I've always considered myself a true patriot." The sincerity of this statement is not to be questioned. There is the gun after all—can anything be more American than that?—and she has a permit to carry it, even to conceal it on her person. To her the law still means something even if it doesn't to the delinquents who find their way into her classroom at the start of each day. She is also a staunch believer in self-reliance and cringes at the idea of calling campus security, a bunch of retired cops better suited to writing parking tickets than dealing with an unstable and potentially dangerous seventeen-year old stalker.
With a broom and dustpan she sweeps the army figures from the floor, tosses them into a trashcan, then locks her office door. After adjusting the mirror that hangs on the wall behind her desk she begins her daily exercises—smiles, frowns, pulls the skin tight against her cheekbones. She tries to ignore the faint lines at the corners of her eyes and how the makeup seems to accentuate rather than camouflage her age. In the soft light she still looks youthful, certainly younger than her forty-three years, but there is no way to disguise the roughness of her sun damaged hands, the flat brown patches, the wrinkles, the veins and tendons that stand out through the thin skin. She applies another daub of lotion and works it vigorously over her fingers and wrists.
Today she wants to look her best, wants to be prepared for the confrontation that has now reached a boiling point.
