Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(19)
I’ve begun to track my dietary intake, writing down every bite I take in the back of this journal. If these new feelings and facts are the result of some change in my meals (as I suspect may be the case), then I intend to catch it. All I have to do is recognize the pattern, or the new introduction to my usual pattern. Then I’ll find it.
Maybe I’ll add a second set of pages to the end of this volume, wherein I record the symptoms of resonance. Do they happen most often when I am indoors, or out? When I’m at the university, or at my home? Where do they come from, these flashes of . . . of overwhelming desire . . . of yearning, as if for someone or something who yearns for me in return?
I’ll describe it yet.
I suspect I’d better—my students are grumbling more than usual (and honestly, drat the ungrateful lot of them). They’ve been grousing to the dean that I’m becoming unresponsive, not making my office hours, and grading unfairly. Not a new complaint in the lot, but the volume has raised some interest. I don’t care for it, but there’s only so much I can do. I’ll carry on, teach my courses, and evaluate the brats as fairly as possible.
? ? ?
Yesterday in one of the elementary biology classes, there was an incident.
Dr. Warner thinks the fault lies with me. He says that it’s a matter of my pride, and my obvious disdain for the students. He chided me to be more patient with them, for they are first-years, and still learning their way around the university and their coursework. He asked me what had changed, and if anything was wrong.
It is as I have said. Nothing is wrong.
But I’m sick to death of being patient with them. I’ve always been patient with them, for years upon years—as long as I’ve been at Miskatonic—and the time has come for a raising of the bar. It’s an utter waste of my abilities, dealing with the first-years and their inadequacies!
One outstandingly inadequate youth is named Theodore. He is a small weasel of a lad, intelligent without being wise—and very quick to spout whatever is on his mind. It’s as if there’s no one at all working the drawbridge between his brain and his mouth. He’s been trouble since his first class, and he’s trouble now, and he’s trying to bring the trouble to me.
Should I have attacked him? A noble man might say “no,” behave in a penitent fashion, and hope for the least of all possible reprimands. The question, then, is whether I am more noble or less for refusing to pretend I did not intend to harm him.
For I did intend to harm him. And why not? He intended to insult me. An eye for an eye, or so it’s been said. I will not quibble here, in my own papers, over whether or not a moral injury and a physical one can suitably correspond. I was justified. We’ll leave it at that.
Theodore Minton, youngest son of a haberdasher from someplace no one cares about, I’m certain, stood up in class and accused me of mortal sins. Even the least puritan left among us in the region can understand the offense I took. He attributed unto me sloth, saying he’d caught me sleepwalking in the halls between the chemistry lab and the biology department on Monday afternoon.
I was not present in these offices on Monday afternoon, and therefore could not possibly be guilty of this offense. I told him as much.
He insisted that he’d come to ask my help with regard to one of the upcoming assignments, and that I’d rebuffed him with violence—pushing him into a door, and sending him sprawling. Then, he asserted, he’d gone to seek the department head . . . to tell him what, I wonder? That he was a weakling and a coward, a feeble, frail, useless little twig of a not-quite-man who’d been bullied by a fellow almost old enough to be his father?
(Which of course, did not happen. As I have said. For I was not present.)
I haven’t the slightest notion of what went through the whelp’s mind when he made this claim in front of the classroom, God, and everyone else within hearing distance, but I will not tolerate disrespect.
He came too close; that is what happened. He put his face too near to mine, and his eyes were earnest—What an actor he must be! Perhaps science is the wrong discipline for him—and he tried to say that I had not been this way in the previous semester, when he’d taken the first round of my introductory biology course. Babbling, he said that everyone knew it, and no one understood it, but that he was taking his concerns to the top of the university’s administration if I did not resume my previous demeanor.
“What previous demeanor?” I demanded to know. Nothing has changed in my classrooms, except that each season the boys are stupider and the classes feel longer; those are the only differences.
Something insipid fell out of his mouth, some diatribe couched in terms of concern for my well-being, suggesting that in prior months (before the summer leave) I had been more patient, more perceptive, and more willing to assist the young men who were my charges. He then was so bold as to inquire after my health, and went on to make accusations about my pallor—for neither that, nor my demeanor, either, was satisfactory to this wretched snake of a character.
I do not remember the precise words that moved me from where I stood, listening angrily, to up against him, with my hands on his throat.
But his classmates intervened—treacherous idiots, the lot of them—and someone ran out into the hall, where the lumberjack-sized (and -brained) Dr. Greer was dragged into the altercation, effectively bringing it to a close.