Hardscrabble Road(115)

This looked like the right building. She went inside and looked at the information board just inside the door. Not all buildings had them. She was glad this one did. Maybe it had something to do with this being a science building, and committed to modernity and reason. Or maybe not. The information board didn’t give much in the way of information. It didn’t list professors’ offices. It did say that the Math Department was in “Room 217,” by which Alison supposed it meant that the office with the Math Department’s secretaries was there. She wondered sometimes why academic departments always wanted to make having to deal with them something that was very hard to do.

She found the stairs and ran up them. This building might have an elevator. It was hard to tell which ones did and didn’t. On the second floor, she went down the corridors counting doors, looking for Room 217, and then she got lucky. She heard his voice, sailing out into the corridor as clearly as if he had been speaking into a microphone.

“No more hegemonic discourse, Delmore,” he said. “I’m very, very serious.”

Alison was startled for a moment. She didn’t think math people talked about hegemonic discourse. She got tired just hearing literature people talk about hegemonic discourse. She slowed down a little and tried to listen, but whoever Delmore was, his diction was deplorable. All she could catch was mumbles.

“The revolution won’t be destroyed because you learn to speak in plain English,” Jig Tyler said then. “It might be destroyed if you don’t.”

Alison went up to the door and looked inside. Jig was sitting behind his desk, with his legs up, wearing a ratty old crew-necked sweater over even rattier khaki pants. “Delmore” was wearing jeans, but he shouldn’t have been. He was too fat, too round, too soft, and far too earnest-looking.

Alison was just wondering if she should clear her throat, and knock, when Jig saw her there. He put his feet down and sat up straight. “Dr. Standish,” he said. “Get yourself together, Delmore. This is Dr. Standish. She teaches in the English Department and writes articles about the development of vernacular poetry and heresy.”

“Heresy is good,” Delmore said earnestly. “Heresy is inherently transgressive, and because of that it almost always has subversive and underminic effects on the hegemonic—”

Jig cleared his throat. Delmore shut up. He had thin hair pulled awkwardly across the top of his head, over what was becoming a bald spot.

“Well,” Delmore said. “I’ve got Dr. Markham’s seminar in about twenty minutes. I should go.”

“Good idea,” Jig said.

Alison watched Delmore leave the office and go down the hall. He looked dejected. She thought the oppression he most needed to alleviate was his own.

“Do you always behave that way to him?” she asked. “Is it—I don’t know—some sort of tradition in the Math Department, like it used to be at Chicago, when people said you were presumed guilty of stupidity until proven innocent?”

“I’d never presume anybody guilty of anything until proven innocent,” Jig said. “Delmore proved his stupidity long ago. He’s an entirely mechanical actor. He’s flawlessly conscientious. He comes to every class. He does every assignment. He studies for every test. He’s always prepared. It’s taken him this far, and that isn’t a small thing. Getting admitted to the graduate program in this department these days makes getting elected God look like a piece of cake. But the mechanics are all Delmore can do. He has no imagination, and he has less knowledge of the real world and how it operates. You don’t want to begin discussing his problems understanding people.”

“Is that necessary in a mathematician? That he understand people?”

“Probably not. Lord only knows there have been enough mathematicians who don’t. And in some highly technical fields, a lack of understanding and empathy could even help. You wouldn’t want a surgeon standing over you with a knife and feeling your pain. But it’s necessary to a human being that he—or she, excuse me—understand people, and I’m afraid Delmore isn’t ever going to be much of a human being.”

“But he does what you tell him to do, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, yes,” Jig said. “Delmore tries to compensate for his lack of interrelatedness with people by committing himself to what he thinks are left politics and hero-worshiping me. In the beginning, I thought the hero worship was what bothered me. Lately, it’s been the left politics.”

“I thought you had left politics.”

“I do,” Jig said. “I have real left politics. Delmore is sunk up to his neck in the intellectualized crap that’s become the security blanket of the embattled academic class. A transgressive hermeneutics of grammar. Ad infinitum.”