idea,” I said, “of the past being an illusion and the future a false hope. It’s funny.”
“It’s not funny,” he said. “Not if you can’t prove otherwise.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I trust that I witnessed my past, and the future will come along, more or less in the way I expect it to. Whether I want it to or not.”
“And what’s the basis for this trust?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“How do you know that this moment isn’t everything?”
“I don’t know.” But I did take a second to think about it. Okay, I figured, maybe there would be a bit of a respite if this moment were everything. Maybe it would be nice to relegate my past to a fiction and not deal with it. But I’d want the future part. Sad and lonely as I was feeling at this moment, I still had hope that things would get better. So I answered The Professor honestly. “It would suck if this moment were everything.”
“It would more than suck. It would drive you mad. It would be unbearable.”
I actually saw where he was going with this. “It would be so bad,” I said, “that I’d probably create a fictional past and a belief in the future, just to keep from going mad.”
“And so there’s no distinction.” The Professor pointed a finger to the sky, I guess to illustrate his point. “You can never know if there is any reality to reality, or if it’s all a fiction created to ward off madness.”
I leaned back in my chair. My pencil commenced its rolling between the pads of my fingertips. “This is the problem that you seek to solve?”
“Exactly.”
It was too much for me. Curiosity had completely taken over my better judgment. And besides, this discussion was proving to be exactly the distraction I was seeking. I asked, “How are you going to solve this problem?”
“A series of objective experiments to show that the world does not necessarily operate the way you imagine. Of course, I’d need funding. Which is where you come in. I have proposals, hypotheses, prospectuses, you name it. It’s all outlined and available for your perusal.” His pacing led him to the window behind me. He opened it. A gust of January filled the room. I spun my seat to watch him.
“I’d like to see it,” I said. I wondered for a second if these documents really existed, or if they were the elaborate pantomimes carried over from the front of the lecture hall.
The Professor snapped his fingers. I watched. He climbed out the window and floated away.
An hour later, the bare wood above the point of my pencil had turned black from pencil lead and the oil of my fingers. I continued to roll it between the pads of my fingers. I still sat in my chair, gazing out the closed window behind my desk. Of course, The Professor hadn’t really floated out of it. He couldn’t have. It’s not humanly possible. He walked out the front door of my office and counted his footsteps to the exit of the Williams Building. There was no other way to explain it.
Still, our conversation had my head reeling. How did I know anything? More particularly, The Professor seemed so genuine in his beliefs, so convinced these grounds were still part of a university and I was a university grant writer that I didn’t know what to think. Which one of us was the crazy one? Could it be that I was the patient? That there was no wife in Fresno, no Lola Diaz, no dead Nietzsche? I thought about the woman in the laundromat. Surely that had to be part of my overactive imagination, no? Surely American women at the beginning of the 21st century are more careful about exposing their backsides. Or…
Hmmm. I set the pencil down and turned to my computer. After several minutes of searching through the tangled lines of the internet, I found a story about Descartes. The story had been written by a professor and posted on his university web page. According to this professor, Descartes admitted that there were moments in his life when he spent so much time wrestling with these questions about existence and reality that he could actually make himself believe that his hands weren’t really his own. According to this professor’s web page, when Descartes had these crises of faith, he generally left his lonely office. Being around people seemed to hold these deeper questions at bay.
At this point in my day, I was leery of the stories professors tell and sick of these questions. I decided to find some people to be around. And preferably not psych patients. I stood and forced opened my window. It creaked. Dust and flecks of old paint fell.
Outside, a woman with gray hair and a dark business suit approached the Williams Building from the direction of the dual diagnosis dorm. I watched her approach. She waved to me. I waved back. She kept waving. I realized that she was signaling to me. I closed the window. It dropped smoothly. I counted my steps, winding my way down through the labyrinth.
The woman sat in a plush, dark leather chair in the front lobby of the building. “I’ve been meaning to meet you for a week,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Yes, indeed,” she said. “I’m Dr. Bishop.”
I gave her a broad smile and offered my hand. “It’s a pleasure.”
She grasped my hand. Her fingers were slim and cool as fresh asparagus.
“Did it seem sincere?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
My smile hadn’t waned. “My greeting. Do I seem sincerely pleased to meet you?”
“I suppose.”
“Good. I figure sincerity is everything. If I can fake that, I’ve got it made.”
She gave me a flustered look as if to say, “You are the grant writer, right? Not a patient?” But, no, I realized. Dr. Bishop was a professional. A psychologist. All of her facial expressions must be carefully calculated.
I explained myself. “The signature on your email. It’s that quote from George Burns. ‘Sincerity is everything…’”
Dr. Bishop smiled again. “Oh! I get it. A joke. I’m sorry. My secretary—ex-secretary—put that on my email. It was funny to her. A geeky psychologist joke. I can’t figure out how to get rid of it.” She pointed out the two plush chairs with her cool, slim fingers. “Please have a seat.”
I did. We discussed hospital business for the next half-hour: forms, departments, hierarchies, donors, social events that were encouraged, social events that could be ignored, insurance plans, retirement benefits, staff projects, research projects, administrators’ jurisdictions, the secretaries who really ran the joint, the charge nurses whose good sides I’d do myself a favor to get on, places to get office supplies, where to pick up the paycheck that had been waiting for me in payroll for 48 hours, Hawaiian shirt Fridays (the first of each month), vacation days and the best time to take them, and everything else that Dr. Bishop could think about. At the end of it all, she said to me, “You know, I’m not an administrator. I just volunteered to lead the search committee for a grant writer.”
I did know that and told her so.
She continued, “Which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. I’ve been engaged in some recent fascinating research myself.”
I
