sticky-doored building with a half-assed paranormal hallway, choose her furnishings.
Illogical. Irritating. Time-consuming. Her time consumed. A small black marble sticks to her left palm. A jackrabbit turd. She flicks at it until it unsticks, bounces, thocks into the grass. She looks back at the Crawley Hall door swinging listlessly, like a tooth, in the dim, grim doorway. She needs to call Vivianne.
No. She needs to make Vivianne proud.
She plods heavily, warily, the long way around Crawley Hall’s giant, protruding concreteness, past normal pine trees, along normal sidewalks past the library, past the students’ union building to the Novacrest School of Kinesiology building. The electronic front doors slide open and wait for her, like gentle, non-racist butlers. She enters the glamorous, state-of-the-art building, its brand-new, open-concept loveliness, and pool-chlorine and squash-ball smells enfold and embrace her.
Edith curls her toes on the pool’s edge, thirty-one minutes late for lane swimming. She snaps on her goggles and eases herself into the freezing chlorine soup. She thrashes out a single lap in the pool, then halts midway through the next lap, panting, choking for air. She paddles her arms and legs, floating in place, water sloshing in her earholes, waiting for her lungs to pump less frantically. Is she traumatizing her lungs by leaping into exercise so quickly? Shouldn’t she go home and rest after being gaslit by Crawley Hall and nearly assaulted by rows of chairs? She is not frightened, but so many jammed and locked doors certainly rattled her; obviously, witnessing possible paranormal phenomena is a distressing way to start the day. She doesn’t like having to believe in the supernatural, especially so early in the school year, and so early in the morning. She is a scholar, an intellectual. There has been no peer-reviewed, conclusive article published about the existence of the supernatural, but she also understands that some things can be unknown, some explanations still percolating and awaiting discovery. The first European scientists to examine a platypus thought it was fake, for goodness’ sake. Edith ducks her mouth under the water and blows bubbles.
The teenaged lifeguard busily texts, grimacing at something on her phone. The clock at the far end of the pool reads 7:01 a.m.
I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select its fixtures.
She bobs in the water, remembers her back-to-school shopping from the day before. So what if there’s a supernaturally contaminated hallway. The building’s old and contaminated with all sorts of things. Maybe she’s special and that’s why the hallway rearranged itself for her. She should have tried to communicate with whatever mysterious entity it was instead of running away like a goose. The tiny balloon of elation still hasn’t popped from the three new blouses hung side by side in her closet, the new cardigan tucked back into its tissue paper, and the new pair of Hangakus yin-and-yanged back into their cardboard box. She’s launching into a new academic year.
Edith inhales a giant breath and plops her face into the pool water, begins side-stroking slowly, softly bumping up and down in the ripples and waves of the swimmers in the adjoining lanes. An old man’s pale belly and spaghetti arms dipping in and out of the water with the breast stroke, his swimming trunks obscenely red and tiny. She thinks it’s Angus Fella, her colleague, but she’s not 100 percent sure. A woman in black with the body of a 1940s pinup girl shoots past like a penguin. Pimple-like protuberances nestle in the mint-coloured concrete of the pool floor. An acned landscape for the floating scraps of Band-Aids, an errant pair of swim goggles. Dark jellyfish made of hair.
Edith makes time. She bakes metaphorical matrimonial squares. She wraps them in metaphorical gold-and-silver paper and sends them as a metaphorical Just Because gift to her parents, to Vivianne, to Beulah.
She lurches her face through the water. Seven-thirteen a.m. Her goggles starting to fog.
She has no time for swimming. The semester starts in one week, September 4. She has course outlines and syllabi to prepare, essay questions and lecture notes to write and insert into PPT slides, monographs to decipher, a graduate student’s thesis chapter to red-pen, articles to cobble together, a conference presentation 6,000 words too long to jury-rig as best she can, a forty-three-page agenda and appendix about the CASC strategy to absorb for the next faculty meeting. Her next book to start drafting. Her AAO to fill out so she can prove her relevance for the next two years and avoid that awful circumstance of being refreshed by the dean.
When the jolly previous dean, with his waxed moustache and cowboy hat, awarded her tenure two years and seventy-five days ago, she believed that finally every day at her job would be Christmas Day, with spontaneously carolling students and her professor colleagues smiling at her and bestowing upon her bouquets of red and white flowers and pearly-bowed presents for no reason at all as she sailed down the halls, her healthy new self-possession shining a crystal-ball light. She wouldn’t have to worry about job security anymore, she could intellectually and even literally wear pyjamas to work every day and no one would care: she would be free! But post-tenure Elysium was a rabbit on a greyhound racetrack. This new dean, Dr. Phillip Vermeulen, with his extraordinarily hairy fingers and origami-crisp silk ties, brought in one and a half years ago, is part of the new EnhanceUs university plan. He was brought in to refresh the Faculty of Liberal Arts. He wanted to refresh Edith the moment he met with her for the first time and opened her file on his desk. Refresh the heck out of her, just like he refreshed Coral and the tinier departments, the same way he refreshed sections of Crawley Hall’s operational budget. He is white South African, which makes her nervous. What if he hates her because, well, because she’s a brown woman with prematurely drooping body and face parts? Although her roommate in graduate school was a white South African girl, and they regularly guzzled too many zombie cocktails together, holding each other’s hair back when they puked three times a weekend, every weekend. Misty sure could hold her booze. Really, the dean with his small, catlike head and fancy clothes just reminds Edith a bit too much of her father. Whom she loves, of course. You can’t not love your dad.
– I see here, Edith, Dean Vermeulen had said in their first meeting, his hairy fingers slithering through her file, his elbows on his desk and his cuffs rucked up so she could see his thick hairy wrists too, – that for two cycles in a row you’ve received only four Value Increments on your AAO.
She nodded. Her right eyelid spasmed. She pretended to scratch her eyebrow but really gave her twitching eyelid a poke. Edith had thought his accent was English the first time she heard him; he did not immediately correct people who mistook him for British.
– One more AAO cycle with a four VI would confirm your eligibility for the EnhanceUs Refreshment Strategy, said the dean, his index fingers parked in the middle of a page.
His back was to the window. The sun bleated from behind a knot of clouds, and the leather of the punching bag planted in the corner of his office glistened.
– I’ve been writing my book, she said, jamming her finger into her eyelid. – I’ve been trying to complete my book, and that’s why my publication record has appeared to slow down the past few years …
– You’re going to have to write that book and future books a lot harder, I’m afraid. This university is on track to be in the top 1 percent in the country in terms of excellence and globalization, but to do that we’re going to have to shed those who diverge from the EnhanceUs strategic plan. You understand, eh, Edith?
He cocked his head.
She spilled out of his office, her head a tumbleweed, her eyelid dancing a tarantella no matter how insistently she pressed it with the palm of her hand. How could she explain to him, explain properly, that her book, her tribute, her temple erected to Beulah Crump-Withers, had to be flawless? No one could rush this book. Not even her. Tears dribbled out from under her palm.
On
