Peanut Butter Tea

Laura and I still made a point of dressing and beginning the day together. I felt around for clothes by the light that my eyes could scrounge up.

‘Hmm?’ Laura said in waking.

‘I’m going out a few minutes.’

‘It’s still night.’

‘Leniter wants to talk.’

‘It’s still night.’

‘Tenure,’ I said sympathetically. I rested a hand on her stomach and kissed her brow. ‘How were you sleeping?’

‘Usual,’ she smiled and squeezed my hand. ‘Back for breakfast?’

‘Surely.’

I left the house, coat collar to the cold and grateful for the warmth of my bracers tight embrace, thin as it was. Leniter wasn’t worth a jacket and tie at this hour.

I picked my way through the snow-wrapped football field. It was thick and broad there but among the lecture halls and laboratories and libraries, it had been sieved to a crisp dusting. It fell lightly and I was grateful for its movement. Alone, the mountainous buildings with their upright angles could have easily daunted. With the gentle snow, trees and awnings and sandstone became children’s illustrations, even and flat by the distant moonlight.

When I entered my hall’s unlocked block, I could tell that at least one room was being heated. The rest were dead in the cold. I could guess the living one was mine. But darkness makes all walls – even walls ornamented by cabinets, notices, and oak benches – sheer slabs, and turns hallways into labyrinths. My door was ajar, with a warm, weak light, tinted slightly with electricity, creeping out of its gape.

The base light was the fire in the far corner. In its place, it was like a young boy wearing his father’s brick coat. Askew on my desk, defiant against its gaseous ancestor, was my lamp. Between them, with the front left quarter of his body unclaimed by either light, was Leniter. He was dressed for class and sat hunched over a stack of papers. He was middle-aged, but held himself like an ancient father. Around him, like a great jagged basin, rose the cliffs of seats. Behind him lurked the blackboard, my last lecture’s erased notes glowing faintly in the waving light.

‘You and my wife,’ I said, sitting in the first row of chairs and laying my coat by me. ‘Should invest in sleeping pills.’

He did not look up, but jolted with a small sniff that may have been a laugh. He finished reading a paper and moved it to one of four piles he had set out in front of him. He sat back, removed his glasses, and ran a hand through his thick black hair. He rested his hands on his stomach, and I thought he closed his eyes.

By now, I could tell that I had little time for the mood he was in. ‘So, you wanted to talk.’

He nodded in a small, distant way. He waited a few more moments and then spoke.

‘How is she?’

I took a moment to register the question, and another to consider it before I answered.

‘She’s fine. She’s not sleeping well.’

Leniter nodded. ‘That can happen.’

‘How do you know how my wife sleeps?’ I smiled. He smiled briefly.

‘I had a wife once.’

‘Divorce or death?’

‘Death.’

‘I’m sorry. What was her name?’

He furrowed his brow for a moment, then released it. ‘I can’t recall.’

‘You can’t recall?’

‘I can’t recall.’

‘Isn’t that funny.’

‘It isn’t really, no.’

I ran a hand around my bare throat and thought that maybe he had expected a tie. I had a feeling that being intellectually malleable in his conversation would get me back home quicker. To the guest’s room, that is.

‘How long ago did you marry?’

‘I think I called her tunnag, duck.’

‘Tunnag?’

‘It means duck. It’s Scots Gaelic.’

‘Is it. Was she Scottish, then?’

‘We both were.’

‘I didn’t know you were Scottish.’

‘I was,’ he said. Leniter had never sounded accented to me. He may have been trying to recreate it now. ‘We married a long while ago. I was born in a stone house in the highlands. I had brothers and sisters. We kept sheep. We were shepherds.’

‘That sounds very nice.’

He gave a lost look. ‘My wife was a relation, of course.’

‘Of course?’

‘In those days of course. I remember a leaky roof with children under it.’

‘Your children?’

‘Probably.’

‘Are you high?’ he looked at me when I said it. ‘I’m sorry, Leniter, but I really have no clue what you’re on about.’

He slowly held up a hand. ‘My child – a child – ran off one day. We never found it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Thanks. I did find someone else.’

‘After your wife’s death?’

‘After the child’s.’

‘You absconded from a grieving mother?’ But I really suspected he was high.

‘I made a deal. A devil, you might say,’ his lips fell apart from each other. ‘Maybe a druid or a witch. God himself, maybe.’

‘You’re high. And what was the nature of this, hm, deal?’

‘It wasn’t a deal. Not an exchange, at any rate. It was – is – a gift: life. I was given, laid out in the grasses of the highlands, immortality. I was laid bare before the stars and gifted their endless days. Then I returned home and held the hand of my wife, the hands of my children, their children, as they died, full of years and finally broken. I did not abscond from the Tunnag. But I foresaw the weary of the world as a home and asked the giver for a way to die. I asked that my own hand alone could do it.’

‘And you call that a long while ago?’

He nodded.

‘And in that time, you obviously wrote the Scottish Play.’

He smiled. ‘You think I’m lying.’

‘I think,’ I crossed my legs and folded my hands. ‘That you may have suffered,’ I looked at my knuckles. ‘Some blow or trauma that has caused you to forget a family that is perhaps not so far away as all that. You recall them through a concussion that looks a lot like centuries from inside your head. That’s my current theory, my initial proposal, which counts you as an honest man.’

‘Any secondary proposals?’

‘That you’re not an honest man.’

‘I’m not lying.’

‘See a doctor.’

He smiled distantly and laughed sniffingly again.

‘I could tell you many things,’ as if they were in the seats by me. ‘Many, many – many things. I could describe for you the flames of Latimer and Ridley, the lips of a young provincial woman in the Indian colonies – oh, but they still move me to think about. I could take you to where I kissed her. I could tell how it feels for Napoleon’s canons – I’m seeing him right across from me as it’s happening: I’m here and he’s there – to tear the ground asunder from beneath your feet, the Battle of Smolensk. Take me to a museum. Any museum. I will tell you where the royal portraits where embellished. Do you want to know what they each said to me? I remember.’

‘You do.’

‘I do,’ he had stood and paced around the hall. I had anchored myself in my chair.

‘Leniter,’ and he looked at me. When he looked at me, I almost believed on his eyes’ conviction alone. ‘What proof do you have – for yourself and for me – what proof or reasoning do you have to distinguish history from delusion? Could you tell me that? What proof do you have that distinguishes history from delusion? You teach philosophy: consider your thoughts.’

‘I have been mad. Yes, I could tell you that too. I can tell you what it feels like to be resigned to,’ he cleared his throat. ‘Spectatorship in your own head. It would take me a while to get the words right, and then we would weep.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But at least recognise that I have no way to believe you.’

He stopped pacing and stood behind the desk. He thought he was lecturing. He produced from a drawer in my desk something that glimmered molten in the firelight. He held it up, then placed it on the desk, behind the paper stacks. Even though he held it up, it took me a moment to puzzle out what it had been.

It may as well have been aimed at me. I worried for a moment that he was right and there was no argument left but to test his claim.

‘You said,’ I said at last. ‘That you won’t die. You might be wounded. I cannot prove anything unless I aim for the head or heart, in which case I am thankfully refuted or reluctantly murderous.’

‘Stop stalling,’ he leaned one hand on the desk. ‘Here we are, then, in a pickle.’

I stood and went to join him behind the desk. I took the stack of paper that the revolver was sitting on and flexed it to rigidity. That is how I slid it out of the way. I removed from the opened drawer a pen and paper and put them on the desk where it had been.

‘Describe your mother,’ I said, and returned to the seat by my coat.

‘Really?’ Leniter said. ‘Stop patronising yourself.’

I couldn’t answer that, so I didn’t. It was true that I was relying on a self-pastiche.

For a long time, Leniter stood there behind the desk, looking at the paper or at me, sometimes at his eyelids. But I said nothing, and that adamance eventually made him sit and take the pen. He wrote slowly and frequently stopped to rest his head on the back of his hand.

‘I cannot remember her,’ he looked up at me once. I returned nothing.

After a full half hour of silence, he had filled the page. He slid it to the centre of the desk and stood. I took his place and read what he had written. I read passively first, and then actively. Reading actively, I had a red pen, but I didn’t use it. His paper looked small among the other pages, like a city park. He had written two sentences about his mother. The first described an obtrusion on her nose. The second fumbled around the smell of her hair: sweat and dandruff, apparently. He had then written a few lines in Scots Gaelic, and bad poetry about the highlands.

‘Well?’ he had moved to stand before the fire. ‘Am I mad?’

‘There’s not a wealth of precedence in this kind of hermeneutics,’ I said. ‘But a man who would write this about his mother – would even write it if he couldn’t remember anything else – would have no qualms about leaving his family to die in antiquity.’

He turned away from the fire and the lamp’s light did not read his chin. He stood with his hands behind his back. The lines of his face took up small folds of life, so he looked somewhat ethereal. His hair was lost to the shadow, and in the shadow could have been loose and long, or tied, or shorn. He could have been the base for a man. I wondered how I had ever considered him middle-aged.

‘I’m not lying,’ Leniter said.

I couldn’t look him in the eye.

‘So,’ I said. ‘Then tell me, what is the undying life?’

‘The?’

‘Suppose we grow into hegemony.’

‘Or grow above it.’

‘You have not grown above it.’

He looked down at his tweed suit and the spectacles hanging around his neck. He chuckled. ‘I haven’t.’

‘So tell me about it.’

‘I think you know,’ he said and then I did look him in the eye. ‘Or can guess to some extent. It's common, in part. It was placed there, or, for whatever reason, our forefathers wrought it on us. The soul, I mean, of course. The soul thirsts for its own immortality – significance – but the body has resigned it all to death. The mind, closest to self, loves the soul but is married to the body. On occasion, in music, in art, it sneaks off to lie with the soul. But it always returns to its nuptials.

‘Yes, sometimes I think I am the most natural man.’

He meant a sort of desired unity and cleaving with the soul. A kind of divorce from the body.

‘The pessimistic existentialist?’ I asked.

‘How do we know about pessimistic existentialists if they don’t find significance in telling us?’

‘But you are not perfectly immortal.’

‘I said “most”. Yes, so I must rage, rage against the dying. I only know my mind, and my mind has beaten my body back, caged it. My mind runs with my soul barefoot through French streets and meadows, rents many Venetian rooms, buys it jewellery and pretty things.

‘But I’m a fugitive in the end, lying to my lover and self, buying the soul many bands, but never the wedding band it demands. Someday, yes perhaps even now, the body must break its cage and hunt me. It will find me. I have enraged my body more than anyone else has enraged theirs. It will find me. Now it is vengeful and will kill my mind and my mind’s love of the soul before it itself dies. It will make a murderer of my mind. So I am a most unnatural man.’

Admittedly, he had left me with some young soul in a French meadow.

‘Sour picture,’ I returned as he lingered by the fire.

‘I’ve had a long time to paint it. But don’t think I’ve sieved out goodness from my palette. I have considered the net sum of things.’

Very quietly, I spoke. ‘The net sum of your things.’

He may have heard me. It seemed foolish even then, in that discourse, to have thought of a little child who would be born in a few months. I smiled and felt the weight of her little head in my hand, the first few strands of hair growing through my fingers. I thought that my hand might still have been warm from my wife’s belly.

I looked up. The way that Leniter stood between me and the fire, I could see his eyes. The accumulated thought in them had been lit like kerosene. Countless considerations burning briefly bright.

I rubbed my eye. ‘So why can’t an immortal wait for the morning?’

He picked up the paper under the revolver and flourished it to me. I went and took it. It was stiff between our hands a moment. It was one of my student’s papers.

‘If you think I marked leniently,’ I said. ‘Just say so.’

‘You haven’t read Helen Castro’s paper yet.’

‘I haven’t.’

‘She’s an interesting student, isn’t she? I’ve heard things.’

‘Academically? What things have you heard?’

He stopped his pacing momentarily. ‘Academically, of course. How would you say she is interesting?’

‘Academically,’ I said. ‘Academically interesting. Have you had her?

‘In her first year.’

‘Hm,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t recall her being interesting then. Did you find this interesting?’

‘Because of the references thing, right?’ Leniter said.

‘Because of the referencing thing,’ in which Helen misinterpreted every major scholar that she referenced and eventually came to their same conclusions, or thereabouts. We had a pool going to see if it was purposeful.

‘She wrote on Dorian,’ Leniter said.

‘Did she?’ I skimmed the first page. ‘And has she read a word of Wilde?’

‘I doubt it.’

As my eyes glazed over the first page, I applied Gray to Leniter. Then Helen’s thesis to Leniter.

‘Ah,’ I placed the paper back on the desk and leaned on it. I rubbed the bridge of my nose. ‘So that’s what we’re talking about.’

Leniter leaned, arms folded, against the blackboard. ‘Her thesis is that Dorian is ineffective.’

‘Yes,’ I placed Helen’s paper back on the desk, over the gun, and stood. ‘I’m not sure that my class is for her.’

‘Insightful nonetheless.’

‘The class or Castro?’

‘Both. The girl.’

‘Her qualm?’

He kicked off from the wall and paced around before the front row of seats. ‘“What Wilde fumbles lamely at-” by the way, teach her that she just described art – “What Wilde fumbles lamely at with his metaphor of the portrait is the soul. This much is obvious.”’

He looked at me.

‘Valid,’ I said, leaning back in the chair, smoothing my shirt over my stomach. ‘The task was to analyse through personal critical ideology.’

‘“Obvious”?’

‘I’ll speak to her about wording.’

‘“Though leniency must be given to artists in their attempts to capture truth, the metaphor of the portrait is problematic. It irons out the essential creases that make truth at all known to us.”’

‘What the hell?’ I cracked into a smile.

‘Hear her out: “The soul is essentially intangible and unknown. This defines it. The portrait is not only tangible, but visually known: manifest in clarity that supersedes, indeed annuls, all other interpretations of morality and redemption.” She goes on to talk about the compromise between universality and ambiguity. She praises the Wilde’s objectivity.’

‘It was a personal task.’

‘“No one living is afforded the luxury of observing their soul with such clarity. Perhaps a better metaphor would be music: transcendental in meaning, but preferential in adherence, and possessing a great sense of unknown reality. The portrait is a brazen claim to comprehension of self.” Well, then perhaps that comprehension exists in the highway off the mortal coil.’

‘Would the music become more dissonant with every transgression?’

‘I don’t know the soul I’ve been philandering with,’ he ignored me. I was avoiding.

‘But that assumes objectivity for the Western ear.’

‘I must see if I measure up,’ this his resolve. This my enemy.

‘You make her sound like a prude,’ I said.

‘They’re her words!’

‘In the way you’re reading them.’

‘I’m reading them as written.’

I looked at the curved lump under Helen’s paper. ‘So that’s what we’re talking about.’

I knew he was looking at it too.

‘You know, Leniter, I was sleeping very well.’

‘There’s nothing left to do.’

My eyes flicked up to him and waited for his to join them. They were very slow and deliberate. They seemed to close off all other things in the room. The highlands were very distant and a very separate thing. I greatly feared that I was inadequate for this. The walls seemed very cold. I felt very alone.

And then I laughed.

‘Now I see through you, Leniter: you claim to have seen all sorts of developments and deaths, and you think the portrait’s now ready to be hung? The more that you paint, the more that you realise there is more to paint. That’s a natural law. You think experience and action have stopped just this morning?’

‘Excuse me while I take your words out of my mouth,’ he moved forward, and I sat. ‘I have experienced all things in base. I have fathered, abandoned; loved, murdered. I’ve been bearded and bald, recovered from alcoholism. I have been all things at base, felt all things at base. All barring one page of experience has been filled in, and that last page, since the devil, druid, witch, has been destined for what it’s innevitable execution. The crossword is done. Now I check the answers.’

‘To see if the soul really enjoys Paris and Italy.’

‘Or if jewellery really can buy beauty.’

‘It can’t,’ I said, reluctantly, involuntarily, thinking of my mother.

I was becoming steadily intolerant towards this conversation. I had a feeling that we were both standing on a very, very high ledge. I slapped the desk and stood up. With hands in my pockets, I stated to circle my lecture hall. Leniter paced across it. We never met. I had a sense that the seats I traced were staring at me. I went to feel comfortable by the blackboard. When I was about to be staring at it for too long, I turned.

‘It can’t buy beauty, Leniter,’ I said.

‘Maybe it can.’

‘Aesthetic, maybe, but dogs like bitches and cats like cats. It doesn’t matter how shiny the collar is. You won’t like what you see.’

He shook his head. ‘You’re confusing metaphors again. This isn’t love, it’s introspection and clarity. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in love, but I don’t usually get those things when I am. If anything, I’ve been in love with the soul already, and now I’m trying to marry it – take off the beer goggles – consummate the thing and all. The wedding is the funeral. Have you realised it yourself yet?’

‘If it’s all the same, let’s leave my wife at the door for this.’

‘I’m trying to wake up sober.’

‘If there’s a waking up at all. You’re assuming the mind’s preservation through death – that it’s more than the brain. You’re assuming that the mind is more than the brain based on Helen’s paper.’

‘Assuming anything less, why are we here having this conversation: go home. But it will happen to me sooner or later.’

‘Perhaps. No, yes it will. The body will have the mind if it can’t have the self, and so you said it yourself: rage!’

He laughed sadly. ‘Raging will work for you. It will be wonderful for you. Gently is the only way I can go now, my friend.’

The Sun was beginning to light the campus, and the drawn blinds were now bordered by a cold yellow. The room became uncertain of itself, and all in it with it. Natural light was starting to put up a fight. As the lamp’s radiance diluted, our orbits tightened about it. I tried to find the centuries in Leniter’s eyes. I couldn’t. I couldn’t find a lie either.

‘You still rage,’ I said. ‘I’m here.’

‘I never said I wasn’t raging.’

I smiled in a small way and realised my burden.

‘What if I were to join you in this?’ I ventured.

‘In what?’ he chuckled. ‘In life and death?’

‘In death and sobriety.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ he said with heat.

‘Why not?’ I came to the desk.

‘You have the option of raging,’ he stayed by the seats.

‘Is that a question?’

‘Argument.’

‘It’s weak.’

‘I know.’

‘Predicated on living being morally right.’

‘I know.’

‘Predicated on there being a moral right.’

‘This whole conversation is predicated on that.’

‘Castro predicated that.’

‘We accepted it.’

I reached for the thing on the desk. ‘Why?’

‘You have a pregnant wife.’

‘They’ll both die too someday. Best to cut my life short before the portrait gets any uglier.’

He looked at me for a long time, and then at the gun for a long time. Then he turned away. ‘Best to, then.’

I picked up the gun and cocked it. I held it under my face. I blinked a couple of times and tried to retrace my faith in this conversation. It held as far back as I could see. It wasn’t predicated on the immortal. It was predicated on the soul. But then, everything has to be predicated on something. It was a cold circle on my chin for a few moments, but soon pressed with the same temperature as my flesh. My hands were still cold from my pockets, and they began to sweat against the leather handle.

Still he stood there, his back to me. I thought about counting but didn’t want to open my mouth at this point. I closed my eyes.

‘If you’re going to do it,’ he said, so I paused for a little longer.

And then he spoke again. ‘We are not comparable.’

I put it down and wiped my hands on my trousers. They felt rough.

‘Paintings’ subjects don’t change over time,’ I said.

‘Have you read a word of Wilde?’

‘Have you listened to yourself?’ I moved forward. ‘You claim to have done all things, made all marks, at base. Well, where does base start? For all we know, all things at base were eating lamb and making eyes at family reunions.’

‘Genocide at base?’

‘You really don’t know though, do you?’ I felt momentum. ‘You slaughtered sheep. Surely you were racist. You don’t know your soul. You said so. Your argument defeats itself. All things at base and the unknown soul. One confirms the other.’

‘And one thing only confirms either,’ he said. ‘You’re saying that this was all for a weekend.’

I shrugged, slowly.

He was quiet and fiddled with a button on his jacket.

‘Hell with it then,’ he cried. ‘Let’s both have it over.’

Neither of us reached for the revolver. I slipped my hands into my pockets, their thumbs slipped into my bracers, holstered.

‘We should get students in to watch this,’ I said. I said it quietly.

‘You should get the police.’

‘I’m not convinced I have the right.’

‘Or the need?’ he smiled hopefully.

Doubt. It made me look at him cold. I saw now the true gears he had put his paw between. Leniter had told himself the existential lie until he could no longer see beyond his eyes: the body’s resignation. But trapped inside his head with him was still his coveted soul’s notion: that sense or lie about the divine that the next day on this long tape of history might bring justice and unblemished light. That significance might come. And so, the body is not wife but warden, so that all must devote to the divine or ascribe to pessimism. At this junction of lie, sense, truth, lie, we all must bow our heads and hope we take the one that leads to the right and whole conclusion. All but Leniter. Leniter had been overcome by both in a hopeless twofold strangle. He had fallen out of design.

I took the gun from the table and offered it to him. Such a resigned fear was in him then that I looked to see that I was indeed offering butt not barrel. But we both knew that the thing had no ends now. It was as much a pure and unbridled manifestation of his death as Helen’s paper. It took me a moment to realise that this latter notion was the only that Leniter had considered. The former was, to him, pointless. Surely it was to me as well.

I said, ‘You assumed my conscience.’

He nodded. ‘That I did.’

He wrapped the gun in his hand. He cocked it. He opened his mouth.

I don’t know why I didn’t turn. I should have turned. He had closed his eyes. Curtain drawn, show over. Scottish Highlands, Napoleon, his mother’s warts, lost a few days after Christmas. I wondered if the whole block would be closed down. I could always lecture in the open like the Greeks. But it would be cold.

His cheeks were trembling, but that was well, that was my argument, that would be over soon. My last thought before losing was that I would have “That I did” engraved on the tombstone, and know that joke, his secret baseness, and seal his secret myself some sixty or so years later. Thus, I myself would save an ignorant race from the cataclysmic existential experiment that we had configured in this room.

His eyes flew open and with the next fight’s fire well and truly kindled. He dropped the gun, wet with saliva, from his mouth. A few drops from the barrel fell to the floor.

‘The assumption stands unrefuted,’ he put the gun on Helen’s paper, and it soaked. ‘I reject the premise.’

‘Leniter, you are a dog.’

‘I am a man.’

‘You are the most unnatural man. You are a dog with its paw in the rotors. A young dog I might try to save – that is, tell it the lie – but not the old dog. You have become arthritic in laziness. And as you have rejected the mercy of the definite argument, I fully expect you to stay terminal for the rest of eternity.’

He laughed. ‘My but you are a literary professor,’ he crossed me to pace. ‘All metaphors and absolutes.’

‘I’m not the one who started us on metaphors, Leniter.’

‘You condemn me,’ he roared. ‘You with your whole three decades condemn me. How dare you? You condemn me? Like government housing.’

‘You condemn yourself, Leniter. That’s why you brought me here. I’m just closing the corpse’s eyes. You’ve given up: realise it.’

‘Arrogant boy!’

‘Dead dog! How many other people have you had this conversation with?’

‘Countless!’ He articulated here. ‘Countless. I have done all this at base. All things. All things. All. I have stayed through to ends you couldn’t dream. They’ve all known. They could all see it, and not just in frozen wrinkles.’

He heaved his chest in breaths. My own were coming very long and thin now.

‘Waiting for judgement day, Leniter?’ I said. ‘Or just a pair of balls?’

He turned on me with such fury then. He wrought Armageddon on the paper city with my body and pushed my neck flat against the desktop.

‘You have no idea,’ he hissed. ‘None. You’re of the mud and roots and worms and turd. You have no idea.’

I felt the fear like cataracts in my own eyes, grasped a paper and pressed it into his face. My thumb forced the staple into his brow and when I drew blood, he released me. He had gone a few paces by the time I was sitting. I threw the bloody pages at his back. We breathed heavy as the room’s light evened out again.

He stood looking up now, looking into the dark ceiling. I righted the lamp.

‘We’ve been talking,’ I said. ‘Like it’s logic. Men of reason. Reason doesn’t come into it. We’re con-men. We’re freefalling con-men, yelling at the ground: “Hey down there! Better move! We’re a-coming through!” Men of reason? Nah. There’s nothing reasonable about being a man. Be a dog, Leniter.’

He didn’t look at me. He went to the window’s sunny frame.

‘What are we doing here, Leniter?’ he turned profile to listen, nose sharp in silhouette. ‘We both knew you were a dead man tonight the moment you read Helen’s paper.’

‘A dead dog,’ he said. ‘Surely.’

‘It was a metaphor.’

‘Better to be a dead dog than a wounded man?’

‘Better to be a dead man than anything else.’

‘You have a pregnant wife,’ Leniter laughed.

I shrugged. ‘Afford the innocent ignorance.’

‘I am not innocent.’

‘No.’

‘I must die for that.’

‘You will die, and you’ll do it. “Must” is a useless word.’

‘Only death is a must,’ he agreed distantly.

I let him stand by it by the window.

After a moment, he spoke again. He chuckled. ‘This isn’t how I thought this would go.’

‘So you can still be surprised.’

He appreciated that. ‘Maybe I can still hope.’

I appreciated him then. I realised that this man would tread water until he accidentally came about drowning himself. The gears would still have him when I had long since left this hall.

I turned and crossed the room. These sounds were large in the lecture hall: the mechanical striking of my heels; the clod rustling of my coat; the fire’s murmur. When I had my hand on the door, I had resolved that nothing he said would keep me from my wife any longer.

He said nothing.

He howled.

It was such a guttural, welling sound, and the hall such a brilliant basin to bear it, that my stopping was out of my hands. It was short and tore through his throat. It wrapped me. It pervaded my skin. It split my fingernails.

I turned, half expecting to see him dead. His professorial posture was broken. His spine sat down at his pelvis, and his neck craned forward. The head on its end seethed. Both his forearms were turned outwards and flexed.

He was pitifully wronged and petulantly vengeful. Excuse my laughter.

‘Damn the divine,’ he yelled.

The outcry grabbed my stomach and twisted. I recovered, ‘Prove it first.’

‘And damn you too.’

I adjusted the coat in my arms. ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’

‘You cannot deny the sense of the divine. I cannot deny it. My soul.’

‘It’s just a sense,’ I said.

‘It is potent,’ he wrapped his face around the word.

We stood looking at each other for a moment. Then I draped my coat again and went back to him.

‘So what is it?’ I asked. ‘Morality?’

‘Don’t be simple.’

‘Purpose.’

He beckoned. ‘More.’

‘Well, it’s something beyond the self, surely,’ I crossed my arms. He bent lower. I looked at the roof and bit my cheeks.

‘Be specific,’ he roared. He was fixed in place and only his jaw and eyelids were contorting now.

‘God’s image,’ I had to raise my voice over his stance.

‘Really?’ he broke out of his stance and slung towards me.

‘You know I can’t think beyond the Greco-Judeo-Christian-’

‘Shut up.’

‘Justice and judgement,’ I said. ‘Then.’

He nodded. I had crushed him.

‘Oh it is,’ he cried and fell to leaning on the desk.

‘Justice and judgement,’ I repeated.

‘The world’s filth. Filth, filth. Murder: filth. Rape: filth. Disdain: filth.’

‘Wiped away. Hope for vengeance and justice.’

‘The sober abandonment of all hope,’ his words were wetted with tears.

‘Inadequacy!’ I enjoyed the word.

‘Abandonment and death,’ Leniter knelt with his forehead to the desk and arms stretched across it.

‘Sobriety and weeping!’

‘Such a sense of it,’ he muttered. ‘Such a sense.’

‘Doomed to failure, all of us: doomed to worthlessness and less than insignificance.’

‘Succumbing to ourselves.’

‘Every son and daughter the same!’ I bent with him

He slipped to the floor and I had to lean on the desk.

‘Where is hope? Where is hope?’ I called to him.

‘In others,’ Leniter responded. ‘In retribution.’

‘In being the least laid low.’

‘In comparison. Only hope in comparison!’

‘Kick out their knees,’ I muttered. My elbow buckled

‘Raze them! Raze them! If only to yourself.’

‘In razing, stoop,’ I was curled on the floor and kicked out my legs.

‘Tunnag! Tunnag!’ he sobbed. ‘Take hope. It may not be our claim.’

And then everything else that we said was lost in tears and retching. We had both fallen to the floor, and there we writhed and cried. Neither the young nor the old, the scholar nor the highlands farmer, could see beyond their own eyes.

The Sun’s thin, strangled arms began to paw down and across our forms on the floor. We kicked against it and clawed at the wood planks. I was, to him, a cracked mirror in a Venetian bathroom, and obliged to be so.

Then Leniter stopped. I followed a few moments later. He sat on his knees with red eyes and dry cheeks. His hands were in fists on his thighs. When I scooped myself up into sitting and dried my face on my sleeve, he spoke.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘It mustn’t be much of a sense if it stops so easily.’

‘Then it’s nothing?’

He smiled.

‘I’m tired,’ he said. And then the weight of those words collapsed his face. He said them again. ‘I’m just tired.’

We knelt there on the floor together. Such a numbness overcame me that I thought the Sun’s rising was peripheral. I thought that, perhaps, choice had been taken out of it; that it had been done to us. I thought this save Leniter’s occasional sigh.

‘Scottish Highlands,’ he scoffed. ‘Hell, maybe I did rob Macbeth.’

‘It won’t happen on a technicality, will it?’ I laughed.

He shook his head. Then, groaning and bent, he stood and put the revolver in his pocket. He stood behind the desk and waited for me to join him. I took a few seconds longer. We put out the fire and I switched off the desk’s lamp as Leniter pulled on his coat. I collected my own coat and we left the hall together. I opened the door for him and he patted the handle to make sure it was locked. In this manner, we came to the block’s steps.

‘I’ll go out onto the ice,’ he said. But I was the still lake now. ‘If Laura has a boy, name him after me, won’t you?’

‘I will not,’ I said, and shook his hand.

And he left: footprints in the snow and a cold touch on my hand.

I crossed the campus and field again with my coat close about me. I focused on the intense heat that the fire had warmed my bracers’ metal to. Many times, I thought I heard the thing. Sometimes I thought it had matched up perfectly with a step crunching the snow into slush and I had missed it. Then I would pause and listen for its ring and look for birds flying. But it was in the day now, and I mostly hurried back.

Then I was home, a door closed to Leniter. My wife was in the kitchen stirring peanut butter into her tea with a knife. I tried placing her, with her cardigan comforts, herding sheep in Scotland. It broke the thought. I smiled and kissed her cheek.

‘What did Leniter want?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ I put her knife in the sink. ‘Nothing of importance.’