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“The saddest thing about getting old is that no one comes to visit anymore.”

     That was the wholly abject and utterly surprising analysis that Dr. Brimm offered our Comparative Literature graduate class late in the fall of 1995 and with midterms looming just a few short weeks away, it was a response that baffled the class and seemed completely at odds with my own interpretation of the obscure Zen Koan that he had assigned to us a week earlier. I was worried and re-read my notes. Suseki’s view of the Koan differed and I thought of bringing this to Dr. Brimm’s attention, but something seemed wrong with him. Usually erudite and engaging, today his words seemed to wheeze out of him like soot from an old Irish factory. I decided to leave it alone. He looked like he needed to be alone. Or was alone. 

     “Alright class. Twenty minute break and we’ll pick up with Akutagawa.”

     The class shuffled out into the hallway and I thought again of mentioning my concern, but by the time I packed my things and headed to the front of the class Dr. Brimm had already gotten up from his perch on the corner of his desk and strolled over to the window. As I left the classroom to join the others I looked over my shoulder and saw him staring out the window at the parking lot below. His posture was one of pensive pins and needles: he had one hand stuffed into his pants pocket and the other came up and scratched the back of his neck. 

     Granville Marsman and Richard Partridge joined me outside for a smoke and a chat. It was a bitter fall day. Walrus sized clouds crushed their large dark bellies into the granite grey sky and the buildings surrounding the courtyard contracted in the cold, huddled closer and shivered. Several crows swooped through the sky and one perched on the clock tower. It was 3: 30. 

     “You guys notice anything weird about Doc?” I asked inhaling my cigarette. 

     “Weird?” Granville asked. As always he was far off and disinterested; for the four years that I had known him he hardly ever raised his eyes from up off of the ground, a posture that lent him an air of tragic intellectualism. He avoided most things, like talk of his past or his family or his old girlfriends, preferring instead to dig deep into discussions on Sartre or Nietzche. I knew better, though. Whatever was eating at him was more tragic than intellectual. He was haunted by something, something about the soul, I was sure, but I thought it was lame. I mean, all forms of spiritual machinations had ended with the advent of the personal computer. Everything was modern now. Even the old. 

     “No, not really,” Richard said. I liked Richard. He was a good head and good with the ladies, particularly the undergrads, and good with odd-angled insights that he brought up in class. He was into Kerouac and Burroughs and all of that existential druggy Po-Mo stuff that I thought was crap. I never got to the point of telling him, though, because I knew a debate would ensue and I didn’t want that from Richard. Besides, I liked his passion for the stuff; these days, anyone with passion was an anomaly and I collected anomalies–even fuck-ups like Granville. “I totally dug his analysis though, man. The loneliness of old age. Perfect, but I didn’t see it that way. Do now though, man. That guy hits a home run every time.” As Richard said this he swung an imaginary bat and with his hand arched over his brow he watched the “homerun” soar up and over the gothic grey Arts building. I thought he looked like a golfer, though, and I hated golf. It was a sport for environmental butchers with Rolexes. “Dead on, baby. The guy is gold.”

     We smoked in silence for another four or five minutes and then I tossed my butt on the ground. The wind swept it away and I watched as it curled and rolled around the building. I kicked a pebble. 

     We knew very little about Dr. Brimm. The last thing I learned I had gleaned from The Muse, the campus rag that I had submitted several pieces of poetry and short stories to. A couple of years back when I was in my second year and undecided about what I wanted to major in, I had read an article that said his wife had died and that his two sons would be returning from Europe. Students were asked to respect the man’s need for privacy. The article was succinct yet delicate and although I don’t remember all of the details now, I do remember it being a heartbreaking story. 

     Other than that there was the typical stuff surrounding a star professor. He had published several important books that added to his field and had hobnobbed with composers and artists and editors of the top newspapers. It was also a well known fact that sometime back in the early seventies he had even participated on a panel for the BBC as a contributing intellectual for a six part mini-series special about the role of the intellectual in a post-consummerist society. He, Edward Said and Michel Foucault were all there, captured in lo-fi and grainy black and white. Dr. Brimm was cool: the guys loved his Che Gueverra badass attitude and the girls loved his thick silver hair with its currents of black floating from the side of his head to the tuft of curls grouped at the back of his neck. His sharp almost Italian or Basque features increased his mysterious look and it was rumored that he had had many chances with his students, although there was never any firm confirmation that anything happened. I never thought it did. That didn’t seem his style. 

     “Hey, look at that.” 

     I looked over and Granville was pointing to a black limo with tinted windows and two strange pendant flags in the front corners of the hood. The flags were a deep blood red with a golden star shaped like a pentagram. The flags snapped and snarled in the wind. We waited for someone to get out, but nothing happened. It was incongruous with the rest of the scene. After a minute or so, a large man in a dark suit got out of the front driver’s side and went to the back and popped the trunk. He lifted out a large black duffel bag and with the bag hanging by his side he headed across the lot and into the front door of the Arts building. 

     We volleyed a few guesses. Richard said that it might be some visiting professor whose field was Wiccan Chanting Traditions and Demonology. Granville guessed that it was that rich financial backer we had been reading about who wanted to build a privately run research facility for oil and gas. 

     “Yeah, man” Richard mused, a wry smile cutting across his face. “And what the hell does Satan have to do with the oil and gas industry anyway?” 

     We chuckled and headed back inside. Class was due to start in another five minutes, so we grabbed a quick coffee from the vending machine that was tucked just inside the entrance and raising our classes to cheer our health we guzzled it back as if it were a shot of tequilla. We scooted back to class. 

     On the way we cut through the atrium and headed up a short flight of stairs. As we went up a large man with black hair and a black pinstripe suit made of impressive material, took up half of the stairway. We slid passed him, our jeans scraping along the walls as we went up. At the top of the stairs I looked back at the man. He was stone faced, maybe Middle Eastern or North African, and I half expected to see a white wire curling down from his ear into the back of his suit but there wasn’t one that I could see. 

     We exchanged confused glances as we turned into the hallway and headed towards our classroom where a large group was waiting outside of the door. Murmurs choked the air like cigarettes in a blues bar. The ones closest to the door bobbed and dipped their heads in order to get a glimpse through the door’s vertical window, but it was frosted and I knew that it was a useless effort. 

     “What the fuck is going on, man?” Richard asked. “Did the fire alarm go off or something?” 

       “I dunno,” I said. “But I wanna find out. Come on.”

     We picked up our pace and joined the group. Richard did a quick re-con mission and came back a minute later to inform Granville and I that he had talked to Monica and a few of the others. No one knew a thing. Nothing certain, anyway. 

     What was certain was that the door was locked and nothing could be heard beyond the door. Neither could shadows be seen sliding passed the frosted window. Beck Dinn claimed to be the first to get back from the break and he said that he saw Dr. Brimm dash into the classroom with a pile of blank sheets under his arm. DInn guessed that he must be inside making a surprise test or something. Everyone knew that was bullshit. Beck Dinn was a dick who looked for attention anywhere he could find it. Another rumor rose up rhizomatically with the message that Dr. Brimm and a woman had gone inside–another totally discreditable notion. The final goofball rumor was that he actually wasn’t in there, that it was some kind of joke. That rumor I liked; but I wasn’t buying it. I wasn’t buying any of them.

     The Potatoes, a group of fat ugly grad nerds with no souls and no ideas of their own but the ones they recited from the books that they got out of the library, snivelled and snotted in the corner. So close to other human beings and frightfully on the edge of social interaction, they took to nervously fixing their pink or green or red plastic clip on bows. I hated the Potatoes’s and their grimy skin with its oily sheen. And their hair was awful; there was nothing to it; it hung like limp lettuce around their ears and if there was one thing that disgusted me in this world, it was limp lettuce. I looked passed them, down the hallway, and three large men in dark suits came striding up the corridor, their shoulders rolling like bulls. 

     Richard nudged me in the ribs. 

       “What?”

     “You see that, man?”

       “Of course, Dick.” That was meant to hurt; payback for the shot in the ribs. 

     “Just like the dude in the stairway.”

       “Yeah, no kidding.” I needed a smoke and whipped out a straw that I kept on me at all times and started to chew. 

     As the men neared the Potatoes scattered, others turned their heads and pretended not to notice, either tying their shoelaces or reading notice boards, while the ones in their way made a wide respectable berth for the men. Nothing was said as they passed: It was an act of psychic acceptance–let us pass or your body would learn how to bend at strange and obtuse angles. 

     They opened the door and filed in. For the split second the door remained open, I stood on my tippy-toes trying get a glimpse but as soon as I had a chance to see something, another person ahead of me would bob up in my line of sight. 

     “Did you see that?” Granville hissed at my side. 

       “See what, dude? Let us on the inside or you’ll be up out the upside.” Ugh. Richard and his damn Beat talk. He unapologeticallty burrowed the Beats’s jargon and I thought this at odds with the depresso-who-fuckin’-cares attitude of the mid nineties.  What the hell did that mean anyway?

     “I saw a man. A tall man with dark with olive skin. He was wearing some kind of beany-type hat thing with weird colors. And he was tall, real tall.”

       “How tall?”

     “l don’t know. This tall,” he said shooting his arm straight up over his head, “and I think he was wearing sunglasses. And–” He screwed up his face. 

       “And what?”

     “And… I think Dr. Brimm was lying down on his desk. Like he was on an operation table or something.”

     Apparently others had seen something too and a mechanized buzz something not far removed from the sound of processing data filled the hallway and I was pulled along with the rest of them into the quixotic swirl. So. He was in there alright. There was no doubt. But who the hell were these men? And what did they want with Dr. Brimm? 

     “Jesus, man, do you think this has something to do with that limo outside?”

       “Definitely,” I said. “But I’m not sure what it is all about. That flag looked evil.”

      ”Like something from the crypt, man”

        ”Or lower and darker.”

      The door remained shut for another fifteen minutes and slowly, bit by bit, people formed into smaller groups and waited. A constant murmur of debate hung over their heads and filled the corridor. We decided we needed a plan. One idea was to run back down to the parking lot and catch a look through the window, that was Richard’s stupid idea. The room was too high and we didn’t have an extension ladder.  A second later he came up with another doozy. 

     “Lets go to the can and pop out one of the ceiling tiles. We can crawl over the hallway and to the classroom and then—”

     “–And then what, Richard?” I said. “Crash into the classroom n’ greet Dr. Brimm and his Insane Assassins from Parts Unknown with a handshake and a box of chocolate peanuts? This ain’t The Goonies, ya know.” 

     I turned and looked at Granville. His eyes were on the floor and he had his hands clasped behind his back like he was some kind of Buddhist monk chewing on the intricacies of a Mahayana sutra. He liked to imitate Asian poses. “Yeah, Dick,” he said. “That’s a stupid idea.”

     “Shut up, Martian.”

       “Whatever,” Granville muttered. He hated that nickname. In our defense, we only used it when necessary–actually, that’s not true–we used it whenever we wanted to. I mean, come on, his last name was Marsman for Christ’s sake, how could we not? 

     I zoned out while Granville and Richard yapped about different ways to infiltrate the room. I needed to figure it out. I had to get in. I scanned the crowd next to the door and I noticed Geoff and Roland eyeing each other but not saying anything. They were the kind of mopes who, in a few short years, would invite complete strangers to be their friends on Facebook and lost their virginity to blow up dolls. I took a minute to read their minds. This was a habit I had developed to entertain myself when I was a kid, but kind of drove me nuts now.  

–Lets bust the door down, Roll.

–But we’ve got no weapons, Geo. Just this stupid pen. 

–The pen is mightier than the sword, Roll!

–No it isn’t, Geo. You saw The Maxmen of Oren Five. Remember what happened to them? The Maxmen were reduced to sniveling cave dwellers. And why? Why were they nothing more than inhuman scum!? Because of laser guns and space ships, that’s why, Geo. Guns and spaceships are mightier than the pen, Geo. Period. And besides, don’t you remember Rand’s last speech, ‘Gather ’round men! This is our moment of glory.The time to prove that Maxmen will not die without a fight! We need to be strong! Gather our forces! We need to fight as one. And if we are going to win the war we need to–

     “Deploy the ships! Deploy the ships!” I yelled at the topp of my lungs.

     Everyone fell silent and turned to stare at me. This was the most troubling aspect of reading people’s minds: one got carried away sometimes. Undeterred and with the slow embarrassing grace of a sea slug, I lowered my right hand, which, for some reason I had stabbed upwards towards the florescent lights as I screamed out my epiphany, and turned towards the classroom, my brow set, and issued forth the following decree. “Fellows of the written word,” I announced in my best Rand Maxman voice. “Waiting here is pissing me off! I’m going in.” 

     The crowd made an even broader path for me than they did for the Insane Assassins from Parts Unknown. I felt powerful. Like King Kong, Rumplestillskin and Queen Elizabeth all rolled into one, swept along by the tide of bravery and courage that I, the Moon Man, had set in motion. Calm and collected, I waded forth, a World War I fighting Ace with amplified vision. The posters on the bulletin board next to our classroom floated on the cork background with a strange luminous intensity. One was on red paper and advertised a mixer this Saturday night. Another was for The Womaniquins, the campus punk/alt-rock/country band.   

     I reached the door. It was larger than I remembered. Like a weightlifter I squared myself in front of the door. People huddled around me in various poses of anxiety: one of the Potatoes, Bertha or Belinda or something, had hooked her hand over her mouth in a bad imitation of that Edward Munch painting, Beck Dinn chewed on his thumb and in front of me, Geo and Roll, clasped their hands about their waists, their knees shaking. 

     I inhaled a long, slow breath and held it in my chest. I squeezed my eyes shut and raised my hand then brought it down to hammer on the door. Miraculously, I meet nothing but air. I swiped my hand again and again. But nothing. Slowly, I opened my eyes and looming there before me was Dr. Brimm’s dark angular face. I tucked my chin into my neck and blinked a few times. I tried to read his face, but it was a weird collision of opposites and hard to read. 

     “Okay class, come on in.”

     I turned and cocked a smile at my classmates trying to conceal the thud stomping my chest. Richard tagged me on the shoulder, “Deploy the ships, man? What the hell was that all that about?”

     “Maxmen of Oren Five.”

       “Wha–”

     “Just get in there.”

 

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