Writings by Dr. John C. Rao

Periphery: A Novel of Rage and Reason

Imagine there’s no heaven;
It’s easy if you try.
No hell below us;
Above us, only sky.
Imagine there’s no countries;
It isn’t hard to do;
Nothing to kill or die for;
And no religion too.
Imagine all the people;
Living for today.
You may say I’m a dreamer;
But I’m not the only one.
I hope some day you’ll join us;
And the world will be as one.

(With thanks—but, no thanks—to John Lennon)

Freedom Center
#415

Dispatch Immediately:

Be on the lookout for Carmine Spostato. Forties. 5’11”. 165 lbs. Black hair, with patch of brown as birthmark on back of head. Brown eyes. Nearsighted. Gold frame glasses. Clean shaven. Aquiline nose. Thin, athletic frame. Last seen in a pair of black shoes, light gray slacks and a dark-gray pullover. Interested in history and conclusions. Dangerous.

Time:

(The Last Days of the Ancièn Régime: A Vague Sometime Between 1979 and 2001)

Book One: On the Periphery

An Exile Finds a Home
Citizens on a Hill
The Yearnings of the Huddled Masses
They’ve Thought of Everything!
The Kermesse, or Goya’s Triumph

Book Two: The Spread of Periphery

The Eternal Return
Can Anything Good Come From Queens? Part One
Novus Ordo Saeclorum
At the Core of the Apple
Faith of Our Fathers
I am Looking for an Honest Man!
Narodnik
Stakhanovites
Pardon Me!
The One is Not the Many
Acts of the Apostles
See Lenin Laugh
Sparafucil
The Ramifications of Siddharta
The Triumph of the Will
Thanks, But No Thanks
Can Anything Good Come From Queens? Part Two
E Pluribus, Definitely Unum
Part One: Salve! Popolo D’Eroi!
Part Two: The Pot Melts, or No Enemies at the Abyss!
Ritorna Vincitor!

Book Three: Flight From Periphery

Bathing in the Fresh Springs of Ignorance
Danse Macabre
Liber Scriptus Proferetur
Either-Or

Summary

This is a root and branch attack on the central principle of American life: Pluralism. That attack unfolds through the story of Carmine Spostato, an American who studied at Oxford, returned to New York, and, after years of not finding an academic job, is hired by Periphery University, in a difficult-to-reach section of the City. Carmine discovers that Periphery lives up to its name: it has, as its purpose in life, the goal of being on the periphery of learning; of never actually aiding the central cause of education, the discovery of Truth, which he had embraced with great enthusiasm.

Horrified by this fact, Carmine goes into a kind of “inner exile” at the university, while he explores the possibility of finding meaning on the outside. He is aided in doing so by two mysterious figures from Queens, a group of beggars, and a large array of baffled and increasingly annoyed friends. To his dismay, everything else in the United States--liberal, conservative, popular, elitist, worker, business, religious, immigrant, and criminal—despite its promise of being “unique” and “vibrant”--all proves to be linked together in the same, meaningless, peripheral enterprise that his University supported. After dabbling in an equally futile Nihilism, Carmine and his friends decide on a last, supreme effort to confront the supposedly “different” elements of American life with one another, so that they can prod them on to a real hostility, and stimulate an explosion of true divisiveness. This is designed to take place at an enormous party that they have arranged to coincide with the historical celebration of the Birthday of Rome. But, instead of finally “vibrantly” coming into conflict with one another, all the various “different” aspects of American life recognize how much they actually are the same. They all share an acceptance of the “common sense” of American Pluralism and the purposeless, integrated, non-confrontational existence that it demands of “free” individuals. Carmine and his friends, by this point, are ready to accept their inevitable defeat and surrender.

Their opposition is revived by Don Primo, the second of the mysterious men from Queens dedicated to aiding Carmine and his friends in their quest to find the true rock on which to build their lives. Don Primo announces that he has decided to take seriously a central joke of the Birthday of Rome party, his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States. A variety of wild mishaps give this candidacy an absurd plausibility. But Don Primo’s only goal is that of exposing American Pluralism for what it really is: an attack on human life at its very core; one that works by exiling all meaningful thought, spirit, and action to the “periphery” of existence. Carmine and his friends are dragged, unwillingly, into the campaign, only to that see it, too, ends by being highjacked into serving the purposes of what they all call “the Regime”. It is at that moment, that Carmine realizes what Pluralism actually is: demonic.

The book ends with Don Primo having set off a tumult in the United States and the world at large. This tumult convinces Carmine and his friends that an historical Decision Time of drastic significance has been reached, compelling them to make a choice either for Life or for Pluralism. Their decision commits them to a fight to the death against the demonic force that has devastated their world. Unsure as to the exact nature of their role in this battle, but aware that it involves an infinitely deeper acceptance of the teachings of their Faith and their Reason, they await, in hope, further enlightenment from the Christian God.

BOOK ONE: ON THE PERIPHERY

Chapter One: An Exile Finds A Home

“Misled!”, the Dean lamented. “Haven’t you noticed? People are constantly misled by superficial judgments. Even you may have leaped to the conclusion that Periphery is not at the center of things. And yet our location impacts well on the demographic unit definitized as focal by the Student Attraction Program inputted by The Team over at Hormone Hall.”

He pointed in the direction of a needle-shaped structure recently donated by an alumnus of the Department of Pharmaceutical Studies enriched from the sale of tattoo-inducing enzymes.

“Besides”, he added, “you’re not likely to pursue domiciling in town after a couple of weeks at Periphery. You’ll want to be with us constantly. We’re a community here. Noah’s Ark! All for one and one for all. We’re a place where you grow. As a person. But not just that! Fun? Forget about it! Never ends! And look at it from this angle. Until you move, you’ll have Lady Liberty in the harbor to inspire your commute.”

A secretary interrupted the Dean’s monologue. Signatures were needed on a dozen sheets of what appeared to be estimates for the annual budget.

“WEFMUR”, the Dean grunted, by way of explanation for the disturbance. “Weekly Faculty Mail Use Reports.”

The secretary fled. She, like everyone else in the building had a multi-colored tattoo on the reverse of her right hand.

“I found myself at Periphery!”, it proclaimed.

“Steel!”, the Dean bellowed, in praise of his aide, his fortissimo intense enough for the entire office staff to hear. “Pillars of strength, each and every one! Chemical agents would run right through their systems without leaving a trace. Love and respect all The Team in this neck o’ the woods, I do.”

Carmine Spostato did not claim to understand much that Dean Diaphonous Veil was telling him. Oh, he was certain that it must make sense. Or, at the bare minimum, that its profundity would be clarified, along with all the other apparently inexplicable experiences dotting his own confused existence, on Judgment Day. At the moment, he did not need the Beatific Vision. All he wanted was a job.

Carmine blamed himself for his failure to grasp the message of Veil. He was, after all, very, very tired. First, there had been the fortnight of nervous excitement, stirred by the advertisement announcing a position in European History at Periphery University, and the unexpected call to a face-to-face interview. Carmine had spent a number of years since his return from Oxford looking for a job without encountering a single serious bite. Or a proper nibble. Or even a respectable scrap from a fairly sterile rubbish bin.

Yes, there was that possibility of a Chair of Seventeenth Century Polish History at Ratatan College in Slavic Pope, Arkansas. The one replacing a madman who had threatened to throw acid in his face if he dared to appear at the podium.

Carmine had not gone to investigate. He had always preferred Italian pontiffs anyway.

Since the Ratatan affair, he had labored at the Fond Embrace Envelope Factory on the Lower West Side, and gradually abandoned all academic hopes. But now, the times they were-a-changing. Opportunities were opening up, due to a nationwide renewal of education. Periphery was knocking at his door. And in New York City, no less. Home, itself! Was this to be his castle in Spain? If, that is to say, exhaustion could be overcome en route to the drawbridge?

Anxiety also accounted for Carmine’s present fatigue. True, only seven other applicants had been called up for an interview, but he became a bit discouraged upon hearing of the stiffness of his competition in the tense atmosphere created by the general concern for educational renewal: A Double Transgender Catholic priest-nun. A Lubavitcher Eskimo. Two Siamese Dwarfs, who complicated matters by insisting upon sharing the post. One certified idiot, the completion of whose doctorate had been transformed by the media into a national triumph. A former convict, flushed with enthusiasm over his rise from wife-slayer to prison philologist. And a token Lapplander, who prided himself on his complete and utter ignorance of the English tongue.

Causes for fatigue? More Still? As if these were not sufficient? Try that labored search for the most suitable means of arriving punctually for the appointment!

Carmine knew from the start that Periphery was not quite in the center of town. He finally had to go to the City Archives for a map of New York detailed enough to pinpoint it at all. Eight miles separated the campus from the Village, where Carmine had lived since returning from Oxford. Still, connections seemed clear, he would be going against the traffic, and his interview was fixed for a civilized 10:00 A.M. Always an early riser, Carmine planned to leave his apartment around 7:00, arrive at the campus an hour later, saunter round about the gardens, and smile, knowingly, at the earnest faces of industrious summer students. Who could tell how many of them might soon debate his interpretation of the Age of Reason? Ponder the ins and outs of Revolution and Counterrevolution? Nihilism and Utopia? As understood in the Spostato manner? After all the homework they’d been given since pre-school? It would be hard to get them to leave the classroom! Carmine even thought that he would linger for a moment in the cafeteria, savouring a blend of university coffee made palatable by the certain success of his visit. A well-chosen mint would repair any damage done to the attractiveness of his breath.

Things did not proceed precisely according to plan. Kamahojo Fugiwara-Minamoto, a wealthy Japanese businessman with whom Carmine had shared digs at Oxford, was a major catalyst in its breakdown. Kamahojo arrived in New York for a surprise visit on the eve of Carmine’s interview, accompanied by four of his fellow countrymen, all of whom knew less English than the Lapplander. Carmine met them on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building. He had been out walking the entire afternoon and early evening, seeking to calm his nerves. Bed had beckoned.

Heartfelt yearnings sometimes remain unfulfilled. All five Japanese nabobs kidnapped Carmine, forcing him into a New York Geisha House for a nocturnal debauche. Carmine was quickly discalced. The pungent scent of Spostato toe jam placed an entertaining obstacle in the path of swift satisfaction of appetite.

“Feet! Feet!”, one Japanese plutocrat screeched incessantly, both horrified and amused by the stench emitted by the American’s extremities.

Carmine’s explanation of the reason for his aroma and its connection with the approaching interview plucked a tender chord in the soul of the Nipponese capitalist. It was time for a gift. Computer-chip watches were the fellow’s forte. He carried pocket samples with built-in alarms to dispense, as tokens, to sympathetic riffraff, wherever commerce guided him. An Italo-American required a device that played a tarantella. On the hour. And da capo once the first round was finished. A mere jab with a straight pin in Carmine’s forehead was enough to install the mechanism, relieving sinus pressure as it settled in. Time was told instinctively, to the inner man, with each blink of the eye.

It reached 5:00 A.M. At least Carmine would not risk oversleeping. He escaped to his morning ablutions. Weariness so benumbed him that he forgot the effects a crisp new blade would have on his Mediterranean beard. He noticed the blood stains on his collar by the time he entered the subway, and watched them smear to Jackson Pollock proportions inside the train. Who would attribute them to a toilette gone awry? Suspicions of endemic Village perversions with high medical costs as hangovers would arise.

Carmine learned in the subway that long-term improvements in MTA service mandated forty years of short-term disruptions. His trip temporarily required two changes, including one to a local delayed by a bag lady who refused to allow the doors to close unless the train changed directions. The main part of the journey, thirty minutes on a ferry, tipped the hour mark due to a confrontation between the boat’s refreshment stand manager and his supplier. A consignment of butter had been erroneously delivered, instead of margarine.

“No respect for my customers?”, the manager spat at the foolish merchant. “What’s happened to the Social Contract? I tell you, the polis is finished! You’re walkin’out through the eye of a needle!”

But Carmine was really held back by the double bus ride that awaited him on the other side, and the second driver’s inept attempt to spread cream cheese on a bagel. Carmine promised to perform the task for him, repeatedly, for life. And even to put on the weight due the driver after the concoction’s ingestion. So long as the man would depart. A twelve minute hike through the grounds of an abandoned mustard factory completed the odyssey. Bloodied, stained with fats, smelling of cinnamon-raisin, and drenched with sweat, Carmine reached the administration building at 10:05.

It was now 11:00 A.M., and Dean Veil was elaborating the Philosophy of Periphery.

“The benefits of Periphery for both students and faculty—and let me say at this point that our faculty is genuinely loved and respected by The Team over at Hormone Hall as much as they are by Me and Mine—these benefits are incalculable. Utterly incalculable. You’ve got the perimeters of urbanity at the edge of your fingertips--truly fingertipized, as it were—and yet you wouldn’t know that we were anywhere near what my assistant—sixty pillars of strength he is—calls “the city”. That’s why you’ll want to actuate a move here, quick.”

Dean Veil was en train. His relaxation boded well for Carmine’s acceptance. Furthermore, there was the promise of rapport with the as yet nebulous figure of the Assistant Dean: Carmine also tended to refer to New York as “the city”. Still, he could not grasp what appeared to be an obsession with the importance of his emigration. Why should he abandon what was a pleasant apartment, especially in the current housing crunch, to establish himself near Periphery? And, besides, Carmine appreciated his home. Lord knows he’d undergone the agonies of the souls in torment in order to find it. His mind wandered back to that painful endura as Dean Veil perorated without ending.

When first returned from Britain, Carmine lived in various perhaps overly modest accommodations in the East Village. One of these dives was occupied by a friend, his friend’s brother, the friend’s brother’s harlot, and two pensioned off Yemeni terrorists. Carmine slept in a closet. His initial sensation each morning was that of a raincoat or a tie tickling his forehead. On special days, the odd riding boot stored high up top fell down upon his prodigious nose to remind him of the problem of pain.

Carmine came out of the closet after several months. He then headed towards Second Avenue and a room in a Hells’Angels’ redoubt, notice of which had escaped the Real Estate section of The New York Upright Zeitgeist.

One entered Carmine’s second hideaway through a communal doorway, passing, first, into an interestingly-appointed, cat-infested salon. This overflowed, regularly, with more than mousers. Spandex-clad lovelies, seated Indian style on table tops, were also present, clutching Nazi regalia and staring blankly ahead. The blankness of the gape was fixed forever vividly in Carmine’s memory. At that time, there remained a number of New Yorkers who had some life left in their faces. And the contrast with those who did not was still noticeable.

Carmine’s room was on the second floor. Transportation thereto was afforded by means of a rope ladder. A trap door had to be removed upon arrival at the ceiling. Corridor walls were the only forms visible, once through the barrier. These could be slid away, revealing a fairly large collection of miniscule chambers. Carmine saw sights in some of those cubicles that no man should ever see. All the walls of both corridors and rooms were decorated with murals depicting suicides. In Pre-Raphaelite style.

“I see the English as a curious race”, one debased cycle fiend commented under a watercolor of a Northumbrian maiden’s butchered body, as Carmine hung up his clothes. “At once, both traditional and subversive. Don’t you agree?”

Carmine was very agreeable.

A condition of inhabiting the place was that no furniture be brought in, except for a pallet on which to sleep.

“The cops”, Carmine was told. “Let’s hope they don’t come at night. In winter. Or when the girls are pregnant.”

Life on Second Avenue was indeed hard. Carmine took to frequenting a local tavern.

“Do you sleep with your head aiming towards the sliding wall or away from it?”, a young wench asked him at the bar one day over a beer.

“Towards the wall”, he answered, bemused. “Why?”

“Aren’t you afraid that someone will chop it off?”

He hadn’t been.

He left that day.

An apartment building some blocks away seemed as though it might perhaps become home. Oh, it was hideous. Oddly constructed, too. Exaggeratedly long and wide. But its setting seemed so calm. So human. And the structure was a trifling two stories high. Done in brick. Even surrounded by a little garden. With roses. Trimmed.

One gained entrance to the quaint abomination through a double set of doors, the outer one solid and secure, the inner, totally of glass. Guests could be buzzed in through the first entrance, sight unseen, though the inhabitants were obliged to go, in person, to greet them and assure their passage through the next. Destiny assured Carmine rapid introduction to his new neighbors. Having rented the front ground floor apartment, he would inevitably witness the continuous commerce of hosts and visitors.

Yes, indeed, he thought. Be it ever so humble. Here it was. His refuge. His rock. His Sion, Persepolis, Acropolis, Capitol Hill, and Cliffs of Dover combined.

The boy had not yet read Schopenhauer.

It took no more than two nights in this pleasant pastoral enclave for him to long for the calm and cultivation of a school of gladiators.

Carmine had happily picked up his pallet from the Death Gallery and thrown it onto the floor of his new mènage to rest a weary but intact head. The first of what he presumed would be many nights of salubrious undisturbed sleep descended. And, as it did, a long, loud drum roll announced one half hour of Polish military music from the apartment next door. Slavic Pope, Arkansas had apparently moved to the East Coast. Two elderly Poles, illegal aliens, could be heard sobbing, bitterly, reliving all the horror of the three Partitions, as the old songs called them to the doomed colors.

Innocent words and sounds are often transformed into something unexpectedly vile under the pressure of circumstances. Carmine was long familiar with this metamorphosis. Now, the names Pilsudski and Dombrowski, a phrase resembling green chickens and the harsh report of heavy slippers manifested the phenomenon anew . “Green chickens—stomp, Stomp. Green chickens—stomp, Stomp. Pilsudski, Dombrowski, green chickens—stomp, Stomp.” Later, only the words “professor” and “student” would vie with these for the laurel wreath of loathsomeness to crown his tormented psyche.

Noisemakers, Carmine learned, also occupied the basement. Its inhabitants were Serbs. This was appropriate, for, with Carmine serving as a reference point in central Europe, North and South Slavs were then situated approximately where they would have been found on the map of the Old World. Carmine’s position enabled him to suffer, as did SS. Cyril and Methodius, from pressures endemic to areas plagued by corrupt interests of both Latin and Greek origin.

Serbian merriment began at midnight. It was then that the Folk heated up their bean soup, brought out cassettes of native tunes sent from relatives in Nis, and wept. Carmine, ever alert sociologically, noted the penchant of both branches of the great Slavic Family for tears when the music was turned on.

Italians were about to join their ranks.

But these nuisances were merely the antipasto. And the entrées were so varied and rich in woof and web.

Through single-minded application, Carmine finally succeeded in dozing off. He was awakened from his dogmatic slumbers by thumps in the hallway at three-o-clock. A door opened. A television blared. Devilish cackling replaced the thumping.

Only after several days did Carmine ascertain the cause: the nightly ritual of a seventy-five year old, one-legged roué, who left his apartment every dusk in pursuit of sexual conquest. Vice was always rewarded, even in those perilous times. The roué returned home, left the door ajar, and made as much noise as possible, apparently in order that the whole world might rejoice in his continued potency. This murky chanson de geste played until near dawn, when, exhausted, his member shriveled, and his arrogance and pride along with it.

Don Giovanni’s wall separated him from the apartment of a hunter, whose whole living space sported mounted trophies. The roué himself informed Carmine of the hunter’s activities over breakfast, the first dawn that the scholar screwed up courage to complain to the sinner about the triune problem of door, tube and cackle. Once, the hunter had accidentally shot a hole through his own ceiling while cleaning a gun, and had blown up a beer bottle on the table of his upstairs’ neighbor. The hunter never understood the ensuing row, especially since he had offered to buy another beer for his victim.

“For cryin’ out loud!”, he had protested to all who would listen. “It was only a Budweiser! And I was gonna replace it with a Pilsener Urquell!”

All of Carmine’s neighbors seemed to thrive in either legal or physical danger, whether Slavs, degenerates or potential killers. Worst of all, and in this last category, were two young drug dealers, who, due to the peculiar structure of the building, lived both next to Carmine and alongside the Poles. These citizens were cherished by the landlord—a rapacious, frustrated architect from Graz named Glorian Feschpendel, responsible to date for the construction of Carmine’s building alone—who was pleased that the entrepreneurs paid their rent a year in advance.

Drug dealing generally kept the villains away from home. Carmine might thus have benefited. If, that is to say, their two Dobermen had not hurled themselves ceaselessly against the apartment wall in rage over their masters’ absence.

Unspeakable sweatshops attract immigrants, like the Poles, who sometimes have no choice but to frequent them to survive. Yet young maidens voluntarily streamed into the drug dealers’ apartment to offer themselves as holocausts in that overworked temple. Some, once they had gained the status of resident aliens, did not leave the premises for weeks, obviously fearful that their passports might not be stamped for multiple entry. It was easy to determine who was leaving for good: the two heart throbs would send the offending girl’s suitcase, and then the creature herself, plummeting out of the kitchen window. The departing guest would always crawl humbly away, swearing that she would somehow learn to please her owners should the opportunity to serve the demigods once more come her way. Perhaps hurtling herself more speedily into the walls than the Dobermen would do the trick? In fact, the drug dealers began to post notices on the wall urging the babes to follow them as role models.

When frightened crowds gathered round the front door of the building, Carmine himself felt the need to keep watch for those exemplary hounds of hell. They were regularly let out for a romp to allow their masters the chance to make love to human pets. When they were not, the pups became too nervous, drew one another’s blood, and disturbed the touching romantic atmosphere a tad above the chillingly acceptable.

Carmine’s studies raised his mind to higher things. So did the roof of his ground floor apartment. Alas, his upstairs’ neighbors sustained no such heavenly aspirations. They dedicated themselves to ripping from their floor every material placed there by the already stingy Feschpendel to muffle sound. Afterwards, they had deposited as many noisemaking devices as possible on the ground above Carmine’s pallet.

Oh, it wasn’t the strains of Josquin des Pres that called down from the clouds. Nor an unknown chorus of Aeschylus’ Persians. Country music of the Texas Panhandle, transposed for hard rock and rap, were the dominant theme. The male would sing along with these ditties in falsetto. His foul-mouthed consort punctuated the concert with vulgarities even more base than those of a revolutionary journalist. As it turned out, she was a college administrator; he, a doctoral candidate in linguistic analysis.

A wicked nightly ritual guided the life of this couple as rigidly as that of any pharaoh preparing for the Sed-Feast. Carmine pieced the ceremony together as best he could through the power of logic alone. Aristotelian. It seemed that a given signal from the bubble gum music warned the incubus and succubus that it was high time to don metallic shoes and clomp from one end of the flat to the other.

“I am the peripatetic incarnate!”, he would then thunder.

“Fuck, shit, fuck!”, she would respond to his epiphany.

After an hour or so of drill, one of the duo would call a halt to the parade by knocking down their dresser, loaded with weighty stones, onto the ever weakening floorboards. Finally, all would be quiet on the ceiling front.

Life is hard, the Second Avenue refugee reminded himself. Perhaps this kinky pathway to mutual self-fulfillment was necessary to the couple’s temporal salvation. Yet another petty persecution flowing from the bite of an apple. Probably one with worms, as well.

A new twist was added to the farce with the purchase of a dog. The frisky little female was wont to run and slide from wall to wall, hour after hour, scraping on the floor with her sharp claws and yelping like a squeaky milk shake machine. The female dog as well. Ever on the lookout for means of raising the decibel level, the couple acquired a steel Sisyphysian ball for the cur to roll hither and thither during drill. Sometimes the dog’s antics reminded the woman too much of her own colleagues, and she was aroused to expressions of vulgarity which Carmine preserved in the chip in his forehead for the delectation of future generations.

“Bitch!”, she would then screech in her lewd, concluding argument. The exact purpose of this choice of word was difficult to interpret. Was she addressing the dog? Accurately? Or was she merely “signing” her own stupendous outburst, truly artistic in its own right, and worthy of being laid claim to by its author?

The cry of “bitch” was accompanied by a kick befitting a Turkish child at play with a hapless Armenian; a kick that hurled the offensive creature against the opposite wall, and set off the beasts downstairs. One day, the kick was followed by the clanking of metal human feet, a rush to the bottom of the staircase and the slamming of a garbage can cover immediately outside the building. Carmine never heard the pup again.

Would that the same were true of the assassins.

Everything in Eden came to a head on weekends. Nearly all the occupants were at home. Pick-ups were plentiful, drug deals were in full swing, and Slavic memories sailed comfortably down a river of plum wine. Even Glorian Feschpendel visited, to show off the designs for yet another edifice, certain, finally, to assure recognition from his otherwise indifferent peers. Only Carmine’s upstairs’ neighbors frequently absented themselves from the festivities. Their Texas Panhandle proclivities regularly tempted them to the Little Falls, New Jersey rodeo circuit. Just as house alarms inform burghers on an entire city block that no burglar has entered the residences on their street, so, too, forty eight hours of loud, uninterrupted country rap music told Carmine that his upstairs’ buddies had, most certainly, taken Jersey Transit to southern Passaic County to wrestle steer. He confronted the Bitch the Monday after the atrocity first was perpetrated.

“Oh, fuck, shit, fuck!” she said. “I forgot!”

She forgot regularly. And she forgot, each time Carmine reminded her, that she had forgotten before. There was no point remonstrating with the man. No human sound was of sufficient intensity to register on his damaged ear drums. These were plugged all the time, anyway, as he listened to tapes of grunting cattle.

Steer had too much natural self-respect to perform that action live before him.

Carmine thought of wrapping string around the entire apartment. Or maybe placing a dead dog on the doorstep. The landlord was certainly of no use. Glorian Feschpendel became a civil libertarian whenever Carmine urged him to exercise his rights as owner to enter the corral to shut the offending devices off.

“God forbid that I should perhaps see my tenants’ underthings!”, he gasped. “Do you want that I should sift through my tenants’ underthings? And look at the labels? To see where they buy? Some things are sacred. Besides. No one else hears it but you.”

Glorian Feschpendel’s libertarianism sometimes gave way to such concern for majority opinion. Still, he was right about the noise directing itself only towards Carmine. One heard nothing but the sounds of silence from every other vantage point in the universe. Carmine had, of course, tried merely a few of these. The rest was a simple process of deduction. Even in New York. Even after Francis Bacon. Even after David Hume.

One August weekend, all Creation groaned. Carmine again picked up his pallet and walked.

At first, that fateful weekend, the evil had stayed within traditional bounds. Glorian Feschpendel had appeared around 8:00 A.M. to show Carmine his plans for yet another totally concrete and windowless church.

“Let in the fresh air!”, he exulted. “I see this as a symbol of the reconciliation of Christian spirituality and Sokka Gakai. I call it: ‘Our Lady of All Things Bright and Beautiful’.”

Carmine had little time to listen. He was off to the dentist. Extraction of all four wisdom teeth was imminent. The operation took but a few moments. He returned home in the late morning, very groggy and eager for a day of repose.

Day of repose?

How could there be a day of repose if his neighbors and he did not share the same definition of a basic sense of fairness?

That Saturday afternoon, moved by some profound but misplaced communal drive, everyone in the building took out vacuum cleaners to expunge a year’s accumulation of filth. The drug dealers were so aroused by the rumble of the machines that the Dobermen were thrust outside to irritate unwary passersby.

Not that the vacuum cleaners really mattered, though. Pain caused by failure to heed the dentist’s cogent post-operative instructions was already making Carmine toss about on his pallet. He got up. Perhaps activity would help. To while away the hours of suffering. Carmine took to clipping his hair. As he worked, he noticed that his butchered gums were moist with blood. A call to the dentist taught him that biting down on tea bags would stop the flow of vital sap. He quickly inserted two tea bags into his mouth, one on each side, not bothering to undo the Lipton labels which dangled, rather symmetrically, from the edges of his lips. He returned to the hair clipping. Unfortunately, the gums again unnerved him. While trying to shorten his sideburns, he accidentally sliced open each ear lobe. Yet another previously unknown medical fact impressed itself upon him. Those suckers could bleed! Carmine’s face resembled slightly dampened dry land, surrounded by a Red Sea. He looked around him for the Promised Land.

Nope. Only the New World. And without any manna and quail to boot.

At that moment, the bell rang. Carmine was no atomist. He believed in society. He turned to answer it. The door was ajar. This proved to be useful. Applying pressure to each lobe with the appropriate hand, Lipton tea bag labels dangling from the ends of his red-stained lips, teeth clenched tightly together onto bloodied scissors, wearing shorts and bare-chested, Carmine had only to kick the partially-opened portal inward with his foot.

It was the Poles. They had come for a visit.

“We are perhaps here at awkward time?” the woman both asked and admitted simultaneously.

Carmine shrugged an embarrassed yes, and the Poles walked apologetically away. He heard them commenting on what they had just witnessed as he shut the door and bolted it firmly.

“So sad”, she said. “And such a nice boy.”

“Just like the Swobodas”, her husband reminded her. “Only they wore latex.”

Carmine had become part of the local show. All he needed now was for a house committee to award him membership in the building association.

But things really got out of control only at dinnertime.

Carmine was in no condition to party. He prepared the best meal that he could, given the circumstances: illness; heat; scirocco; and a kitchen which remained close no matter how much air was allowed into it.

The drug dealers were still making love, and their liberated Dobermen, attracted by the aroma of victuals, inserted as much of their bodies as was possible through Carmine’s screenless windows. He sensed that the dogs were not exigent. Should the food run out, he himself would satisfy their need for the odd hors d’oeuvre. It was not their snarling and snapping that bothered Carmine. He was merely uncomfortable, having been raised to consider it to be impolite to eat alone in front of others. Moreover, he thought it wasteful for him to devour all his delicacies, only to be mauled and digested himself but moments later.

Shutting the windows in the torch of August was unthinkable. Little alternative was offered by the living room, though, as he would then be forced to eat on the floor. Carmine had detested the floor ever since undergraduate college, when everyone was obliged to sit on it in a spontaneous ode to freedom. Besides, dining in the living room would require him to endure the full volume of the concert coming from the apartment of his dear absent friends above.

Step by step, Carmine was led to an inexorable conclusion. He must repair to the only other room in the house with a seat. No need to worry about waste there. Hands could be washed, meals eaten and digestive demands met with an economy of movement that the Pilgrim Fathers would have respected. And the Founders enshrined in the Constitution. As a demonstration of Common Sense. Of Truth. But, above all, of Beauty.

Allowance did, of course, have to be made for the oddities of Glorian Feschpendel’s architecture. The Austrian Palladio had designed Carmine’s bathroom with a sort of alcove for the toilet, allowing just enough space to slide oneself onto the seat. This alcove might have been cozy, had it not been for the fact that two spikes protruded from its walls: spikes which aimed at the front and back of one’s head. There was no room to move, side to side. And the slightest twitch, frontwards or backwards, threatened instant impalement.

Perhaps this was a result of Glorian’s deep concern for good posture. Carmine’s parents had begun to ask him why he had cuts on his forehead. He explained to them that he regularly jabbed his fingernails into his temples in frustration over the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. They did not understand. They became cranky.

“But I like electric can openers”, his mother whined.

The mob is bought that cheaply.

After dinner, Carmine glanced out the window. The drug dealers were insatiable. Nevertheless, the Dobermen were temporarily busy, scoffing a Chinese takeaway meal someone had thrown to them in order to secure uninjured entry to his home. Carmine took advantage of the respite to empty the rubbish.

This was no swift maneuver. A bag man, a veritable Everybum, was chanting obscenities, beating his head with a worn-out briefcase, and picking chicken wings out of the trash bin. Emboldened by the courage forged from his own physical suffering, Carmine asked him what his problem might be. The man then recounted a perfectly coherent tale of bureaucratic difficulties sufficiently vexing to drive a computer geek into the arms of a Whirling Dervish.

“But it was the stamp that really did it”, he confided.

There had been just one form too many to fill out and return to the appropriate illiterate authorities at his own expense.

“I mean it’s their government!”, he argued. “Couldn’t they at least provide their own stamp? If I scream at you, do I ask you to pay for my throat doctor? After I’ve unburdened myself? No. But not the secular authorities. Not the Imperium. It’s usury, I tell you.”

Carmine understood.

“Get on with it”, he urged. “Rage is therapeutic. The Jews know this. Never forget.”

“Thanks”, Everybum responded. “Most of the other derelicts accuse me of casuistry. Jansenism is pandemic.”

Carmine turned towards his abode. Upon reentering the hallway, he discovered the hunter pacing back and forth about the door to his lodge, awaiting a friend who was a trifle late for an evening fête. The occasion was the bagging of a goat. Newly stuffed. And placed next to an enormous duck in the living room. A celebratory ragout of goat’s innards was bubbling on the stove in anticipation of his arrival. Carmine was invited in for a look at the luckless creature. It was standing, whole, on a pedestal, like a golden calf awaiting renegade Israelites to worship it.

Carmine felt no misplaced piety. He entered his apartment and tried to read in his bathroom for a while. His eyes became strained in doing so. The lighting was fine, but the effort of holding the book to the right or left of his head, and then of probing it, eyeballs sideways, was debilitating. If only the Feschpendel Spikes could have been temporarily moved! But then they would have been only artificially dramatic, like make believe pillars on colonial homes. Reality would have suffered another defeat.

And could it stand a further test?

About 9:00 P.M., Carmine heard the doorbell ring outside. After an interval of no more than five seconds, that ring was followed by the sound of smashing glass. All the occupants of the building, and Carmine among them, ran to their doors or down the staircase to investigate.

There was nothing. Only the hunter. Chatting happily, to a man with a bloodied arm, as the two processed towards the idol and the sacrificial stew. Behind them, the glass entrance to the Feschpendel Arms lay in ruins.

The hunter looked with some irritation at the gaping crowd.

“My buddy got impatient”, he announced, as the two entered the menagerie together. “Ain’t he gotta right?”

The hunter then noticed his upstairs’ enemy, staring in disbelief.

“Waatsamatta?”, he yelled out in derision. “Wanna nutha beer?”

He laughed with the security of a Cicero obliterating an infinitely more pitiable Cataline.

“The creep wants a nutha beer”, he said to his friend.

He turned to abuse his retreating foe.

“Wanna nutha beer? Wanna nutha beer? Wanna nutha beer?”

That did it. It was Carmine’s stamp experience. He fled from his ground floor window the following morning.

“Don’t you even want your scissors?”, the Poles shouted in surprise as they noticed him rounding the block.

No. Carmine wanted nothing. Not even the memory, for future vengeance. No memory. No photographs. No postcards. No monthly deposit. Nothing. And, thenceforward, he ran instinctively for an exit whenever anyone asked him if he wanted “a nutha”.

The summer of Carmine’s discontent thus continued, with the prospects for resolution of his housing dilemma diminishing rapidly. Vae victis! Practically all of his funds had been depleted in securities for shelters that had possessed the charm of open air sewers.

Someone urged consultation with a witch.

“Yes?”, the hag asked.

“A home?”, he inquired.

“Here?”, she continued, hesitantly. “Now? Long term?”

Carmine nodded affirmatively.

She opened the Sybilline Books. Checked the chickens pecking their seed. Split the small intestine of a sheep with a straight pin.

“Sorry”, she announced.” I just don’t see it. But we’re all in the same boat. And it may prove to be beneficial. As a start. For the reconstruction of the social order. Without consulting the General Will.”

Carmine refused to believe in hoary superstition. Finding a true flat now became a full time job for him, one to be approached with grim purpose and self-donation. He left his bags and pallet with a bartender at Grand Central Station, so as to have a convenient, temporary, midtown address from which to work. Each night, he took from behind the bar whatever he needed for the next twenty-four hour period, and went off to stay with one or another of his boon companions.

“You’re on your way!”, Everybum congratulated him.

Most frequently, Carmine stayed with Thalwart Sequitur. Thalwart was known to his friends as Demosthenes, ever since the day that he had been fired from his brokerage house for Philippics against the free market. Demosthenes, of average height, average weight and average colored skin, might have been taken by the passerby as an ordinary, dark-haired fellow in his early 30’s.

Caveat emptor!

At the first words of a serious conversation, Demosthenes’ flesh became the body electric. No doubt remained as to the character of the artist responsible for this form. He hadn’t been a merely competent draftsman, but a Byzantine mystic, an El Greco, and a Caravaggio tossed into one. Structure was completely transformed by this Genius through an understanding of spiritual desire, inner strength and movement towards light. And Demosthenes was his masterpiece.

Demosthenes’ real home was Tuscany, where he had had the good sense to purchase an extremely well-priced villa during his very brief period of capitalist prosperity. Every summer, usually in August, Carmine, Demosthenes and their circle somehow managed to get to Europe to spend a bit of time there.

The pilgrimage was always vicious. Demosthenes detested flying. It was discomfort rather than the fear of death that annoyed him. A fixed feature of each New York-Rome journey was Demosthenes writhing in agony in the middle section of a 747.

“This is it”, he would say, hopefully, as he maneuvered himself into a position promising bodily relaxation, but actually fit for nothing more than a moment’s quiet preparation for still greater misery.

When not at the villa—namely, for ten months or more of the year—Demosthenes’ abode was the Upper West Side, on a landmark block near Riverside Drive. The block could just as well have been an eyesore, so little did Demosthenes ever regularly see it in the light of day.

Every morning, Carmine’s friend rose and read one or another of the Great Books. Then, as night fell, he hurried excitedly out onto the street to find someone with whom to discuss the day’s exhilarating discoveries.

He needn’t have rushed.

Demosthenes sometimes became so enraged over the lack of response from his fellow man that he would run back to his apartment, choose a particularly large Great Book and hurl it at a dull-witted pedestrian from his roof top. Generally, however, the demise of thought was lamented in dialogue with Carmine. Excessive quantities of good wine, paid for with earnings from the editing jobs which now kept Demosthenes alive, consoled the masterpiece as he bemoaned the ramifications of intellectual collapse.

Once, after getting nowhere in an argument over the romantic conception of love, both men were seized by lust, and went off to a local honky-tonk in search of the Incarnate Idea. The girls at this brasserie did not want to speculate about divine pulchritude. Their interests veered in the direction of television commercials.

“Did you see the ad about the pig and the lemon shampoo?”, one babe cooed in Demosthenes’ ear.

Passion faded. Reason revived. Desperate now for intellectual female companionship, Carmine and Demosthenes found two prostitutes willing to abandon their normal function and give sexy feminine comment on readings from early modern political theory instead. Carmine took Room 401 and the Leviathan; Demosthenes, Room 405 and Marsilius of Padua. They agreed to discuss their findings later. But the evening ended in disaster. Twinkle objected violently to Demosthenes’ emphasis upon Marsilius’ dismantling of the medieval synthesis.

“It wasn’t worth a farthing to begin with!”, she argued. “I’ve seen the polls!”

Demosthenes called her a fool. She spat at him. He overturned a table, shook his fist and said that he would be avenged on her and all who prattled as she did by the judgment of future centuries.

“Future centuries!”, the whore laughed. “Future centuries! What a joke.”

The Madame called a squad car filled with cops on the take to throw him out.

“But we never even got to the Defensor Pacis!”, Demosthenes complained, as the police urged him and Carmine—who protested that the Hobbes’ colliquoy was proceeding fruitfully—to go peacefully.

“Can’t you perverts leave normal people alone?”, one of them begged. “No wonder things are going from bad to worse. Even the girls at the Frankfurt Book Fair have been complaining.”

Apartment hunting is a tiresome venture. Once, Carmine felt the need to leave the city. For two nights, he took a vacation from his labors at the home of Florida Brilliantina.

The Brilliantinas lived in the piney woods, on a hilltop in a forgotten section of Westchester. One reached their property by means of a trail hewn out of the forest rocks by Florida’s father, Hermes. The house was surrounded by two dozen wrecked cars with which her brother, Zorba, an exegete, liked to dabble when not annotating Syriac texts. It had been built, bit by bit, by Hermes, as new, unexpected amenities were required. Thus, it had something of the look of a Pompidou Center adapted to the needs of the palisades and Sleepy Hollow.

Florida was an extremely attractive Latin in her mid-20’s. Undulating, vital black hair framed her Roman face, her warm shoulders, narrow waist and very feminine hips. To this cross of beauty, she added a second: that of being another of the most extraordinarily intelligent people whom Carmine had ever met. If Demosthenes’ form was transfigured by impassioned wisdom, Florida’s was naturally accompanied by it. Her shape demanded an inspired complement, lest the order of the universe prove somehow out of synch. Forced to enter upon the path of life with two such crippling defects, it was no wonder that she continuously met obstacles, and had to deal with frustrations that a plain or downright ugly simpleton could easily have avoided.

“All I want is men to buy me drinks”, she sighed, whenever Carmine consoled her.

This was not quite accurate. What she really wanted was one man who loved her to buy those drinks. And then, in the attendant euphoria, to ask her hand in marriage. Allow her to have children. To exhaust herself in normal human activity. And try to make him immeasurably happy.

Florida was obviously no historian. She confused hers with previous centuries. Carmine once tried to explain the difference. Her sighs grew deeper and more lasting. The sole cure for her fin de siècle malaise proved to be vin de siècle. She entered vigorously into the vintage wine explorations of Demosthenes and Carmine, making the case for Amarone as strongly as the other two for Riojas or Barolo. When Carmine visited Casa Brilliantina, her generosity with the grape both humbled and edified him.

But Carmine had to return to the hunt.

The woods were barren. And his friends, unexpectedly, were temporarily called by other business out of reach. Several days after returning from Florida’s, Carmine found himself in the dreadful position of having to locate an inexpensive hotel; one in which he might actually survive the night. It was not an easy task. He was about to give up entirely when the Empress Elizabeth Inn beckoned to him from near the Byelorussian National Home in Alphabet City.

A gigantic Ethiope speaking truly excellent Punic greeted him at the reception desk, and offered a room on the top floor. Cheap hotels only have rooms on the top floor. Anyone visiting France knows as much.

Oh, the Empress Elizabeth did have a European flair. It was illumined by timid lights. Like Parisian dives. Carmine pressed a button at the foot of the staircase providing rays. They were of limited intensity and duration. He made it to the top, fifth floor, just as the hall went black.

Gross darkness covered the earth.

Determined to get to bed, Carmine groped his way back down to the button. Pressing it smartly a second time, he raced to the top floor anew, now reaching his very door. The lights went out again. No keyhole was visible. Down he went.

The Ethiope pointed to an elevator at the corner of the lobby. Carmine pressed the button a third time. He ran to the lift. It moved. First floor. Second. Fourth.

Fourth and a half.

He crawled through the two feet of space permitting exit, grasped onto a thin metal bar and chinned himself up to the top floor. This time, Carmine kicked down the darkened door. He flicked on the faint overhead bulb. The landscape left something to be desired. A rug, outwardly proper, rose at intervals, covering large lumps, the smell of which indicated dead animal. Bits of bathroom lay about the entire chamber. A showerhead here. A toppled sink there. A kind of sherry trifle, decorated with cigarette butts, filled another, seemingly functioning wash basin.

Examination of the operative sink soon explained the presence of a toppled one in the same room. Carmine rested his hands upon its edges. It tumbled next to its fallen comrade. The floor spread about with still more bathroom furnishings. And Carmine had to take some of the tempting sherry trifle into bed with him. Even though he hated eating between meals. After he had brushed his teeth.

His bed sloped on all sides, like the steep roofs of alpine chalets. This made it possible for Carmine to explore the excitement of rolling onto the floor from every conceivable vantage point. When he collapsed from one direction, he bathed in the fullness of the sherry trifle. Mixed in with other types of slime. And the occasional whole granola bar as well. A run down the matching opposing hillock introduced the guest to little quasi-Feschpendelisch spikes making up a conspicuous part of the room’s finer, if more incomprehensible accoutrements.

It was best to entertain oneself on the slopes, though. Sleep was out of the question. Every sexual activity known to man was taking place in all the other rooms of the Empress Elizabeth Inn. Simultaneously. By each of the occupants, singly and in groups. A printing press in a neighboring building began to churn out the daily account of disasters for the late morning borscht and pierogi of the whole of Little Minsk. An English student on holiday vomited out of his window all night long. Five Californians occupied the room above him. They didn’t have to do anything. Being Californian was sufficient, in and of itself, to disrupt and stir unwanted gastric juices prohibiting rest and relaxation. It was a question of essence and existence. Even the logical positivist might have understood. Could Bertrand Russell have lived at Muscle Beach?

Above the insomnia presided a portrait of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria. Weighed down by Wanderlust and incapable of settling down herself, she smiled upon the weary Carmine as though to encourage him: “Who knows? Maybe an anarchist will dispatch you as well. End your misery. As he did mine. Though ideas still reached conclusions in my day.”

The inevitable happened. Not the appearance of an anarchist, though. Something more natural. Thankfully, Carmine had been so revolted by the filth of the room that he had not undressed. He got up and walked to the door in his search for a bathroom. As he tugged at the objects that he had piled up next to the unlocked and half-destroyed entrance to his chamber, he became aware of the fact that the hallway was flooded with light. What was responsible? After such difficulties with darkness? The aurora borealis? Son et lumière? Organized by Hapsburg loyalists? In these days of post-Soviet, pro-legitimist change?

Carmine looked through the keyhole. Eyes looked back at his. He opened the door. There were many Arabs squatting round a bonfire roasting a lamb.

“Cigarette?”, their chieftain asked, seeking friendship.

“Bathroom?”, Carmine inquired, as he accepted the weed. Just to spite the Californians.

“Lamb’s brains?”, the man offered, while gesturing to the hallway to his left.

“Later”, Carmine promised. “But why are you here?”

“Why are you?”

“I asked first.”

“Because”, he said. “This is it. This is definitely it.”

Carmine clambered down the corridor, past some bored rats, over a heap of what appeared to be earthquake rubble, and into a little weasel of a man without a tooth.

“Bathroom?”, the man wondered, seeking to ascertain Carmine’s wishes.

“Cigarette?”, Carmine questioned, providing tit for tat.

“That way!”, the man indicated, grabbing the butt and pointing out a window.

Carmine shimmied down a rope. He had experience, after all. But he was out in the street. He raised his head to the window above for enlightenment.

“Where?”, Carmine asked his guide.

The weasel knew Goethe’s Italian Diaries.

“Dappertutto!”, he shouted. “Dappertutto! Isn’t it obvious?”

Just as Carmine was helpless, a maniac from the building housing the printing press dumped a bucket of water on his head. At least this stimulated his own flow. The weasel hoisted Carmine back into the hotel. Carmine devoured the lamb’s brains. They made him ill. He fell into the sherry trifle for dessert. His drenching resulted in a summer flu. The next morning, he beat his head with a briefcase alongside Everybum.

“It’s just like the Athenian public”, a passing dramatist explained. “They’re having a catharsis. Theatre is reviving in our Homeland. This portends great things for the Red, White and Blue.”

Everybum now took Carmine under his wing. They breakfasted at the Grand Central rubbish bins. Slept on the streets. Washed wherever the gods decreed.

Unhappy and unclean after his first night roughing it, Carmine was coaxed by Everybum into a restaurant famous for being outfitted like the Baths of Caracalla. In their original state, of course. He had located a working shower fixture between the library and the sous-chef’s cutlery and hung a curtain before it, decorated with portraits of all the emperors from Septimius Severus through Heliogabulus and up until the time of troubles in the mid-200’s.

“I sneak in whenever I can”, Everybum explained. “The later Empire fascinates me beyond all other periods.”

This shower became the two friends’ early morning solace; the sounds of the Baths’ ordinary breakfast customers a cosmopolitan touch in their daily levée. All went well until Everybum forgot his toothbrush and needed to borrow the Spostato model. Carmine agreed, but only remembered to hand it over after climbing in behind the curtain. He took the device out of his notions bag and waved it to his mentor, standing outside.

“I’m finished”, Carmine alerted Everybum, the passing guests, the sous chef and the head librarian. “You can use it now, I’m finished.”

No one in the crowded Baths took up the offer. The mayor, who was a regular, complained. The owner personally evicted Carmine.

“Perform your unsanitary mendicant ablutions elsewhere!”, he snarled.

“It’s your fault”, Carmine exploded to his friend, as he wrapped his bathrobe tightly around him on the street corner. “You tempted me into thinking I was back with the Severan emperors. They were open to everything. Oriental mysticism. Mystery cults. Sol Invictus. You think confusion over a toothbrush would have led to this?”

Carmine found another shower. On his own. Without derelict wisdom. It was in a museum. In the basement. He had never seen such a facility. Equipped with book racks, sporting works on existentialism and hand towels embossed with little excerpts from the Brothers Grimm. Neither had he ever entered a stall whose door--impenetrable, uncompromising, extending from floor to roof—automatically slammed shut upon entering. Nor had he previously been trapped in a space which demanded a large sum of money to be allowed to escape.

The police eventually freed him.

“I was worried by the second day”, Everybum admitted.

“And yet I wanted for nothing in the way of intellectual stimulus”, Carmine assured him.

The suggestion of a fellow Oxonian provided Carmine with his most painful experience in those weeks of crisis. He worked in a law firm that had it all. Including showers. Of European quality. Such as the Empress Elizabeth herself would have known. Only better.

“Why not bathe here?”, the man inquired. “No one need know.”

Carmine took up on the offer. Funny. The embarrassingly luxurious room seemed to lack that staple of every continental toilette: a bidet. He stepped into the shower. Water rushed over his head. It was at that point that he discovered the missing item. The same intense jet shot upward from a barely visible spigot on the shower floor and into the appropriate target. He rested the next few days in the Emergency Room. Everybum welcomed him back onto the streets as August came to a close.

“Trust professionals from now on”, he admonished.” Would the Legions have conquered if they had lacked hierarchy? Or a sense of mos maiorum? How do you think Scipio Africanus Maior overcame the odds? Against Hasdrubal in Thither Spain?”

Finally, Labor Day weekend, when nearly all the world was out of town, Carmine located his present apartment. He had noticed the ad while trying to ignore the revulsion aroused in those around him by his increasingly unshaven and unkempt body. As well as by the odd bit of trifle which he had never quite been able to dislodge from his left hand fingernails. Carmine rushed to the address given, and forced himself upon the landlord and the landlady as they were still in pajamas eating breakfast. He asked them, sometime afterwards, why they had agreed to rent an apartment to such a stinking mirage of a man.

“You looked like you were down on your luck”, they explained. “Like you had nothing. We thought it was our duty to be charitable.”

“By taking what might have been my last pennies?”

“What are we? Saints? They’re all dead and buried.”

Nothing bothered Carmine in this West Village paradise. He had moved to a remnant of a real Italian neighborhood. A quarter inhabited by true sons of Rome, not Chinese who went inside at night so that the trattorie could make the area pass for Naples. Actual babies and live children could be seen on the streets. Il Caffé del Garda beckoned with honest espresso and vino generoso. The flat was of ample size, good design and aimed away from the square that made the front apartments rather noisy. And Carmine needed no rope to go to bed or to the bog. No money or armour for the shower. So pleased was he with his good fortune that he refused to be upset by the one undeniable disturbance of the entire building: the antics of Maddalena and Matteo, who lived directly below him.

Both these figures, husband and wife, were quite mad. Luckily, their madness was predictable. And limited to normal waking hours. At mid-morning, Maddalena moaned. Then, she began to undo all of the ten locks that secured her apartment door.

“Oh, my God!”, she would gasp.” The jewel thieves! Again! How did they get in? Oh, may God! Matteo! The jewel thieves! We need another lock! Matteo!”

Matteo would then appear at the door, and, while embracing in mutual terror, they’d voice their common, constant, inexplicable fear in life.

“Oh, Lordie! We’ll never get to Chelsea!”

Carmine was seriously alarmed when first exposed to their outburst, which was repeated regularly during the course of each day. Not knowing what to do, he ran to his landlady, who lived across the hallway from him. She heard his tale, sighed and descended to assure Matteo and Maddalena that the jewel thieves had left. That they had robbed everybody. And that, indeed, the couple would never make it to Fourteenth Street, much less Chelsea.

“You can’t pander”, she told Carmine as she returned to her ironing. “They never learn.”

Maddalena, her various parts fitted roughly together like a primitive, mastaba pyramid or an Italian tootsie roll, always dressed as though she were a horse past its prime and wrapped compassionately in a blanket. Matteo played Jack Sprat to her piecemeal equestrian presence. He was fastidious, and, in true Latin fashion, primped for the evening. At dinner, Maddalena played Christmas carols on tasteful cds. She always presumed it was Christmas. Several weeks after his arrival, Carmine heard Matteo balk at the sight of a table set for twenty. A holiday meal was about to be served.

“What’s all this?”, he screamed.

“Merry Christmas, dear one!”, she shouted, overcome with seasonal cheer.

“It’s not Christmas!”, Matteo yelled, momentarily lucid.

He thought hard.

“That’s next week.”

He’d lost it already.

“Who’s going to eat all this food then?”, she gasped.

It was the only time Carmine was to enter their flat. At least Maddalena could cook well.

Normally, the Christmas carols signaled the beginning of the vicious daily dinner battle.

“Move that spoon!”, she commanded.

“No! You move your spoon!”, he retorted, authoritatively.

“I never saw anybody move a spoon like that!”

“I’ve never moved a spoon any other way, and I’m not gonna start now!”

Both then stared out the window, broken by the horror of it all, loudly lamenting the increase in jewel theft. With “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!” as an accompaniment.

Carmine warned Florida and Demosthenes about the inevitable outburst from below as his friends sat down to a housewarming meal in his new flat towards the end of September.

“Always the joker”, Florida laughed in disbelief.

“I’m dead and in Hell!”, Maddalena screeched through the floorboards, on cue, as Carmine smiled to his friends. “I’m dead and living in Hell for all eternity with a husband who can’t even move a spoon right!”

“One man’s poison…”, he thought, later, as he lay his intact head upon his pallet.

Diaphonous Veil was still en train. His tall, thin body boasted sixty years of odd physiological extras, which bulged, anarchically, into many udder like appendages, giving him the general appearance of an overblown map of Switzerland. The Dean’s head was a mystery, both active and stable in concert. Strands of his thick crew-cut hair stood immobile on an oily, shifting, soft-shelled skull. In fact, Dr. Veil’s entire cranium was constantly in motion, a slowly bubbling stew, different bits of which rose to the surface from time to time, held in check only by the grateful presence of his mummified follicles. Carmine noted the curious way in which, eyes half-closed, he related the merits of the university. Memories of cheerleaders, arms and legs akimbo, preaching the invincibility of the home team, crossed his drowsing mind as the Dean took fire.

“Now, Periphery has a very dynamic mission in the utimate scheme of things in today’s vivific modernity”, he chanted, each phrase punctuated by reverse peristalsis. “It’s exciting what we’re accomplishing here. Exploiting the outskirts, as it were. Giving shape to their aspirations.”

The Dean grasped his forehead between his thumb and middle finger. He squeezed it tightly. Was he committed to its destruction? Something like a carrot appeared to shoot, for a moment, to the crown of his head, but then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, deigned to disappear. Dr. Veil adjusted his udders. Lugano and Locarno slipped further down the right hip.

“Carmine”, he said, “the outskirts are the future. I saw this already when I wrote my dissertation—The Impact of the Abyss on Higher Educational Facilities. No one has ever really probed its depths before. The abyss, I mean. Going to the abyss of the outskirts. As the greatest of missions, so to speak. An exciting mission. In today’s vivific modernity.”

He leaned as close to Carmine as propriety and the Swiss frontier permitted, enunciating his final words with the fervor of a Jeremiah. Before he was hacked to death by doubters.

“Dr, Spostato! We were looking for the Best Way! And we found ourselves at Periphery! Yes! Yes! Young scholars like yourself can make a difference! No need for cynical Nihilism any longer! I can see from the electricity in your face that you already share our sense of purpose!”

Dean Veil was partly correct. Carmine was, indeed, charged up. Still, his excitement was only marginally due to this epiphany of Periphery. Its intensity actually had more prosaic roots. A roach, whose home appeared to be in the moist, dark underbrush of a forest of papers marked “concretize”, had emerged from its lair. Retreated in horror. And rematerialized with a skeptical friend. This pair, now reconciled with the outside world, was making its path by means of forced marches to the exotic butter-blood-cinnamon raisin stains on Carmine’s shirt. Carmine did not want to call attention to the roaches’ existence, lest such a reference to the Dean’s untidiness embarrass Dr. Veil. After all, letters from a fresh batch of serious candidates lay on a filing cabinet behind him, including one from a Mexican syphilitic who had edited the Emperor Maximilian’s doodlings with an emergency grant from the National Endowment For Whatever is Left. Why did the best always seek what Carmine wished?

Three men providentially appeared outside the Dean’s open door. Dr. Veil excused himself for “momentary deliberation with discussion and dialogue over an intrinsic matter”. Carmine utilized this unexpected interlude to dispatch the vermin racing towards him. His intention was assassination; his weapon, the copy of Spengler’s Decline of the West that he’d brought along with him to read on the journey.

Alas! The dictum of a graduate school comrade was all too true. The murder of an ant is swift and clean. But a cockroach leaves behind it a most unedifying corpse. Both victims fused together shamelessly onto an impressive document atop the Dean’s desk. Carmine turned away from the abomination in horror, fumbling for a handkerchief that might serve as a shroud.

Piety was useless. A second demon then materialized, this one conjured up from the Orient. Carmine had forgotten the existence of the chip in his own forehead. His agitation somehow set off its alarm. Periphery became Sorrento.

“I like a man with a little humor”, the Dean said, glancing back from the negotiations at the portal. “I guess I have sort of been neglecting you. Great head, too.”

Carmine stood and began to stammer a reply, but Dr. Veil interrupted him.

“This is part of The Team from Hormone Hall”, he said, introducing the three men with one regal sweep of the arm. “Ed-Joe-Bill”, he belched, “meet Carmine Spostato”.

Ed-Joe-Bill represented three different manifestations of the same entity: consubstantial, totemic and frozen in time and space. Carmine could see no means of attributing a specific designation to any one of them. All three looked identical. Each had neatly coiffed, moderately lengthy hair, blown out and parted smartly down the middle. Each wore a blue, three-piece, polyester suit. Each had a fitted shirt. All three tottered about like cowboys, the consequence either of a youth encased in designer jeans or excessive sexual activity on horseback.

Individuality proclaimed itself only in choice of ties. This aroused in Carmine a hitherto unnoticed sympathy for conformity. One manifestation of Ed-Joe-Bill wore a tie with little footballs and the faces of robust athletes on a computer monitor background. Another boasted a pizza red cravat that said: “Hi! I love Everyperson and Everythingamajigee at Periphery!” The third sported a blob that displayed a completed crossword puzzle.

Carmine smiled a hello and sat down sweating next to the Dean’s desk. Dr. Veil fumbled with the document upon which the bloody dead had been consummated. Carmine now understood that Instrument’s significance. It contained a drawing of what was to be Periphery’s now logo.

“Now, fellahs”, the Dean began, continuing his top-level negotiations near Carmine, so as to make him feel at home. “I’ve been studying the new emblem for some time. I like the “P” symbol, the indicativeness of a university community in the embracing envelopment of the peripheral structure. But what the hell the dot is on the edge of the “P”, I’ll never be able to figure out.”

Carmine was mortified. He was referring to the remnants of the massacre.

Ed-Joe-Bill the First and Second seemed baffled. Ed-Joe-Bill the Third was not. He explained that the Student Attraction Program had seen this as the final touch.

“It’s exciting!”, he insisted. “We’ll add an arrow from the center of the “P” to the edge where the dot’s located! We’ll place the inscription ‘We’re There!’ next to it! We’ll write highway directions straight on the arrow line! The whole thing will serve as an emblem and a map. Both! Together! In unison!”

He looked at Carmine.

“It’s exciting!”, he reiterated. “A new concept!”

“You know”, the Dean explained to Carmine. “That idea really developed out of a meeting here in my office two months ago. Ed-Joe-Bill, they were all here. And we sat together. We often sit together, cause, heck, what can I say, I’m a sit together kind of guy. We each had a Danish. I had the blueberry. They had cherry ones. I remember, ‘cause it was the day that poor old Flesh’s fingers got stuck in the soda machine. Dr. Onnipotente stopped by. A Team Player, Carmine! The best! And Mrs. Frenetico—that’s my secretary, Carmine, sixteen pillars of strength, she is. Mrs. Frenetico wore her new dress.

“Well, anyway, I said to Mrs. Frenetico how much I respected this Team here, and, Ed-Joe-Bill, you remember! You said: ‘Dean Veil. We respect You and Yours. You’re our Guru. You care for us as people persons.’ And I said: ‘Well, isn’t that funny, cause Guru is spelled—Gee! You Are You!’”

He put his hand on Carmine’s shoulder.

“And they agreed with me that it was funny, and we wanted a symbol of that agreement for Periphery.”

Dean Veil held the document high in the air.

“I see that dot, with that arrow which will be drawn in, as a real sign of what a community that loves and respects itself can achieve. Dr. Fist, I can tell you, will be thrilled.”

Everyone stared, fixedly, with the solemnity of the priests of Marduk, at a portrait of Dr. Wholesome Fist, President of Periphery University. This had been painted by the faculty union leaders and hung over the entrance to the Dean’s Office.

Painting Fist, as opposed to portraying Demosthenes, had obviously not required much in the way of artistic skill. No Vasari would write the life of those who had undertaken this task. His tiny face was entirely covered by an enormous pair of sunglasses. All one could see was their label.

“Made in the USA”, it read. “Buy American.”

When Ed-Joe-Bill had departed, the Dean’s mood moved from satisfaction to elation.

“Carmine”, he said, “I want you here at Periphery. We’re looking for interested young faculty, devoted to their research, to good teaching and to the peripheral environment. All of them. In this exciting time of educational renewal in our ever greater land.

The Dean became serious. His syntax had improved.

“Good teaching, devotion to students and commitment to publication can be hard, unenviable work, Carmine. But they will move you high up in the hierarchy here at Periphery. And there are no ranks better to move up through.”

Dean Veil scrunched up his face in thought.

“Of course, we will have to go through the formalities of interviewing all of the others. The two dwarfs will make a stink if we don’t. The dwarf community is big in the news at the moment.

The Dean was referring to an incident, all too well known to Carmine, which had occurred some days earlier, when a dwarf had been caught in a man’s raincoat while crossing a street. The little ones had answered the reporters’ queries with a resigned “it happens” that had awakened dwarf rage. Carmine, luckily, had escaped unnoticed, with a tuft of tiny hair and subatomic bits of dandruff in his pocket.

Elation returned to the Dean’s face.

“As far as I’m concerned, though”, he concluded, “you’re as good as hired. We can go over the terms of the contract right now if you’d like.”

Dean Veil led Carmine past half a dozen filing cabinets marked “traffic” to a small shoebox containing a hard copy of information on faculty benefits.

Carmine left the office a tired but ecstatic man. Fears of fifty years of forced camaraderie with the Untermenschen of Fond Embrace vanished like the glue on the envelopes its workers produced. Moishe and Alfonso would have to debate the relative merits of Yodelos and Ring Dings in front of another victim. Zipski could no longer berate “the stupid genius” for his failure to follow Monday Night Football. Wang-Ho Friedman’s regular laceration of his finger on the Embraceagross Machine—“good for a coffee break”, he said—would cease to be the highlight of the day. Carmine would have a title. His own office. Love and respect from The Team. And a civilized pathway to honor and glory.

He gritted his teeth.

“I will survive!”, he shouted. “That which has not destroyed me has made me stronger!”

The time before his acceptance at Periphery had been unfruitful due to bad luck. The six years available for work towards tenure could be marred by nothing other than personal failings. Carmine lusted for labor. It was clear that he would never succumb to laziness. What other obstacle to a place in the sun could possible arise?

“Hi!”, a jovial man in his 50’s boomed from an door neighboring that of Diaphanous Veil. “I’m Costanzo Paura, the Assistant Dean. Got time for a coffee?”

Mixed feelings overcame Carmine as he searched for an answer. He feared a new skirmish with the roach faction at Periphery. Besides, Florida and Demosthenes were awaiting him in Chinatown for a lunch that would now be transformed into a celebratory feast.

Still, Dr. Paura was one of the Dean’s chief confidants. And Carmine could not help but feel flattered by the thought of already being treated so warmly as one of The Team. He opted for acceptance, and walked towards the beckoning administrator, who withdrew, backwards, slowly, into the hinterland, behind his desk. Mrs. Frenetico shot into the office as well, carrying two official Periphery coffee cups, each sporting a handle moulded into the form of a toll booth.

Dr. Paura leaped up and carefully closed the door as she exited. He beamed a Krishna smile. Carmine thought of the Count, in the Barber of Seville, when Almaviva disguises himself as a music teacher to befuddle Bartolo. “Pace e gioia sia con voi!”, he half expected the Assistant Dean to bubble in benediction over their budding relationship.

Carmine looked closely at Dr. Paura. The cause of his smile was difficult to determine. It could not be ascribed to his nature. Clearly, any peace that he experienced must have been the product of long warfare against thrones and dominations. Ravages from the conflict were obvious throughout his face and thick body. His hair was burnt, like toast. Perhaps from mustard gas. All visible skin surface was crisscrossed by deep and well-fortified trenches. A perfunctory glance might have mistaken him for the Hindenburg Line. Everything seemed to have been patched together for the peace treaty as a result of compromises with which no one was happy. Any impact upon his flesh—with a hand, a breath or a soft word—might have caused the entire quilt to explode. Luckily, Paura kept his distance. It appeared as likely that one could get close to him, physically, as it was for tourists to approach restricted fields, covered with landmines, in certain areas of Verdun.

“I cannot tell you how honored I am to meet you”, Dr. Paura alleged, bowing on the horizon. “I’ve heard so much about your fine scholarly abilities.”

“Well”, Carmine demurred, “I am immensely interested in Revolution and Counterrevolution in the nineteenth century”.

He started to feel more comfortable, and nestled into the first of innumerable quality discussions at the university. He grew bold.

“In fact”, he boasted, “I am hoping to do ground breaking work in that field”.

“Of course you are!”, Dr. Paura agreed. “Such intensity is what Periphery is all about. How well-defined your goals are. How clear the path that you have taken. I think it’s just wonderful.”

He beamed, knowingly, at Carmine.

“Your lectures, naturally, need only be passable.”

Carmine laughed, pleased with Dr. Paura’s teasing banter.

“Well”, he joked, “I think that I can do better than th…”.

“Oh, no, no, no”, Dr. Paura pontificated, wagging his finger vigorously. “Barely passable lectures ought to be your highest aspiration. Tenure is a difficult thing to get now. Especially with the reforms pending. Sad but true. Socrates would seem overly standoffish to a tenure committee. His homophobic denial of involvement with the boys would suffice to do him in. Plato? Detours, detours, nothing but detours before getting anything practical done. Pascal? Too abstract, much too abstract. Who wants a man who thinks he’s a reed in the wind? Better to welcome an Alcibiades. Dynamism, Dr. Spostato, dynamism! We need a dynamo! Dynamic publications! From a dynamic Alpha professor. Lectures must be barely passable if you are to do your job dynamically. And avoid permanent adjunctship.”

Dr. Paura opened a desk drawer for a snack. He offered Carmine his choice of a Yodelo or a Ring Ding. Smiling broadly, though in torment, as if a bayonet were fixed in his gullet, the Assistant Dean awaited a statement of submission from the bewildered place seeker.

“I…”, Carmine stumbled, meekly, after a time. “I, um, it still ought to be pos…”.

“And cooperation”, Dr. Paura cut him off. “Cooperation at Periphery is central. Cooperation and enthusiasm. Dr. Onnipotente is quite adamant about that. ‘No cynics on our faculty’, he says. And he does go on. ‘Cooperative men. Filled with optimism’. Oh, yes, he is insistent.”

Mascherato Onnipotente, to whom Dr. Veil had also made reference, was the Vice President of Faculty and Student Management at Periphery, and known as the Dean of Deans.

“Just focus on those guidelines, Dr. Spostato”, Paura concluded. “Just focus on those guidelines, and you’ll be us a long, long time. As long as time allows.”

He looked intently at Carmine. His smile faded. Something like compassion made a visit to the tortured battlefield. It appeared that he had a vital truth to reveal. One that had been learned from bitter combat experience. His trenches filled with armaments. His face seemed ready to blow.

But the Krishna smile soon reemerged. Not without great effort, though. And not without leaving Carmine perplexed and slightly queasy.

“What, exactly, have you published to date?”, he asked.

“There was an article in a journal in France last year”, Carmine responded, happy to be on solid ground again. “I wrote it at the envelope factory.”

Paura smiled indulgently at the mention of Carmine’s labor history.

“Dear Dr. Spostato, please do not make mention of ‘the envelope factory’. You’d be much better off saying that you spent some time studying the social question. In an urban environment. But, back to the article. How many pages was it?”

“It was reduced to four, because of the print size, but that was still…”.

Dr. Paura shook his head.

“Four does not look good to the tenure committee. The National Mean for four year multi-interconnected campuses is twelve. We’re shooting for twenty five here, to build up the image. What was it on?”

“It was in my field. On two counterrevolutionary thinkers. Louis Veuillot, from Paris. And his Italian friend, Taparelli d’Azeglio. And the interest…”.

“Twenty five would be the best. Dr. Affirmativo edited telephone directories. He looked for clues regarding ethnic commitment to letters of the alphabet. He got six hundred pages out of that. The tenure committee really went wild. He got the President’s Medal. The Lithuanians like “Z”.”

“Well, my article on Veuillot and Taparelli might be short, but…”.

“Where did you say you published it again? France?”

“Yes. A small journal. Foi et Raison.”

“Why not The Review of European History?”

“It wasn’t appropriate. And, besides. The subject is tricky.”

Dr. Paura shuddered mightily. His face alternated between concern and horror.

“You’re not taking stands on anything, are you? Young faculty should not be taking stands. Courting divisiveness. Dr. Fist cannot tolerate controversy. Dr. Onnipotente has been known to come down hard on polarization. The tenure committee doesn’t like it. In French, was it? Good. No one will understand a word at Periphery. ‘It’s Europe’, they’ll all say. ‘We’re hated there’.”

He thought for a moment.

“Why don’t you write on Turkish bullet use in the late Delhi Sultanate? I read something on that subject in Get With It, History a few years ago. No one is hurt by it. At least not around here. There are only a few Hindus near Periphery.”

Carmine now grimaced, despite firm resolve to remain cheerful.

“I’m not all that gripped by the subject”, he admitted.

Paura chuckled.

“Life is hard, dear boy. We can’t always do what we’re interested in. It’s a question of learning to live with the devil. So to speak. Why, you probably could list the serial number of every bullet. It would take about fifty pages to do so. The committee would like that. Dr. Fist would probably award you with President’s Medal. With the William of Ockham ribbon in the bargain. Affirmativo wouldn’t speak to you afterwards of course, but that’s what you’d want anyway.”

He got up.

“Unfortunately, I have to go now. It was so nice chatting with such a fine young scholar.”

Dr. Paura led Carmine to the door, slowly, hesitantly, as though he still had something more to tell him. They stood for a moment at the threshold of the office on a tile of darker hue than those both inside and outside, like two men poised on one small but significant rock in the middle of an impressive pond.

“You’re Italian in background, aren’t you?”, the Assistant Dean asked. “A noble people. I once was Italian.”

Carmine remained silent. What could he answer to a comment of that sort?

Paura searched for more words. He floundered. The Rossini libretto came to his rescue. Almaviva returned. Peace and Joy along with him.

“The Italians”, he bubbled, “have an affinity for ‘S’.”

The two men remained frozen.

“Remember”, Dr. Paura noted, as Carmine leaped off the rock and eastward to the other side of the pond. “Barely passable. Think bullets.”

He took a deep breath.

“And remain forever grateful for a fresh start in a completely new life.”

Troubled, confused, Carmine eventually reached Chinatown. He was too early. A dazed meandering took him northwards. Into the East Village.

Caspite!

He found himself in front of the Empress Elizabeth Inn. Almost twelve months to the day from his first, wretched visit. Good humor returned. Carmine smiled, triumphantly, in the direction of the room from which he had been lowered by the weasel. Finally, he thought. A future. This is it!

The noise of cascading water burst forth from the window of the printing house next to the Empress Elizabeth. The maniac, holding an empty bucket, laughed down at the dripping Spostato.

“I’ve waited all year for that!’, he roared.

Chapter Two: Citizens on a Hill

Carmine had no opportunity to settle into his office or meet any of his colleagues on his first excursion to Periphery. In fact, Demosthenes and he left immediately for a two week vacation to Tuscany after the initial visit, actively encouraged in the venture by Dean Veil himself.

“Periphery will soon be in your marrow, Carmine!”, he belched. “Get out there in the good air. Eat. Drink. Write up your lectures. Good ones. Outstanding! Thought provoking. Periphery standard.”

It was, therefore, only on the day before classes began—a day marked by both departmental and faculty meetings—that his chance came to penetrate the heart of the Periphery community.

Plenty of time was available for exploration on that occasion. The meetings commenced at 6:00 A.M.

Carmine’s journey to the university, the second time around, differed in its particulars though not in its overall character. He again encountered the woman troubled by the train’s direction. She was sitting, calmly, in his local IRT station, a child’s portable piano keyboard on her lap, attempting to play what she called “her songs”. His attention focused on her. This was a mistake. It blinded him to the difficulty of drinking a cup of coffee with a knapsack slung over one shoulder. The strap dropped, insidiously, as he listened to the hag. It hit his arm near the elbow joint with a thud, causing him, reflexively, to toss the coffee in his face, much to the horror of two proper ladies standing by the turnstiles. Carmine did not really enjoy hot coffee in his face in the early morning. Nor did he appreciate the fact that the bag woman took a liking to him, got off at this stop, and happily set sail by his side.

The boat crossing was uneventful, though depressing, since all the lights were shut off.

“We only turn’um on going towards Manhattan”, the Captain informed Carmine.

Too bad. With light, he might have recognized the other side for what it was and turned back.

Four bus shelters extended from the ferry exit to the main road. Four buses, which, as Carmine had already noted on his last visit, all seemed to follow exactly the same route, were parked brazenly across from them. A five-o-clock crowd of commuters, each of whom, like Carmine, was headed away from the city, stood by the first of these shelters, presumably for more light from inside the terminal. They had not been there on the previous excursion, when Carmine had had the good fortune to depart for Periphery at a slightly later hour. Or, perhaps, he had simply been too nervous then to pay them any heed.

A half dozen were Hasidic Jews, engaged in a bitter dispute over the Russian invasion of Lodz in 1919. They were bordered, on both sides, by a shoeshine man returning from a night shift on the Ferry and a seventy year old woman in a leather cat suit. The pianist stood to the side, admiring Carmine, while the owner of two microscopic pooches named Angus and Digby permitted these rat-like mutations to sniff, unhindered, at his feet.

A driver briskly marched to the number 14 bus. He started its engine and pulled into position at the farthest most shelter. Prayer shawls flew in the late summer wind. They were followed by shoeshine rags. Bits of distintegrating skin, both tanned and human. Paws. And the none too stable bags into which Carmine had stuffed the books essential to his teaching. The People—led, appropriately enough, by the chosen ones, were running toward the earthly paradise. Angus and Digby became overexcited, and urinated on Carmine’s shoes. Just as all had reached salvation, and the doors of the New Jerusalem had closed, the other buses sputtered into action. They stopped at their shelters, found no passengers and departed in indifference. The number 14 driver shut off his engine, went for coffee and moved out half an hour later.

Carmine was exasperated. He screwed his head in all directions to meet the eyes of the others and share his indignation with them. There was no response. The Jews were resigned. It was Lodz all over again. The worker and the sexy old age pensioner were dozing. Angus and Digby, kidneys relieved, leaped and cavourted in the aisles. The bag lady, who could not afford to board the vehicle, remained at the shelter, entirely at the service of her music. Carmine’s outrage was the number 14’s “what did you expect?”

Further difficulties developed at the mustard factory. Half-dead bees, driven mad by their memories of this once fruitful haven, and angered by their inevitable end-of-summer fate, were aroused to one last passion by Carmine’s embittered sweat. They displayed special interest in those areas violated by Angus and Digby. Encumbered though he was by his books, Carmine nevertheless flailed courageously and smote his enemies. He passed through the valley of death, charged into the university precincts and triumphantly entered upon the path towards the faculty center, Gorgias Hall.

The path to Gorgias Hall was actually not a pathway at all. It was a parking lot. Indeed, Periphery itself was a parking lot, punctuated by evangelically loathsome buildings. Here and there, it is true, one spied once attractive structures whose character had been altered for reconsecration to the cause of ugliness. Carmine was reminded of a girl with whom he had worked at the envelope factory who had carefully disguised her charm and cultivation so as not to seem out of step with her hideous, vulgar co-workers. A brief shudder passed over him as he remembered a postcard that he had recently received from a friend exiled to a prairie college. “Here”, the fellow had noted, “dull, flat people occupy a dull, flat landscape.”

It was the architecture of the former beauties gone a-whoring with those born to the game which disturbed him the most. Two of the fallen virgins could be seen in one glance.

Gorgias Hall, Carmine’s destination, was the closest. The first impression gained from it was that of an iceberg, sitting, threateningly, upon an ocean of steel and macadam. One could recognize that it had an elegant history behind its corrupted façade, perhaps reaching back to the previous century. Indeed, it had probably then exuded that bourgeois sense of smugness and abundance whose vices Carmine was now more than tempted to forgive. His spirits rose when he noticed nineteenth-century stained glass in the door windows of Gorgias Hall. They fell when he came closer and discovered that a plastic copy had replaced the original. A glimpse of the fine Victorian woodwork that remained visible at the building’s edges was inspiring. Spray paint and aluminum siding over much of the rest were not. Still, Carmine told himself. What could be expected, when one thought of the immense sums of money that the university had to save in order to carry out its true mission. Art? Yes! But not at the cost of knowledge!

From closer to Gorgias Hall, across the Great Lot, as it was called, one had a better view of the second prom queen gone astray. This was Knossos Hall, the main administration building, the site of Carmine’s interview. Though almost an exact replica of the faculty center, it gave off the image not of an iceberg, but of a cathedral. With the closely-parked cars around it playing the role of flying buttresses.

Innate ugliness began next to the administration building with Plugdata Hall. The most interesting thing that could be said on its behalf was that it had not yet been torn down. And, of course, the fact that this dubious place, filled with classrooms, was to be the focal point of Carmine’s life work. To the right of Plugdata, sunken below the Great Lot and barely visible to the naked eye, was the Library, the Hohenheim Multi-Media Ingestion Center. Its neo-Stalinist façade had been tempered by the addition of seven friezes on which were depicted the Seven Activities of the peripheral life: Engine Tuning, Toll Collection, Lawn Mowing, Shopping, Turning on the Various Devices, Turning Off the Various Devices, and Complaining About the City.

Two structures stood out most impressively from all the architectural horrors. One of these, Hormone Hall, called to Carmine’s attention on the day of his interview, was also known as the Management Efficiency Service Site. Here, methods for spreading the philosophy of Periphery throughout the country were conjured. The second, the student center, was designed and constructed by Dr. Irksum Skreetch, who had hung himself from a superfluous beam extending from the second floor on the day that the building was dedicated. His last words—“Enough! Enough, already!”—were etched on the portal of what was baptized Irksum Hall in his memory. His body had almost entirely deteriorated before Carmine’s arrival, though certain features on one or two bits could still be noted if one squinted vigorously and craned his neck.

Carmine proceeded to Gorgias Hall through that small, insignificant segment of the Great Lot enfiefed to the faculty. The cars in this alcove, now filled to capacity, bore only a generic relationship to the average automobile. Each seemed to possess a medical history all its own, the one suffering from a bone cancer, another victimized by epilepsy, a third bearing the scars of a perilous psychosis. Two vehicles appeared to be abandoned, their headlights simply attached to their decaying carcasses by means of adhesive tape. The entire scene called to mind a visit Carmine had once made to a Rumanian flea market to purchase a discarded portrait of President Ceaucesceau for a friend convinced of their common descent from the Emperor Trajan. There was that same sense of longing on the part of everything present, man and machine, for a prosperity which, alas, everyone knew would always remain a dream.

Resigned sighs and the din of unremitting labor emerged from the edge of the lot. A young, blonde, slightly chubby woman, possibly thirty, obviously one of Carmine’s colleagues, was kicking—or, rather, attempting to kick—shut the driver’s door of an enzyme-colored Rambler from the days of the Eisenhower Administration. Carmine prepared for his first encounter with a fellow member of the faculty of Periphery University.

“Hello!”, he said, enthusiastically.

“Shit! Shit! And all the shit that comes from shit!”, she repeated in response, clearly preoccupied by the fact that a book had jammed into the joint between the door and the rest of her diseased machine. Carmine helped her to release the text, only to discover that he had actually succeeded in ripping it in two. And not on a seam.

“Damn it!”, she shouted, stomping her foot, and bursting into tears. “That does it. That really does it!”

Carmine reddened.

“I’m very sorry”, he stammered. “Not the best way for me to get to know people on a new job.”

“Are you Dr. Spostato?”, she asked, her face heavy-laden with concern upon hearing the affirmative reply.

She stared at Carmine’s bags.

“You didn’t bring any books with you, did you?”

Carmine was baffled by the question. While trying to decipher its meaning, however, he noticed that two or three other faculty members were loading up their heaps with magazines, paintings, manuscripts, family photographs and similar objects. One man packed a bust of Franklin Delano Roosevelt bearing the inscriptions “1936” and “Return of Hope” into the back seat of a Studebaker. Another embraced a Statue of Liberty, complete with Emma Lazarus’ poem, before depositing it into his trunk.

“Well”, Carmine replied, “there’s just these few which I’ve…”.

“It’s alright”, the woman interrupted. “I’m Inca Kakatatatonic. You can call me Inca. And I’ll call you Carmine. Carmine’s your name, isn’t it? No. It’s quite alright. I live near the mustard factory. I can bring them in my car to the bus for you.”

Dean Veil had not told Carmine about a faculty migration from Gorgias Hall, especially one requiring public transport. Thank God he had not returned earlier and placed everything that he had intended to bring with him into the old office! He would now be able to set up shop once only. In the new improved quarters.

“Where are we moving to?”, Carmine asked. “You can just drive my things there. Really, you know, I can even carry them myself.”

“Books are not allowed”, Inca continued, in response to Carmine’s comments. “We’re not going anywhere. Dr. Swabalot just will not permit personal books in the office any longer. Or pictures. Or posters. Or eating. Or drinking. He feels that it is unprofessional. And betrays standards. Dr. Swabalot says that Periphery must not be allowed to disappear in a cloud of dust. ‘How can it help the revivification of education if it can’t be seen?’, he argues. I’m a sociologist. Do you think you’ll get tenure? Will it rain today? When’s your birthday? Do you like tofu? How much wood could a woodchuck chuck? Want a coffee?”

The last thing Carmine wanted was a coffee. Especially with this malcontent. Why, she seemed eager to poison, through insane accusation, a not yet even begun relationship with Dr. Swabalot, the Chairman of his department! Carmine had heard of people like her while at Oxford. Frustrated colleague cannibals. Living ‘twixt their miserable research, love of gossip and fear of competition for grant money. Under no circumstances would he fall prey to her unhealthy charms. No coffee with Academicus Pandemos for him!

“Here come some of the others”, Inca said, cutting short Carmine’s thoughts of flight.

Four men and one woman of varying ages trudged through the debris of the faculty parking lot, skirting those packing up their cars, and approached Carmine and Inca.

Ernst Wissen von und zu Nichts was the eldest. Sixty four year old Ernst proclaimed just that mixture of central European bloods which racial theorists and eugenicists hoped not to have to deal with by the middle of the twentieth century. Squat and dark like a Bavarian, his facial expressions sang the melancholic ballads of the Pripet Marshes. One’s attention was inevitably drawn to his excrutiatingly thin lips, whose size was continuously diminished due to an habitual nibbling. Map images again came to Carmine’s mind, as they had with Veil. Ernst’s lips were to the rest of his body as the Panama Canal to the bulk of Latin America. He was as nervous as a fugitive aware of an all points bulletin issued against him by the police of the entire globe. And Simon Wiesenthal as well. In fact, Ernst was a refugee, a man from the old Soviet Bloc, who had managed to get out and briefly pursued a dream of becoming a concert pianist before settling down to life as a philosopher at Periphery.

“I am relieved to see that the faculty are still capable of producing children”, Ernst confided to his thirty year old colleague, Anatole Crumbs, a professor of literature and chain-smoking father of a one month old baby, as the group arrived. “I, too, once produced. But that was many years ago. When I still had a brilliant career ahead of me.”

Anxiety also seemed to plague Crumbs. Clearly, he had more to lose from its ravages than did Ernst. Crumbs was tall and trim, with a basketball player’s frame, even though his hair, goatee and glasses gave to his face the configuration of a Leon Trotsky. If nervousness made Ernst appear resigned, it assured Crumbs the look of an athlete whose benching by the coach had been accepted only with the gravest injury to pride.

The third male member of this consortium was a mathematician. Dr. Volontier Corvée balanced off his companions brand of tension with one built upon disorientation and perplexity. Corvée had an empty coffee cup container in his hand and was busy tearing off little bits from the top and carefully placing them inside.

“Tenure”, Crumbs whispered to Carmine. “He got tenure. Last spring. Tenure. Yes. Tenure.”

Dr. Corvée was noted for growing hair on his bald pate in the summertime, upon leaving Periphery, and losing it again once he and the students returned in the fall. Still, it was not the cranium that captured one’s regard. Rather, it was the almost impossible banana-like appearance of his body. Curved. Thick-skinned. And yellowed. Two little feet were attached to the bottom of the parabola, almost as an afterthought, though they did serve the laudable purpose of stifling the temptation to try to peel Corvée from the neck down. Neuroses were particularly upsetting in his regard. All of his energy seemed needed just to keep mind and rind together.

Hermione Rittenoff and Porphyry Contramundum were the last of this Gang of Five.

Dr. Rittenoff, translator and commentator of a five hundred page collection of Florentine Renaissance Neoplatonic texts, not yet published, taught Remedial Reading. She was carrying with her, in a sizeable golf cart, dozens of reams of paper for her work.

“I have to secure my supply now”, she told Carmine. “You just can’t be certain later. Especially next semester. When BARF begins. And the Halloween costume essays will be upon us before we know it.”

Carmine looked at her closely. Nearing forty, she was already quite gray. Hermione clearly had once been attractive. Like Gorgias Hall. Like the envelope factory worker. Like the Western Hemisphere, before the Puritans. Every part of her was well-formed and sensuous, from her inviting lips to her classic hour glass figure. Unfortunately, she had the demeanor of someone who had been stretched, regularly, upon the ground, so that an elephant dance could take place atop her body. If Dr. Corvée had had Hermione’s spirit, banana strands would now be carpeting the Great Lot. Her inviting lips probably had not called the right people to the regal feast that they promised. And her hourglass figure might well have been utilized chiefly to hang pasquinades in the service of pointless causes. Should first impressions be trustworthy, however, a gentle soul housed within that battered palace, and the eyes that confirmed its existence welcomed Carmine to relax and know that it would cause him no harm. Though perhaps no help either. Still, Hermione’s bearing stirred Carmine’s confidence, as well as a desire to make inquiry about a number of Periphery oddities. Including the mysterious menace called BARF.

Before he could question her, however, Porphyry Contramundum pulled him firmly aside. He gave Carmine a card entitled “Eternal Plunge”. This advertised the “Ultimate Service Corporation”; one providing funerals, over Long Island Sound, with bodies shot out of helicopters in disarmed warheads purchased in the Ukraine. With heavy metal accompaniment.

“Here’s the way out”, Porphyry promised Carmine. “Get in on the ground floor, and you’ll never have to get up for early morning classes again.”

He moved away, sketching pictures of plummeting corpses, swathed in chain mail and Viking helmets, on the back of his business cards as he walked.

Porphyry, like Ernst Wissen von und zu Nichts, was a philosopher. He could not have been older than forty-five. Just under six feet tall, just slightly overweight, just barely graying, Porphyry called to mind a likeable and common enough type with which Carmine had had a long experience. The transvestite. No. Not the type that masqueraded man as woman. Rather, those of one background taking on another form of outward dress. Orthodox Jews from Second Avenue imitating Viennese aesthetes. Culture starved Brooklynites strutting about like Hungarian magnates and speaking, endlessly, of their engagements with expatriate countesses. Neighborhood butchers who entertained themselves as amateur detectives, and assured their friends that they were hot on the trail of the Czarevitch Alexis. Porphyry, however, was a more complex manifestation of the phenomenon. He was clearly a man of intelligence. A wit. Probably a bon vivant as well. But one who wished to hide something under the unnatural garb of a dedicated cynicism. What was his secret? An ingrown toenail? The makings of a sixth finger? A tail? A mistress? Maybe even a deceived idealism? What was he covering for?

Whatever the case, there was little time to mull over such superficial judgments. The cortège was moving towards Gorgias Hall. It was not a cortège triomphant. Carmine was guided by Ernst Wissen von und zu Nichts, who explained to him his escape from Philippopolis to Linz in a taxi cab in 1968. Drs. Crumb and Corvée took up the rear, the former chastizing his banana-like colleague for what Carmine gathered to be a yeoman effort to abandon caffeine.

“Never reduce external stimulants and depressants”, Crumbs catechized. “You know what happens to us.”

The full battalion pressed through the entrance to Gorgias Hall, that extraordinarily large and eclectic mansion that housed the entirety of the Periphery Faculty: the Department of Pharmaceutical Studies; Advancement of Management and Kineseology; Real Estate and Litigation; Personal and Software Growth; Bigger Computer Parts; Smaller Computer Parts; Motivation; Technocracy and Mysticism; Communication and Personal Finance; Money Science; and, finally, the center of this particular company, the Department of Other Studies.

Gorgias Hall’s interior was not without impact. A banner hung in its foyer, joyfully preaching the Good News that “At Periphery, Appearance Is Reality!” The door to the lobby was open, though passage was obstructed by two enormous slabs of metal; the kind that refugees like Ernst used to find at the borders of the East Bloc.

“Put up to keep visitors away”, Crumbs explained to Carmine. “But it costs too much to actually buzz anyone through.”

He and four others, familiar to the work, pressed the diptych open, like so many Egyptian fellahin urging bits of pyramid into place.

The vista west of the Wall was dominated by a dilapidated couch, evoking embarrassing memories for Carmine of the day that he had conspired with several friends to drag a similar object from the canteen of a bankrupt fried bread supplier in Oxford to the rooms of a detested fellow student. To punish him. Professor Contadina Panico and her husband, Bozhimoj, both in their late fifties and teachers of education, rested immobile, their heads in their hands, worrying intensely amidst the couch’s dust. Tiny, bulbous, radish-like feet, dangling from equally miniscule, grapefruit bodies, scarcely touched the ground as they sat. When Dr. Corvée stood next to the Panichi, the trio transformed Gorgias Hall into a Jersey truck garden.

“What’s on their mind?”, Carmine asked Porphyry, pointing to the fruit and vegetable stand.

“How to please the students before they’re asked”, he explained. “It’s a category of BARF that has forever marked them.”

Above the educators sagged a portrait of Dr. Wholesome Fist, emblazoned with the presidential motto: “Our Students Deserved Something Better!” A bulletin board and a “No Smoking” sign completed the chamber’s furnishings.

Immediately to the left of the seedy lobby stood the door to the Department of Other Studies. Its central window pane was decorated with a poster labeled: “Who’s Where in There!”, detailing desk assignments. A sketch of students with bookbags slung over their shoulders, and apples shining in their open palms, nestled to the poster’s right. Matched by a “Welcome Back to the Inside Track!” sign, colored in with magic marker, on the left.

“Dr. Swabalot”, knowing voices croaked to Carmine.

Titans alone could require the colossal desk dominating the interior of the office, facing outwards towards the entrance. Graduate assistants sat behind it, hired to direct traffic to faculty members’ places. One telephone occupied the desk top, riveted thereto, with the words “Do Not Use Without Permission!” inscribed in Roman and Gothic script, Carolingian miniscule, and italics around the edges.

Fifteen little desks flanked the Monster, each arranged neatly, one behind the other, imitating those of secretaries in a turn of the century typing-pool. Each desk was mated with a filing cabinet and a garbage pail. Desks, filing cabinets and garbage pails were all labeled according to faculty member. With his birthdate. And list of publication rejections. Summer scenes brightened the office walls, along with “We’re There!” and “Appearance Is Reality!” banners. A blackboard was affixed to the back end of the room, one piece of chalk suspended on a string at its side.

“Meeting! 6:00 A.M.! Faculty Lounge! Gorgias Hall!”, the chalk had written on the blackboard’s face. A typewriter and a slowly-turning ceiling fan—the sort used by southern sheriffs in Hollywood films as they contemplate the latest pogrom—languished in the far corner. The typewriter was bordered by a table, topped with a plastic seraphim and a curious septagon divided into pockets identified as “one through six” and “last of all”. All the desks had legal calendars turned to the accurate date. Carmine glanced at his. “Not scrap paper yet!”, he learned from the admonition penned in on the front of each message sheet through December. No books were anywhere in sight. Additional members of the Department of Other Studies were seated in the office.

“Every man his own show”, Porphyry Contramundum whispered to Carmine.

He may have been correct. Television is full of odd and dull programs.

Veiled in the corner, separated from the masses by a little iconostasis, was Dr. Gordian Riddel, sixty-one years old and a teacher of psychology. His neighbor, on the congregation side, was Arius Affirmativo. Arius Affirmativo was a political scientist, about fifty. He was also President of the Faculty Union and a fine portrait painter. Carmine met him as he was investigating the contents of his filing cabinet. It proved to be impossible to avoid peeking into it along with him. Carmine observed a picture of King Charles II, bound for execution, with the caption, “Thanks for the advice”, etched in beneath it. Serge Sarcophagus, a fifty five year old rhetorician, could be discerned, intermittently, at and about his desk. Serge entertained himself with little nips from a Balkan liqueur, purchased illegally through the Albanian janitorial staff. He tried to cover his face under a mound of pencils whenever Carmine happened to draw near to him.

“It’s hard to get close to old Serge”, Porphyry commented. “The quality of his rapport with other faculty at Periphery depends upon tariffs levied in Tirana and by the emigrant Albanian community down the road each semester.”

Umberto Flesh, a mathematician nearing retirement, mammoth in proportions, struggled to change clothes at the window, the Department of Other Studies’ only source of fresh air and light. Beside him stood Periphery’s sole musicologist, the forty-three year old Ronald Coleman look alike, Alfred Humdrum-Impasse. Alfred stared hard at the window pane, seeking enough of a reflection from it to straighten his tie.

“We’re going to have to chip in for a mirror this year, Flesh!”, he prophesied.

The two graduate assistants introduced themselves at this time as well. These were the Monopolus Brothers, or the Monopoli, as they were nicknamed, being identical twins. Roma Pasticcio, a faculty secretary, also wanted to make Carmine’s acquaintance. With the bearing of a mother about to tell he child that he must drink a bottle of Pepto Bismol for an unspecified period stretching long into the foreseeable future. The other secretary, Thelma-Gruff Artifact, sat dutifully at her desk, as pitiless as Queen Zenobia of Palmyra when her husband begged for sexual intimacy more than once within a given cycle. There was not much time for a look at the rest of Gorgias Hall. Carmine heard that the other departments were not worth the visit anyway.

“Private offices”, Crumbs explained. “Most of the good stuff is closed to the casual tourist.”

Besides. The graduate students began almost immediately to corral the faculty into the Other Studies’ Meeting.

Carmine was conducted to a room designed for storage. Bits of lumber of uneven size and inhuman purpose leaned, arthritically, in one of its corners. A water fountain, long deceased, slumbered sideways against the adjoining wall, topped by hundreds of back issues of Periphanalia, the school newspaper. Pieces of crippled office furniture were scattered poignantly about the length and breadth of the place, pleading for attention like incurable lepers hiding in the back caves along with Ben Hur’s mother and sister. The room was adorned, here and there, with the sort of inexplicable and often dangerous peculiarities that one frequently finds in side desk drawers, and periodically purges. A rubbish bin, occupied by age-old tenants, exuded an exotic eastern aura. Faculty were moving about amidst the ruins in small groups, as citizens in wartime might examine a neighborhood after a particularly devastating bombardment. Ernst Wissen von und zu Nichts gazed steadfastly at an unexpectedly magnificent chandelier, which hung, as perplexed and worried as Corvée and the Panichi, above the destruction.

“The lights are going out all over Periphery”, he mumbled, in response to Carmine’s quizzical glance. He stared in terror at the newcomer. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

Immacolato Swabalot was already present. Rag in hand, he was dusting bric-a-brac with the diligence of a lesser Prussian bureaucrat. It was clear that he was almost uncontrollably excited. Carmine found his enthusiasm contagious. He could not help but wonder as to its cause. Surely, it was knowledge of some project of great moment for the life of the Department of Other Studies as a whole! Carmine hoped that he had brought sufficient paper with him to handle the tidal wave of commentary its announcement would inspire. For Carmine had always been prolix. Especially in the service of good causes.

Dr. Swabalot was a long, thin man, nearing sixty, and an exact double of Woodrow Wilson. Periphery boasted faculty resembling plants, actors, revolutionaries, maps and, now, statesmen. Moreover, that Wilsonian character of Swabalot extended from face and body to action. Indeed, he called the meeting of the Department of Other Studies to order with a perceptibly charismatic ebullience, perfectly reminiscent of the former president of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. A mixture of religious abandon, mystic rapture and puritanical zeal accompanied Swabalot’s announcement of the initial steps to be taken by those assembled.

“The first item on the agenda”, he preached, “is the work calendar!”

This seemed reasonable enough to Carmine. His colleagues apparently thought otherwise. Dr. Corvée’s nostrils became inflamed. A Marxist rally could have been called before their flush of resplendent red. He twitched unceasingly and began to search his suit jacket for tufts of hair. The vast majority of those present stared impassibly ahead, so many torsos of Ramses II, trapped in the ancient, sacred crypts of Egypt. Carmine turned to Dr. Swabalot for the words to break this uncanny spell.

“The eighth day of September”, the Chairman began, “is the day when the Albanians shake out the doormats. Faculty can assist by not walking on them at all on the seventh. On the morning of the ninth, the air-conditioner covers will be polished. At 12:00 noon, the next day, the pictures of the Canadian Rockies above Dr. Corvée’s desk…”.

He interrupted, with a gesture of greeting to the suffering don, who smiled, wanly, in response.

“…will be replaced by those of Bambi, frolicking in the fallen leaves.”

A tuft of hair blew across Carmine’s cheek.

“The ninth is a Thursday”, Dr. Swabalot continued. “And pencil shavings will be dumped every Thursday…”.

He said this with violent emphasis. Had there been some debate regarding its necessity the year before?

“…into the western waste basket next to the graduate assistants’ desk.

Carmine emitted a laugh. A nasty, brutish, short and, most unfortunately, solitary one. Dr. Swabalot did not appear to be bothered by it. But the unbroken silence of his colleagues convinced Carmine that he had committed a blunder. The work calendar continued.

“The tenth of September is the deadline for ordering paper clips. It is also Mrs. Pasticcio’s birthday. I will be placing the traditional piggy bank on the desk for collection.”

One of the Monopoli held up the swine for all to see.

Carmine tried to atone for his error by listening with perfect unction to what could not be other than some cosmic joke. Thirty minutes later, he had gained a detailed knowledge of every conceivable aspect of Periphery trivia. He learned how best to place his feet under his desk without disrupting classical canons of balance and harmony and a Confucianist sense of public duty. He heard of the evils of irregular blinking and its impact on faculty morale. Indeed, he was even given pictures of monks from Himalayan lamaseries, and texts on True Pure Land Buddhism to develop respect for self-control. Swabalot’s erudition and Wilsonian fervor brought the science of misplaced zeal to levels undreamed of by generations of Catharists and Presbyterians combined. It took a nudge on the shoulder from Porphyry Contramundum to make Carmine aware that the time had come to proceed to the Faculty Dining Room in Irksum Hall for a gathering of the university teachers as a whole.

“This one’s been laid to rest’, Porphyry explained. “It’s usually just long enough to deaden responses to the next assault.”

Carmine filed into the Faculty Dining Room with the benumbed delegation from the Department of Other Studies, only to be disoriented still further. The place had obviously once been cluttered, then stripped bare, and, finally, redecorated in its present peculiar fashion.

Peculiar was perhaps too weak a word to describe it. An inexplicable eyeball, wires bulging from its pupil, stared down at Carmine from the back of the room. Could this be the means by which some Interrogator General kept control of the activities of his agents in the field? A coat rack, sufficiently deformed to resemble either an instrument of torture or a statue in the Museum of Modern Art, hid, self-consciously, in the corner. It already cringed underneath the weight of those patched and unkempt Bowery rags that are a sign of the presence of a certain type of American university professor. But what could be the reason? It was only September. Had people left them hanging for safe keeping since the previous winter to save storage costs? Or for purposes of barter? Colored photographs hung on the walls, providing a touch of joy to a Puritan eatery. On closer inspection, however, these proved to be the standard depiction of a choking man, and the best means of ending the tribulations of his upper thorax, an action approaching sexual harassment. Yet why were such pictures here? And not on naturalization office walls? To warn aliens of what they might be fed in their future lives? A mucous membrane colored lamp, whose bulbs were being removed by an Albanian just as Carmine spotted it, showered its last dubious rays upon the assembled multitude.

Caravaggio had never seen light like this.

Carmine was abandoned by his departmental colleagues in the doorway of the Dining Room. They all made a dash for the chairs lining the rear, though not everyone made it to the goal. This left two thirds of the space sparsely populated. It was as though Calcutta and Alaska had been placed next door to one another.

On one side of the chamber was a table marred by indelible coffee stains. It had previously been the student dining room. Complaints by sensitive student leaders had brought about its immediate removal. The table was now set with a rickety coffee dispenser, several half-used containers of milk, a few stirrers and, perhaps, two hundred cups and tops. The dispenser shot hot fluid into its users’ eyes. Stirrers broke swiftly in two. The milk was rancid. Each cup had a hole in its bottom. None of the tops fit. That did not stop the entirety of the Other Studies’ faculty from periodically creeping towards this fountain of vigor, eeking out its juice and gratefully returning to its seats with the elixir trickling slowly across the floor.

“That saves me seventy five cents today!”, Hermione Rittenoff chirped.

Dr. Corvée took two empty coffee cups and began tearing little bits of one into the other. Anatole Crumbs held Java before his noise to entice him back into the game of existence.

In the front of the room was another desk, piled high with heaps of paper, behind which were seated DiaphonousVeil, Mrs. Frenetico, Dr. Paura and an unknown guest. Despite the inevitable no smoking sign, an ashtray next to the papers was already filled with anywhere up to two packs worth of stale butts. Voices were heard. Carmine thought that Dr. Veil was discussing The Magic Mountain with Mrs. Frenetico. It turned out that he was merely coughing. Dr. Paura sat, smiling, with hands folded nervously together. Carmine caught snatches of his conversation with passing faculty members. He could not make out much. Only the words “beware”, “take care”, “not on paper”, “untraceable” and “please”, “yes”, “learn to please”. Mrs. Frenetico occasionally retreated from her consumptive and secretive superiors in order to lift the innumerable reams of paper off the desk top and into a tumbril wheeled in for that purpose by Drs. Flesh and Humdrum-Impasse.

Carmine had been eagerly awaiting this opportunity to meet the members of the other departments within the university. It would be a chance to share knowledge with people focusing on subjects different than his own. He had learned so much in Oxford Common Rooms, just by talking with his fellow man! That was one of the major appeals of diversity. And, best of all, given Periphery’s size, there might be a hope of developing real camaraderie among the people dispensing Truth alongside him in a phalanx of enlightenment. After all, there could not be more than thirty faculty in all. Divided among the six departments.

Divided was the operative word.

In fact, all of Carmine’s other colleagues did show up, and all at once. But only, as it turned out, to tell Mrs. Frenetico that they had been excused to attend a champagne brunch with Dr. Fist and several honored pupils. It seemed as though they had arrived, in strength, like a tiny army of decadents, in search of an antipasto of cheap thrills in a gypsy camp before reclining at couch for the grande bouffe.

Still, Carmine did manage to get a general appreciation of the group as it exited the Faculty Dining Room. As a rule, its members looked like professors from the Department of Other Studies who had been dressed, under external threat, in expensive clothing and did not quite know what to make of it. Many were Orientals. Those who were not, resembled ducks, violently compressed, whole, into large take-out containers. One wore a hat, which he had lowered, jauntily, over his right eye. He appeared to be surprised not to be recognized and fawned upon. A man clad in an exaggeratedly long leather blazer turned his head slowly from side to side. Did he think he was a radar screen? Honing in on an unidentified flying object? The last to leave the room was, appropriately enough, the spitting image of a caboose on a turn of the century presidential campaign, upon which fine cotton garments had been mistakingly draped instead of bunting.

Carmine’s observations were cut short by an imposing but complex roar issuing from the direction of the podium. Dr. Veil had cleared his throat to signal the opening of the meeting. This action had disturbed some fault running through his entire oddly shaped trunk, moved extraordinary substances lying in his digestive track and unleashed creative impulses moulding themselves into an atonal symphony.

Sympathies within the room, guided by the spiritus mundi, led others to take up and further develop the theme of Veil’s troubled motif in unexpected ways. Flesh, in particular, was absorbed by this inner, organic dialogue. He seized his stomach and placed it majestically upon the desk in front of him, in order that his artistry might break free from the constraints of mere formalism. If something did not happen soon to break the spell, nature itself would react vehemently, and Vishnu reincarnate yet again to conduct the chorus. Fortunately, the author of these disturbances himself now intervened.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Gentlemen and ladies!”, Veil bellowed. “The Team has a well-computed agenda to definitize today. May we begin so that we can most expeditiously bring to a resolution and a conclusion the items and points within our most specific and detailed and immediate grasp!”

Carmine sneaked a peak at those around him. Everyone was electrified by Veil’s words. Was this Periphery? Or Nüremberg? New York? Or Moscow? The present? Or the 1930’s? A renewed belch redirected his thoughts pragmatically, so that he had no time to dwell on troubling analogies. In true American fashion.

“Ladies and gentlemen!”, The Dean continued. “Allow me to ignite our consultations by insisting that all of us—and perhaps, no one more than anyone, The Team over at Hormone Hall—are more pleased than that which can be imagined when pleasure is thought of, and, indeed, if pleasure could be spoken of more, it would only be a fool who could indicate less of it!”

The audience responded with prolonged applause. Dr. Rittenoff was so touched that she spontaneously leaped to her feet.

“I know I speak for the whole of this faculty”, she bubbled, “when I say that there is a pleasure greater than that which can be imagined…”.

Carmine was lost. He had never been at home in scholastic debate, and this twist on the Ontological Argument confused him.

Rittenoff went on.

“…and it is the greater pleasure of responding lovingly to pleasure freely offered!!”

The ovation was deafening. An icon of St. Anselm levitated above the head table. Dr. Veil silenced the Faithful and commanded Mrs. Frenetico to call the roll. Dr. Rittenoff was surrounded by colleagues congratulating her on her Intervention.

Item One on the agenda involved an address by the Academic Vice President, Dr. Strahlung Beamo. Dr. Beamo was the unknown guest, sitting all this time at the front of the room next to Dean Veil. He could not seem to keep still. His eyes darted constantly this way and that, but never aimed even momentarily where they ought to have been focused. Swabalot surely must have longed to rivet them firmly to one object. Dr. Beamo had fingered nearly every part of his anatomy while in the public eye. Not out of misdirected lust, or a need to convince himself of his continued health, but simply because not doing something with his hands would have exposed him to an existential void and its attendant dread. At moments of excitement, such as the Rittenoff Intervention, he, too, rose to his feet, but in a special way, shooting diagonally with his whole body to the left and to the right, many times in succession. When introduced, Beamo attacked and took possession of the podium, smiling, propelling himself alternately this way and that, darting his eyes and waving his arms at the audience as though he were fending it off.

“No, no, no!!”, he punctuated, clearly eager to prevent a repetition of the enthusiasm awakened by Dr. Rittenoff’s historic deed. But he need not have worried. Instead of applauding him, most people imitated the indifference of Dean Veil, who set about picking his teeth. Some faculty became openly defiant. Alfred Humdrum-Impasse plucked out unshaven hair from his chin. Serge Sarcophagus emitted audible pig grunts. Teeth could be heard gritting so tightly that bits of enamel, which the Albanians swept up to sell on the Black Market, fell to the ground. The mood of the assembly grew faintly obscene and determinedly mean.

“No, no, no, no!!”, Dr. Beamo went on, gazing at the ceili