A City Made of Words by Paul Park

Author:Paul Park
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2019-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said one of the policemen, “but you can’t stay on campus. If you just go down the hill, you’ll find …”

“No, I’ll go,” she said, wiping her nose with her handkerchief. “And thank you, officer. You saved my life back there. I don’t know what I might have …”

“That’s okay. If you just … ”

It was almost dark when she did find it: a safe-hold, a place of refuge, a coffee shop on Main Street where an hour later she sat clutching the remains of a bran muffin, and reading for the third or fourth time the introduction to Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. But finally the man from Craigslist sauntered by the plate-glass window. He pressed his face against the glass, cupped his hands around his eyes. The rain had stopped. When he saw her, he came inside, took off his coat and hat. “May I?” She saw no sign of his revolver.

“I think I’d rather be alone.”

He shrugged, then sat down opposite her at the small, square table. He leaned across it with his elbows on the polyurethaned surface, his long hands near her plate. “That was quite the Q&A,” he said. Then he leaned closer: “Listen, I know what you’re thinking. You think you’re wrong, but you were right. I saw some manifestations, just for a moment. Just before the police showed up.”

“Please go away.”

He sighed, rubbed his long, crooked nose. “It’s humiliating. But there’s a chance. You must know who killed your advisor.”

Yvette swallowed three times before she spoke. “I did,” she confessed. “My dissertation bored her to death. She had a dozen pages with her in the bathroom.”

The man smiled. “Always a risk,” he said. “But I feel sure that was not the proximate cause. Barely a contributing factor.”

“You don’t know. You never tried to read it. Besides, the door was locked on the inside. No sign of a …”

“Sure. A locked door isn’t much of an obstacle to a creature like that.”

“And she’d been depressed. Her husband told her he was leaving.”

But Yvette knew Karen would have been honored to see Judith Butler through the peephole, let alone Julia Kristeva.

She looked out at the slick sidewalk under the streetlight. “Sure,” the man said. “Sure.”

He himself looked so mournful, momentarily, that he was almost handsome, big features, small beard, chapped lips. His hands were big, his knuckles prominent. “Look,” he said, “I’ve been mapping out what I call power nodes in the different universities, mostly in the Northeast. The oldest and the wisest ones are territorial. The one I saw, she’s not that wise, not in comparison.”

“You mean Farinelli.”

“No. God, no. Farinelli’s just a wannabe, just starting out. Butler’s the transhuman here, but I don’t think she’s made the change to full-fledged antihuman. Not yet. She won’t have had the time. She was born in 1919, made, created, you could call it, in the late thirties—maybe by Martin Heidegger, which would explain the anti-Semitism. It would have come in through the blood.

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