Every Wickedness by Susan Thistlethwaite

Author:Susan Thistlethwaite [Thistlethwaite, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498245265
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2017-12-19T08:00:00+00:00

17

My friend.

She’s my friend.

When I see her on the street I’m glad

She’s my friend.

“My Friend”

Marlena Myers, #1059

StreetWise

Friday, May 19, Noon to 3 p.m.

I worked straight through lunch. I had grabbed my paper mail when I figured Frost had departed for her lunch break. When I had finished throwing most of that in the recycle bin, I worked my way through my email. I scarcely took my finger off of the delete button. Every bureaucrat in this institution could now enter a tiny part of my mind by selecting ‘list serve.’ ‘Orwellian’ was already overused as a description of the first quarter of the 21st century, but that was because it was such a fitting description. I could feel the electronic tendrils with their sensitive cilia trying to attach themselves to all aspects of my life. After more than an hour, I started pressing ‘delete’ on my voicemail.

At this rate, eventually all we will ever do each day is send and receive messages without having time to think about any content. It was like an essay I’d once read by the great historian, Henry Steele Commager, written decades ago. He had been railing against the Xerox machine. All his students did now, he complained, was use a machine to pile up copies of material that they never actually read. He’d compared that to a time when one had had to copy references by hand. The laborious task brought one into intimate contact with the author. I shuddered to think what Commager would have thought of our era. Not only the metastasis of electronic messages, but Google searches? Wikipedia? Twitter? I pushed my chair back from the desk in a small, and fairly useless protest against contact with all this mind-numbing repetition. I was starting to feel like the kid’s hamster in his little exercise ball. Rolling and rolling around to absolutely no purpose. I had never considered academic life could be this moronic. By contrast, in rosy retrospect, being a cop was looking pretty good.

I rolled my chair back to the desk and pressed the code to finish listening to my voicemail. Several students droned on about why their assignments would be late. Suddenly, I sat up as Alice’s voice came on. She’d called a little after noon. Her voice sounded more upbeat than she’d seemed in the morning.

“This is Alice Matthews. I’m going to Stedman later. See if Carlyle’s stuff is still in storage there. I should get there by about 1:15, 1:30 at the latest. Come if you want.” I checked my watch. Damn. Probably missed her. But still. Faced with a choice of deleting messages or going to find Alice, it was a no-brainer. I was locking the door and racing down the stairs before the bureaucrats even knew I had escaped.

# # # #

The rain had stopped, but the sky was still laden with clouds. The wind from the west was whipping them into slate-colored streams running toward the lake. Small branches and leaves littered the paths

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