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Jim ends this recollection, letting the remembrance of his epithets serve as the triumphant cadence to this little memory. Yet, he still finds himself unable to progress further in his routine. His memory has made him intent on finding something—something that he put away several years ago, and has not seen since. Standing, he draws near a grey metal filing cabinet in the corner of his home office. He forces open the top drawer without deploying the release lever and riffles through the dog-earned folders until his fingers meet the one he has been looking for. In opening it, a thin sheet of sketchbook paper slides noiselessly onto the thread-worn rug below. Jim doesn't bother picking it up, he just looks at it from above. It is another sketch, drawn by the same boy and of the same subject. In the sketch, Jim stands at the front of a crowded classroom, one hand raised to the blackboard, indicating an equation, the other hand outstretched to the students, as if beckoning them to understand the relevance of the formula to the everyday. Jim had merely laughed when Rob handed it to him three weeks after the coffee shop incident; laughed, and then filed it with other documents of mild interest.
The art student had begun to attend the lectures on Thursday afternoons, as well as several others during the week. At first Jim had been annoyed, and had approached him about it. But Rob had merely said,
"Sylvia, the girl in the coffee shop, she really helped me see that day what I had been missing out on. There is this whole other realm of knowledge, another level to the complexities and the interconnectedness of everything, just passing me by. I don’t understand everything you're saying now, but I think it’s interesting, and important, and I want to learn it."
It wasn’t like Jim to consent to something of that nature, not only that it was against University policy to allow any student to regularly attend a lecture that he or she was not properly registered for, but it seemed an annoyance to have a smart-aleck art kid hovering over all of his lectures, sketching at random, and pretending to be interested in the material. Perhaps Rob had decided that Sylvia was a girl he wouldn't mind buying a latte for more often, and was hoping to impress. Why else would a busy art student be interested in learning Chemistry? Jim didn’t have the answers. He did not even know why he had nodded in consent to Rob's eager question, or why he had smiled to himself once he had turned away.
Though at the time he had not known his motivations, now, standing in his office, looking down at the sketch, he instinctively knows why he had not been bothered by Rob's presence in the class. One did not need to observe the boy for long, sitting in the back of the room, with a wide smile, and a ready pen, to realize that this art student was more interested in assigning Oxidation Numbers than many of the pre-med students were.
What professor wouldn't be enthusiastic about an avid learner? Besides, the good Dr. had had many years of experience in showing idealists how the world truly worked. He lived for those moments when students came into him at the end of a semester and said, "I used to be religious until I took this class, and then I learned how things REALLY work. Thanks, Dr!"
Now, back to that drawing. Jim picks up the sketch and turns it over. For: Dr. James Bentley, October 15 19-- The Professor at his ideal. From: A (not so) Damned Idealist. Jim does not bother to suppress a smile when he reads it. It is the first smile he has allowed himself over the incident in all the eight months. Yet, the reader need not hope that Jim's smile is a sign of his acceptance of the tragedy. As far as he is concerned, there is nothing to accept. The news of the plane crash had come just as the news of rising gasoline prices, or the start of another construction project outside of the apartment window. It wasn't good news, but it was nothing that could be helped, and one had to deal with it as one dealt with other annoyances.
No, the smile is not acceptance; it is more of an outward indication that Jim has realized just how right he had been in his diagnosis of Rob. He had been damned, from the very beginning, because he was always out looking for some meaning, some ideal that could not be found, because it was not there. He'd died for it, and no one had been the wiser. Men may die in battle, Jim reasons, but if the war is lost, the people simply adapt to a new way of life, and the dead soldiers are forgotten. As soon as he thinks it, he feels proud of some alleged literary ability.
A lost battle—interesting metaphor. Art like this is good.
Jim shoves the sketch back in the envelope and tosses it onto the desk. He then picks up the letter once again, and finishes scanning it without comprehension of its meaning. Upon completion, he folds it, places it back and in the envelope, and holds it steadily over the raw, open flame of a candle set in the center of the cluttered desk. The edge of the paper resists momentarily, as if asserting its right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And then, it gives way—wretches, folds, blackens, smokes, and crumbles. He tosses it onto the ashtray and watches the flame shrivel and die on the scorched metal surface.
One down, hundreds to go.
Jim opens the next letter.
Dear Robert: It feels strange to pen those words, I never met you, but I feel like I had. The day I saw the interview on the television of the hikers who found your plane out in the desert, I cried for an hour. I don't understand why I felt so sad that you were gone, but I feel the world was a better place because of your project, and I think it's delightful that you asked Dr. Bentley to continue it for you.
Jim is smart. He knows that what is truly "delightful" is that so many of Rob's admirer's believe that he, James Bentley, had actually been asked to continue the project. Even Rob's own ailing mother seemed to think it the most natural thing in the world. It wasn't any great task to convince everyone that this was the way it was supposed to be. Conveniently, Rob had mailed several notebooks back to the University, in the care of James Bentley, just two days before his accident. It was almost too easy to pretend that the notebooks had been filled with notes, and sketches meant only for the eyes of the man who could finish the project, in the sad event that it became necessary for a successor. In reality, the notebooks were little more than nomadic sketches of people Rob had met along his travels, flying about the United States, scouting out sites for his accursed project. The boy had thought the notebooks cumbersome in his backpack, and had shipped them to the University in order to lighten his load.
A professor with such a long-standing tenure had experienced little opposition to his sudden artistic tyranny, and had not had a moment’s trouble in getting the press to zero in on his story: a heartbroken mentor struggling to finish the project started by his protégée in the very flower of his youth, and so on and so forth. Any sob story to make the people's hearts go pitter-patter and the donations for the project began pouring in by the hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it wasn't hard to hire men to go into the prairies of the mid-west for days at a time, laden with measuring tapes and clipboards making rounds, taking notes, talking in hushed tones while thousands gathered to watch the historic process. People would stand back and cry, and talk about how “beautiful” it all was. In his days serving the marines, Jim had learned that if you punch someone in the nose, it makes their eyes water. These people thought that tears meant something deep, that they were an outer-manifestation of some inner secret that they all shared, that this 'project' would help everyone to see what they had never before seen. Jim knew that they were just reacting to the punch.
To be continued... :)
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