I.

Jim _'______ stood in the mail room of the English Department at I____ State University, scratched his shiny head for the second time, and for the third time read the memo from the department chair:

N*AllaRasta has been hired for the fall semester and is being placed in your office.

Jim thought there must be a mistake, and maybe more than one. The memo, word processed on plain paper, bore no salutation, so he wondered if it might have been put in the wrong mailbox. But if not, then it was unclear to Jim if he was being given another office and this oddly named new person was taking the one he occupied now, or, impossible to imagine, if he would be expected to share the closet-sized space that was barely big enough for himself. He had been convinced that his assignment to that office three years previous had been a form of punishment; now he couldn't help but wonder if he were being punished again, and for what.

With the beginning of fall semester a week away, Jim had come in to organize his desk and begin preparing for classes, but this late change in arrangements left him feeling unsettled and uncertain. Yet he was reluctant to approach Marjorie Berg for clarification. For one thing, it would mean having to go through her secretary, who Jim was certain resented and disliked him because she knew that he knew that she spent much of her time playing computer games. Even more problematic was that Jim had reason to believe that his enemies in the department had informed Marjorie Berg of Jim's having on occasion referred to her behind her back as Margarine and Marginal.

Jim spent a while pondering the matter as he worked distractedly at his desk. When his need to know got the better of him, he screwed up his courage.

He went down the hall and stood in the doorway of the outer room of Marjorie Berg's office. The secretary sat facing away from him, intent on a game of solitaire on her monitor. Jim cleared his throat. She swiveled in her chair and, seeing him, lifted one eyebrow an eighth of an inch. "Yes?"

"I was hoping I might see Marjorie," Jim said.

"I'm afraid that's impossible." She returned to the game. "She's in a meeting and will be going to lunch when it's over," she said to the screen.

"Can you give me an appointment?"

"Marjorie's a very busy woman."

"Aren't we all." If she detected his attempt at irony, she showed no sign. He walked in, stood beside her and held up the memo. "This note was in my mailbox-something about someone's being assigned to my office. There has to be a mistake." The secretary snatched the memo from Jim's hand, gave it a brief look and, returning her attention to the computer screen, held it outstretched. Jim took it. "I typed this at Marjorie's request and put it in your mailbox myself," she said. "N*AllaRasta will be sharing your office with you. We trust you don't have a problem with that."

"My office is barely big enough to turn around in," Jim pleaded.

She assured him that that was a problem he could work out with his new office mate, and, with a click and slide of her mouse, dragged the queen of hearts and deposited her under the king of spades.

Jim slumped out, dismayed but not surprised.

Over the past ten years or so, as the department was transformed by personnel, curricular, and political changes, Jim had come to feel increasingly marginalized and irrelevant and put upon. Jim watched in disbelief and dismay in that time as the traditional canon he had been transmitting for so long went from being taught to being deconstructed, when it wasn't ignored entirely. It was as if he had awakened one morning to find that the New Criticism that formed the foundation of his teaching and scholarship for decades wasn't so new any more. And with the retirement of Rusty Canon three years ago, the last of the colleagues that had had hired in with Jim in the late 1960s, Jim found himself entirely isolated among wild-eyed theory heads-feminists, Marxists, deconstructionists, multiculturalists-leaving him the only one left that still held forth on plot, character, motivation, and conflict, the last to give Hemingway so much as a sideways glance.

Not that Jim had stood shoulder to shoulder with Rusty on the barricades. Far from it, in fact. Wary of collateral damage, Jim had been careful to keep a certain amount of distance from the Rusty who referred to his wife as "the little lady," from the Rusty whose unabashed pro-life rhetoric struck Jim as arising less out of conviction than from a deliberate attempt to raise the hackles of those he dismissed as feminazis, from Rusty the ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran and champion of what he liked to call "literature with balls." Only at Rusty's retirement reception did Jim relax his guard. Rusty began his remarks on that occasion by noting, nostalgically, that he had come to the department "when it was still possible to accuse someone of being queer," and ended by speaking to an empty room, empty except for Jim, anyway, who stayed out of courtesy.

And it became clear to Jim later that he paid a price for doing so.

It was soon after that Jim put in for a different office. He had been in one of a warren of offices with people on both sides who ignored the no-smoking policy in the building. With Rusty's retirement and an influx of new-hires that would mean a shuffling of office assignments, he felt his position as senior member of the department entitled him to first shot at a more agreeable space. In the event, the new people got the choicest locations, while Jim got the tiny one he was now being told he must share.

This time around, feeling he had nothing to lose, Jim decided to persist in his pursuit of an explanation. When he was finally granted an audience with Marjorie Berg two days before the start of school-he was told he could have five minutes-Jim got an earful on a variety of topics: the expansion of the Women's Studies Program, for which Marjorie Berg claimed a major part of the credit; how the (forced) retirement of some hopelessly out-of-date fellow in the History Department had finally liberated it of its last vestige of stodgy antiquarianism; and plenty else, a fair amount of which went over Jim's head, inasmuch as her talk was so heavily laced with foreign words and phrases, most of them French. Not until Jim had been dismissed and was back in his office did he realize that his five minutes had turned into Marjorie Berg's twenty, and that he hadn't got a word in concerning his office and the prospect of having to share it. Lacking the stomach to try again, Jim resigned himself to having to share space with some fellow named N*AllaRasta.

The rest of that day and evening Jim pondered that name, with an asterisk where an apostrophe might be in a normal person's name and that upper-case R in the middle. Jim had no idea if it was a surname or a Christian name or if there were more to it-Bob N*AllaRasta, maybe, or N*AllaRasta Johnson. Jim had heard of certain cultures, the Mongolians, for example, in which people were known by only one name. He had noted, too, that the practice had lately grown more popular in this country, especially among entertainers. The latter cases always struck Jim as an affected attempt to wrap its bearer in an aura of charisma or mystery or confer the cachet of ethnic chic. (Jim had to admit those weren't his strong suits, and in idle moments had even considered, although not very seriously, adopting one name himself, but he suspected Jim wouldn't exactly cause anyone to palpitate over what an exotic fellow he was.)

When he came to his office the next day, Jim found that some of his books had been removed from shelves and stacked on the floor and been replaced, he presumed, by his new office mate's. Even more remarkable, because he would have thought it impossible, another desk had been squeezed in, with Jim's pushed out of its usual place to make room. Jim hung around awhile. He made a stab at organizing within this new arrangement and hoped his new office mate might show so that he could give him a proper welcome. While he waited he examined the spines of some of the new books that had appeared, even took some off the shelf and riffled the pages. It all appeared to be theory, by authors he had never heard of.

Before leaving, Jim wrote a note and put it on the new desk:

Dear N*AllaRasta,
Welcome to the department and to my office. Make yourself at home.
[signed] Jim _'_____

When he returned the next day, the note was gone and unacknowledged, and more of his books had been taken off the shelves and stacked on the floor and on his desk to make room for more of N*AllaRasta's.

Fall semester commenced, with its usual rush and bustle. A week passed, then two, and to Jim's mild amazement, he never once in that time encountered his new office mate face to face, in the office or elsewhere. Of course it was not uncommon for colleagues to go long stretches without seeing each other, what with their having different schedules and forming different cliques based on their professional specialties, politics, lifestyles, and personalities. But it struck Jim as exceedingly odd that office mates would never once be in the office at the same time or cross paths outside of it. What Jim found equally as strange, unsettling even, was that within mere weeks of his arrival on campus, N*AllaRasta had managed to become the darling of the department, the College of Arts and Sciences, indeed, the entire university. Faculty Fanfare was full of notices concerning him: He published numerous papers, almost one a week-theory, Jim guessed from the titles-in refereed journals entirely unfamiliar to Jim; he presided over a symposium at a conference on post-colonial narratology in Khartoum; he had been elected chair of the International Society of the Oppressed but Tenured; he was nominated for a Faculty Excellence Award that, from the writeup, appeared to have been created expressly for him, and which included a $5,000 honorarium. (It was all Jim could do to refrain from complaining out loud that in more than thirty years of loyal and untiring service he had garnered, quinquennially, a collection of acrylic paper weights and fancy-looking but cheap ball point pens that didn't write worth a damn.) And around the English Department, the talk in the halls, the mailroom and the faculty lounge was all N*AllaRasta this and N*AllaRasta that. It seemed that everyone, everyone except Jim anyway, was positively swooning over the guy.

Under normal circumstances, by way of showing Christian cordiality, Jim would by then have invited a new office mate home for one of his wife Ginger's tasty suppers. But how could he if he never encountered him and if his notes to him went unanswered? Jim finally gave up any ambition of doing so, telling himself that someone with a name like N*AllaRasta wouldn't be much impressed anyway by Ginger's meat loaf and peach cobbler.

By early October, Jim still hadn't met his office mate or, as far as he knew, laid eyes on him. Jim had begun to wonder if N*AllaRasta might be a more virtual than real product of the collective yearning of the diversity crowd. Then came the announcement that the department would have its first meeting of the semester, at which, among other business, N*AllaRasta would be introduced and formally welcomed. Jim had never attended a meeting that he didn't find tedious, tiresome, a waste of time, so his attendance at them, especially in recent years, had been spotty at best. But he resolved to make this one.

Jim walked in late but before business had commenced. He surveyed the room and took a seat in the back. He saw no one that he guessed might be his office mate, but near the front a group of his female colleagues were huddled excitedly around someone, and Jim guessed that that someone must be N*AllaRasta. The room was warm, the time late afternoon, and Jim struggled against nodding off as routine beginning-of-the-school-year business was conducted and even later when the discussion seemed to grow heated, involving as it did, if Jim had things right, the use of computers in the classroom, web-based courses, and, somehow relatedly, competing theories of the self.

Jim perked up when Marjorie Berg indicated that the time had come for her to introduce N*AllaRasta. After she ran through a bewildering list of accomplishments and honors, he stood near the front and swiveled around to acknowledge the room. He was short and slight of build, coffee-with-cream colored, and sported a Medusan set of dreadlocks sticking out from under an outlandish knit hat; before sitting again he flashed a brief enigmatic smile. Jim thought he detected the glint of a gold front tooth.

More business was conducted, and when the meeting ended, virtually everyone in attendance surged forward and crowded around N*AllaRasta, all eager, some almost to point of delirium, to meet and greet him. Jim decided that he would too, especially as they were office mates and still hadn't met. Jim stood at the back of the crowd of well-wishers and worked his way slowly forward. Yet when he finally reached the spot where he thought N*AllaRasta had been, he was gone, as if having disappeared miraculously, and Jim looked around to find that he was alone in the room.

The next morning, Jim went to the library to return some books. On a whim, he logged onto Google on a computer and typed N*AllaRasta in the search bar, with little hope that such a strange character string would yield much. Yet in twenty-seven hundredths of a second, the first pageful of more than 17,000 hits appeared, the topmost of which was the N*AllaRasta web site. Jim clicked.

It included some samples of poems that N*AllaRasta had presumably written but which Jim could make neither heads nor tails of; a vita, from which Jim gathered that he had taught on four continents; links to a dizzying number and variety of arcane sites including ones relating to voodoo, Caribbean cooking, and what appeared to be a fusion of Scientology and Hinduism called Strobe-Prana that suggested that enlightenment might be attained by a coordinated pattern of rapid eye-blinking and-here, Jim had to blink to see if he were reading right-anal breathing; an annotated bibliography of works by and about N*AllaRasta, one of which was a two-volume biography by an Englishman who had also done lives of Gurdjieff, Madame Blavatsky, Swami Baba Ram Lipschitz, and Yogi Berra. After more than an hour surfing web sites, Jim came away having learned that N*AllaRasta had achieved varying levels of adeptness in yoga, sufism, and a martial art that Jim couldn't pronounce; that he had raised his kundalini; that he was a kind of Rastafarian-shaman-warlock-bodhisattva with hands-on healing powers, a vegetarian, poet, and rapper with three CDs to his credit; that he had earned a PhD in post-colonial narrativictimology, and was a star midfielder on the Olympic soccer team of his native (island) country of Bartuga. And all this by the age of twenty-nine.

Determined that he had to meet this guy, Jim decided to spend an entire day in his office. He picked a Tuesday, a day on which he didn't teach but on which the schedule showed N*AllaRasta teaching three classes, thinking that he must certainly appear between times. Of course Jim couldn't spend every minute in the office, having now and then to answer nature's call, and after a trip to the bathroom that took no more than two minutes, he returned to find evidence that N*AllaRasta had come and gone: Jim's radio, tuned to an easy-listening station, had been turned off, and there lingered a freshening of the peculiar odor he had got used to since N*AllaRasta moved in-cinnamon, garlic, and a hint of domestic cat, all carried on a vague smoky-weedy smell which Jim couldn't identify.

During the last class period that N*AllaRasta taught, Jim went up two floors to the room that the schedule indicated he should be in. The hall was empty. Jim put his ear to the door. What came through was a cadenced drone, a kind of rap mantra that Jim found both attractive and repellent.

He returned to his office and stayed until late afternoon, but N*AllaRasta never showed. As he waited Jim spied on N*AllaRasta's desk a photocopy of an article on gender as a social construct. Skimming it, he wondered for the first time if his office mate, of whom he had been thinking all along as a he, might in fact be a she, or, who knew, the times being what they were, maybe somehow both. In the brief glimpse Jim had got of him at that department meeting he thought he had seen thin wisps of hair on his upper lip and chin, but, truth to tell, some women in the department had more. It took Jim three days to get that rap-mantra out of his head.

That fruitless vigil marked the beginning of a tough week for Jim. The next day he walked into the mail room as three of his colleagues, a man and two women, stood in conversation. When Jim heard the words "study abroad," there arose in him, unchecked, the impulse to ingratiate himself with a touch of humor: All but sticking his head in the circle they formed, he shook the ash from an imaginary cigar in imitation of Groucho Marx's trademark gesture and interjected that he liked nothing better than to study a broad, depending on the broad, but had spent his entire life studying broads and still couldn't figure them out. Jim laughed so hard at his own joke that it wasn't until later, as he was reliving the moment, that Jim saw in his mind's eye the withering scorn with which his colleagues regarded him as they broke ranks and stomped out.

That same afternoon, alone in his office, Jim set about retucking his shirt. Turning his back to the door, which he had left ajar, he unbelted, unbuttoned, and unzipped his pants in order to do the job properly and push the tail down evenly and deeply all around. At that moment a female student came quietly through the door, behind him. "Is N*AllaRasta around?" she asked. Startled and forgetting what he was about, Jim turned, his pants completely open and his hand shoved down the front as far as his genitals. The female student, a tall, willowy blond with high cheekbones, looked him up and down with disgust. She held her book bag in front of her as she backed out the door.

The next day, Jim couldn't find his Portable Hemingway, one of the texts for his Modern American Lit class. Since half his students hadn't bought the book, most of the other half never brought it to class, and none could be counted on to do the assigned reading, he had resorted to spending entire periods reading from it aloud. In the face of having to improvise, he cancelled class.

And it was in that week that items began appearing in Jim's department mail box that at first puzzled him but that he came eventually to see as part of a campaign of low-level harassment: notices announcing diversity training sessions; a piece photocopied from a magazine on extinct species; a crudely scrawled note on a torn-off corner of paper accusing him of being a meat eater and a Republican.

Jim went home that Friday evening weary beyond telling. At sixty-two, he was old enough to retire and yearned more than ever to do so. But much of his retirement money was tied up in the stock market, which for some time now had been in the doldrums when it wasn't in an outright downward spiral.

After supper that night, at which Ginger remarked on his quiet mood, Jim went to bed early. Unable to sleep, he lay awake for hours, contemplating his situation in the department. He was unable even to look forward to Homecoming, a week hence, which he usually enjoyed for its bustle, parades, and influx of people. Still awake long after Ginger had joined him, Jim saw with stark clarity that he had been wrong in thinking that N*AllaRasta had been squeezed into his office: No, in spite of his thirty-five years of loyal and dedicated service to the department and to I___ State University, it was he, Jim, who was being squeezed-out of his office, out of the department, out of his career.

The Homecoming theme at I___ State University that year was "Our Global Campus," a celebration of the school's international student population. Rural, insulated and off the beaten path, I___ State was nevertheless a magnet for students from many foreign countries, thanks to the offerings of its Agriculture, Computer Science and Business Departments. On the Friday afternoon of Homecoming weekend, festivals celebrating the international cultures represented in the student population were to be held at dispersed locations around campus. The lawn in front of Whiteman Hall, which housed the English Department, had been designated as the spot for the Festival of Caribbean Culture. (Jim guessed that choice was owing to N*AllaRasta's influence, which mysteriously yet clearly had grown far out of proportion to the short length of time he had been a faculty member.)

Jim taught on that Friday afternoon, by which time setup for the festival had begun. Since his classroom was on the ground floor, facing the lawn, and since fair weather called for windows to be open, he found himself competing with the sounds of steel drummers warming up, numerous boom boxes set at high volume, and the hammering together of makeshift booths and food stands. As Jim lectured, still without benefit of his Portable Hemingway, to a bored, sleepy handful-attendance, never good, was especially poor that day-he debated in his mind whether or not to close the windows. Before he could decide, a dreadlocked fellow appeared at a window and shouted that anyone who wanted to come out and help set up was welcome to do so. "Free beer!" he added by way of inducement. Three male students rose and walked out, without apology or request for permission. The rest, who had looked dully at the men at the window, watched dully as their classmates rose and exited, turned their attention dully back to the front of the room. Long since dully resigned to such behavior but fed up nonetheless, Jim dismissed class.

Back in his office, Jim sat at his desk and looked out at the lawn. The steel drummers had by then progressed from warmup riffs to up-tempo numbers. The spicy smells of meat cooking on open grills wafted through Jim's open window. The lawn was so full of colorful skin tones and dress that Jim surmised that people of Caribbean extraction must have come from all over the Midwest.

Somewhat to his surprise, the smells, the music and the colors aroused in Jim a festive spirit; he considered going out and mingling, but since he saw only one other white face, and that belonging to the blond to whom he had nearly exposed himself in his office the week before, he waited. He killed some time trying without much success to work and looking for his Portable Hemingway.

Around four o'clock, Jim spied university president Brendan Campbell, with a small entourage, walking over from Old Main. The few red wisps of hair atop his head lifted in the breeze.

Jim went out to the front of the building and stood on the top step. From that elevated vantage, he watched as the president made his way toward the middle of the crowd. He and N*AllaRasta met and greeted each other with a warm embrace, like old friends. N*AllaRasta stepped up onto a wooden crate in front of a microphone on a pole.

"Ladies and gentlemen," N*AllaRasta said in unaccented English. He stopped to let feedback fade. "Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce a friend of our people, the president of this great institution, Dr. Brendan Campbell." The president stepped up to the microphone to polite but heartfelt applause; he and N*AllaRasta shook hands as they exchanged positions. The president looked around, smiling, and held his hands aloft in a gesture conveying both appreciation for the welcome and a call for quiet so that he might speak.

"Thanks for that warm introduction, N*Alla," he finally said. "And I certainly appreciate the respectful honorifics. But please"-he paused and smiled around-"call me mon."

The crowd shouted its approval. Rolls on the steel drums undulated and faded. "Speak, mon," someone yelled to the delight of all.

"As you know," the president went on, "I'm a longstanding devotee of Caribbean culture." More applause and drum rolls, this time brief and restrained. "As such, I appreciate the role that art, literature, and music played in sustaining the noble people of that region until the yoke of colonialism could be broken."

The crowd burst into uproar. One lanky fellow, shirtless, tattoos covering his torso and arms, gyrated wildly from the waist up, dreadlocks spinning above his head. "More largely," he went on, "I think you all know the value I place on diversity." The vigorous nodding of heads indicated that they did know. "Stuck as we are out here in the middle of the corn and soybean fields, we perhaps more than any place need a healthy dose of diversity."

From his safe distance, Jim groaned and rolled his eyes. It seemed that things had reached such a state that a janitor on campus couldn't replace a roll of toilet paper without first delivering a paean to diversity. The president went on in that vein for about another ten minutes with what sounded to Jim like platitudes lifted from public relations materials from the Offices of Minority Affairs and Affirmative Action. Then he came to a pregnant pause.

"Now I have an announcement of considerable import," he said importantly. "As some of you may have heard, health problems have forced Marjorie Berg to resign as chair of the Department of English after this semester." Murmurs of sympathy rolled through the crowd. Jim perked his ears again; he was among those who hadn't heard. "Furthermore, it's my pleasure to announce that an ad hoc committee has chosen N*AllaRasta to lead the department on an interim basis."

He gestured for N*AllaRasta to step up and stand next to him, then raised a cautionary hand. "As I said, this is an interim assignment." Rumbles of disappointment and protest arose, until he put his arm around N*AllaRasta's shoulders in a gesture of solidarity and said, "But guess who will have the inside track when it comes to filling the position permanently."

The tumult that ensued seemed to bear up the variety of stuff that was thrown into the air: hats, t-shirts, bras, food, paper plates, rolls of toilet paper, CDs, a cat. The president waved with both hands then stepped down and worked his way through the throng behind a wedge formed by the members of his entourage.

Jim was stunned, and chagrined to think that his radar had failed to detect news of such import. The entire business smelled to him like a coup. Most alarming was what this turn of events might portend for his future, especially if he were correct in his assessment that part of N*AllaRasta's mission was to rid the department, as Marjorie Berg had put it with reference to the fellow in History, of its "last vestige of stodgy antiquarianism."

And yet, wary and dispirited as he was, Jim still felt some of his previous impulse to join the festivities. If he could find N*AllaRasta and offer heartfelt congratulations, he might after all step into the uncertain future on the right foot. Together, his feelings averaged into a sort of what-the-hell mood, and he decided to go out on the lawn and mingle. He rose, spotted the blond again, hesitated. He was acutely aware of how out of place he would be: older than almost everyone by a generation, virtually the only white face and dressed in twill pants and an oxford cloth shirt under a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. Ginger would be expecting him home any minute and doubtless already had the table set for supper. When a fellow on the near edge of the crowd gave him a welcoming smile, Jim tentatively approached. He skirted the perimeter for a while then moved in and worked his way toward the middle. He felt like a bar of Ivory soap, yet, to his relief, found that he was more invisible than unwelcome.

Much of the activity was around the charcoal fires, some of which had been dumped on the ground. Merchandise and artwork in various media was for sale at the booths, touching on themes from the revolutionary to the profane. At one, fundamentalist Christians handed out pamphlets to those willing to take them and cajoled those who passed within hearing.

As Jim penetrated more deeply, the crowd grew thicker, as did the patois with which its members spoke and shouted to each other. More than once he thought he had been greeted, threatened, or invited to partake in some activity or commodity, but he could hardly make out one word in ten, so he couldn't be sure. As daylight faded to twilight, a smoky haze thickened over the entire assemblage. A cacophony of reggae, rap and hip-hop blasted from numerous boom boxes that competed with each other and with the steel drums. From several directions at once Jim heard a droning, cadenced chant of the kind he had heard coming from N*AllaRasta's classroom.

Jim began to feel that he ought to return to his office, if not home. As he worked his way through a particularly tight knot of people he felt a tug at his elbow. He turned, and someone thrust toward his face a plump, lit, hand-rolled cigarette. "Herb, mon?" It was then that Jim realized what he had been seeing all along, that virtually everyone in the crowd, including the fundamentalists, was smoking marijuana.

Jim recoiled, and in doing so jostled someone behind him, there being little room for maneuver. He turned to apologize and faced a man in dreadlocks wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and tattered shorts. He was a fearsome-looking fellow of indeterminate age, sinewy and with leathery black skin, as if he might have spent his life at sea between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Fists clenched at his side, the man took a step toward Jim with murder in his eyes. Jim staggered back into two other men, who turned together to face him. He attempted to flee in another direction and stumbled into a female standing close by. Her man appeared at her side, his eyes flashing anger.

Jim was encircled. He forced a smile and feigned a matter-of-fact air, as if his predicament were merely the result of a misunderstanding between people of good will. "Excuse me, gentlemen," he said as he tried squeezing through to freedom. He was shoved back to the middle. The circle closed on him. He was pushed from one side to another, spun this way and that. His shirt tore. His glasses were knocked askew. His escape finally came when the pair who had squared off against him were bumped from behind, and, when they turned to settle accounts, Jim was able to dart around them and into the crowd. Having become disoriented, he determined to move in a straight line until he could break into the clear and work his way back to Whiteman Hall.

He hadn't gone far when he found himself face to face with N*AllaRasta, around whom an eerie calm prevailed. He stood near a fire on the ground that appeared to be fueled entirely by books; more books were heaped loosely at his feet. The blond stepped out from behind him. Her eyes locked tauntingly on Jim, she whispered something in N*AllaRasta's ear. "Judy, dis mi office mate, Jim," N*AllaRasta said. "Jim da Hemway mon."

Judy looked Jim up and down with the sneering contempt with which she had regarded him in his office. Jim managed a smile. "You're going to be chair," he said to N*AllaRasta, trying to keep incredulity out of his voice. "That's...real special."

N*AllaRasta ignored Jim's extended hand. He bent at the waist and brought up a fat paperback book from the pile. Jim's recognized it as his missing Portable Hemingway. "You been lookin' fa dis," N*AllaRasta said. It was not a question. Jim reached for it, but N*AllaRasta held it away, spine down. It flopped open. N*AllaRasta spit a thick wad between the pages and tossed it on the fire. He reared back his head and laughed maniacally into the evening sky as the flames rose higher. Shifting her weight from one leg to another with a swivel of her hips, Judy punched numbers on a cell phone and lifted it to her ear.

Jim felt a sudden fatigue that seemed to emanate from his center to every extremity. He worked his way through the crowd, refusing offers to smoke, feinting from grabs at his clothes. He finally broke into the clear. He saw Whiteman Hall and staggered toward it.

Jim went inside and to his office. The light on his answering machine flashed. He played the message. It was Ginger, wondering where he was and why he wasn't home for supper. Pot roast and potatoes were growing cold, the salad limp. He deleted the message and sat quietly in the dark of his office, looking out the window.

Jim checked his watch and realized that he had lost all track of time: it was almost eight-thirty. And he felt odd in some way he couldn't identify. His perceptions and senses were both skewed and heightened, and seemed to lift him above his fatigue. It was a feeling entirely new to him, and disorienting, although not entirely unpleasant. And then it occurred to him that he was high: the marijuana smoke had been so thick outside that he must have inhaled it passively. A wave of incipient panic came over him then subsided. Apart from home and Ginger, from which and from whom he felt estranged and indifferent, there was nowhere he had to be and no one to whom he needed to account for himself. Without quite deciding to, he went back outside and sat on the front steps. The festival went on unabated.

Jim heard the sirens before he saw the flashing lights of the police cars as they approached from the other side of Lincoln Avenue. The cars entered the drive in front of Whiteman Hall, between Jim and the revelers. It appeared that what had become a drug party was going to be busted, and Jim couldn't help but wonder how this turn of events would affect N*AllaRasta's prospects for becoming English Department chair.

The cops killed the sirens, left the lights on and got out. Jim watched as a handful of men emerged from the crowd, some with lit marijuana cigarettes between their fingers, and approached the cops. N*AllaRasta and Judy joined them. They spoke with the cops a moment, then, as one, all turned and looked toward Jim. The cops, N*AllaRasta and Judy started in Jim's direction.

They came up the walk. Jim stood. All but Judy came halfway up the steps and formed a loose circle in front of Jim. Judy raised her arm and pointed at him. "That's the pervert," she said.

Two cops came the rest of the way up the steps, flanked Jim, forced his hands behind his back and handcuffed him.

"You're under arrest for indecent exposure and sexual harassment," one cop said. He read Jim his rights then led him down the steps. Hardly able to walk on his own, Jim was virtually dragged off. Someone pressed his head down and pushed him into the back seat of a squad car. They sped off, sirens once again wailing.

At the police station, a cop spied a fat marijuana joint in Jim's partly torn shirt pocket and another, half smoked, in the cuff of his pants. When Jim was booked, drug possession was added to the charge of sexual harassment.

In part because the jail filled up with drunks and rowdies-some of them students and some of them alumni trying to relive their college years, all of them, it seemed, intent upon keeping the party alive-Jim spent a virtually sleepless night, the first of his life in a jail cell.

For reasons he felt more than he could articulate, he declined to be released on recognizance bail or to make a phone call, preferring to stay put; only blocks from campus in one direction and from his home in the other, he found that the strangeness of his circumstances provided a perspective from which to ponder the events that had led him there and what the future held.

Finally he managed sleep, only to awaken what seemed like mere minutes later. As Jim swung his feet over the side of the cot, the jailer was making his way down the row of cells, handing McDonald's bags and cups of coffee through the bars. He told Jim that his wife had called the station late the night before, worried and fretting over Jim's whereabouts; that when she was informed of his arrest and of the charges, she gasped, sobbed and apparently dropped the phone; that, concerned that she might have fainted, fallen and hurt herself, the cops had gone to the house to check on her condition and found that she was okay; that she had phoned again only minutes ago and was on her way to the station.

Jim had no sooner finished eating than the jailer came for him. He led him out to a small room, where Ginger sat at a table looking wan and worried and like she had spent a sleepless night. At sight of Jim-haggard, unkempt, his clothes soiled and torn-she stifled a gasp with the thin fingers of her right hand. She and Jim sat opposite each other. A uniformed officer stood near the door. Ginger furrowed her brow. On the table top, she knitted and worried her fingers. She seemed unwilling or unable to speak, so Jim gave his version of events, starting with that first memo informing him of the coming of N*AllaRasta and the new office arrangement, none of which, to protect her from worry, he had yet revealed to her. As Jim went on, she shook her head and frowned with two fingers in front of her mouth. When he finished it was some time before she spoke.

"What will people think?" she muttered as if to herself. "What are we going to do?"

Jim put his hands on hers on the table, "This is just a big mixup, Sweetie. It'll get straightened out and I'll be home soon. There's nothing to worry about," Jim said, although he wasn't convinced of that himself. Among the possibilities that had occurred to him during his night in jail was that he might be stripped of tenure and even fired.

Ginger pulled her hands out from under his. She looked at him but seemed to have turned in on herself and spoke in a barely audible whisper: "What will people think?"

She rose and left without saying goodbye.

Jim heard nothing more from or about Ginger the rest of that day or evening. Some of the rowdies brought in the night before had been released, and others had taken their place, but Jim that night slept well and awoke on Sunday morning feeling fresh and rested. The jailer brought him breakfast. As he ate, Jim checked his watch, and realized that under normal circumstances he would at that moment be helping to pass communion at the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Around noon, along with lunch, the jailer gave Jim an envelope. He opened it and took out a sheet of paper bearing a note in Ginger's cramped hand. He read as he ate:

Dear Jim:
I couldn't bring myself to attend church this morning. Knowing what people would be thinking when they looked at me. And wondering, as I can't help but wonder, ........How long?! I guess my father was right about you so many years ago. I can't stop you from coming home if you must and if the police see fit to release you on society, it is after all the home you have provided. But I won't be there. I'm leaving today for Centerville, where I'll stay with my sister for a while. Bill has said it's fine by him. He is such a good man, a Christian man. Like ours, their children's bedrooms are empty now. I will pray that you overcome your perversion and addiction to false drugs and that God forgive you and that I be able to too.

The letter was unsigned. Jim read it again. His only feeling was the impulse to mark it as he would a student paper, for the grammar and punctuation errors and rhetorical excesses. Later that day he played cards with his cellmates.

On late Sunday afternoon the jailer came, announced that the meals and the overtime were breaking the department's budget, and virtually expelled all those remaining who had been brought in on Homecoming-related charges.

Jim walked to his house and let himself in with his key. True to her word, Ginger was gone. She had left no further note. He showered, napped, made coffee and a sandwich, and watched a World Series game.

That night, the phone rang several times, but Jim didn't answer. He listened impassively as one then another member of his church left messages for Ginger expressing shock at Jim's conduct and promising to pray for her. The pastor called with the same message and, in case he were listening, urging Jim to repentance. Finally Ginger's sobbing voice came over the answering machine: Surely their marriage of more than thirty years was worth saving. She hoped Jim could find a way, with God's help, to change his life. If Jim called and expressed remorse she would return. Jim didn't lift the receiver or return the call.

The next morning, after breakfast, Jim put some clothes into a canvas duffel and some books into a briefcase. Those in hand, he walked to the bank on the square where for more than three decades he had kept not only his and Ginger's joint accounts but also a secret savings account to which he had added odd amounts over the years. At a teller window he closed that account, withdrawing a little over $3,500. He got it in cash in an envelope, which he sealed and stuffed into an inside pocket of his sport coat.

As he exited the bank he heard the Amtrak sound its horn on the outskirts of town. He walked the two blocks to the station, arriving just as the train to Chicago pulled in. As passengers detrained, Jim heard the Old Main bell tower on campus toll the hour. With solemn introspection, he pictured himself in his mind's eye standing alone on the horizon and said silently to himself, "The bell tolls for thee."

With no clear notion of where he might end up but knowing that from Chicago he could connect to anywhere in the world, Jim boarded. He regretted that, unlike in Huck Finn's day, there was no territory left to light out to, and resolved at least to go where no one knew him.

He sat by a window and looked out. He reflected that he had come to I___ State on his way to some undetermined elsewhere, to bigger and better things, but that he had grown comfortable as time and ambition had slipped away from him. Now, thirty-five years later, he was finally moving on, albeit under different circumstances than he had always imagined he would, and already those years began to fade like a dream upon the awakening of the dreamer.

A porter came by, and Jim paid his fare with cash. The train began to move. Jim looked out the window one last time-and there on the platform stood N*AllaRasta, as if having materialized by magic.

N*AllaRasta flashed a fierce smile at Jim. The sun glinted off his gold front tooth. He raised his right arm and rolled his fingers. Jim supposed he was waving, but wondered if he might be casting a spell.