Through the Blizzard by Stephen Haines

This was the difference between being the graduate student with a piece of shit car and being the professor with the keys to an office—well, one of them anyway. You never needed to utter I feel or In my opinion or If it were me in the classroom ever again. Qualifying criticism was no longer  necessary. This isn’t working right now in my opinion finally became This isn’t working and that almost, in and of itself, made everything else worth it. You were finally able to unapologetically be that pompous, self-important asshole that you had always secretly, emphatically believed that you were, and, of course, that corner room on the third floor of the Humanities building was also a satisfying space to Tetris your titanic desk.

You didn’t belong here. Perversely, you’d be the first person to admit that, although not aloud, of course. You knew as well as the rest of the faculty knew that the only reason you had been selected for a tenure-track position or for a professorship at all was because you were the only candidate whose novel had ever been turned into a movie. Notice that word choice again: Movie. As opposed to Film. A crucial distinction, it seemed, whenever the subject was raised among your colleagues. Books about wights and robots and superheroes seldom translated to adaptations worthy of the Palme d’Or. Your book, as it happened, took wights and robots and superheroes and put them all under the same roof. Naturally, Cannes never rang. Nor had The New York Times Book Review.

And so, when the smug, snarky comments inevitably struck in casual conversations, usually during departmental cocktail hours over quarterly breaks, you were ready with that inevitable reference to your royalties like a poker shark waiting for a particular sort of tell.

My sixth-grade son just loves the robot zombie superhero craze! they might wager.

Luckily, you can buy a Corvette with royalties from any audience you would raise.

The awkward laughter and pained smiles while you, again, collected your winnings.

Fuck ‘em anyway your lone friend in the department usually drifted in, about then, to say. Here were the two young stars of the show—the English department, the cast in this production—you an utterly undeserving torchbearer for that old guard of overpaid professors of some arduous and undeserved epoch; Audre the one that everybody really wanted to fire but could never quite find adequate cause to fire despite her somewhat ludicrous antics and traditionally odd teaching practices. But you both knew that the reason admissions were soaring in the last two academic years had at least something to do with both of you—your trendy, if not, altogether, technically warranted expertise.

Everybody and their pale stepmother saw Android’s Second-Death Spell Academy okay? That woman probably loved it, too. And I bet she wishes she were penning that sequel right now, just like you are. Audre slurped her spiked kombucha, paused and then grimaced as her stomach grumbled. She let out a gentle, polite belch. So, fuck ‘em. Capital F, Zack. Capital E. Fuck. ‘Em.

Audre had long carried this sort of attitude about academia and the people jostling around in its pretentious bowels. Even more so than you, she’d never been meant to reach this position in the university’s exclusive apparatus. But here you both were, wading atop the murky, acidic bog, and everyone else the system naturally expected to survive that laborious, digestive churn kept getting passed, instead, out the back. 

Somehow the two of you had survived. 

Somehow, you’d both become semi-permanent fixtures in the bureaucratic plumbing.

Audre taught classes on the intersections of early-nineties Norwegian black metal music, early-nineteenth century English gothic literature, and early-Sunday-morning American cartoons. She once gave a “lecture” in which she devoted an entire ninety-minute class period to reading aloud, backward and skipping every third page, from an assigned text. The lesson made only a marginal degree of sense. Though when she was inevitably criticized by the Department Chair, Mel Lehane, for being “too experimental and obtuse,” Audre argued that this was intentional: experimental was precisely the point—“in the tradition of the French Oulipians”—and if Mel Lehane failed to comprehend the value in that, well, perhaps he was the one who was, in fact, being “obtuse.”

This was, at heart, the danger that you both posed to the establishment: you were under the age of forty, and still wore jeans; you were an eye-squinting, hard-to-pinpoint olive/brown skin tone; you were unmarried and ambiguously asexual; you were the sun setting over a dark horizon, a foreboding gloaming for a faculty composed of old, bleached academics of yester-decade, near-militant in a collective intent to teach Steinbeck and Hemingway no matter the century nor development in modern literature nor popular culture nor current events nor…

You were the new, new wave.

The reckoning. The “roost”—whatever.

If you didn’t get fired first. There were always attempts being made to get you both fired.

Those directed at you had begun almost immediately, and you had kept a tally in a hand-sized leatherbound notebook, complete with the names of all the conspiring colleagues involved. These people, you promised, would get what was coming to them, although you weren’t always entirely sure what that “what” should be. You were thorough about these imagined misfortunes that you prayed would befall your cowardly conspirators, and numerous others who invariably stood in your way, just in case, someday, the vast cornucopia of anathemas actually came true. Writing it all down was no doubt therapeutic, regardless.

Move-in day. I heard Brett Jacobson, the resident Shakespeare dinosaur—whose office is around the corner from mine (and much, much smaller than mine, I’d like to add)—speaking on the phone with campus security about having me fined and escorted out for all the noise. It was not my intention for there to be so much noise, but the movers told me there was no other way. The dimensions of my desk didn’t jive with the narrow hallways and low-ceilinged stairwells. They had to remove all the bay windows and hoist the desk with a crane and pass it into the room, sideways, and being ever so careful. I suppose the crane may have been loud for an afternoon. Really, what’s the big bother? Jacobson is already looking for any excuse. He deserves something professionally humiliating. 

Spell: Shakespeare, turns out, is a fraud. Jacobson’s entire career is a lie.

And there were many others of varying severity and malintent.

Spell: Staff lounge coffee maker always, always, always empty for Dr. Hendrickson.

Spell: English Dept. secretary loses her hearing thus loses enthusiasm for whistling.

Spell: Assistant Dean Monica Hewitt-Packard punctures a lung whilst scuba diving.

Spell: Old Glory goes up in flames and every officious little bureaucrat flames with it.

That last one you had been forced to hurriedly cross out one morning when you noticed Audre swaying on the roof of Old Glory, clad in pinstriped pajamas, arms spread in either Christ or Eagle pose, depending on one’s initial, symbolic interpretation. With any luck, no horned god in the spirit world had yet noticed your chicken scratch incantation.

What the hell, Audre?! you shouted up into mild wind and bright sunshine.

Old Glory had at one time been the largest building on campus though it was now merely the oldest and most composed of faded red bricks and single-pane windows. Now there was New Glory, and Glory Hall, although New Glory was, itself, a lecture hall more than five decades old, and Glory Hall had the unfortunate luck of sitting at the bottom of a rather steep and eroded hill, all but gift-wrapping its freshmen-enchanting, meme-inspiring nickname, Glory Hole. 

The campus had at one time been only Old Glory and the adjacent Student Services building and a single row of dorms overlooking a dusty precipice above an overgrown field. Now it sprawled to North and South and East and West Campus. It had an arboretum, sort of—an infant’s arboretum. It all still needed to grow. Some old, stubborn weeds still needed to be removed. It had been planted by those who would likely never see how amazing it would one day become, how diverse and interesting and unbound. Like that Greek proverb about older generations never sitting in the shade of…

Audre! Are you covered in paint?!

Audre was, indeed, covered in paint. The glare of the sun had kept you from noticing it straight away, but Audre had painted her face, her hands, her bare feet (probably—you couldn’t actually see her feet from your vantage point) with white paint; another odd, elaborate spectacle. Perhaps this stunt would finally be the one to get her fired—or, at least, put on academic leave. Even the laziest and the sloppiest of the old guard academics who wanted you and Audre both gone would almost certainly deduce that Audre was suicidal, and a danger to herself, if not to others.

Audre seemed to nod and then give you a quick thumbs up—but it was, again, hard to tell from where you were standing. She began to shout something. Poetry? You caught only some of the lines. Your hearing was unreliable as of late, due in no small part to the banshee like screech-whistling that emanated every day from the secretary’s office right next door to your office, most of it mangled renditions of what you vaguely registered as old show tunes. You were convinced that each shriek was puncturing your eardrum, every harsh decibel a pin prick, pin prick, drawing blood. Maybe the blood would at least help with your infernal incantations.

On fluttered folk and wild…

Half devil and half child…

Take up the white man’s burden!

By the time that Audre was through with her reading, a crowd composed of faculty and students had gathered on the trimmed lawn beneath Old Glory along with a few firemen who’d kept pointing to different places that seemed best to place a ladder, although always falling just short of committing. To the dismay of the faculty who had, no doubt, believed they had finally found the ammunition necessary to exterminate dear Audre, the crowd surrounding them burst suddenly into raucous applause—firemen included—as Audre took a bow and lit a cigarette. A student threw her a frisbee. Audre caught it. More applause. More anger from the disappointed faculty detractors, some of them still waiting on hold with police dispatchers who were, at that same moment, already dealing with a downtown robbery, a homeless camp “resettlement,” and the third and fourth shooting in the state that month—one at a private Jewish secondary school, and the other at a Black-owned detail shop on the south side of town.

The (probably) stoned lady sermonizing on a roof was low on the response priority list. The firemen had been quick on the scene at least. Lot of good they did.

Do you need help down? one of the firemen pointed at the ladder he was still gripping.

What?! Audre leaned toward the edge.

I said, do you need help d…

Audre, noticing for the first time that gut-churning drop over the side, seemed to become woozy, stumbled suddenly backward, and disappeared over the opposite, sloped side of the roof. The crowd immediately dispersed to her aid, save the faculty still waiting on the line with police department operators.

The idiot just fell off the roof. You can cancel the dispatch.

You visited Audre in the hospital. By then, her room had bulged into a slightly smaller, sterilized, sequestered arboretum, with potted plants and bright wildflowers and balloons and greeting cards overgrowing most of the available counterspace. She had a neck brace, and her arms and legs were in casts. She was sucking a smoothie out of a long straw that was wedged snug and sweating in the narrow cavity of her armpit.

Maybe things have gotten a little out of hand, you thought as you eased a few layers of fan mail from the chair next to her bed and sat down. You read some of what you could see as you placed it on the ground. Crucify the Patriarchy! and My roommates and I are baking you Apple Pie! and Rise again soon!

Jesus, you remarked after looking her over one more time.

Right? How perfect ish thish?! Audre slurred and grimaced in quick succession, and then admired her pure white casts and general dishevelment. She clicked a button, presumably for the morphine or whatever pain medication they were giving her to prevent perpetual agony.

Audre, how the hell is this perfect? What was that stunt all about, anyway? I’m all for a, you know, rebellion against the powers that be. I like stirring the pot, okay? But you’ve gone off the rails. We’re professors now. We need to act like it, don’t we? We need to fit in, too. I mean, what is it you’re trying to point out with all this, you gestured all around her, plaster of Paris?

Audre flicked, with great effort, her straw to the side of her mouth. You leaned forward, but you still had some trouble hearing her clearly. The drugs were kicking in now, and her jaw seemed also, oddly, painfully ajar. Perhaps another injury sustained in the fall. This seemed to disrupt her ability to speak clearly.

Fight… Hegemony. Bite… Celebrities.

You shook your head. What?!

Audre drew a slurping breath.

WIGHT MALE SUPREMACY!

It was hard to keep your classes focused after that. Audre was the talk of the university, her epic stunt now immortalized in the student-body consciousness in little stickers that everyone had by then taken to plastering on their water bottles. The stickers were of a glowing Audre posted atop Old Glory with a bald eagle flying majestically overhead. A graphic design major had designed and printed the stickers by the hundreds in partial fulfillment of her capstone project and handed them out for free outside of Old Glory, each one paper-clipped with a student editorial about the monochromatic racial composition of the university’s faculty, administration, admissions board, and statistical demographics in its matriculation rates. The student described both as being “like staring into a fucking blizzard.”

They really got it, Audre had assured you, before, as she drifted off into a drugged nap.

They really got what? you had wondered aloud in the hospital—were still wondering.

Let’s try to remain on task, alright? you told your writing workshop. 

You were in the midst of discussing an undergraduate named Draemon’s poem, which was entitled, you can’t spell degree without white supremacy. Setting aside for a moment that obvious criticism that you could, in fact, spell “degree” without the words “white supremacy,” there were other problematic elements that you were having a harder time articulating. Poems had a great deal more agency to be whatever they wanted to be, and you were feeling put off, generally, by the fact that this particular student only submitted poetry in a workshop focused primarily on sci-fi and horror fiction. You didn’t know enough about poetry to be able to lead discussions about it. Werewolves with a conscience. Aliens that lived at the bottom of ancient lakes. Precocious children that jostled their morning cereal with their minds. These were your areas of scholarship and, even then, only in the more traditional, recognizable short story and novel form.

Aside from that, the poem was one stanza, repeating for ten consecutive pages, that read jesus was not a white guy but professors and deans and presidents prefer the pale-skinned rise-again vampire to reality because their deification is the same. 

Spell: Jesus, turns out, is a fraud. And now every white person’s life is a lie.

It wasn’t Shakespeare. But spells could be this way at times. Alchemic. Messy.

But where would that leave you and that pompous, irritating bastard, Jacobson?

Look, you said, and the class stopped chatting and turned to you. This isn’t working. You have something compelling in this line. But why repeat it over and over and do nothing else? Is something being missed out on here by making that rhetorical move? Think about it…

I thought the repetition was sort of the point, one student chimed in, and several nodded.

Also, you pressed on, I appreciate you tying this to vampirism. That’s clever. But why a vampire? What else is there to be mined in that comparison?

It’s all… implied.

Blood into wine?

Immortal?

Undead?

The class rushed to Draemon’s defense, and you heard Audre’s voice in your head again.

They really got it.

Still, you shook your head, this isn’t working. We’re out of time now. Develop it more.

You could’ve let everyone go then, but you felt the need to add, If I were an editor, I wouldn’t publish this. Perhaps you should consider using proper punctuation, spelling also.

Draemon, who had said little during the workshop on their poem, quietly collected their belongings, shuffled out of the room with the others, and you were left immediately wondering whether, maybe, you were too harsh about it. 

No, you mumbled. Needed to be said. Needed to—

Someone had left one of those majestic Audre/Bald Eagle/Christ Pose stickers on a desk, and it made you pause and shake your head. Draemon’s poems—and Audre’s escapades also—would never be optioned as Movies or Films. Their antics would never pay for a Corvette. Or a desk the size of a ship, or an office to awkwardly try to place it. Marching through “the blizzard” meant coming out an undead, frozen-white robot on the other side. It meant survival. It was not magic but it was. Black magic. The kind where you kill and die twice or more. The kind where you give up a lot and then wonder what it was for.

You tore open your notebook and nervously scrawled some just-in-case incantations. A few “better-you-than-me” apogees. Fighting through ice winds. Yielding human-flesh cravings. Desires for oil changes. Glimpsing sunlight.

Wights. Robots. How different were they, really?

Spell: Draemon writes a short story about literal vampires, and I don’t look idiotic.

Spell: The Dean never chants “This isn’t working” to me and my Titanic new desk.

Spell: Please accept Audre as a sacrifice for my continued tenure-track witchcraft.

Stephen Haines is an MFA graduate of Western Washington University and the former managing editor of Bellingham Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming at Epoch Press, Hypertext, Rathalla Review, Sidereal, Olit, Thin Air, Adelaide, Creative Colloquy, Bright Flash, and Bellingham Review.

29 April 2022