determination; or the ceaseless wind; or the ocean’s roar outside my cottage, which kept grating upon my ears like an amputating saw cutting through bone. Adding to it all, a report that braved the static of my radio: an atomic submarine that had released radioactive waste onto the beaches of Guam, fifty times the supposedly safe dosage, which spoke to me of a despaired world where we human beings were doomed to destroy ourselves, and everything else along with us.
Whatever the cause, single or joint, I suddenly looked around my cottage and was startled by the condition in which I found it. All about: the litter of tasks started and abandoned. Ironing board open, iron radiating heat, forgotten. Water boiled away on the stove for tea that had not gotten made. Hangers and shirts, obviously waiting to be joined and hung, lay strewn across the bed. A sandwich prepared—how long ago?—tomato leaking through the bread, its red stain spreading outward from the center. A scissors lying on the kitchen table, legs open, blades ashine: to cut what? And a slow fear grew in me. Was I regressing? If so, how far would I fall? For I had not engaged in such behavior since Dr. Schussler’s “lesson” on how to release obsessive thoughts.
In this state, I heard the mail fall through the door slot. The usual junk lay scattered upon the floor. Then came an odd sound—a scrape, another scrape, then another—and I saw, coming through the slot, section by section, a thick manila envelope. The postman continued to stuff it through, a few inches at a time, until the whole legal-sized mass of it fell to the floor with a thud.
I walked over to it; did not touch it; only looked down. And once more I was forced to consider the existence of Providence, some unknown intervening force come to distract me from one trail of obsession and set me upon another. For I saw the return address: the university’s Office of the Provost.
I had been expecting something, some action, some decision, since receiving the letter telling me that my “case,” as it had been put, was to come up before the committee in October. And it was only because of the patient, and my engagement in her mother’s story—how much I owed them!—that I had not spent the time worrying over the proceedings; had not perseverated (as I was so wont to do), playing scenes over and over in my mind, refining the torture, each scenario darker and more damning than the last, until I imposed upon myself a judgment impossibly more harsh than any verdict to come. Death. I should die.
So this, finally, was the end, I thought, taking the heavy envelope into my hands. Surely it was filled with legal papers I had to sign, where, in dense language, I offered up my resignation; wherein I attested to the fact that I was voluntarily unbinding the university from the contract of my tenure. They would crush me otherwise. My quiet going-away might at least secure for me the possibility of teaching somewhere, at a junior college, some night courses; might at least save me from destitution (or worse, I tried not to think: from jail).
I spent several minutes simply holding the envelope, as if procrastination could fool fate.
The very weight of it seemed damning.
Over my shoulder waited the abandoned tasks.
There was no recourse, nowhere else to go.
On the kitchen table: the ready, spread-legged scissors.
115.
Atop a deep stack of paper was a cover letter typed on university stationery. It contained a single paragraph:
Enclosed please find copies of transcripts of conversations conducted with the complainants and others who voluntarily provided information pertinent to the matter.
I noticed that the typewriter’s letter P was missing its descender. Otherwise there was nothing else to see on the page but the stamped signature of the university provost.
The heft of the transcripts loomed behind it, a stack thick enough to strain my hands, which began to shake. So much? I thought. Had they done all this because of me?
I flipped through and saw that within the stack were groups of pages stapled together, each stapled group comprising one transcript. In the top left-hand corner, in bold, handwritten letters, was the name of the “conversant.” So it was that I could flip through the stack and, like one of those children’s cartoon books that create a little movie if one flips through quickly, I could see a sort of documentary of my life. Everyone I