Wake to the ping of an arriving email. It's the Monday of finals week. Three more days to complete this research paper from hell, the one for which I've had a terrific struggle nailing down the thesis to Dr. Miller's satisfaction, not to mention the constant battle to find sources. It's due at one o'clock on Thursday afternoon--the same time, by an odd coincidence, that I'm expected at the hospital in Bangor so that they can sedate me and stuff a camera down my neck. It's going to be a busy week.

Roll to the side, pick up the phone from the bedside stand. Squint at Gmail. The email's from Dr. Miller, but it's not about the research seminar. He's sent it to everyone in the history department--faculty, staff, grad students--in his capacity as department chair.

Roll onto back and consider the ceiling.

Howard's office. Ye gods, there are a lot of books in there. So many books, the Facilities Department declared it a fire hazard a couple of years ago, and turned Howard out into a disused classroom for a semester while someone filled the room with metal-scaffolding bookshelves. While he was undergoing cancer treatment and still trying to maintain a full teaching load. I mean, a fire hazard is a fire hazard, but there must have been a gentler way to do that. Anyway, it's a tiny room--all the faculty offices in Stevens Hall are tiny, except Dr. Miller's--and the last time I saw it, there was barely room in there for Howard's desk and chair, there were so many shelves full of books.

It appears the University gave his widow, Deborah Rogers (a full professor in her own right, but in the English department), six months before telling her she had to clear away his things. They've hired someone to replace Mazie Hough, who's retiring, and she needs an office. For the second time in two years, Howard's being thrown out of his office--posthumously, this time. Emeritus professors keep their offices until they decide they're finished with them. Deceased ones merit no such courtesy.

In turn, Dr. Rogers has apparently decided that the best way to simultaneously honor his memory and get rid of all that stuff she, being an English teacher, has no use for anyway is to open the place up to his colleagues, inviting us (weird as it feels to include myself in that list) to stop by and help ourselves to whatever takes our fancy. I wouldn't be surprised if he'd suggested that himself, if there came a point where he realized that he wasn't going to make it. He was like that. I can practically hear him saying, "Somebody might as well get some use out of that stuff."

On the one hand, I'd love to go--not because I feel a need to pillage his library, so much as because, not having been invited to his funeral (and rightly so--no other member of his family knows me from a hole in the wall), it's probably the closest I'll ever get to some sort of memorial observance. On the other, I've got this accursed paper to finish, and then a medical procedure that will involve general anesthesia, and then the week is over.

I put it out of my mind for the moment. Got to finish this damned paper. I failed to finish my master's in Howard's lifetime. I should at least try to finish it in mine.

Thursday, May 6
3:45 PM

The endoscopy is over, I've come out of the sedation, and apart from feeling slightly woozy and very tired, I feel OK. Not even that much of a sore throat, which is a big change from last time I had this procedure done. That time I came to feeling like they had done it with a fork rather than an endoscope.

The nurse has my mother sign the discharge form, all the same, because I am legally barred from making important decisions or entering into contracts for 24 hours past the point at which they hit me up with whatever they used. Versed and propofol, I think. No matter. I will not be able to respond to any marriage proposals or close a mortgage until roughly 3 PM on Friday. Fine.

I'm also not allowed to drive home, naturally, which is why my mother is there.

We're headed for Orono anyway, because there's a Dairy Queen there and I want some ice cream milk, when it occurs to me that it's only four o'clock, and Stevens Hall, if not necessarily Howard's office, will be open. We're right in the neighborhood, and I don't feel too bad. It's worth a shot.

Ding. The elevator arrives on the second floor of Stevens to find the place dark and deserted, all the doors shut. I'm standing by Howard's office door--they've already taken his name and the press clippings he had taped to the windows off it--but it's clearly locked. I've missed the window. The department office must close at four, not five. I thought things seemed awfully quiet down on the first floor.

I'm standing there with my hand on the doorknob when a masked figure comes out of a nearby classroom, a huge bundle of keys jingling at her belt. The custodian.

"Can I help you?" she asks.

"Hi, I'm Ben Hutchins," I reply, my voice slightly raspy from the oxygen and the scope and muffled by my own mask. "I was one of Howard's students. I was just on my way home from Bangor and thought I'd stop by, but it looks like I missed everyone."

She nods. "Wendy goes home at four," she says. (Wendy is the History Department secretary. Office assistant. I forget what they call them. She's the one who really runs the department, anyway.) "I'm the only one here now, I was just about to have my dinner."

"Shoot. Ah well. Maybe I'll get a chance to come back tomorrow."

"I can let you in now if you want," says the custodian, brandishing her keyring. "I think Wendy and Deb are going to start taking what's left to recycling tomorrow, so you ought to do it now if you're gonna."

I hear myself ask, "What about your dinner?"

She makes a dismissive gesture, unlocks the door, and reaches inside to turn on the lights. "Just shut off the lights and lock the door behind you when you leave, please," she says, and then leaves me alone in Howard's office.

When I pictured myself visiting, I had assumed there would be other people around--maybe Wendy, or Dr. Rogers, or Dr. Miller. Someone keeping an eye on the proceedings. But this is how I would have scripted it if I were writing the movie: just me, in a slightly down frame of mind, surfing the afterwave of sedation, alone in Howard's office, with his desk, his framed certificates, and his books.

What's left of them, anyway. The place has been pretty well picked over. Those that remain are not shelved neatly, many of them having fallen over into the spaces where their neighbors have already been removed. It occurs to the back of my mind that Howard probably wouldn't have approved of that, but on the other hand, it's not like the room has been ransacked. There aren't books on the floor or anything. The shelves are just... chaotic.

I wander around for a while, just touching the spines of remaining books. Next to his desk, I find a shelf that's full of spare copies of the books he taught in his graduate courses, all of which I have on my own shelf at home. Daniel J. Kevles's The Physicists. Black Apollo of Science, a biography of Ernest Everett Just by Kenneth R. Manning. Taking the Wheel, Virginia Scharff's study of women motorists in the early days of the automobile. John Ellis's A Social History of the Machine Gun, which I grumbled about in class thanks to the author's inexplicable misidentification of John Moses Browning. His own books, too. There's a copy of the new third edition of the textbook he cowrote with Alan I. Marcus, Technology in America: A Brief History, which he spent his last sabbatical revising. I don't think he ever had the chance to use it in a class.

Other shelves are a hodgepodge of all sorts of stuff. Biographies of scientists and inventors, of course. Books on social history and the American experiment. Civic philosophy. Shakespeare. (There was a copy of King Lear on the shelf nearest his desk, suggesting it may have been a favorite.) Decades' worth of a number of different journals--The Historian, Phi Alpha Theta's journal, prominent among them. Howard sponsored my election to Phi Alpha Theta, the international history honor society. I'm pretty sure he was behind my invitation to join Phi Beta Kappa, too, but he never admitted it.

Eventually, I make a few selections. A couple of books that just look interesting, one that I know from his teaching was a formative influence on his own graduate work, and one that I'm slightly surprised to discover is still there. I'm sure I'd be welcome to take more--there are some entire milk crates full of books in one corner that have been claimed by other faculty members but not taken to their offices yet--but it feels strange, somehow illicit, picking through a dead man's things, even with his widow's express permission. Besides, I'm walking with a cane today and my free hand is full. Anyway, I'm not looking to fill out an academic library so much as find a keepsake or two, and I've done that. It's enough.

I pause in the doorway and give the room one last look.

"Goodbye, Howard. And thanks."

I shut off the lights and lock the door behind me.

--

Postscript: The custodian heard me close the door and came out to see me off. She seemed genuinely delighted that I'd found some things to take away with me. It was in our brief conversation while I was waiting for the elevator to come up that I learned from her about the pressure from above to clear the office so that Dr. Hough's replacement can have it this fall.

I kept it together until I got to the ground floor, but once there, I had to sit down on the bench outside the Dean of Students' office and just... shiver for a while before I could pull myself together and leave the building.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The other two are a little more significant, and are pictured below.

On the right is a copy of the 1967 Harvard Library edition of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000–1887, which is one of the seminal works of American utopianism. As the numbers in the title suggests, it's a faux retrospective from the year 2000 back to 1887, the year in which it was written, describing how American society developed into Bellamy's vision of an ideal civilization. This was not just a work of speculative fiction; Bellamy and some adherents of his book's vision were sincerely committed to at least try to bring it about. (They failed, of course. Utopianists always do.) Howard's doctoral dissertation was on technological utopianism in America, and he often referred to Bellamy in the parts of his classes that were about utopian visions and what he viewed as the fallacy of the "techno-fix". I have to assume this book, and probably this particular edition of same, was one of his key references while developing his own identity as a historian.

On the left, and even more significant to my eye, is the 1989 first edition of Technology in America: A Brief History, the textbook he cowrote with a colleague from another university. I have the second and third editions (the second from when he used it in class, and the third just because), and I was surprised to find this left behind on one of the shelves in his office, because, well, see that label in the lower right corner? It's an author copy of the first edition. Those notes taped to the cover are about planned revisions to go into the second edition. The interior is full of penciled notes about paragraphs to keep, cut, or modify, and corrections that need making (such as the line where the typesetters erroneously cast Apollo 11 as "Apollo II").

I can only assume it was overlooked amid the jumble (which, to be fair, I'm not sure what led my eye to settle on it, nor what prompted me to pick it up and investigate closely enough to realize what I'd found), and/or just not relevant to the research interests of the others in the department who'd passed through the collection, but... wow, man. As a memento of the man, I'd rather have that than... pretty much anything else in there. I'm amazed it was still there for me to find, this late in the game.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.