“No, now.” He looks at me and sees I’m staying. His look is so frightened I’m about to change my mind, but then suddenly his expression breaks and he turns and runs down the stairs and out the door before I can follow him.
The big heavy door closes down below, and I’m all alone here now. I listen for some sound. Of whom? — Of him? — I listen for a long time.
The floorboards have an eerie creek as I move down the corridor and they are accompanied by an eerie thought that it is him. In this place he is the reality and I am the ghost. On one of the classroom doorknobs I see his hand rest for a moment, then slowly turn the knob, then push the door open.
The room inside is waiting, exactly as remembered, as if he were here now. He is here now. He’s aware of everything I see. Everything jumps forth and vibrates with recall.
The long dark-green chalkboards on either side are flaked and in need of repair, just as they were. The chalk, never any chalk except little stubs in the trough, is still here. Beyond the blackboard are the windows and through them are the mountains he watched, meditatively, on days when the students were writing. He would sit by the radiator with a stub of chalk in one hand and stare out the window at the mountains, interrupted, occasionally, by a student who asked, “Do we have to do — ?” And he would turn and answer whatever thing it was and there was a oneness he had never known before. This was a place where he was received… as himself. Not as what he could be or should be but as himself. A place all receptive… listening. He gave everything to it. This wasn’t one room, this was a thousand rooms, changing each day with the storms and snows and patterns of clouds on the mountains, with each class, and even with each student. No two hours were ever alike, and it was always a mystery to him what the next one would bring.
My sense of time has been lost when I hear a creaking of steps in the hall. It becomes louder, then stops at the entrance to this classroom. The knob turns. The door opens. A woman looks in.
She has an aggressive face, as if she intended to catch someone here. She appears to be in her late twenties, is not very pretty. “I thought I saw someone”, she says. “I thought — ” She looks puzzled.
She comes inside the room and walks toward me. She looks at me more closely. Now the aggressive look vanishes, slowly changing to wonder. She looks astonished.
“Oh, my God”, she says. “Is it you?”
I don’t recognize her at all. Nothing.
She calls my name and I nod, Yes, it’s me.
“You’ve come back.”
I shake my head. “Just for these few minutes.”
She continues to look until it becomes embarrassing. Now she becomes aware of this herself, and asks, “May I sit down for a moment?” The timid way she asks this indicates she may have been a student of his.
She sits down on one of the front-row chairs. Her hand, which bears no wedding ring, is trembling. I really am a ghost.
Now she becomes embarrassed herself. “How long are you staying? — No, I asked you that — ”
I fill in, “I’m staying with Bob DeWeese for a few days and then heading West. I had some time to spend in town and thought I’d see how the college looked.”
“Oh”, she says, “I’m glad you did. It’s changed — we’ve all changed — so much since you left.”
There’s another embarrassing pause.
“We heard you were in the hospital.”
“Yes”, I say.
There is more embarrassed silence. That she doesn’t pursue it means she probably knows why. She hesitates some more, searches for something to say. This is getting hard to bear.
“Where are you teaching?” she finally asks.
“I’m not teaching anymore”, I say. “I’ve stopped.”
She looks incredulous. “You’ve stopped?” She frowns and looks at me again, as if to verify that she is really talking to the right person. “You can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can.”
She shakes her head in disbelief. “Not you!”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“That’s all over for me now. I’m doing other things.”
I keep wondering who she is, and her expression looks equally baffled. “But that’s just — ” The sentence drops off. She tries again. “You’re just being completely — ” but this sentence fails too.
The next word is “crazy.” But she has caught herself both times. She realizes something, bites her lip and looks mortified I’d say something if I could, but there’s no place to start. I’m about to tell her I don’t know her but she stands up and says, “I must go now.” I think she sees I don’t know her. She goes to the door, says good-bye quickly and perfunctorily, and as it closes her footsteps go quickly, almost at a run, down the hall.
The outer door of the building closes and the classroom is as silent as before, except for a kind of psychic eddy current she has left behind. The room is completely modified by it. Now it contains only the backwash of her presence, and what it was I came here to see has vanished.
Good, I think, standing up again, I’m glad to have visited this room but I don’t think I’ll ever want to see it again. I’d rather fix motorcycles, and one’s waiting.
On the way out I open one more door, compulsively. There on the wall I see something which sends a spine-tingling feeling along my neck.
It’s a painting. I’ve had no recollection of it but now I know he bought it and put it there. And suddenly I know it’s not a painting, it’s a print of a painting he ordered from New York and which DeWeese had frowned at because it was a print and prints are of art and not art themselves, a distinction he didn’t recognize at the time. But the print, Feininger’s “Church of the Minorites”, had an appeal to him that was irrelevant to the art in that its subject, a kind of Gothic cathedral, created from semiabstract lines and planes and colors and shades, seemed to reflect his mind’s vision of the Church of Reason and that was why he’d put it here. All this comes back now. This was his office. A find. This is the room I am looking for!
I step inside and an avalanche of memory, loosened by the jolt of the print, begins to come down. The light on the print comes from a miserable cramped window in the adjacent wall through which he looked out onto and across the valley onto the Madison Range and watched the storms come in and while watching this valley before me now through this window here, now — started the whole thing, the whole madness, right here! This is the exact spot!
And that door leads to Sarah’s office. Sarah! Now it comes down! She came trotting by with her watering pot between those two doors, going from the corridor to her office, and she said, “I hope you are teaching Quality to your students.” This in a la-de-da, singsong voice of a lady in her final year before retirement about to water her plants. That was the moment it all started. That was the seed crystal.
Seed crystal. A powerful fragment of memory comes back now. The laboratory. Organic chemistry. He was working with an extremely supersaturated solution when something similar had happened.
A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no more material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased. When you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cool the solution, the material sometimes doesn’t crystallize out because the molecules don’t know how. They require something to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass.
He walked to the water tap to cool the solution but never got there. Before his eyes, as he walked, he saw a star of crystalline material in the solution appear and then grow suddenly and radiantly until it filled the entire vessel. He saw it grow. Where before was only clear liquid there was now a mass so solid he could turn the vessel upside down and nothing would come out.
The one sentence “I hope you are teaching Quality to your students” was said to him, and within a matter of a few months, growing so fast you could almost see it grow, came an enormous, intricate, highly structured mass of thought, formed as if by magic.
I don’t know what he replied to her when she said this. Probably nothing. She would be back and forth behind his chair many times each day to get to and from her office. Sometimes she stopped with a word or two of apology about the interruption, sometimes with a fragment of news, and he was accustomed to this as a part of
