Coda

Lu

Hello. I’ve been here all along. Surprise?

When I came out from inside the walls, I had to decide whether I wanted to finish my Ph.D. I was surprised to find that I did. My dissertation was supposed to take only one more year to complete; suffice it to say, it took a lot longer.

The is largely because I did not only write my dissertation. I wrote a novel. I wrote this novel.

I could have written a memoir instead. Perhaps I should have. After all, what you have just read is a largely accurate account of real events (though I did change everyone’s names). The problem with offering a first-person account of my experiences, I quickly found, was simple: I wasn’t there. When all this happened, I was hiding in a dusty series of corridors and closets, drinking from a mug purloined from the English graduate students’ lounge and eating granola bars and dry cereal. I thought I could expose the truth by myself then; I was wrong. I don’t think I would have been much more successful telling the truth now if the only voice you heard was mine.

It’s been a tricky thing, writing from Piper’s perspective, ethically speaking if nothing else: I know their story isn’t mine to tell. I’d like to say they’re the one who came to me with the idea to put all this together into a book, but that was me, after too many sleepless nights and blank dissertation pages and dead-end therapy sessions, too much anger spilling out from the seams of me and too much guilt piled deep in my gut and too many times asking why. Once I’d given up the idea of a memoir, I thought maybe I could structure the book like The Woman in White, like Dracula or The Beetle—collect everybody’s firsthand accounts, in addition to my own, and cobble them all together. But Piper didn’t want to write about what had happened. Piper was moving through their dissertation in big improbable swoops, thousands of words a day and then revisions that cut cleanly and deftly to drive everything home. They were busy with things that mattered more to them. They said that since I wanted to write about what happened, needed to write about what happened, I should do it. And if it meant telling their story, too, if it meant trying to imagine what they’d gone through in my absence—if it meant presenting my best guess about their thoughts and feelings as if it was the indisputable truth—well. They told me that they trusted me.

I didn’t trust myself, but that mattered less in the end. Getting into Piper’s head was equal parts exhilaration and terror, and I found a lot there that stung, sharp and startling like a wasp surprised in the grass. I tried to do it right. I tried to look the hard things in the face. I don’t know if I succeeded.

But I can’t be there anymore—now that I’m back in the story, not some vanished woman to spur on the narrative but here in the flesh, smaller than I seemed to be when I was gone, I can’t speak in Piper’s voice anymore. My version of Piper’s story ends here.

Charles is different. Charles wants, in the most simple and uncomplicated way, to be a character in somebody’s story. He wants to be made into something imagined, something fictional—something not-real. I owe him a lot, so if I can give that to him I will. Charles was the one I knew the least about when it was all happening. He was the shadowy Watson to Julian Ellsworth’s Sherlock Holmes. And Julian Ellsworth, the former child detective, the TV star I’d watched from time to time in my own preteen years, was the one I was more drawn to at first; but Charles was the one who stuck around, the one who told me everything that had happened when Piper wasn’t around, the one who’d read my fic and worn Piper’s clothes, the one who was there for Piper when I wasn’t. 

Charles thinks what he wants is some impossible shining thing, an unknown magical world that gains its luster from its unreachability, something so complex and nebulous he can’t even articulate it; but he has his detective now and he has his mystery and I can enshrine those both in these pages, and somewhere between the reality of what happened and my writing it down, I think he’ll find that he has, in his hand, that glistening pearl he believed he’d never grasp. Or at the very least, he has it just barely at his fingertips.

When I left Piper and Tyler at the apartment that day, I walked to campus. After those dusty tunnels the air was almost too fresh, too clean and bright from last night’s rain. I hadn’t been gone for very long, but—surprise, surprise—everything felt different. Even my hands, tucked into my jacket pockets, felt peculiarly light, like I’d been holding something tight without realizing and had just let go.

There was dread, though, as I walked through the door of the humanities building and up the stairs to the second floor, dread swirling in the air, though whether it came from me or somewhere else I couldn’t tell. My footsteps echoed in the empty hallway—classes had been cancelled that day, and the four new admits had gone home, never to return—and muffled sounds came from behind the occasional closed office door. I reached Isabel’s, which was cracked just open.

I knocked.

“Yes?”

Pushing the door wide, I found her elbow-deep in a cardboard box full of books. Her shelves were half empty, their contents distributed between more boxes stacked on the floor and on her desk.

“Going somewhere?” I asked. I felt, mostly, numb. “A sabbatical? Leave for the rest of the year, till the dust has settled?”

Isabel shook her head. “I’m leaving Schenley,” she said. A pause. “I’m leaving academia.”

I blinked at her, standing wordless in the doorway.

“Will you sit?” She gestured to the chair facing her desk, the one I’d sat in countless times as we’d talked about my work, and hers, and the department. I sat.

“I know there isn’t really anything I can say.” The bags under her eyes were pronounced, the crow’s feet I’d always found lovely blurred and sagging. Her wild mass of hair was loose around her face, her dress a dark brown one she usually wore with a wide belt and dangling earrings. “I could tell you I’m sorry, and it would be true, but…”

“An apology doesn’t really cut it.”

“I know.” She pushed a tendril of curly hair out of her face, but because she didn’t tuck it behind her ear—she never tucks it behind her ear—it fell right back in place. “I failed you. I failed Rachel. The moment came when I needed to put my politics in action, and I chose gaining power in the department over what every feminist bone in my body was telling me to do. I betrayed my philosophy, my politics, my ethics of care, and that’s the worst thing I could have done.”

I looked at her. In my veins, just under my skin, something fierce and fast had started to move. “No,” I said. I could hear the disbelief in my own voice. “No, that’s not the worst thing you did. This isn’t about ideological consistency, Isabel. Your student needed you, and you didn’t help. That’s what this is about.”

She bit her lip, that quick habitual tic she made whenever she was confronted with an argument she hadn’t been prepared to encounter. “Surely they amount to the same thing.”

I shook my head. “No. They don’t.”

She was struggling, somehow, because she should have answered faster; even when she was changing her mind she usually answered fast, a quick eager actually you have a point there just as quick and confident as yes I’m right or no you’re wrong. She didn’t waver like this, quietly, in her own head. She spilled her doubts and questions along with her certainties and made them seem alive with need and possibility, made you believe the answer was out there somewhere. She sparred and she ranted and she gave speeches glittering with life; she didn’t sit there, trying to work out what words to say.

“Listen,” I said, unable to take her hesitation anymore, “I’ve been thinking a lot in the last few weeks about what exactly we got so wrong. All of us, our side, Pace’s. Why, when a crisis happened, everything we’d fought for didn’t save us. And I think…” I took a breath. It was hard to admit it: I’d spent years in this battle, first on Pace’s side and then on Isabel’s, and I’d been as sure as anybody that it was a critical fight. “I think the thing is that—the ideas we argue for, and the issues, how to think about queerness, or gender, or race, or how to prevent harm or dismantle oppressive systems, those things—those are life and death. Truly, literally life and death. But none of our individual arguments, none of our papers or articles or books or lectures, not even our entire department’s output, is anywhere near life or death. And we confuse the two—the issues themselves and what we say about them—so, so easily. Enough that it might make sense to think that waiting a month or so to address one person getting hurt is worthwhile, if it meant that we’d get more people on our side for the future.”

“Ideas matter.” Isabel looked drawn, and older. “The things we think and say matter. Their effects might not be tangible or measurable, but the way we talk and write about things does matter, Lu.”

“Yeah, no shit.” That movement under my skin was faster now, speeding my pulse, running through me. “I’m not saying they don’t matter at all. I’m saying that we’re willing to hurt other people, to fuck up their work and careers and lives, because we think we’re literally saving someone else’s life by prioritizing an idea. And we aren’t. Maybe collectively, sure, all the things people say and write and think, yes, yes, those do change the world, in huge ways. But not whether we get one new graduate student on our side, or two, or none.”

Isabel bit her lip again. “I know you’re right, Lu. Somewhere in me, I know that. Not deep down, not in my heart of hearts—but somewhere, some part of me knows. That’s why I’m leaving academia. Because I can’t convince myself fully that you’re right, and I don’t know how to change that.”

That hurt, more than it should have. I had believed Isabel was worth following, as I had followed her, with a kind of devotion I should have been wary of. She was telling me, now, that she wasn’t.

A knock sounded on the open door. I turned around to look. Francis Pace stood there, a tentative expression on his round freckled face.

“Oh, Lu,” he said, seeing me. “I—hello. I’m so glad you’re okay.”

I’d followed Francis, too, my first years here. He’d laughed with me about gaffes I made when I was first teaching, scribbled all over my seminar papers with his bright purple pen, shaped what I understood the university to be. “I’m sorry about Jack,” I said quietly.

Francis blinked rapidly, darting a glance at his green high-top sneakers. “Me too,” he said. “He was a very good person. You both are.”

He didn’t blame, me, then; I could see it on his face. A breath a hadn’t known I was holding came out of me in a great whoosh.

“Isabel,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know. I talked to Bianca about that paperwork and she’s sorted it all out. You should have it in your email. I sent it to the others, too.”

“Oh, thank you,” Isabel said. “I appreciate that.”

After an awkward moment, he ducked his head in goodbye and left. I turned back to Isabel. “What paperwork?” I asked.

She hesitated. “I’m not the only one who’s leaving,” she said finally. “Pace is going too. And—and Sarah, and Jordan. Marco Spina as well.”

Nearly the whole department, especially when you added Maynard to the list. “Did Dean Hanley—”

“No,” she said quickly. “This wasn’t his decision. We—we all talked. We decided…” She sighed. “We decided there was no way the department could get back on its feet, could heal, with us still here.”

I hadn’t seen this coming. I had known things would have to change, but I hadn’t seen this coming.

“We did consider staying one more year, to try and clean up some of the mess we made. Get things on the right track. But then it would be all about us, our reconciliation, or détente, or whatever, and we just…people need to be able to do what needs to be done, to determine the department’s future, without taking us into consideration at all.”

In some ways, I knew, she was right. It still felt like a cold slamming front of wind, the kind that knocks small children off their feet and blows so hard against doors you can’t pull them open to get inside. She might have been right, but it felt like abandonment anyway.

“Are you all leaving academia?”

She hesitated. “We’re all taking at least a year off. Some of the others might go back. Not me. Not Francis. He’s thinking of teaching high school, eventually.”

“That’s ironic,” I said, with a bitterness I couldn’t control.

“What do you mean?”

“Teaching high school. No research, no conferences, no publishing. Just teaching. The one thing none of us ever prioritized.”

Isabel frowned. “Well, that’s not quite true,” she began.

“I don’t mean grad students. I mean undergrads. The hundreds of undergrads we had or could have had in our classes every year. Most of whom won’t ever go into academia, especially in those survey classes no one wanted to teach. If we really cared, really and truly, about the impact of how we think and what we say on—on the world at large, surely there’s nothing more significant than teaching.” I was up on a soapbox now, but I didn’t want to get off until I’d gotten it all off my chest. “Teaching students who will go on to be librarians, and doctors, and scientists, and preschool teachers and filmmakers and bankers and businesspeople—getting them to think about how they see the world, and how they might see it differently. Actually talking to them, and hearing what they have to say. We thought that wasn’t important. When it was the most important thing we could have been doing.”

Isabel was silent for awhile. I looked at the holes in her emptied-out bookshelves, the spaces where Audre Lorde had been, bell hooks, Eve Sedgwick—teachers, all of them, as much as anything else. I wasn’t only a graduate student, but I should have known better, too. I’d gotten here through teachers: high school, college, pulling me through. Isabel herself. I knew what it meant to have a mentor, someone who really cared. Or at least I thought I had.

“Wait,” I said, realizing belatedly what it meant for them all to leave. “Who’s going to teach next year, if you’re all gone? We can’t conduct five searches over the summer.”

“Fatima is staying, and so is Arla. They’ll lead the department together. They’ll hire a few visiting professors, or adjuncts if needed, and between them and the graduate students, you’ll manage. It means more teaching opportunities for you all, in fact.”

“Okay,” I said, “okay, well, that’s way too much labor for them and that sucks, but they’re really good choices to lead the department and I guess that’s doable if everyone pitches in—but what about dissertation committees? Fatima and Catlin can’t chair every single committee, and everyone needs three members anyway. Are you still going to supervise dissertations once you leave?” Professors can do that, after they retire or move to another university. See their graduate students through their degrees.

She hesitated. “No. We decided it would be best to make a clean break. But—” she cut me off as I started to speak—“but we’re not going to leave you all in the lurch. We’re all contacting colleagues at other universities, calling in some last favors. It’ll be good for all of you to have fresh eyes on your work, and to make contacts outside of Schenley right now. Both for your projects and your future career prospects. I’ve got somebody in mind for you, in fact, and I’m sure you know at least a couple folks you could ask yourself.”

I stared at her. “I’m…really not sure I’m going to stay at Schenley.”

She had the nerve to look surprised. “What? No. You’ve already put so much work into your dissertation.”

“I’m not sure I care about my dissertation anymore.”

“Lu,” she said. She looked dismayed, urgent, more alive than she had since I’d walked in. “Don’t let this happen. I know you’re doubting the impact of your work, now, and that’s fair, but it does matter some. Even if it’s not life and death, like you said. It’s still worthwhile.”

“Academia is fucked up,” I said. “The whole system. Schenley’s a special kind of mess, but it’s not a complete aberration.”

 “Lu,” she said again. “Lu. Just—stick with it. Get your doctorate, then do something else, if you want. Write your book, the fanfiction book—”

“The one you think will end up a pile of commercial drivel?”

“You don’t think that,” Isabel said. “If you want to do public-facing work, if you want to be a public academic, go ahead—do that. But don’t stop writing. Please.”

She looked like it mattered to her. And I hated that, after everything, I still cared that it mattered to her. That I cared that she still believed in me. And I could tell she knew what she was denying to me, too, by leaving, knew exactly what she and all the others were depriving their grad students of, us and the ones who had come before. Professors’ relationships with their graduate students aren’t supposed to end when the students leave. They’re supposed to be there, still, in their students-turned-colleagues’ corner, sending them calls for papers and news about publications and letters of recommendation when they apply for new jobs. They’re supposed to get drinks with them at conferences and congratulate them on their first book, on getting tenure if they’re lucky enough to have a tenure-track job. They’re supposed to become peers, colleagues, friends. Their graduate students are supposed to praise them when they retire, eulogize them when they pass away. Let them live on, in their own classes and their own writing. Cutting ties as cleanly and brutally as Isabel and the others were planning to do might have been the best thing for all of us, but it meant pulling out from under us the supports we’d been building our professional lives on, leaving gaps that would never be filled.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, half unwillingly. “I haven’t made up my mind yet, anyway.”

“Good.” She sat back in her chair, looking like herself again, like the professor who’d convinced me to change my project in risky and electrifying ways just a few years before, who had told me I had a remarkable voice. I stood up.

“Bye, Isabel.”

“Oh, wait—” She opened a desk drawer, rummaged around. She pulled out an envelope and handed it to me.

Warily, I opened the unsealed flap, expecting some sort of letter of apology, or explanation. Instead, I found a check made out to Piper.

“Can you give this to them, please?” Isabel asked. “For the private investigator. They shouldn’t have to pay for that.”

I looked at her. Something tightened in my throat and burned at the corners of my eyes.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m moving out east,” she said. “My parents are getting old. Probably time for me to be closer, anyway. I’m leaving in a couple of days.”

“Have a safe trip,” I said quietly.

“Thanks, Lu.”

Out in the hallway, I leaned against the wall, breathing hard. Then I picked myself up, left the building, and headed home.

“Hey,” I said. Piper was sitting on the floor of the living room, leaning back against the split-open sofa. I sat down next to them, pulling my knees up to my chest. “Everything okay with Tyler?”

Piper blinked. “Yeah,” they said. “Yeah. Um. Actually…actually, we’re, um. Dating. Now. I guess.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Like, dating dating? Like, in an official relationship dating?”

Piper nodded.

Tyler and Piper had been sleeping together for a couple years, ever since Tyler started his MFA in Schenley’s theatre department. I’d always thought Tyler’s friendship helped keep Piper sane amidst all the chaos of the English department. Now I was doubly glad of it.

“Good,” I said. “Tyler really likes you.”

“We’re not planning to be monogamous,” they said abruptly. “Just so you know.”

I nodded, then grinned a little. “You have a boyfriend.”

Piper made a face. “Partner.” I waited. “Yeah, okay, boyfriend. Ugh.”

“As far as cis men go,” I conceded, “you could do a lot worse.”

Piper’s smile faded after a moment. They looked down, playing with a stray thread of the carpet.

“Hey,” I said, something urgent rising suddenly in me, “look. Piper. It’s good. It’s something you want.”

“I know.”

“Piper,” I said again. I wanted to pull the thread out of their hand, make them look at me. “Piper, you don’t want to marry me.”

They looked at me now, shocked. “What? What do you—of course I don’t, I never said—”

“Well, not marry exactly—”

“I don’t even like the institution of marriage. I don’t want the validation of the state—”

“Okay, okay, not marry. But, like…” I took a breath. I knew the words would sound vain at best, but they were brimming in me, pushing up my throat, too important to keep in. “If you could, right now, agree to follow me wherever I went, for the rest of my life, as I go and do whatever I want to do, wherever I want to do it, sometimes I think—sometimes I think you’d say yes.”

They stared at me. Hurt materialized in their eyes, in the set of their mouth. “I—I don’t…” They tugged again, viciously, at the loose thread. “Look. I know that’s not an option. I understand you don’t want to be in one place or with one person for the rest of your life. You’ve always been honest about that. And if I—whatever I might feel, or…or…want, it’s my problem.”

“But I don’t think it is what you want.” I was on my knees, now, stretching towards them. “I think you want—you want to be a professor, for one thing.”

They let out a mirthless laugh. “The chances of me getting a tenure track job are—”

“I’m not talking about the shitty job market. I’m talking about what you want. You want to…to put roots down somewhere, in some way. Build a life that grows, that accumulates, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ll want someone or maybe more than one person to do that with you. To stay.”

Piper’s mouth was pressed thin; their voice, when it came out, was straining to keep steady. “Maybe I do. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want other things more.”

I shook my head. “Piper…”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

The words came out raw and ripped, like they had to get through teeth and knives to make it into the air. I stared at Piper, their eyes brimming with what looked like defiance and shame.

“Lose me?” I could barely shape my mouth around the words. “What do you mean, lose me?”

A couple of tears spilled over onto Piper’s face. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Piper, do you—what do you think is going to happen? Do you think—” I swallowed hard, swallowed down the bile that rose up at the thought that Piper, all this time, might have thought I was going to, someday, up and abandon them. “We’re going to—yes, when we finish here, we’ll probably end up in different places. But…but we’ll talk all the time. I’ll write you long flowery annoying letters. I’ll…you’ll come visit me, yeah? And I’ll visit you, all the time, and maybe—maybe someday we’ll live in the same city again, maybe even the same house.”

They were staring at me, eyes still spilling over.

“And we’ll—” I pressed on, frantic to make up whatever they had misunderstood, whatever I had failed to communicate. “Whenever we’re together, we’ll—we’ll stay up till three in the morning, and laugh ourselves stupid, and—and have Sherlock Holmes sex, if you still want to, and…”

I was crying too now.

“Really?” they whispered.

“Yes, of course, yes, you—you know that, you must know that, you sent a private detective after me when I left without saying goodbye, you knew I wouldn’t do that to you—”

“Sometimes it’s hard to believe it,” Piper says, wiping furiously at their eyes. “You know I never really felt like I was…home, till I came here. And now Schenley’s all fucked to pieces…”

“But we’re not.” I grabbed their hands, squeezed them tight. “We’re not. This is…” I took a breath, but it was easy to say after all. “We’re forever, Piper.”

They let out a choked sob.

“I don’t want to lose you,” I said. My heart was racing. I squeezed their hands again. “Yeah?”

“Okay,” they whispered, and looked at me, eyes wide and wet.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said, and kissed them hard on the mouth, pressing the back of their head with my hand, and bit their lip, just a little, with a grin as I pulled back.

There. Now there was happiness in their eyes, too, and more importantly, belief.

“Are you going to live with your boyfriend next year?” I asked as casually as I could.

“What?” Piper shook their head to clear it. “Oh. I don’t think—it’s too early for that, I think.” They hesitated. “Are you…planning to still be around?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so. Yeah. And you…”

“I want to finish my degree.”

“I talked to Isabel. Did you know…uh…”

“They’re all leaving. Yeah. Phoebe told me. But Fatima’s staying, and I…I wanted Catlin on my committee anyway. I’ll get a third somewhere, someone who does nineteenth-century British at some other school, and that’ll be that.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “One more year. We can manage one more year.”

Piper leaned their shoulder against mine. We sat there companionably for a minute. “Oh,” they said. “One thing, though.”

“Yeah?” I asked, suppressing a sudden flutter of nerves.

“I…don’t really want to put this all back together,” they said, gesturing around the room at the knocked-over armchair, the old medical journals lying open on the floor. “If that’s okay.”

It sent an ache rising in my breastbone, but I nodded. “Yeah. Whatever you need. We’ll…we’ll go thrifting in Lawrenceville and buy the most hideously orange sofa we can find.” They made a face. “Or something nice, whatever. We’ll see.”

They smiled. “We’ll see.”

After the drama and the debriefings, the police interrogations, the tears and the thank yous, Charles goes back to the office with Julian, waiting for the high to come crashing down. We did it, Charles thinks over and over, head spinning with it; we solved the case. The gaps and jagged edges present themselves one by one: Maynard’s denial, Todd’s confession, all the awful mechanisms of bureaucracy that must still be shunted and shuffled through by people who are already traumatized enough. But still he is floating, still the air is bright and shimmering. Still Julian’s face is flushed pink, his hair mussed above his big sharp ears; still Charles’ heart catches when he looks at him, looks at him and sees both the thirteen-year-old boy and the grown-up man, flickering between each other, grinning wide.

Julian shuts the door and pulls him in. “Do you still want me,” he murmurs.

“Yes,” Charles says, still waiting for the fall. Still waiting for the moment that stops being true. “Yes.”

Julian surges forward into a kiss. Charles opens up for him, easy as that, skin tingling wildly as Julian’s hands move over his back, his neck. He kisses back, kisses hard. Julian struggles with his coat one arm at a time, shedding it onto the floor, then goes after Charles’ with their mouths still pressed together. Charles laughs, at his eagerness, his clumsiness, and slides out of his coat and pulls them both down onto one of the ugly orthodontist’s waiting room chairs, Julian perched on his knees, barely keeping his balance, and keeps waiting for the letdown.

Julian tugs them onto the floor, this is absurd, they should do this in a bed, they’re not teenagers—buttons and sleeves and pants, naked skin, he still looks so good, Charles puts his mouth on Julian’s nipple and sucks and Julian’s cry hits straight between his legs.

Hands, stomachs, thighs; still Charles is sailing, whirling high above the ground; wet mouths, lips, traveling down and down; still Charles floats. Even as they gasp and writhe, closer and closer, trembling on the edge and then, finally, once they’ve jumped off the cliff together, there isn’t any thud. There isn’t any impact, body splaying out on the ground. Charles pants, regaining his breath, Julian’s fingers running idly up and down his arm, and the fall still hasn’t come.

“Can I really have this?” he asks Julian, breathless with wonder.

Julian reaches out and touches his cheek, then his hair, then his lips. There’s no spy bracelet, no key to crack whatever code his fingers spell out on Charles’ skin. Maybe there isn’t a code at all. Maybe the mystery is over.

No, Charles thinks, looking at the man lying next to him, his smile half-familiar and half utterly strange. No, not over. Not quite.

END.