
We were the class of no tomorrow, and he was our valedictorian. He was not our leader, but we followed him. He never offered his advice, but he was our mentor. He never cared how much we secretly admired him, how we grew silent when he spoke or how we came to his defense when he was challenged. We were his pupils, but we could do nothing but fail in his eyes. Our mere presence only reflected The Professor’s own sense of disappointment and regret. He saw himself in all of us, repeating the mistakes of the past and following down similar paths of peril. We disgusted him to no end.
The Professor’s entire life had been spent within a 20-mile radius of his cramped room on the third floor. He was born at the University Hospital and was immediately given up for adoption. He was adopted the University’s Dean of Student Affairs and his family. He grew up in the Dean’s residence in the now condemned East Campus and was home schooled by his father and mother. Although he had options, he elected to attend the same college his father worked for, and spent four undergraduate and two graduate years earning a Master of Arts in English with minors in psychology and philosophy. He immediately transitioned from student to teacher’s assistant and became a tenured professor of English by the time he was 27. He taught at the college for more three decades before a series of financial scandals—born during the tenure of his late adopted father—bankrupted the school and forced it to close.
He was one of a dozen resident professors and a few hundred students who moved into the main residence hall and refused to leave in protest. Most lasted a week before they ran out of water and electricity. Others barely made it through the first winter without heat. The protesting professors eventually gave up the cause and found new jobs. The students either transferred or dropped out altogether. The campus itself became entangled in property tax loopholes, land ownership disputes, and became inhabited by local squatters, addicts and others who had simply lost hope. The Professor refused to move. He was born there. He grew up there. He was going to die there.
The Professor had spent more than five years on the third floor by the time I started my freshman year at the dilapidated hovel once known as Morgenthau University. He was the campus’ celebrity, even though he refused to get to know anyone who attempted to make his acquaintance. The Professor had no friends at the University; at least no friends that were still alive.
It grew colder every year on the third floor of the main residence hall. The Professor was rarely seen outside during his last summer at the school. In years past, he could always be spotted at dusk walking along the fearsome pathways that no one else would dare travel after dark. The Professor was untouchable, even by the lowest of lowlifes. The addicts feared him more than they feared the ruthless landlords and their lawless self-proclaimed deputies who terrorized the campus. Some of the addicts claimed that The Professor had mystical powers that he drew from the puffs of smoke that emanated from his worn pipe. The Professor was never seen without it. On misty spring evenings when he walked along the campus thoroughfares the smoke seemed to swirl around his head like long, flowing locks of snow-white hair. It was easy to see why the crackheads mistook him for a wizard. But The Professor wielded no special magical powers. He was as vulnerable and weak as any 70-year-old man.
The Professor’s real mysticism was in the mystery that surrounded him. Just about everyone who lived at Morgenthau had a long story, some tall tale about where they had gone wrong and why they had ended up in such a godforsaken place. The Professor offered up no back-story or explanation for who he was, what he really thought or why he remained here. He could have left anytime, but to The Professor, Hell was a place that you made a conscious decision to go to, and a conscious decision to stay.
That was the subject of The Professor’s final exam.
By the time the rain finally surrendered to a brilliant blue October sky, the mood around campus remained as damp as the moldy room that The Professor kept on the third floor of the main residence hall. Of all the people who cared about The Professor, it was the squat’s unmannered de-facto landlord Simeon that discovered his body no more than a few hours after the old man had taken his own life with a combustible combination of pills and 100-proof liquor. The Professor was neither a drinker nor a pill-popper, but he had gathered this arsenal over the years for the specific purpose of carrying out this action when the time was right.
Simeon, furious that he was out a month’s room and board from The Professor, kicked a hole in the door and yelled random obscenities on his way out of the building. Grover, who lived below The Professor and occasionally ran errands for the old man, came up to see what the chaos was about and fell to his knees at the sight of The Professor’s lifeless body, clutching a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy in one hand and two silver dollars in the other; his fare to cross the River Styx.
Grover spent a good half-hour at The Professor’s deathbed before mustering the courage to wipe away his tears, get up off the ground and begin the long process of alerting his fellow residents. There were few stable individuals who called the abandoned campus their home. There was no way of knowing how they would take it. By midday everybody who cared knew.
Deaths at the university were just a part of the life of a squatter; be it the typical overdose, the common suicide or the less-common homicide. It was always best not to get the police involved. Just about everyone who ended up at this place had nowhere left to go on the outside. They had no family to pay for a proper burial and few friends who would speak at their funeral.
On the west side of the campus sat several shallow graves that had been kept by the residents over the years. West Campus had housed the chapel, the service building, and The Gardens. In the campus’ heyday, The Gardens was a picturesque, exquisitely maintained study cove filled with flowers from all around the world, said to inspire deep thought and concentration with its stunning beauty. It was now where we buried our dead.
By the early afternoon, Willie, Grover and Alistair had begun preparing a section of the Gardens for The Professor. Willie had always secretly reserved a space in the center of the garden—next to the fountain and statue of Dionysus—for someone like The Professor. Up in the main residence hall, Eva, The Steve and I had pieced together a long stretcher and began the slow, careful process of moving The Professor’s body from his third floor room, down the crumbling stairwell, and across the entire length of the 3000-acre campus.
With winter quickly approaching, the night fell faster than any of us wanted. By dusk, a small pack of people, some of whom we had never met before, began a slow funeral march across the snake-infested quadrangle, through the archway of the library and down the hillside to the Gardens, where Willie and his friends had finished preparing the site. Even Simeon watched from a distance, cloaked by darkness, careful not to show any signs of life from his black heart. In the woods, the whispers of the addicts grew silent. The snakes even showed their respect, and slithered along the edge of the tall grass, not daring to cross the path of The Professor’s makeshift casket.
He was born there, he spent his life there, he died there, and on that night, we gave his body back to that which gave birth to him. Lit by flashlight and the harvest moon, we slowly lowered The Professor’s body into the grave. He was wrapped in one of Winston’s finest canvases, a painting he had commissioned on behalf of Kendra, who lay in one of the nearby graves. Although The Professor would surely be furious with the pomp and circumstance we paid to his passing, he would secretly have wanted to be buried next to her.
Nobody spoke after Willie and Grover pulled the ropes back up from the ground. The addicts and the maniacs descended back into the woods or to the tunnels where they would sink their sorrows in chemicals. The snakes returned to the pathways, not ready to offer us the same respect as they had The Professor. Simeon went home and reported the passing of the old man to his brother Nolan, who offered few—if any sympathies. And everywhere on that crisp autumn night, the property formerly known as Morgenthau University suddenly felt lonelier, and a gaping void grew deep within the collective consciousness of its residents, who—with The Professor—had lost one of the few scraps of hope we had left. In losing The Professor, we lost the only connection the campus had to its glorious past. So long as he had been alive, it was still Morgenthau. Now, it was just an overpopulated crackhouse on the verge of being bulldozed and sub developed into luxury townhouses, the likes of which might one day come to rest on top of the very graves of our deceased brothers and sisters.
Nobody was going to move into the third floor, let alone to The Professor’s residence. Lots of people had spooky superstitions and spoke of ghosts that haunted the buildings. Grover and I went back to The Professor’s room to talk after the funeral. Lined floor to ceiling with books, papers and a few of Kendra’s old drawings, it was by far the most attractive residence in the entire building, albeit for the two dozen buckets, jars and containers that collected the rains that poured in from the moldy, leaking ceiling.
The Professor had not left a suicide note. He would never have allowed such a welcome insight into his famously guarded psyche. Instead, The Professor had left us a challenge. He had left us a mission. He had left the class of no tomorrow their final exam.
On a single sheet of paper, typed with black ink, read a simple question.
It is better to die in the real world pursuing the dream of a better life—to struggle, to bleed, to go without sleep, food and love; with no guarantee of success, only the guarantee of knowing that you lived for something, and that you were willing to die for something—than to spend 75 years of your life rotting away in a hopeless, colorless world like this.
A.) True B.) False
There was no answer key.
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