Page 20 of The Headmaster’s Binding

I sat in my wet coat with the pen in reach and the form in its drawer, and I watched the calibration candle stand at its correct height, and I did not write it down.

Let the record, which no one reads, be accurate for once: the officer formed a suspicion at nine minutes to two, under an active mandate, with an inspector asleep two staircases away, and the officer went to bed.

The candle was still standing when I left the room. I did not stay to watch it out. I was afraid, if I am setting things down, that it would lean toward the quad, and that I would find the lean correct.

Chapter 9

Thomas

Eleven seconds. I counted them while they were happening, some back-office clerk in me clicking a stopwatch while the rest of the building burned, and I want to know who installed that clerk, because the first time my life came apart this way I didn't count anything. I just fell. Apparently I've developed procedures since then, and the procedure for kissing your boss in a rainstorm at ten to two in the morning is: count, retreat, document.

So here's the documentation, written Saturday at noon with coffee going cold, because I slept till eleven for the first time since August and woke up already arguing with myself.

Item thirty-two: eleven seconds. Counted. Broken off by both of us at the same instant, which I have decided to find comforting, because the alternative reading is that we're synchronized, and synchronized is worse.

Item thirty-three: he laughed. Before. Once, one syllable, out of him like something escaping, and I've been on this campus four weeks and I would testify under oath that the man has never laughed in the working memory of anyone here. Filed under events, not sounds. The rain actually seemed embarrassed.

Item thirty-four: the lamps on the east walk browned out in a line that ended where he was standing, and the fog ran all night toward the building he was touching, and his nose was bleeding, and he said "weather," and I kissed him anyway.

Item thirty-five: amend the new page's heading. Things that are actually happening, including, apparently, to me.

The rain had dried. My mouth had not got the message. Every time I touched it, the eleven seconds came back whole: his hand at my jaw, the sound I made at four, the step back at eleven. I wanted a twelfth second. That was the unfiled item.

I looked at the four of them together for a while. Separately, each one was survivable. Together they said that the strangest thing on a campus where I have watched a wand put out fire is the Headmaster of the college, and that my mouth has opinions about him that it acted on without calling upstairs.

Fine. Protocol, then. I've run cold-turkey protocols before: after Richard, I didn't so much as have coffee alone with anyone above me on an org chart for four years. The Ashgrave version drafted itself in twenty minutes: no more night walks past the Lodge side of the quad; meals shifted early, out of high-table hours; the long way to Letters, which adds four minutes and subtracts one corridor where a man in a gray coat crosses at eleven and one; all agenda items requiring the Headmaster to be routed through email, cc the department, tone of a man laminating something. Two people can dodge each other for years on a campus this size. Whole marriages have been avoided this way. I gave the protocol a green light Saturday afternoon and it ran beautifully for two days.

Monday at 9:40 a.m., the protocol died in my pigeonhole.

College letterhead. Three sentences. As part of a review of onboarding procedure, the appointment of new senior members will be subject to termly supervision meetings, conducted personally by the Headmaster. Dr. T. Mercer's review will convene Tuesdays at four o'clock in the Headmaster's office, beginning tomorrow. The schedule is not elective.

I turned the memo over, then checked the other pigeonholes, because that's who I am now: no cream envelopes this time, no matching memos. There are six other new hires this year, including a chemist and an economist, and I found out by Wednesday, asking around with the special casualness I'm getting so much practice at, that none of them has a Tuesday anything.

Item thirty-six: the same institution that edits its own ledgers has assigned the Headmaster and me to a room together. Weekly. By name. The memo says procedure, and I have read enough of this college's paper now to know that the word procedure is where it keeps its fingerprints.

* * *

His office manages to be the warmest room I've been cold in. Long windows, a fire laid but not lit, a desk you could land aircraft on, and every object on it squared to every other object, which after four weeks I could have predicted, and did, in the notebook, in advance, for points.

He was standing when I came in, and neither of us tried to shake hands, which was its own conversation.

"Dr. Mercer."

"Headmaster."

"Sit, please."

I sat. He sat. Between us on the desk: my file, a printed agenda, and a carafe of water with two glasses, and I looked at the two glasses and thought about the last object that had stood between us, which was a decanter, and did not say so, and he watched me not say it with the expression of a man reading a telegram through the envelope.

"You will want to know the terms of this review," he said. "There are four items."

"Of course there are."

"Teaching. Research trajectory. Committee load. Integration."

"Integration," I said. "Into what?"

A pause you could have parked in. "The life of the college."