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listening.
    I move to the Family Waiting Room. Again, I dial. “George hit Jane with a lamp,” I say to Jane’s mother.
    “That’s awful,” she says, not realizing the gravity of what I’ve told her. “When did that happen?”
    “Last night. Is your husband home?”
    “Sure,” she says, sounding a little vague.
    In the background I hear him ask, “Who is it?”
    “It’s your daughter’s husband’s brother,” she says. “Something happened to Jane.”
    “What happened to Jane?” he asks, taking the phone.
    “George hit her on the head with a lamp.”
    “Is she going to press charges?”
    “Most likely she is going to die.”
    “That’s not the kind of thing you say to be funny.”
    “I’m not joking.”
    “Son of a bitch,” he says.

    I want to go home. I want my life back. I had a life of my own. I was in the middle of something when all of this happened, wasn’t I? What was happening? I don’t have my date book, but there had to be something, a dentist appointment, dinner with friends, faculty meeting. What day is it? I check my watch. In five minutes I am teaching a class. Twenty-five undergraduates will file into a classroom and sit nervously in their chairs, knowing they have not prepared, knowing they have not done the reading. The course, Nixon: The Ghost in the Machine, a close examination of the unexamined. They sit like idiots waiting for me to tell them what everything means, to spoon-feed them an education. And while they numbly perch, they compose letters to the Dean; one complained that he was being asked to write in class, another calculated the cost per session of each of the twenty-two sessions in the semester and made a list of things he could have bought for the same or less money.
    I have yet to put a dollar cost on the stress of having them stare blankly at me for ninety minutes two times a week and showing up during my office hours, asking me, “What’s new?” like we’re old friends and then sitting down as though they own the place and telling me how they can’t get “an angle on things.” And before they go, wanting me to pat them on the head and say, “You’re a good kid,” for nothing, for no reason. There is about them a kind of casual entitlement, the sort of thing that when I was growing up would have gotten you a lecture for bad attitude and a week of detention.
    In all the years, I’ve never failed to show up, have only twice had to reschedule a class, once for a root canal and the other a gallbladder attack.
    I call the university, I call my department, I call the secretary of the Dean of the school to which I am affiliated—voice mail everywhere. I cannot find a real person to talk to. What will happen if I don’t show up, how long will they sit there? I phone the security office. “This is Professor Silver. I have an emergency.”
    “Do you need a paramedic?”
    “I am already in the hospital, but I am supposed to teach a class in two minutes; could someone go and put a note on the door telling the students that I have canceled?”
    “One of our men, an officer?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s not what we do.”
    I try another tactic. “But of course it’s exactly what you do. If no one shows up, if no one of authority takes charge, there could be rioting. This is a course on politics, and you know what that means—radical ideas are loosened, the students feel empowered, mark my words.”
    “What should the note say?”
    “Professor Silver has had a family emergency and will not be in class. He is sorry and will make it up to you.”
    “All right, then, and what building and room?”
    “Can you look it up for me? I never pay attention to the names and numbers.”
    “Hold,” he says. “Silver, there is no class today. You’re in the School of Arts and Sciences, your people are on vacation. Party on the beach …”
    “Oh,” I say. “I forgot. I simply forgot. Thank you.”
    I had a life. I was doing something.

    I meet the lawyer later