The nameplate has been there longer than the department.
Dr. Aldric Sorn.
Longer than the building.
Longer, if anyone thought to check,
than the university's
founding charter
(though nobody has thought to check
because nobody thinks to check
the nameplate
of the man who has always
simply
been there).
Third floor.
Office 312.
View of the parking lot.
The same parking lot
that was a field
when he took the position
and before that
a forest
and before that
something he doesn't think about
in the office
because the office
is not the place
for that.
He teaches the ancient world.
That is the sentence
that appears in the catalog,
in the department newsletter,
on the university website
beneath a photograph
taken in 1987
that still
somehow
looks exactly like him.
He teaches it
the way a man teaches
a language
he learned as a child,
with the fluency
that looks like scholarship
but is something older
than scholarship.
Something scholarship
was built to approximate.
Tuesday.
Ten AM.
Survey of Ancient Civilizations.
Seventeen undergraduates
doing their complicated best
to care about
the second millennium BCE.
He stands at the front
of the room
the way he has always stood:
still in a way
that isn't stillness exactly,
more like
the stillness of something
that has learned
to hold itself
very carefully
in spaces
designed for smaller things.
He is discussing the dragon myths of the ancient near east.
He does this every semester.
He has developed certain techniques for this.
Controlled breathing.
A particular focus on the middle distance.
The window. The parking lot.
The ordinary saving grace of the parking lot.
The dragon, he says, represented chaos to the Babylonian mind. The force that civilization was built against.
He writes this on the board. His handwriting has not changed in three thousand years.
Nobody has noticed.
(Handwriting analysis
is not what it was).
A student,
second row,
the one with the laptop
always open
to something else,
looks up.
"So basically," she says, "dragons were just a metaphor for the things people were afraid of."
He turns from the board.
Something moves
across his face.
The student sees it.
The others see it.
Nobody will be able
to describe it afterward
with any precision,
only that it was
briefly
not a professor's face.
Not a human face.
Something older
looking out
through the available features at a girl who has just explained him to himself as a metaphor.
Three seconds.
Perhaps four.
"That's one interpretation," he says. "The sources suggest the relationship was more complex."
He turns back to the board. His hand (steady, always steady) writes:
"PRIMARY SOURCES: SEE READING LIST."
After class a graduate student stops at the door.
Lucas.
Third year.
Dissertation on
ancient dragon cosmology.
Good instincts.
Occasionally too good.
"Dr. Sorn:
I've been looking
at the Ugaritic texts
and there's something
in the original language
that none of the translations
quite capture.
A quality of —
I don't know.
Firsthand account, almost."
Dr. Sorn
looks at him
for a long moment.
"Yes, he says.
There is.
Keep pulling on that thread."
He closes
the office door.
Stands at the window.
The parking lot
does what parking lots do —
continues,
indifferent,
without his permission.
Somewhere under it
the old field.
Under that
the old forest.
Under that
the older thing.
He puts his hand
flat against the glass.
In the Ugaritic texts
(the ones Lucas
is getting dangerously close to)
there is a passage
in the original
that no translation
has ever rendered correctly.
He knows
because he was there
when it was written.
He remembers
what they got wrong.
He has never
corrected it.
He is still deciding
whether the world
is ready
for the primary source.
He suspects
it is not.
He has suspected this
for three thousand years
and so far
he has been right.
Part V