The Last Sane Man

The Last Sane Man



It had been the perfect place to smoke when they still allowed it, and when he still smoked. He hadn’t quit because they took away his spot, and all of the other spots like it across campus, saying it was to close to the building, but it had made it easier. At least half of his cigarettes each day had been there on those steps. He still sat there at times throughout the day, following the schedule if not the full habits of the lifetime addict. To his mind the massive granite steps had long ago molded to the curve of his ass, and now it was still a perfect place, if not to smoke than to sit, to watch the periodic streams of young men and women bustle through the courtyard. And when the clockwork torrents ceased, and his scenery reduced once again to trees and grass and paving stones, Ben Stark would return to the yellow legal pad in his lap.



Always yellow legal pads, never white, and always a felt-tipped blue pen. A pen should scratch against the paper, there should be friction. A man should know when he’s writing, it should be a physical act with resistance against the fingers. Ball point pens were too smooth, too easy, and laptop computers were the true modern mark of intellectual sloth. He stared at the pad, feeling the familiar scant weight of it in his hands. Sometimes there would be writing there, scrawled words in vivid blue that were decipherable only to him and his secretary. Sometimes the words were inspired, sometimes they held answers for some thorny problem or other that confronted him, and sometimes there were limericks. Often, like now, the pad was blank.



With a sigh, Ben stood, turning toward the ashtray that was no longer there to dispose of the cigarette that was not in his hand. He touched his moustache. It was short and bristly, sandy-blond and red, like what was left of his hair, and he was always touching it. Always the same way, too, with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand, tracing the edges where the whiskers met the corners of his mouth. He could not clearly remember when he had begun the habit. It might have been when he was first growing it, years ago in graduate school, when there was novelty to the thing, or perhaps later, as a subconscious grooming ritual checking for stray ash from his cigarettes. In any event, he continued to do it. When in conversation, it could made him difficult to hear, something he would at times do on purpose.



No one had stopped to talk to him during his time on the steps that morning, which was unusual. Three or four times a day he would assume his perch in front of Casper Hall, and almost always he would be joined by a colleague or a student. In the old days, he would share a smoke with them, the faculty and the undergrads alike.



For twenty years Ben had been sitting on those steps. He was not an old man, not yet fifty, but he had achieved the distinction of becoming an institution without getting old. He liked that, liked dispensing advice in the courtyard like some Eastern guru; he even liked when students came to complain about exams or grades or some other grievance. There had been a Dean of the college once, an elbow-patch academic back in the eighties who groused that Ben Stark could be mistaken for a gargoyle on those steps, and if he wanted statuary in front of the Liberal Arts building, he would commission it himself, and he would select something far more impressive. Ben outlasted that Dean. He had outlasted six.



A slow dirge escaped from the bells in the high clock tower of Tappan Hall, the massive red-brick administrative building that faced Casper across the courtyard. Tappan was the oldest and most beautiful of the buildings on campus, a four-story orgasm of the Romanesque Revival style so popular on academic campuses when it was erected in 1889. Turrets of brown brick rose from each of the six corners, Munson slate from Canada tiled the slanting roofs, and attentive rows of fourteen-foot windows lined each mortared wall. The building’s singular feature, and most recognizable asset, was the clock tower stretching an additional two stories above the main structure. When the bells rang out from her depths as they did now, no one on campus could mistake the time. Even in that age of cellular phones and handheld devices, many students and more faculty relied on that venerable timepiece to mark the hours of the academic day.



Tappan Hall was named for Lionel Tappan, the godfather, or perhaps midwife, of New Hampshire State University. During the Civil War, Colonel Tappan commanded the 2nd NH Regiment Cavalry in New Orleans. He left much of his left arm in Louisiana in 1864, along with his two children, Enoch and Thomas. Wifeless and childless, he bequested his sprawling family farm in Wolfeboro, snug against the eastern shore of Wentworth Lake, to the state upon the event of his death. It would take three decades for the old man to die, but in 1891 the state of New Hampshire inherited 30,000 acres, half of which it sold. The remainder proved an ideal location for an agricultural and mechanical state college, astride the north-south railroad that ran from Dover on the seacoast to Conway in the mountains. Tappan Hall was built in 1893 on a central rise of the property, with majestic views of placid Lake Wentworth, and a portrait of Tappan was placed in the vestibule that remained there for the next century.



Father Lionel startled generations of students with his long forked beard, his armless left shoulder, and cinders for eyes. It was a remarkably lifelike portrait, with the crisp and unforgiving detail rendered by the photographic technology of the time, and it was enormous. University tradition, or perhaps legend, held that if you were looking into the eyes of Colonel Tappan when the bells rang in the tower, you lost a year of your life. Consequently, few lingered in the entryway near the colossal portrait, the better to avoid a chance encounter with those hellish eyes at the wrong time.



None of this ran through Ben Stark’s mind as the bells rang at eleven in the morning. His nimble and tired brain was elsewhere, or more accurately, several elsewheres. As an Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, the largest college at the University, Ben bore a large and diverse portfolio of responsibility. There were three Associate Deans, but the other two had the merest fraction of Ben’s tenure, and, frankly, his talent. And so the weightiest or least pleasant tasks usually fell to Ben. He made his retreat into the cool marble interior of Casper, through the double-hung oaken doors, up the curved staircase to the Dean’s Office.



Casper Hall was an old building, not as old as Tappan but a younger brother in the same Romanesque style. It had been renovated substantially twice in its century of life, most recently only a few years before, and it still possessed that odd aura of new materials trying to look old.



Ben shrugged out of his brown leather jacket and hung it from one of the floor racks in the corner of the main office. He could feel the eyes of the Dean before he saw her, and reluctantly he dragged his gaze from the carpet and slowly raised it to meet hers.

“Ben,” she said, and her quiet voice somehow seemed to give more syllables to his name. White-haired, tall and rail-thin, Grace Palmer was brilliant, sixty and British. She had been Dean of the College of Liberal Arts since her arrival from Oxford three years before, and by all accounts she was precisely what the College needed. Under previous Deans, even Ben would admit, there had been a certain casualness, and Grace Palmer was anything but casual. Rectangular spectacles anchored to the tip of her thin nose, she peered at Ben.



“Dean Palmer!” Ben grinned.