Spring 2014

          The chair of the department—it doesn’t matter which department—slept with all of his junior colleagues, men and women, and when he broke up with them he managed to do so diplomatically, which is to say he made them chairs of the most powerful committees—travel, research, curriculum, etc.–in the department, and in this way ensured they forgot about his wounding them, and this had gone on for years—it doesn’t matter how many—until finally the day came when there were no more committees without chairs, even the lesser committees were already chaired by his jilted junior colleagues, and so the department chair was forced to break up with his latest lover, the most junior of all the junior colleagues, without being able to give her anything in return for her broken heart. “Sorry,” he said. They were outside their office building. It was ten at night, late April, and the world smelled like the first true day of spring, which is to say, the world smelled like sex, but to the junior colleague that smell was so far away she could barely smell it. The smell was only there to remind her that sex was something that happened to other people, that she would never again be a person who would have sex, just as she would never be a person who would chair a committee. “Really sorry,” the department chair said, and then, their business concluded, he walked away from her. When he did that, the junior colleague felt as though it was a life, not a man, that was leaving her, and when she noticed that someone—it doesn’t matter who—had left a shovel lying in one of the flower beds and the junior colleague picked it up, took a few steps toward her department chair and when she reached him, pulled the shovel back, fully intending to kill the chair with it. But the chair sensed something was going on behind his back—he wasn’t chair for nothing—and turned around just in time to grab the shovel out of his former lover’s hand. They stood for a while, contemplating each other. They both saw the same thing: a future empty of committee chairships but full of shovels. And so the chair struck the junior colleague, his former lover, in the head with the shovel, killing her. Then he dug a hole with the shovel and dumped her body in it, used the sleeve of his linen blazer to wipe his prints off the shovel, which he then also threw into the hole. Then he walked away, picturing how tomorrow morning would go. He would get to the office early, so that he would be the first to discover the hole, his junior colleague’s body, the shovel. He would call an emergency department meeting. At the meeting, which would be held outside, next to the hole, the chair would pretend to be as baffled as everyone else about who had done this terrible thing to their most junior colleague. We need to find out who did this, he would say, and then would suggest that they form a committee of the hole. It was a good idea; everyone would think so; everyone knew that the death of their junior colleague mattered a great deal, and when something mattered you had to form a committee, making it matter even more. But who would chair the committee? the chair would ask, rhetorically, and then he would look sadly into the hole, thinking, It could have been you, except it couldn’t have been you, before saying, “I suppose we’ll have to hire someone.”