Free Visiting Professor by Robert Littell Page A

calls.
    Charlie Atwater belches into the back of his fist. “Thish is all very depresshing,” he groans. “I badly need a drink.”
    The guests gaze silently into their coffee cups for a long while. Lemuel’s head bobs uncertainly several times. He glances
     at the Director, who appears to be having a conversation with himself, then manages to sink into his seat so awkwardly he
     upsets the plate containing the seed roll. Scrambling under the chair, Lemuel slips the roll into his briefcase and surfaces
     with the empty plate.
    A coed carrying a tray of after-dinner mints passes behind him and drops one onto his coffee saucer.
    “I thank you,” Lemuel says.
    The girl smiles engagingly. “I welcome you,” she shoots back with a giggle.
    “You may be the only one here who does.”
    Staring out at his colleagues at the Institute for Chaos-Related Studies, watching them as they push back their chairs and
     drift away from the parenthesis, Lemuel wonders if this vision of a never-ending cycle of randomness and chaos is not simply
     another one of his convenient fictions, something that satisfies parts of himself he has not been to yet.
    Dejected, he bumps into the Rebbe outside the Institute Center. “Where did I go wrong?” he asks him. “What do I do now?”
    Rebbe Nachman dances on the ice to keep his toes from turning numb. “A smart-ass goy once offered to convert to Judaism if
     the famous Rebbe Hillel could teach him the entire Torah while the goy was standing on one foot. You have maybe heard the
     story? Rebbe Hillel agreed, the goy balanced on his one foot, Rebbe Hillel said to him, That which is hateful to you do not
     do to your friend. This is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary. Go and study.’ “
    Rebbe Nachman’s smile seems more asymmetric than usual. “I don’t believe you will ever find randomness, I’m talking pure,
     I’m talking unadulterated, for the simple reason it doesn’t exist. On the other hand, you certainly won’t find it if you don’t
     look for it. Go and study.”

Chapter Three

    “I was wrist-cuffed to a lady movie reviewer who also signed the petition
,“ Lemuel shouts over the noise he refuses to acknowledge as music. “I heard she spent three years in a Siberian gulag, sucking
     frozen sticks of milk over open fires at mealtimes.”
    “How did you worm out of it?” hollers a fraternity brother wearing a tie and jacket and football helmet.
    “Hey, how did you?” Rain, sipping wine, smiling whimsically, wants to know.
    “Lem here signed the petition, the fuzz picked him up and took him in for questioning,” Dwayne, the E-Z Mart manager, recapitulates
     in a loud voice, “but they didn’t charge him. He had to have a wrinkle.”
    “A wrinkle?”
    “A gimmick,” Dwayne’s girlfriend, Shirley, explains.
    “A stratagem,” Dwayne adds. “A ruse.”
    Lemuel smiles sourly. “I had a wrinkle—it was two signatures,” he shouts. “One I used to sign my internal passport or my pay
     book or my applications for exit visas. The other signature I used to sign documents I might want to deny I signed. When they
     finally got aroundto interrogating me, I said them someone had forged my signature. They verified it with a handwriting expert and let me go.”
    “Like it must have been goddamn dangerous, living in a Communist country and not being a Communist,” observes Rain.
    “In Russia we have a proverb: It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”
    Lemuel turns to watch the couples in the next room. In the half light, they appear to be jumping up and down, their heads
     hanging off to one side as if their necks are broken. He leans closer to Rain and shouts into her ear, “Looks like—” The noise
     ends as suddenly as it began.”—communal hiccups,” he hears himself shout. Heads swivel. Lemuel blushes.
    The three musicians in a corner of the room strike up a slow foxtrot. Shirley sinks into Dwayne’s arms and they start to shuffle