Free The Oregon Experiment by Keith Scribner

top, then walked through the door marked POLITICAL SCIENCE .
    The outer office was empty, the assistant’s computer blank, her desk tidy. He peeked around the corner to the inner office and saw a man standing at a table and hunched over a book, his back toward him.
    “Hello?” Scanlon said, and the man turned. It was, as he’d suspected, the chair, and to his delight, Cebert Fenton, who’d been clean-shaven in February, now sported a fledgling beard, even splotchier than his own. Thin and mangy, a sorry-ass beard.
    He was holding what looked to be a dictionary open in front of him, running his index finger down the page. “There it is,” he said. “Hah!” Thenhe looked up. “Do you know what the German word for ‘pretzel’ is?” He clapped the book shut. Bright-eyed and very pleased, he announced:
“Brezel.”
    Fenton’s research concerned reunification, and his latest book was on Germany. Scanlon knew all through the interview process that his own interest in mass movements was helping him with the chair, and probably hurting him with the other members of the department.
    “Are pretzels what got the two sides back together?” Scanlon asked, regretting his flippancy even as he said it.
    “Exactly the opposite. The pretzel developed differently on the two sides of the wall, and now they can’t stand each other’s versions. You’ve got East Germans living in the West who travel back to their old neighborhoods to stock up. So, will they ever fully reunite?”
    “Keep your eye on the pretzel,” Scanlon said.
    “Bingo.”
    They looked at each other for an awkward moment; Scanlon was unsure whether they were joking. Then Fenton offered his hand and they shook. He was deeply tanned, especially over the top of his shiny bald head, which, since Fenton was a small man, Scanlon viewed from above. What hair he had was dark, flecked with white, and buzzed short. His scraggly beard was completely at odds with the rest of his presentation—neatly pressed khakis and a fussy yachting belt, boy-sized tasseled loafers, a peach-colored polo shirt clinging to the lithe, compact body of a man who’d done fifty sit-ups and toe touches every night before bed for the last thirty years.
    “Getting settled in?” he said. “How’s the house?”
    Scanlon remembered that even in February, during his campus interview, Fenton had been tan. “It’s all great. We’re just trying to get ready for the semester. And the baby.”
    “Of course. I’d forgotten. What’s your wife’s name?”
    Svelte. Could a man be
svelte
? “Naomi.”
    “You don’t know how lucky you are. There’s no place like Douglas to raise a child. The parks, the mountains, the ocean. You have no idea of your fortune.”
    “How about the mass movements out here? Have you done any work on them?” Scanlon knew he hadn’t published anything on the Pacific Northwest.
    “There’s nothing to reunite. We’ve got secessionists, though. Survivalists, polygamists, anarchists. Take your pick.”
    “What about the secessionists? Anything there?” Scanlon asked, pretending this was the first he’d heard of them.
    “PNSM? Pretty ragtag, from what I know.” Fenton kept looking, back and forth, from Scanlon’s beard to his eyes. “I doubt there’s any real political theory worth speaking of. Certainly no successful action. Might as well be Thursday-night discussions on recycling Styrofoam, or how to make yogurt from goat’s milk.”
    Of course Scanlon already knew this was the case, but part of him had hoped that just maybe the group had a drop of credibility—if not a movement then an inclination, a shambling drift.
    “No,” Fenton continued. “Nothing local. Not for me, anyway.” His fingertips crawled through his beard like a blind man reading a face, apparently feeling out the thin spots. “The Dakotas might unify,” he said wistfully. “Mostly, though, I look across the ocean.” He gazed out the window as if trying to spot reunifiers in