Privilege

Copyright © 2019 Jason Rothery

Great Plains Publications

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Winnipeg,

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or in any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Great Plains Publications, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada,

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Great Plains Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for

its publishing program by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program;

and the Manitoba Arts Council.

Design & Typography by Relish New Brand Experience

Printed in Canada by Friesens

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Privilege : a novel / Jason Patrick Rothery.

Names: Rothery, Jason Patrick, 1978- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190109882 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190109890 |

ISBN

9781773370224 (softcover) |

ISBN

9781773370248 (Kindle) |

ISBN

9781773370231 (

EPUB

)

Classification:

LCC PS

8635.

O

738

P

75 2019 |

DDC C

813/.6—dc23

For Griffin & Suki

But everyone’s too damned sensitive these days. I see people now, kids right out of college, and they really think they should never experience an unpleasant moment. Nobody should ever say anything they don’t like, or tell a joke they don’t like. But the thing is, nobody can make the world be the way they want it to be all the time. Things always happen that embarrass you or piss you off. That’s life. I hear women telling jokes about men every day. Offensive jokes. Dirty jokes. I don’t get bent out of shape. Life is great. Who has time for this crap? Not me.

—Michael Crichton, Disclosure

Prologue

Doctor Barker Samuel Stone had no idea where he was.

His first thought—froth struggling to the surface of the tar—was this: Mexico? Had he somehow been delivered south of yet another border?

Room drenched in tacky Mexicana, like an exploded souvenir shop. Honey-mustard walls dripping with sombreros, decorative plates—Whatshisname? Enraptured flautist with the hedgehog spikes? Kinkajou? No, those were the ornery bear rats from Guatemala. Uh…Kilimanjaro?—crucifixes of varied sizes and materials: wood, punched tin, embroidered lace…

A bubble broke through, a snippet of text—Authentic Talavera tiles… Burst. Irretrievable.

Article? Brochure?

Gone.

Inside: Arrhythmic thumping. Thump thump thump.

His heart?

Large flat-screen television mounted on the wall. A man. A face. A familiar face: thinning patch of shorn, blond bristle; porcine eyes restless; neck crimson, overflowing his open collar like dough; porpoise-smooth skin speckled with sweat, glistening under stark white light.

The camera zoomed out to wider shot as the man pounded his mallet-sized fist on a rostrum. Behind him hung a nondescript navy blue curtain patterned with regal-looking insignia. To his left— a woman, hands folded primly over her pleated russet skirt, mouth clamped in a grim line. Though the

TV

was muted, the man was clearly shouting, swinging his arms in emphatic arcs, a conductor combatting an unruly orchestra.

The camera closed in, cutting the woman out of frame, fighting to keep purchase as the man bobbed and weaved—the pin against the butterfly.

Thump thump thump. Faster. Sharper. A staccato rat-a-tat.

Cardiac arrest? Am I dying?

The soundless television loomed. An epiphany: I’m on the floor! Let his head loll. Yes. Floor. Legs outstuck, pants bunched below his knees, limp penis sticking out of the slot of his briefs like a dead tongue. Remote control in one hand, ball of toilet paper in the other.

An echo. An unknown voice. Sounds like a party!

Female.

On the floor, slumped back against a bed, caped by a duvet with a faux-woven Aztec pattern—girders of rust and tan and turquoise.

Party?

Returned his eyes to the television to find the man replaced by black—No! African-American!—faces. Night. Buildings ablaze. Everyone angry, yelling. Raised arms and pumping fists. Cut to a police cruiser engulfed in fire, objects hurtled—Bricks? Rocks?—at the flaming carapace. Plastic bags wind-whipped through the frame. Cut to a high angle, helicopter hovering over the cauldron of chaos. Spotlight tracking haphazardly scuttling figures, arms laden with spoils. Barker struggled for coherence. What was this? Protest or plunder?

Pounding more insistent now: Thumpthumpthump! Thump­thumpthump!

Have to get up. Hospital.

Thumpthumpthump! Thumpthumpthump!

Thumbed the remote to turn the television off, unmuted it instead, flooding the room with a concert of disorder: chanting, burning, shattering, sirens. Instinctually flung his arms in front of his face, sending the remote pinwheeling into the wall. Heard the cover spin off with a crack, the batteries clatter across the tiles like tossed dice.

The blare abruptly broke off, supplanted by the soothing, singsong timbre of a male news anchor—face thick with foundation, hands firm against his desk. The speakers crackled as he spoke.

Thumpthumpthump!

Barker resolved to stand, to lift himself out of oblivion.

Sounds like a party!

Who was she? What party?

Hands on the floor. To his left, cool (Talavera!) tile, to his right, a patch of lumpy muck. Lifted the sodden hand, dripping yolky slime, sensed another bubble straining to the fore. Pushed it back down.

The thumping morphed, no longer seemed to emanate from within…

Wiped his hand on the duvet, reached up under his shirt and pressed it flat against his chest. His heartbeat, steady as a metronome.

…Stone?

His name.

Was someone saying his—?

Dr. Stone? Barker?

Propped himself on his knees, grabbed an edge and pulled. A decorative plate rose before him like the sun at dawn: The hunched deity, the flautist mid-leap, in the throes of—

Kokopelli! More text materialized in his mind. This revered god of fertility—

His still-slick-with-slime hand slipped. Landed hard on his coccyx, grunted with pain—first Gah!, then Fuh!—rocked side to side like an upended tortoise.

Stomach lurched. Before he could stop it, the tide crested.

Vomited onto the floor. Again. Again.

Dr. Stone?

Thump thump thump!

Dr. Stone? Barker?

Thump thump thump!

The thump resolved into more of a…pounding?

Doctor Stone! Are you all right? Pound pound pound!

A man’s voice. Did he know him?

Pound pound pound! Open the door, Doctor Stone!

From the television: Joining me now is Professor—

Pound pound pound!

—a Civil Rights historian who teaches law at—

Pound pound pound!

Professor, thank you for joining us this evening.

Glad to be here, Chet.

Using the bed for support, Barker lifted himself to standing. A mirror on the wall, punched tin frame with scalloped edges, revealed him to himself: hair pressed into oblique peaks, eyes red and sunken, skin pallid, shirt sodden with yellow.

POUND! POUND! POUND! POUND! POUND!

Tugged up his pants and shimmied for the door. Even these mincing steps made his stomach churn. Clenched his jaw and pursed his lips. Hold it back. Push it down, down, down, down…

Doctor Stone! Open the door! Doctor Stone!

Had more or less wrested his pants up to his waist when a full foam broke through: The Fiesta Room! The keynote! The woman at the—

Sounds like a party!

TV

: "What we’re watching unfold here is the unfortunate, but in many ways inevitable outcome of years, decades, of institutionalized discrimination and disenfranchisement…"

Took a step back.

…the overarching goal of which is and always has been to abridge, under one guise or another, the freedoms of a particular set of people grouped per their racial heritage…

When had he come back to his room? What had he been doing on the floor? Who was this asshole pounding on his—?

A blunt

THUD

. A tremor. Force meets immovable object. The door shuddered. Barker rolled back on the balls of his feet. A second

THUD

, this one accompanied by splintering. The door distended; a puff of dust clouded the air like cold breath.

Barker held out his hand as if to dissuade an attacker, watched as the door caved, split down the middle in a confusion of powder and plywood shards. One half of the sundered door swung dazedly on its hinges, the other toppled at an awkward, canted angle.

TV

: Excuse me for interrupting, Professor, but it sounds like what you’re saying is that these people have no choice in terms of their own actions…that these acts of civil disobedience and vandalism—

Barker froze, one hand suspending his loose pants, the other extended in self-defence. Through the rubble of the shattered door, two men appeared. Police officers. Behind the officers, a man and a woman in identical uniforms. Paramedics? A few feet behind this second duo was a concierge holding a keycard aloft like an Olympic torch, looking crestfallen.

In many ways they don’t have a choice, so thoroughly have their freedoms—in different ways, over so long a period of time—been systematically stripped from them.

The taller policeman pushed inside. Barker watched the officer’s eyes scout around the room—first to this, then to that, and back to Barker. The officer’s eyes narrowed, mental gears grinding, knitting every observable element into a firm narrative sheath.

For many of these people, far too many of these people, agency is no more than this: An illusion.

Barker had to say something; stop the officer’s story from crystallizing. While in certain respects, in certain quarters, Barker was considered a genius (of sorts), this was no time for showboating. All he needed was a simple and succinct interjection, a different angle, a unique twist, a contrary but equally plausible counter-plot.

What he came up with was this: It’s not what it looks like.

Okay. Not great. But it would have to do.

As Barker began to speak, the relay between his brain and mouth fizzled.

Instead of It’s, he said Look.

The word hung in the air. Barker gawped, considering how best to correct his error.

The officer lunged.

CAROL

: Do you know what you’ve worked for? Power. For power. Do you understand? And you sit there, and you tell me stories. About your house, about all the private schools, and about privilege, and how you are entitled. To buy, to spend, to mock, to summon. All your stories. All your silly weak guilt, it’s all about privilege…

—David Mamet, Oleanna

The Tower

Barker’s iPad and dog had died on the same day, and in this moment—fortyish minutes into the second faculty meeting of the fall semester, with his colleague Gordon Rusk in the midst of a characteristically epic rant—Barker wasn’t sure which one he missed more.

Bored as shit, Barker’s scan of the assembled told him he was not alone. Of the dozen-odd faculty, four administrators, and one graduate student in attendance, only the student—Molly Ellen Clarke—and Dr. Maureen Alexi, their esteemed program director, seemed to be paying any attention to Rusk whatsoever. Barker could tell by Maureen’s two-fisted grip on her pen, and the way she chewed on the nub of her upper lip, that she was torn between allowing all stakeholders their time at the podium, and keeping the proceedings on point and schedule.

Everyone else was engrossed in a device. To Barker’s right, a fidgety colleague thumbed through a social media feed on his smartphone. Others swiped and pawed at tablets. Even Dr. Siobhan Grady, Barker’s stalwart ally in arms—Let us ban technology from the classroom forthwith!—was typing absently away on a laptop.

Tried to catch Shiv’s eye, flash her a conspiratorial glance— Can you believe the tear Rusk is on today?—but she carried forth unawares.

Most would have protested, perhaps, that they were simply attending to manifold professional duties. No harm no foul. After all, these meetings were procedural busywork, a diversion from the many more pressing demands on their time and attention. The students especially—as their assignments and midterms resolved from abstraction into reality, as their panic percolated. Bodily present or not, the student corpus was always there, always felt; a moon exerting its pull on the tide.

And sure, to be fair, under desperate circumstances, Barker might avail himself of a tangential discussion or classic Rusk crusade to field an inquiry or two. No one, himself included, was perfect.

But by and large, students were an excuse. Professional duties a deception.

That’s not the point, Rusk responded to a comment or query Barker had missed. "These companies are trying to use common carriage as a Trojan horse. They’re contending that, basically, they control the means of distribution, the pipes, but have nothing to do with the content flowing through them."

Barker shook his head to himself, irked that his colleagues—all of whom were waging the same impossible battle to beat back the horde of devices inundating their classrooms and lecture halls—were so indifferent to their own hypocrisy, sitting here in the selfsame thrall of the selfsame machines they bemoaned in the hands of the kids. Who of us, they seemed to say, has the fortitude to ignore the siren call of possibility, of taking up throne and sceptre in our own mini media fiefdom?

Sure, faculty meetings were dull as fuck, but that’s why they got paid the big bucks, right?

Isn’t that a good thing? asked Fidget, setting his phone face down. I thought common carriage protected these companies from being held liable for questionable content, illegal content…?

Nothing to be gained by calling anyone out. What was that Goethe quote? The futility of trying to change someone’s fixed inclination? You will only succeed in confirming him in his opinion…or drenching him in yours! You could only lead by example, stand as a paragon of restraint; silently and civilly declare your allegiance to the cause of Paying Fucking Attention to Other People While They’re Talking. Only one of the litany of social compacts and courtesies—Holding the Door Open for the Person Behind You, Not Claiming Two Seats on the Subway—inexorably breaking down in the mid-to-late-Anthropocene.

Don’t even get me started on Texting While Walking, Barker thought, nodding in assentation with himself.

Rusk puffed his cheeks, flared his lips like the mouth of a bullhorn. "Common carriage is a good thing, in itself, broadly speaking. But as a regulatory mechanism, it wasn’t designed or intended to deal with the degree of corporate concentration we see today. Some of the biggest ai-ess-pees—"

Barker mentally squinted. Internet Service Provider.

—are also effectively content producers. They’re the cable company and the broadcast network all rolled into one!

Could he duck out and retrieve his phone from his office? He’d left it behind out of habit—padded his pants pockets for the umpteenth time… Yup, definitely not there—forgetting about his defunct iPad. Now his hands felt empty and restless, as baffled as a concussed bird.

Barker started to doodle instead. Struggled to render the image he’d summoned in his mind. Scratched and scribbled, shaded and smudged, erased and revised. The drawing refused to cohere, every fix compounding earlier errors. The more effort, the more distorted the features became—more melting toad than his dead dog’s true face.

Rusk: In many cases, these huge, vertically integrated companies generate the content they’re distributing. I mean, look at Viacom, for example, or, or—

Fidget eased back into his preposterously expensive ergonomic chair, shifting and sighing to signal his discomfort.

Barker tilted his pencil to fill in a shadow under a bulbous jowl.

The dog had been a disaster from day one. Google suggested a digestive or irritable bowel disorder, but no amendment to the dog’s diet—raw beef, organic kibble, fish oil—stymied its emissions. Both indoors and out, his dog cavalierly warped the world around him with limpid clouds of stink.

Barker had just begun to adjust to these astringent ambushes—even renewing his Costco membership to buy Febreze by the pallet—when the seizures started. He’d wake in the middle of the night to agonized grunts, the dog writhing around on the floor, muzzle bearded with foam, torso wrenched with bone-cracking spasms, like a senseless sequence of sign language letters.

After only a few months, the number and magnitude of issues left Barker reeling. Another small but significant dream crumbling no sooner than it had been fulfilled.

He’d desperately wanted a dog throughout his childhood, but was denied one by (who else?) his parents. Perpetually harried professors, they appeased their progeny’s frequent (and increasingly plaintive) petitions by declaring low-maintenance animals the only possible compromise.

First fish. A small aquarium swarming with finny globs of orange and black, like leakage from a lava lamp. Barker was nonplussed, found their bugged-out eyes and emotional alterity unnerving. As if sensing his ambivalence, or in protest of their confinement—comfortable though that confinement had been made on their behalf—there was a rash of piscine suicides. He’d return from school to find yet another knotty corpse strangled in a tuft of chestnut shag. Though he cared little for the fish themselves, these recurrent brushes with the sharp cliff-edge of existence left young Barker shaken. He started avoiding the basement altogether, the stairs to which the tank—that ominous shrine to finitude—stood at the bottom of.

Soon enough his father soured on the frequent tank cleanings. Sayonara fishies!

Then gerbils. His mother cared for them with surprising tenderness, took Zen-like pleasure in configuring the yellow plastic tubes that protruded from the cage like ingrown plumbing; three-dimensional mazes that engendered not only latitude, but, in Barker’s appraisal, the cruel fantasy of escape.

Like so many fantasies, a futile one. No matter their arrangement, the tubes always (of course) returned the gerbils to their cage, to its turd-peppered mounds of cotton and sawdust. As with the stationary wheel, a whole lot of energy expended to end up in the exact same spot. Barker detected a mounting sense of desperation in the gerbils’ forays, would often observe one or the other animal in the throes of frenzied digging, trying to claw through translucent piping with tender, insufficient nails.

When the gerbils finally did escape—how this was done, and where they had gone, was never determined—his mother was forlorn for days. (Had the loss of her tube time, or the actual animals, left the deepest cut?) Barker pretended sadness, but was secretly relieved. The gerbils had rewarded his sporadic attempts at affection—cupping them in his hand while gingerly stroking their fur—by gnashing at the webbing between his thumb and forefinger.

Gun-shy, perhaps, due to these formative failures in pet-owning, it took him decades to register that, as a self-sufficient adult person, he was not only equipped, but required no one else’s permission, to acquire a dog on and of his own. He struck out for the

SPCA

, wanting a rescue partly because purebreds were so rife with genetic defects, but mostly for the varnish of beneficence the word rescue accorded.

How many times had he heard you don’t pick the dog, the dog picks you? Nope. Barker definitely picked this dog. Stooped to find, consigned to a corner, the canine embodiment of his then-current mental and emotional state: weakened and vulnerable from his crumbling marriage, harbouring early doubts about the arc of his career. This lax brown lump of inscrutable lineage—squat and stocky as a miniature ox; square-headed, stumpy-legged, with a tail as short and sharp as a quip—had clearly abandoned all hope, was perfectly content to curl up and wither on the vine.

They would rescue one another from despair.

Barker would later reflect on the conflicted look that had crossed the attendant’s face when he announced his pick. Well versed, presumably, in the animal’s myriad complications, who was she to stand in the way of its potential future happiness?

After purchasing the requisite accessories, Barker—pockets stuffed with biodegradable bags and bone-shaped treats that reeked of zoo enclosures—strutted off to the park like a proud parent on the first day of school. Fulfilling his fantasy in its entirety, he named the dog Atreyu, an homage to his favourite childhood book and film, the underlying rationale being that it would be frickin’ high-larious to repeatedly yell the name aloud.

Upon arriving at the park, Atreyu, resplendent in a badass spiked collar, assumed a state of resolute inertia. Barker cajoled, lured him with treats, delivered prodding nudge-kicks to his posterior. Atreyu was as uninterested in mobility as in the brethren bounding up for their sniff, whose entreaties to scrap he outright rebuffed.

Barker put some distance between them. Enthusiastically called and clapped.

Atreyu!

Clap! Clap!

Atreyu! Here boy!

Clap! Clap! Clap!

Barker had only just caught the first of what would turn out to be many whiffs of disappointment when, momentarily distracted by the heedless owner of a shitting mutt—You want to come back here and pick up that mess?—he turned to find Atreyu gone. Vanished. Barker stomped through the park, his ever-more desperate cries of Atreyu! Atreyu! bereft of their anticipated comedic impact.

After a dozen-odd agonizing minutes, a woman appeared, cradling the stupid dog in her arms like a panting, overstuffed stomach, paws booted with muck. She’d spotted Atreyu ferreting at a rodent hole in a copse of maples—a second-hand account of energy and purpose that Barker would never personally witness—set him down, joked how those same holes drove her own dog into a similar fugue state. Overwhelmed with anger and relief, Barker was primed to deliver an appropriately jarring smack to the crown of Atreyu’s dumb, boxy skull when he noticed the woman cock her head and give the air a circumspect sniff.

Grim smile. Smells like trouble, she said.

Yes. Trouble.

He’d imagined an animal that would love him unconditionally, satisfy his every whim (by sensing his need/want) for affection, save him from lassitude and sadness, lick him when he was low, curl up on the couch while he played video games, or at his feet while he marked papers, fold effortlessly around the shape of his body and life, his daily routine; break up and fill out that routine, get him up off his ass, force him outside, radiate energy and animacy, pore over scents like a monk over velum, lubricate his interactions with dog-toting women. Barker endowed Trouble (née Atreyu) with all these hopes and dreams and responsibilities and more.

They never returned to that first park. It was too sprawling, too boundless, and clearly Trouble could not be trusted with too much freedom. From then on, Barker took Trouble only so far as the park nearest his condo complex—a fenced-in, woodchip-lined, shit-littered patch of thinning turf. (A gerbil cage for dogs!) Barker had intended it as punishment—See what you get for running off on me?—but Trouble evinced zero compunction. Evinced zero of anything actually, simply conceded to squander his soon-to-be abbreviated existence hunkered down on his haunches, sponging up the world’s dirt and wet, secreting foul-smelling, eye-stinging, throat-

throttling haze.

Needless to say, even in this inner-city dog ghetto teeming with cocksure hipsters tethered to glorified rats, Trouble was profoundly unhelpful in picking up dames.

Then seizures. These brought Trouble’s signature characteristic, besides smell and stasis, into bold relief: The dog was expensive. Costly middle-of-the-night runs to a twenty-four-hour vet, x-rays with inconclusive results, prescriptions for pills, liquids, and tinctures with no discernible effect, that offered no alleviation.

One night the convulsions grew so severe that Barker feared Trouble might snap his own neck. The vet who typically worked the graveyard shift—a freckle-spangled ginger that looked not a day over fourteen—advised him that they were running short on options. Would Barker consider surgery? The procedure, relatively common for dogs with epilepsy, had a decent success rate, at a cost of nearly ten thousand dollars.

What does ‘decent’ mean?

Well, the vet sighed with four a.m. fatigue, "if it is epilepsy… Rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand, shrugged. Flip a coin."

Ten grand, Barker thought, trying to appear pensive, is a pretty hefty coin to flip.

Technically, he could have shouldered the expense, but for so uncertain an outcome? Did Barker have the right to prolong this poor animal’s suffering for the sake of his own selfish wants, to fill the breach opened up by a failed marriage and uncertain future?

He had half-a-mind to cart the shuddering canine back to the

SPCA

, preferably mid-seizure, and demand recompense. You sold me a defective dog, he’d tell them. This one’s on the fritz.

Which reminded him, he needed to cancel the reservation for the kennel during the conference in November. Under Trouble’s mangled portrait Barker wrote: Cancel kennel booking.

Underneath that added: Write keynote.

After the euthanization, Barker stopped by the mall and relinquished his tablet to an impassive Genius whose efforts failed to rouse the machine. He devoted the remainder of his Sunday to crafting a suitable tribute to Trouble on Facebook, one that struck the requisite balance of mourning and optimism.

Barker recounted intermittent bouts of tenderness, rare instances when Trouble consented to be held, would feint in Barker’s arms, flopping his bricklike head over the crook of Barker’s elbow. The way Barker phrased this affectionate quirk made it sound as if Trouble had done this all the time. A minor deception for the sake of a more moving eulogy.

Come Monday morning Barker was awash in sympathy and consolation. Family and friends and peers and colleagues and people whose names and faces he could barely place alike all rallied to his aid, bequeathing condolences and well-wishes, inquiring as to his emotional mettle, sharing pithy aphorisms, quotes, and words of wisdom. Some buoyed his spirits by recounting the loss of their own cherished companions. It’s so personal, one wrote on his wall, like losing a part of your self. (Barker: That’s exactly where I’m at right now.) Spent most of the day on the couch, nursing scotches as the compassion poured in.

The torrent tapered off mid-Tuesday. Maybe there’d been a resurgence during the faculty meeting? Patted his pockets. Right, his phone was in his office. Yes, he should definitely go and get it after all.

Shiv stared at him over the top of cartoonishly large frames, the colour and circumference of a Coke can.

Barker returned her stare: What?

Jutted her head.

Barker followed the gesture. Maureen was staring at him also. Had she asked him something? A prompt for Barker to do something? Say something? Interject?

Rusk’s voice broke back into the forefront of Barker’s awareness, …creating and circulating content, profiting from that content, just like traditional broadcast companies—paywalls and advertising and so forth. You can’t just say ‘we’re in charge of the pipes and whatever flows through them has nothing to do with us.’ When you’re granted access to public airways, Rusk repeated the words for emphasis, "public airways, you’re subject to oversight and regulation. But more to the point…"

Rusk lost his train of thought. Maureen audibly inhaled.

"This is a distraction from the real crime, Rusk blurted, that they’re using this process, this opaque process, nominally for the purpose of revising common carriage regulations—and it’s really troubling that the government is giving them so much leeway, basically letting them draft their own legislation—to rewrite the rules governing the neutrality of the Internet itself!"

Rusk gripped the table with both hands, as if bracing for impact. This is the real deal here, folks! This could mean the end of the ’Net as we know it!

The room went gauzy with silence. Fidget picked up his phone and thumbed. Barker stole a longing glance outside. Another gorgeous afternoon. Wished he were cycling. Any other Wednesday he would be cycling.

Another facial plea from Maureen. Barker was meant to manage Rusk whenever feasible, as Rusk was more liable to consent to said wrangling if it was undertaken by another man.

Barker’s legs pumped restively under the table.

Something between a groan and a grunt emanated from Dr. Bertrand Shuler. With his billow of bright white hair, and the silkish scarf coiling his neck like a mane, Bert was the closest thing the program had to a grand doyen. His renown and longevity, along with his brushes with some of the greats—he’d not only worked under McLuhan, but penned the quintessential McLuhan biography, The Message in the Medium—granted him a nigh-legendary status.

Because he seemed to deserve it, Bert was treated with extraordinary deference. He could have retired years ago and become a professor emeritus with a tidy pension, and yet he lingered, leading the first half of the yearlong seminar for the incoming PhD cohort before jetting south for the winter. An enviable schedule, and uniquely generous of the program, but such was Bert’s prestige that it was regarded as his generosity to them, and not the other way round. Even deigning to appear at these meetings—meetings at which he paid as little attention as anyone—was treated as a nigh-monarchical courtesy.

Barker liked Bert, and Bert liked Barker right back. He was a triple rarity: an iconoclast, a charming storyteller, and a lifer who’d foresworn the typically itinerant academic existence despite the fact that his clout and acclaim would have secured him work anywhere in the world.

A few days after officially joining the faculty, Bert invited Barker out for drinks. Barker couldn’t help but ask—Why’d you stay put? I was young, married, two kids, liked the city. Better yet, my wife liked the city. My kids…well, who gives a shit what your kids think? Whisked his hand through the air, nearly felling his pint. This is a big country. A long, serpentine border town. Lots of good places to be. But this, rapped his folded bifocals twice on the table, "this is where the action is. This city has its head up its own ass, absolutely. But not for no reason."

Barker found Bert’s war stories riveting: the internecine skirmishes that had nearly toppled the department in its infancy; the subsequent purge of raucous, rebellious Marxists (There was this unspoken agreement that, at any moment, we were prepared and more than willing to burn the fucker down), their ranks replenished by a mosaic of obsequious, sycophantic lickspittles (Bert’s phrasing) overly-grateful for a job in an increasingly crowded field (Too busy ass-kissing to concern themselves with societal collapse); the broader battles waged over political correctness in the nineties ("I wrote my thesis on McCarthy, and I’d be goddamned if I was going to sit idly by while students—students!—tried to resuscitate the blacklist!").

The forthrightness of his cynicism could be bracing, yes, but also refreshing. Bert made Barker feel far less crazy for harbouring his own creeping doubts. Barker’s generation had been reared to believe that scoring a tenure-track gig in so intensely competitive a market was tantamount to winning the lottery; an extraordinary privilege bestowed upon a select and distinguished few. Here was a standing member of the old guard, still holding his ground against successive waves of young Turks, voicing an uncomfortable truth: It was just a job. A job with obvious benefits, sure, but a job nonetheless.

Bert leaned out of his recline, plucked his bifocals off their perch, folded them into a wand, waved the wand at Rusk. It’s unconscionable, Bert said. We should all sign his damned letter. Bert fussed with his scarf, pruning its lint, primping it for the pride.

Barker looked to Maureen, but she was watching Bert, who resumed his former leonine repose.

Maureen’s voice was calm and deliberate: The concern, I think, is that having multiple faculty sign an open letter will make it look like the program, or the university itself, has taken a position on this legislation.

"The university should take a position," Rusk insisted.

Riiight, their collective silence said, but that’ll never happen. The university had no incentive to pick a fight with the government, much