The Dilettantes (9 page)

The editors had just sat down at their computers when a small voice piped up from the doorway. Tracy recognized him as the same nervous, bespectacled kid who’d hung around
The Peak’
s Clubs Days table for most of the afternoon, not saying much, but nodding at everything anyone else said. Tonight he must’ve spotted the editors up in the Pub and trailed them back to the office.

“Are you,” he said to Keith, “uh, are you still doing that list?” Spinning around to face him, Keith stared without blinking. “I heard you talking about it,” he added. “Before. The one about Darfur.” He nervously rubbed his hands against his crisp,
SFU
-brand sweatshirt.

Keith kept staring. Eventually he wiped the stray pesto sauce off of his hands and folded his arms. “What’s your name, awkward guy?”

“Claude,” he said. “I’m just visiting. I don’t work here. Obviously.” He did a kind of half wave, half flinch, as if he were expecting some combination of pie-in-face and football-in-groin. “I was just thinking, you know, that the Darfur thing seems a little, I don’t know, too soon?”

“Interesting. And what do you study, Claude?”

“S-science. Earth science.”

“Listen. There might be a billion ways to climb a mountain or whatever, but there’s only one rule in comedy: if you think it’s too soon, then it’s probably already huge in Dubai.”

“What?”

“Our website gets a lot of traffic from the United Arab Emirates. I think I’ve got my finger on the pulse of something huge. Did you come here to get free dinner?”

“No, I—”

“Because we already ate, asshole. Have you ever read
A Thousand Plateaus?”

“No, I—”

“Correct. Nobody has. Now, what do you think is the worst thing ever?”

Claude blushed. He had no idea if he was expected to be funny here or not. Panicking, he decided against it. “I don’t know—Twitter.”

“Yes
. That’s going in.” Keith started typing with floppy fingers, all too aware that Tracy would have to clean up his mess later.

She peered down from behind his chair. “What if the scalped orphans were also in wheelchairs?”

“No. God no. Maybe—
maybe
—they could be dyslexic. Or hungry.”

“Two Paper Cuts in Five Minutes?”

“Better.” More floppy typing.

“What about Scurvy?” asked Claude, barely holding back a nervous giggle.

Keith stood up, clapped both of his hands on Claude’s shoulders, and looked him right in the eyes. “That’s fucking terrible,” he said, enunciating each word.

Claude’s expression wobbled. “Oh. Well, how about—The Black Plague?”

“Jesus,” muttered Keith, plonking back down in his chair. “Did you grow up inside a goddamn Monty Python sketch?”

Tracy stepped between them. “Hey, forget it,” she said, giving Claude an encouraging pat on the arm. “Really. Keith is an asshole. It’s just hazing. He doesn’t mean any of it.”

Keith got a faraway look in his eyes. “Shut up for a second, both of you. I’ve got it: Getting an Abortion in Darfur.” He threw both hands in the air. “It’s
perfect.”

A wave of disapproval came in from around the room, equal parts muttering and groans. Keith had hit his target. He looked so proud.

“I’m sure our lawyer will love it,” Tracy said, patting her pockets for more caramels.

But Keith was already halfway underneath his desk. “See you guys next week.” He tucked his sweater under his head as a makeshift pillow and was out cold within seconds.

A few minutes later the door swung open, and in came Alex, his head held low. He was carrying a shiny plastic bottle in the shape of a trophy. But this trophy was see-through, and full of a cloudy purple liquid. He held it to his chest like a comfort blanket.

“So?” Tracy asked, trying to act casual. “Did you find the guy?”

Alex barely broke his stride. “Technically,” he said. “You could say that. Did anyone save me some yam fries?”

He sequestered himself in the archive room and used its decade-old computer to pull a feature from the Canadian University Press newswire more or less at random. With no scoop, with no story at all, he had to start his entire section over from scratch, and pronto. Luckily, the newswire had access to nearly every student newspaper in the country, and as such was full of add-water journalism. He chose a story on the rapidly changing economy of Liberia—or was it the ecology of Libya?—that had obviously begun life as a term paper. Alex dumped the text into InDesign. Then he added a few pull quotes, picked an appropriately abrasive title font, and boom: he was already halfway there.

Frankly, the whole thing was impenetrable. But then nobody read features anyway. Alex’d be the first one to tell you.

He emerged just after eleven and started gathering up his stuff. His lips were stained purple; the trophy bottle lay sideways and vanquished on the ground behind him. On his way out he stopped by the copy desk, where Tracy sat hunched over in her chair, working her way through sheets of paper with “2nd” written loopily in the top corner.

She looked up. “You done already?”

“That’s it, that’s all.”

“Even your part of page 2?”

“Yeah,” Alex said, his eyes aching in mysterious ways. “I just stole the wire synopsis. Turns out I had it backwards: it was about liberty in Ecuador. Who knew? I’m having trouble remembering if I even read the thing.” He looked around. “Where is everyone, anyway?”

“Dunno. Keith’s napping. Suze gave that Claude kid a
CD
review to work on—you should’ve seen the look on his face. Then she took off with Steve somewhere.” She let this last bit hang in the air.

“Oh, I see,” Alex said, pausing for dramatic effect. “They’re off
sexing
each other.”

Tracy sighed. “Nicely played. And hey, about the video thing—I’m sorry it fell through.”

“Yeah, thanks. It’s not a big deal.” Alex was still irritated, though, as if he had a splinter in one palm and fingernails too long to get a good grip on it. “You know the weirdest part? The guy actually would’ve done it. But he wanted me to pay him.”

“Wow,” Tracy said. “Really?”

“So I just walked out. I mean, I
had
to walk out. That’s breaking some kind of major rule. Isn’t it?”

“Honestly? I have no idea.”

“Me neither. I’ve actually been kicking myself ever since it happened.” He paused again. “But I think I was right. Fuck. I think.”

“Either way,” Tracy said gently, “maybe next time involve the rest of us, okay? You ran off before we could even send someone along to get a photo of the guy.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right. But it’s going to take the
Metro
a few weeks to make a dent up here anyway, right? We’ve still got time. I just got a little fired up.”

Tracy’s eyes brightened. “Hey, how’s Secondhand Shakespeare going? My class read a great play this week. Remember those? Plays?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Ha! Spill it, loser.”

“Yesterday,” he said grimly, “we sat through an hour-long presentation of pop songs where Shakespeare is one of the many things that aren’t relevant to the singers’ lives. Algebra was another big one. After it was over, someone asked what it is we really
mean
when we say ‘Shakespeare.’ It seriously may have derailed us for the rest of the semester.” Alex adjusted his slipping backpack. “Okay. Night. Hope you don’t end up on the couches.”

Tracy smiled all the way now. “Dave’s coming to get me,” she said. “Did I tell you? I’ve been avoiding his phone calls lately—for a bunch of complicated, dumb reasons. I won’t bore you with the details. But things are starting to look up, I think. I found a note on our kitchen table this morning about a dinner reservation at that sushi place over at Lonsdale Quay. I’m supposed to think he left it there by mistake. And then he offered to come pick me up tonight. How cute.”

“Hey, cool. Have fun.” With that, Alex was out the back door, his footsteps echoing in solitude back up the parkade ramp.

Hours later, after Tracy had yelled at him to wake up and finish his Darfur list already, Keith shot up and hit his head on the underside of his desk, making everything on top shuffle a couple of inches to the right.

He looked around for the long-departed Claude. “Hey, where’d Chuck Norris go?” he asked, blinking and rubbing his eyes. “That guy was alright.”

The crowd in the hallway outside
AQ 5009
started buzzing when two girls, an apple-cheeked nineteen-year-old and a grizzled
5
th-year double major, broke several weeks of silence to acknowledge that they shared another tutorial that semester, too. After a few minutes of pleasantries, the teenager’s real friend in the class showed up with a plastic bag brimming with sour keys and gummy fried eggs. The candies were quickly distributed three ways. Then the friend turned and offered one to the
2
nd-year in the spotless Oxford button-up who, up until then, had been leaning quietly against the heating vents. Before long there were nine of them, all laughing and doing impressions of their professor’s vocal tics and hand gestures, the chatter becoming steadily louder until someone from inside the classroom came over to the door and closed it with a huff.

It was
11:23
a.m., Monday morning, Bizarro Christmas.

Alex, meanwhile, had gotten to school several hours earlier. He needed to see the
Metro
boxes—so inviting, so full, and so infuriatingly well distributed—for himself. To confirm it. The whole situation tugged annoyingly at his sleeve, rendering him unable to focus on anything else. He’d spent the entire weekend half-awake and restless.

The copy he carried with him up the
AQ
stairwell came from one of the twenty-one boxes he’d counted scattered around campus,
but as he flipped the pages, Alex was surprised to feel almost nothing. It wasn’t so scary when you were actually looking at it. Really, the
Metro
was the same pile of horseshit it had always been—today’s front-page story was about some local dogs that resembled famous Hollywood dogs—only now it had migrated up one measly hill. The ink still smeared on a finger’s first contact, and the faded dishwater-grey pages still made it look like hamster-cage carpet in the making.

This was supposed to be his downfall?
This?
He wanted to laugh.

Alex came around the corner of the
AQ
and saw the backs of his classmates filing into the emptying room. With them went their communal air of secrets and sugar crystals, leaving what felt like a vacuum chill in its wake. Sometimes he felt his entire university career was nothing but looped footage of him walking into a room two minutes too late.

The tables inside were arranged in a loose rectangle, and, seating patterns having been pretty much established since week two, Alex took his usual place beside the apple-cheeked girl and a few empty seats to the left of Oxford shirt.

Two
Metros
were lying on his table. Two
Metros
, and none of his paper. This was easy enough to rationalize: the
Peak
s probably hadn’t even been put out yet. He could picture them in big cubic bundles on the loading docks right now, bound and gagged with neon zap straps. As he shrugged his jacket off, Alex noticed everyone around him sucking on sour keys. He gave them all an instinctive frown, then settled into doodling on the back of that week’s lecture notes.

Tutorials at
SFU
were designed to supplement the lectures, which usually took place in huge, multi-hundred-person-capacity halls where raising your hand to ask a question was tantamount to academic suicide. It was hard enough sounding eloquent when surrounded by legions of your snickering peers, without having to keep up the illusion that you were having a normal conversation
across an echo chamber the size of a football field. In fact,
SFU’S
lectures were still cozier than those of its older brother, the gargantuan University of British Columbia. But dialogue had been a cornerstone of the upstart school’s constitution, and as a result, these seventeen-person discussion blocks, led by underpaid graduate students, were here to stay.
SFU:
Sibling Rivalry Since 1965.

Alex’s
TA
stumbled into the room, juggling a stack of shifting looseleaf papers, several manila folders wedged under one armpit, a bulletproof travel mug, and an ancient lime-green Discman connected by a long, knotted cord to a set of beefy headphones that threatened to devour his neck. His name was Eli, and his thesis had something to do with
King Lear
and plate spinning. He had long ringlets of blond hair that fell just below his nose, and thick jowls, though he was not especially chubby anywhere else. Today he wore one of his many striped shirts, unbuttoned over an off-white T-shirt, with the sleeves rolled sloppily to his elbows. In the divide between
TAS
who stuck to recapping and clarifying material from the lecture, and those who tried to spruce things up by inserting their own bright ideas into the curriculum, Eli fell, enthusiastically, into the latter category.

On the desk in front of him, he smushed his papers together so that they leaned tenuously against one another for support. “Well,” he began, “how did everyone enjoy Thursday’s lecture?”

A few murmurs and nods of approval.

“Good, good. Personally, I thought Professor Devereaux made some very salient points about iconography in our post-Industrial age—the fish tank in Luhrmann’s
Romeo + Juliet
[1996] as ‘postmodern’ Christian bumper sticker was, I thought, rather brilliant.” He leaned forward, as if giving his students an illicit heads-up. “I’ve seen excerpts from his new book,” he added softly, “where this kind of approach fully reveals itself. It is a real …
delight.”

Satisfied, Eli resumed full volume. “Are there any questions about what we covered last week?” It clearly bothered him when there were, but the apple-cheeked girl raised her hand anyway.

“Yes,” he exhaled. “Eleanor.”

“Hi. Professor Devereaux mentioned there’s been a recent movement to compile all of Shakespeare’s references to products and, like, material goods—to create a profile of what he was maybe like as a consumer?”

Eli waved his hand dismissively. “You’re referring to the Hawk v. Handsaw Coalition. Some interesting work there, but frankly, most of them are loonies.” He chuckled as if this were beyond obvious. “Either way, they’re of no relevance to this course.”

“But don’t you think,” she pressed, “all the same, that it might be of some interest to know what Shakespeare would’ve thought about all this stuff we’re looking at?”

“Right,” said the double major from the other side of the room. “What if Will’s favourite colour were blue, and we spend all our time wondering about a pair of red sweat socks with his name on them? That’s got to count for something.”

The syllabus for HUM 335: Shakespeare Without Shakespeare was jam-packed. Even though anything penned by the Bard himself was strictly off limits, the reading list was loaded with all kinds of hand-me-down resources: diary entries from contemporaneous Globe audience members, apocryphal biographies, Japanese manga (where every character for some reason wore a gleaming spacesuit), films written by or starring Kenneth Branagh, quotes from early
Simpsons
episodes, street graffiti, fortune cookie scrolls, films enjoyed by Kenneth Branagh, and the latest ad campaign for a brand of skateboard shoes that the class was only allowed to refer to as Those Scottish Sneakers.

Eli slowly shook his head. “A classic error,” he said. “It’s what we call the intentional fallacy. You see, we can never say for sure what
Shakespeare
meant
to express in his work. We have the end products, yes. But these are necessarily fallible. Incomplete. They are merely rough drafts that cannot lose their watermark. To equate that with a writer’s supreme vision is akin to—well, saying my mother’s famous coffee cake recipe is the same thing as the cloud of black smoke that pours out of my sister’s oven every Christmas.” He looked out the window, pondering. “So would the Bard have been a Coke or Pepsi man? We’ll never truly know.”

Alex muttered to himself, “I don’t think that’s quite what the New Critics had in mind.”

“Are there any other comments on this?” Eli knew that the best way to deflect an unwanted question was to open it up to the room; in that sense, it was a page right out of
The Peak
editors’ playbook. “Okay. On to new business.” Eli took a big sip of coffee and began burrowing through his stacks of paper, finally coming up with the desired sheet.

“As you all know,” he said, “your first essays are due in a few weeks. You should all still have the topics I distributed last class, but if not, that’s okay: there’s now an Exciting Alternative.” You could actually hear the capital letters in Eli’s speech, in the same way he implied sneaky scare quotes around grad-student-quicksand terms like
postmodern
, or
text
.

Alex had already grown to hate these flights of fancy. Was it too much to just write his two essays, earn his 10 percent participation grade, and move on? Was nothing allowed to be just boring anymore? Did university have to be
wacky
, too?

Eli cocked his head, looking first bemused, and then increasingly unsettled. He’d expected more of a reaction. Several seconds passed.

Oxford shirt eventually gave in. “But what
is
the alternative?” he asked in a flat deadpan.

“Ah, so glad you asked, Jeremy! After consulting with Professor Devereaux, I am thrilled to announce that, should any of you choose
to do so, you may officially forgo all of the assignments listed on the syllabus.” He paused again, evidently expecting gasps of disbelief. But Alex’s generation lived in decidedly more jaded times than whatever was running through Eli’s head. “Just—just ditch the whole lot,” the
TA
added.

Only one student, a 2nd-year in a black turtleneck who always sat at the
TA’S
immediate right, was still furiously taking notes.

“Okay …” Alex said.

“What’s the catch?” asked Eleanor.

Eli’s jowls seemed to frown with him. “Geez, you guys. No love for the art of suspense, huh? You just want answers, answers, answers. ‘Will this be on the test?’”

“Actually,” the double major said, “we’re trying to figure out if there’s even going to
be
a test.”

Eli held his hands out in surrender. “Fine. Wonder no longer. No need for a drumroll or anything.” There wasn’t one. “If you decide to take on this alternate curriculum, the only thing you must produce by the end of the semester is: your very own Shakespeare adaptation.”

Jeremy coughed into his sleeve. The turtlenecked girl’s pen scratchings only barely filled the silence.

“Now, don’t worry,” Eli continued. “It doesn’t have to retain all of the nuances of the source material—in fact here I suggest you follow Professor Devereaux’s ethos, and consult it as sparingly as possible—and it doesn’t have to be fancy. If you want to make a film, it doesn’t have to be feature-length. Your
Richard III
–inspired hot air balloon doesn’t have to meet Transport Canada regulations.”

Slowly, the implications of this new project began to dawn on the class. Restrictions, possibilities, and especially loopholes. And since the social barrier had already been weakened by their shared pre-class snack, actual discussions started to break out, to Eli’s shock and joy. Cheap sugar lasered through the students’ veins. They took
turns pulling apart their
TA’S
idea and reassembling it, looking for weaknesses like a raptor at an electric fence.

Eleanor raised her voice to interrupt. “Are you sure Professor Devereaux approved this?”

The rest of the class froze.

“Absolutely,” Eli snapped back—though his cheeks twitched a little as he said it. “So as I was saying, your adaptation doesn’t have to be perfect. But it must be artful. And it must capture the spirit of the Bard’s ideas, in whatever style, length, and medium you choose.”

Alex, who had been privately mulling the project over, thought back to what he’d half-joked to Tracy earlier. Maybe he
should
sculpt something. When else would he get the chance to do something so perverse for a pretty much guaranteed A?

The conversations grew steadily louder and more expansive. Alex wasn’t included in any of them, but his mind was racing with too many possibilities to be envious. Falstaff pop art.
Titus Andronicus
brand meat pies. A re-worked clip from
Aladdin
with Shakespearean verse dubbed overtop of the cranky parrot. It became a kind of Mad Lib, an undergrad’s drinking game: see how badly you can desecrate a legend. (Tyson had a similar trick he played with Beach Boys songs, where he’d quietly sing to himself his own ultra-graphic reinterpretations.)

Alex felt up to the challenge. His lungs swelled with adrenaline, just like they had at the outset of his viral video stakeout. After all, he’d always considered himself an artist. Time to prove it.

He started scribbling down notes of his own.

At the front, Eli took in the room with a huge smile. The number-one topic of conversation in
TA
offices across the department was not which pedagogical—nobody was so crass as to say
teaching—
style worked best. No, it was how to make the students do anything. Literally, any thing. Speak, sneeze, whatever.

“Everyone,” he said, “settle down.” His voice wavered with emotion. “Is it fair to assume that some of you would be Interested in doing this?”

Seventeen hands shot straight up.

After tutorial let out, and Eli had re-gathered his mountain of paper and tottered off to his office, flush with pride, the same bunch of students who’d bonded in the hallway waited behind in the classroom, still buzzing with sour keys and their gossip-worthy new assignment. It was now after noon; a plan to “continue this discussion” at the Pub was quickly taken up.

Eleanor nudged Alex, who was sweeping a series of pens back into his bag. He looked up and saw her cheeks flaring a light Braeburn red. “Do you want to come?” she asked, before quickly adding, “We’re going to the Pub. Didn’t know if you heard.”

“Oh,” Alex replied. “Yeah. It’s nice of you to ask, but I have to meet a professor. Office hours.”

What? Why am I saying this?