The Retreat

"Can I tell you something?"

Pam has always seemed a bit crazy to me. She's a grandmother who acts like an arrested adolescent, crowding conversation with desperately harvested, hip neologisms--"I know, right?!?"

Her emails are spiced with jejune, grinning emojis. How she became chair of our department, I'm not sure. Buchanan told me a story about her after we'd finished a bottle of scotch at a party one night.

"We deliberated for a long time before Pam was hired. We finally sent off the acceptance letter, and her trip from Toronto to our first meeting was long and treacherous. She stopped at a diner a few clicks from campus when she finally rolled into town. There was an insane waitress working at that diner. She grabbed Pam in the parking lot, bashed her with a brick, and collected her things. She assumed Pam's identity, and has been teaching here for twenty years."

His delivery was deadpan. I wasn't sure he was bullshitting until he started laughing and clapped me on the shoulder. His laugh was part wheeze, like a dog with three legs.

"Sure," I said to Pam, nudging my office door closed with the scuffed toe of my shoe.

"I know you're not a believer," she said, which made me brace myself. My coffee was cold, but I took a long pull to hide my apprehensive mouth. "I hope you'll trust me when I tell you that I think God entrusts the students in my classes to me. I can't complain about them, because I think I have a sacred duty to take care of them. You shouldn't be so sarcastic." She starts playing with a few strands of her gunmetal hair, winding them around her fingers.

"Does the registrar know about this?" I hold her gaze, disciplining my tone so that she won't take offense.

She laughs. I wonder if that laugh was the last thing the legitimate occupant of her tenured post heard, before the brick landed?

"No, silly. This is just between us. Think about it, will you? God bless you, Jack." Her touch on my shoulder is gentle, even fond. She leaves.

I will be spending time with Pam in the woods, soon. A "departmental retreat" is scheduled to take place this weekend. I think it's rather farcical. Our department doesn't offer a graduate degree. We have relatively few majors. We live on introductory rhetoric and composition, which all students must suffer through to get a degree, most certificates and some diplomas. Micro-credentials, I'm not sure about. I'm sure we'll shrink a course into a tweet soon.

Lots of sections of this course must be taught, which means we can hire and fire contract faculty, or adjuncts, or sessional lecturers whenever we like, and get them to do most of the grunt work in the classrooms while we fondle our boutique ideas, and find places to publish our ridiculous thoughts about them. It's pretty plush.

When you make a handsome salary and have plenty of time on your hands, you start polluting meetings and chats and message boards with your needs and complaints about the department's failure to meet them. When you take yourself too seriously, you start aping people who actually deserve to be taken seriously. Your attire, your diet, your opinions have to change. So does your interest in the trappings of a real department, like conferences (who organizes a conference that features papers by undergraduates? What surgeon just hands the freshman intern a scalpel, slaps a blindfold on them and says, "Just have faith in yourself. My grandmother has a hardy constitution."?!)

A departmental retreat. That's the kind of thing a serious department has, so we've got to have one too.

In the woods. Away from everything interesting in this entire province. Rachel's uncle has a "beautiful little spot" in the woods, which will cost the serious members of the department, and the "university," nothing. They'll splurge on excellent cheese and mediocre wine, and some will play in the snow or on the ice, and most of us will sit around inside making fun of the world and ourselves and the very idea of a retreat.

I look forward to doing that with Buchanan. He does not need to drink a lot of scotch to speak honestly, without worrying too much about what will happen next. He's been wearing the same, lime green track suit for about a year, though. Laundered and what not, you understand. But the same one, or he's got a set, like uniforms for each day. I'm concerned, but I haven't said anything. He's been around a long time. He deserves some respect.

All of the serious members of our department, our departmental educational assistants (sometimes, when you do not want to give someone a raise, you give them a shiny new title; you can't eat a title, or pay your rent with it) and a few lecturers, like me. If we had fewer sessionals and more serious members of the department, with tenure and so forth, sessionals like me would not be welcome at all. We wouldn't have to absorb most of the nonsense for a laughably low price, so we wouldn't merit a second thought.

I packed a bag and brought it with me today. They're going to get us there, deep in the tedious, frightening woods, for nothing. Generosity takes many forms.

A school bus is coming. Yes, that kind. Marked like a weirdly oblong, wingless mechanical bee. Most of us have doctoral degrees. Some stages, you get through once and for all. Nobody needs a second bris.

All of the serious department members have handsome automobiles of their very own. Again: half the teaching, twice the salary. I am glad the bus is coming, because I want to be miserable at the departmental retreat. I can be miserable at home any time. Being on a bus with some of these people will be unpleasant, but there are others I like well enough, and a few I am always pleased to see in the hallway.

The local heartthrob, a syrupy charlatan who was a preacher and then a rock star before he joined the team and went full Elmer Gantry, is going bald. I'd like to sit close enough to track the retreat of his golden locks. I'd like to tell Buchanan about it, in detail, over a beer.

I got a good seat. Debbie, the educational assistant who knows where everything is and who to call if something doesn't work is across the moat of gum and graffiti that "the aisle" always becomes. She opens some kind of snack cake when we're all aboard. We all cope somehow.

One of the moles (a sessional who "gets feedback" from the serious people and tries to "encourage your colleagues to think about that, too") suggests that we play some sort of team building game. I swear they study dystopias, looking for "exciting ideas for the retreat."

I pretend to fall asleep, sprawling toward the window with my feet dangling a little into the aisle. Debbie makes a sort of clucking noise when I go down. She really does care about all of us. Border collies must form strong attachments to those in the herd.

I see Randall Muskwa in a row of seats that is otherwise empty near the back, reading something on his phone. He told me the other day that he thinks the heartthrob's spirit animal is a pigmy marmoset. He'd have tenure by now, if the serious people didn't insist on a global search when they anoint a new member of the elect. Kate, who waited five years for a promotion, has a DPhil from Oxford. Let me repeat: we do not offer an MA or a PhD. We're in the Canadian North. People grit their teeth and endure the place. Who do the serious people think they are, and where?

I get up when the team building seems to be subsiding and make my way to a seat opposite Randall. He looks up from his phone and smiles. "I think they want me to do some kind of talk about 'indigenous ways of knowing' when we're up there. I'll just give them some Heidegger and a little Franz Fannon and find you afterwards to tell you their dumb questions. Do you have marking with you?" He turns his phone my way. There's an image of Sisyphus, pushing his boulder up a hill, on the screen.

The bus smells like a mobile public toilet for young people. They sprayed some carcinogenic, commercial perfume around before "repurposing" it for our sake. It didn't help. Debbie comes back and gives Randall and I a snack cake a piece. Randall hid his phone as Debbie approached, and I straightened my shirt without thinking about it. We always feel like Debbie is approaching in order to tell us about a problem that is not our fault, that we must solve right away. She walks like she's completing a form.

I actually see her savor the aroma of her second round, when the little plastic sleeve parts in her slightly tremulous, ringless hands. She dips her beak and smiles. Randall thanks her and pockets his. I commune with Debbie. The icing is pale, sweet plasticene. I wonder what insulin costs?

When we've been driving through darkness and green needles for a few hours and the sun is growing bored of us, a mole comes and hands each of us a "room arrangement" form. I'm in "outbuilding two," which makes the hair on my arms behave like the green needles on all of these tall, obstinate trees. Randall is in "outbuilding one." They know we gossip about them.

The "outbuildings" are aptly named. The cabin is gigantic, luxurious and lightly inhabited. The "outbuildings" are stationary school buses.

Bunks.

Another rite of passage that I do not need to repeat. Do you know what human males do, by night? What if they did it on a ceiling two feet from your nose, and your ears...but here I am. With a bunk. There is indoor plumbing. I can smell it now, in fact.

After a team building exercise that involves balloons and inane chanting, some mediocre food is distributed, followed by a sugary apology. Cocktails are being made by some, cans opened by others. Then the "serious" portion of our little gathering begins.

"Tell me how you feel."

Pam went to a seminar last year that transformed her into someone who is suddenly, routinely heralded as the one who "gives good meeting." She realized that if she could do so often enough, she might ascend into administrative Valhalla, never to read an essay that conflates Sophocles and Socrates again. She likes to start with a jarring, visceral question that lets us know that she is full of empathy.

I nudge Randall. He leans in and whispers, "People fall for this all the time. She's basically saying she knows it sucks to be us. She doesn't just think about it; she feels it, just like one of us. She is not one of us. She is the priestess, and the gods are on high. She cannot mitigate our suffering, but she can help us cope with it. There you go. Tolerable cultural stasis."

Randall is the sort of person who becomes a poet when he drinks. If he drinks too much, the magic fades. It's there though. At first.

I move toward the ostentatious kitchen masquerading as a quaint rural b&b to get us another pair of cans. Debbie is looking around the kitchen like a Sicilian grandmother waking up in the Vatican. I admire her faith.

While my head is in one of the fridges--yes, that's right, they're plural--seeking cans, Anahita nudges the dorsal side of the door and says, "I'm Jack, and I'm sulking and mocking with the cool kids while the rest of you feel." I did not see her on the bus.

I emerge canned. "I'm Anahita and my impression of Jack needs work." We have been working on our routine for years. I'm still not sure how she feels about many things, but I know what she thinks about a surprising range of things, and I stand close to her often.

She's gorgeous. Don't stare.

She elbows me in the solar plexus and goes to rouse Debbie from her ecstatic stupor with a hug. Debbie insists that she look at everything they have here. "You know," says Debbie, in a kind of sacramental whisper, "I think I could cook anything at all here, from scratch, without ever running to the store. For anything." Debbie is born again.

"What are you and the Fonz doing tonight?" Anahita may be hiding flirtation under peevish disdain for my rapport with Randall. What do you think?

"Oh, gazing into each other's eyes and reading Keats, I should think. What about you and Debbie? Baking, is it?" Please understand, there is no malice toward Debbie here. When she is at her desk, we all hear and obey her and like it. She knows things we do not. Free of her desk, she seems ill at ease, and we sympathize, but it's funny.

"Her claws retract, you know!" Anahita gives Debbie another hug and means it. The moles are in a frenzy, herding us toward the dining area (there's a sort of mess hall/banquet barn deal on site, too--did I mention that?) now that the feelings have been aired.

The dinner is pretty solid. Different kinds of animals and vegetables, tastefully made more edible. Buchanan always seeks us out, which I take as a compliment. He comes downstairs to meet us, you know?

"Lads," he puts his arm around Randall's shoulder, as he often does. I think Buchanan enjoyed team sports, when he was young and impressionable. He's still got the moves. That must be his third scotch, and his tie is bright red, atop a brown shirt, under the lime green sweatsuit jacket, which is jauntily unzipped. He looks like a frog hemorrhaging in a mud puddle.

"I'm not sure I'll live the night. Having cleansed myself of all my bitter outrage, I'm just a dusty husk."

"Dusty husks was the name of my garage band in high school," says Randall. He claims Buchanan is an o.g. firebreather. He likes talking shit, lyrically. He needs prompts, sometimes.

He laughs. "Come outside, lads, where we won't be neck deep in disapproval." We're outside smoking and laughing for a while. Anahita joins us. I'm thrilled. No, honestly. She's implausibly impressive. You'll see.

"You know, I get the impression that the young people of today do not come to class to learn anything at all. They come to class to play stenographers during an amusing slide show. Is that so, lads?"

"If they're stenographers, your handwriting must make them nuts," says Anahita, because she knows Buchanan will let her get away with it. She was his student, back in the day. Wrote about Othello in a final paper he just loved.

He chuckles smoke. "Wise words. Look, I don't think I can take another day. Will you all live if I'm gone by morning?" We're all disappointed, but we're not surprised. There is more drinking, and laughing, and talking. I try not to leer at Anahita.

In the morning, Buchanan is gone. The next day, Pam just doesn't show. Someone says she sent an email about being sick and staying in her room to "preserve social distance." No worries there.

The moles are uneasy. We all are, I guess. Activities resume, but hearts really aren't in it. You know how that can be. Randall thinks they're having an affair, Buchanan and Pam. I don't buy it. Do you?

When the heartthrob doesn't gush about the eggs the next morning, there's real fear, and second guessing among the moles about their strict mandate that we leave our devices at home--coverage is spotty in the woods anyway, and it's important to be present when we're sharing.

Anahita tells me that she is tired of reading the glittering, AI sludge. I agree. The sandwiches are listless. There's some desultory gabbing about the conference, but even the "serious" people know it's theater. I decide to figure out something sensational to say to Anahita. I'll sleep on it.

There's a knock on the outbuilding door, and I'm the only one it wakes.

When the cold comes in, I'm pretty sure I'm next. It's Randall, but he's not himself. I'm trying to remember what he wrote his dissertation about. It had a hip tile: some magic words, followed by a colon, followed by an explanation of the bloody thing.

"Tupilaq Time: Indigenous Ways of Knowing a Monster. You didn't read it." Randall's voice sounds like he's been screaming. "Let's take a walk," he says. Something scurries into the open door's rectangular shadow.

He says something to it I can't hear. There's small, sharp, scuttling.

"How do you choose?" I resent that I will not learn any Farsi from Anahita.

"I don't. It does. I taught it to choose."

"If that's it, why are you here? I get Buchanan, glad handing and patronizing and full of himself. Pam knows how you really feel, at last. The heartthrob? Please. You know, a student told me last month that she thought he was wistfully gazing through the little window in the door of one of those ancient lecture halls in the basement of Old Arts while droning about Baudrillard or Baudelaire or something else she hadn't read, and then she realized, he was looking at his own reflection. Farewell, Narcissus.

Why me?"

Randall gestures. It comes out of the shadow. I wish it hadn't.

"You think I'm your sidekick, your box checked, your sensitivity training certificate with the wry observations and the uncle on the reserve.

You'll learn."

It has flashing eyes, the little thing.

Parts of it belonged to a dead child.

Huge teeth.