Read Online The Captive Condition by Kevin P. Keating - Free Book Online

herringbone blazer and a cornflower-blue button-down shirt, Professor Kingsley could have passed for a petite male model. With the certitude of academic privilege and the condescending air of a louche languid soul luxuriating in the warmth of his own intelligence, he leaned far back in his chair, held his hands up to the light, and frowned at his manicured fingernails. At least he didn’t put his feet up on the desk—a small show of deference for which I was grateful—but he did tell me, rather glibly, I thought, that the provost had revoked my teaching assistantship for the following semester.
    “I would also urge you, Mr. Campion, to abandon your thesis in favor of a new one. The simple fact of the matter is that in order to be taken seriously as a candidate for a master’s degree, you must show your scholarly chops by reading something more substantial than de Maupassant, something more penetrating and insightful. Starting now I want you to focus on Flaubert. I think so, yes. We can credit Flaubert for having changed the direction of literary fiction as we know it today. You have aspirations to be a man of
belles-lettres, oui
? And
Madame Bovary
can offer practical instruction if not outright inspiration. After all, you can’t be a
flaneur
your entire life, can you?”
    I rolled my eyes at his slavish imitation of a French Canadian accent, full of Quebecois allophones and affrications. Despite his WASPy name, he insisted that his family came from old French stock—“My people helped settle Montreal with the Jesuit missionaries”—and claimed that his grandparents hailed from an abandoned logging town somewhere in the Quebec wilderness. “Fierce separatists,” he boldly lied, “cunning saboteurs on the lam for their terrorist activities.”
    As our brief meeting came to an end, Kingsley must have sensed my profound disappointment. I was drawn to tales of the grotesque and fantastic, not to those obscure and tumescent tomes about the influence of naturalism on modern literature that evangelizing professors so revered. I told him so, and before escorting me to the door he offered a small compromise by graciously granting me an incomplete for the semester.
    “Provided,” he said with a sharp, impatient mouth, “you submit a draft of your new thesis on the first day of the fall term. The
first
day, Mr. Campion, and no later.”
    —
    In addition to my abysmal grades, I was now nearly broke. Without a roommate to split the expenses, I watched with mounting panic as the funds in my bank account didn’t merely dwindle little by little but vanished into a bottomless black hole of bills. I worried that I might even have to sell the car I’d recently purchased, an unreliable clunker with a dirty carburetor and a clean title. My prospects for the immediate future looked bleak. I needed to find a job without delay, and in desperation I applied for a summer position at the Department of Plant Operations, known on campus as the Bloated Tick.
    Every semester, in long and detailed letters to the editor of the college newspaper, the professors complained bitterly about the Bloated Tick’s employees, who, according to the college handbook, were responsible for “providing students, faculty, and visitors with an aesthetically pleasing and well-maintained environment.” Because they feared upsetting “the ticks,” the professors never signed their names to these letters and always delivered them to the newspaper office under cover of darkness. Disgruntled ticks were known to seek revenge in ways only service employees can. They could, for instance, start a lawnmower in front of a classroom window just as an important lecture or exam was about to get under way, and if especially “ticked off” they might smear a foul mixture of dog feces and grass clippings on the door handles and windshields of targeted cars in the faculty parking lot.
    After their shift ended, the men often lingered outside the garage doors and