image from Miskatonic University Press
The placard on his desk read Dr. M. T. Pickman. The title Albert M. Wilmarth Chair for Literary Studies was emblazoned on the line directly below the name. The desk itself was a dark, glossy behemoth, cut from a hoary old white oak that was already bearded with ivy when Essex County was still roamed by Iroquois. Topped with a heavy slab of Italian marble, the desk was cluttered with all manner of ephemera, as were the shelves ringing the large, airy, sumptuously carpeted office; old, leather-bound tomes sealed behind sliding glass doors and bearing such esoteric titles as The King in Yellow, The Pnakotic Manuscripts, and Revelations of Glaaki. Behind the desk were two open casement windows, their glass immaculately clean, offering a commanding view of the slow, dark, ancient waters of the Miskatonic River as it wound its way through the center of Arkham.
Dr. M. T. Pickman, current occupant of the Albert Wilmarth Chair for Literary Studies at Miskatonic University, was not currently enjoying the slow roll of the river through his window. Neither was he admiring the stately Arkham skyline with its gambrel-roofed Georgian style houses. He didn’t even enjoy the faint scent of the ocean, borne in through his open windows on a pleasant September breeze, though he did absently stroke the top of a carved-coral bust of Dagon he had once received as a gift from one of his students that hailed from nearby Innsmouth. No, Dr. Pickman, a fastidious man of late middle age, did not even enjoy the contours of his Corinthian leather desk chair he had sunk his impeccably groomed yet corpulent frame into. He scowled, his brows wrinkling, salt-and-pepper Vandyke bristling. An enraged walrus, Dr. Pickman was most certainly not enjoying this wonderful New England afternoon.
There was a soft click, and then a moment later a curl of acrid smoke stole through his office and out the open windows. Pickman looked over to his left where Dr. Whately was seated in a simple folding chair. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice fluid and mellifluous as he closed his silver-filigree cigarette case with a dexterous snap, “am I disturbing you, Doctor Pickman?” Whately deliberately flicked ash from his kretek – a Djarum Black he’d screwed into a sterling silver cigarette holder – directly onto Pickman’s carpet.
Pickman glowered at his guest. “The least you could do is use an ashtray, Doctor Whately. I made a very generous concession to allow you to smoke in here when we agreed to use my office instead of yours-”
“You mean when you demanded to use your own office?” Whately took a long drag, his kretek sparking and crackling as he inhaled. Pickman fought back the urge to bare his teeth at his younger, recently tenured colleague. He’d flatly refused to use Whately’s office, which was like the man himself: reeking of cloves and shamefully unkempt.
Whately’s thick black hair was cut short and artfully tousled, hanging over his eyes in a look that the younger undergraduates nowadays called “Emo,” whatever that meant. Tall, gaunt, and dressed in his trademark rumpled black Armani from head-to-toe, Whately was uncharacteristically languid as he let a long plume of smoke drift from his mouth; normally he was so bristling with energy he would pace unceasingly, from lectures to department meetings.
Whately grinned at Pickman through the haze of blue cigarette smoke before flicking his ash again. “I’m sure a man of your girth - excuse me, of your stature - has people to clean up after him. Now, let’s call the first applicant of the day in, shall we?” He leaned over Pickman’s desk and jabbed the intercom button down with a pale, manicured index finger. “Janice, send in…” he looked down at the open manila file folder on Pickman’s desk. “Mister Paladino, please.”
“Doctor Pickman?” Janice’s voice came back through the speaker, tinny and attenuated, sounding unnerved at doing the bidding of a foreign voice.
“It’s all right, Janice,” Pickman said. “Go ahead and show him in, thank you.”
“Yes, sir.” The intercom buzzed as the connection broke. A moment later, the office door swung open, and Jake Paladino walked in.
Pickman glanced down at Jake’s file, open and spread across his desk’s marble top: a third semester doctoral student, concentrating on both medievalism and cultural studies. Perfect. Pickman looked back up and smiled beatifically. “Come in, Mister Paladino. Come, sit down, make yourself comfortable.” He indicated a simple padded wooden chair, which Jake took and positioned equidistant from Pickman and Whately before sinking down into it.
A plain-faced young man of average height and build, Jake was affecting the sort of grubby grad student chic that Pickman had seen develop over his years at Miskatonic: hastily combed dirty blonde hair in need of a trim, tired but wary brown eyes behind a pair of battered eyeglasses, and a sweater vest thrown over a polo shirt that had seen better days. The ensemble was completed by blue jeans that should have probably been washed two days ago and a pair of scuffed, sprung black work boots. The faint odor of the Twin Gods of the graduate student – black coffee and cheap cigarettes – wafted over Pickman’s desk as Jake leaned forward to offer his hand.
“Doctor Pickman, Doctor Whately,” he said, shaking hands with both in turn. “I can’t tell you how very excited I am with the possibility of conducting research for the both of you.”
“Well, thank you, Jake.” Pickman gave him a toothy grin. “I understand that your research for Professor Armitage last spring was very helpful for his paper on the Eltdown Shards.”
“Oh, yes, that was very interesting,” Jake said. “Very different for me, since Professor Armitage is in Archaeology, not English, but for the most part I figured that research is research, after all. I learned a lot about archaeology that semester, actually. It really helped me for my paper on Medieval Scholastic theorists – I was able to draw a conceptual link from the Shards to some of the Scholastics that were active in England in the Twelfth Century, especially the ones who were said to have lived in the same location the Shards were found.”
“Interesting.” Whately took another drag from his kretek. “I’ve always found the Scholastics so absolutely dull. Thomas Aquinas, William of Occam… though the castration of Abélard always makes me giggle. So much for the phallocentricity of the patriarchy, eh Pickman?” He let out a sardonic laugh, wiping a nonexistent tear from his eye.
“Yes, well, we can’t all be expected to apply old ‘Popeye’ cartoons to queer theory, can we, Whately? That is what your dissertation was on, was it not?” Pickman gave Whately a tight, thin-lipped smile.
“Hmm, that’s actually very interesting,” Jake interjected. “The constant struggle between Popeye and Bluto in their quest for Olive Oyl, could that attempt to possess such a woman with no feminine qualities be seen as a subconscious desire to possess each other? I mean, yeah it’s just a stereotype, but Popeye and Bluto are both sailors, after all.”
“That was precisely my point, Jake, thank you.” Whately carefully plucked the remnants of his kretek from his cigarette holder and flicked the butt expertly out of the open casement window. “Non-traditional texts like ‘Popeye’ are my specialty.”
“’Non-traditional texts.’” Pickman harrumphed. “I’ve always thought it preposterous to refer to anything but actual physically extant books as ‘texts.’ Seems like so much pretentious nonsense, if you ask me.” He glared openly at Whately.
The younger professor bared his teeth at Pickman. “Perhaps if you would try living in the Twenty-First Century, Pickman, you might actually come to enjoy it. You know they have color television now.”
Jake coughed and moved to rise from his chair. “You know, if now isn’t a good time, I can come back later—”
Pickman held a hand up. Jake lowered himself back down. “No, my apologies. My learned colleague and I simply occupy different theoretical poles.”
“Yes, you might want to consider us in binary opposition to each other.” A snake charmer’s smile slipped across Whately’s face. “There’s a little meta-discursive humor for you there, Jake.”
Jake smiled uncertainly. A tendril of tense silence unfurled throughout the room. The rancor in the room was actinic, like the stink of ozone after a lightning strike. Finally, Jake cleared his throat. “So, what kinds of research might I be doing, if you decide to take me on?”
“Ah. A very pertinent question, wouldn’t you agree, Doctor Pickman?” Whately had taken the moment of silence to insert another kretek into his cigarette holder. He produced a black lacquered Zippo from his shirt pocket and flicked the top open one-handed like a prestidigitator. The lighter sparked and a puff of flame engulfed the wick. He lit his waiting kretek and blew a long stream of smoke out through his nostrils.
Pickman coughed politely and pulled a face, as if to say if you get cancer, you vile bastard, the second-hand smoke is worth it. He schooled his expression back to stillness. “Yes, indeed, very pertinent. Both Doctor Whately and myself are in the process of writing papers to be presented at the spring symposium here on campus, and with our teaching loads and other side-projects we don’t have enough time for everything.”
Whately chuckled. “I’m focusing on something new and exciting, whilst Doctor Pickman here is rooting through the bones of more dead white men to suck at any marrow he might have missed from his last visit to the cemetery.” Pickman sighed.
“What my colleague is trying to say, Jake, is that our projects are very different. I am interested in forging a link between both Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
“Well, that doesn’t seem too difficult,” said Jake. “They both attended Bowdoin College together in the early Nineteenth Century, didn’t they? Lifelong friends. Didn’t Longfellow favorably review Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales?”
“Yes, and Hawthorne favorably reviewed Longfellow’s Evangeline. But I’m not interested in linking them together in the traditional manner – I’m referring to a strange concatenation of events wherein Hawthorne’s great-grandfather, a justice during the Salem Witch Trials, actually persecuted an ancestor of Longfellow during those terrible times, and that Hawthorne’s befriending of Longfellow a hundred-and-fifty years later was actually familial guilt over this persecution. Much of Hawthorne’s extant work focuses on sublimated guilt, after all, and-”
“Yes, that’s absolutely brilliant, Pickman, but I’ll save Jake the time by voicing the question for him: Who cares?” Pickman sputtered angrily at the interruption, but Whately steamrolled over the older man’s protestations. “Now listen to this, Jake, if you want to hear a truly groundbreaking research topic. While trawling the dark recesses of the Internet one night, I found a horrifying, yet riveting pair of images that blew my mind. First was an exquisitely depicted oil painting of the cast of the original Star Wars trilogy, except that they were portrayed as a rock-and-roll band! Luke and Han were playing guitar, Vader was on bass, Chewbacca was on drums, and R2D2 and C-3PO were on synthesizers. Princess Leia was singing. It was breathtaking.”
“I think I’ve seen that piece,” Jake said. “Is Vader on wires and throwing the horns with both hands?”
“Yes! That’s exactly it! Now, as if that image wasn’t compelling enough, I found yet another image related to Star Wars, but in a different way. The artist had made the cast of Seinfeld appropriate the roles of the main characters and arranged them in a tableau that was a parody of the original movie poster: Jerry and Elaine as Luke and Leia, and George and Kramer as Artoo and Threepio. Newman’s head loomed over them ominously as a fat, shadowy version of Darth Vader. It was sheer brilliance. And I knew I had to explore the themes that were practically bursting out of both images-”
“What themes?” Pickman had recovered his composure sufficiently to rejoin the battle. “Hack artists creating ridiculous lowbrow icons to market on coffee mugs and t-shirts? You can’t possibly be telling me that you’re seriously considering an academic research paper on some television sitcom? It’s preposterous!”
“Actually I was thinking the same thing,” said Jake.
Pickman and Whately, who had been scowling at each other, both turned to look at the undergraduate student as if finally noticing him.
“What?” they both demanded, in unison.
“Well,” Jake began, “I agree with Doctor Pickman-”
“Aha!” crowed Pickman victoriously.
“-but not for the same reasons.”
“Oh?” Whately eyed Jake carefully. “Pray enlighten us with your wisdom.”
“Well, the comparison between Seinfeld and Star Wars, while amusing, is an inaccurate representation, considering how Jerry Seinfeld’s favorite fantasy text is that of DC Comics’ Superman mythos.”
“My god, you’re right, Jake. I’d completely forgotten!” Whately graced the graduate student with a vulpine smile.
“You might want to see if you can find a copy of Seinology: The Sociology of Seinfeld, Doctor Whately. I think it’s by a Tim Delaney.”
Whately nodded and snatched a ballpoint pen from Pickman’s desk, scrawling the title and author down on the palm of one pale hand. “This is most helpful, Jake, thank you.”
Jake nodded. “I’m also very interested, Doctor Pickman, in your Hawthorne-Longfellow ancestor theory. I believe there’s an exhibit down at Brown right now that has a large collection of their correspondence and it might be a good place to start looking for evidence of some sort of residual guilt on Hawthorne’s part. I remember hearing somewhere that he was so upset at the stigma attached to his great-grandfather’s name that he changed the spelling, putting that ‘w’ in there, in trying to distance himself from that nasty witch-hunting Puritan.”
Pickman nodded, stroking his Vandyke, before reaching over and yanking his pen back from Whately’s clutches. He made a notation on a memo pad on his desk, then looked back up to Whately. The younger professor gave him the slightest of nods.
“Well, Jake, we’d like to offer you the research assistant position.”
Jake’s face lit up. “Oh, hey that’s great! Thank you both, you won’t regret this at all.”
“Well, one of us might,” Whately said. “I’m afraid that our research budget isn’t very luxurious and that we only have enough money to pay you to do research for one of us.”
“Oh,” Jake said. “That’s too bad.” He frowned. “Truth be told, I was looking forward to doing research on both of your topics.”
“Is that so?” Pickman cocked his head at Jake. “You don’t find one more appealing than the other?”
“Oh, absolutely not,” Jake said, smiling. “I know there’s a lot of scuttlebutt about having to choose an academic specialty, such as Nineteenth Century American Lit-” he indicated Pickman with a hand, “-or some postmodernist approach, like Cultural Studies-” he then gestured towards Whately, “-but I truly don’t see why someone can’t do both.”
Both Pickman and Whately laughed. The smile slid off Jake’s face.
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, my boy,” Pickman said. “The primacy of one academic theory over another is serious business.”
Whately picked up the thread of Pickman’s argument. “Every decision between one theoretical standpoint and another, no matter how seemingly innocuous, can be devastating or vindicating to the political climate of the department. There are no fences to sit on in the groves of Academe, Jake; there’s no possible way for you to conduct research for both of us, I’m afraid.”
Pickman nodded gravely. “While it galls me to say such, my colleague here is correct. Yes, my boy, you’ll have to choose not just between our two different research topics, but our two theoretical arguments.”
“But this is ridiculous,” Jake said. “Why should I have to do such a thing? I didn’t come to Miskatonic to become some political player in a game I don’t even understand. I just thought that being able to put ‘Research Assistant’ on my c.v. would be a step in the right direction.”
“It still can be, Jake.” Whately was gazing intently at the confused grad student. “The wrong choice here, today, can completely destroy you. You just need to be careful in choosing whom you wish to throw your lot in with. Is it going to be the aging, washed-up anachronism that’s been clinging to the same tired old theories for thirty years?”
Pickman was looking at Jake now as well. “Or is it going to be the flash-in-the-pan pseudo-intellectual front-runner who changes theoretical approaches more often than he changes his socks?”
Jake looked from one to the other, several times, worrying his lower lip. Finally he said, “This is crazy.” He stood up. “Doctor Pickman, Doctor Whately, I’m sorry, I respect your scholarship, but I can’t get involved in this kind of political posturing. I just don’t feel comfortable choosing sides in a conflict that I feel is absolutely pointless and demeaningly petty.” Both professors opened their mouths to respond but Jake waved them to silence. “No, I’m sorry, but this is just ridiculous. I mean, look at the both of you! Sniping at each other like frat boys, so concerned with what the rest of the guys are going to think back at the clubhouse. Why don’t you just offer me a beer with a few Roofies in it so you can screw me properly? For God’s sake, you’re both highly educated intellectual adults. You should be above this kind of futile posturing. Can’t you find some theoretical common ground to both occupy instead of constantly striving to destroy each other and everything that stands in your way? It’s like a goddamn Godzilla movie in here. You two are acting like monsters.”
In the silence that followed, Pickman gave Whately a long look. The younger professor just shrugged in response. Pickman chuckled. “’Monsters,’ indeed.” He hefted himself to his feet and turned around to close his casement windows. “You should think twice about trying to forge your own way here at Miskatonic, Jake. There’s an often-misquoted aphorism of Nietzsche. It goes something like ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster yourself.’ Are you familiar with the misquote?”
The graduate student blinked, looking from Pickman’s broad back to Whately’s suddenly emotionless face. “No, I’m afraid not. Regardless I’m afraid I won’t change my mind.”
“Pity, that.” Whately rose as well, slinking around to Pickman’s office door. There was a faint click as he turned the lock. “I’m familiar with the misquote, Pickman. ’Monsters we are, lest monsters we become.’ It seems more appropriate here, doesn’t it, Jake?”
Jake turned to face Whately, who was leaning his back up against the door and idly twirling his cigarette holder between thumb and forefinger. “Not really,” he began. “Unless you mean that this political posturing you’re both doing is in order to present some more serious monstrosity. I can’t see what you both could be getting at however.”
There was a strange sound, like that of ripping fabric, and Pickman’s voice, suddenly gravelly, guttural, and darkly malevolent, stole through the office to assault Jake’s ears. “In that case, let me show you, my young, idealistic friend.”
“Doctor Pickman, I don’t really have time for this-” Jake turned to face the older professor, a horrified shriek replacing his previously disdainful tone. “Jesus Christ!” He backpedaled, slamming into Whately from behind, who wrapped his arms around the young graduate student in a viselike grip.
“You won’t want to miss thisss,” Whately whispered in Jake’s ear, his voice suddenly sibilant and raspy. Jake felt what could be only described as a forked tongue caress his cheek.
Pickman had changed. Already portly, his body had grown grotesquely obese, splitting the seams of his well-tailored suit and exposing grey, pustulant flesh beneath. His carefully manicured hands had transmogrified into wickedly sharp, gnarled claws, and he deftly plucked a set of dentures from his mouth to reveal a gaping maw crowded with pointed, yellowing teeth. The smell of decay filled the room, making Jake gag.
“Like Whately said, there’s no fences to sit on in the groves of Academe,” Pickman growled, running his long, obscenely red tongue over his shark’s-grin teeth. He reached down and with one magnificently terrifying claw, depressed his intercom button. “Janice, hold our next appointments,” he said. “Doctor Whately and I have decided to have a long lunch.”
