Dr Morris Schumann (medieval and early Renaissance literature; bibliography and textual criticism) thumbed the button on the side of his watch that stopped the alarm, speared his red pencil into the pewter mug full of pens on his desk, pulled off his reading-glasses and dropped them on top of the pile of papers he was marking, and then rocked back in his chair and rubbed his face with both hands. Outside the window, December and a lot of rain made four o'clock look an hour later and darker. Friday, and the last Friday of the term, it was, and there were only five or six more of these mediocre Marlowe things left to read. And they could wait. He could finish them over the weekend--Sunday morning, fiveish say, before walking Buck and coming back through the kitchen door to brew coffee and watch the frost glisten in the sunrise and gloat over all that time ahead of him--three delicious weeks--before he must return to an office, a schedule and a professorship. A not unduly burdensome professorship, true--actually, a pretty plum one--with all the irksome tasks like torturing first-year students with Blake or Anglo-Saxon going to younger faculty members, and his Sidney graduate seminar sparkling with a couple of real talents--but a time-consuming, a time-annihilating, a time-evaporating-away-and-never-to-be-replenished professorship. And not that his heart was not in it. His heart and his soul were in this professorship, this thirty-year miracle of doing what he loved, for pay and esteem and a pension in a couple of years. But his heart and his soul were not in it, no. How could they be? He didn't have time to read.
Dr Schumann squealed his wheeled chair back, slapped his palms on the arms of it and bounded up. He pulled the hem of his knit sweater-vest down past his belt-line, above which it always collected in buckles when he sat for long, and re-tightened his loosened tie--the tie the snorting, polo-shirted junior profs regarded as an antediluvian affectation--and worked his blazer back on with several authoritative snaps and tugs. He bundled all the unmarked papers into his open briefcase, threw several books on top of them, folded his reading-glasses and placed them in their pouch in the briefcase lining, snapped the briefcase shut, felt for his keys in his pocket, snatched from the neck of his desk lamp the yellow adhesive note on which his wife had written, One bottle of Soave or something on the way home--we're having the Jonsons. XXOOO, and headed for the door.
On which somebody now knocked.
Dr Schumann halted. Damn it all anyway. Well, but it was only four o'clock and although his formal office hours, when he was available to talk to students, had ended long ago, he'd promised a number of grad students they could stop by anytime on Friday afternoons to chat or philosophize or sob uncontrollably, as the case might be. He could grab his overcoat from the rack behind the door and fold it over an arm, and pull on his gloves, and plop on his hat, and yank on the door and snap, "yes, what is it?" to whatever student was standing outside--and then, when they asked guiltily if he had a minute to spare, he could dither and filibuster before saying "oh all right, come in."
But the knocking went on and Dr Schumann, like the porter in Macbeth, finally gave in and opened the door.
"Dr Schumann? I have an appointment with you."
It was no student Dr Schumann had ever seen--and for a moment he only stared. Indeed, it was no person he'd ever seen, and an odd-looking one at that: for a second he had the strange impression that it was Christopher Marlowe, and that he was about to enter a dreamlike and terrifying state of consciousness in which none of the lurking forces of evil in the world would be stopped from singling him out for lasting harm. It was as if the young man had sent something out from him--an invisible intent on a drift of air, a vile smell just below the level of awareness. Dr Schumann, in a building full of people, feared for his safety.
"I'm--going out. I don't remember any appointment."
"It will take only a minute. I understand your forgetting it. It was made years ago. Please." And he pointed a thin finger at him, and Dr Schumann found himself staggering back as if the finger were a gun-barrel and a bullet had slammed into his chest. The man stepped in and shut the door behind him. "Excellent," he said, sitting on one of the two chairs that faced Dr Schumann's desk. "Please take your seat. There will be papers to sign."
Dr Schumann found himself helplessly compliant to the man's suggestions. He flopped down and stared at the fellow. More than before, he felt the eerie resemblance of this twentyish or thirtyish youth--in tightly cinched overcoat and brown leather shoes, with the faintest of moustaches and fiercely windblown brown hair--to the apocryphal portrait of Marlowe owned by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The mouth that seemed to smirk, the eyes that seemed to know everything, matched perfectly.
"Of course you don't recall our conversation of June 18, 1970, Dr Schumann--when you said you would give anything to have more time to read--do you?"
"This is all quite mad," said Dr Schumann, fiddling pointlessly in a dish of paperclips. "Surely you wouldn't even have been born in 1970. And I certainly don't recall ever having made such a personal declaration to anybody in that year, or since."
The Marlovian-looking fellow reached in his overcoat and withdrew, between two buttonholes, a sheaf of papers, which he consulted. "June 18, 1970," he said, and looked up. "I was right. True, I wasn't then present in the sense I'm present now, but still, in whatever form I was present, I clearly made a note of it--you can see for yourself--" He held up a handwritten page, dated as he'd said and entitled "Morris Schumann's Request" "--I never let anything of this sort slip by without noting it for future reference. And, along the same lines, I have records of subsequent pledges made by you, with increasing sincerity and vehemence over the years, to the effect that you would give absolutely anything to have more time to read. The dates of these statements run as follows: October 18, 1974; May 4, 1977; January 30, 1978; November 11, 19--"
"Look here," said Dr Schumann, in his best from-the-podium baritone, "I want you out of my office, young man. You're clearly on the brink of collapse or quite heavily on something, and I'm not going to humour your delusions another minute." He laid a powerful grip on the handset of his desk-phone and commandingly thumbed the button for campus security.
"The line's dead," said Marlowe's ghost. "And you will be too if you don't cooperate. Hang up."
Dr Schumann clapped the handset back and blushed at the ease with which this thug had shoved aside his pose of fearlessness. What sort of weapon might be hiding under that capacious coat of his? Or perhaps there was nothing at all beneath but matted hair, goat legs, and the tail of Mephistopholes. "I can't believe this is happening," he confessed, rather helplessly, as if to invite a pat on the shoulder.
"To continue, Dr Schumann," said the young man, pitilessly, "for we are going to continue this, right to the end, bitter or otherwise. The quota's been met, the critical mass of desperate pleas has been more than reached--and all appropriate papers have been xeroxed, stamped, forwarded and filed, and now I'm here to make payment according to the clauses in the contract. A few signatures from you, some explanatory preliminaries from me, and we can wrap this up."
"Fair enough," said Dr Schumann shakily. "And you'll leave?"
"Of course. We aim to please, where I come from." And he leaned over and laid some sheets out on the desk. "Press firmly, there are carbons. Do you need a pen?"
"What am I signing?"
"Explanations come after. Sign."
"You're joking."
Marlowe looked like he was trying to explain why the sky was blue to a three-year-old. "Look. The process is too far advanced for you to withdraw now. The signatures are formalities, but necessary ones. This is what you wanted. It's the wanting it that seals it. We're just notaries, ultimately. Once by the red x on the bottom of each page."
"No. Never. Never."
"Your dog Buck's just been hit by a car. He's bleeding to death in a ditch. Sign."
"Never."
"Your wife's choking on an olive. She has eight seconds of oxygen before she faints and hits her head on the counter-edge and haemorrhages. Sign the papers."
"You're-- I'm not a fool, you know. I can't be played with--if this is some hoax--"
"Three, two, one, okay, time's--"
"All right." He scrawled three signatures and then tried to read the typewritten text above them, but Christopher Marlowe snatched them away.
"Never mind the legalese. The gist is you've been given infinite time, which is what you wanted. You're not immortal as such. You're sixty and you're going to die--in case you were wondering--on the day after your eighty-second birthday. Meanwhile, thanks to our contract, you can breach time at will--simply think the word stop and there will be an interruption of the normal flow of events. You can step outside the flow of temporal duration for as long as you want--a hundred years, if you feel like it. Whenever you are outside time, you won't age or tire or fall asleep, although you might get lonely or bored, take my word for it. Back in normal time flow, you'll age as you normally would--and like I said, you've got another twenty-odd years and then it's all over. And when it's all over, the repayment plan begins. Repayment is difficult for me to explain or quantify in terms you could understand, while you're still alive in a finite body. It won't be anything eternal or too hideous. It will be thousands of years and ferociously painful. But not infinite. So there's kind of a good side to it, in that sense. Okay. Well. That's it for me. A done deal, as they say. Enjoy yourself, Dr Schumann, and until we meet again, fare thee well."
Marlowe-Mephistopheles rose and winked once at Schumann-Faustus, and left. "It isn't fair," Dr Schumann muttered to himself. "I don't deserve damnation. It's no sin to want to read. It's no sin to want to read and read and read."
And Dr Schumann put his head down on his desk and cried and cried and cried.
Time passed. Soon it was five o'clock, and he could hear the last of his colleagues locking up their offices and shuffling by humming and jingling their keys, more than a couple of them whistling loudly and gaily along to some festive tune, whose words might as well have been, considering who was singing them: Jingle keys, jingle keys, jingle to the car: oh, what fun it is to read for three weeks peacefully! Hey!
Less cheerfully, Dr Schumann pondered hellfire. "Ferociously painful," according to a reliable source. Sounded charming. Luckily not of infinite duration in his case--only many thousands of years. Dr Schumann considered climbing into his car, accelerating, and crashing into the wall of the Richard Sandhurst building. That would deliver him from this horrific meditation on hell. It would deliver him into hell. He rubbed his face. Yet his mind would unhinge if he sat here much longer, on the mouth of the abyss with tongues of infernal fire scorching his dangling loafers and the screams of tortured heathens, blasphemers and bibliophiles rising up in hopeless chorus.
He stood. Well, what had saved him so often before from spiritual terror and disgust at the fragility of human happiness? He marched to his bookshelf--a floor-to-ceiling extravaganza of literate bliss, more than nine hundred packed spines of the often looked-up-at, sighed-over, untouchable temptation that made him hate his daily duties and commitments--the duties and commitments he loved and had worked years to consolidate. There it stood: the thing that seduced the faithful professor from his lawful life and sent him head-over-heels into a destructive extra-curricular affair. But he was hellbound now! He could do it! Nothing was forbidden him! Forgive him, Margaret!
And Dr Schumann seized a variorum edition of Coleridge. The spine cracked virginally. The smell of the pages was like a woman's hair. He skipped to his desk, chortling. He frowned up at a blank square of white wall for a minute and thought the word stop. And outside, in the high-spirited hallway, all whistling, shuffling, and jingling ceased. He looked at his watch. The pulsing colon between the five and the double zeros had vanished. He existed in the heartbeat between two digital ticks of an electronic chronometer: he existed in his imagination. He started to read.
He read Coleridge straight through--to the last page, the nine-hundred-and-fifty-seventh. He looked at his watch. Five on the nose. He fetched Moby Dick and read it through. He didn't come up for air, he didn't toddle off to the washroom or the coffee machine midway through. He didn't tire. He clapped the book shut and opened it again. "Call me Ishmael," he read: and read on. He clapped the book shut and almost opened it again, but fought the impulse. He went humming to the shelf and took down Remembrance of Things Past and tap-danced back to his desk. He read and re-read the book. He read the complete Chaucer. He read the complete Milton. He chewed and re-chewed The Faerie Queene. Marlowe scared him off, but he did Shakespeare eight times. He read The Arabian Nights eleven times. He read Finnegans Wake fifteen times. He read the Bible twenty-six times.
Thirty-seven-and-a-half years later, Dr Morris Schumann re-entered time. He had memorized his bookshelf. The departure of colleagues continued outside his door. He bounded up and lunged out and clapped Sam Butterfield, the Yeats specialist, on the back.
"Off home are you, Sammy, my man? Hang on--I'll grab my coat and join you."
He seized his things and locked up.
Sam Butterfield stared at him. "You're in high spirits, Morris. Or else insane. You get all your papers marked?"
"No, I've still got a few, but they won't take any time. They won't take a second."
They walked downstairs and ran into other colleagues in the parking lot--Tom Webster (18th century), Annette Middleton (Victorian literature, especially McCauley) and Jeff Fletcher (20th century American literature). Dr Schumann haled and hollered them together beside his car, where he held forth in a booming sort of singsong--loud enough to draw a dozen students--about his newest achievement: he'd set all Shakespeare's sonnets to music.
"Listen to this one--my personal favourite. I did it in the style of Purcell and scored it for basso continuo, harpsichord obbligato, and female voice."
"I didn't know you composed music," said Annette Middleton.
"I learned!"
"Can I see it?" asked Jeff Fletcher, a pianist.
"I didn't write it down! It's all up here!" And he laughed like a drunk. Everybody, indeed, believed him to be stupendously liquored up. The students thought this fabulous and laughed along with him, but the professors, who knew he never had more than a glass or two of anything at faculty parties, were having doubts about his sanity. When he broke into song, however, there was no doubt. The piece was lucid, lilting perfection, a sorrowing dirge deeply moving even in Dr Schumann's uncertain bass-tenor. A woman student put a hand over her mouth. Jeff Fletcher jammed his hands into his pockets and grinned at the ground. "Morris!" Annette Middleton said, in the pause between the sestet and the octet. And it concluded, to much glove-handed applause:
"Since sweets and beauties do themselves
forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow,
And nothing 'gainst time's scythe can make defence,
Save breed, to brave him, when he takes thee hence."