The Karma Booth

Shamefaced, the football star came forward like a ten-year-old caught chewing gum. He surrendered the phone to his professor, who efficiently and quickly removed the SIM card and smashed both it and the phone.

“Hey, that’s my fucking phone, man! You know how much it cost?”

“Far less than what your father paid for your wasted education, Mr. Harding,” the young-looking professor answered. “And this new land that you’re in is not a democracy.”

But the student didn’t know when to quit. “New country? So you can do what you like? Fuck that! It’s ridiculous!”

Tim shoved his hands into the pockets of his gray trousers and strolled away from the furious linebacker. He was talking to the others now. “Is it so ridiculous? Let me ask—sit down, Mr. Harding. Sit. You either comply or face exile from the kingdom. Let me ask all of you: How many people—and at what point when they develop an organization—does it take before you recognize them as a state?”

The students looked to each other, none wanting to debate or challenge him. Barely anyone paid attention to Harding slinking back to his seat. At last, one of their ranks ventured a challenge.

“It’s… silly. I mean, it’s like, preposterous. With a political state, you know, you got history, you got geography—”

“I have tenure here,” Tim cut in, his voice gentle and reasonable. “Same lecture hall I’ve always taught in. Why can’t I be a state?”

With a shrug, the challenger decided to press on. “You already gave us the answer.”

“Which is what, Mr. Bell?”

“Maybe we don’t trust you.”

There was a wave of nervous laughter helping to break the tension and then a sprinkling of appreciative applause.

“I mean, hey, you’re an authority,” added Bell. “You’ve demonstrated force, that’s all.”

“But you are participating,” Tim pointed out.

“Because we need something from you. We want to learn, so we go along for a while. That doesn’t make us citizens—or subjects.”

Tim nodded, apparently pleased with the brave reasoning. “Very good. Mr. Bell here has lived in Europe. He knows what it’s like to tolerate the rules of others. Oh, don’t look embarrassed by it, Mr. Bell. Okay! Okay, here, right here is our problem in these United States! And it’s in all of you. The assumption that worldly means ‘privileged’—that you should actually be embarrassed for being smart and having seen other countries.”

Tim scanned the rows of faces, seemingly taking them all in and tossing them back, shaking his head as he began to pace again. “Less than twenty-five percent of Americans own a passport, and to me, that is pathetic. It means you trust CNN and Fox News more than you want to go see what’s out there! Now some in this room want to go save Third World orphans—when you probably couldn’t get out of Newark airport if you tried.”

He made a point of stopping in front of a lovely young redhead in the first row. Her eyes flicked left and right, and she settled on a patch of the broadloom carpet. Tim mercifully walked on, his stare fixed now on one of the male students in the back row.

“Some of you—God help us—want to run for political office.”

Before the others could be sure exactly who he meant, he was already moving on, walking up the aisle and stopping in the middle.

“Some of you are hiding. You think education is camouflage, and a degree is a passport. Perhaps. But in this room, you will learn to think. And your understanding of what a nation is, what power is, will be broadened as we go along. For instance, how many people here believe in non-violence?”

There was a substantial show of hands from the seats. Tim let out a cruel laugh.

“What a delightful bunch of liberal pussies!”

There was more nervous laughter at this, but above it all was a new whispered chatter over his language.

“Oh, my words are offensive? They’re sexist? If you can’t handle words, how can you possibly help a man tortured in a cell or who’s got a rifle to his head? Every political action in history began as an extreme. Passive resistance is passive.”

“That’s not true!” piped up a girl in the seventh row. “People filled Tiananmen Square and—”

“And what, Ms. Wong? They sat. Woooowwww! And when the tanks rolled in a few thousand of your distant relatives got shot. As I recall, you told me your parents immigrated here in 1989. Well, did they leave because they won? Do you ever ask them what morally questionable things they had to do so that little Michelle could get her degree in America?”

She glared at him, not bothering to answer.

“Gandhi admitted he could never fight Hitler with his methods,” the professor continued. “Why? Because non-violence relies on shame. What if your enemy feels no shame? Non-violence is a political response to a matter of warfare. It means you are not willing to do everything you can for your noble goals, so how important were they? No? Anybody?”

The students traded looks, checking up and down the aisles, and just as it became clear that no one had a response for this, their professor pointed his finger at them like a gun.

“Bang.”

As the students filed out of the lecture hall, Timothy Cale packed up his reference texts and files. He was mildly annoyed by the man shifting from foot to foot, hanging back reluctantly like a slow buzzing insect at the edge of his peripheral vision. The man wore a boxy suit with a flat texture, the kind that was a wife’s compromise purchased at Sears. He had a weak chin and watery eyes, and his black hair was going silver. He was a man in his late forties who gave the opposite physical impression of Tim—aging faster than he actually was. Everything about him looked like it had been arrived at by compromise.

“Professor, my name’s Schlosser. I was sent out by the Justice Department.”

If he expected Tim to give him his full attention, he was disappointed. A student with the typical self-absorption of his years pushed forward and asked the professor a question about his thesis. Tim frowned as he flipped through a Steno notebook packed with scribbles, and then he rattled off a time for the afternoon.

“So McInerny must be sending you on this errand,” said Tim, already heading for the door.

“No, it goes higher.”

“Weatherford then,” said Tim, stopping in mild surprise. He made it sound more like an accepted fact than a question.

Schlosser nodded. “Yes, Weatherford. This is right from the top.”

Tim arched his eyebrows then started walking again. Schlosser moved fast to grab the door as Tim let go of it, not caring if it slammed in his visitor’s face.

“Do you actually believe the ideas you suggested in there?”

Tim allowed himself a tiny smile, perhaps over an inside joke known only to him.

“Mr. Schlosser, don’t be obtuse. My job here is to get these cognitive amputees to actually construct a logical thought—perhaps for the first time in their iPad-carrying, game-playing, Netflix-watching lives. Go ask a university student in Vietnam or Zimbabwe what democracy is, and he probably can’t give you a textbook definition, but he won’t be apathetic in searching for an answer. He’ll be invested.”

Schlosser shrugged, a way of saying fair enough. “The department has a job for you, but it’s not about politics.”

“Then don’t ask me how I teach political science.”

Schlosser bristled. This wasn’t the reception he’d expected: curiosity, perhaps even gratitude, maybe a polite rejection with an acknowledgment that it was flattering to be asked. Not this rudeness. Timothy Cale didn’t even wait. He was already heading into the hall.

“I asked about your theories because they’ll listen—the cabinet secretaries will listen, I mean—in part to what I have to say about you,” said Schlosser. He tried not to walk so quickly that it was obvious he was struggling to keep up.

Tim was merciless. “No, they won’t. The ones making the decisions already know who I am and everything relevant in my career. McInerny does, Briggs does. You showed up on my doorstep because you wanted to put your two cents in, and you didn’t have anything on paper about me that hadn’t made the rounds and could be assessed by others. You need something new.”

He suddenly stopped walking and stood in place, waiting for Schlosser to grant his point. Schlosser licked his lips, glanced down the long hallway at the students making their way to classes, and wondered why his impulse was to deny the truth. They had warned him that Timothy Cale had insight. But they had said nothing about him having a laser that bored right into you and got to the heart of your intentions.

“You want to tell me what this job is now so I can say no and stop wasting both our time?”

“No, Professor. Let’s talk about India.”