The Grasshopper King
Novel by Jordan Ellenberg

"Tithonus: a member of the royal family of Troy, who married Eos, the goddess of dawn, and subsequently suffered an unusual fate. Eos loved Tithonus desperately, and could not bear the fact that, as a mortal, he was doomed to leave her when his time for death had come. So she petitioned the gods to grant Tithonus immortality; and her heartfelt request was granted. But Eos had forgotten to ask also for eternal youth. So Tithonus grew older and older, unable to die. His mind became deranged and he lost the power of speech. Eos kept him in a baby's crib in a locked room. Some versions of the story have it that, out of mercy, Eos eventually transformed poor Tithonus into the chirping grasshopper."
-Heinrich Dubler, Enzyklopädie der griechischen Mythologie

Chapter 1
Athenae Occidentalis Americae

I think it's best that I begin with a legend-a mostly true one.

It goes like this: in 1871, a luckless prospector and aesthete named Tip Chandler, lost in the desert, his mules weakening and his canteen two days empty, came to the edge of a tremendous mesa. Seeing that he could travel no farther, and knowing that no salvation lay behind him, he fell to his knees and resigned himself to death. But at that moment, a spring of fresh water gushed out from the desiccated ground. Chandler threw himself down, pressed his lips to the earth, and drank; and when, at last, bloated and drenched, he allowed himself to lift his head and breathe, he was overtaken by a vision. He saw, he wrote later, "a splendid City, replete with and dedicated to the sundry pursuits of Knowledge, Art, and Faith; truly a second Athens, through whose avenues progressed Architects, Mathematicians, Clergymen, Poets, and Scientists of all sorts; and having in it a great College, which stood upon the Cliffside, a Testament to the Power of Reason whose Beacon shined forth unto the savage and uncomprehending Plain!"

Hallucinations were hallucinations, and Chandler had seen his share; but the next morning, fortified by the springwater and the roasted flanks of his mules, the old prospector, for the first time in his dismal career, struck gold. As was customary, he interpreted his good fortune as a supernatural directive. He devoted the remainder of his life, and the balance of his riches, to realizing the learned city of his vision.

But the architects and the poets, for the most part, stayed East, and the ones who did not stay passed over Chandler's city for the more agreeable frontier of California. The museums and zoos were never built; the electric railway, half-completed at the time of Chandler's death, was left to sink, slat by slat, into the clay. The streets-laid out in golden rectangles, each named for a hero of the antique world-filled up with roughnecks, unsupervised children, and shopkeepers. The Temple of Reason stood empty for years. Finally it found use as a municipal convention center. By the time Stanley Higgs arrived, in 1950-thirty-five years before I met him, thirteen before I was born-the only reminder of the prospector's vision was Chandler State University, Higgs's new employer, which sat moodily on the mesa's edge. The rest of Chandler City stretched out to the west, hanging back from the cliff.

Then, as now, Chandler State was known primarily for doling out a four-year diet of Western Civilization to whatever men and women of our state came forward to be educated, and for fielding a basketball team that could be relied upon each year to make a more or less brief appearance in the national collegiate playoffs. None of our academic departments were much thought of in their fields. The worst of them-the "hoops houses"-survived almost entirely on their reputations as dependable sources of credits for the basketball players. So the arrival of Higgs, a scholar of much-heralded promise, was an occasion of rare optimism; some, caught up in the excitement, went so far as to call it hope.

Higgs's subject was the literature of the Gravine, a tiny valley-nation in the Soviet Carpathians. He had made his reputation on a thoroughly forgotten Gravinian poet of the thirties, a child of British expatriates named Henderson. Two years before, Higgs-gung ho back then for comp lit, combing Düsseldorf for certain letters of Hölderlin and his circle, to be digested into his dissertation thereon-had come across Henderson's Poems Against the Enemies Both Surrounding and Pervading Us in a trashbin. He could tell from the first poem (untitled: "The wanton whores of Germany gum up my sight . . .") that Henderson was not a great poet, or even a good one. Nonetheless, walking zigzags through the blasted streets, holding the sour, mottled book in one hand, his gaze flickering from book to traffic to beggar to sky, Higgs was smitten. Smitten! He had not in general been given to discontinuity of feeling. But now-the awful, shriveled poems of Henderson firm in his memory, after a single reading-he saw that his life had been shunted to a new course, instantly and by accident, as in the ten-cent novels he suffered himself to read on the train. Henderson, in his hatred for the reader, for the female sex, for his adopted Germany-really, for everyone-had arrived at a sort of perfection of which ordinary and good poets could not be capable. His work was cleansed entirely of affect, wit, and sense. And so, as he read, was Higgs. He had to lean on a wall; he was shell-shocked; he could smell the evening's fog coming in, and the fish. It was like a glimpse of a world where all laws were suspended: not just human laws but natural selection, the relation of energy to mass, gravity.

Higgs thought of his half-written thesis, its measured conclusions, its cadences, heaped on his dim desk at the rooming house, and was struck with a deep disconsolation, tinged with nausea. The thesis seemed a foolish waste of his energy and youth, and furthermore it seemed to him that he had known this for some time, months perhaps, the knowledge helpless until now to break through the sea wall of his consciousness. Again he looked down at his rescued volume. Absently, he flicked a daub of mayonnaise from its battered spine. He began to decide.

(This is a kind of legend too. The facts are checkable; I've checked them. But for Higgs's thoughts I have had to rely on the testimony of his wife. Less than ideal, I admit-but the best I can do, under the circumstances, the unusual circumstances, which are perhaps, even at this early stage, gathering themselves above him, us . . .)

Four weeks later, back at Columbia, Higgs strode into his advisor's office in an attitude of silent challenge, shut the door behind him, and dropped a stack of one hundred eighty-five typed pages on the desk. The pages were the first draft of his new dissertation, the paper that would earn him his degree a year early and make both him and Henderson household names-where by household, of course, I mean department of Gravinic literature. We have modest expectations, here in the business of learning. And even Higgs's small celebrity was enough to arouse long-dormant ambitions in the sardonic, wizened hearts of our senior faculty. He was young and appropriately humble; his references were effusive; best of all, he had grown up in Chandler City and graduated from Chandler State itself. (Not a few professors spoke quietly of having remarked, even then, his promise-though he'd made B's, though he'd been admitted to Columbia in the first place only because our state was "underrepresented," their courteous way of saying "unrepresented.") There was no question that Higgs could have had his pick from dozens of preferable institutions. But he had fixed on his alma mater. His fierce affection for his native terrain, he wrote our dean, had only been reinforced by his time East.

"Is he joking?" Dean Moresby thought, peering out at what terrain he could see from his office window: the campus lawn, gamely struggling to cover the unnourishing red clay, and the blacktop paths that crisscrossed the lawn, and the students progressing along the paths, themselves gamely struggling through the April heat, their curls drooping. Beyond the row of cloned Parthenons (the philosophy building, history, math) was the skyline: a few smokestacks, half obscured by a low, off-red awning of haze. "He's joking." But Higgs was serious. He made it clear that his intention was to stay on at Chandler State as long as he was welcome. By all indications it would be a long time.

The dean, accompanied by his wife and younger daughter, met Higgs at the train station. Above them, on the pediment, Hephaestos wrestled sullenly with an ingot. And at the appointed time came Higgs, doing little better with his luggage.

Dean Moresby moved forward: "I'll get it."

Higgs shook his head, withheld his valises.

"But it's perfectly all right," the Dean maintained, without conviction: then, as they turned toward the exit, "Let me introduce my wife, Mary, and my daughter, Pamela."

"Our oldest attends Vassar," Mrs. Moresby said.

"All right," Higgs said. They proceeded in silence to the car, looking, Dean Moresby thought, like a family retrieving their son from school back East-Higgs could have passed for twenty. Clean living? More good news, if so. But then again, Higgs was silent on the drive back, which could betoken secret thoughts; and, more worrying, for the length of the trip, despite all Moresby's collegiality, his exclamations on the unexclaimable scenery, even an arm thrown genially, and at some risk to all involved, about the new man's shoulders, Higgs-like a coward, like a banker, like a sneak-refused to meet his eyes.

But it turned out Higgs was always like that. His eyes, turned down at the corners like a sheepdog's, were never still. Otherwise he was handsome. His face was boyish and broad, his skin clear; his hair sprigged out above his ears in an agreeably academic fashion. In photos from those days he comes off as one inclined to good cheer, committee membership, uncontroversial politics. He seems the picture of easy charm; but in fact he was not charming. It was those eyes. And then, too, there was the way he talked. Higgs never said a word that was off the point, and it was unknown for him to commit an error of fact. His sentences hewed tightly to every standard of grammar and usage, so that he gave the impression of reciting from memory. But his speech was marked by judicious pauses, tiny and ever-present, and during these pauses, it was understood, he must have been composing his remarks. He was polite-everyone agreed on that. But even his politeness was eerily precise; as if he'd had to learn about politeness in books, had skimmed through all the formulas of courtesy and rehearsed the ones he thought he'd need.

So not charming, no, but still . . . it was Higgs's uncanny eloquence, more than his prestigious degree, more than the brilliance and influence of his dissertation, that kindled in his new colleagues the hope that the university might come in their lifetimes to resemble the motto that Tip Chandler, in the giddy aftermath of groundbreaking, had affixed to the college seal: Athenae Occidentalis Americae. But: no Athens without Pericles, no Algonquin without Dorothy Parker, no Metropolis (if I may) without Superman. Now there was Higgs. And among the professors there was a sense of bare possibility, a sense that things might be about to change for the better, sharply and finally, as if by a sudden tectonic shift.

Higgs seemed completely unaware of the commotion his arrival had occasioned. He was installed in a private office with an air conditioner and a cliffside view; he seldom left it. Toward the affairs of the university outside that one room he maintained a perfect indifference. Once that fall, at the regents' dinner, in the thirtieth minute of an address on the patriotism of the American farmer, Dean Moresby leaned across a feathered matron and said "Stan." (The dean hated calling Higgs "Stan." He wanted badly to call him "Professor Higgs," like everyone else. But there was something wrong with that from a dean.) "Stan," he said fiercely-the matron drawing back ungracefully from the boggish smell of steak and bottom-shelf scotch-"Please let me thank you again for coming here."

"It's my pleasure," Higgs said. "The steak is perfectly prepared."

"Here to Chandler State," Dean Moresby, dogged, went on. "Not here tonight. You can't possibly imagine what it means to us-to the university. To the community."

At this Higgs clicked into a thoughtful aspect.

"No," he said, "I suppose I can't."

The state senator at the podium apostrophized an agricultural virtue whose very mention drew a swell of applause.

"Keep up the good work," said the dean. Then both men joined the general clapping.

Higgs's work, for now, consisted of assembling a chronology of Henderson. It would necessarily be fragmentary; Henderson had avoided notice not only as a poet, but in every other facet of life. His lone impingements on the public record were a Gravinian birth certificate dated December 16, 1900 ("the nineteenth century produced me and promptly expired in horror," Henderson wrote in a rejected letter to the Frankfurter Zeitung) and a 1936 littering citation from the Berlin Department of Works. He rated occasional mentions, none long, few charitable, in the memoirs of his contemporaries. (In a never-performed verse play à clef by Hannah Höch, the character of "Heinrich the vile Pole" was believed by some to represent him.) Where he might be now, or even whether he was still alive, was unknown.

That first year, Higgs published papers on Henderson's political stance (apathetic, occasionally reactionary), his education (cut off at sixteen by the Revolution), his tuberculosis (chronic), his influences (Greek mythology, the Kaiser). He wrote letters: to policemen who had served in Henderson's neighborhood in Berlin, to the operators of local restaurants, to madams, druggists, launderers, to the building workers in his apartment house and to the crew who had fixed the road by his window, to his landlord and his landlord's partners at cards, to every newspaper, large and small, within a hundred miles of the city. To the post office in Henderson's part of town he sent two hundred posters and fifty dollars for the trouble of nailing them up. Each bore the same message: Anyone having knowledge or reminiscence of a certain man-a thin overtall man with a wet cough, perhaps carrying a notebook or other writing platform, poor command of German, mostly seen alone-is urged to address correspondence to Stanley Higgs, bitte; there follows the university's address. There were few responses, and most of those that did come back were useless: obvious misidentifications, intimations of sightings joined to requests for advance payment, letters suggesting blackly that Higgs was somebody or other's agent, and offering, again for a price, not to tell. Perhaps one letter in a hundred came back a success. A newspaper salesman recalled overhearing Henderson curse a photo of King George V. He was said to have worn a coat sewn together from rags. A bricklayer reported that Henderson wore a gold crown on one of his teeth. (Higgs sent letters to every dentist in Berlin.)

With each of Higgs's papers the Henderson scholars grew in number and influence. A Henderson Society formed up, whose presidency Higgs courteously, and curtly, declined. Graduate applications began arriving in Chandler City from Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, even Moscow, each one breathlessly setting forth the extreme desirability-no, the necessity-of its author being chosen to work side by side with the great man, Higgs. It was unprecedented. And when Dean Moresby, trampling all protocol, offered Higgs tenure at the end of the year, there were few grumbles from the faculty. For the first time in decades they were united in a higher purpose than their meager individual advancements.

Whatever naysayers remained were silenced when Higgs was invited to address the plenary session of an international literary conference at Trieste. The conference was at the height of its fashionability that year, and Higgs's speech was a tremendous success. A profile in the New York Times ensued, along with a spray of prizes, recognitions, various memberships in learned societies. The last faculty member invited to speak overseas had been an elderly astronomer who, misaligning the lens of the campus telescope, had inadvertently photographed a new satellite of Jupiter. That had been 1920.

The Gravinics department was a hoops house-one of the worst. The chairman, Professor Rosso, had been a Princeton cager, and was willing, even eager, to invent passing grades for members of the squad. Under the circumstances, Dean Moresby told Higgs, it was perhaps the best thing to waive the ordinary teaching requirement, and it would be no trouble. But Higgs insisted. He would be happy to teach, he told the dean; he did not want to be perceived as commanding special favors, and, moreover, he was confident that the athletes, presented with an enthusiastic and thorough account of the material, would become inclined to learn.

And against all reason, Higgs was right. Something in Henderson's crabbed, defiled poems struck a resonant spot in the minds of the basketball players. His persecution was somehow their own. In his commingled affection and condescension towards the Kaiser ("my blundering, beloved uncle with the spiked derby") and the German war machine, they saw mirrored their own ambivalence toward the nonstop routine of competition; his dismissals of religion, rule of law, and the rights of women were topical and thrilling; his scarlet hatred of the intellectual and all his accouterments was not unfamiliar to them. Soon Higgs's course was joined by players from the other hoops houses: from physical education they came, from Spanish and journalism, from agricultural studies they came. By the end of the semester the whole team was in his class. There were no absences or late papers, and no end-of-term visits to Rosso. Higgs had made students of them. Quite a few quit basketball altogether to devote themselves more fully to Henderson; though among these there was only one starter, and he'd broken his wrist.

And the rest of the team: in practice they were sullen and insubordinate, slogging through drills as if each layup, each free throw were a personal and spiteful imposition. But at game time they played with a fierceness such as Coach Mahemeny had never seen. It made him uneasy (he told me) but he knew that he was an older man and it was his time to become uneasy with the new ways of doing things. And it worked, whatever it was. His unsmiling players had developed a ghostly way of slipping out from their coverage, then, alone, flicking in a jumper, not even watching to see the shot drop in-was it a kind of contempt he saw in their eyes? But it worked. They were humiliating the opposition.

In 1956 the Prospectors won the national championship in Syracuse. To celebrate the players' return the university organized a gigantic reception at the convention center downtown. Some five hundred of Chandler City's notables filed between the chipped, stolid columns of the former Temple of Reason, into the great open ballroom, lined floor to ceiling with empty marble shelves. It was to have been the library.

Higgs drifted among the celebrants, bearing an untouched scotch and water. Arnold Meadows, the mayor, was calling the players to the podium one by one. The P.A. lifted their names to the marble ceiling, where they shattered and echoed down into the crowd, incomprehensible. The mayor was fresh from his own national triumph. He had convinced the previous session of Congress to attach to an uncontroversial appropriations bill a provision to study the feasibility of tapping the mysterious source of Tip Chandler's spring for geothermal energy. The first group of federal geologists, and the first installment of the concomitant federal funds, had arrived in town the month before.

At the party too was Ellen Moresby, the dean's daughter, home from Vassar on spring break. Her father had made her come. She made a point, whenever she could, of avoiding university functions, which she found provincial, and which were always well-attended by old men in ridiculous mustaches who wouldn't stop looking down her dress. She was halfway through her second gin and tonic and she knew she would soon have to find something to do but drink. Otherwise she would start laughing at people and it would be bad for her father.

When she saw the slight young man standing in the corner, bearing an expression of such perfect peace and detachment that he seemed to believe himself alone in the cavernous ballroom, she thought: ah, there's someone. She supposed he was a teaching fellow-he'd wrestled the starting point guard through Math 1, or something, and this was his reward, this hallful of cold cuts and deviled eggs and awful bores. Presumably he was a bore as well. But he was almost certain not to tell her what a fine young lady she'd grown up to be.

"I hate these things," Ellen said, joining him.

Higgs leaned back thoughtfully, resting his hands on the shelf behind him as if testing its ability to hold his weight.

"I'm sorry to hear it," Higgs said.

His politeness made Ellen's face hot. "I mean it," she said.

"'Hate' is a strong word," he said. "Do you really mean it? It suggests malice. Are you willing to say you want this party"-he gestured upward and outward-"destroyed? If you could, would you end it now and ensure that it was never repeated?"

"Don't joke. It's asinine."

"I'm not joking. I'm only making sure I understand what you mean."

"Well, I don't hate it, then, not the way you take it. I dislike it-is that all right?"

"It's all right with me."

"And I dislike basketball too, if you want to know. It's moronic. It makes me sick the way they go on about it as if they'd cured polio or something. I dislike that. The absolute honest truth is that there isn't anything about this stupid place I don't dislike. What do you think of that, mister?"

She was too drunk already. The sickening realization silenced her. She had embarrassed herself in front of a stranger, her father would have to leave early to drive her home, he'd be furious; and wouldn't he be right?

But Higgs didn't denounce her; didn't stalk away, didn't summon her father. He just stood there, head cocked, at a loss for words. If Ellen had known who he was, or had heard anything of his reputation, she would have known just how extraordinary this was; but she didn't know. She thought he was giving her another chance.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That was inappropriate. I'm a little drunk."

"It was perfectly appropriate. As long as you meant it."

"I did mean it." She was confused now as to what they were discussing. But she liked the stranger's weird forthrightness. It emanated from him like a soothing light. It inspired her to forwardness.

"Do you like it here?" she said.

"Yes," he told her. His eyes were fixed on her face-and this great anomaly, too, she was unequipped to recognize. "I like it here a great deal."

"You must be nuts."

"Do I look like nuts?" Higgs said.

"Excuse me?"

Higgs cocked a finger at her. A joke. Suddenly it seemed the funniest thing she'd ever heard. She knew it was the alcohol, or relief at not being in trouble; but she couldn't stop laughing.

"Acorns," she said, when she could breathe. "Almonds. You look like a big pile of pistachios."

"If I'm nuts," Higgs said, "who are you?"

"I'm Ellen Moresby," she said. "My father is the dean."

There it was: the admission that had gotten her chucked from a dozen fraternity parties in her teenage years-"See you at school," her friends said from the front porch, beaming, each with a brother's thickset arms around her lucky waist. . . . She studied Higgs's face. If he blanched-or, still worse, if opportunism clinked to life in his eyes-the conversation was over. She could walk home from here.

Higgs just nodded. He offered his hand.

"I'm Stanley Higgs," he said. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

And this last conventionality was uttered with an expression of such concentration that it seemed not a conventionality at all; it seemed like something that had never before been said. It seemed, that is, as if Higgs meant it.

The party went on around them: hundreds of hands lifting pigs-in-blankets to equally many champing mouths, feet shuffling, arms pumping, the echoing din of men punctuated by shouts of recognition-"Rogers!" "Old man!"-the drink-reddened cheeks of the triumphant crowd . . . Three hours passed. The Prospectors departed, the floodlights were shut off, the drunkest guests sat morosely alone, faces cupped against the half-light. And by the time Dean Moresby arrived, query-eyed, to take his daughter home, she and Higgs were lovers-more or less.

Ellen went back to Vassar, and the two exchanged long letters for the remainder of the term. In July they were married in a businesslike ceremony at the university chapel; Dean Moresby, relinquishing his daughter, could not help reflecting glumly that now he would always have to call Higgs "Stan." Ellen transferred to Chandler State, which she had come to dislike much less, for her final year. The couple moved into a gabled two-story house on the edge of campus-that is, on the edge of the cliff-from which the anthropology department had been summarily ushered out. Ellen, who had never been handy, surprised herself by taking great pleasure in the house's workings, in checking the caulking and the soundness of the joists, the bolts of the thick mahogany door. Might one suppose she felt some premonition of the day, still nearly two decades in the future, when she would set that bolt in vain against the men from the university with their wires and tape recorders; or even speculate further that Ellen's habit of leaving the radio on all day, turned so loud she could hear it in every room, was a remedy in advance for the silence that was on its way? One might. But what would be the use?

An unlabelled, water-damaged reel tape, fifty minutes long, in the university library's repository downtown, is the only recording still in existence of a lecture by Higgs. Click the tape into the apparatus, lean firmly on PLAY (the button sticks) and listen: an aggregate of youthful voices, the beseeching scrape of desks. Professor Higgs has not yet arrived. There's about a minute of this; a soft voice behind the microphone saying, "Check. Check. Check"- and then Higgs enters, or so we infer from the sudden settling of conversation. Mentally we grant him ten or fifteen seconds to mount the dais. But the pause is longer; it stretches; we wait thirty seconds, a minute, and still there is no sound but the anxious coughing of the undergraduates. What is he waiting for? We strain to hear the rustling of notes on the podium; but Higgs, we remember, never used notes. He lectured from memory, or, for all we know, impromptu. Someone close to the microphone says to his neighbor, "That's what she actually said, can you believe it?" The neighbor: "I can't believe it." The first boy: "And you know what I said?"

But we never find out, because just then Higgs begins to speak.

"Henderson between the wars," Higgs says, "was a figure of solitude, and an object, when his solitude was interrupted, of derision and contempt. He was an expatriate in Berlin held fast by perfectly balanced hatreds for Germany and his homeland. His linguistic skills were negligible and his philosophic viewpoint was juvenile. For all these reasons, and for other reasons which I will put forth to you during the term, Henderson's body of work constitutes one of the most important poetic moments of the century. In this class-"

But here the aged tape gives way to the inflictions of moist years. The lecture dissolves into a high angry screech, ten minutes long, like a superhuman trumpet blast, and when the sound comes back Higgs is reading from Poems Against the Enemies Both Surrounding and Pervading Us.

He reads: ". . . the hectoring of the vendors of spoiled fish/ is equal in offensiveness to/ the/ hideous coughing of my mother/ Berlin is dying/ of syphilis and I/ am its rotting nose."

And from the lecture hall there is silence, a perfect and unnatural silence, unbroken by the clearing of a throat, the scratching of a pen, or the shifting of a single chair. The students are transfixed. Before five minutes have passed the tape goes silent too, all the way to the end, and that is all that remains of the voice of Professor Higgs-all, that is, except one word. But here, again, I'm getting ahead of the story.

So: years passed, uneventfully enough. Higgs had gained a measure of fame among the undergraduates, not so much for his scholarly standing as for his habit, when warm weather came around, of playing checkers with students on the outdoor tables in the quad. He was very good. He was known to play one man down, or blindfolded, with an onlooker calling out his opponent's moves. When the whim struck him he would play three blind games at once, striding between the tables with his arms waving madly in front of him. Girls crowded the tables to watch him; in concentration he was fascinating, his fickle gaze hidden behind the gingham blindfold, his arm's motion, as he reached for a checker, as smooth and quiet as a submarine.

After a particularly commanding victory, or trio of victories, the bravest of the coeds might press forward to ask Higgs a question: what was his secret?

Higgs seemed embarrassed by this attention. He lifted the blindfold from his face and let it dangle off one finger as he surveyed his opponents' hopeless positions-as if he didn't know exactly what he'd see. He demurred: "It's simply a matter of thoroughness. One has to consider every possible move and eliminate those that lead to defeat. That's all."

Out in the world there were the missiles in Cuba and all the nagging worry that followed-red-starred boots tromp-tromping on Fifth Avenue and all that. The university, miles from anyplace that could even generously be called strategic, went about its sober business. The basketball team continued winning many more games than it lost; the children of the state kept marching through the terms, en route to the slots awaiting them in the middle levels of hardware stores and banks; and Higgs went on publishing.

His project now was a survey of Henderson's influence on his contemporaries. Henderson ought to have-was previously thought to have-influenced exactly nobody. His books were underprinted and unreviewed; worse, they were in a hinterland language that no one of any importance bothered to understand, and whose grammatical complexities had frustrated even those few who had attempted to so bother. Before Higgs, only Poems Against the Enemies had even been translated, and that so amateurishly that the German edition appeared as Verses for the Foreigner Who Lives Inside My Body. But Henderson's work, despite all, had made its way to the literary heroes of Europe. A German girlfriend had given Sartre Poems Against the Enemies as a joke. Brecht, like Higgs, had found it in the trash-so had Böll. Paul Celan, caught in a downpour on the Kurfürstendamm, had ducked arbitrarily into Café Maeterlinck, where Henderson was giving a rare reading in his execrable German. And so it went. Higgs exposed these links, and dozens more like them; not satisfied, he probed the writers' works, line by line, teasing out the traces of Henderson's thoughts, the echoes of his maladroit phrasings, his psychic fingerprints-unmistakable once pointed to-blotting their clean white pages. Henderson had infiltrated the world's literature through the low cunning of coincidence; now Higgs had found him out.

In the midst of this, in March of 1965, Higgs received a letter from Dr. Georg Knabel, Henderson's dentist. Higgs had located the man years before, in connection with the matter of the gold crown. The dentist had responded to Higgs's inquiries with one uninspiring sentence: "I recall Henderson only as a particularly contrary patient."

But now Dr. Knabel had come through. He had gone to London for a three-day conference on cosmetic prosthodontics, and on the last night, careening drunkenly down Fleet Street with his fellow whiteners and unsnagglers, he had seen Henderson in a window. Was he sure? Higgs wrote back. Absolutely sure. He had recognized the upper left canine, his handiwork.

Armed with the dentist's description and a business map of London, Higgs was able to narrow the list of possible addresses to a few dozen. To each of these addresses he sent a letter, respectful but not obsequious, in perfect Gravinic, stating the author's admiration for Henderson's work, summarizing his research thus far, and gently inquiring as to Henderson's possible interest in a mutually beneficial correspondence.

Twenty of the letters returned unopened in the first two weeks, stamped "NO SUCH OCCUPANT." More trickled in over the days that followed, each bearing the same weary gray message. Before long there was only one letter left extant. Months went by. Higgs's colleagues did their best to encourage him. Surely, they said, Henderson was lingering over his response. No doubt he was tossing draft after draft out into the beery, ancient street.

But when the letter came back it was Higgs's own, sealed in a new envelope; under Higgs's signature, a single Gravinic word was scrawled in red. The closest translation of Henderson's response is "bastard"-but the English word fails to capture the specific connotation of a son who, not content with dishonoring his mother by his illegitimacy, rapes her upon achieving manhood and abandons her to the poverty of soiled women. In Gravinic there was no firmer way to say no. Higgs must have been disappointed; but he could not have been surprised.

Soon afterwards, Coach Mahemeny retired. His replacement, a marginal ex-Laker named LaBart, found his players' dedication to Gravinic more troublesome than Mahemeny had.

"You can't paddle a ship with two oars," he told Dean Moresby significantly. "You can't have two captains in the middle of the stream."

"You're making sense," Dean Moresby said.

LaBart recruited players from his home territory: the flat, sun-blasted counties around Los Angeles. The new boys, shivering and dull-eyed, had no interest in Higgs's class, or any class. LaBart enrolled them all in the brand-new mass communications department, to graduate from which they had only to perform mock sportscasts once a week and pass a multiple-choice test at the end of senior year.

So Higgs's course was cut in half, and subsequently it continued to dwindle. The ideological savor of those years had reached even to Chandler City, and it was becoming increasingly clear that Henderson was not-as they called it then-relevant. His views on women and racial minorities were retrograde, and his attachment to patriarchal militarism, in the person of Kaiser Wilhelm, was no longer endearing. The feeling was not restricted to our university. On the contrary, because of Higgs's presence it was weaker than elsewhere. Gravinicists worldwide were turning away from Henderson in favor of other, more palatable artists. A particular favorite was a poet from Henderson's own hometown, a woman who for thirty years had worked loyally on the line at the provincial collective bread factory, tucking a revolutionary stanza into the crease of each loaf as it rolled by. The remaining Henderson scholars became defensive and mistrustful, exchanging beleaguered late-night calls from their home phones. There were further failed attempts to track down Henderson in London; he'd moved, or had convinced the post office to bounce his mail. This surprised no one. Their journal diminished to a dittoed newsletter, then gave out. Their field had settled into the status of a shared peculiarity; like it or not, they were in with the matchbook collectors now, the cat fanciers, and the Esperantists.

For the few students who remained, there was still the matter of Higgs's deteriorating teaching. Often he would stop during a class and cock his head as if he'd heard an untoward noise; it would be a while before he started speaking again, and when he did, he sounded distracted and empty of conviction. The tiny pauses in his elocution grew to seconds, then to minutes, so that in an hour-long lecture there might be only fifteen minutes of actual speech. And more often than not, he let his class out at half-past. What he did say consisted mostly of difficult allusions which he left unexplained; he met all questions with a pained expression and an interval of weary silence. No one could explain Higgs's behavior. There was speculation, among those who knew about it, that the rejection from Henderson was to blame; but the change in Higgs had started before Dr. Knabel's news, and had if anything eased a bit with the arrival of Henderson's letter. He seemed healthy. He expressed no bitter dissatisfactions. But the pauses kept growing longer; and the students kept growing fewer. They moved him from the auditorium in Gunnery Hall, now embarrassingly empty, to a seminar room at the department. Soon after that, his class was canceled altogether. No one had enrolled.

Dean Moresby, worried, visited his daughter for lunch.

"You've made a nice little place here," he told Ellen. His daughter stood at the stove, grilling him a ham and cheese sandwich, humming along with the radio in the sitting room. She looked barely older than a teenager; though there was no trace left of the bracing, willful girl she'd been.

She stopped humming. "If you say so, Daddy. It's not as though we've redecorated. The basement's a mess."

"I don't exactly mean the decorations."

Ellen waited silently at the stove.

"I mean-you can always tell the house of a happy married couple. It's not so much a matter of what it looks like. There's a certain sense of permanence. Your mother and I-"

The two of them were quiet for a while as the smell of frying ham, greasy and reassuring, filled up the kitchen.

"Are you trying to ask me something?" Ellen said. "I'd like it if you'd just ask."

"I don't want to intrude."

"So it's about Stanley."

He swallowed glumly. "Well, he hasn't seemed to be himself, has he? And we just thought you might know if there was anything he needed, or wanted-we could certainly see to it, if it were something of that sort."

"Thank you for asking," she said, "but no. You've been very generous already."

"And as your father," he went on, "naturally I've been concerned . . ."

"Oh," she said. "That we're on the outs."

There, now, was the willful girl.

"If you think it's necessary to put it that way."

"Well, you were right the first time," Ellen said. "We're perfectly happy." She lifted the sandwich off the pan and set it on a plate before him; her frown smoothed out. The battle was over before he'd had a chance to take a swing: "If you think it's necessary . . ." Pathetic! Resignedly he wished his wife were there. She had a finger on Ellen's switch; with a single word she could have turned this into a screaming all-afternoon affair, just like in the old days.

Ellen produced a scotch and water in a tall, heavy glass and set it on the table. The dean took down a third of the drink in one forceful, medicinal swallow. Sprightly drums pounded in the sitting room.

"Your mother asked me to ask you something," he said.

"I guess I know what."

"It's already nine years."

"Stanley believes in sharing the work of raising children equally," Ellen told him. "And he's very busy right now."

The dean adopted his warmest and most fatherly aspect; he was Santa, he was Norman Rockwell's mailman on an ice-cream stool. "It would be a big change," he said. "Your mother and I would help you in any way we could."

"But we don't need to change," Ellen said. And Dean Moresby realized-as he sent his final hot slosh of scotch down the hatch-that he believed her.

Whatever it was got worse. Higgs arrived at the department at dawn and left in mid-afternoon; he kept his office door locked when he was inside. He met all disturbances politely, but with such obvious forbearance that no one could stay for long; it was choking. Each visitor felt he'd flouted an article of some unforgiving etiquette of which only Higgs was aware. And there were steadily fewer visitors. Higgs spoke with hardly anyone; and when he did speak, each word seemed to have swum up from a deep and secret grotto, which at any moment could snap shut. He quit playing checkers. He published nothing.

In December of 1971, Professor Rosso organized a conference to mark the 40th anniversary of Henderson's first book, God of Bile. Higgs, to everyone's surprise, agreed to deliver the opening address. His title was "Henderson and the Meaning of Grubs."

Despite Henderson's decline from fashion, the turnout at the conference was substantial. News of Higgs's turn inward had spread quickly through the erstwhile strongholds of Henderson scholarship, and his name, in those constricted circles, had acquired a connotation of intrigue. People who hadn't deigned to write on Henderson in years had come, just to see what Higgs might say. Why not? The Henderson Society, flush with cash, had flown everyone in. There was a new donor, a transistor heir from Tokyo named Koiichi Kosugi, who'd found a Henderson pamphlet in his dead father's army chest, and within a month had redirected the family fortune: opera and cancer wards out, the Henderson Society in.

The campus was overrun with Gravinicists, perched on every flat surface, spilling over with disagreement but eerily alike. They were men, they were not too old, their glasses were somewhat dirty and they favored greasy food; though none were fat. They talked in spurts. Not a few lisped. Their hair, what there was of it, was for the most part dark, and they had a shared habit, in concentration, of hooking their fingers into it and tugging; so that a group of them together, bent over plates of corned beef hash, of fat-flecked chili mac, resembled a troop of macaques at their grooming, waging their fervent, hopeless battle against the ecosystem of their own too-hospitable heads.

When the time came for Higgs's address, every seat in the auditorium was full, and there were scholars huddled in the aisle.

Higgs climbed to the stage; the audience, as one, craned forward. Higgs looked around. As always, he had no notes. His eyes flicked from one curious face to another, betraying nothing; to the ceiling lights, trained on him; to the fire exits on each side; back down to the podium. He cleared his throat. The audience waited: a minute, then two, then five. Something in Higgs's carriage, the determined set of his mouth and the angle of his jut over the podium, made him seem continuously on the verge of beginning. It was impossible to leave.

It was forty minutes before Higgs-his audience still intact-said a word.

"The 'feasting grubs' in the 1939 folio should be construed as referring to the banquet of maggots in the original Book III of God of Bile, rather than to the fall of the Basque provinces to the nationalists, as has been conventionally understood."

Interesting, came the murmurs from the crowd, yes, I see that, interesting! Now things were moving along! And they waited, pens cocked, free hands tangled in hair, to see how Higgs would continue.

But Higgs was done. He had nothing to gather up; he walked off the left side of the stage and out the door.

There was a pause. "This is sad," one scholar said. "I saw him at Trieste," said another. "Didn't I meet you at Trieste?" Someone had a copy of the relevant folio and a crowd formed around him, bending to the pages, the folly of the heretofore prevailing viewpoint already becoming clear.

Dean Moresby had hurried from the auditorium when he saw Higgs leave. He caught up with him on the low rise that immediately preceded his son-in-law's house. Below him he could see the house, the cliff, and, off to his left, the gray, morose water of the reservoir. Breathing hard, he put a hand on Higgs's shoulder.

"Stan," he said (wincing), "what's going on? What kind of an idea is that speech? What is your idea in making everybody wait for an hour and then, and then saying just the one thing and walking off?"

"What else did you want me to say?" Higgs asked. And Dean Moresby didn't have an answer.

Less than a month later-to be precise, on the tenth of January, 1972, sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 P.M.-Higgs entered Happy Clappy's, the undergraduate cafeteria, through the north door, and proceeded approximately ninety feet to the à la carte counter, where he ordered a cheeseburger, medium rare, with lettuce and mayonnaise. The student on grill duty was Cheryl Hister, a junior. She recognized Higgs. After the one-sentence address the school paper had run a photograph.

"That comes with fries or baked potato, Professor Higgs," Cheryl said. "Which would you like?" Higgs thought for a good long time.

"Potato," he said.

"Potato?" Rosso asked. Around him sat the members of the emergency faculty committee, nursing stale coffee. "You're sure that's what he said? Potato?"

"I told you," Cheryl said tearfully. "I asked him which he wanted and he said 'Potato.'" She dragged one frilly sleeve across her nose. They'd made her wear her Happy Clappy's uniform for the reenactment.

"You're doing fine," Rosso told her. "Nobody's saying otherwise."

He directed a gathering-in gesture at the row of wan faces flanking him, soliciting consensus. Oh no, came the murmur. Nobody's saying that.

"But I want you to think back very carefully now, one more time, and tell me if Professor Higgs might have said anything besides 'Potato.'"

"Potato," Cheryl said. "That is absolutely the last thing and then I gave him his cheeseburger. Which he ate and then left. Can't I go home?"

The rest of the committee was growing restless. It had been two hours and they'd learned nothing. Dean Moresby leaned forward. "I think we ought to end this," he told Rosso.

"All right," Rosso said, reluctantly, "the meeting is adjourned. Thank you, Cheryl." Still crying, clutching her starched sides, the girl fled.

What had happened? In brief: the word "potato" was the last one Higgs had spoken. After eating his cheeseburger he'd gone back to his office and begun writing letters: a note authorizing Ellen to make financial arrangements in his name, references for his few persisting graduate students, a petition for sabbatical, effective at once and continuing until such time as Higgs saw fit to end it. Since then he had not spoken to anyone, nor had he communicated in writing. The professors and the Dean had tried every flavor of cajolement and threat; all in vain.

Only Ellen seemed unperturbed. "I suppose he'll talk again," she said, "when he has something to talk about." After she'd gone, the committee members buzzed at her equanimity. Rosso wondered aloud how long she'd keep it up. Rosso, Dean Moresby reflected, hadn't known the girl when she was twelve.

Months went by; Higgs remained speechless. His story went out as human interest on the AP wire. In April, Harry Reasoner arrived on campus to film a piece on Higgs for 60 Minutes. The segment, when it aired, implied strongly that the whole enterprise was a veiled act of protest against the war. A movement, Reasoner hinted darkly, might be on its way. In those days it was possible to imagine such a thing; silent professors on every corner, accusing and significant, our homegrown variety of torched monk. But it didn't catch on.

Higgs retreated to his house on the cliff. Every so often the student paper ran an article: "PROFESSOR STILL IN SECLUSION" or some such, on the back page, under the comics. That was all.

One afternoon in September, Ellen responded to a knock on the door to find her father on the stoop, accompanied by two professors she didn't know, a nervous-looking graduate student, and a pair of technicians laden with tape recorders, microphones, and yards of wire.

She stepped into the doorway and crossed her arms. "What's this all about, Daddy?"

Eyes fixed on the lintel, he explained: the Henderson scholars had formed a plan. Recalling that Higgs's shorter pauses had invariably concluded with some concentrated insight, they had reasoned that the current silence promised a breakthrough on a previously unimagined scale, a Grand Unified Theory of Henderson. They were terrified of missing it, when it came. They had no reason to be confident that Higgs would publish, or even repeat himself for their benefit. So the Henderson Society had arranged a substantial fund to assure that Higgs's next words would not go unwitnessed. The nervous graduate student would sit all day with Higgs; the tape recorders would run all night. In this way an exhaustive record could be kept.

"Absolutely not," Ellen said. "There will not be strangers in this house bothering my husband." She shut the door and barred it.

"Honey, be reasonable," Dean Moresby said through the door. "You'll get used to it."

"Out of the question."

He took a deep breath. "I don't like to have to remind you that your house is owned by the university."

"Then don't."

"Think how terrible it will be if the police have to come."

After a meaningful interval Ellen pulled back the bar, allowed the intruders to file shamefacedly past. Higgs was sitting in the kitchen, eating corn chips one by one from an ancient-looking wooden bowl. Ellen stepped behind his chair and laced her fingers together; and in this conjugal tableau, silent and stubborn, they remained, as the workers installed the recorders and the mikes. But when the technicians started upstairs to the bedroom she balked.

"But in case he should talk in his sleep . . ." her father explained.

"He does not," she said icily. And Dean Moresby ordered the men back downstairs. He didn't want it to be any harder for his daughter than was necessary. And this was necessary: that, he believed. He was as convinced as he had been two decades before that in Higgs, somehow, lay the university's salvation. With his decline the rest of the faculty had slunk back to its traditional malaise. The torrent of graduate applications was a dripping tap again. And LaBart's boys had never really adjusted to the climate; the taller and more playful Eastern teams were drumming them off the court. A word from Higgs, he thought, the right word, could change everything back. Whenever he imagined letting go of that certainty he felt sick and confused. He did not expect Ellen to forgive him.

And indeed, she never did. She made some inquiries about a suit; but the Henderson Society was wealthy, who knew how, and conversant with strange by-ways of influence, and it was clear before long that the scholars could mire any litigation perhaps indefinitely-certainly beyond her ability to pay a lawyer on Higgs's salary. She had no money of her own with which to move out, and, under the circumstances, she couldn't ask her father. So Ellen made do with a more personal defiance. Whenever the nervous graduate student, or one of the successors to his position, was with Higgs, she made a point of banging pots, vacuuming, knocking over chairs, running the blender empty. The radio was always on, as loud as it would go. She didn't speak to her father. And Higgs didn't speak to anyone.

Thirteen years later, I, Samuel Grapearbor, graduated from Chandler State University-penniless, dissatisfied, experienced at nothing, in need of a job.