Slubberdegullion, they called me. Well, I called myself, but they followed soon enough.
It was only a year ago that started the slide into this fuddled fugue. Trudging out of the library was I, bent-double under a burden of books and slouched in self-loathing. I had just about busted a brain vessel trying to decipher some paper on pataphysics that may as well have been written in Cimmerian cuneiform for all that I understood it, and my next grade was sure to be a scarlet letter deep enough into the alphabet to fill three washbasins with my mother’s tears.
Impervious to the sorrows of the universe, skipping next to me so merrily was Dantalion, a fellow of no small acquaintance and a ratiocination quotient north of one-sixty. We got along famously, in more common times, but he’d skipped out on the course in question for some plumb-easy extended field assignment with his sweetheart T.A., a decision no less cowardly as it was intelligent. Likely they’d be painting the crossbar by the second week, all the while my brains were dribbling out my nose.
“Say, why not?” he spattered some spiel entirely off my tune. “The office hours could use a visitation, Teller, I’m sure.”
Ahead of us, creeping up, was some down-and-out in a shabby grey coat, white hair all asplay like Van de Graaf. I was already pawing for my pocketbook, resigned to paying the ferryman’s obol, so to speak, when, to my surprise, the tramp gave a what-ho and a wave to old Dantalion.
“What, you know him?” I turned a suspicious eye.
“Hm? Oh, would you look who it is.” They approached each other gallantly. “Tatterdemalion, now, is it? Fancy knocking into you again. This is my good friend Teller. Teller, my old supervisor.”
“My pleasure,” I clasped hands with the vagrant, entirely untruthful, surreptitiously wiping the palm against my pants afterwards.
“The pleasure is all mine,” Tatterdemalion nodded. Younger than he seemed, at first sight—I privately speculated whether his shock of white hair was chemical contrivance or if he’d been struck by lightning trying to scale some sacred peak. He tilted towards Dantalion, “All thanks for remembering the nu moniker. How goes the research?”
“Fair to middling, to tell the truth. Full of beans but all hat and no cattle, as the sages say.”
“Clear as crystal, old sport. Give me regards to the postdocs, anyway. Never could stand the old guns. Glad to get out.”
I let them chatter on—I knew better than anyone what a pair of lungs Dantalion had on him—while I negotiated a binder from my rucksack and puzzled through the diagrams. Days are like deer, my father used to say, when you kill them you have to use every part. The auld wisdom of the indigene and all that rot.
Soon enough the sun sank and our shadows stretched, and I snapped a few times in succession—rather impolitely, I might admit—to put the spurs in them, cracking the whip so to speak, and they at last they deigned to wrap up the dialectic.
But just before bidding the fare-thee-well, Tatterdemalion looked at me with a glimmer. “Daskalakis et al., eh?” he gestured at my binder. “An evil thing if I ever saw one. If you’re ever in need of an exegesis, we run a club at Athamasius’s. Open every evening, no need to send word—join or don’t.”
When he receded in the streets Dantalion turned and gave a shake of the head. “Best you not get caught up in that crowd, Teller. Word is he ran with that guerilla theatre production that had the deans in a tizzy last semester. Shame, really, his dissertation was shaping up to be a real firecracker. Last I heard they handed it to some undergraduate with hardly the brains to sponge a monkey.”
“What’s he up to now, if he dropped out?”
“Who even knows. Whatever it is bums do, I suppose.”