Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates
including a broken eye socket, M.R. wasn’t inclined to be skeptical.
Or, rather—she’d learned such a technique, from her first years as an administrator—her skepticism was lightly repelled, suspended, like a balloon that has been given a tap, to propel it into a farther corner of the room.
“Of course, the University is going to investigate the assault. I’ve named an emergency committee, and I will be ex officio. Whoever did this terrible thing to you will be apprehended and expelled, I promise.”
Stirk laughed. The wounded little mouth twisted into a kind of polite sneer.
“Better yet, President Neukirchen, the township police will investigate. Whoever attacked me committed a felony, not a campus misdemeanor. There will be arrests—not mere expulsions.” The thin boyish voice deepened again, with a kind of suppressed exaltation. “There will be lawsuits.”
Lawsuits was uttered in a way to make an administrator shudder. But President Neukirchen did not overtly react.
M.R. had been vaguely aware, before the assault, of the controversial undergraduate—at least, the name “Stirk.” In recent months she’d been made aware of the conservative movement on campus, that had been gathering strength and influence since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the very eve, in early March, of a “military action” against Iraq, expected to be ordered by the president of the United States within a few days.
It couldn’t be an accident, Alexander Stirk had declared himself passionately in favor of war against Iraq, as against all “enemies of Christian democracy.” A wish to wage war as a religious crusade was a part of the conservative campaign for a stricter personal morality.
Before every war in American history there’d been a similar campaign in the public press—often, demonic and degrading political cartoons depicting the “enemy” as subhuman, bestial. The campaign against Saddam Hussein had been relentlessly waged since October, mounting to a fever pitch on twenty-four-hour cable news programs in recent weeks—Fox, CNN. It was a farcical sort of tragedy that the murder-minded Republican administration led by Cheney and Rumsfeld had its ideal foil in the murder-minded Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Except that hundreds of thousands of innocent individuals might die, these deranged adversaries deserved one another.
Disturbing to realize that the conservative student movement was steadily gaining ground on American campuses in these early years of the twenty-first century. Even at older, more historically distinguished private universities like this one, that were traditionally liberal-minded.
In the hostile vocabulary of Alexander Stirk and his compatriots—leftist-leaning.
“I told the township officers, and I will go on record telling you, President Neukirchen—I don’t feel that I should try to identify my assailants even if I have some idea who some of them are.” Stirk paused to remove a handkerchief from his coat pocket which he unfolded and dabbed against his injured eye, in which lustrous tears welled. He spoke with exaggerated care as if not wanting to be misunderstood.
It was clear to M.R.—unmistakably!—that Stirk was speaking with an air of adolescent sarcasm, perhaps hoping to provoke her.
It hadn’t happened often, in M.R.’s university career, that students had spoken disrespectfully to her. Perhaps in fact no student ever had—until now. And so she wasn’t accustomed to the experience—wasn’t sure how to react, or whether to react. In her chest she felt a sharp little pang of—was it hurt? disappointment? chagrin? Was it anger? That Alexander Stirk whom she’d hoped to befriend was not so very charmed by President Neukirchen.
Yet more daringly—provocatively—Stirk was saying: “Frankly I can tell you—as I am sure you would hardly repeat it—President Neukirchen—when I was attacked, I had blurred impressions of faces—and maybe—an impression of just one face—or more than one—belonging to a light-skinned ‘person of color.’” Stirk paused to let this riposte sink in, with a look both grave and reproachful. Then as if he and President Neukirchen were in complete agreement on some issue of surpassing delicacy he continued, piously: “But—as a Christian—a Catholic—and a libertarian—on principle I don’t believe that it is just—as in justice—to risk accusing an innocent individual even if it means letting the guilty go free. That isn’t a principle that makes sense to pro-abortion people—who grant no value whatever to nascent human life—but it’s a principle greatly cherished by the YAF.”
Pro-abortion? Nascent human life? What this had to do with Stirk being assaulted, M.R. didn’t quite know. But she knew enough not to rise to this bait.
“Well. After I’d been knocked to the ground, kicked and humiliated and threatened—‘You don’t shut the fuck up, you’re dead meat, fag’”—Stirk’s boyish voice assumed a deeper and coarser tone, reiterating these crude words—“still no one came to my aid. Within seconds all witnesses fled the scene—laughing—I could hear them laughing—and by the time some Good Samaritan alerted a campus security cop in the office behind Salvager Hall, I’d managed to get to my feet and stagger out to the street—off campus—a passing motorist saw me, and took pity on me.”
Passing motorist. The phrase struck M.R. oddly.
Like one who has told a story many times, though in fact Stirk could not have told this story many times, the bruised and battered undergraduate related how he’d been helped into the vehicle of the passing motorist and driven to the local hospital ER—“This citizen didn’t worry about the inside of his car getting bloodied, thank God”—where he was X-rayed and treated for his injuries and township police officers were called—“Since this wasn’t an accident, but a vicious attack”—and came to interview him; when he was feeling a little stronger Stirk called Professor Kroll, his politics adviser, also faculty adviser for the local chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, at whose house Stirk had been before the assault.
Strange, M.R. thought, that Stirk hadn’t called his family in Jacksonville. Stirk had been adamant, the dean of students was not to contact them without his permission.
Where once the university was legally held to be in loco parentis, now the university was forbidden to assume any sort of parental responsibility not specifically granted by the individual student.
Where once the university was likely to be sued for failure to behave like a protective parent, now the university was likely to be sued for behaving like a protective parent, against even the wishes of an eighteen-year-old freshman.
“Y’know what Professor Kroll’s first words were to me, President Neukirchen?—‘So it’s started, then. Our war.’”
Our war! How like Oliver Kroll this was—to make of the private something political. To make of the painfully specific something emblematic, impersonal. For our war meant a division of campus and nationalist loyalties as it meant our war soon to be launched in Iraq.
Somehow, campus politics had become embroiled with such issues as abortion, sexual promiscuity and drunkenness on campus; patriotism was measured by the fervor with which one argued for “closed borders”—“War on Terror”—the need for “military action” in the Middle East. M.R. had followed relatively little of this at the University for she’d been busy with other, seemingly more pressing matters.
Proudly Stirk was telling President Neukirchen that, though it was after midnight by the time he’d called him, Oliver Kroll came at once to the ER. There, Professor Kroll had been “astonished” to see Stirk’s injuries—“disgusted”—“furious.” Professor Kroll had insisted upon speaking with township police officers, informing them of threats he’d personally seen that Stirk had received from “radical-left sources” at the University, in protest of Stirk’s outspoken views on politics and morality. More specifically, in the week prior to the assault, Stirk had addressed in both his radio program and in his newspaper column a “truly despicable, unspeakable” situation that had transpired at the University—the “open secret” that an undergraduate girl had had a third-trimester abortion in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia. Stirk had slyly—dangerously—come very close