Antiphony Read Free Page B

decades in academia since, nearly all knowledge must either be handed down from a more experienced source or painstakingly discovered on one’s own. Nearly every committee he has ever been entangled with only served to produce confusion, delay, or outright lies.
    Because his desk happened to be the one in the cluster facing the rear of the class, away from the chalkboard and the teacher’s desk, he spent nearly the entire first year of school twisted around in his chair, trying to see what the teacher might have to tell him. This arrangement also afforded him the opportunity to stare unabashed at the studious girl with the curly light brown hair whose desk was directly across from him in the cluster. He cannot remember her name. She never spoke a word to him, nor he to her. But she seemed to have something indefinable that he wanted. Then, shortly before Christmas break—they still called it that then—she came to school one day with a milk truck calendar. Now he knew precisely what she had that he wanted. The calendar was fashioned out of creamy beige cardboard, with the name of a local dairy on it, propped upright by a tongue of coarse brown cardboard, and the small rectangular pages of the calendar itself attached to the truck where the milk would have been stored. One day, he found himself in the classroom alone, back from lunch or recess early, and he seized the opportunity to take the calendar into his hands, lift the top of his desk, and stow the calendar in it. It was his now. Then, when the girl came back and discovered that the calendar had gone missing and the kindly teacher asked the classroom full of students if anyone had seen it, he had been forced to confront the fact that he must either confess to taking it or sit there, his face burning with the effort of not saying anything, knowing that the milk truck was parked snugly in his desk, hidden beneath his reading books, erasers, and pencils.
    It must have been the next day, or maybe the very same afternoon, when his mother challenged him, inevitably, with hiscrime. The teacher, as was her right, had searched through the desks of all the students, and had found the calendar in his. When his mother asked him whether he had taken the calendar, he stuck to his baldfaced lie. He will never forget the way his mother dug her fingers into the placid flesh of his upper arm and yanked him, her face as red in anger as his was in shame, pulling him forcibly with her to the car for a trip to the principal’s office after school. He has never even come close to telling another lie since that day, nor will he ever.
    Entering the corridor where the three elevators are lined in a row, he sees the door to one of them is open, waiting for him, inviting him to ride to his room and gather up his notes. But even as he is letting the door to the bathroom swing shut behind him, the familiar face of Pradeep Malawar appears as if from nowhere, a shadow that has materialized into another obstacle on his path. Pradeep seems just as startled to see Theodore emerging from the washroom as Theodore is to see him. Pradeep’s dark face expands into a grimace, hardly seeking to conceal his surprise at finding Theodore here.
    â€œIsn’t your presentation at one?” The two of them bump into each other this way so often in the cramped corridors among the cubicles at the Institute, that no other greeting is necessary. Pradeep’s office adjoins Theodore’s own, and Pradeep will often pop over unannounced and lean his long, lanky frame at a rakish angle against Theodore’s bookshelves to bounce a new idea for tackling a research problem off of him or discuss a particularly sticky matter of interdepartmental politics. Sometimes, when Pradeep’s feeling playful or wants to get a rise out of him,he calls him Teddy, and it does indeed annoy Theodore to no end.
    â€œIt is. I’m on my way now.”
    â€œYou better get going. I was just by the