A Sad Place

"It's been a long time since I've used calculus," Professor Tallon coughed from the hospital bed. He had always said, "used calculus." The way a magician uses misdirection, or the way a carpenter uses a measuring tape. "We don't do calculus," he had begun the first lecture of every course he taught. "We use it to understand our world. Calculus, like physics, allows our minds to explore the bounds of what is earthly possible." I had scribbled these words frantically on my yellow legal pad, my roommate Todd yawning next to me.

"Please, professor," I gripped his frail hand in the hospital room. The skin was papery; it felt like it might peel off right there in my palm. "All those years ago, before you went to Washington, you were on to something." I leaned in closer to him, and my pen slipped out of my shirt pocket.

"I won't be made into a news story, Peter"

"You won't. I won't even mention your name."

"An anonymous source? You'll take on the Department of Defense with an anonymous source?"

"It's been done before."

He coughed hard, one of those coughs that comes from deep within an aged body. There is something desperate and ancient about such a cough. A horn blowing to beckon open the gates of death ahead.

"You can use my name," he said finally. "But I haven't entered that corner of my brain in decades. I'm a poet now, Peter."

"I know professor. But please, anything you remember."

Professor Tallon sighed and looked sideways at the glass of water on the bedside table, as if he may conjure up the energy for a small drink. He didn't.

I flipped to a clean page on my legal pad and picked up my pen off the floor. "Let's begin at Stanford," I said. He closed his eyes, and opened up the corner of his brain he had left unused for so many years. The place was sad, silent, dusty, long fallen into disuse and disrepair. I had no story.