March 21
11:03 a.m. Pacific Standard Time
“Mr. John D. Porter?” Mrs. Welch said in a flat voice.
“Yes.”
“What does the D stand for?”
“It stands for: Does That Matter?”
“Do you know why you’re here Mr. Porter?”
Mrs. Welch, a forty-three year old with tight brown curls, which were obviously dyed, and matching color contacts in her eyes, sat behind a neatly organized desk in her pin-striped business suit. Her skin had been tanned too often and showed the splotchy signs of sun and age, but her face wore enough make-up to look almost normal, except where it cracked near the wrinkles around her mouth. She knew her position was high and mighty relative to his, and her relaxed eyes examined Porter’s with only an occasional glance to his face.
Porter let his eyes drop to her name plate, Debby-Anne Welch-Degree Assessment, Office of Admissions and Records. Without a smile, Porter asked, “Am I safe in assuming that I’m here for assessment?”
“Do you know what your problem is Mr. Porter?” She spoke again in her flat voice. She really didn’t want to bother with this. In her mind, John Porter was just another smart-aleck student who wasn’t mature enough to leave the university and step into the real world. Though he never smiled, his eyes were lit with a fire that looked for an opportunity to burn someone.
Had Porter been particularly handsome, Mrs. Welch might have treated him differently. But he had as normal and plain a face as one could get. His eyes were small, his nose average, his lips not too thin, but not thick. A light complexion showing little time spent in the sun. So he was probably a bookworm know-it-all. His brown hair, cut short, neatly fell to one side. He wore no earring, no wedding ring, and was dressed in gray slacks and a white button-down shirt. His features might have appeared attractive in their simplicity on anyone else, but not on Porter. But neither was he ugly-just bland and somewhat colorless.
Most of all, she didn’t like his attitude. If he wanted to have a hard time, she’d be happy to give it to him.
“I have lots of problems, Mrs. Welch,” his lips curved in a slight smile, and his eyes seemed to sigh. “To which might you be referring?”
Mrs. Welch looked at him for a moment without speaking. There was just something else she didn’t like about him. And it wasn’t due to her bad-hair day. “Mr. Porter,” she said, sighing as she looked down at his record. “Let’s see now.” Pause. “You graduated with a bachelor of arts in history from Berkeley and went on toooo-”
“Chicago,” he said. His face smiled the way it had since he’d stepped into the office, his mouth barely moving, his eyes glowing. A little pride held his head aloft.
Mrs. Welch looked through his file to confirm his words. “An MA in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. And you wrote your thesis on-”
“Semitic temples,” he said as she read it.
She took a long breath. “It says here that you graduated in the top of your class, summa cum laude, from Chicago University,” she flipped backward through the file. “But you didn’t do so well at Berkeley.”
“It was a real liberal school,” he replied, looking at the white walls with colorless Yosemite photos and a matching calendar hanging as if set by a professional decorator. His gray eyes stopped on the framed shot of her father’s yellow catamaran in high waves.
“What’s wrong with liberal schools?”
She saw the smile as he looked back into memories of Berkeley. “Nothing, as long as there are some rules attached. We had people come to class on a daily basis with barely a stitch of clothes. I got my mortarboard. Personally, I think an anti-conservative theater allows me to do better work. But it can be a bit distracting.”
“Berkeley didn’t have regulations?” she said sarcastically.
He returned to his normal smile and smooth tone. “Berkeley had rules, but a great deal of the students thought they had the right to rewrite them.”
“Maybe they did,” she said, her eyes dry and locked onto his.
He smiled again with his mouth, but his eyes didn’t shine. “You graduated from Berkeley.”
She nodded. “A fine school.”
“I assume the students wore clothes in your day.”
“We had streakers in my time,” she said, getting personal, but keeping her face hard.
He realized that he had walked into a mine field and should back out slowly, but he couldn’t resist the set-up. “Was Berkeley an accredited university way back then?”
She lifted her eyebrows at the insult and dove into his file. “Mr. Porter, might I assume that you have a problem with our liberal university?”
“No, Stratford is a fine school,” he said, repeating her definition of Berkeley.
She stopped and stared at him for another moment, squeezing her eyelids tightly together. After contemplating the idea of finding another counselor to advise this John D. Porter, she tossed it aside with the hope that he was stupid enough to get himself thrown out of Stratford University despite her warnings.
Looking back into his file, she said, “Well it seems to us that you have a problem with this university.”
“When you say ‘us,’ I assume you mean the assessment department?” He crossed his right leg over his left, put his right elbow on the arm rest, and leaned his chin into his hand.
“You don’t get a Ph. D. until after we say you do,” she said, pointing at him with her black pen.
“Of course.” He smiled again.
“You have been at this university for a long time, haven’t you Mr. Porter.”
“I have been attending Stratford for close to seven years.”
She nodded as she clarified, “One semester shy of seven years. You studied at Berkeley from 1982 to 1987, six years, and then at Chicago from ‘87 to ‘89. Why so long at Berkeley?”
“Do you normally ask personal questions while assessing Stratford students?” Porter said, his eyes shifty.
“I didn’t realize I was asking a personal question, Mr. Porter. If you would prefer not to answer-”
“I took a two year leave of absence to serve as a missionary in Tokyo,” he said, staring at the fake rubber tree in the corner of her office.
“Oh,” she said with one raised brow. “And you’d prefer not to talk about it. Bad experience?”
“Not at all,” he smiled and cupped his right knee in his hands. “I don’t mind discussing my time in Japan, but it was a sacred occasion for me. A special moment in my life.”
“I see,” she said without looking at the file. Her curiosity was taking her away from her actual duties of student assessment, but he seemed distracted by the subject as well. “You were a missionary. Campus Crusade?”
“Mormon,” he said. The fire still danced in the back of his eyes, and the corners of his mouth lifted. She could tell he was attempting to ascertain her response.
Her minister had given enough warnings about Mormons to squelch her curiosity. She looked back to the file. “You speak a little Japanese then?”
He nodded, smiling as if recalling some mental secret. She had heard that the Mission Training Center in Utah was supposedly well known by the United States government as one of the best language training centers in the world. There were also rumors that the FBI loved to search Brigham Young University for returned missionaries who had served in foreign countries. Mormons had the reputation of learning languages better in two months at the MTC and two years in the mission field than the majority of military intelligence agents serving in the US. Mormons and the government-one of her minister’s biggest warnings in predicting the end of the world.
He didn’t tell her just how good his Japanese was, but grinned, and she had suspicions. He was probably wondering if she knew any of the language and if she’d dare to speak to him.
But his pride wouldn’t be gratified today in that way. According to his transcripts, Porter had not taken a single course in Japanese. “You’ve covered extensive courses in Near Eastern Languages, not to mention German,” she said, shuffling through the file. “Arabic, Aramaic, Egyptian, Hebrew…Spanish 101?” She looked up inquiringly about the last class since it stuck out as the only Spanish course he’d taken.
“Four units,” he said. “I needed four more units at Berkeley to graduate.”
She looked back down with a nod. “You’ve taken Hebrew 101 four times and both Arabic 101 and 102 twice.”
“It’s too easy for me to forget one language as I study another,” he said, probably wondering about the problem she had referred to. “I knew I couldn’t take them for credit. I just wanted to restudy them for myself.”
“It’s taken you a long time to review all these courses.” She said, looking up at him. He was thirty-three, a Mormon, and unmarried. She had known a couple of girl friends at Berkeley who were Mormons, but they had both surprised her by getting married before they were twenty-one. She’d scorned them for leaving school without their degrees and told them they would regret it. But when she’d bumped into one of them only a few years earlier, the friend had appeared happy and healthy. She learned that together, her two friends had more children than she had fingers.
In that way, Mormons seemed forever mysterious. They never lost that cheerful glow, at least not publicly. They faced the hot furnace of reality with hope and a faith she couldn’t understand. They gave up everything, only to end up with more than she could gain while sacrificing nothing. Meanwhile, she felt alone and afraid of the world. So she wanted to smile at the young man before her without the wedding ring. To find a Mormon his age and unmarried was something pleasantly unexpected. There had to be something really wrong with John D. Porter.
Mrs. Welch looked back at the file and flipped to the end. She took a single sheet in her fingers, scraped her red nails against the page, and examined it. “John D. Porter,” she read his stylized signature at the bottom of the page. “Dated September seventh, 1989.” Her eyes drifted to the paragraph directly above the signature. She coughed into her hand and read the words: In compliance with the rules of the Stratford University Doctoral Program, I the undersigned do hereby agree to comply with all school regulations and stipulations of the abovementioned university. The attached contract has been assessed and accepted by the undersigned professor, who will be my advisor and supervisor during the duration of my stay at Stratford University. I understand that failure to comply with any of the above regulations and stipulations will be recognized by the assessment board of the aforementioned university as just cause for immediate dismissal from the university. If I am dismissed, all former contracts will become null and void upon announcement of my dismissal, and all credit work completed for the doctoral degree at the abovementioned university will be forfeited at the same time.
Porter sunk a bit in his chair and knew he was in trouble, though he probably didn’t know in what way. No doubt, it was one of those paragraphs that he hated to read. He’d probably breezed over it quickly, said, “Yes, yes, of course,” and signed in order to rise to the next step of his schooling.
Mrs. Welch smiled lightly as she watched him squirm. She leaned back in her chair, still holding the paper. “Do you recall signing this agreement admitting you into the doctoral program here at Stratford?”
He opened his mouth, but must have been too busy pondering all the trouble he might be in. He’d violated no rule that could result in his dismissal from the university, but then, what student remembered all of the rules. He had been here for seven years, after all.
“Is your advisor Dr. Kinnard?” she asked with a dart of her eyes to the second signature at the bottom of the page.
“He is,” Porter said.
She stood, pulling at the bottom of her blazer, and took a step to a shelf set up as neatly as her desk. She sniffed, realizing that his Old Spice scent clashed with her Liz Claiborne, displeasing her even more. She pulled a thin book from the row and sat back in her chair.
He would recognize the book, though he most likely had not seen it, nor its equivalent, in a couple of years.
“This is the Stratford Catalogue of Doctoral Studies,” she said, flipping to somewhere in the beginning.
Surely, he felt humiliation coming on. She was obviously about to show him something in the first sections of the book which he ought to be very familiar with after working on his degree for almost seven years. He didn’t have the mission excuse this time.
“I won’t read this to you, Mr. Porter,” she said, being kind. “But I will paraphrase it.”
She turned the book around and flopped it down on her desk with the pages facing him. As she tapped twice the page titled, “The Duration of Your Stay,” she said, “As students working on their Ph. D’s often need more time than other students, they are encouraged to relax and do their best at Stratford. This is a school of pride, Mr. Porter. I assume that is why you came here to finish your studies on the Near East. However, Stratford wants her students to graduate. Do you see how many years are allotted for doctoral candidates.”
He looked through the mess of letters and found the answer at the bottom of the page. Mrs. Welch watched his heart sink into his stomach as he answered in a soft voice, “Seven years.”
She sat again in her high-backed chair, confident that his silent cockiness had been squelched for good. “Seven years, Mr. Porter.” She waited a minute to let the poison seep deeper into his body, closer to his heart. “May I assume that you understand your problem now?”
He read the page in the book as he nodded and thought to himself, sins of omission have always been my worst problem.
“Mr. Porter?” she called his name as if they hadn’t been talking for the past ten minutes.
Porter continued bobbing his head and looked up. The fire in his eyes had turned to a struggling smoke, and the corners of his lips remained flat. His eyebrows relaxed with innocence and vulnerability. She had the knife and was about to stab him dead. Of course, he already knew how the wound would feel.
She went on. “You do not seem to have had any difficulties in your classes, but to our knowledge, your dissertation has yet to be completed. The last day for all papers and presentations is…May 21.”
He continued to nod, and his eyes lowered to the desk.
“You have the remainder of this semester to finish it,” she said, dropping the fluff, “then your seven year stay will be up, and the conditions of your final agreement paper, which you signed, will go into effect. Do you have any questions?”
“Yes,” his gray eyes fluttered. “Do I have the opportunity to apply for an extension?”
“That’s taxes and loans, Mr. Porter. I believe the contract is clear.” No emotion escaped her eyes, but she obviously enjoyed this. It was her ball-game now.
Slowly, he continued to nod, looking at her desk. “I have two months?”
She leaned forward. “Mr. Porter, if you do not complete your dissertation and present it by the twenty-first of May, you will not earn your Ph. D.”