13. Kind of a Tradition - Lords of Serendipity

The stage was bare. No round table for King Arthur and his knights, no woods for hunting the legendary fox, no green chapel for meeting the mysterious giant. Instead, there was a large screen, suggesting a multimedia version of Haven’s annual student production of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Also, there were some tents.

No one comes to the Gaudy for a protest or for flatness and shine, do they, Allard? asked Patricia.

Right, he said, not looking up from his phone.

Fine, the earth is burning, but couldn’t they have printed programs on recycled paper instead of not printing any at all?

Patricia grimaced.

Right, said Allard, still not looking up from his phone. He was waiting for confirmation that the STA 105 exams had been graded by the other TAs so that he could go in and finalize the marks for his paying students.

He didn’t see the look on his mother’s face as she considered the stage. But sitting nearby, Jack noticed and he grimaced back, not so much at Patricia as at the fact of the person sitting beside her. Why was Allard Hamburger attending the Haven Christmas Gaudy? Was he dating the pained-looking older woman sitting beside him?

It didn’t matter. Jack just wanted Allard to go away. He didn’t want this reminder of Arcadia Tech here, where he first saw Elizabeth playing Reynard the Fox. And especially right now, with Katrina playing the same part in the same production no less, and even using her mother’s script! And, and! . . . He had not returned to the Gaudy alone. He was, you could say, on a date. He was sharing a wool blanket with Helen, and their knees were definitely touching. All was good, except for the unexpected, unsettling outlier, the severed wing, the giant blot that was Allard Hamburger attending the Haven Gaudy.

How to solve for this?

Helen. Helen. Do you see that man over there? That’s my head TA, for STA 105. Helen?

But like Allard, she was also staring into her phone, and grimacing.

She stood up, the blanket slipping from Jack onto the ground.

I need to take a call.

The play’s about to start.

Helen edged past the others in their curving row. She dropped her scarf. Someone handed it to Jack, which filled him with pride as he watched her walk to the cider stand and step to the side, moving out of view, the phone to her ear, nodding.

The play began.

The players were all clad in black cloaks. Some wore black and white keffiyehs. Others, black N95s. A few wore both. They gathered at center stage.

They looked up as one, and addressed the audience.

THIS IS THE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVENTH PERFORMANCE OF SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT AT HAVEN COLLEGE. WE, THE PLAYERS, ARE THE LAST GENERATION OF THE ANTHROPOCENE. WE, THE PLAYERS, DEMAND THAT THIS IS THE LAST PERFORMANCE OF THIS PLAY. WE, THE PLAYERS, QUESTION A PLAY THAT PERPETUATES SPECIESIST, SEXIST, RACIST, ABLEIST, AGEIST, AND CHRISTIANIST IDEOLOGIES THAT ARE ALSO DEPLOYED IN SUPPORT OF SETTLER-COLONIAL ZIONIST APARTHEID FASCIST REGIMES. WE, THE PLAYERS, QUESTION A PLAY THAT GENDER-NORMS, SLUT-SHAMES, BODY-SHAMES, AND CELEBRATES STATE VIOLENCE AGAINST PEOPLE OF COLOR. WE, THE PLAYERS, WILL NOT BE PLAYED ANYMORE. NO KINGS! NO KINGS! NO KINGS! WE, THE PLAYERS, INVITE YOU, THE AUDIENCE, TO JOIN US IN THIS WORK. LET US MAKE SPACE. LET US LISTEN, LET US LEARN. LET US LISTEN, LET US LEARN. LET US LISTEN, LET US LEARN.

They repeated this to mutters, sighs, babies crying, clapping, and hisses, and to Patricia pointing out that it was actually the one hundred and thirty-eighth performance. After a few more chants the players nodded and turned as one to face the screen, and sat. A few crawled into the tents and watched from there.

An independent scholar of the Middle Ages appeared via Zoom. After removing her N95 and adjusting her red keffiyeh, which had many of the students worrying their black ones, she delivered a series of Indigenous land acknowledgments, listed her pronouns, and then began her lecture, “The Coeval of Evil in Medieval Studies; or, Who Really Gains When We Read Sir Gawain? (And Who Is We?)”

The students onstage held their hands in the air and snapped their fingers appreciatively. When the snapping stopped, the lecture started. After a few minutes Katrina stood up and dropped her black cloak, revealing a red bodysuit.

Reynard the Fox, the trickster character chased by the hunters, uncatchable for almost all the poem.

Using her fencing training, Katrina began to dart and thrust and slide across the stage: hiding in the open, peeking out from behind the tents, taunting the hunters to catch her, acting the part of the poem when the king and his hunting party give chase in vain. The speaker on-screen didn’t notice. The audience was filming with their phones but generally silent, unsure if this was meant to be part of the production or not, and, either way, not sure whether to applaud. The other actors were watching Katrina move about, whispering vehemently at each other until, finally:

Tegan! Catch her!

But Tegan didn’t move. No one did. If they chased Reynard, wouldn’t they be participating in the play they’d just chanted they wouldn’t perform? This would make them guilty of hypocrisy. No greater sin could an elite American university student imagine committing.

While the other players watched Katrina, Cham stood up and dropped her black cloak to reveal a costumey suit of armor and a child’s plastic sword. She was Sir Gawain, the hero of the poem, the one chosen to cut the strange and terrible giant green knight’s head off.

Cham marched to stage right, held the sword high, then swung it down. A moment later Zoom froze and the screen went black, making it seem like she’d cut off the speaker.

A few people in the audience began to clap. Others booed. The students onstage were standing now, arguing about what to do, phones out, filming everything and delivering passionate selfie monologues. Meanwhile, Cham and Katrina had disappeared.

At least the students playing Reynard and Sir Gawain read the poem, Patricia said.

She repeated herself, to be heard over the crowd. Everyone was out of their seats and moving around. Parents were approaching the stage, calling to their children to put down their phones and cover their faces.

Do you think any of the rest of them have read it, Allard? Allard?

Right, sure, he said. Can we go now, Mom? I need to catch the last bus back to the city.

The notifications were coming in—it was time to finalize the grades for STA 105, to finish the semester’s work, to get ready for the next cohort. He had to go.

You can’t come back for dessert?

Go to his mother’s apartment a second time in three hours?

He didn’t want to see again an apartment full of old clothes and plants and books and row on row of back issues of defunct scholarly journals; an apartment of tufted and torn vintage furniture and a stained French press and thrifted Le Creuset pots and notebooks everywhere, full of ideas and plans for the research seminars his mother ran at Haven. Or used to run. She still hadn’t given him all the details, but Allard had the sense that she was being replaced, and that working from home was the first step. He could have asked her more about her situation, but he didn’t, and not because it had been her lonely texting, earlier that semester, that had led to his Jan Fung Jane Fung mistake. Rather, it was because of the vacant sadness on her face these days. His mother had so wanted to be an actual professor but had given up because of his cowardly bastard of a ghost father leaving her pregnant and alone. Also, because of Allard himself. The fact of him. And now she wasn’t even a homunculus academic anymore because Haven was probably replacing her with a younger person or a chatbot. All she now wanted was for Allard to become a professor. And all he wanted was to show his father that he was more than just a professor. That he was someone who created, out of nothing, whole research chairs for mere professors. To do that, Allard had to get back to the city, continue the work, complete the project.

Sorry. But thanks for the ticket. Kind of a tradition.

Kind of? There is no such thing, Allard, as kind of a tradition. It is, or it isn’t.

There was life in her eyes just then, a brightness he hadn’t noticed since she’d started working from home. Allard sighed. The project could wait a little longer. And he could take a statistically insignificant sum from what he’d made so far to treat his mother to some cheesecake.

So whatever just happened onstage—was that part of the tradition?

Excellent question! It’s a question that deserves an answer, an answer that will take a little time and the right kind of spirit. Cocktails, my treat, Allard, at Tile Fish. On the way to the bus station. The performance ended so early, there’s lots of time. Okay? Please?

No.

No? Really? You’d rather sit in the bus station by yourself than at a table with me?

No. I mean, it’s my treat. Drinks on me.

Oh. Oh! Really?

Beaming, Patricia got up and left with Allard.

Elsewhere in the amphitheater, also beaming, Jack was searching for Helen. He was in a state of giddy shock. Was the person who just did that—going against the grain, rebelling against a rebellion—really his daughter?

Yes!

Yes, she was, unrecognizably, confoundingly, his daughter.

When she was in tenth grade, she’d cut the cheeks out of her underwear. When he’d asked her about it, because he did the laundry, she’d denied it. Eventually, in tears she’d told him that the other girls on her fencing team wore thongs and that she couldn’t bring herself to ask him to buy these for her and so, the tears suddenly gone, and sounding defiant, she admitted that yes, she’d done it herself. That was about as close as she’d come to rebelling, and even then, it had been to conform to everyone else.

Until this.

Even though Jack knew, as a university person, that Katrina and her roommate might get in trouble for disrupting the performance, he was happy that she’d finally done something for herself, by herself. Not because she knew someone else wanted her to, or she had been told to do it for her own good and the good of others, whether by her Montessori teacher, elementary school teacher, fencing coach, piano teacher, dance teacher, high school teacher, guidance counselor, recruitment consultant, academic advisor, professor, play director, grief counselor, Episcopalian youth minister, above all by her mother, her father, her dying mother, her widowed father. No, she’d done something herself. And how happy Elizabeth would have been to see her do this, not because Elizabeth had done it first, but because Katrina had done it her own way! Jack didn’t even know, perhaps he hadn’t really admitted to himself that there was this whole other person behind his winsome, thoughtful, resilient, porcelain-cheeked Haven-admitted perfect child.

He texted Katrina a giant thumbs-up. She immediately hearted it.

Jack felt a lightness, the first real lightness he’d felt in a very long time. And he wanted to share it, not at a cemetery, mumbling, but with the living breathing person who’d been sitting beside him, knees touching under a graveyard, just a few minutes earlier. Where was Helen, now?

He saw Allard leaving with the older woman, guiding her through the crowd with one of his big hands on her shoulder. They were both smiling, too. Seeing the crooked-branch shapes of their mouths, it finally made sense: not his date, his mother. Who taught at Haven? Under normal circumstances, Jack would be more skeptical, even disappointed, but what did he care? His Katrina was her own Katrina, and he was on a date, his second in two days.

Helen!

He saw her beautiful face lit up by her phone. She was staring down at it. She didn’t look up as he approached.

If we hurry, he said, we might still get a table at Tile Fish. I’ll see if Katrina and her roommate want to join us. I really want to know how they came up with that.

What?

What do you mean, Helen, what? Did you really miss what just happened?

But now he was seeing the look on her face.

What’s wrong, he asked.

A student committed suicide.

Oh no, I’m so sorry, Helen. You need to get back to Arcadia. I’ll drive you.

We both need to go back.

Why?

It’s one of yours.

One of my what?

One of your students killed himself.