15. Until Death Do Us Part - Lords of Serendipity

While Devi kept dreaming, Allard was staring through a drip-lined window in the living room of his mother’s apartment. He was studying the gray sludge street, the bare, gray-bark trees, the gray sky overhead. This was New England in late winter. It was like living inside an IV bag.

Having lost his job as head TA of STA 105, and, by extension, the driving purpose of his life, Allard was now living with his mother. And he wasn’t feeling like himself.

Normally that condition could be alleviated either by going over the terms of his project or by watching a little Mature Audience anime. But neither was, presently, an option for him.

After Johannes’s suicide, the university had canceled all subsequent offerings of STA 105 and was offering automatic A−’s to every student affected by the death. Allard’s project was over. But that wasn’t really why he had moved out of his basement apartment in the city to live with his mother.

It wasn’t fear of being caught, either. He didn’t know if the university was investigating why Johannes had killed himself, but no one had asked him anything about it, yet. Maybe he never would be asked. But Allard knew that other students who had used his service would probably hear about the suicide. And that one might decide to say something. After all, they had paid for guaranteed B’s, and now A−’s were on offer to all students, past and present. But would you still be granted an A− if you admitted to cheating the first time you took the course? Or would you lose the credit itself, which meant losing the program you were in, the degree you received, the work visa and job you now had? Of the 670 students who had paid him for grades over the past three years and one semester, how many would be willing to make the case that they had cheated to avoid committing suicide? So far none had contacted him directly. Maybe because he always told them there were no refunds?

But regardless of whether any would ask for their money back, which was never going to happen, it was highly improbable that the response rate for this aggregated subgroup of STA 105 students was going to be 0/670, if every one of them now had the chance for an automatic A−. Someone would run the risk of getting in trouble for using Allard’s service, to get the better grade. It was only a matter of time.

His calculation was off, he thought, remembering the last client he’d told there were no refunds. He winced and looked away from the window, down at the frayed tassels of the living room rug, which dipped and rolled in the gaps in the old, gashed hardwood floor of his mother’s dismal apartment. How Allard wanted to be an old, gashed hardwood floor.

The improbable response rate for this aggregate subgroup of STA 105 students was not 0/670.

One of his students was dead.

The improbable response rate was now 0/669.

But it wasn’t because one of his students had committed suicide that Allard had moved in with his mother.

Allard moved in after he saw a ghost.

He had gone to his office early on New Year’s Eve, under the guise of clearing it out after having been informed, in an emergency meeting, that he wouldn’t be TA-ing 105 as of January. The union rep who sat in on the meeting with Allard and the department chair told Allard that he had so much seniority in the bargaining unit, he was guaranteed any other course assignment he requested for the winter semester. Allard found that idea offensive and stupid, like a high roller being removed from a six-figure buy-in table and told he could play any nickel slot machine he wanted. Every win would be a glaring, embarrassing loss that only the world’s losers would celebrate. He declined the offer.

He left the chair’s office and went down to his own, on the first floor of the department. He opened the drawers to make sure he wasn’t leaving anything behind. He did this because he had the sensation that he was being watched, and it struck him as normal to look through your desk drawers before leaving your office a final time. Of course, Allard had never opened the drawers in the three years he’d been using the office. He cupped and yanked on a small, domed pull, but it only came out partway and jammed. He tried another, and then the two on the other side.

The drawers were full of test booklets from years back that had never been picked up. Obviously, nothing of his was in there, related to the service or otherwise. He pushed the drawers back in place with the meaty bottoms of his palms and brushed the top of his desk, even though there was nothing there. Feeling again like he was being watched, he surveyed the room thoughtfully, as if he were thinking of buying the place or planning a renovation and trying to decide where to put the crematorium.

Who kills himself because he’s not allowed to rewrite an exam?

What kind of person?

A coward.

A selfish coward.

A selfish, weak coward whose action destroyed so many other things than his own life.

What did it take to kill yourself over an exam rewrite?

He went over the night Adi Bhopal had come to his office. Something about needing a better grade to get into graduate school, and his parents needing his help, and his having a younger brother who wasn’t allowed to help because he was the younger brother.

It was a mess. He was a mess. And then he jumped off one of the city’s old bridges, far from campus, when there was a perfectly good bridge for this purpose directly across from the department.

According to Reddit, he’d left a note. The post didn’t say what he’d written, but Allard assumed he hadn’t mentioned him or his service, or else he’d already have been questioned about it.

Allard pulled his jacket off the empty chair and was putting it on when someone knocked at the door.

Excuse me. Excuse me, please. Dr. Allard?

He turned, and there, in the threshold, clean-shaven, wet-eyed, well-dressed, bone-dry, and living, was Adi Bhopal.

Allard stepped back and back and back until he hit the fireplace mantel and his funny bone zinged, an ambassador laughing at him on behalf of his brain for being a rational twenty-first-century human being trying to get away from a ghost.

Clutching his elbow, he stepped forward.

What kind of person fakes his own death to get a better grade in STA 105?

Let me explain.

No!

I’m not—

That’s right. And guess what? Faking your own death’s not going to work. You’ve done so much damage to so many people! And for what? What, again? Remind me? An A-minus, was it?

You’re mistaken.

I’m going to report you, Allard said, swaying righteously, and not just to the university. I’m calling the police, too. No, I’m calling ICE! You’re worried about your visa status? You think they’re letting grade-hustling suicide-faker international students stay in this country? Do you have any idea how much shit you’ve caused? How many lives you’ve screwed up?

You’re mistaken.

No—

Listen to me, Dr. Allard. I’m not Adi. I’m Adi’s twin brother. My parents don’t have enough money to come from India and I’m already here so I’m trying to get things organized.

But . . .

Twins.

No. He said he had a younger brother.

Technically, true. Meaning, he was born first. Please, when did he tell you he had a younger brother? Did you know him very well then?

No. I’m leaving.

Allard wished the young man at the threshold actually was a ghost so that he could run right through him and down the main hallway and out the front door. But he wasn’t. He looked just like Johannes, only cleaner and smoother. The crazed wet eyes were just wet.

I know you were his TA and I know Adi asked you to help him retake the course. He told me these things.

What else, Allard wondered, did he tell?

But he said nothing. Allard wasn’t moving now. He was like a giant flabby rabbit trying not to be seen by a creeping, panting dog.

And also, I know you denied his request.

Allard held his breath and tensed for the attack.

But the young man sighed and looked away, shaking his head in the negative.

He took a big breath. He sighed.

That was when Adi asked me to write the December exam, he said. To impersonate him. And I told him no. And so he tried to do it himself, and then, that was when he . . . But what kind of person would break an engagement because her fiancé got a bad grade in a university course? Did my brother meet his fiancée in STA 105?

He was getting married?

He left a note. It read, Until death do us part.

Until death do us part?

Yes. And so we’re trying to find the girl he was going to marry. If I’d just written the exam for him, then he’d probably be getting married now.

Allard brushed past him. The suicide note was about him. It had been written to remind him of the conversation they’d had back when Adi first signed up for the service.

Allard felt like a dog’s pile of steaming, stinking relief.

Until death do us part.

He went to his basement apartment and packed his things and met his mother at the bus station that night.

By February, Patricia still didn’t know why Allard had moved into her apartment. She hated, absolutely loathed, the idea of being typical—years before all the other mothers were breathlessly warning each other about BPA products like they had suddenly discovered a coterie of child murderers in their midst, Patricia had read enough in the critical literature about bisphenol A to ensure little Allard’s lips never touched a toxic sippy cup. She’d read The Drama of the Gifted Child multiple times and had him tested for autism before it was the fashionable thing to do. Decades later, and like every mother, she still wanted to know what was wrong with her child so that she could help him.

While he lay about the apartment, staring at his screens, Patricia had started a new project. Puck, the Haven research chatbot, was learning so rapidly that it was making fewer and fewer requests of her, and so the college library had asked if Patricia would start tutoring through the writing center. She had said yes, immediately, only to find out the meetings would be conducted virtually; she would continue to work from home. No matter. At least she was dealing with people now. She was helping international students with their humanities papers. It was wrong and could be considered racist to say so, but the original versions they shared frankly read like they were written by robots—Allard said they absolutely were written by robots, but Patricia didn’t care to understand large language models—and so she was humanizing the essays and refusing their shocking generosity: they wanted to give her so much money for helping them!

While Patricia conducted her sessions, off-screen Allard would wake up late on the couch and watch things on his laptop like a shift worker watched television. He also spent great stretches of time looking out the window, like an old man in a nursing home. What had happened between drinks and dessert at the Tile Fish after the Haven Gaudy, and now? And why couldn’t she just ask him?

That Allard held grudges against the world made sense, she thought. His life hadn’t been easy. He’d been in graduate school for nearly a decade, which, to Patricia, a humanist, wasn’t that strange. Maybe he’d been in school too long, as impossible as that idea seemed to her? Had whatever was wrong with him just taken this long to manifest? Or had something happened at the university that created an exhaustion and slackness in him, and, beneath that, a disappointment with things, even a sadness, and beneath that still, a sense that this wasn’t going to end anytime soon? The whole idea of the university, if you made it as an academic, was the life you could make for yourself, on the inside. Whatever its difficulties, and wherever you found a job, this was a life that would never end. But what if Allard had given up on even making it? How soon would everything else fall apart, for him, for her idea of him, her ideas for him, for them? How to ask? And what would she do with the answer, if he answered?