2. No One Else Applied - Lords of Serendipity

Thousands of miles and tens of thousands of dollars to the west, another father was standing outside another door, also knocking, also in need of money. If he had to, he’d clean toilets for his daughter, too, but he was a white man in late middle age with multiple degrees, living on the East Coast of the United States: he could never get hired for that. But he could get hired for this, instead.

Jack Bayern knocked again, and looked down at his phone, at the Final Payment Deadline notification his freshman daughter, Katrina, had forwarded him. From behind the door, you could hear the hydraulic drone of a standing desk descending.

Jack, come on back!

It was all white inside the department chair’s office. You could still smell the paint. There were rocks of different shapes and colors placed here and there, and two large iMacs set up on the desk.

The chair had invited him to meet because the prize, an emergency posting, was his. Jack was being hired to teach two sections of Introduction to Statistics for Non-Majors, fall semester, Arcadia Tech. Syllabus and PowerPoint slides already set. Wei, the professor who had been assigned to teach it again this year, had just gone on sick leave.

Is the winter semester also available? asked Jack.

Are you saying you want that, too?

Yes.

Really?

Yes.

That’s wonderful, Jack, thank you. On behalf of the whole department, really the whole university, thank you. One oh five is very important at Arcadia Tech, for lots of reasons. I needn’t explain that to a valued senior faculty member like yourself, of course. And it’s not easy, as you probably know.

Because?

No one really wants to be there, but they have to be. You know the course nickname, right?

No.

Life or Death for Non-Majors. Because the course is required for a lot of other programs. And that’s also why the course has the highest cheating rate at the university.

Yes, I heard about that, during the pandemic.

It’s ongoing. So yes, this is a big ask, Jack. And let’s say that if you teach all of the non-major intro courses for this year, which would be amazing, really, we should do something nice for you. I want to do something nice for you. So, I don’t know, do you want me to see about finding someone to take one of your other winter courses?

No. I want the extra teaching. I want 105 on overload. I’ll teach the winter section too, but only on overload. Like the fall sections.

The chair nodded and studied the man sitting across from him.

Jack was kind of like the department’s photocopier machine. He occupied space and, technically, he worked. But most of the time, you forgot he was still here. You didn’t need him for anything anymore, until suddenly, you did.

He had been first to reply to the emergency posting.

Excellent, Jack. So let’s proceed. All Intro to Stats for Non-Majors sections for this academic year are yours, and because you want this as overload teaching instead of a reduction of your other teaching—

Correct.

Then you will receive the STA 105–specific overload payment for each section.

The overload payment is specific to this course? said Jack.

Yes.

Which means what?

It’s double.

Double? As in . . .

Double the standard payment for teaching an extra course. In recognition of the size of each section and also the management of the TA teams, including the Head TA. You must know Hamburger. Or at least have heard of him.

Yes. What year is he now?

Year nine. And counting. He’s been Head TA for 105 for, I don’t know, at least a few years now. Maybe more, actually. Apparently he’s just ridiculously good at running things—has a whole system, everything under control, all the junior TAs in lockstep. He even has his own anti-cheating program. Sorry, we’re supposed to call it academic integrity.

Prostitution versus sex work.

What?

Nothing. What about assessments?

Assessments? said the chair.

Did Wei also set the weekly quizzes and the midterm and the final for this year’s version of the course? I couldn’t set fourteen weeks of new assessments while teaching the course. Without extra compensation, I mean.

Ask Hamburger. Just talk to Hamburger.

Really?

Yes. Hamburger loves TA-ing 105. I don’t know how he lives on that. Maybe he’s independently wealthy.

Probably doing something on the side, said Jack.

Jack himself had been very close to using an AI bot to create a Mandarin-language math-tutoring profile for Weibo when the emergency posting went out on the department listserv. It was either that or finally give up, give in, and answer one of the emails he regularly received from insurance companies looking to hire statisticians to analyze car accident claims.

He had come into the chair’s office hoping that teaching two sections of STA 105 would net him an extra ten thousand dollars, which would at least pay down the remaining residence balance for Katrina’s first four months of college. But teaching four sections, on double pay, meant forty thousand dollars, which would take care of the rest of the year and part of her sophomore-year residence, too. Which meant next year’s extra summer teaching could go straight into paying sophomore-year tuition. If she wanted to do study abroad, he’d probably have to use the line of credit, but there’d be extra space by then. Of course he still had to teach the courses themselves, from September to December and January to April, alongside his regular courses. But with Katrina off to college, what else did Jack have to do with his life but pay for it?

So. We’re agreed? said the chair.

I’ll teach all 105 sections, said Jack.

On overload?

On double overload.

Ha! Yes! Correct. Double overload! And who knows, Jack, but if this works out this year . . .

Jack smiled and nodded. He returned to the most important thoughts of life as a single parent with a child attending an expensive college: money thoughts.

He’d already planned for Katrina’s four years of tuition. If he taught STA 105 on overload for four years, that would cover residence and living expenses, including, potentially, a year abroad, and then Katrina’s entire time at college would be taken care of. Unlike her parents, she’d graduate debt-free. Knowing his daughter, and also knowing the woodsy Gothic paradise where she was now a student, a place so, so far away from the downtown concrete brutalist university where he was a professor, it was highly probable she’d stay at Haven College for a fifth year. Which meant teaching 105 on double overload, at double rates, for five years, then. Which was fine. With his regular salary he would continue to pay down his line of credit, full of his debts from Katrina’s pre-college life: years of piano and ballet, the Outward Bound summer trips throughout high school, the tutors, the college applications coach, the fencing lessons recommended by the college applications coach and then the fees for varsity fencing during high school, and high school itself: he was on a payment plan with her private high school: three more years: modest compound interest.

All of which was fine. Jack loved his daughter more than anyone or anything else in his life. Not more than. No. Loved only her, at this stage, which didn’t mean he didn’t still love her mother, of course. It meant he could only, actively, practically, love Katrina, at this point. And thinking of her there, at Haven, where he’d dropped her in late August, this filled and bit at his heart. On move-in day, he’d showed her the amphitheater by the pond where, many years earlier, with cold fingers clutching a metal mug of mulled wine, he’d watched her future mother, Elizabeth, play Reynard the Fox in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in the Haven College Christmas Gaudy. That was at the end of fall semester, her senior year, 1984, one of the last before Haven went coed. Jack did not care for mulled wine. He did not come from a family that drank wine. And from the cold mug, the cold air, his hands suddenly looked like his grandfather’s: knobby, red, the skin scaling like a plucked chicken’s. But what did he care? Reynard the Fox, having evaded every hunter that visited campus from the men’s college in the woods up the road, had chosen him, quiet and plain Jack, a math major two years her junior, no less. It would be twenty-one years before they had Katrina, nine more before Elizabeth died, and nine more until now, until this: Katrina starting her freshman year at Haven.

His late wife had been an Episcopalian and a children’s book editor. Jack had probably spent more time in churches and books than any other statistics professor in the world.

And so even if the probabilities of God and the afterlife and the goods of reading weren’t plottable, graphable, calculable, Elizabeth had believed in these things, and for reasons that also weren’t plottable, graphable, calculable, she had believed in Jack, too. At dinner parties and department receptions she liked to quote a line from a Dickens novel to explain what it was like to be married to a statistician—to someone who had “the careless spirit of a gamester who felt that he was part of a great gaming system.” But he was never a careless spirit and he saw nothing great in the system of the university. He saw greatness in Elizabeth; he cared for Elizabeth; his spirit was lit up and lived because of Elizabeth. He still believed in Elizabeth, and in what she would have wanted for Katrina.

And so Katrina was at her mother’s alma mater, which, Jack knew deep in his heart, in his bones, had always been her own first-choice college.

And he would do whatever he had to do to keep her there.

He smiled as the chair walked him out of his office. The chair was also smiling, and saying again how fantastic it was for the entire department, really for the entire university, that Jack had been the first to apply for the emergency instructor posting for STA 105. What the chair didn’t say: no one else applied.