3. What Are You Working On? - Lords of Serendipity

A few days later, loose and baggy Allard Hamburger walked through the gridlocked city in bright September sunlight. He was scrolling through a donation guide for endowing research chairs at the famous university where his father taught. The cost was four million dollars. Allard was partway through his project of endowing a research chair of his own. He was doing this through a grade insurance service for certain students who took STA 105. For a fee paid by wire transfer to a numbered account, a reasonable sum compared to total tuition for international students—and all his clients were international students—Allard would go into the system and fix their final grades to 76. This was the median score needed for a B, which qualified them for their majors. Over a thousand students enrolled in STA 105 every semester. There were more than seven thousand individual grades. While the university invested in more sophisticated, more expensive cheating-detection tools every year, just as students found more sophisticated, more expensive ways to cheat, no one thought to check grade-entry columns, never mind for a scattering of mere 76s, among thousands of other grades. So far, he’d made $2.25 million. He needed to raise another $1.75 million. At current rates, if the enrollments in STA 105 remained stable, he’d need three more years. Maybe he’d do it for a fourth year.

A victory lap.

What he cleared, that final year, he could live on until the named research chair was in place to show off and shame his father. But it required that Allard continue to clear $750,000 each year, as he had the last three years. This figure was based on 250 students paying him $3,000 each: 120 from the two fall sections, and 65 each for the winter and spring/summer sessions. He advertised his service on the dark academic web, where the students learned that in addition to the money, he required copies of their student visas and passports.

The first year of his project, a student had asked how long Allard would hold on to his personal information. Until final grades were submitted in December? Until the end of freshman year? Senior year?

The student was a young man from India who already looked like he belonged in an Emirates Business Class Lounge. He had a trim, sporting build; short, greased hair; and a close-cropped beard. He wore a crisp white shirt, navy trousers, and navy socks with Winston Churchill’s face all over them. His cognac leather shoes matched his cognac leather smartwatch strap and cognac leather iPad portfolio. He had a vaguely British accent.

But the leather was too shiny to be real. And he had glassy rabbit eyes and he picked at earwax. This wasn’t a lifelong elite. This was another child of another village man who had worked psychotically hard for years and years and years to send the future of the family to university in America.

I think I know what you’re worried about, said Allard.

What? said the student.

You’re worried about it coming out when you’re about to be confirmed as secretary-general of the United Nations. That they will find out you paid someone to get the grade you needed, in Intro to Stats for Non-Majors at Arcadia Tech, to get into your diplomacy studies program.

The young man smiled, flattered. But then he shrugged and hunkered down in his chair.

Actually, I’m going for a place in the international relations program and then a master’s at LSE and then I’ll be a partner at McKinsey. And I’ll do it in years, not decades.

Okay.

The student wiped and extended his hand. Allard wiped and took it. They both wiped their hands on their pants afterward.

My good name, as you know, is Adi Bhopal. My students call me Johannes.

Your students?

I am sole proprietor of an exclusive international tutoring company on the side. I make dreams for young people who want to study at prestigious unis overseas. Like ours.

Really? But you just started university yourself.

And I need to pay for things, chap. Surely, you understand. We are both businessmen, no?

Allard took out a booklet and a USB stick and placed them on the desk between them. He turned the booklet so that the student could read it.

Arcadia Technological University Code of Academic Conduct.

That’s your copy, Adi. Please read through it. I draw attention to page thirty-four. Item six point one. Which states that any student found to have participated knowingly in the falsification of a course grade, or to have helped someone else do the same, is guilty of forging a university transcript, an offense that normally results in either expulsion or the revoking of the guilty party’s degree. Understood?

Yes. But . . . what do you think is meant by “normally”? Is what we’re doing here normally something done between a TA and a student?

Even if you’re not expelled and don’t lose your degree, I’ll still have scans of your passport and student visa on this USB stick. Understand? Also, no refunds.

Me burning you burns me, he said. The vaguely British accent was gone. Replaced with a much blunter voice. Also, in my business? Same. No refunds.

So what do we have, then, between us?

An alignment of interests. A reciprocal investment. A symbiotic relationship. Actually, a marriage.

Okay. That’s a way of putting it. I might start using that. And how long do you think this thing between us lasts?

Of course it’s until death do us part, said Johannes. He smiled, pleased with his cleverness.

Allard nodded and pocketed the USB stick. And he never heard from Johannes again. At least that year.

Since then, even with all the money he’d made, Allard continued to live on packaged noodles and stolen logins while sleeping on a sunk futon in a basement apartment under a Montessori supply shop. And if he just kept going like that, he could probably live on the money from the victory-lap year for at least two decades after working out the plan to fund a research chair. And then Allard would send news of what he had created, himself, to his father, Martin. Who merely held, but did not create for himself, an endowed research chair, in astronomy, at a well-known university in the greater Boston area. Who had never acknowledged his existence.

Now do you know who I am?

He bookmarked the page he was reading and checked his phone. He began walking faster. He didn’t want to be late for his first meeting with Jack Bayern, this year’s 105 professor.

This was a few days before classes started. Arcadia Tech’s Orientation Week activities had moved into the neighborhood that surrounded the campus, which was in an ongoing transition between low-slung runs of loan shops, garages, safe injection sites, hair-extension salons, phone-repair stalls, Pakistani takeout shops and Puerto Rican grocery stores, and soaring, sharp-edged, smoked-glass condominiums. Allard passed a group of students with faces painted the colors of the Palestinian flag, black and red and green and white, most of the men shirtless and many of the non-Muslim women wearing only sports bras. The students rushed into an intersection and lay down and played dead, their bodies forming the flag while drones hovered above, filming. Off to the side was a small group of students wearing chunky golden Star of David chains over their shirts and Israeli flags like capes. They were also filming. Cars were honking in solidarity, outrage, annoyance.

Cutting down a side street, Allard pulled up Jack’s faculty profile on his phone. Allard had been a graduate student in the department for nearly a decade but had never met him. Jack’s biography was only a few sentences and the picture had been taken with an actual camera, in the prior century. There were no hyperlinks to personal pages or research sites or labs. Nothing published in years.

He was perfect.

Jack’s door was open.

He was sitting at his desk, studying something outside his window.

Professor? Hi, it’s me, Allard Hamburger. Hamburger? I’m head TA for 105? We’re supposed to—

Jack pointed outside his window.

Come around my desk. It’s all right. Just look at that.

Allard went around the desk and looked outside.

Where’s the rest of it?

Exactly.

A bloody pigeon wing rested on the ledge outside Jack’s window.

The wind picked up and the gray and red wing swayed, tipped, and fell off the ledge, a feathery scalene triangle pirouetting toward the ground.

Leaning forward, foreheads against the glass, they followed it down and down. A sudden dark shape appeared from above and dove down and grabbed it out of midair, then swooped up and landed on top of the used jewelry shop across the street. It was an eagle. The bird dropped the bloody wing at its feet and looked around.

Did you just see that?

The department chair was standing at the threshold to Jack’s office, clutching his phone.

We did, yes, said Jack.

What are the chances we all saw that! said the chair.

I think you mean, What are the probabilities, don’t you? said Jack.

Yes! Of course I mean that! This is the Statistics Department, not Religious Studies! Can I use that on my Instagram?

Definitely, said Jack.

After posting about it, the chair looked up from his phone and blinked rapidly, surveying the scene. He’d never been here before. Jack’s office. It was all brown tones, and full of books. Not textbooks, but books. Also banker’s boxes and stacks and stacks and stacks of student papers and exam booklets that had never been picked up. It felt like a storage room for the English Department or something. It reminded the chair of his grandmother’s apartment. Old things, sour odors.

Also like his grandmother’s apartment: there was a daybed. Professors couldn’t have daybeds in their offices anymore, could they? Or wait, oh God, was Jack homeless? Is that why he was teaching 105 on double overload? Backing away, the chair smiled and nodded at Jack, turned, and left.

Allard watched Jack watch the eagle across the street.

So, said Allard. You’re teaching 105 this year, Professor Bayern.

Jack turned from the window and nodded.

Yes. And I understand you’re the head TA. And you can just call me Jack.

Great. And you can call me Al. No need to sing the line.

You’re a little young for Paul Simon, aren’t you?

My mom’s a big fan.

Jack nodded.

Allard was lying.

He had grown up listening to Edith Piaf. His mom was a big fan. But Allard hated the likeliest outcomes of fielding questions about why his mother was a big Edith Piaf fan.

Was she French?

No.

Had she spent time in France?

No.

Was she raised in a household with a proclivity for midcentury popular French music?

No.

Was she a stuffed-animal cosmopolitan and a failed academic and a jilted lover turned single mother so completely self-deluded that she considered herself a living, breathing cosmopolitan and a successful academic and jilting lover and single mother?

Allard sighed and ran his hands through his hair.

Yes? said Jack. What is it?

Oh. Sorry. Just, that was something, wasn’t it, with the bird? The pigeon wing and the eagle?

It was. I wonder if anyone was watching in the Cultural Expression and Action Department.

Why?

Well, if we were philosophers or theologians, instead of statisticians, we’d see something else in it. Something more than it was. Like an augur, or an icon. You look through it, to see something else.

Then thank God we’re not philosophers and theologians. And “augur”—isn’t that from Shakespeare? Auguring hope?

Jack raised his eyebrows.

No, no, said Allard. The Shakespeare stuff comes from my mom. I definitely don’t read it.

Understood, said Jack. For a moment he had hoped Allard was a secret sharer in the old knowledge, someone willing and capable of unnecessary thought. But Jack was a midcareer associate professor of statistics at a barely ranked urban university, chatting with a lifer graduate student in data science. Whose mother was, what? Probably a passionate high school English teacher? Jack was a fool to hope for unnecessary thoughts. But, he reminded himself, Katrina at Haven, Katrina at Haven, Katrina at Haven.

Should we talk about 105? The department chair tells me you’ve been head TA for a while now.

Allard nodded and shrugged. As in: no big deal, nothing to see here.

But sorry, that’s not the way we should start. You’re a doctoral student in our department. We’ve never met before, I’m fairly sure, even though I understand we’ve both been here for a while. So, take a few minutes and tell me about your research. Who’s your supervisor? What are you working on?

Allard smiled. Not exactly warmly.

Thank you, Professor. I’ve recently changed to a new focus.

Which is?

Statistics pedagogy. How to help students make good academic integrity choices.

Jack was far from an active researcher, but at least he wasn’t interested in pedagogy. People who worked on pedagogy were the gym teachers of the university. As in, no real athlete would be a gym teacher. No real professor would care about their teaching.

What about you? What are you working on? Allard asked.

The last time Jack remembered actually working on something was when he had collaborated with the other statistics professor hired the same year: they ran Monte Carlo simulations to determine whether the frequency of convenience store owners and family members purchasing winning lottery tickets was statistically significant or not. But then Elizabeth noticed something the size of a chickpea in her left breast, and then the tests and treatments began, and other than for a miraculous and cruel, cruel period of remission, the tests, the treatments, never ended until it was all over. Meanwhile, his colleague went on without him in the research. Eventually he was being interviewed, again and again, about the scam he’d exposed with the Monte Carlo method, that the probability distribution of winning lottery tickets purchased at convenience stores was statistically at significant odds with the number of owners and family members purchasing winning lottery tickets.

Jack had watched these interviews on a muted news loop from a cancer ward waiting room until he was told it was time to go in, to say goodbye. Then he drove Katrina to the parking lot of an Armenian youth center—take her somewhere she will never visit again to tell her the news, had been the grief counselor’s advice. A sudden single parent to a nine-year-old girl, Jack never did much in the way of research after that. Meanwhile, his colleague won a MacArthur grant, was recruited to ETH Zurich, and kept showing up in news loops, for years. He became that rare thing: a statistics professor known to the public. Not Jack. Not yet, at least.