(vignette 13) Mortadella

Mortadella!  . . .

Mortadella; Mitchell heard the word correctly as the scent of the fresh cut meat tore him from his sleep.  His Italian was awful, but there was no mistaking the scent of Italian sausage.  Mitchell’s mouth began to water.

Mor • ta • del • la!   David Croeso spoke the word as if frolicking across a dale.  Its syllables rose then fell, and rose then fell again.  Mitchell could be forgiven if he initially thought that David might have been turning them in his mouth, as if morsels of the meat that he was cutting.  The word had a simple poetry about it.  A music, Mitchell thought.  Mortadella.  Mortadella, men have named you.  He hummed the tune of Nat King Cole’s Mona Lisa to himself.

The scents of toast and cornichons were also on the air when David began reciting a second verse with the staccato of the first.  Mot • za • rel • la.  — Mozzarella!  Mozzarella.  Mozzarella!  David sang in time to the sound of his knife landing on the cutting board as if to say Cutting!  Cutting.  Cutting!  — Perhaps a bit too staccato, Mitchell said to himself of his translation from the Italian, mozzarella, to the English, cutting.  He wondered if David was thinking the same thing.  The two of them often did.  Think the same thing, that is.  At the moment, Mitchell had begun to think that David might soon give him his own sampling of mozzarella con mortadella.  Anticipation was over-spilling his gums. 

The scents of fresh cut basil and sundried tomatoes crept up as well.  They, like characters from a tragic opera.  The young royal and the upstart commoner.  The latter wise beyond her years.  Drawn together.  Yet, meant to be kept apart.  Mitchell’s olfactory acuity, bordering on hyperosmia, usually expressed itself as euphoria, . . . with a great deal of fanciful visualization.  Even so, Mitchell was wise to the fact that David was happy, possibly ecstatic, about something.  Something, other than a lunch of mozzarella con mortadella.  These were symptoms of his happiness, not of its cause.  It would be a bit odd, . . .  David, to be feared, if his Italian gave away the cause of his happiness.  Mitchell was translating the word mozzarella using an archaic meaning, cutting.  And, presuming meaning hidden behind similar archaic use, Mitchell translated the word mortadella a bit too, … well, too literally to be certain, but also a bit too sinisterly.

Mortadella?  Mitchell lingered over the word.  Morta — della!  The two Italian words rolled around like rueful imps inside his brain.  Egli è morto della malattia profonda.  They repeated.  Morto — della — malattia — profonda.  “He has died of a major illness.”  Surely, David was not among the living dead.  The living dead didn’t make themselves cheese and meat platters.  They preferred living brain matter and blood-thumping human flesh.  But, who was dead, then?  And, how had they died?  These were the questions that Mitchell was left with.  Perhaps the answers lay in David’s choice of condiments.  Why ruin a quintessentially Italian platter with something as English as toast and as French as cornichons?  David couldn’t be pregnant?  Could he?  A croque-monsieur and a Monte Cristo sandwich also suggested themselves to Mitchell.  These might possibly involve the use of toast and cornichons.  But, the more he thought about these, the more he considered death and revenge as the motives for David’s happiness.  Mitchell’s French was worse than his Italian — virtually non-existent, in fact.  Had David next barked the words Eh, viola. Croak monsieur!, Mitchell would have to have considered that a stitch of Voodoo was being preformed.  It wasn’t in David’s character to wish someone dead, particularly not through the medium of a cheese and meat sandwich with pickles.  Revenge — the thought that sprung from a Monte Cristo — something to do with the movie perhaps — wasn’t in David’s character either.

As I’ve said, Mitchell was translating too literally.  We can forgive him.  He is only a dog, after all.  A truer etymology is unimportant here.  Unless.  —  No.  That would be preposterous.  Indeed.  Besides, in a strange way, David Croeso was happy just because there had been a kind of death.  The President’s.  A kind of political and fiscal suicide that left David Croeso, as the next highest ranking official not involved in the “well-intentioned” plot to misappropriate funds, as acting-University President.

     

     

(vignette 12) Of Nano-tubes and Pipe-dreams

The air in the cabin was electric.  Electric, not to feign the fey exuberance of Walt Whitman singing to the grass, though that might follow if only the flight was longer and the drinks were stronger.  No, it was electric in more of a good ol’ boy kind of way.  Dr. James Fabricante was still in his self-congratulatory mood.  And, he had a mind for slapping the backs of those he knew.  Frankly, on a mid-week, mid-day flight, he didn’t expect to see anyone he knew much less to find himself seated with the Dean of his Medical School, enjoying the flight.  It was more than a welcome relief.  You never know who you might end up with on one of these flights, Dr. Fabricante heard himself say.  Air travel had become democratic.  The University was literally in the middle of nowhere.  There was a highway that rolled out — one-and-a-half hours, top speed — to the coast.  The city at the other end of the highway was full of bankers and military men.  And, there was this five-times-daily flight to the big city up north.  There, connections could be made to the nation and the world at large.

It was true that seating on these flights was random.  My son, the Dean droned over the sound of the propellers, took the late morning flight last week.  He ended up sitting next to an opera singer who had been in town for “La Traviatta”.  “La Traviatta” was the perfect opera for a college audience, they both agreed, though both men thought only a handful of students likely filled the seats.  Neither of the two, themselves, had attended.  The boy tried to pretend that he was Russian, the Dean offered with a laugh.  — Russian!  Dr. Fabricante repeated.  He might have expected French or Spanish, something common.  But, Russian?  Russian takes dedication, he said.  — Awh, the boy’s a polyglot.  The Dean replied, to both acknowledge and dismiss any approval for his part in the fact.  Apparently, not good enough to put off an opera singer though.  The fellow engaged him Russian. the Dean continued.  Didn’t improve the conversation much, to hear the boy tell it.  — Well, Dr. Fabricante leaned closer to the Dean, I’m glad that you’re seated here.  — Me too, the Dean shot back, perhaps a bit too quickly.  Dr. Fabricante, his boss, was still new enough at the University that the Dean was nervous.  Me too.  I mean, he caught himself, though not soon enough, the man was the size of an opera singer; and, the poor boy was pinned in the window seat!  — Now, Dr. Fabricante laughed.  A conventional laugh.

With male-bonding rituals ticked from their lists, the two began talking shop.  It came naturally enough, and, saved them further awkward silences, or, the discomfort of yet more personal banter.  The plane rocked gently as it passed through pockets of turbulence, but it was altogether a smooth flight.

Dr. Fabricante would eventually come to know the reputation of the mid-week, mid-day flights.  They would become endless, ironically enough; Dr. Fabricante’s efficiency measures introduced wide-reaching cuts in travel budgets.  The flights had grown the reputation of “administrative specials”.  No one on an average fixed salary could afford to fly them.  It was odd then that a young man was seated in the row ahead of him; but it was easily dismissed.  The kid had, as students do, likely awoken too late for his scheduled flight.  The airline would have placed him on this flight, to fill an otherwise empty seat.  The kid was quiet, respectful, and — as students go — relatively well dressed.  Judging by any number of facts in evidence — that his shirt, a button-down Oxford, was tucked in at the waist — that his shoes were black leather rather than canvas or white — that his ears weren’t cuffed into ear-buds, listening to something god-awful — Dr. Fabricante presumed that the kid was a Campus Conservative.  The smooth rub of foundation for men, a bronzer perhaps, suggested that he might even have parked his sports car in the priority spaces next to Dr. Fabricante’s own well-polished saloon car.  For a moment, Dr. Fabricante thought what it might have been like to have had money like that when he was a student.  Any girl — not that he wasn’t happy with Jean-Anne — might have been his.

The kid went by the name of Aram Assyrian.  Name aside, he was the kind of young man who could fly under the radar.  His common good looks made people trust him.  He made the perfect spy, paid by the student newspaper as one of Dr. Fabricante’s several shadows.  His dress that day was just a uniform, tailored to fit in to the President’s background.  Aram couldn’t believe his good fortune.  Dr. Fabricante and the Dean of Medicine, both.  A captive core of actors, within easy hearing.  And, not just their banal thoughts on politics, small-talk about the wives and kids, or the quality of the student body.  It was as though they’d entered a world devoid of others, or, one in which they presumed that those whom their voices enveloped would neither understand nor care to understand a thing they had to say.  It wasn’t every day that a student reporter had access to a business meeting let alone to frank discussion and planning.

When his editor heard what he had to report, they agreed it was too explosive without further corroboration.  Instead Aram, who wrote under his middle name — Az, short for Azazel — had the pages of his story notarized, witnessed, and sealed in a envelop mailed, in triplicate, special-delivery to the Editor and the newspaper’s lawyer.  Once received, they would remain unopened, . . . until it became necessary to do so.  It was overkill to be certain.  But, the caution might one day work in their favor.  Sure enough, that day would come.  And, it came, along with denials from the President’s Office, in the newspaper’s Friday edition, at the start of “Legislative Weekend”.  Politicians found themselves arriving on campus as the ensuing scandal erupted.  It was awkward for everyone, especially Dr. Fabricante.  Denials from his Office had the whiff of attempted cover-up in the face of a direct witness statement and the newspaper’s documentation of how the plans made during that flight had been acted upon.  The cartoon that ran in the newspaper that day depicted a set of wind-up, jumping teeth with the caption, “Read my lips!”

If the plan hadn’t involved the misappropriation of legislated and donor funds and endowments, little would have been made of the story.  The premise of the plan overheard that day was simple: Support the development of nanotechnologies in the Medical Center at all costs, whatever the costs.  That alone didn’t invite curiosity let alone the Administration’s downfall.  Indeed, it was — in part — part and parcel of running a university.  The economic seed of the business of education was restricted and inadequate.  The University was forced to provide value-for-money that was bankrupting the institution.  Though less restricted, the value of a top-ranking athletics program in support of education was likewise finite and tapped.  Need was exceeding that for which athletics had already provided.  And, athletics as a source of supplemental funding appeared to be tapping-out, like an oil well going dry.  Alumni donors, another well of funding, were also closing their wallets in the face of tough times.  Contraction was the order of the day; but, the politicians would never stomach it.

University research needed to produce something tangible that could be ceded to the University’s Foundation and licensed, for profit, to keep the University competitive with its peer institutions nationally.  This much of the premise was sound.  Development and subsequent sale of a sports-drink brought millions of dollars to the University.  But, millions in today’s market was inadequate.  The University needed billions to secure the future.  And, sale of the product was terminal and short-sighted.  Licensing would ensure continued payments together with an ability to demand higher fees over time. 

For as simple and as certain was the case that could be made for his assertion, it was an assertion that could not be placed before the politicians and donors who allocated funds to the University.  If they understood it, they would only reduce their allocation by the amount of profit they anticipated.  Capitalism, Dr. Fabricante thought with disgust, had come this.  It no longer seeded growth without stripping it of its produce.  It was like selling all of your corn crop at market, retaining none for sowing the next year.  It wasn’t sustainable. 

Mrs. Fabricante had a more colorful analogy.  Why, she said when her husband ran his thoughts by his wife, that would be like sell’n your stud horse for dog food!  But, she continued, you can’t tell the Governor that.  The Governor, everyone knew, was a man who suspected disloyalties of educated men, of anyone really who wasn’t — as he described himself in his campaign literature — “self-made”.  Who was it, she asked her husband, who recently said that “Universities should focus on enterprises and integrate production, teaching and research; to capitalize on the intellectual property that they create”?  Dr. Fabricante had long suspected that his wife hung on his every word.  But, it was certain that she wasn’t paraphrasing him.  Neither he nor she for that matter would have been so direct.  Dr. Fabricante reeled through his memory of the Governor’s speeches.  I give up, he replied.  Communist Chinese Premier When Jowl-Bow!  Her accent made clear that she wasn’t mastering Chinese in her free time, but mention of Wen Jiabao made plain that his was a concept that would be foreign, to say the least, if planted into the Governor’s ears.  Dr. Fabricante knew, as he’d always known, that he’d have to be creative with what he had.

Nanotechnologies had a promising future, particularly in medicine.  But, they were also developmental and untested.  They were as voracious of funding as the returns they promised.  To see them through, the University would have to bet the farm, as Dr. Fabricante was overheard telling the Dean of Medicine.  That would mean using the economy as a reason to close programs, to shift funds.  Programs in the arts and humanities, the two men reasoned, had the lowest rates of demonstrated success, producing useful products and intellectual property for which people would pay.  What was the English program capable of producing?  The Dean asked rhetorically.  The one or two authors internationally who might gain fame every decade weren’t exactly buying Caribbean isles or castles in Scotland.  Even when they donated to educational institutions, they were more burden than blessing.  They saddled university libraries with their papers, Az reported overhearing Dr. Fabricante, . . . papers, so valued culturally, that they couldn’t be sold on, not even for the up-keep of more important papers. 

The graduates of these programs, Dr. Fabricante elaborated, weren’t providing donations in sufficient numbers, let alone to the level of funding required to sustain the programs from which they’d graduated.  This was a lament that the newspaper had often previously reported from the President’s Office.  At least some of the social sciences tapped into lucrative anti-terrorist and drug-war grants.  And, Az reported, paraphrasing, while the university’s scientists were by and large studying esoteric and useless subjects, such as paleo-climatology, those few that tapped into commercial services were returning value to recover the running costs of their entire programs.  The loss of certain popular romance language programs, such as French or Spanish, would be acceptable.  They were being taught elsewhere.  People would always need health-care; and, they’d demonstrated time and again the willingness to pay hand over fist for new and life-prolonging medical technologies.  Dr. Fabricante described the closure of “invaluable programs” as a “bridge loan”.  The phrase invaluable programs was characteristic of Dr. Fabricante’s humor.  The Dean gave it an appropriate, knowing laugh.