Harriet was extracting another orange donut from the box. She was a solid woman, thick in the middle, with her white hair （loose that day in the museum） now in a single braid pinned to her head in a coil. She looked intrinsically out of place in the year 2001, as if she knew she would not tread too far into the new century and wasn’t overly interested in acclimatizing herself. She must be … Sally wasn’t good at guessing people’s ages past twenty or so. Then again, few women in her hometown went naturally into the good night of aging. The moms of Walden wouldn’t have dreamed of greeting the day without a slather of sunblock, preferably at blackout SPF, and if they ate Entenmann’s orange donuts they did it in secret. She wanted to know how old Harriet was, and she opened her mouth to ask this very thing, but what actually came out was something else entirely.
“Say what?” Harriet turned her head. Evidently, one ear was sharper than the other.
“I said: Next time you go out picking, can I come with you?”
Chapter Seventeen
Messy Things
In which Harrison Oppenheimer briefly considers escape,
and a surprising invitation materializes from an equally surprising source
In the wake of Eli’s accusation and Carlos’s denial, everything began to unravel.
There was debate, then argument, then outright fighting, with roughly one half of the students arrayed in vigorous defense of the accused plagiarist, roughly the other half crouched in an outraged scrum around the alleged victim, and a few leftover guys with their fingers in their ears, trying vainly to tend their gardens and get in some quality time with the Stoics until this messy thing resolved itself.
But here was the sad truth about messy things: they did not resolve themselves. They got resolved, if they got resolved at all, by grunt and confrontation and maybe a little screaming, followed by （gruesome as this was to contemplate） deliberate and redemptive hugging. Mostly, though, as history effortlessly demonstrated, messy things just jolted on until they shuddered to a halt in exhaustion. And so, when it became clear that debate and argument were just so much treading of mud, the students of Roarke commenced not speaking across the lines in their little community, and whatever bonds they’d forged in Plato and animal muck throughout the fall and early winter began to degrade in earnest.
By the end of March the damage felt irreversible. Carlos and a few of the others were no longer sitting down for meals; instead, they loaded their plates in the kitchen and went off to eat in one of the seminar rooms, while the rest conversed in a state of general suppression around the dinner table, sticking to the universal and the strictly academic and absolutely avoiding the topic on everyone’s mind. In the classrooms a fragile pact held longer but it waned soon enough, discussion splintering into first veiled then open hostility and disagreements beginning to feel, for the first time, personal. The center, in other words, was not holding, and as the student body fractured, the systems themselves began to break down, little fissures opening everywhere. Class meetings started after their appointed times or stopped abruptly before they finished, and there was a strange epidemic of oversleeping, which distressed the animals. Some nights, the school even ran out of food due to imprecise planning and indifferent safeguards, and more than once they drifted dangerously low on things the animals needed, like straw and even feed.
At the center of it all, Eli Absalom Stone—prime mover of the crisis, or its victim, depending on your affiliation—remained a still point. Eli had not deviated from his own routines and responsibilities, which now included oversight for the current applicant pool and an active search for a new faculty member to teach the history of science. He still rose at his customary time, took his shower, visited the kitchen for black coffee and a single piece of fruit, then went to one of the classrooms or to the cubicle in the administrative area and began his day’s work. Occasionally he could be seen walking with Emmanuel, or one of the Justins, out along the road up toward Jackson, and he could often be found in his preferred armchair in the meeting room, the one with the shredded arms, powering through a book at his normal, accelerated pace. By evening he’d be at the dinner table, passing the salt, genially complimenting the cook （Gordon, who would now only glare at him）， and resolutely not acknowledging the tension. He declined, outside the meetings dedicated to the subject, to mention Carlos or his alleged crime. He declined to give the slightest indication that he held any responsibility for the mire in which they all found themselves. He declined to show his hand, and he never, ever broke. But the damage crept steadily outward, ensnaring them all.