She didn’t want the community college police officer to walk her to her car that night. It wasn’t necessary, she told him. But he insisted with a firm, courtly manner. It was late. Almost eleven. She had all those cloth tote bags filled with papers and books. And it was raining, a half-hearted winter storm on its way out. Late January in Southern California.
Over the years, they enjoyed a cordial relationship, chatty and warm, sharing photos of their growing kids. Each had had a single child late in life. His daughter was now eleven. Her kid seventeen. The two handsome children could have been siblings. She genuinely liked Officer Santos. He always looked in on her when she worked late. Hers was often, if not always, the last car in the parking lot on Thursday nights on an otherwise deserted campus. After all, for most instructors, Thursday was the beginning of the weekend. They skedaddled. Not her. You get your money’s worth with me, she joked with her students. She appreciated the officer’s conscientiousness, his starched professionalism. He called her “professor.” Hardly anyone did that. Not even students.
His friendly solicitousness made her wonder about the decade preceding his hire when no one, absolutely no one, seemed to notice the female English professor’s office door open, the lights on, the lingering lone car in the parking lot. What was up with that? Not that she felt unsafe. Not really. At least not anymore than she did anywhere else. She could take care of herself. She knew where to walk. How to hold her keys splayed between her fingers like brass knuckles. She’d been taught that particular technique by a professor as an undergraduate in what was then called a Women’s Studies class. That prof understood what could happen in parking lots if no one was looking.
She never forgot arriving on this very campus one bright morning years earlier. She was still new, untenured, wary about whether this upscale college was right for her, if she were right for it. Its “service area” was suburban, but growing richer, the new developments swelling into the foothills like inch-high frosting on fancy cake. She’d been purchasing her faculty parking pass on a semester-by-semester basis, just in case. She had already begun parking in the last space in the corner of the faculty lot. Her getaway spot, she joked.
That morning, police cruisers blocked the entrance to the student lot. Yellow caution tape staked out the far corner adjacent to hers. Fire trucks, paramedics, an ambulance waited. White tarps were being stretched to cover a small car whose doors she could see were hanging open. A middle-aged man sat on a nearby curb, his back to the aging grove of citrus trees which bordered the campus. It was spring. The old neglected orange trees were full of fragrant white blossoms, if not fruit. The man’s legs were bent, his arms on his knees, his head bowed. Even before she opened her car door, she could hear him howl.
Later, she put the pieces of the story together. The man was a father. His son, a student at the college. The son had troubles. He hadn’t come home the night before. The father spent all night cruising around to favorite haunts, calling his son’s friends, then waiting vigil at home, then making the rounds again. In the morning, he thought to visit the campus. There he found his own son, dead in his car in the parking lot from what would soon be identified as an overdose. In the days that followed, an impromptu memorial appeared: flowers, candles, stuffed toys, a Dodgers cap, a worn hoodie. For most of that semester, the parking spot stayed empty, the memorial tended, until, inevitably, one day, students began to park there and the offerings disappeared, collected, gently, by the same workers who trimmed the bushes and trees, kept the lot tidy.
She couldn’t help but wonder where the campus cops had been that night. The ones so eager to give tickets for expired parking passes or for vehicles parking head out, instead of head in. The ones who rousted the homeless people when the buildings closed for the night but who didn’t come and check on her when she worked late. Where were they? The keepers of order? How long does it take to O.D.? Hours sometimes. The kid’s last class got out at seven. He was found some twelve hours later. Not by the cops, but by his own father.
#
When they first met, she and Officer Santos discovered that his family had once visited the sea turtle rescue camp in remote Baja California where her family spent their winter holidays. Maybe this is what made them unlikely, but easy friends. Their shared admiration of the Mexican couple who rescued the turtles and the stark desert beauty of the peninsula, the deep blue gulf waters. “You should go back sometime,” she would say when she saw his eyes linger on the framed photo hanging on her office wall, the beautiful sweeping bay, its archipelago of islands, the sixteen angels that gave the little town its name. And for his part, Officer Santos was always encouraging her to take her family to a street festival in downtown L.A. on Broadway. He assured her she would love the scene and that she would really hit it off with his wife. She kept promising she would try. Then the festival abruptly ended, along with the career of the city councilman who sponsored it. Some kind of scandal. The councilman was indicted. Money laundering. Bribes. Corruption.
“Really,” she reassured him that rainy January night, “you don’t have to walk me, officer.” That’s what she called him, though a couple times he suggested Rick. She shook the suggestion off. “Maybe when you come to Baja,” she joked.
But Officer Santos prevailed and scooped up her bags, filled with the first week’s student papers, hoisting them on his broad shoulders. It was late. Later than usual. That night, the first night of her evening class, she stayed after to talk with eager students. They were always eager at the beginning of the semester. So many questions, so many ideas. And Santos, he had been checking the new electronic locks which were giving everyone, including him, big trouble. The new locks were the campus response to the growing threat of school shootings. But the locks were tricky, locking some people out, locking some people in, sometimes not locking at all. The new key cards that hung around her neck and everyone else’s on regulation lanyards didn’t always produce the desired results despite practiced swipes and taps. The centralized automated electromechanical system that now opened and locked down all doors at prescheduled times sounded like those heard in prisons, faraway hands simultaneously turning invisible bolts. It still made her flinch even when she knew it was coming. By the time they left the building that evening, almost thirty minutes after the lockdown, the rain had turned to drizzle. Her car was parked, as usual, far away in that very last space in the big lot.
She had driven the tiny leased electric car that day. The Easter egg-blue Fiat with the orange detailing and the bright red IMPEACH bumper sticker on the back.
That was the real reason she didn’t want him to walk her to her car. The bumper sticker. Bright red with white capital letters spelling out the single word. She was afraid Officer Santos would see the bold bumper sticker and not like her anymore. She was about to lose her unlikely friend, the campus cop. She knew how that sounded, but it was true. After all, even the college president had told her dean, a Muslim immigrant, “Of course I’m voting for Trump and, if you know what’s good for you, you will too.”
But that’s exactly why Officer Santos wanted to escort her. He definitely knew which car was hers. He didn’t have to ask. He was a smart guy. They’d been working together now, for what, five years? Six? A cop like him noticed things. For instance, the lone woman who worked late in the two-story building. Of course he knew her car was the last one in the parking lot. She realized this only later, driving home, listening to the jazz station, sorting things out while Sarah Vaughan declared that they couldn’t take that away from her.
As they walked across the black asphalt, toward the far corner where the tiny car waited under a glowing dome cast by the street light, he started to tell her that they were thinking of leaving – him, his wife whom she still had never met, their daughter. Leaving.
“The country,” he said, “has turned upside down.” His parents had come from Mexico, his wife’s from the Philippines. They imagined it would be better here, and, for a while, it was. “But look,” he said, “look at what’s happening. What does my daughter have to look forward to?”
Then he told her about spending a recent holiday weekend with his small family out in a resort town near Palm Springs.
“Rancho Mirage?” she asked. She’d been there once with her family. A conference. Air-conditioned meeting rooms. A pool for the kid. Palm trees. Lots of guys in golf shirts. Lots. More mirage than rancho.
“Yes,” he replied.
One night they went out to California Pizza Kitchen, he said, a favorite of their daughter. It was full with all sorts of people and the servers, of course, were mostly Latino. Of course. At some point, two couples arrived with their kids. Lots of kids. A big boisterous table of what you might call “white Americans,” he said. During the course of the evening, after they had ordered and were waiting for their food, the children at this big table started chanting, “Build that wall! Build that wall!” and cracking up.
“They were,” Officer Santos went on, “not doing this quietly. Banging silverware. All together on the table. Boom, boom, boom. Snickering. Looking our way. And at the staff who were busy, so busy delivering sodas and breadsticks, salads and pizzas, the works.”
“You know,” he said, “the parents did nothing. Nothing. They seemed proud. Like it was a good joke. No one did anything. Not even the management. This went on forever.”
He and his family, they got up and left, leaving a big tip for those workers who couldn’t do the same, who couldn’t leave.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What’s going to happen next?”
What indeed, she thought. Weeks earlier, when her family crossed the border coming home from the Mexican turtle camp, they found the frontera barricaded. Rolls and rolls of razor wire several feet thick. As if, she thought, waiting patiently in their truck with their three passports in her hands, inching forward in the designated lane, hordes of immigrants were going to physically overtake the sentries and just walk right in. “Checkpoint Charlie,” her husband quipped, a reference he had to explain to their kid.
She and Officer Santos approached her car, avoiding the puddles.
“So we’re thinking,” he continued, “Mexico. Costa Rica. I have a cousin in San Jose. We have passports. The kid too. What do you think, Professor?”
She clicked open the hatch. He deposited the bags inside, leaning them again the seat back and closed the trunk.
What did she think? This is what he wanted to know. This is why he walked her to her car. Who else was there for him to talk to on this campus? What had she told him? The pandemic had turned her memory mushy. She remembered the feeling of responsibility, of sympathy. Yes, she could see the attraction of Costa Rica, of Mexico. But doesn’t every country have its own problems? In the end, she pleaded for him to stay, that the country wasn’t just theirs, but ours too.
This was the last time she remembers really talking to him. A month or so later, the pandemic arrived. The campus closed. The parking lots and entrances were barricaded by orange and white sawhorses. Years passed before she taught in person at night again. Years. And then, when she did, she noticed that so many people, including, thankfully, the Trumpster college president, were gone. But Officer Santos was gone too. She asked after him. No one knew anything.
#
She often thinks of Officer Santos when she works late. Now, it’s just her and the custodian in the big two-story building most evenings. She knows the campus cops are there somewhere. After all, she got a forty-nine dollar ticket tucked under her windshield wiper because she forgot to buy her annual parking pass for the first day of the semester, but nobody drops by to see how she’s doing.
The night custodian’s name is Farhad. He’s new, keeps to himself and smells like cigarettes, now banned on campus. He pushes around a cart filled with brushes and brooms and spray bottles of cleaning chemicals. He stores his dinner in the faculty lounge refrigerator where they meet sometimes, taking turns at the microwave, the water cooler. As soon her class is over, Farhad is there, helping her rearrange her tables and chairs from the circle she prefers to the rows preferred by other instructors. He moves quickly, methodically. Hers is the last room to clean before he moves on to another building. He uses a foot-long two-by-four wrapped in cloth to wipe down the tables after he has sprayed them with disinfectant. He slides it across the long tabletops with wide arcing speed. When she admires it, he tells her he made it himself. It’s more efficient, he explains, better than just a rag.
Farhad is from Iran and has two young children. The job is good, he says, with excellent benefits, but he is angling for a day shift so he can spend the evenings with his children and wife. When he was a child, both parents were home every evening. How it should be.
“You should be home with your family,” he advises.
“I like working at night,” she tells him, “and my kid is all grown up.”
“Your husband?” he asks.
“He’s fine on his own one night a week.”
Farhad looks skeptical.
One night she asks, and Farhad tells her that he used to wish to return to Iran. “I am over it,” he declares, “Professor, I am an American now. Iran was better,” he tells her, “with the Shah. Iran will never have that again. A country needs a strongman.”
This takes place in the lounge. The big windows show off one of those dramatic California sunsets that is all smog-inspired Technicolor oranges and purples and dramatic silhouettes. The Santa Ana winds are blowing. The blackened shapes of power lines and palm trees seem to spar. Farhad is unwrapping all the food his wife has prepared for him, extracted from his insulated lunch cooler. He assembles it on the counter below the big windows. Some kind of roast meat, rice, a glistening salad, flatbread cut into wedges. A small, fragrant feast. She leans against the refrigerator, waiting for her frozen bean and cheese burrito to finish spinning in the microwave. She tosses its plastic sleeve in the trash.
She doesn’t say anything though she could say a lot. She is an English professor but she knows about the Shah, about strongmen, how they rule, first perhaps their homes and then their countries. But it’s not her place, she thinks at first. Then she thinks, no, that’s wrong. She has a place in this too. Besides, Farhad is her fellow countryman now. Is that the right word? Countryman? But once again, she doesn’t want to risk the easy if opaque camaraderie she imagines they have established here. She retrieves her now heated burrito, lonely and pale on its plastic plate, and returns to her office.
That night, after she has advised one student about various strategies to transform autobiography into fiction (Change point-of-view! Change names! Alter the outcome of events!) and then listened to another earnestly describe the intricate plot of his three-book series about what happens when unwitting U.S. citizens elect a robot president (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well!), she helps Farhad rearrange the tables and chairs, then returns to her office to fetch the bags of papers waiting for her weekend attention. She leaves him in the classroom where he reinserts his earbuds and resumes listening to what she thinks of as radio shows but really must be podcasts, all in Farsi with the occasional English advertisement leaking out so loud she can hear it: “Oh-Oh-Oh-O’Reilly Auto Parts!”
She doesn’t linger. She closes her office door, waiting to hear the chirp of the electronic lock. It chirps. Officer Santos is gone, but the locks he struggled with continue to work. Her car waits in its far corner space under what she has come to think of as its own spotlight. She never took the bold bumper sticker off but it’s faded to pink and cracked, almost illegible. The Santa Anas are still blowing, strong and warm, sending loose twigs, leaves and palm fronds scratching across the pavement.
Then, instead of heading out immediately, she drives the ring road around the deserted campus. On the car radio, the late night jazz deejay is digging deep into Sidney Bechet. She passes the parking spot where the student OD’d. The ever-dwindling orange groves where his father wept. The trees were subtracted as the college expanded, vanishing from development and neglect. The drought-tolerant native plants, spiky and patient, slowly replaced the citrus. Succulent. Cactus. Sage. Yucca. Where, when in wild bloom, students stop to take selfies.
She’s looking for something. She finds it in the far parking lot preferred by classified staff like Farhad, the one adjacent the old Quonset hut used by maintenance and closest to the thickest stand of remaining neglected orange trees where students and staff alike sneak forbidden cigarettes. She sees the smokers when she takes the long way around to stop and shop at the venerable farm stand near the strawberry fields. All men for the most part, mostly young, a few tattooed punks and then the older men, lots of immigrants like Farhad, huddled together in their shared habit, shuffling through the leaf litter, ducking under the branches with their shriveled bitter fruit.
There it is. Another late night lone car. She suspects it’s Farhad’s. A blue minivan with attitude, a family car for the man who wants to spend more time with his family. This parking lot is not so well maintained. The blacktop is splintered, the fissures filled with dark smears of filler, fractured into an illegible map. Blades of grass sprout through the cracks. She pulls closer, driving in the wrong direction across the white pavement striping. Who’s going to stop her? In the lower corner of the driver’s side of the front window is a static cling staff parking decal featuring the college crest, one of those dying orange trees sprouting out of an open book. The motto scrolls below in Latin which never, of course, was ever actually taught at the college: “A posse ad esse.” She had to look up when she was first hired all those years ago: “From possibility to actuality.” Like hers, this vehicle also sports a red bumper sticker with white letters. Newer. Brighter. No translation needed. Make America Great Again.
Soon enough, Farhad gets his wish. He lands a transfer to the day shift. She sees him cross the campus in a golf cart, his supplies riding in the back where the clubs should be. They exchange waves. She has yet to speak to his replacement, a giant of a man with a penchant for overalls who shows up mid-evening while she’s still teaching to dump the trashcan by the classroom door. The arms that reach for the tall plastic bin are full-sleeve tattoos, filmy swirling designs inked into his skin with the same soft blue color of his faded denim overalls, or of certain blue veins seen under thin pale skin. His movements are swift: the door opens, one foot keeps it that way while he reaches in to tilt the bin and pull up its plastic liner filled with the day’s assortment of beverage cups and paper. He adds a new liner and the door closes. By the time she has finished teaching, he is long gone. She knows it’s wrong. He shouldn’t leave the building like that. Her classroom unswept, the desks unwiped. He shouldn’t leave her alone, but he does. She doesn’t have it in her to report him.
This night, she is still in her office when she hears the synchronized chorus of locks tumble. Somehow the remotely secured building is less attractive than when it was unsecured, waiting for human hands to do the locking. She gathers her bags and leaves. The motion-sensitive lights in the hallway pop on as she walks, and she discovers she is not as alone as she imagined.
Tucked into a recessed seating space is a familiar student. They sit cross-legged, leaning forward and propped on elbows, better to peer into a glowing laptop computer screen broadcasting something which, judging from their joyfully engaged face, pleases them. Since the return to campus from the pandemic, this student has adopted the Liberal Arts building as their own and often can be found in the various common spaces throughout the day and evening. Tonight’s perch is a comfortable vinyl couch in a hallway alcove where they are surrounded by their belongings: backpack, textbooks, computer, a couple takeout containers of Chinese food and a large water bottle. The water bottle is completely be-stickered, covered with pink and blue and white decals announcing to any who care to read that trans rights are human rights and that their pronouns are they/them. There is something elfin about this sturdy, compact person, something reminiscent of a gymnast or acrobat, emphasized by their tendency to wear bright nylon shorts and tank tops, glittery eye shadow and their obvious exuberant good health. So much skin. So much muscle.
They look up as she passes, smiling, a bright cube of sweet and sour pork pinched between two chopsticks. The two are familiar to one another. She smiles back.
A while back she had worried about the student, noting what seemed obvious to her, if not to others, what appeared to be an extended and rather solitary residency in the well-equipped building. Could they be homeless? In danger? She shared her concerns with a colleague who decided, as he put it, to investigate. He did. His report? The student is fine. It’s their parents who are fucked up. Let’s keep an eye out, he advised, but let them be for now. They aren’t hurting anyone. They can take care of themselves. The college is better for them than home is. And besides, they got cast in the school play. Soon, they will be busier. And that’s a good thing, he observed convincingly.
This student is around the age of her own child, who, like this person curled up on a couch in a community college hallway, is also off in the world, alone and with others, making a life, finding places to be, to become. She imagines those places, those people, her child, with fear and hope. Years earlier, before the automated locks came into force, when the campus police still patrolled, this student would not have lingered in this hallway, would not have set up camp on the couch. This building would not have been a safe place then, assuming it is even now.
She should keep walking, but she also wants to stop, to say something. But she also wants to stay silent. She doesn’t wish to disturb what they have, a quiet nodding shared acknowledgment.
for Roy Bauer
