***
The wind whipped down Wright Street, from the north, bringing a sudden and rare reprieve from the clinging heat, stirring the air and cooling it, relieving the feverish brows of everyone around. The heat in Champaign was almost otherworldly in its oppressiveness, and now despite its looming danger the gathering thunderstorm would be welcomed by many.
Conditions would soon resemble a monsoon, sharp winds splattering horizontal rain, soaking shoes, bags, underwear, everything. Storm sewers would quickly fill and back up, flooding the curbsides and making crosswalks impassable. Lightning would crack repeatedly, blistering out of the clouds with a flash and climaxing with a deafening roar as it found its target; although everyone must have realized the chances of getting struck by lightning were infinitely slight, that uneasy feeling—wariness, trepidation, primal fear—was always present.
The storm front had already cooled the air, and the sky dimmed as I carefully crossed the Wright Street artery and, just as carefully, the adjacent bike path. Several times I had seen pedestrians make it across the street, safe from cars, only to let down their guard and get hit by a bicycle instead. Around here one looked both ways, whether crossing street or bike path. Given the recklessness with which bike riders flew around campus, most of them Greg Lemond wannabes, getting hit by a bike was as likely as by a car.
Safely across both street and bike path, I approached the English Building. When I first came here, as an undergrad, the building was decrepit—classrooms not updated since the forties, walls not painted since the seventies, original 1912 windows which rattled incessantly in heavy winds, hallways underlit with a working bulb in only every third fixture, uncooled in summer and underheated in winter, floors filled with cracks which were crammed with decades of dirt and impervious to the most aggressive sweeping. Stepping inside, I could see not much had changed.
The building was an unfortunate symbol of the school's priorities, of the minor importance placed on the humanities, in sharp contrast to the facilities enjoyed by engineering and the physical sciences, where new labs gleamed, elegant architecture comforted the eyes, and libraries were stuffed with the latest volumes and technology. Or the business campus, where grants from wealthy corporations and alumni surrounded students in academic luxury.
English was one of the few campus buildings where I could imagine Wheatyard feeling comfortable. Its decrepitude suited him, its condition relative to other campus buildings not unlike his house compared to others out in Tillsburg. The building may have been grand at its inception, but that was long ago.
I knew Wheatyard had been here to confer with Mitch Hanratty, and a few others whose fleeting names I couldn't recall. He made only passing reference to these others, and I was so absorbed in his discourse at that moment that I failed to mentally note their names, which I now regretted. The more people I could talk to who knew Wheatyard personally, like Hanratty, the better. Maybe they could tell me about him, passing along critical details he would never divulge on his own.
Wheatyard as a man of mystery, who kept his personal life almost a state secret, intrigued me at first, nagging and making me want to learn more, but had lately begun to irritate me. I wanted to know his story—not just his stories—but he was less than forthcoming, so I'd have to figure him out indirectly, through others. Don Eastman and Emily at The Grind were a start, but I needed to talk to many more people.
I was here to see Hanratty. He kept regular office hours even though he was teaching no summer classes, staying in town unlike most of his colleagues who fled to Europe or Wisconsin lake cottages for a three-month reprieve from what they considered the tedium of farm-country college-town life. Why Hanratty was still here, I couldn't imagine. But I had to take advantage of his presence while I could.
The office door was ajar, and swung in slightly as I knocked.
"Professor Hanratty?" I said to the figure seated at a desk set against the far wall, facing away from the door. He turned in his chair, which screeched in its well-worn joints, and looked up at me.
"Yes?"
I said my name and extended my hand. He shook it, without standing up. Even seated, I could see he was tall, with broad shoulders and a paunch, tousled gray hair and thick salt-and-pepper beard, and a jovial expressive face, with a smirking mouth and rounded cheeks, fleshy nose and ruddy skin.
He must have been quite handsome in his day, even dashing. Back then he probably didn't need to try very hard with female students. He might still have a decent chance with them now, if the permissiveness of those earlier times hadn't completely dissipated during the last few uptight decades. He was a charming rogue, gone far to seed.
He repeated my name, questioning, and looked me over, as if trying to recognize me. He waved me to a chair. "Haven't seen you around here. Grad student?"
"Yes, grad student, but in business. I haven't been in this building since back when I was a sophomore, taking Rhetoric."
"Rhet? Whose class?"
"Dave Cowley."
I heard a few raindrops splatter heavily on the windowpane, and noticed the daylight had darkened.
"Ha! Cowley. I miss that old bastard. So...a business major, MBA," he marveled, looking at me with curiosity, as if I was some rare foreign species. "Money man, master of the universe, barbarian at the gate. What in the world can I possibly do for you?"
Despite Hanratty's standoffish pose, staking a clear delineation between the humanities and business worlds, his words—master of the universe, barbarian at the gate—told me he was at least passingly familiar with the RJR Nabisco takeover and Michael Lewis' bestseller about bond traders, and wasn't entirely unfamiliar with my world.
As I wasn't unfamiliar with his. Otherwise I wouldn't be puzzling over an oddball writer.
"I'm here to ask you about Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard."
"Ah, Wheatyard," he replied thoughtfully. "Certainly an odd duck. But he's sharp, under all of that confusion, that detached distraction. How do you know him? "
"I met him a couple months ago, at Cellar Books," I replied. I was somewhat surprised at his directness, right from the start, without knowing me.
"Yes, he tells me he spends a lot of time there. Let me guess—he slipped you one of his manuscripts."
"Yeah, he did—Longing Dissolute Midnight. How did you know?"
"He's got manuscripts floating all around this building. I don't remember that one in particular, but I've read several others, and some of my colleagues have, too. He comes here looking for an expert opinion, though he never puts it that way. He's never on bended knee, in supplication, begging for validation. He'll hand a manuscript over casually, as if it means nothing to him, saying something like, 'If you have some spare time, maybe you could look this over.' But he must not be completely satisfied with what we've told him, since he's even given a few to Don Eastman over at Cellar Books. Eastman is an interesting one, too—very bright guy, has an English degree but never really used it. You know him, right?"
"I've met him," I said, quickly, wanting to get back on subject. "So what do you think of Wheatyard's writing?"
"Scatterbrained genius. That might sound like an oxymoron, and for anybody else it would be. But it fits him." He was facing me, his back to the window, through which I could see the rain now streaming down in torrents. "Obviously he has trouble staying focused, which could be caused by any number of factors."
"Like what?"
"That's not for me to say," Hanratty said curtly. "That's his personal life. I'm not going to gossip—wouldn't be fair to him. What I will say, however, are all matters of public record, and can be confirmed independently by anyone who digs deep enough."
"Go on."
"First, his writing, which he's freely given me. Scatterbrained genius, as I already said. He can't stay focused, writes during overpowering bursts of energy, pours everything onto the page whether any of it makes sense or not, maybe goes back and sorts it out later, or maybe not. For him the moment of creation is everything, and
polishing it up afterward is nothing, but slowly he's learned to go back and edit what he spewed out during that first binge of inspiration. His earlier stuff was completely unreadable—you could tell he didn't edit a single word. But now he’s learned the importance of editing, even though he doesn't enjoy that part at all."
"The manuscript I read must have been edited. Somehow he managed to connect all the loose threads, which must have required very meticulous rewriting."
"That's true. And strange, too. He doesn't appear to be meticulous in any other part of his life—just look at his clothes, and that wreck of a pickup truck—but in his writing he pursues a quest for perfection and has a great eye for detail. It's as if he's two different personalities, one for writing and one for the rest of his life."
"Writing seems to be his whole life. I don't think he has a job."
"I don't think so, either. He must get money from somewhere, though—maybe some sort of state disability. He comes into town every Friday for books and copies and supplies, which might mean he gets a check every Thursday. But he must have some other sort of income. I know he's got a house out in, where, Ennis?"
"Tillsburg," I corrected.
"Tillsburg. Houses may be cheap out there, but not cheap enough to buy with disability checks. So he's getting money from somewhere else."
"The money can't be much. You should see his house. Compared to that, his pickup is in good shape."
The room suddenly brightened, a flash of lightning piercing the gloom outside, followed almost immediately by an enormous boom that rattled the window and shook the walls. Hanratty almost jumped from his seat.
"Jesus," he uttered, settling back down. "I've been here twenty years, and I still haven't gotten used to that. Probably never will."
Though startled, I merely nodded. It had been years since thunder and lightning scared me.
The conversation drifted on, with Hanratty expounding further on Wheatyard's writing habits and talent, then veering into some war stories of days long gone and finally back to Wheatyard again.
"He's a polymath," Hanratty suddenly said, in a flat and matter-of-fact tone.
"Polymath?"
"Someone who gathers people, facts, ideas from a broad range of unrelated sources, finds connections between them, and melds them into a coherent narrative."
"Huh," was all I could answer. That made sense.
"The word might sound bad, but it's not an affliction. For a writer, it's a gift."
"I see."
"Unfortunately," Hanratty continued, "I think he's also a hypergraph, which is an affliction—a mental disorder that compels him to write obsessively, no matter what damage it does to the rest of his life. A lot of great writers had it—Moliere, Dostoevsky, Poe. It's also called the midnight disease."
I had nothing more to say, nor to hear. Mental illness was something I had never considered about Wheatyard. Eccentricity, yes, and maybe some illegal substances, but not any disorder. But Hanratty's diagnosis seemed too tidy, convenient—an armchair opinion made from a long distance. I doubted that the professor ever stopped talking about himself long enough to really get to know Wheatyard, who was too guarded to ever let a conversation get that personal. They would have only talked about literature.
I realized any further talk would do me no good. Whatever Hanratty believed about Wheatyard was just some interpretation gleaned from his writings, something I could do just as well on my own. I nodded at Hanratty, stammered a goodbye, and left.
Outside the rain had already stopped, the storm swiftly blown away, and the heat gone for the moment but soon to return.