Figure on a Grassy Common at Twilight: A Tale of the Arts Department

CW: Contains references to abuse, psychological trauma, and suicide attempts.

“University install a new time rift no one bothered to text Faculty about?” Anand Deshpande murmured as he studied the formation just beyond Wrightson Hall. “Given our current sociopolitical trajectory, it somehow seems imminently plausible.”

“You’re not entirely off-base,” Saanvi cut brightly through her husband’s sardonic bleakness. Dusk was settling in, with a bruised pink aura to the west, and the late afternoon Main Street rush two blocks over was transitioning into the Wednesday brew-and-wings crawl. The arts chairman and her beloved macroeconomist instead craved lamb biriyani off the Old Courthouse Square, but the “other Dr. Deshpande” paused to watch the five intent sketchers arranged under a sprawling pine.

“You see, given recent controversy over AI art, I felt perhaps it was time to remind our budding artistes of the lingering importance of human observation, manual skills, and visual and cerebral processing within the evolving creative landscape.”

“Ah, yes the evil AI,” the towering Dr. Deshpande rumbled hollowly. Saanvi smiled indulgently.

“The AI Age inevitably will inform contemporary art, just as modern realism, abstract representation, performance art and socially conscious graffiti have redefined – or should I say realigned and expanded -- our concept of art. We’re talking a rebalancing – neither wholesale capitulation to the unbridled use of artificial ‘creative’ intelligence, nor abandonment of traditional techniques and media.”

“The apex artist there, Ms. Thomason, attended my senior seminar series on economic value creation. So, in effect, this is a remedial exercise..”

“Succinctly reductionist,” Saanvi cooed, taking his arm, and peering at the artists’ “subject” – the central Quad, fortified by brick and limestone and marble and steel and glass, and criss-crossed by sidewalks and assorted statuary and markers.

“I will say,” Anand added, studying the quintet, “there is something, ah, nearly halcyon about the image. Like time out of space, an idyll in the postmodern tumult.”

“When your left hemisphere dominates this way,” Saanvi smirked, “I know you’re gravely in need of protein and curry.”

**

Saanvi respected faculty autonomy, even when faculty was absent. The sketchers had toiled under the amblyopic watch of Associate Professor Bertrand’s TA, armed for bear with an iPhone and Albert Camus, but she knew Cirie Bertrand would have seen an approach by the department head as a breech of confidence.

Bertrand’s appearance in Professor Deshpande’s office doorway at 9:13 a.m. thus was a source of dual apprehension and curiosity. As the studio arts instructor-cum-AI addiction counselor laid a portfolio on the chairperson’s blotter and took the guest chair without preamble, Saanvi shifted to a different level of apprehension and a new plateau of curiosity.

“Whit Hofgren,” Bertrand stated. In two words, Cirie nearly brought the zen administrator out of her hand-carved teak Rajistan chair.

Hofgren had four years before been a trophy acquisition late of Stanford with a specialty in color theory and lithography and an apparent way with headlight-averse freshmen. After a couple of semesters flying essentially sans radar, one of Whitford’s TAs and a student Health Center counselor revealed he had a darker, deeper, pathologically camouflaged way he with handpicked undergrads.

A near-suicide in Ramsen Hall exposed a campaign of gaslighting and coercion, and over the stringent objections of Professor Deshpande and her colleague Thea Mason, the administration had allowed their prime catch to slip the hook. Professor Mason never forgot a Chicago cop in riot gear, a crypto-racist donor, or a predator hiding behind a fine arts degree, and had been the first two years later to report Whitford Hofgren’s own self-inflicted demise to the department’s new chairperson.

Saanvi began to formulate a cogent response, but Cirie already had fanned five sketches across the desk. Bertrand tapped the one in the center of the array, and Professor Deshpande located her reading glasses.

After a few moments, Saanvi glanced up. “Impossible. Even with that pretentious walking stick he affected…” She reached for another rendition of Quad At Sunset.

“Nope,” Professor Bertrand stated hollowly. “He’s only in Cole Pertwee’s sketch. I had a disciplinary issue to deal with, but I had my grad assistant signal precisely when my students were to mentally capture an image of the quad in 20 seconds and begin drawing from memory. None of the others remembered seeing Hofgren or included even a vague figure correlating to Pertwee’s detailed depiction. None.”

Saanvi again scrutinized the figure in blue windbreaker and jeans. Even wearing a navy watch cap, the finely wrought three-quarters profile was unmistakable. She scanned the remaining four sketches.

In the space where Cole Pertwee had resurrected the dead predator, Anand’s economics defector, Erin Thomason, had rendered what at first resembled a gray wolf seemingly poised to pounce. The beast, like Hofgren, was absent from any of the other drawings.

Brandon Rainey, whom she’d recalled sporting a thigh-to-toe cast covering his left leg, had included several sharply defined figures featured in the others’ works, from the lanky young man in the familiar Blackhawks jersey on his pad by the statue of Frank Lloyd Wright that guarded his eponymous arts center to the shapely student in the teal hoodie and neon yellow jogging shorts 20 feet away under a streetlamp, apparently eyeing the hunk in the hockey shirt. Thomason, as well as Kendra Tyler and Orelia Gomes, had dressed the woman in royal blue and yellow, though Tyler had the tall drink rooting for the Cubs rather than the ‘Hawks, and both he and his admirer remained expressionless – indeed faceless.

What’s wrong with this picture?, Saanvi pondered, musing over a side-by-side puzzle she’d once vanquished in seconds in her dentist’s waiting room.

“Well, I don’t know that it’s appropriate I even bring it up,” Professor Bertrand drawled. “Cole is on the spectrum, neurodivergent. Highly functioning – probably closer to Aspergers than autism. I guess I decided he must have hallucinated or misremembered or something. Then I thought, what if he didn’t? What if Whit Hofgren is, ah, back. And, this time, good and pissed?”

**

“That appears very uncomfortable,” Saanvi empathized. Brandon Rainey grinned in self-deprecation as he adjusted his rigid limb under the conference room table.

“Nah, I’ve gotten used to it, and it’s not my first rodeo. Well, the first was more like a bumper car ride. Got T-boned my senior year of high school at a four-way stop.”

“And this,” the unnervingly serene head honcho murmured. “My understanding was this one was the result of a pedestrian-auto encounter near the arena.”

Brandon blinked. “Yeah, I wasn’t looking where I was going, or rushed the light. Probably looking at my phone, or you know, I think I might have had a few beers. Yeah, you probably know I’m underaged. Any way we could delete that?”

Saanvi suppressed a tingle. “Brandon, I’m not Campus Police or the morals police,” she chuckled. “I wanted to inquire about the sketch you created last night.”

“This about the dude Cole said he saw on the Quad? He seems like a good guy, you know, for being, you know?” He swallowed. “So, anyway, dude remembers like anything you say and everything people do. My dad would say Cole’s wired different. Which is cool. But what if his wiring got a little fuck— sorry, screwed up, and he drew what he remembered from a different time? Like the guy’s a what, like an afterimage?”

Brandon let that sink like he thought it might. He looked indeed highly uncomfortable, and his eye contact was becoming practically Aspergian. Saanvi decided to release him – temporarily – from his obfuscations.

“Actually, I wanted to ask you briefly about a different anomaly, if you don’t mind…”

**

“I frankly found her exasperating,” Anand shrugged, savoring his steaming ashwagandha as the CNBC logo segued into a Schwab commercial. “She was constantly ahead of herself – and me. So eager to impress, so oblivious that her brash fecklessness and over-anticipation was an invitation only to personal humiliation. Ms. Thomason reminded me of those quiz show contestants so rattled and competitive they hit the, the, uh, buzzer before the clue is even fully articulated and shout out their wildest guess. She was a—”

“Premature ejaculator?” Saanvi offered with rare whimsy.

“Ah,” her husband nodded. “A joke. Do we still have those—”

“Butter biscuits?”

“Beer Nuts,” he clarified. “You see?”

**

“You have the most luminous eyes,” Saanvi reflected as Kendra Tyler settled behind her large boba tea.

The senior graphic arts major raised a thick brow. “Well, that was random. They’re like blue. Why you want to talk to me anyway? And why here

“Professor Bertrand showed me your sketch from last night, and I was intrigued on several levels.”

“Why?” Only the young woman’s lips moved.

“They’re particularly cerulean in tone,” Saanvi pressed. “Do you wear contacts?”

“This is just a little fucking creepy. What’s so intriguing about my drawing? This about that…guy Cole seeing the imaginary pedo professor? I told you, none of us saw Professor Perv.”

“I don’t believe you did.” Saanvi’s voice took on a hard edge. Kendra straightened abruptly. “This man was a sociopath, a predator. He was dangerous enough under the protection of his reputation and position. Can you imagine what he now might be capable of?”

“What do you want?” Kendra shrank before Saanvi’s eyes.

“I was struck by your sketch’s duality. On the one hand, you displayed an acute eye for detail. The lines of each building, the contours of the Quad lawn. Nearly photographic detail. On the other hand, there was an abstract, primitivist feel to your human subjects. They’re nearly featureless. I considered you might be nearsighted. But selectively nearsighted? The generic, static elements, you drew with astonishing accuracy. Well, nearly astonishing accuracy. On a clear night, even at or perhaps especially because it was dusk, there were few to no shadows, and those that were present angled into the setting sun. As if the sketch had been completed at a completely different time of day, and you extrapolated twilight.

“Professor Bertrand informed me there’s been a rather precipitous decline in your work. That often signals larger, personal problems, and I’d like to help you with those, if I could. I know you were desperate to make this grade, and you knew Professor Bertrand’s lax TA would be supervising the project. You took a calculated, last-ditch chance. But you must, for everyone’s safety, admit you submitted your original, pre-composed sketch, hastily adding only those figures you’d very briefly spied after Hofgren’d left the scene.”

Roughly 10 minutes later, Kendra Tyler provided the answers Saanvi needed, then began to formulate the questions Professor Deshpande knew Kendra would need.

**

The man in the jeans regarded Saanvi with benign curiosity, then detected or intuited something in the professor’s grimly calm expression. The massive canine at his feet merely opened one eye, then adjusted itself on the hotel patio.

“A Vlcak?” Saanvi asked politely, joining him at the glass-top table without ceremony or invitation. “Beautiful animal.”

Without his watch cap, the man clearly was Whit Hofgren’s senior by far more than an absent four years. Theodore Hofgren was as fit and wiry as his lupine son, but in the late afternoon sun, three feet away, Professor Deshpande could define every facial line etched in age, disillusionment, and was it regret or guilt or both?

The old man smiled gently, and a liver-spotted hand dipped to scruff the huge, docile beast. It responded with a grunt of pure pleasure. “Yes, Zora is. My wife was Czech, and the old girl here has been pretty much my sole companionship since her death and my chief consolation over the last two years. You know your breeds, which somehow does not surprise me. You are her? Dr. Deshpande? I never got to meet you, to my regret.”

“I am sorry for your loss,” Saanvi murmured.

“That’s charitable, to say the least,” Hofgren acknowledged. “I’m sorry for the emotional cost my boy incurred. It’s been difficult to reconcile the young man I raised to appreciate the arts and humanity with the, well, the animal that stalked so many young women. Apologies are not remotely adequate.”

“Nor yours to give,” Saanvi stressed. “Is that why you’ve come here? To apologize? For him?”

The old man shrugged. “To seek amends, I suppose. Maybe to help reconcile the two Whitfords.” He peered across the table. “How did you find me?”

Professor Deshpande quickly summarized the puzzle of the five student artists and Cole Pertwee’s anomalous “ghost.” “I pondered the question, what was wrong with Mr. Pertree’s sketch relative to his classmates’ renderings? But I was asking the wrong question, given the potentially significant implications. How might Mr. Pertwee’s drawing be the only accurate depiction of the five?

“Several distinct possibilities arose. The stylistic contradictions and odd shadows in Kendra Tyler’s work indicated a deliberate attempt at fraud. In the momentary, cursory act of scanning the Quad for any major revisions necessary to her prepared sketch, she caught the young woman in the hoodie and neon shorts and the young man in the eye-catching jersey. But she missed you.

“Erin Thomason’s drawing included one distinct discrepancy compared with her peers’ works – an improbable wolf roaming the common. I assume that despite her advanced years, Zora retains her breed’s strong prey drive – excitability and sudden bursts of energy in response to a small animal. Did Zora lunge after one of our campus squirrels or chipmunks while you were walking her, I presume unleashed?”

Hofgren smiled contritely. “It was a squirrel. She briefly ran off in pursuit, and as I caught up, both the rodent and Zora changed course and ran into the shrubbery between buildings. I waited for a moment, but she was determined to rout the animal.”

Zora snorted perhaps as a squirrel scampered across her subconscious.

“And in the moment Zora gave chase, our overeager, eager-to-impress Ms. Thomason jumped the gun on her instructor’s orders. By the time Zora circled back, leaving you alone on the lawn, the others were signaled to ‘record’ their image. Ms. Thomason’s attention was elsewhere.

“Brandon Rainey’s sketch included a single anomaly. A teal hoodie that appeared royal blue in everyone else’s sketches. Now, teal and neon yellow ideally are not an ideal fashion match, but more than that, royal blue and ‘gold’ are the University’s colors. Factor in that Mr. Rainey has been statistically accident prone over the last few years, both times at pedestrian traffic stops. Have you perhaps heard of deuteranomaly? It’s a type of colorblindness that affects the green cones of the eye, resulting in difficulty differentiating reds from greens and, in many cases, blues from greens. You were attired entirely in blue, and if you’d turned to watch Zora as Young Rainey’s gaze crossed your position, your face would have been hidden and your white hair covered by your knit cap. As natural light dims and color saturation drops at dusk, it wouldn’t be unusual for you to have simply blended into the grass and foliage around you. Three rational explanations for ‘Whit’s absence from every drawing except Mr. Pertwee’s.”

“There were five students,” Theodore Hofgren noted in a vaguely admonishing tone.

Saanvi nodded gravely. “And that’s why I felt it essential to locate you. Most local motels and hotels will forgive a shitzhu or Pomeranian overnight, but given Zora’s majestic scale, the possibilities seemed limited to a specifically dog-friendly establishment. So, in Millington, either the La Quinta or here at the HomeAway Suites.

“You see, I went through every conceivable explanation for your absence in Orelia Gomes’ drawing. Which was especially unusual because of her attention to minute detail in every other aspect of that upper right quadrant you and Zora were crossing. As I examined the remainder of her sketch, I noted a number of hesitations, erasures, and mis-strokes, as if Ms. Gomes became distracted, stressed, as she continued to sketch. I could find no physical, mental, or neurological causes for missing you. The likely conclusion is, she did see you, and kept it secret for some reason. Can you speculate what reason that might be?

“Ms. Gomes didn’t see Zora, and probably assumed she was a product of Erin Thomason’s imagination or whimsy. So she may be running through the entire list of area hotels trying to find you. Well, find Whitford Hofgren. You know the young woman who tried to jump from a fourteenth story window at Ramsden Hall housing years ago? Rachael Bellermine?”

Hofgren closed his eyes, nodding somberly. “One of my son’s students.”

“She left the university after the incident, and I understand she’s attempted twice more to harm herself. Mr. Hofgren, I don’t dredge this up to exacerbate the guilt you so unnecessarily feel. But looking through my records of our investigation into Whitford’s conduct and my interview with Rachael’s family, I recalled a minor stepsister. She now attends the University, in fact is a very talented art student.”

Hofgren drew a long breath, and Zora’s massive head lifted for a moment. The predator’s father smiled down, and the Vlcak again relaxed.

“HomeAway must have been high on her list,” he told Saanvi. “The girl came to my room about an hour ago. She realized her error the second I opened the door. We came down here to talk. I explained why I was here, she explained the lasting damage my son had done to her Rachael, about the fear and anxiety she herself felt every time she crossed near the arts building. Then, she just. . .left. She gave me something, I suspect for you.”

He'd wrapped it in a hotel towel likely swiped from the lobby or a first-floor cart. It was black and hard and about as serious a thing as Professor Deshpande had ever seen. Saanvi stared at it, silently, hands in her lap. Contemplating reopening doors and wounds, deliberating whether to call someone willing to touch the thing, simply so that she might not…