A Model World And Other Stories by Michael Chabon Read Free Book Online Page B

accretion.
    “That’s the man my wife is having an affair with,” he said, reaching into a cardboard box on the floor beside him. He took out a Baggie filled with marijuana and a small water pipe.
    “Smith?” said Levine, and a light went on in his head. I’m afraid I had never told him anything about it.
    “Mehmet,” said Baldwin, spitting out the last syllable. “Not Smith. It’s driving me out of my wits.”
    Levine didn’t know what to say to this. He and his committee chair were not friends. There were one or two graduate students who spent a lot of time in his office on campus, talking about Robert Heinlein and Buckminster Fuller, but they were not Professor Baldwin’s friends, either, really. Perhaps Professor Baldwin didn’t have any friends.
    “Never mind. Forget it.” He gave his head a shake. “Tell me about this Ross thing,” he said, and lit the pipe. As he inhaled, the professor raised his eyebrows, and lowered them as he blew out. He and Levine passed the pipe in near-silence for several minutes. The room filled with miniature cumulonimbus clouds. Levine looked at the titles of the books on the shelves without registering them until his vacant gaze fell upon a slender black spine at the upper left-hand corner of the bookcase, unmarked, exactly the same height and thickness as the spine of Dr. Kemp’s book.
    “Oh my,” said Levine, exhaling a thick plume.
    “What?” said Professor Baldwin. He looked toward the bookcase as if there might be a large spider or rodent crawling across it.
    “Were you a student of Dr. Kemp?” Levine could see Baldwin, a little heavier, with hair, standing beside his brave mentor, frost on their faces, against a background of auks and green icebergs. They had been inseparable.
    “Dr. Kemp?” Baldwin frowned. “I never heard of him.”
    This did little to reassure Levine. Even if it were not Dr. Kemp’s book on this particular bookshelf, it might as well have been—the book was out there somewhere, waiting; he was going to be found out. He was not in the least surprised, and the sudden renascence in his heart of defeat, of the sense of failure, was almost a relief, as though he had loosened his necktie and unbuttoned his collar. There was no easy way out of the prison of his studies, and he had known this very well until yesterday. His plagiarism had been only an act of self-deception.
    “It is Smith,” he said, with a feeling of great detachment from the words he spoke.
    Professor Baldwin was staring intently at the face of his wristwatch and seemed not to have heard.
    “It isn’t that Monsour guy,” said Levine, abandoning both of us to our fates. “I think it’s Smith, sir.”
    Now the professor looked up at Levine and bit his lip. He was going through the evidence in his mind.
    “You could be right,” he said. “That sounds feasible.”
    He replaced the pipe and the plastic bag, carefully, then stood and steadied himself against his desk. On the screen of his computer a model world of weather slowly overheated and drowned.
    “What are you going to do?” said Levine.
    “I haven’t decided yet,” said Professor Baldwin. “But something. Him I’m not afraid of.” He strode to the door. “A bad student I know how to handle.”
    “A bad student?” said Levine, rising with a wobble to follow Baldwin out of the cloudy room.
    As he switched off the light, Baldwin smiled weakly, as though seeing that his phrase had perhaps not been appropriate.
    “You know what I mean,” he said.
    “Professor Baldwin,” said Levine. “What if all of my numbers came out of the Bay of Whales? That wouldn’t be good, would it?”
    “That wouldn’t make any difference at all.” He stepped aside in the hall to let Levine pass. “After you,” he said.
    The party was in its second hour, the bones and oily plates cleared from the table, when Mehmet Monsour was begged to demonstrate one of his famous little games. He and Jewel had done most of the talking