Paper Cuts

The dull light filtering through the gaps in the heavy brocade curtains was the only other appearance of life in the room. It caught the dust motes that flew up from the pages of the book he had just opened, and highlighted them, silver specks in the heavy air of the dim study, like tiny newborn flies, just out of the egg, circling the newly-dead. He watched them, long enough for them to become less of a distracted interest, before he turned his eyes back to the tome.

The Oxford Classical Dictionary. All three-and-a-half inches of the spine of the 1971 edition; just missing the first edition by a pressing but still loved enough to be as valuable. His fingers faltered over the pages, feeling their dangerous thinness, just sturdier than tissue. Look at all the knowledge contained here, we simply have to be so thin to keep within a realistic binding...

“So what is it agin you want me to doe?”

The Professor ignored the extraneous presence and finished the silent dialogue with his book. You delicate little things, be good to me, find me the reference. His fingertips now skimmed like a lover’s over quivering, yielding flesh to find the page, and his outwardly inaudible exhalation was, for him, an ecstatic sigh, gently hitting the spot with a manicured fingertip. Yes. He knew he had been right. It was Sophocles all along. No need to retire him just yet.

Closing his eyes in a silent prayer of thanks to Gutenberg and Caxton, his twin gods, he felt rather than heard the floorboard creak behind him. The young person was still there, all five-foot-ten of milky skin and disastrous hair that had landed in his doorway not five minutes before. It was looking more cowed than previously, when it had arrived with forceful helpfulness at his door and entered without being asked, mouth unattractively open like a fish when it noted the vaulted ceiling, the brocade, and then the books...books filling the wall-to-wall shelves that made the room feel so much smaller, books piled on every surface, heaped in neat columns across the carpet like terracotta pilae stacks from the hypocausts in Pompeii, holding up an invisible floor, just enough space to move between. They radiated from the central table, where the most important books came right up to the legs of the desk, where the Professor sat. He now looked at the little piscis, but it had such a sullen little face it was hard to concentrate on without it fading from view. And then that voice, harsh and pygmy-voweled and quite simply all over the place, when it asked “D’you need ‘an ‘and with anything?” and proclaiming, when he had obviously appeared somewhat bewildered , that “I’m yer pet undergrad!” by way of dubious explanation. His unfounded confidence was appalling. “M’ere to ‘elp you move out.”

The Professor winced. Move out. He forced the words from his mind, now stroking Volume III of his Gibbon Rise and Fall, Bury edition, protectively. That wasn’t something he was going to be doing today. Or any day. He had seen the letters of course. He hadn’t needed to read them. He had put them in the shredder, watching them pulled through the metal teeth, turned into ribbons of mangled text. He had winced – he hated to see any print go to waste, it was an automatic reaction. But he had bought the shredder, an unusually modern purchase for him as it required actual plugging-in to the only socket in the room, specifically for the purpose.

The University was making cuts, according to a phrase that had caught his eye as it fell in a curl of paper like an apple-peel through the machine. Regrettable, cutbacks, retirement age were other magic words that he had not been able not ignore in the shining piles of papery hay he had then fed to his fireplace. They had burned well. But although he had tried to ignore them, they had continued to burn in his mind’s eye, smouldering slowly.

His student numbers had grown increasingly few over the last few years; now he only taught one class, and didn’t need the lecture theatre – they fit in his room, using piles of books as seats. He let that slide. They enjoyed the novelty. Years before, he had been the novelty – a sparkling wit, engaging with the material, papers flying from his typewriter to critical acclaim. But, it was true, he hadn’t published in years. He admitted he put less effort into his lectures. He had stagnated, neglected to keep up with... he spat the word, developments.

He knew the new students snickered at his flat cap, his sandals, the lack of technology in his lectures. When they had removed the lecture theatre’s blackboard, his trusty chalk and eraser disappearing as if in a cloud of chalkdusty smoke, replacing it with a computer screen, that was when he had retreated, allowed his giggling students, now clad in denim and jersey instead of the once-regulation black gowns over tweed and corduroy, to enter his office and claim it as their own. And, he had surrounded himself with books, bringing them out of storage, buying them with what meagre amounts he had left in the department cashbox, stealing them from the library. They were familiar and precious. They were all he had left. And, by claiming to be reading them, ‘researching’, it meant he didn’t have to write any of his own. To an extent, it was probably his own fault. He had not modernised. He, like his subject, was Ancient History.

But, they hadn’t helped him. They had made it clear they thought he was no longer relevant, his subject too old fashioned and out of date to warrant additional funding. Even Theology now got more than him, the Head of the original Department. Instead, he had floundered like a fish out of water, and they had warmed the frying pan in anticipation. They would spit out his bones. The professor’s mouth twisted into a hard white line and his fist clenched. Deep inside, the embers roared into a furnace. Oh, how he’d like those bones to choke them.

“...moovin’ these, puttin’ em in boxes and suchlaike...d’ya have any boxes, sir?” The ‘pet undergrad’ was moving somewhere behind him, and he could hear shuffling. Paper being moved. He spun round with a sudden agility and leapt from his chair.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” he roared, finding his nose inches away from his imagined opponent’s. “TAKE YOUR HANDS OFF MY BOOKS!”

The boy froze, mouth hanging open, wide brown eyes staring straight into the Professor’s in confusion. Slowly, he put down the stack of books he was holding in his arms, and stepped backwards, pulling his moonface out of the Professor’s own. The old man breathed out, heavily, imagining flames flickering in his eyes, unblinking.

“I’m... sorry...” the boy mumbled, his voice cracking. He backed away further, arms reaching for balance as he stumbled over a pile of Classical journals. The Professor watched as the wretched thing walked quickly from the room, glancing round to check the old man was still there, imagined confidence gone. The heavy door shut firmly closed after him.

The Professor fell heavily into his chair, fire extinguished.

After some minutes, he wiped a tear from his eye, thinking to himself, that was not how I wanted it to happen. He had intended to leave with dignity when the time came. It was nothing to scare these little scrubbers these days. Nothing impressed them. That little mooncalf was probably already in the Union bar, laughing into his pint as he recounted the tale of the crazy old Professor to his friends, rolling his eyes rather than admit his own fear, and saying isn’t it sad how old people get? Word would get round soon enough, and then his leaving would be far less ceremonious.

Angrily, he grabbed for the topmost journal from the pile the boy had deigned to touch. As he yanked it from the stack, he felt a momentary sharpness, the freshness of pin-stuck skin, an odd, metallic satisfaction. He looked down at his finger, and at the bubble that bloomed there as he watched. The cut was think and deep. A paper cut. He stifled an unexpected laugh. He hadn’t had one of those for years.

se vita privare, his mind suddenly said to him. vitae finem facere. mortuum Romanum. He wanted dignity, didn’t he?

He found himself breathing a sigh of relief. Could paper go so deep? He smiled at the irony. There was always paper. It was clear now, but which volume to choose? His beloved dictionary was like tissue paper, not sharp enough. The journals obviously were... but so plebeian. A certain spine caught his eye from the shelves directly ahead. Of course, his eyes watered with sudden happiness. The Aeneid. He reached for it, then sat back down, wiping dust from its cover. It was a Loeb, in the original Latin. The pages were yellow but sturdy. On a compulsion, he raised the book to his nose and inhaled. The warm, fresh smell of books greeted him, and he felt calm. Now all he needed was a match. He fumbled with a stubborn desk drawer, got it open and found, amid piles of unfiled receipts, a box of Swans from his pipe-smoking days – it wasn’t allowed indoors anymore – and even a tin of lighter fluid for his long-lost Zippo, from the days when he had smoked rollups with his students after lectures and they had swarmed to him like happy moths. How all the more fitting.

The Professor made himself comfortable in his chair, and carefully raised his legs so that he could swing them onto the desk. He remembered from somewhere that having them above heart-height helped. He had removed his jacket, placing it carefully on the back of his chair. Tweed, with leather elbow patches. Now he rolled up his sleeves, and exposed his wrists. This was the difficult part. Courage. He summoned to his mind Seneca and the Stoics, and selected a page. Book 4. The death of Dido. Slowly, he drew the invisible edge of the paper across his wrist.

Nothing happened. He flexed his wrist, saw the cheesewire of a crimson line appear. He drew the paper over his skin again, pressing hard. Again, the thinnest of lines appeared, crisscrossing with the first. He smiled inwardly. This will be Chinese death by a thousand cuts at this rate. One more try. This time, he emulated a proper paper cut – fast and hard, taking himself by surprise, and the blood immediately flowed from nicked artery. He did the other wrist, again and again, until he felt lightheaded with the loss. He sprinkled the fluid over his desk; over overdue budgetary demands and late, unremarkable essays, struck a match, flinging red splatters over the desk as he did so, and held it, with difficulty now, to the wet papers. The flames, grew, echoing the ones in his heart.

“You’re all coming with me,” he said to his books from the top of his own funeral pyre. “Let them see this and drink in this fire and bear with them the evil omen of our death.”

And saying this, he held the page to his throat, and his soul flew down to Hades as the flames grew higher.