Dr. Talc had been having a miserable week. Somehow the students had found one of those threats that that psychotic graduate student had flooded him with a few years before. How it got into their hands he didn't know. The results were already awful. An underground of rumors about the note was slowly spreading; he was becoming the bu*t of the campus. At a co*ktail party one of his colleagues had finally explained to him the reason for the laughter and whispering that were disrupting his previously respectful cla**es. That business in the note about “misleading and perverting the young” had been badly misunderstood and misinterpreted. He wondered if he might have to explain to the administration eventually. And that phrase “underdeveloped testicles.” Dr. Talc cringed.
Bringing the whole matter into the open might be the best plan, but that would mean trying to find that former student, who was the sort who would deny all responsibility anyway. Perhaps he should simply try to describe what Mr. Reilly had been like. Dr. Talc saw again Mr. Reilly with his ma**ive muffler and that awful girl anarchist with the valise who traveled around with Mr. Reilly and littered the campus with leaflets. Fortunately she hadn't stayed at the college too long, although that Reilly seemed as if he were planning to I make himself a fixture on the campus like the palm trees and the benches. Dr. Talc had had them both in separate cla**es one grim semester, during which they had disrupted his lectures with strange noises and impertinent, venomous questions that no one, aside from God, could possibly have answered. He shuddered. In spite of everything, I he must reach Reilly and extract an explanation and confession. One look at Mr. Reilly and the students would understand that the note was the meaningless fantasy of a sick mind. He could even let the administration look at Mr.
Reilly. The solution was, after all, really a physical one: producing Mr. Reilly in the abundant flesh. Dr. Talc sipped the vodka and V-8 juice that he always had after a night of heavy social drinking and looked at his newspaper. At least the people in the Quarter were having rowdy fun. He sipped his drink, and remembered the incident of Mr. Reilly's dumping all of those examination papers on the heads of that freshman demonstration beneath the windows of the faculty office building. The administration would remember it, too.
He smiled complacently and looked at the paper again. The three photographs were hilarious. Common, bawdy people at a distance had always I amused him. He read the article and choked, spitting liquid onto his smoking jacket. How had Reilly ever sunk so low? He had been eccentric as a student, but now... How much worse the rumors would be if it were discovered that the note had been written by a hot dog vendor. Reilly was the sort who would come to the campus with his wagon and try to sell hot dogs right before the Social Studies Building. He would deliberately turn the affair into a three-ring circus. It would be a disgraceful farce in which he, Talc, would become the clown. Dr. Talc put down his paper and his gla** and covered his face with his hands. He would have to live with that note. He would deny everything.