By Gwen Thompson

Dan was flying down the forgettable green blur of I-95 at 80 m.p.h. when he spotted the cop car among the trees on the median. He didn’t usually speed unless he could tail someone with a radar detector, but today he had a plane to catch, and road work had already put him behind schedule. He couldn’t afford to get pulled over, so he switched the cruise control off on the dashboard rather than risk a telltale flash of brake lights. Then he saw that the police cruiser wasn’t in a position to pull anyone over: the cop was squatting down beside it, struggling to change a tire. Instead of accelerating, Dan let up on the gas, close enough now to see that the cop had a full-sized spare—and that was what decided him. 

As he put on his left blinker—cars honking and swerving behind him—the parable of the Good Samaritan came to mind, and he wondered if this cop were familiar with it. The Bible—all of it—had been required reading for Dan’s two-and-a-half degrees in English literature. He pulled over, parked with the four-way flashers on, and stepped out onto the grass. 

“Here,” he reached for the lug wrench, “let me give you a hand with that.”

#

“Excuse me, sir.” The flight attendant shook Dan awake just as he was drifting off.  “Could you please fasten your seatbelt and restore your seat back to its full upright and locked position? We’re experiencing some turbulence.” 

Dan abandoned all hope of sleep. These were the kinds of rules he hated. If the plane went down, no seatbelt in the world was going to save you, so why not spend your last few minutes as comfortably as you could? Now he’d have to sit up straight and swelter wide awake. Some things you couldn’t trust to your carry-on luggage, and his clothes were bulkier than usual with them.

#

This is the way life should be. Dan washed down the last of his flan with a swig of coffee and wiped his mouth on a starched cloth napkin. The waiter appeared with the check almost before he beckoned for it, and Dan was pleased but no longer surprised to find that the five-course meal he’d just devoured came to a grand total of two American dollars plus fifty cents for the wine. At three dollars a night the Hotel Alborada was the cheapest and cleanest he’d ever stayed in; every time he crossed the courtyard, the woman who ran the place was scrubbing the tile floor or scraping sheets across a washboard. 

He wandered through the walled Old Town, panting by the time he reached the top of the cobblestone stairway tumbling down the cliff to the river. He had not yet grown accustomed to the altitude, but if corn could grow at 12,000 feet on the Equator, then he too would adapt in time. He gazed down at the Quechua women resplendent in their costume jewelry and embroidered blouses as they washed clothes in the murky river, then spread them over rocks to dry, turning the turf into a tapestry. As dusk descended, the cliff top would vibrate with the footfalls of soccer teams in training pounding up and down the stairs in the evening coolness; by nightfall the washerwomen would have been supplanted by teenagers proudly wearing their American jeans for drinking and necking on the riverbank. 

Dan’s eyes traced the line of red tile roofs towards the green mountaintops encircling his new home. What a change from Maine in March, sodden and gray with mounds of stale snow. Who says you’ll never get ahead majoring in English? He hadn’t entered college with that intention, though he’d always liked to read. But high school had taught him that reading for pleasure was something you did on your own time.  Most of the courses in the college-prep curriculum-linked letters and numbers in perplexing formulae that had to be memorized for reasons unspecified. Once he was safely enrolled in college, Dan vowed never to prop his eyelids open over physics or calculus again. He calculated he could save hours studying if the books he had to read for class formed an identical set—yes, he’d taken far too much math!—with the books he would have read on his own anyway.

But even English majors couldn’t just read literature. At first Dan tried to evaluate the books he read on their own merits, believing a liberal-arts education would teach him how to think for himself. But this straightforward approach never passed muster with his professors, who insisted that he find secondary sources to do his thinking for him. Even after he’d completed most of his degrees and started teaching at UMO, if he didn’t read up on the latest critical theories, he fell behind in the jargon and could make no more sense of the papers presented at conferences than if they were all in foreign languages. 

Which was how he happened to be reading “The Modern Macbeth: Ambitious Autocrat or Misunderstood Mastermind?” when the English department Chair asked him if he’d take charge of organizing UMO’s first annual Antiquarian Book Fair. “When opportunity knocked, Macbeth answered,” the author concluded. “His downfall was only precipitous because he climbed so high. If Tennyson, in the face of death, could affirm ”Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all,’ then so too might Macbeth maintain, in the face of defeat: ”Tis better to have won and lost, than never to have won at all!'” 

Dan sometimes wondered, if he hadn’t been reading that particular article when the Chair walked into his office, whether he might have protested that he was too young and inexperienced to be put in charge of such a large undertaking. Instead, despite the murmurs beforehand about how moldy old books by dead white males were insufficiently diverse and inclusive to turn a profit, he screwed his courage to the sticking-place, figuring most of the people with enough spare cash to squander on rare books were live white males moldy and old enough themselves to be indifferent to political correction. Time proved him right, to the tune of five figures in cash alone, for which The Canon would remain forever capitalized in Dan’s mind. The classics it enshrined were not so much deficient in relevance as their detractors were deficient in the reasoning ability required to perceive how relevant they were. 

Take Vanity Fair, the catalyst for his present venture. Re-reading it at a time when his salary as an adjunct lecturer and his chances of getting tenure anywhere seemed equally slim, Dan had found himself admiring Becky Sharpe’s talent for living luxuriously on nothing a year. Naturally her approach to finance could not be directly applied to present-day circumstances. Local merchants no longer extended credit to customers as a matter of course, but the underlying premise—by which British aristocrats packed up and relocated to the Continent when scandal or insolvency threatened to deprive them of the lifestyle to which they were accustomed in England—remained untarnished by time.

Of course, continental Europe was no longer significantly cheaper than England, nor was Dan an English gentleman with a dwindling private income. Parts of Eastern Europe still fell within his price range, but there was the language barrier to consider.  Fortunately, he had already mastered the art of analogy in order to achieve the SAT scores that had gained him access to higher education; thus he saw that Latin America was now to the United States what continental Europe had once been to England. And since he did speak Spanish, he simply borrowed the idea of living on the cheap indefinitely in Latin America from his college roommate, who’d gone to Costa Rica for spring break and never come back. 

He borrowed the idea of sewing all his money into his clothing from accounts he’d read of Holocaust refugees. They’d been traveling by train, but in backwater regional airports pre-9/11 the same principle applied, ensuring that your portable property passed through the metal detector rather than the X-ray machine manned by someone in uniform who might be mindful of tiresome regulations about carrying large quantities of cash from one country to another. 

He borrowed the underpowered minivan he’d abandoned on the median of I-95 from the driveway of a trusting colleague who left the keys above the visor even when he left the country on a research fellowship. 

He borrowed the police cruiser whose flashing lights and siren had enabled him to catch his plane from the cop whose tire he’d changed and whose head he’d conked with the lug wrench as he was bending over the trunk to put away the jack. 

And he’d borrowed the idea to do so from the Bible—not from the good Samaritan, but from the priest and the Levite who didn’t stop to help the injured traveler.  What Dan had done was probably what would have happened if they did.

Most importantly, he had borrowed—with no intention of returning it—the contents of the cashbox from the book fair, which would not be missed until the accounting came due at the next monthly departmental meeting. 

He’d even borrowed, from the United States government, the money to pay for the college education that had taught him how to borrow ideas from books; and now there was no need to repay that either.

His only original idea had been the mysteriously poignant message he left behind on his answering machine in case anyone called wondering why he did not show up to teach class on Monday morning: I’m sorry I can’t take your call just now—I’ve been called away by a family emergency. I don’t know yet when I’ll be back. If your call is urgent, you can reach me at—Here the recording trailed off into a garbled simulation of an answering machine on the blink.

#

By now the sun was making him thirsty, so he abandoned the view and made for his favorite juice stand inside the covered market. This time he asked for pineapple juice and coconut milk, anticipating a fresh piña colada for the equivalent of a quarter, but the woman behind the counter wouldn’t take his money.

“We never put pineapple with coconut. Bad for the stomach.”

“What’s good for the stomach?”

“Tree tomato with sugar.”

Dan watched her pulverize the rust-colored fruits in the licuadora, then sipped this new-found nirvana. If he ran low on money, he would just set up shop teaching English—the global language of the future that everyone, everywhere wanted to learn.  Soon even the tomate de árbol farmers of Ecuador would be able to read the great books Dan had read.