Contingent Faculty

The professor stood at the edge of things at the university—conversations, meetings, committees—contingent, he wanted to say. Not real. Only present for a time, but it wasn’t what people, other faculty or students wanted to hear. It might make the students uncomfortable, and he didn’t know how much students knew about contingency. If they’d hear about his condition and then stop thinking he was an expert in his subject matter, twiddle at their phones and write e-mails to their parents about how they were being unfairly given a B by someone who shouldn’t even be teaching a class, an amateur. He was a comma in a sentence as opposed to a period. So, he hid it from them. 

But he felt it too, among his colleagues, some of whom welcomed him with open arms, offered syllabuses and words of encouragement, but others seemed unaware of him. At a faculty event, he’d been handed a raffle ticket, mistaken for a student. He politely declined the ticket, even when his colleague, who seemed baffled by his refusal, tried to press it on him a second time. He gently guided the conversation away from the ticket and toward something else, a way out that would be face saving for his colleague. 

At home when he was with his children, he wondered if he needed to tell them that he was contingent. He didn’t want to worry them, didn’t want to worry his wife either, make them all think they’d be unable to afford the mortgage payments next year because he wasn’t real. He decided there was no reason to expose the children to his invisibility. For them, he would remain solid. 

Of course, there was the matter of his earlier divorce from his first wife, which meant the children only spent half their time with him. So, maybe they already understood, especially on the days he was not there, when he wasn’t giving them baths or tossing around the football or wrangling them around bedtime. Maybe everyone in his life understood that he wasn’t real except him. 

He had grown up religious, gone to church when he was young and even maintained a level of faith during college. He thought of how his mother still so strongly believed in God, a belief so strong that she often reminded him of God’s love via e-mails and inspirational reels on Instagram. The crux of it, at least for her, was about contingency. In God’s eyes, his mother would say, everything matters, every sunset, every laugh, every molecule in your body. She wouldn’t use scientific language like that. She’d leave it at sunsets and house finches and rain. Everything was real in the eyes of an almighty God. 

No serious-minded person at his university believed in God. But still, it lingered in his mind. The promise of  being real. 

He thought of calling his mother and then remembered that she was dead. He thought of talking to his children, but they were away with his ex-wife, and it was past bedtime. His current wife was out for drinks with some colleagues from her job. He looked out the window at his own ghostly reflection, pale, unreal. The wind moved through the pines in the small cone of light given off by the streetlamp behind his image, as he thought of himself as a ghost imagining the world.