The Closet had a somewhat sordid reputation among department members. A dire shortage of office space for faculty members, in a department where everyone already shared offices and even desks, had led some inspired planner with the physical plant to annex what had literally been a broom closet as office space for three people. The Closet was tucked between the rest rooms at one end of the hall and the so-called Resource Centre, where faculty and peer tutors worked their magic with struggling students. It was dark, dismal, and cramped, windowless except for the window in the door, over which someone hung a venetian blind for privacy. Its most bewildering feature was that it was located across campus from the building where the department offices and most of its classrooms were.
The first three faculty members to occupy The Closet were two department chairs and an instructor who ran the Resource Centre, all long time members of the department. Other faculty members rarely stopped by, preferring instead to phone if they needed to speak to the co-chairs, and the third occupant could generally be reached in the Resource Centre. Stopping by was also a seldom occurrence because one would invariably be met by a closed door. After a while, little whiffs of rumour started to circulate, as they often do in a nest of singing birds.
Eventually the coven of three was broken as each was moved into a different role and, hence, different office space. The new occupants were myself, along with a newer full time faculty member and a long time part time instructor who was practically never there.
My contact with the newer instructor had begun shortly after he was hired into his position, a year before, and installed into an office in the department itself. Although I had been teaching in the department for over two years prior to his appearance, I had spent the entire time squatting in other people's offices, sharing desks, and keeping my books and files in my car. It was called paying my dues, one of the former chairs assured me. In this summer term, I was informed, I would be permitted to use the desk of the newly hired Dr. B and should contact him to see if he would need access through the summer so I could accommodate him as necessary. All things considered, this particular directive smarted - to be relegated to the desk of this upstart new hire whom I hadn't even met was (close to) the last straw!
I began my email to this unseen new colleague: Dear Dr. B, I have been advised blahblahblah?.
In short order came a cheery and casual reply, along the lines of, No problem, I won't be around, blahblahblah, and I understand we share some teaching and research interests, great news, Frank. With not the slightest hint of frost or irony in response to my own rather rigid and frigid communiqu�. Either he had a very thick skin or he really had no clue about the politics that had made me such a chilly correspondent and had missed the sharp edge to my tongue entirely.
The situation wasn't his fault, anyway, so, softening slightly, I wrote back: Dear Phantom Phrank, thanks so much, blahblahblah - the address an allusion to his planned absence from the office for the term.
So began the occasional correspondence that led to our meeting in the fall term, at which time I discovered him to be as friendly, cheerful, casual, and unpretentious as his emails. We did also share some teaching and research interests, which led, in the winter term, to us beginning to share office space in the notorious Closet. I had been ensconced there for a semester already, having presumably finished paying my dues, and one person had relocated, so Frank moved in.
Frank brought with him stacks of books, masses of ideas that he bounced around freely, a tendency to blow in and out at somewhat unpredictable times, stories about and pictures drawn by his young child, spontaneous consultations with students, and a breezy attitude completely devoid of academic puffery. I could relax around him, enjoy his exuberant ramblings - which always had more than a kernel of originality and were never as random as they sometimes began - and infectious laugh. We riffled through each other's books and talked trauma. For trauma, genocide, and life writing were our shared interests, though we came at them from different angles and so usually benefited from talking about our individual perspectives. Students who knew us both from courses we taught would come by, just to discuss and debate. The door was always open - well, a crack, anyway, because it was a high traffic corridor - and the camaraderie was one I looked forward to whenever I came to work.
Of course, we didn't just talk shop. I learned about Frank's wife and children and how deeply he cared about them, how he lit up whenever he mentioned them. It became clear that he worried about looking after his family, that he felt little security in his position, chafing at the way the institution managed to keep him slightly off-balance. How well I knew that feeling! After a couple of department meetings at which Frank let it be known that the kinds of abuse to which he was subject were taking a terrible toll on him, my heart broke just a little, as it would have for my brother in a similar circumstance. We were colleagues, but we had also become friends, and I felt almost protective of him in those moments.
But we actually looked out for each other, creatively and academically, and life in The Closet wasn't gloomy, even if we had lots to whinge about. Frank often talked me into believing I had far more to say than I thought I did, persuading me to write a paper and present it at a conference on a panel he chaired. To this day, I don't know how he managed it, but I've never forgotten the experience, for a multitude of reasons.
My nerves were singing at a very high pitch as I waited my turn. That pitch cranked up even higher when I saw that one of my academic heroes had come to listen to the session, but she gave me a reassuring smile and a wink that eased my tension a little. We had met a couple of years before at a panel discussion on the translation of a novel by an Indigenous writer into German, a translation that both of us found appalling. We bonded, as she said, over a bad translation. As it happened, one of the papers being presented at this session was on a novel by an English writer, and the entire paper was predicated on an incorrect translation of a German word. One word. My hero leaned over to me and reminded me that we were bound by bad translations. (Most of) my nervousness evaporated, and I never forgot her openness and collegiality. When she died suddenly a couple of years later, I was genuinely saddened at her passing.
Whether Frank was aware of any of this intrigue playing out among the session attendees I have no idea. But when he introduced me to the room and explained our collegial connection, he genuinely made me feel like I belonged there. I will always remember his kindness to this person who had always felt she was academically never enough.
Still being relatively new to the department kept him from the whispers and intrigue to which I was occasionally exposed while we occupied The Closet and developed our friendship. Colleagues wanted to Know More about Frank and me, an irksome insinuation that I was quite sure no one would have made to Frank. Denial of Anything Other than Friendship sounded like a variation of "methinks thou dost protest too much", so I latched on to what became the response that shut down discussion and garnered chuckles: "We are both too neurotic."
Neurotic or not, what I shared with Frank in The Closet was safe and honest and motivating and, I would like to think, we both encouraged each other to be our better selves, as teachers, as readers, as academics, as spouses to others and parents to our respective children, and as students of the world. In short, we enriched one another's lives, which is what one hopes for from colleagues and so rarely gets in such a pure form. Although short-lived, it was a crystalline moment.
The department underwent a renovation while we were in The Closet, and upon its completion, we were given the opportunity to come into the fold. Was it an opportunity? Perhaps. Frank and I moved into offices with new office mates, and became involved in other projects with other people, and so expanded our contacts and connections. I became more active in the Union, and tried to ensure that colleagues were treated fairly and equitably, to feel secure in their positions, and to have opportunities. Perhaps, institutionally, I did my best work then. But it came at a high cost, which is a story for another day. Ultimately, I retired early because I felt broken, and sometimes I wonder if moving out of The Closet was the beginning of the end of my career.
Now, almost nine years after leaving my job, I think fondly sometimes of Phantom Phrank, and his boundless energy and ideas and enthusiasm that galvanized me, creatively, in ways that I can't describe and never imagined. I find myself driven back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to try to tap into her vision of galvanism, because I've renewed contact with Frank and our recent conversations have practically electrified me. I have, in a way, been hit by lightning and it has charged my creative batteries, prompting me to return to being a wordsmith. The sense that something really vital to my being was about to happen was caused by his excitement and energy around creative expression, his love of language and wordplay, the ideas that tumbled out of him in rapid succession, too many to keep up with -- so palpable, I just wanted to feed off that boundless energy.
That makes me sound vampirical! But nothing could be further from the truth: I would not want to drain it out of him. It seems this spark is what died when he and I wound up in different offices in that corridor of dysfunction. To have it reignited is a gift, as hard to pin down as Phantom Phrank was and continues to be -- off on his Phorays into electric creative expression of words and ideas.
