We’d be wiped out soon, that’s what we believed. We’d be put out of our misery soon. Some apocalypse or another would do for us.
It couldn’t be allowed to go on, our being in the academy, could it? A kind of equilibrium would find itself again, the error would be corrected. The typo erased.
We’d disappear – or perhaps the whole academy disappear. We’d vanish, just like that. Just disappear. And things would be righted. Would go back to normal. Order would be restored.
Our time would pass. The whole anomaly. It’d be history – and forgotten very quickly. Just – buried, as it should be. No one should remember!
A phase, nothing more. An experiment gone wrong. A mistake, capital M. But one quickly righted. One quickly memory-holed. An accident. Well intentioned, perhaps. With laudable aim, no doubt. But best forgotten. Best passed over. Best buried in the memory.
They’d talk of the philosophy episode. And shake their heads. They’d speak of Livia’s folly, and look rueful. How could we let it happen? They’d ask themselves. How could it have occurred, on their watch? Wasn’t it their fault, too: the philosophy episode? Livia’s folly?
Yes, they had a part in it, the philosophy disaster, it had to be admitted. Their heads should hang in shame, and so on. An oversight! A lapse of judgement: yes of course.
Only no one will ever care about the philosophy disaster. No one will give a monkeys about Livia’s folly. The university will have other things on its mind.
And there’d be no one remember the whole sorry episode. No one would want our idiots’ testimonies. Of course not! We’d have been shuffled off elsewhere. Shrugged off. Dispatched, as soon as Livia retired. And that would be that. It would just be another university trauma, to be forgotten.
Work in Progress 