“How’s it goin’, Dean?”
“Hey, Clyde. Big day. Our buddy Fazoul is heading back to Vakhan land. Hold this for me, would you?” He handed Clyde a half-smoked Camel while he reached in a backpack for his robes and hood, which had evidently been tightly wadded together and stored in a damp location since the spring ceremony. “Don’t want to immolate myself,” he explained, nodding at the cigarette. “These robes are made out of frozen gasoline, you know.” The robe was already zipped up, so he threw it on over his head like a T-shirt. Then he pulled out something floppy and violet: a gaudy, oversize beret. “Got this as a freebie with an honorary doctorate at the University of Dubai. Doesn’t blow off in the wind as easy as the goddamned mortarboard, which is an important consideration out here on the prairie. We’d better go in. Thanks.” He took the cigarette back, smoked it down to a butt in several long draws, and stamped it out at the threshold of the Flanagan’s main entrance.
The gym was about one-quarter full. Knightly led Clyde down onto the maple floor of the basketball court and pointed out some empty seats close to the dais where he and other university dignitaries would be seated. “If you would do me a little favor and sit there, Clyde. We’ve gotta talk after this is done.”
The Twisters’ pep band, dressed in their blazers and gray flannels, began to play “Pomp and Circumstance.”
Clyde was a softie for ceremonies—even the flag ceremonies at Cub Scout meetings. He looked around the half-filled gym and saw a few parents, but mostly wives and children, all dressed in their best. He saw one of the Iraqis he’d been following and wasn’t sure whether to be glad that the man was getting out of Dodge, or frustrated by his inability to catch the guy red-handed.
The degree candidates were led in by the president of the university, his administration, and then the faculty in their robes and hoods. Then came the students themselves with their different specialities represented by different series of colors on the hoods. By the time they were all in, the pep band played with a bit less flair. Then the “Star-Spangled Banner” was played, and then a suitably neutral prayer ("O Creator of the Universe") was uttered by the local Unitarian pastor.
Clyde sat down and stood up on command, like a twelfth-century newly converted peasant at his first Mass, but his mind was elsewhere. He didn’t even realize the ceremony was over until he felt a gentle squeeze on his left arm, and there was Farida. “We’re so happy you could come.” She extended her baby son over to Clyde. “Could you hold him while we take pictures?”
The baby was sound asleep, an angelic, honey-skinned creature with astonishingly long and thick eyelashes. Clyde watched as Fazoul stood bedecked in his M.S. hood next to his adviser, Chung-Shin Kim, and then with Dean Knightly, who seemed blinded by all the mini-strobes and badly in need of a smoke. Then Fazoul motioned for Clyde to come up. Clyde was surprised when he was dragged in with the entire family.
“This is good-bye, my friend,” Fazoul said as he held Clyde’s hand in a long handshake. Then he hugged him. “Don’t forget me.”
Farida came up, tears in her eyes, and said, “Know that we are praying for your wife. We are all in the same struggle here.”
Fazoul said something sharply to her, and she responded in English, “We are together. That’s all.”
Knightly stepped in and said, “We’d better get you folks down to the train station. The Amtrak’s showing up in about forty-five minutes. I’ll give you a ride. You want to come along, Clyde?”
“Got space?” “Got a Suburban.”
“Sure. My shift doesn’t start for a couple of hours.”
When they arrived at the station, it became clear that the next train to Chicago was going to be filled with newly minted Ph.D.’s and M.S. students going to Union Station, then catching the El to O’Hare for flights back to their various homes around the globe. It was an incredible multiethnic crowd in a decidedly mixed set of moods—many didn’t want to go back to their homelands, while others couldn’t wait to be free of what they saw as the cultural barbarism of America in general and the Midwest in particular. But all of them seemed to agree that Dean Knightly was the best thing about this place, and so Clyde enjoyed standing there, leaning back against the wall of the station, watching the graduates and their families line up to shake his hand, hug him, kiss him, press small gifts into his hands. By the time the train pulled into the station, tears were running freely down Knightly’s face.
Clyde and Knightly stood together as the train pulled away, and Knightly said, “You know, it rips me apart every time we send a bunch of them on. They have to go back. They can’t stay. It’s better that they go. But working with these people is the best job any man can have in this business.”