There I stood before the board of reviews because of the grievances regarding the book I’d written on sabbatical, a book about Cervantes, bliss, and the search for meaning, and I’d been tasked with defending my book because of the pushback and complaints regarding my book about Cervantes, bliss, and the search for meaning, although not strictly a book about Cervantes, bliss, and the search for meaning, I felt, but a book about rapture, storytelling, and the holy spirit, not holy in the religious sense, not religious as in blood and wafers and a weeping Jesus or Mary and I’m not exactly sure who was weeping only that there’d been weeping, I’d always heard about the weeping, and certainly someone somewhere was weeping, anyway I was a Jew and a relaxed Jew at that, a lapsed and indolent Jew, lazy about being Jewish on my best days and sometimes I’d completely forget I was a Jew and if someone had approached and asked, Jew? I would’ve had trouble answering; point being, I had enough on my plate.
In any case, there I stood; the very room in which the board of reviews had taken place for over a century, frigid and bleak, serious and somber, hidden away on the second floor of an academic structure whose name changed no less than twice a decade; the Robert L. Kurtz Wing when I’d first arrived, a young instructor, wide-eyed and tender, then, a little later, the Estelle Gawronski Lecture Hall, and the current name I couldn’t quite recall, although I was almost certain it was the Hershel Something Complex, Hershel being a long-forgotten professor who’d written something once about Auden. Yes, the building’s name changed often and without notice and just as quickly transformed from Wing to Hall to Complex, adjusting its purpose overnight, furtively shape-shifting so to speak, though this wasn’t really the case because, monikers notwithstanding, the Hershel Whomever Complex was nothing if not static, from its design and odor to the half-lit vending machines, infinitely stubborn in its aesthetics, as if its ever-changing moniker was an effort to challenge the solemnity of its architecture, that of a bland, mid-century edifice owing as much to academia as to Marxism.
Besides the dean, the board consisted of another ten souls, administrators mostly, but a handful of retired academics as well, pensioners who faithfully emerged from the woods of senility whenever a little dust was kicked up, brittle bones be damned, they likely thought, there was drama to be had, and this group had small patience for chitchat, wanting nothing more than to commence with the harassing of the instructor, in this case me, about whatever the current controversy might be because the board of reviews was the most forbidding inquiry on campus, a procedure reserved for the most austere and grave offenses, and letters were notarized and letters sent and I’d received the summons a week before about the troubles and misgivings and, to quote the summons itself, factual quandaries about my book regarding Cervantes, bliss, and the search for meaning or, depending on the order, the search for meaning, bliss, and Cervantes, the order mattered more to them than to me and I was baffled because I’d defended the book and spoken eloquently about the book and received what I believed at the time was glowing praise and adulation for the book, a conclusion made from observing the tremulous eyes and stunned expressions of my superiors, as if they’d expected very little and I’d confounded their expectations, bringing to light a new branch of scholarship. Now, though, the tone had altogether changed and the first question posed from the board of reviews, once everyone was seated and offered water or coffee, was how could I support the central argument, thrust, or gist of my book, mainly the part where I claim Cervantes was not a writer of fiction but a biographer and a serious one at that and, following this reasoning, so went the first question, you assert that Don Quixote was real? I affirmed and blithely declared yes, adding that the man was as real as you or me.
There followed some audible gasps, largely, I think, for dramatic purposes, and I gazed across the conference room at Kate, a colleague and fellow professor in comparative literature, someone of whom I’d once been fond but had grown to despise, mostly, if I’m being honest, due to the company she kept, because whenever I looked at Kate I couldn’t help but think of her husband Archibald, an insufferable man who’d once taught at the college himself, computer science I believe, but had left after inventing a link or an app, some sort of digital contraption that had become incredibly popular and had thus made them, that is Archibald and Kate, remarkably wealthy, a device, I was told, designed to inform people how many breaths they’d taken in a day or an hour or even, I suppose, a minute, devised to help people relax, I was told, to keep track of their breathing, I was also told, measuring their heartbeats and, in essence, their general health, and there were countless similar apps, but Archibald’s app, Kate once explained in tedious detail, was the most precise and accurate app, an app having the catchiest name and the most fashionable logo, an app that people couldn’t get enough of, hundreds of thousands of people purchasing and downloading the app in order to track their breaths or count their breaths, compelling people to compete with themselves or their friends about the number of breaths taken and exhaled and I of course knew nothing of Archibald’s invention except it was incredibly popular, an app essentially counting a person’s inhalations and exhalations, and making matters worse, I despised Archibald’s name, a name that felt garish and archaic and drew attention to itself as well as to the enormous success of his breathing app, as if success had made Archibald grow into his own name, as if the name he’d been given at birth was merely an augury of his future self as an insufferable app inventor, and now he and his terrible name tormented me equally, and because of the success of Archibald’s inhaling/exhaling app, Kate didn’t have to work, making sure everyone on campus knew this, that work for her was a choice, that she showed up each day out of passion and generosity of spirit, a job she could just as easily walk away from, and each day as the rest of us locked our cars and trudged the seemingly uphill parking lot to plod the seemingly uphill halls amid our seemingly uphill careers Kate appeared to float. She smiled more easily now because she had Archibald’s app money or digital device money or whatever the fuck money he’d made for having invented a way for people to count their breaths and keep track of their breaths, both inhaling and exhaling, without actually having to count or keep track, who knows how the money from these things was generated, but once begun, I was told, it never ceased, because the app was intended to count people’s breaths and as long as people continued to breathe, they reasoned, people would continue to pay, and who could say, perhaps even after they’d died and their breathing stopped forever, perhaps even then Archibald would still find a way to be paid, so no, I cared not a whit, because it had nothing to do with anything I cared about, certainly not Cervantes or the search for meaning and certainly not the current defense of my book upon which my tenure, thus my future, depended, a book about Cervantes and my contention of his being a writer of nonfiction and not, as historically believed, fiction, thus meaning Don Quixote himself was real.
Not surprisingly, Kate posed the second question, which was about evidence and did I have any, meaning evidence, to support my claim that Don Quixote the novel, and by extension, the person, was the stuff of real life. It’s in my works cited, I said, forgetting if I’d included a works cited, if a works cited was even required anymore and were they called works cited or footnotes nowadays because I’d always confused the two, always been incredibly aloof regarding the finer points and minutiae of academia, downright incurious said some, and was the works cited the same as a bibliography or an appendix and Jesus Christ, I’d thought, there are so many words for things. I tried drawing the board’s attention to my sabbatical instead, illustrating in dramatic detail the months I’d spent conducting research, recounting my trip to Spain, the visits taken to the Toledo province and Alcalá de Henares, illustrating my meticulous analysis of Cervantes’s life as well as the keen scrutiny I’d made of the national registries and source materials; I described the museums and the national archives, musty with scholarship, the same tactic I’d used initially, a month earlier, when defending my book (the very tactic, in fact, used years earlier when defending my thesis) in order to display not only the passion I had for my subject but my capacity for research, describing the archives visited and the papers uncovered, one in particular, which related Cervantes’s admission that his famous novel, what everyone agrees to be the very first novel, is in fact a biography. I spoke of Cervantes having been captured by the Turks, along with Fernando Gutierrez Delgado, a fellow Spaniard, and how the two became dear friends during their years of captivity, and later, once both men were freed, Gutierrez Delgado, suffering from the harsh conditions and threats of death, had gone insane, had begun dressing in armor, chasing windmills, seeing things that simply weren’t there. Yes, I told the board of reviews, Gutierrez Delgado saw himself as the brightest star in the world’s greatest adventure, thus becoming the subject of Cervantes’s biography, because who could ignore a maniac who believed himself a goddamn knight errant, I asked. It wasn’t only entertaining, Cervantes surely thought, I said, but it was too rich to ignore, and Cervantes the biographer pretended to be Cervantes the novelist until he became that way. My book included a litany of accounts never brought to light, coarse and tawdry misadventures, of Cervantes in particular, who wasn’t the kindest influence on Gutierrez Delgado and instead of escorting his ailing friend to the nearest asylum, which, I believe, would’ve been the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians, goaded and badgered the feeble Delgado into fistfights, duels, and the instigation of general turmoil. Yes, I went on, the faces of the board pale and inscrutable, Cervantes attached himself to Gutierrez Delgado and studied Gutierrez Delgado as if Cervantes were Gutierrez Delgado’s loyal sidekick, his Sancho Panza as it were, and thus the biography of his dear insane friend, Fernando Gutierrez Delgado, emerged as the novel we all know and love. It certainly doesn’t take anything away from his genius, I continued, after all, this isn’t a character assassination, simply a breakthrough in literary scholarship, and yes, I thought to myself, I’d made it all up, of course I’d made it up, I’d had to make it up, Gutierrez Delgado’s entire existence and a litany of other details produced from thin air and written about exhaustively, although not my love of Cervantes, no, my love of Cervantes was perfect and pure; I loved Cervantes and Don Quixote, at least the parts I’d read, it seemed like a fun book and once finished I was sure to have stronger, more sophisticated feelings, but returning from Spain I realized I had less than ten days to write the book expected, guaranteed, in fact, to my advisor, and of which I’d composed not a single word because my sabbatical was simply the greatest experience of my life; I’d felt my heart expand, felt my soul at the mercy of rare and fragile longings. I had a vision of bliss or what I took to be bliss or, if not bliss, joy at the very least, and I hadn’t visited a single archive, museum, or university, I hadn’t made the slightest of efforts because, I’d thought, fuck them, instead I’d gorged upon cheese and olives and tapas, climbed the green hills of San Isidro, made love to a woman named Isabella, at least that’s what she called herself, and in the morning, after counting her money, she placed the softest, most tender kiss upon my forehead, a kiss infused with history because in Spain a sense of illumination and calm overcame me, the sort of calm one sees in the eyes of a Buddhist monk or a cow employed in the chewing of its cud, and I fell in love with life, perhaps for the very first time, and the arc of the sky was a page of possibility. In Spain I fell in love with the faces and the streets and the faces in the streets and the sunlight too, especially the sunlight, the way it curved in soft, crepuscular streaks that eluded description, and in the mornings that pale-yellow light, almost golden, eventually fuchsia, finally flamingo red, settled upon the structures softer than a suggestion. In short, Europe agreed with me and quickly I’d forgotten the purpose of my sabbatical because life, true life, had intruded.
The dean rifled through my manuscript, producing a booklet from my primary source materials, something I immediately recognized as the menu from Sala de Despiece, a restaurant I’d frequented during my visit, at first because of the outside patio and later because of the effect the sunlight had on the outside patio and lastly, after striking up conversations with both the staff and the locals, for the outstanding cocido Madrileño, a stew that would sate the most demanding of palates, and soon enough I’d become friends with the staff and judging from the photo you’ve just retrieved, I told the dean, that would be Miguel, a young waiter studying architecture but taking a gap year. We became quite close, he and I, he has the most charming parents by the way, Adelia and Pedro, yes, we got to chatting, Miguel and I, and soon enough I was invited to their home because that’s how the Spanish are, I said, courteous and frank, not simple or gullible, not at all, merely warmhearted and without pretense and Miguel’s parents were worried because Miguel had taken a year off from college and Adelia and Pedro urged me to talk sense to Miguel, to convince him to return because it’s so easy, as we all know, to abandon school and never go back, but his talent at design and architecture, his father said, taking me aside, whispering in tender-hearted disappointment (resigned to his son’s fate but saddened by his own resignation to his son’s fate), because Miguel’s talent is innate, he whispered, he has a natural gift, the father ushering me to Miguel’s bedroom to show off his sketches, and yes, I’d agreed, the boy was not without talent. The dean extracted more of my source materials, parading a series of photographs I’d taken: the Royal Palace, the Prado, the Quinticas Gap, some lovely shots of local graffiti along with a series of snapshots of some Polish backpackers I’d attached myself to for several weeks and, lastly, the brochures from a wax museum and a Segway tour I’d taken and it was, I thought, a lovely montage of those happy months.
Simple question, sighed the dean, closing my manuscript, are you fucking insane? I sighed in return, discouraged by the direction of the proceedings, disappointed the impression I thought my book had made a month before meant so little, and I looked into the eyes of the board and saw nothing, no understanding, no comprehension, no appreciation for the transformation I’d undergone, and asking permission to speak, I expounded the importance of our collective fictions, explained how our collective fictions revealed our most inner truths, that the pinnacle, the apex, the triumph of existence is the stories we tell, no matter their veracity or legitimacy, if the tale told feels real it becomes that way, meaning real. I said some other things as well, mostly to buy time, things about faith and destiny, superstition and the sublimity of the human soul, and once again Madrid (I always found myself returning to Madrid); the smell of the streets in the early morning, the storefronts not yet open, how the shopkeepers, cumbered in their private thoughts, faithfully washed their sidewalks, how the Spaniards ate dinner at absurdly late hours, that eleven o’clock at night in Spain meant the evening had only begun because life in Spain, I said, was lived the way life should be lived, that is ecstatically and Debra from Humanities chimed in, called me a lunatic, and the dean, whose expression had become fixed and severe, accused me of academic fraud, promising an immediate search for my replacement. Kate began checking her husband’s invention to see how many times she’d inhaled and exhaled since the start of the review and a spirited argument broke out between Debra, an evident fan of the app, and Chris from the history department, over their rates of breathing, meaning who had inhaled and exhaled more and Chris laughed, pointed out that the point of the app was to breathe less, not more, that the lower number was indeed the better number, as the lower number translated as having a better resting heart rate and this was achieved, or at least proven, by breathing less, and there followed a series of lighthearted jabs at Debra’s expense for not realizing, after using the app for over three years, that the goal was fewer breaths not more, and Chris made another joke about Debra’s outlandishly high number of breaths, asking if she was having any pain in her chest and she should seriously consider seeing a doctor and the board laughed and offered one another coffee or water, and even though I was standing before them I’d been all but forgotten, my dismissal, it seemed, the most obvious outcome in the world and my thoughts once more returned to Spain, the light especially, the yellows and the golds, the flamingo reds, colors so rich they felt invented, and gazing out the single window was a sky waiting to cry and the disparity of the skies between here and there, meaning the sky over the board of reviews and the sky over Spain, Madrid in particular, was not lost but heightened by the fact that the sky that day was so heavy and oppressive, identical to the room, the building, the entire campus. No matter, I thought, I’d begun packing my apartment the moment I’d received the summons, because getting summoned to the board of reviews meant only one thing, the end of one’s career, and I couldn’t help but smile, knowing I was one day closer to Spain, and the Prado and the green hills of San Isidro, and the sunlight as well, don’t get me started on the sunlight, and the stars too, not that I’d paid attention, but I was certain the stars in Spain were glorious, they had to be, no less glorious than the patio of Sala de Despiece and Cervantes of course, who could forget Cervantes and the greatest novel ever written, a book I promised one day to finish and perhaps, I thought, I’d bring it on the plane. 
Mark Haber is the author of the 2019 novel Reinhardt’s Garden, nominated for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award, and the forthcoming novel Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, both from Coffee House Press. He is the operations manager at Brazos Bookstore.
