Truths of the Heart

PROLOGUE

January, Michigan
State University

Nearing the end of an hour presentation, Dr. Rachelle Zannes detected negative
energy in the room. Aware from whence the force came, she would rather eat
razor blades than show signs of discomfort. Standing at a wooden lectern, she
scanned, seated around a modest oak table, the four members of the
Communication Department Curriculum Committee: In brown wool suit, white shirt,
and yellow tie, Department Chair, Sidney Rait; next to him, wearing a ratty
green M.S.U. sweater, lounged associate professor Tim Hackworth. Beside Tim,
Dr. Kim Lee picked at the sleeve of her maroon corduroy jacket. And, leaning
over the table, Professor Elisabeth Sweetwater, looking to Rachelle like she
had just stepped off her Harley Low Rider motorcycle—black leather jacket,
black jeans, black engineer boots—stared like she might be inspecting road side
kill.

Rachelle—white turtleneck sweater, blue blazer, gray slacks, tan snow boots,
five feet eight inches—had, with one whoosh, at her last birthday party,
flattened thirty nine candles. She looked twenty-nine. Her honey-colored hair,
the front sweeping casually across her forehead, flowed to the tips of her
slender shoulders. She began concluding remarks: “To sum up, Alexandra York
seems to say it best: 'New questions arise: Is this idea true? How is truth
determined? Is it relevant to all human beings or just a few? Or only me?'.”

Elisabeth squirmed.

Rachelle continued: “York concludes, 'Because the written arts are conceptual
in form, those who create them have an opportunity to explore the moral
imagination. Literature seeks a conceptual transmission from the mind of a
writer to the mind of a reader, a passage to the imagination, a journey of
ideas, not to
what is
, but to
what might be
. For it is art that
best inspires the moral imagination.'”
⁽¹⁾

Elisabeth could stay silent no longer, “Moral imagination!” Her facial muscles
contorted like she had just sucked a lemon, “Once you get started down that
crucifixion path you never get out. We have other departments for that frappe.
Why for god's sake would the Communication Department want a graduate course in
moral imagination? This is for the philosophy departments, not communication
science.” She spread her arms in supplication to Chairman Rait, “Why are we
here?”

He smiled benevolently.

Elisabeth looked back to Rachelle, “You're talking gibberish, Z, for god’s
sake, get real. Science prizes things it can put a finger on. There is no room
for warm and fuzzy iffy-ism. It is or it isn't. If A then B. If not A then not
B. Period!”

“Yes, and look where we are in the name of putting a finger on A then
B.”

“This is impossible. What you are doing is looking for God, and she
ain't there baby cakes!”

“What I am doing is proposing a graduate course in creative writing
that will pursue, among other things, the communication of universal truths.”

“Dearie, there are no,” Elisabeth etched quotation marks in the air
with her index fingers, “universal truths.” She rolled her eyes at the group,
“Pretty basic stuff, huh guys?”

Silence no longer in him, Tim Hackworth said to Elisabeth, “And your point
is, Dr. Sweetwater?”

Under her breath, “Jesus,” then “there are
only
individual
truths, in each human experience, how one reacts to his/her environment, social
setting.”

 
Amber topaz eyes intense,
Rachelle said calmly, “Truth molded to the moment is not truth.” Ignoring
Elisabeth, she closed her notes and said to the group, “I trust you will give
my course proposal your every consideration. Any questions?”

Elisabeth, shot back, “What is truth?”

“Truth searching goes way back, people etching on cave walls. Some are still
etching, win-at-any-cost, pushing aside the arts, the creative, the truth,
crushing anything that suggests a moving toward a more enlightened humanity. So
the aggressive win. Darkness prevails. Beware the darkness, beware the slick fast-talking
lie, beware the apology for truth in the rush to global insanity.”

Elisabeth, “This is unbelievable! Back to square one, what is truth?”

“Keats wrote, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on
earth, and all ye need to know.'”

“So what is beauty?”

“Why you, Lizzy, of course.”

Elisabeth's jaw dropped a mile.

Rachelle, confident, said, “Some believe Keats was referring to something
unique to human imagination—creating something from nothing.”

Elisabeth raised an eyebrow: “Does all this truth talk have anything to
do with our Jewish American princess being engaged to a former football star?”

The others knew of what Elisabeth spoke: Rachelle's upcoming marriage to
Carl Bostich.

Chairman Rait said, “That is out of line, Dr. Sweetwater.”

Rachelle, ignoring Elisabeth, spoke to the others, “Perhaps, in this
new curriculum I am proposing, we will find a pristine voice that will take us
beyond T-Rex mentality.” She looked Elisabeth squarely in the eyes, “and bottom
feeders like you.”

“TRAITOR!” Elisabeth screeched, “Science! What happened to science!”

Rachelle, “It’s got us to where we are today.”

Elisabeth, sucking on that lemon again: “Next time you get a cold take some
truth.”

“You are such a dear person, Lizzy.”

Elisabeth glared at Rait, “This is an insult, Rait. Pie-in-the sky hocus-pocus,
belongs in religious studies, not communication science.”

Rait: “When do you propose to start this class, Dr. Zannes?”

“Next fall semester.”

Elisabeth: “Hah, she'll never have time to get it in the fall catalogue,
let alone get it past the full curriculum committee.”

Raising his right hand, Rait said: “No time to dawdle, I vote yes,
anyone else?”

Tim reached his right arm high. So did, smiling politely, Kim.

Rait said, “I guess that says it.”

Elisabeth, with looks like vomit, stood, dusted her black leather
jacket, and exited the room.

⁽¹⁾
"The Fourth 'R' in Education: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Art,"
Alexandra York, in a speech to Hillsdale College.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

Eight Months
Later, Sunday August 4

Another summer semester completed, the Michigan State campus deserted,
Dr. Zannes sat behind her Bessey Hall office desk. Having given a final exam
for Communications 201(she had only one class this summer), she assigned the
last of her students' grades, saved the data to a disk, and stuffed everything
into an 8x12 manila envelope.

Her left-brain basking in closure, her right-brain wallowed, as it had
been for the past few months, in a nightmare. To soothe the nightmare, before
leaving her Lake Lansing home for campus, her plan was to finish the required
paper work then take a long jog.

Dressed in her standard running gear—tan shorts, sports bra, white T-shirt
with a CATS logo on the front, white sweat socks, Adidas white running
shoes—she stood and stretched in a thirty-second warm up. Finished, she
strapped on her nylon belt pack, picked up the grade-containing manila
envelope, stepped to the reception area, dropped it in assistant Kay Jackson's
inbox, locked up and headed outside.

Her run would take her along, meandering thru campus, the placid stream
officially designated the Red Cedar River.

Jogging at a good clip, the Sunday afternoon pleasant, campus deserted,
images from a PBS documentary she had seen a month ago came to mind:
Chernobyl:
Russia's Nuclear Disaster
.

She slowed to a trot,
Why that now, Zannes? You should be enjoying
this about-to-happen milestone in your life.
She rolled her eyes.
Milestone
or disaster. Stop that, stop it right now!

Always-in-control-Zannes, shooing the Chernobyl images away, picked her
jog up to a nice run, savoring the lush sights and thick smells of August, a
light wind caressing her glistening face.

Ten minutes into her escape, sheen of sweat forming on her forehead,
she stopped, a little over a mile east of campus, at her favorite spot: a
secluded tree-shrouded nook at a bend in the Red Cedar. A mirror of calm, the
deep-green water lolled more than flowed. She had claimed the spot years ago
and christened it (with the famous sculptor's “Thinker” in mind) her Rodin spot.
She often came here to reflect, gather ideas, tie-up loose ends, moods, jot
impressions in her journal.

She sat on the grassy slope, pushed off her Adidas, slipped her white sweat
socks from her elegant feet, and dangled her hot picture-perfect toes in the
cool water. Her eyes closed, she felt something move beneath her right foot.
She jerked her feet from the water and looked at what appeared to be, floating
an inch below the surface, a human thumb. She looked closer. A brown water
logged leaf rose to the surface.

Relieved, the leaf sinking, she put her toes back in the water and
absorbed the distilled essence of summer coming to an end. After a few minutes,
she took her journal from her belt-pack, opened the maroon cover, turned to a
blank page, and wrote:
Michigan in August is a holding on. Holding on to the
sweet
spring and short summer, and the land absorbing the waning
sunlight
and pressing it down and hoping the moment will hold
the warmth into
winter and dreaming of spring and the warm
summer sun and an ocean full
of flowers.

She laid the journal on the grass. A gust of cool wind—
where
did
you come from
, she thought—caught her honey-colored hair.

Usually falling to her shoulders, bangs brushed to the left over her forehead,
today her silky tresses were pulled back tightly in a ponytail. She never wore
makeup (what you see is what you get, she often said). No jewelry except for a
simple gold Timex wristwatch with black band. No polish on her modestly cut
fingernails. She did allow, on her perfectly pedicured, mannequin-like toe
nails (a personal thing for fiancé Carl's edification) an off-white polish more
at pearl.

From her belt pack, Rachelle took a bottle of Crystal Stream water, uncapped
it, and sipped. Studying the slow-moving Red Cedar, her eyes reflected a hint
of sorrow, just enough to draw you in, wondering where the sorrow originated
and why the pain in this wealth of subtle attractiveness—the amber topaz eyes,
the slightly-thick-in-the-middle nose, the dimpled chin, the sensuous lips most
often in a playful smile.

Z, as she was called by colleagues, described by the often heard quote
among males around the Communication Department, which went something like, “If
one didn't know better you'd swear Z was a TV infomercial star for some TV fitness
guru's exercise machine.” Rachelle had been an associate professor for six
years, advanced to full professor three years ago. Her BA in Communication,
followed by a MA, then a PhD, all earned from Michigan State University. She
had written several articles published in communication journals, and had
published a coffee-table book, “Chicken, Fat, and Old Age.” In ten chapters,
the book pointed out, in her words, “The things people spend most of their
lives worrying about: pimples, wrinkles, suntan, haircuts, cars, different ways
to cook chicken, body fat, and old age, all this while seemingly oblivious to
the larger context of the world going to hell in a hand basket.”