The Manly Paradox

Walter Black was the head of the anthropology department at Athené and he had a problem. His favorite student puzzled him. He had talked it over with his wife Marcia and they had agreed to invite him to dinner. Dr. Black valued his wife’s impressions of people. Chris Krail was a computer science major who was seen as a genius. Chris Krail was also interested in anthropology where he excelled. But Dr. Black had discovered that he was either a young man in trouble or a dangerous psychopath.

They had first met at the request of Chris who wanted to take an advanced course given by Dr. Black for which he did not have the prerequisites. Since he had done so well in introductory anthropology, Dr. Black waived the usual requirement. He was pleased that he had done so since Chris unlike many undergraduates was intellectually engaged, always came to class, and often had a novel point of view. Chris was the best student he had taught in years.

Dr. Black loved nature and it was his interest in the outdoors that led him to what he thought of as the Chris problem. His wife had bought him a pair of snowshoes for Christmas so after the first big snowstorm he was out before dawn. He knew all the forest land around Athené and loved the gorges and the rock cliffs. He was thinking that the heavy drifting snow and the snowshoes were letting him go into an area where ordinarily the underbrush wouldn’t let one walk. There were a few animal tracks but otherwise the unbroken snow was exhilarating. He was not prepared for what he found.

Chris was sleeping under a rock face. Chris heard him and looked equally surprised. Chris woke quickly and extemporized that he was into winter camping. He had grown up in the city and had come to love the outdoors after he had moved to Athené. He said the night had been tough but waking outdoors on such a beautiful morning made it all worthwhile. Dr. Black really liked Chris and was pleased to find a kindred spirit.

It was only after leaving Chris and heading home that Dr. Black had second thoughts. He had heard hundreds of excuses from countless students over the years and he had a sixth sense about bullshit. He knew it when he heard it. “Well,” he thought, “maybe he was just hiding something he didn’t want to tell me.”

A couple of weeks later, Dr. Black wanted to tell Chris that he had loved the paper submitted for his course. He didn’t want to embarrass him in class so he picked up the student phone directory. Oddly, the only phone number was a campus computer lab. Why didn’t Chris have a phone? Couldn’t he afford one? Usually students would give up food before a telephone. There was something odd about the home address but he just couldn’t place it. After dinner he asked his wife to go for a drive. The home address was a commercial mailbox that allowed its boxholders to write an apartment number in lieu of a box number.

Dr. Black was not a really suspicious man but he genuinely liked Chris and wondered what was going on and where Chris really lived. Maybe he had a girlfriend. He relied on his wife who pointed out that he was going to the city on business. Why not see if Chris’ parents lived where they were listed. It was the trip to the city that got his attention. He not only could find no listing for the parents but neighbors said they had been killed in a car accident when Chris was in his last year of high school. They said Chris had just turned 18, and as soon as he graduated moved out and left to spend the summer before his freshman year in summer school at Athené. Dr. Black talked to the neighbors. They were not helpful, they all liked Chris but didn’t know of a single living relative.

Back with his wife, Dr. Black told her that he knew few students like Chris. Chris was a junior and was already being actively recruited by the faculty who wanted him as a graduate student in computer science. Yet Chris had found another intellectual interest as well. He was polite. Yet he was hiding something or from someone. The Blacks knew that they were instinctively supportive of students and they were a little afraid to be taken in by someone who was so obviously not telling the truth about something. They would invite him to dinner.