% tenure.c1.tex: chapter 1 (also 2-4)
Stephen Dedekind looked out at a landscape straight from Hell,
like one of those crazy Hieronymus Bosch paintings of a literal Hades,
filled with smoke and fire, elaborate machines,
and the most fantastic demons tormenting the damned.
A tiny figure near the bottom was Stephen himself, half swallowed by
a fish-like creature.

He had started the day in the dark when the first of two alarms
woke him.  He'd turned off the second
and staggered into the kitchen for a quick meager breakfast
while his cat Iphigenia frantically rubbed his leg.
The apartment's cooling system groaned in the background---not
a regular air conditioner, but only the cheap swamp
cooler that locals used in the dry climate.
He'd resolved to call the editor early today, find out once and for all.
This tenure business was starting to consume his life,
keeping him from work and pleasure both.
He fed Iffie and headed out, locking his shabby one-story rental.

He drove the old green VW bug along dusty dark streets, with
a glow in the east promising dawn soon, past scrawny
trees and cactus plants.  He turned onto Butte Avenue, a
larger four-lane street that bordered the university itself.
Then up a hill and into the faculty lot, almost empty this
early.  As he left his car the east was getting bright.
Already the sulfur dioxide in the air made him choke and cough.
He trudged along next to the road past a billboard
written in Spanish for the locals.
Five years in this god-forsaken place and he
still knew only a few Spanish words.  It reminded him of how little
he knew about the cactus plants he was passing, with only his private
names for them, such as pincushion or fuzzyspikes, but what their
real names were he hadn't learned.

Stephen walked on the loose gravel beside the road and reached the top of
a small hill, with a larger one ahead.  The sun was up
now and would be visible from the next hill.  Rows of light-brown stucco
university buildings squatted on either side like giant loaves of bread.
Then he finally reached the top of the larger hill with a view of the
entire valley---the familiar vision for those like Stephen
stuck in purgatory, hoping for salvation,
but expecting a trick, a sneaky push from
behind that would send him off from the university
into the pit in the distance, or maybe into some lowly non-tenured job.
The brassy sun shown horizontally though a haze of pollution, illuminating
the school where he taught as an Assistant
Professor (tenure-{\em{}track})---the school
that spread out before him: the State University, but he called it SDU,
for {\em Stinking Desert University}.  Many fancy buildings large and small,
but the best ones reserved for the athletes.
Further away was the giant copper mining pit---with lights that never
went out and machines that never stopped.  What kind of a school
would allow an open pit mine right beside its campus, on land that it owned?
Well, Stephen knew the answer.

Past the huge pit itself and beyond a few low hills, the land dipped
down to the river and the copper smelter---with four giant smokestacks
spewing pollution, mainly the sulfur dioxide that made the
campus barely habitable.  In the far distance across the
valley, at the top of the highest hill opposite, was the statue
of Mary, the Queen of Heaven.
He called her Our Lady of the Stinking Dessert, or
sometimes the Blessed Virgin of the Stinking Dessert.
One of his friends said they should run a smelter pipe up through
the statue and out her mouth, so she could belch out sulfur.

It was all there in front of him: his school, and what he hoped was
the closest to Hell he would ever get in this life.
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