Party in Tiltsville, Florida
The palm trees flash red and blue. Like the intoxicated driver negotiating with the police, they sway, feigning stability against the night breeze.
I heard the car sputter to a stop outside my rental property. In my current state it sounded like war. He should get a pass for trying to get out of here. I’ve been in Tiltsville for two days and already have a feel for the place. Forced to drive, I ping between the Publix, the Cumberland Farms, the Mexican/Cuban/burger place, and the dispensary, my GAD granting me access to medical flower. I’m pretty sure the local “mall” formerly a mall, the local “Korean” restaurant inauthentically Korean. I don’t care to find out. Despite ruining my evening with the palm trees—and, it goes without saying, fucking up my high—I feel for the driver. His night is also ruined, his tipsy, calm demeanor falling on deaf cop ears.
“Pig,” I mutter to myself. I get out and head inside, water dripping down my naked buttocks. I forgot my escitalopram, so I hope this Florida weed is good. One more night until my funeral.
~
What else would you call it? An apologetic sendoff? A career divorce party? An academic bris? Whatever this party is, Gareth is throwing it for me tomorrow at noon. Gareth is an old friend and for now, still my chair. I suppose I’m still Tiltsville College faculty until May; it’s March and the official “fuck off” email did not accompany the official “you’re fired” one. If only the Board had been so candid.
“I hope this letter finds you…”
“This difficult decision was reached after careful…”
“Certain aspects of your portfolio…”
I thumbed “tenure denial letter template” into my phone.
“Sure, I can help you with that!” ChatGPT spit back.
“Dear [Candidate]…”
“I hope this letter finds you…”
“This difficult decision was reached after careful…”
“Certain aspects of your portfolio…”
There are probably several reasons why the Board did not recommend me for tenure. For one, I’d never been to Tiltsville. They announced a tenure-track opening in April 2020 and made me an offer, sight-unseen, in May. It was a fast turnaround for a professional job, but what else was there to do but sit at home and read cover letters, I thought. I opened the email alone in my Queens apartment, already intimating from the attached files that the news was in my favor.
“On behalf of the Tiltsville College Board of Trustees…”
I still remember pulling down my KN-95 to smile at my screen, as if I were about to shake an extended hand. I went from underemployed shut-in to fully employed, fully insured professor at a solvent Florida college. What I did not intend, then or now, was to become a Floridian.
I didn’t have to. During my first semester all teaching was online, so I stayed in Queens, donning my mask for every office hour, lecture, and meeting. I became skilled at slipping in a hit of my vape while on camera.
A few semesters later, every English class was back in person, except mine. My online presence was construed as chronic absence, my annual peer reviews slipping despite my student evaluations remaining steadily in the green. This discrepancy kept Gareth from imposing any ultimatum regarding my “unique” geographic circumstances, as he put it.
AWOL teaching isn’t the only reason I’m being canned, I think. My published writing tends to read as angry. “Whoa, why so angry?” Gareth texted, after reading a screenshotted abstract. The paper was about color theory in disease nomenclature (Black Plague, Scarlet Fever, Red Scare, and so on) and included a preachy epilogue about vaccine denial. It’s my only academic publication, my other stuff being short fiction. Milan Kundera meets Nas, I pitch.
That’s where I ran into issues. The Republicans won big in the last midterms. This led to the achromatically named “white memo,” an Executive Order that bloated the “banned words” list into a full-blown censor’s bureau. Words like “diversified,” “diversifying,” “diversification,” and “diversifies” made conjugation a potential crime. They put out a tool called “SpeakFree” that scanned sites like Submittable and Scholastica for offending terminology, like an AI plagiarism bot, but for fascism.
And it came for me. When I published my novella, Spectrum, “SpeakFree” alerted Tiltsville of 198 words that “flagrantly violate the laws of patriotic prose.” What happened was I had named my protagonist Deia, which according to the memo, meant that “its author should be censured for his use of state institutional funding to publish a propaganda promoting racist and unpatriotic ideas known as Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access, also known as DEIA.” What a terrible sentence, I thought.
A Tiltsville College press release apologized on my behalf, burying the semantic mix-up in the fourth paragraph where no local journalist would care to look.
I suspect there’s a third reason.
Mina and I met at a graduate student conference. On the last evening of the conference, a group of us wandered through the hip, and only walkable, part of the city. Mina and I trailed by several yards. Nothing happened that night. At the following year’s annual convention, we met for drinks, picking up on a text conversation that continued, on and off, in the months since the graduate conference. We had sex in my hotel room while Gareth was attending an evening session.
Mina and Gareth did not know each other until Tiltsville. Gareth had just become chair when Mina was hired as a visiting lecturer. I was on the search committee. This was a year ago. Even then I knew that this was a faux pas, made more conspicuous now that her being a Korean woman could be construed as a “diversity hire” and therefore endangering university funding.
Mina was moving to Florida from the west coast college town where she had just defended her thesis. In the United States, lateral moves seem easier than longitudinal ones. New York to Florida signaled a political exodus. A few years ago, my uncle sold his house in Bay Ridge and moved to Fort Port, citing fears that a “blue state vaccine police” would take away his green card. California to Florida, on the other hand, was a straight swap: palm trees for palm trees, dry heat for wet heat, drive-thru tacos for drive-thru guns.
By then, we had been in a more-or-less secret relationship, solidifying the parameters over periodic weekend visits, she to Queens and me to Irvine.
“We could find a place together,” she pondered over Zoom, “like one of those pink two-bedroom ranches. They’re adorable.”
“So you want to be my roommate? Are we thinking 50/50, or 40/60? Seniority rule.”
“Haha.” She always ended a sarcastic laugh by pressing her tongue between her teeth.
“Anyway, do you want to fly up during spring break, or are you writing?”
“Ivan, I’m serious.”
We had managed to keep Gareth in the dark during Mina’s first round interview, my masked, virtual presence offering protection against bluff. I was invisible at her campus visit, during her apartment hunt, and after her move. I hid in her pocket, providing running commentary on photos sent to my phone.
“Ask about that ceiling stain.”
“Literally where is this house. Is there even a store nearby?”
“Nice office. Would’ve been mine. You’re welcome?”
I was proud of how long we were able to keep our relationship concealed behind Tiltsville’s two-factor authentication. It worked for us, and I knew Mina would eventually agree. We were the classic literary couple, I argued, navigating our two-body problem through letters.
“Like Danzy Senna and Percival Everett,” I remarked one night.
“They’re married and they live in the same place,” Mina replied, her anger deepening her voice, like an alto at the bottom of her range.
The authors of Colored Television and James may have cost me my job.
The ensuing phone argument smoldered into a prolonged text exchange, the replies longer and further apart, like a tense round of ping pong. We soon lost track of each other’s whereabouts, which had been shared in daily “what r u up to today” exchanges.
Eventually, I would learn that Mina was invited to dinner by Gareth and his husband on the evening I decided to reply for what would be the last time.
I would imagine Mina asking where the restroom is, her phone face up on the dining table, my long text illuminated in a halo of implication.
I would imagine Gareth’s uncharacteristically emotive texts.
“Ivan, wtf?”
“Ivan, you know I have to report this.”
“It’s going to be okay, Ivan. Zoom drinks this weekend?”
I would imagine the email from the provost’s office containing three-word phrases like “conflict of interest,” “compliance and ethics,” and “equal opportunity institution.”
~
I wake up to the haze of morning sunlight blazing into my rental. Nine in the morning and already sixty-nine degrees. Shielding my eyes, I see the cover of the hot tub laying flaccid on the grass, the bubbling cauldron likely a mass lizard grave. I remember the laminated house rules:
WIFI NETWORK: NETGEAR_AC1900
WIFI PASSWORD: DaytonaB!tch
PLEASE TURN OFF AND COVER HOT TUB IMMEDIATELY AFTER USE
Gareth’s house is inland, about a mile west of campus. I Google the directions over coffee. Twenty-five minutes, a red line connecting my location to his. I add a detour: Simpson Hall, Tiltsville College. The faculty offices are a mile away, but to walk, Gareth would have to trek fifty minutes on what looks like a shoulder. I sip my coffee and enter another location: Royal Grove Villas. From our video calls I could probably navigate Mina’s apartment with my eyes closed, but I have no mental image of the outside. A photo shows a strip of two-story white stucco buildings. Above the Spanish-style rooftops is a typical Florida sky: ocean blue, offset by one gray bladder holding five minutes’ worth of downpour. In the bottom half of the photo, the scorched black surface lot.
I park my rental car at the Publix. It’s weird to find wine in a supermarket. Looking past the cheap footprint and marsupial labels, I find Italy. I try to remember the color of the liquid in Mina’s glass, its hue always muddied by the directional lighting of her apartment. Gareth did not confirm if she is going. I leave with a red and a rosé́.
I take the wrong exit out of the parking lot. My phone recalibrates. I wait to turn left across seven lanes of traffic. Within the logic of directional driving, the middle turning lane is a paradox. The security of its solid lines is contradicted by stuttering dashes. One arrow wraps around another like a snake eating its own tail. I turn right.
It’s half past noon. As I pass a billboard of a grinning lab technician promising “same day new teeth,” I draft a text to Gareth in my head.
“Hey man, sooo sorry, but I think I got the stomach bug last night. I’m sure it’ll be a great party w/o me. I fly out tomorrow pm so maybe coffee?”
Gareth has remained an ally. I suppose he came out on top, playing the dual roles of diligent administrator and forgiving friend. His approach with me was always that of empathetic coldness, his emails laced with the twang of leadership webinars.
“I understand your decision to stay in New York, a decision I’m sure you gave much consideration.”
“I want to thank you for being open with me, and for allowing us to problem solve as a team.”
“I just want you to know that you are heard.”
It was his idea to host this party, this ambiguous coproduction of a homecoming and a farewell. It was his push that secured my airfare, the rationale being I never received a proper campus visit. Better now than never, he joked. But the one thing I wanted to know I could not ask. And in the moment, I kind of hate him for not telling me.
No, I really do hate him, I think. I realize I’m sweating.
With his diplomatic demeanor, his tolerance for all sides, his seamless facility at playing both friend and rat.
While I’m being truthful, I didn’t vote for Mina. I was the only one on the committee to dissent. I did not want her to feel as stuck as I did. You are supposed to feel lucky to land an academic job. But the air of luck dissipates, leaving you suffocated. Her being here meant a decision for me. A decision I had made after the first year but could not admit, neither to Gareth nor to myself.
I stop at a red light. To my right, Kayaks 2 Go, a flagpole jutting out of the storefront like a split bone. To my left, a family diner, now hiring cooks and servers, guarded by a front line of utility trucks with empty beds.
I lift my phone from the cupholder.
After the third ring, silence, then the din of chatter.
“Ivan?”
The light turns green. I disconnect.
Jack Blaszkiewicz is the author of Fanfare for a City: Music and the Urban Imagination in Haussmann’s Paris (University of California Press, 2024). His articles and reviews appear or are forthcoming in The Opera Quarterly, Exacting Clam, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and other venues. While partly inspired by true events, this is his first fiction.