Strange Yarns

Letter of Resignation - Deleted Yarn

To the Dean, the Board of Professors, the Metaphysics Department, Arnold, the Custodial Staff, and my Students,

By the time these words leap from this page into your brain you may already know the truth. And with this secret now exposed I, of course, must resign as your Professor of Cryptocosmozoology and Material Astrophysical Engineering.

I would like to take this moment to apologize to the entire custodial staff from the bottom of my heart. No one should have to clean such atrocities. I would also be remiss if I didn't offer condolences to the families of those students who gave their lives. Take some small solace that their sacrifice will not only give humanity a chance at survival, but it will push all the fields of science centuries forward.

I'm sure people will decry that I'm - and please excuse the alliteration - a malevolent mass murdering madman. I only take umbrage with the notion that I am mad or malevolent. I am very very sane and my intentions I can assure you are good. 'How do good intentions leave the sub cellar of the Goldberg Psychology Building with the remains of the 40 missing students?' you ask. I believe with certainty that the ends justify the means. A few sophomores had to be mutilated, but if you have grandchildren, fortune willing, they will not be slaves of the monstrous space deities that threaten our liberty.

This letter is not meant to excuse my actions. I resign not because I feel bad, or harbor guilt, or because if I were to stay I would be incarcerated. The truth is that I resign because it is time to do something very few academics get to do: Put their theories into to action and save the world. I resign, because only I know how to stop the space deity. Only I can exterminate it and rid our dimension of its repugnant horrors. And that is what I have set out to do. Ahh, to set out on plans that have been in the making for forty-two years. Arnold, my knees haven't hurt in weeks! I feel alive!

Here is how it came to be that I, your colleague, teacher, friend, and lover, have set out to save the world.

This story began in a unit of time beyond human comprehension, but in terms of how it came to be that the campus police found the 40 missing students grotesquely mutilated in what can only be described as a paranormal transformation in the sub cellar of the Goldberg Psychology Building, well, you'll have to take my hand and join me for my tale. The seed of my involvement germinated on the eve of my thirty-third birthday as said, forty-two years ago. Math students be damned! I still stand by that I am only forty-nine. HA HA!

In my younger days I was just a regular old zoologist. I was studying the post coital behavior of cephalopods in the shallow seas off Bermuda under the tutelage of the incomparable Professor Felix Harper Toledo. Our floating lab, a yacht we dubbed The Inn had docked for winter break in the Port of Hamilton. Waiting for me in the marina was a birthday present by way of a letter. The letter was penned by my old roommate from my salad days as a freshman; Diego Danzon.

The name lit a fire in my belly. Once, we were two young philosophers he and I. Wild and free. There was no grog that wasn't drunk and no woman for that matter. We were scoundrels! Danzon majored in music. He'd play the trumpet at midnight, waking up all the girls on campus. They'd run to our window, a scolding fury in their cheeks, but we'd offer them rum and he'd play jazz and we'd dance until dawn. We were devils. Danzon and Crayon! I digress.

At eighteen years old Diego Danzon was already a renowned violinist. By graduation he left America and returned to his homeland. A year later, at only twenty-four years old, he was named the youngest ever maestro of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra. We had remained in close contact, but the last few years that closeness at been shrouded by the fog of time. Danzon had stopped returning my letters or was it the other way around? I had been meaning to visit Diego. I had long dreamed of a night with my boon companion on some crooked street, howling at the moon and into a bottle of chianti. Six months at sea and the salt left me parched. I thirsted for mischief. I would find much more than mischief.