The Case of the Vanishing Jacket

Image by bongo vongo via Flickr

In the English Department where I teach there’s a mystery afoot, brewing with the kind of innocuously trivial intrigue fit for Harriet the Spy.

At the beginning of the semester, English faculty were asked to add material related to their projects to a bulletin board outside the main office. People tacked up interviews and articles written by and about them, as well as promo stuff for forthcoming books. I made a photocopy of my book description from the publisher’s catalogue, a nice color printout of my book jacket, and posted it to corner of the board with some pushpins.

About a week later, on my way to the main office to root around in the candy bowl, I noticed that the jacket had vanished, although the catalogue copy remained. The two pins that had held up my jacket were tacked side-by-side in the empty space.

Weird. No one else’s stuff had been taken down. I speculated about it with a couple of women from the office. Maybe the jacket had just worked free of the pins and drifted to the floor. But it seemed likely anyone finding it would have simply tacked it back up.

A student of mine working in the main office offered the flattering suggestion that someone perhaps wanted the jacket for themselves, perhaps for some kind of voodoo shrine. This seemed unlikely, as anyone who wanted the thing could just go online, find it, and print it out for themselves to put it in a jar with a lock of my hair or whatever.

My book–a nonfiction narrative about going undercover among Evangelicals–is, yes, controversial, so maybe someone was offended by it. Although why would they take down the book cover and leave the catalogue description?

For the sake of moving on to life’s next bite-sized mystery (what’s with all the squirrels scrambling around on my front porch?), I went with Occam’s Razor–the jacket fell on the floor and someone threw it out. I printed out another, tacked it up, and forgot about it.

Until a week later, when the jacket disappeared again. Twice was no accident. I hadn’t exactly written A Treatise on the North American Teddy Bear–I figured somehow I’d pissed someone off, and decided not to repost it.

But the office manager noticed it was gone again, and she wanted to reopen the case. She brought me to the shelf of figurines in her office, taking down Wonder Woman and the Virgin Mary, both about the same size. “You know how when Wonder Woman lassoes you, you have to tell the truth?” She cast the lasso around the Mary doll. “OK, Mary,” she said, “who’s the father?”

Nestled in with these figurines was a squat, wind-up nun. Every now and then, the office manager told me, someone comes into her office and turns the nun to face the wall. She suspected it was a superstitious cleaning person, someone who perhaps didn’t appreciate the irreverence of a toy nun.

Across the hall, the head of the department had a similar story. On his windowsill he’d kept a little toy nun with her butt peeking out of her habit, and always positioned it so that the butt faced the room. Apparently preferring irreverence to obscenity, the cleaning person always turned the nun’s bare ass to the wall. Until one day, when the vulgar little nun disappeared.

The office manager thought this cleaning person might have disliked the five crosses lining the top of my book jacket. In the design, the crosses look like little gold pendants, meant to suggest individual Christians. But the general image of the cross on a book written by a nonbeliever–maybe that really upset the guy.

Not wanting to get overly emphatic about the whole thing, I didn’t want to put the jacket back up. But the chair didn’t like the idea that someone was removing things down from the board, so he told me to repost it.

Maybe I’d stack dozens of copies of the jacket underneath the one on top, so that each one you tore down revealed another. Maybe I’d put up a single jacket, with a picture of a watchful eye taped beneath it.

In the end, I didn’t want to harass this person, who probably felt harassed himself by the fact that the people he had to clean up after were playing fast and loose with the stuff he cared about most. I just posted the thing again, and I suspect it’ll be gone in a week.

In the wake of the Supreme Court discussion about that five-foot cross in the Mojave Desert (the discussion in which Scalia declared–disingenuously, I thought–geez guys, what’s the big deal, the cross is simply “the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead“), I’ve been thinking a lot about the cross as symbol. I’ve got a whole chapter about it in my book, about the masochistic pleasure afforded by contemplating the cross if you believe that the guy who died there died for you. It’s both the ugliest symbol (in that it suggests torture; Cicero called it “the most disgusting pencil”) and also one of the most beautiful, with its clean lines and simple symmetry.

I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong having crosses on my cover that represent Christians, but maybe there’s a question about a whited-out cross on the cover that seems to represent me. Perhaps it is trespassing to appropriate the cross to represent myself in any way, and perhaps that’s the specific offense the cleaning person is reacting to.

Next time he takes down my jacket, maybe I’ll just tack up my phone number so he can get in touch and let me know.

Here’s the book jacket in question:

And here, ahem, is my book’s Amazon link in case you’d like to pre-order. No presh.