University of Sacramento

The University of Sacramento exists in Nightbitch's world almost entirely as a name on a screen and an e-mail address in a draft folder, yet it carries the weight of an institution that legitimizes the unbelievable. It is the employer of Wanda White, the mythical ethnographer whose book A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography becomes the object of Nightbitch's obsessive devotion. The university's faculty page for White, with no picture and only the scantest of information, provides the single point of contact that allows Nightbitch to believe that her transformation might have an explanation, and that someone, somewhere, might understand it. The university is thus less a physical place than a promise of authority, a guarantee that the magical women White documents are worthy of serious study rather than dismissal as hoaxes.

The University as the Anchor of Belief

The university first enters the narrative through the back matter of White's book, where a short biography states that White holds a Ph.D. in biology and teaches at the University of Sacramento, having worked her whole life in the field of mythical ethnography. This credential is what separates White from mere charlatans in Nightbitch's mind. When Nightbitch wonders why she has never heard of White, why the scholar has never appeared on a morning show or NPR, she reasons that the university's employment of White must mean something. The fact that White is housed within the Philosophy Department, rather than a science or anthropology department, strikes Nightbitch as odd, but it also makes her wonder whether White's book and scholarship might have been pointedly crafted to make a reader consider whether it could be true. The university's institutional structure, with its odd departmental placement, becomes evidence that White's work is deliberately provocative rather than accidentally dubious.

The E-mail Correspondence

Nightbitch's relationship with the university is mediated entirely through the e-mail address she finds on White's faculty page. After scrolling through the University of Sacramento website, she pastes the address into a new e-mail and then closes it, still blank, saved to a draft, planning to collect all her questions and thoughts and write them down after the boy is asleep. This first draft becomes the beginning of a sustained correspondence, with Nightbitch addressing her letters to "WW" and signing them with her initials. The letters are philosophical and personal, asking whether White's research is true in a scientific and rational sense or whether she is performing scholarship to make larger points about the limits of knowing. Nightbitch notes that she saw on the University of Sacramento's website that White is part of the Philosophy Department, and she hopes such questions might not be outside White's purview. The university thus provides the formal frame for what becomes an intimate, almost religious exchange, with Nightbitch rising each morning to see if there is a response and sitting down each night at her cluttered desk to write another missive.

The Silence and the Search

When White does not reply, Nightbitch's anxiety grows, and she wonders if she has the correct address, an academic one at the University of Sacramento, or if White is still alive, no doubt in her eighties or nineties based on the publication date of her book. She searches the Internet for any trace of White but finds almost nothing, which she finds peculiar given her advanced searching abilities. The university's website remains the only evidence of White's existence, a single contact page that Nightbitch clings to as proof that the woman is real. The silence from the university becomes a kind of test of faith, with Nightbitch continuing to write letters that go unanswered, each one more desperate and more revealing than the last. She tells her husband she is obsessed with the book, waving the Field Guide in his direction, but she cannot explain the woman, the icon, the looming and massive idea that White has become.

The Revelation of the Defunct Institution

In the aftermath of Nightbitch's final stage performance, the truth about the University of Sacramento emerges. When reporters research White, they discover that the University of Sacramento proves to be a short-lived institution no longer in operation, and White herself is a persona that exists only as an online profile at a defunct school. The university, which had anchored Nightbitch's belief in White's legitimacy, is revealed to be as insubstantial as the magical women White documented. The revelation does not diminish White's significance; rather, it completes the transformation of White from a person into a concept. The university's collapse confirms that the authority Nightbitch sought was never external, and that the answers she found in White's book came from within herself. The defunct institution becomes the final proof that Wanda White is not a person but a place at which a person finally arrives, and Nightbitch, standing behind the heavy velvet curtain in darkness, smelling her own rosy musk, has arrived there.