Mountainview College

Mountainview College is the Utah college where Dom Corvaisis is offered a tenured position teaching English and creative writing—and which he leaves before beginning the job. Its significance lies less in a sustained campus life than in the reversal it marks: a position that promises shelter from professional failure becomes the point at which Dom rejects the quiet existence he had previously sought. The college’s secure offer gives him a plausible refuge; his refusal becomes an early sign of a dramatic change whose later consequences remain entangled with his sleepwalking.

Setting and appointment

Mountainview College has a student body of about four thousand. It is a modest institution by comparison with the university Dom is preparing to leave, and its scale matters to the appeal of the position: the job promises security without demanding that he reinvent himself as a prominent academic. His published stories, the one part of his record he considers worth emphasizing, impress the college enough that it flies him from Portland for an interview. Dom makes an unusual effort to be outgoing, and Mountainview offers him a contract to teach English and creative writing with tenure guaranteed.

The offer arrives while Dom fears losing his place at the University of Portland. He has kept such a low profile that campus decision-makers question whether he has shown enough commitment to merit lifetime employment. He recognizes that a denial could also make him less attractive to other universities, which would want to know why Portland had turned him down. His applications to institutions across several Western states are therefore a practical attempt to get ahead of an impending rejection. Mountainview’s offer answers that immediate professional danger with unusual certainty: unlike the uncertain tenure decision he faces at Portland, the new position comes with tenure already guaranteed.

A refuge that becomes intolerable

Dom accepts the position with relief, though not with great delight. In late June he leaves Portland towing a small U-Haul trailer, filled mostly with books and clothes. He remembers being in a good mood on the road and looking forward to life at Mountainview; he does not remember feeling that he had failed at Portland. Instead, the move seems to him like a fresh start, and the day he sets out is, by his recollection, one of the happiest of his life.

That anticipation does not survive his arrival. In the second week of July, at the last minute, Dom decides he cannot bear to continue with the kind of life he had led before and tells the college he no longer wants the job. The institution is unhappy with his reversal. The contrast is central to the episode: the post that had seemed to rescue him from precariousness now resembles another sheltered retreat. Parker Faine later characterizes the appeal as a low-pressure job at a small college where Dom’s introversion could pass as an artist’s temperament. Dom’s own account is less a dispute about the college’s qualities than a repudiation of the life he associates with accepting it.

The life Dom chooses instead

After turning down the position, Dom takes a tiny apartment in town: one room, with a kitchen and bathroom, and a view of the mountains. The contrast between guaranteed tenure and this sparse arrangement is sharp. Rather than begin the secure academic life he had traveled to Utah to take up, he chooses to live on his savings while writing a novel. There is not much money in the bank, but he has always been frugal. The evidence does not establish how long he stays in the apartment or whether he completes the novel; what it establishes is the choice itself, made despite the limited financial cushion.

Parker later connects Dom’s rejection of the job to the changes that trouble him in the present. Dom recalls the transformation as dramatic and inexplicable but, at the time, for the better. At thirty-three, he feels he has taken hold of his life and entered unfamiliar territory. Mountainview consequently marks not simply a change of employer but a break in self-understanding: the reserved academic seeking safety becomes someone unwilling to resume what he calls his former, diminished existence.

Later significance

When Dom develops persistent somnambulism, Parker proposes that the episodes may be related to the changes that began during the Mountainview trip. He urges Dom to stay with him so they can examine the connection, but Dom refuses. Living alone, he reasons, is not merely a preference: accepting Parker’s offer feels like retreating to the same hiding place from life that he had occupied for years. He likes the person he has become and fears slipping back into his old existence.

Dom doubts that the connection between his earlier transformation and his sleepwalking is mysterious or complicated. He suspects instead that the nocturnal episodes offer an excuse to retreat from the challenges, excitement, and stress of his new life. That interpretation is his own, not a confirmed explanation of the condition. Still, it shows how Mountainview continues to shape his decisions: the college is the place where he rejected a secure retreat, and the memory of that choice informs his later determination to remain alone and face the sleepwalking rather than withdraw from the life he has chosen.