When I finally found the correct key and opened the door I was surprised by a sudden blast of wind, a few papers swirling in it. The large window facing the lawn was open some ten inches, had perhaps been that way for many months, although the computer and desk would prove to be dry, undamaged. As I took in my office from the doorway, I felt I was looking into the office of a dead man — a mildly musty smell, despite the open window; the disarranged papers, a leftover plastic Starbucks cup that had once held iced coffee, a small plastic bag of almonds, an open copy of the Cantos facedown on the desk: it felt like somebody had planned to be right back and never returned, dissected. I picked up the papers and hastily organized the desk, then turned on my computer, reassured by the Apple start-up chime, F-sharp major chord, a registered trademark.
My desk faced the wall; I swiveled around in my chair so I was facing Calvin in his; although we’d often sat in these positions before, he kept looking either at the screen or the window behind me with such fixed intensity that I couldn’t help but turn around to see what he was seeing (nothing). I asked him how he was.
“I’ve been good, I’ve been good,” he said.
I asked what he’d been doing, how his work was coming.
“It’s been amazing, amazing.” He was bouncing his right leg up and down rapidly, a habit I had, but which in him alarmed me. I suspected his energy had its origin in prescription amphetamines, which I had used, before my aortic diagnosis, semirecreationally.
“Did you read the O’Brien poems?”
“Man, I have been reading everything. Have been reading and not sleeping.” Adderall. Or, paradoxically, withdrawal from Adderall. He put a piece of gum in his mouth, and offered me some, which I accepted.
“What did you think of Metropole?” It was the O’Brien book we were due to discuss.
“You know how those poems just spider out, how those poems just spider out on the page?”
“Go on,” I said, unfamiliar with the phrase, which made me uneasy.
“How they can move in any direction, how you can read one line a thousand different ways, the syntax shifts as you go.” This was true, was often true of poems, but was particularly true of O’Brien’s work. I was relieved by the comment’s applicability, since I feared Calvin and I were in distinct universes. I said some things about the form of Metropole I thought he might find useful, and he took notes, head bent over a legal pad. But when I stopped talking, he kept writing.
“So has reading Metropole made you think any more about the prose poems at the center of your manuscript, how you might strategically disrupt your sentences, for instance?”
And writing.
“Calvin?” Finally he looked up from the paper and met my eyes. His were hazel, shining, although the shine I probably imagined. I felt a manic energy of my own, as if I’d had too much coffee.
“Do you see this?” he said, holding the pad up to me, which was now largely covered in a kind of microscript.
“You have bad handwriting,” I said.
“How the materiality of the writing destroys its sense, like we talked about in class. You start by writing and then you’re drawing. Or you start by reading and then you’re looking. Poetics of modal instability. Pushed past the point of collapse.”
I recommended a famous essay about the visual components of writing, in an attempt to reassimilate Calvin’s frightening energy to the academic. I swiveled around to the computer and searched an academic database to get the full citation. When I turned back around he was looking out the window the way Joan of Arc looks out of the painting. Was he being called?
“What kind of gum is this?” I asked.
It took him a while to look at me. He smiled. “Nicotine gum.” That’s why I was a little nauseated. It was strong. I didn’t spit it out: it was one of the few things connecting us.
“Are you quitting?”
“No, but my mom bought me a ton of this at Christmas.”
“How is stuff going beyond poetry?” I felt I could ask, after the mention of family.
“Well, you said once that we shouldn’t worry about our literary careers, should worry about being underwater.” I must have been joking around in class — half joking. “And in any new civilization you need those who have a sense of usable history and can reconstruct at least the basic concepts from science. Also there is the literalization of all literature because the sky is falling, if you know what I mean — that’s no longer just a phrase. A lot of people can’t handle it, how everything becomes hieroglyphic. I lost my girlfriend over that. Body without organs, for instance. I can swallow but there is a cost to swallowing in the sense that I don’t have the same kind of throat. That’s a metaphor but it has real effects, which is what she couldn’t understand. What’s tricky is you want to test it, take poison or whatever to show how you can absorb it, but you don’t know in that instance if it will be symbolic or spider out.”
The college did not have good psychiatric services. He was twenty-six; no one could force him to get help or even legally contact his parents, whoever they were.
“Nobody thinks we’ve been told the truth about Fukushima. Think about the milk you’re buying from a bodega, the hot particles there, I mean in addition to the hormones and what those do. There are rabbits being born there with three ears. The seas are poisoned. Look at this”—here he pulled his hair back, maybe to indicate his widow’s peak; I wasn’t sure—“that wasn’t there when I lived in Colorado. And I know that some of the bone mass in my jaw has thinned, can feel that when it clicks, but I can’t afford insurance. And now there is this storm, but who selects its name? You have a committee of like five guys in a situation room generating the names before they form. The World Meteorological Organization’s Regional Association IV Hurricane Committee — I looked it up. And ever since I looked it up I can’t get service on my phone. Every call is just dropped.”
“I agree it’s a crazy time,” I said. “But I think in times like these we have to try to stay connected to people. And we have to try to make our own days, despite all the chaos. We have to focus on feeling comfortable in our own skin, and we need to be open to getting help with that.” I was desperately trying to channel my parents.
“Exactly. And the skin is where a lot of the information is entering now. The pores. The pores are the poets of the skin. Who said that? And people try to seal them, silence them. I guess I did. My girlfriend would seal the pores on her face with egg whites and other shit and she’d have no idea where that was coming from, even if the companies say all natural or organic. Why do you think they sell so much makeup at airports? They don’t need to test them on animals; they have supercomputers that can basically feel pain at this point. It’s like molecular caulking but you’re not going to keep particles out that way and you’re just shutting yourself off from the social. From what’s coming.”
“Calvin”—I spoke slowly—“a lot of the things you’re saying aren’t really making sense to me.” Was that true? “I get the feeling you’ve been really stressed. This is a stressful place, a stressful time. Sounds like you’re going through a breakup. I often feel really worn out when I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to write.” He looked at me with hurt surprise. “I’m wondering if you’re seeing anyone or maybe could consider seeing somebody. Just to talk through things.”
“Okay, wow. Wow. You want to pathologize me, too. I guess that’s your job. You represent the institution. The institution speaks through you. But let me ask you something”—I sized Calvin up physically; he was taller than I was, nearly as tall as the protester, but thin, almost lanky; I involuntarily visualized punching him in the throat if he attacked me—“can you look at me and say you think this,” and here he swept the air with his arm in a way that made “this” indicate something very large, “is going to continue? You deny there’s poison coming at us from a million points? Do you want to tell me these storms aren’t man-made, even if they’re now out of the government’s control? You don’t think the FBI is fucking with our phones? The language is just becoming marks, drawings of words, not words — you should know that as well as anybody. Or are you on drugs? Are you letting them regulate you?” He stood up so suddenly I flinched, then felt bad for flinching. “Sorry for wasting your time,” he said, maybe holding back tears, and stormed out of my office, forgetting his legal pad.