The local lakes were already verdant with scum. I failed my Neutral Pelvis final. I simply forgot to go. When I approached my instructor to say, “But my roommate was throwing up blood!” she said, “That line is as old as the hills.” I turned in all my papers and exams. There was not an informed word in them. I had no idea what I was talking about, though here and there I would burst forth with an embarrassing intensity of assertion. I was given Bs.
“Who was that witch you worked for?” asked Murph before she went home to Dubuque for the summer, her stomach pumped, her pulse returned, her courses done.
“She wasn’t a witch.” I sighed. “At least, I don’t think so.” I thought about this some more. “At least, not a very good witch.”
“A good witch at all?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Still, I’d like to smack her,” said Murph.
I laughed drily. “God, so would I.”
She touched my arm. “Don’t make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time. I don’t mean that personally. I mean that for everyone. It was revealed to me as I fell back from the great white light of death.”
I felt nothing but admiration for her. I felt she was a healer. I felt she could read minds. “Do you ever feel certain people are psychic?” I asked. “Like you know someone and secretly feel they are psychic and that they don’t understand this themselves?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You do? You’ve felt this about someone?”
“I feel that about you.”
This seemed so much like a joke that I laughed.
“Really.” She smiled and embraced me. “Have a great summer.” We had given up our lease and neither of us knew what we would do come fall, but it wouldn’t be with each other. We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
My father phoned to ask me if I’d like to help him with the farm. He had recently started a three-season-spring-greens angle to his business and needed help with it: I would run out in front of his newfangled thresher-shaver and scare the mice away. My brother was packing up for boot camp at Fort Bliss and would be gone all summer and all harvest. Did I have another job? Was I interested?
I said I thought that would be good exercise and I appreciated the offer. As a coincidence, I told him, my other job was suddenly over. I’d come home on the bus on Monday and we could talk about it more. I had to clean the apartment to get our deposit back.
“You will miss Robert’s graduation if you don’t come sooner. It’s on Sunday.”
“Well, I’ll take the early Sunday bus,” I said.
What had I learned thus far in college? You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you’ll see everyone you’ve ever known living there.
I had also learned that in literature — perhaps as in life — one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for itself. The creator was inconvenient — God was dead. But the creation itself had a personality and hopes and its own desires and plans and little winks and dance steps and collaged intent. In this way Jacques Derrida overlapped with Walt Disney. The story itself had feet and a mouth, could walk and talk and speak of its own yearnings!
I learned that there had been many ice ages. That they came and went. I learned there were no mammals original to New Zealand. I learned that space was not just adrift with cold, flammable rocks. Here and there a creature was riding one, despite the Sufic spinning of the rock. The spores of lightless life were everywhere. I think I learned that.
VI
My brother and my father picked me up at the bus station, figuring I’d have a lot of stuff. Robert was wearing his graduation gown but carrying his cap.
“Well, you don’t have that much,” said my father, puzzled.
“I put a lot in storage,” I said. I tugged at Robert’s gown. “Hey, congratulations.”
“It’s more of an accomplishment than you may realize,” he said, abashed.
“What time is the ceremony?”
“Not until two.”
“And you put on that gown already?”
“You bet.”
“We have already taken a thousand pictures,” mused my dad.
“You didn’t answer my e-mail,” said my brother.
“What e-mail?” I asked.
“The last one I sent you!”
“You told me to ignore it.”
“No, not that one. The one after that!”
I was slowly remembering that I had archived it for later.
“Is your address still bassface-at-isp-dot-com?” he continued.
I always believed my e-mail address was clever and hip until I heard it said aloud. “It is. Jeez, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.” I would change the subject. “How are you?”
“Great!”
“Really? Nobody’s great!”
“Well, it’s not great with a capital G. It’s actually g-r-a-t-e. That may not be so good.”
“No, it may not be. How did that happen?”
“I got grated on a curb.”
“Ha! Did he ever,” said my dad.
“Did you just make that up?” I asked my brother.
“No,” he said, smiling and climbing into the truck. “I’ve been working on it for weeks.”
“Weeks?”
“Well, not weeks. Months, actually.” He was working hard to sound upbeat and had landed on bizarrely merry.
“Did you leave that Suzuki of yours back in Troy?” inserted my father as we were driving off.
“Yes. I did.”
“Too bad!” said my brother. The topic of the lost e-mail had too much regret and belatedness attached to it and was no fun. Unlike the motorbike. “I wanted to see you buzz around the ceremony this afternoon. It would cause a sensation!”
“That’s just what I want to do.” I stared out the window of the truck. Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses were sprawled across the farm fields.
At home I had to help my mother dress, in the room she called “the store.” Here she would stack up boxes of apparel that she had mail-ordered but not tried on to see whether she would keep them or send them back. When she was ready she would go through and open them one by one, but until then they stayed in the store — which was in essence a kind of mail room.
“Gail?” my dad called up for my mom.
“We’re in the store!” she called back, and I helped her try on something I thought would be fine, and then yanked the tags off for her. “Send the rest back,” I said. “But wait — what is this?” There was a beautiful black hat with a feather sticking straight up and a sash dangling down the side.
“That’s not for a graduation.”
“No, it’s not. Unless you’re the one graduating: then you could flip the sash as you walked across the stage and blow a whistle with the feather between your thumbs.”
“It’s for something, though,” she said, holding it with more affection than was seemly. “I don’t know what yet.”
“A party from fifty years ago, maybe.”
“Hey, around here? There are a lot of those. And you still can’t wear a hat like this.”