What happened next I had to puzzle over for weeks afterward. And even dead, as I am and have been for I don’t know how long, I try to reconstruct the mores that reigned over that campus and to recapitulate the troubled efforts to elude those mores that fostered the series of mishaps ending in my death at the age of nineteen. Even now (if “now” can be said to mean anything any longer), beyond corporeal existence, alive as I am here (if “here” or “I” means anything) as memory alone (if “memory,” strictly speaking, is the all-embracing medium in which I am being sustained as “myself”), I continue to puzzle over Olivia’s actions. Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime’s minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component? Or can it be that this is merely the afterlife that is mine, and as each life is unique, so too is each afterlife, each an imperishable fingerprint of an afterlife unlike anyone else’s? I have no means of telling. As in life, I know only what is, and in death what is turns out to be what was. You are not just shackled to your life while living it, you continue to be stuck with it after you’re gone. Or, again, maybe I do, I alone. Who could have told me? And would death have been any less terrifying if I’d understood that it wasn’t an endless nothing but consisted instead of memory cogitating for eons on itself? Though perhaps this perpetual remembering is merely the anteroom to oblivion. As a nonbeliever, I assumed that the afterlife was without a clock, a body, a brain, a soul, a god — without anything of any shape, form, or substance, decomposition absolute. I did not know that it was not only not without remembering but that remembering would be the everything. I have no idea, either, whether my remembering has been going on for three hours or for a million years. It’s not memory that’s obliviated here — it’s time. There is no letup — for the afterlife is without sleep as well. Unless it’s all sleep, and the dream of a past forever gone is with the deceased one forever. But dream or no dream, here there is nothing to think about but the bygone life. Does that make “here” hell? Or heaven? Better than oblivion or worse? You would imagine that at least in death uncertainty would vanish. But inasmuch as I have no idea where I am, what I am, or how long I am to remain in this state, uncertainty appears to be enduring. This is surely not the spacious heaven of the religious imagination, where all of us good people are together again, happy as can be because the sword of death is no longer hanging over our heads. For the record, I have a strong suspicion that you can die here too. You can’t go forward here, that’s for sure. There are no doors. There are no days. The direction (for now?) is only back. And the judgment is endless, though not because some deity judges you, but because your actions are naggingly being judged for all time by yourself.
If you ask how this can be — memory upon memory, nothing but memory — of course I can’t answer, and not because neither a “you” nor an “I” exists, any more than do a “here” and a “now,” but because all that exists is the recollected past, not recovered, mind you, not relived in the immediacy of the realm of sensation, but merely replayed. And how much more of my past can I take? Retelling my own story to myself round the clock in a clock-less world, lurking disembodied in this memory grotto, I feel as though I’ve been at it for a million years. Is this really to go on and on — my nineteen little years forever while everything else is absent, my nineteen little years inescapably here, persistently present, while everything that went into making real the nineteen years, while everything that put one squarely in the midst of, remains a phantasm far, far away?
I could not believe then — ridiculously enough, I cannot still — that what happened next happened because Olivia wanted it to happen. That was not the way it went between a conventionally brought-up boy and a nice well-bred girl when I was alive and it was 1951 and, for the third time in just over half a century, America was at war again. I certainly could never believe that what happened might have anything to do with her finding me attractive, let alone desirable. What girl found a boy “desirable” at Winesburg College? I for one had never heard of such feelings existing among the girls of Winesburg or Newark or anywhere else. As far as I knew, girls didn’t get fired up with desire like that; they got fired up by limits, by prohibitions, by outright taboos, all of which helped to serve what was, after all, the overriding ambition of most of the coeds who were my contemporaries at Winesburg: to reestablish with a reliable young wage earner the very sort of family life from which they had temporarily been separated by attending college, and to do so as rapidly as possible.
Nor could I believe that what Olivia did she did because she enjoyed doing it. The thought was too astonishing even for an open-minded, intelligent boy like me. No, what happened could only be a consequence of something being wrong with her, though not necessarily a moral or intellectual failing — in class she struck me as mentally superior to any girl I’d ever known, and nothing at dinner had led me to believe that her character was anything but solid through and through. No, what she did would have to have been caused by an abnormality. “It’s because her parents are divorced,” I told myself. There was no other explanation for an enigma so profound.
When I got to the room later, Elwyn was still studying. I gave him back the keys to the LaSalle, and he accepted them while continuing to underline the text in one of his engineering books. He was wearing his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, and four empty Coke bottles stood upright beside him on the desk. He’d go through another four at least before packing it in around midnight. I wasn’t surprised by his not asking me about my date — he himself never went on dates and never attended his fraternity’s social events. He had been a high school wrestler in Cincinnati but had given up sports in college to pursue his engineering degree. His father owned a tugboat company on the Ohio River, and his plan was to succeed his father someday as head of the firm. In pursuit of that goal he was even more single-minded than I was.
But how could I wash and get into my pajamas and go to sleep and say nothing to anyone about something so extraordinary having happened to me? Yet that’s what I set out to do, and almost succeeded in doing, until, after lying in my bunk for about a quarter of an hour while Elwyn remained studying at his desk, I bolted upright to announce, “She blew me.”
“Uh-huh,” Elwyn said without turning his head from the page he was studying.
“I got sucked off.”
“Yep,” said Elwyn in due time, teasing out the syllable to signal that his attention was going to remain on his work regardless of what I might take it in my head to start going on about.
“I didn’t even ask for it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for it. I don’t even know her. And she blew me. Did you ever hear of that happening?”
“Nope,” replied Elwyn.
“It’s because her parents are divorced.”
Now he turned to look at me. He had a round face and a large head and his features were so basic that they might have been modeled on those carved by a child for a Halloween pumpkin. Altogether he was constructed on completely utilitarian lines and did not look as though he had, like me, to keep a sharp watch over his emotions — if, that is, he had any of an unruly nature that required monitoring. “She tell you that?” he asked.
“She didn’t say anything. I’m only guessing. She just did it. I pulled her hand onto my pants, and on her own, without my doing anything more, she unzipped my fly and took it out and did it.”