The students can’t stand it any longer. They leap out of their chairs and make for the door.
They press against the professor, squeezing him into the cold wood.
His cheek presses against the glass window in the door, emboldening a popped blood vessel.
He moans.
The lights start blinking.
The floor starts shaking.
We slide across it in slowtime.
Unexpectedly, the professor collapses over a desk. I try to help him up. He shoos me away.
The fire alarm won’t stop.
There might be a real fire somewhere.
Somebody says they see a fire out the window. “A real one,” they emphasize.
We run to the window, trampling the professor. He begins to cough and choke. Long strands of plasma extend from his open mouth.
Next door a building is on fire. I don’t even know what building it is even though I have used several of the toilets inside of it.
Venomous flames hiss and buckle in every exploded window and doorway.
There are people on the roof.
They’re all on fire.
They screech and wail as they run back and forth like angry swarms of fireflies. Sometimes they crash into one another and fall off the roof.
The fire alarm keeps ringing even when the firemen show up, put out the fire, help the people, and go back to the fire station. Two days later it’s still ringing.
Then it stops.
42
I get back from the wine store or the gym or gym class or somewhere or someplace and I catch my roommates doing the Macarena.
I’ve suspected this for a long time.
When I’m gone, they line-dance. I don’t think they do much else.
They try to keep it to themselves because they think I’ll shame and ridicule and symbolically castrate them.
When I interrupt them doing the Macarena, I can tell they’re mad, because they really like that one, but anxiety trumps enjoyment, and they break out of formation and pretend to be inspecting the walls, and inspecting the ceiling, and inspecting their fingernails, and thumbing through textbooks that would otherwise remain permanently shut.
I say, “Were you just doing the Macarena?”
Their faces bunch in surprise and confusion. “Macarena?” says one of them, as if I’m speaking Spanish.
“Don’t lie to me. I saw you doing the Macarena.”
“What’s the Macarena?” says another one.
Eyeballing him, I slowly pace across the room to the Victrola sitting atop the minifridge.
The title of the record has been crossed out with a thick black marker.
I adjust the fleur-de-lis, wind up the machine, maneuver the swing tube, and lower the needle onto the vinyl.
There’s some static.
There’s the music.
Then, finally, there’s the chorus:
Dale a tu cuerpo alegria, Macarena.
Que tu cuerpo es pa’ darle alegria y cosa buena.
Dale a tu cuerpo alegria, Macarena.
Heeeeey Macarena. (Aaaaaiy!)
I give the needle a flick and the music squelches off. I watch the record turn for awhile, then look over my shoulder and stink-eye the rabble. “That sounds like the fuckin’ Macarena to me.”
They all deny it.
Each of them has a different excuse as to why they weren’t doing the Macarena.
One was studying.
One was playing a video game.
One was ordering a pizza.
One was daydreaming.
One recycles another one’s excuse.
Another one recycles another one’s excuse.
Etc.
I pretend to believe them before applying a chokehold of circular logic that broadsides their excuses and reveals their absurdity. This takes hours. I attend to each roommate in turn. By the time I’m finished with them, not only do they admit to line-dancing, they commence line-dancing, limbs swimming and synching like a cell of eels in an aquarium.
43
It’s rush hour.
I accidentally cut off a pickup truck with jacked-up tires.
At the next stoplight the truck pulls next to me.
The driver rolls down the window.
He glares at me.
He says I drive a faggy car so I must be some kinda fag.
“Do Subarus denote homosexuality? This is a Forester, mind you. It’s technically an SUV.”
He swears at me. He tells me he’s going to kill me.
“Well, if it helps, it’s not my car. I ‘borrowed’ it from one of my roommates.” I laugh.
He continues to threaten me. Then the light turns green. He rolls up his window. He flips me off.
We go.
I’m running low on gas. I stop to get some.
The pickup truck pulls into the gas station. The driver leaps out and marches toward me.
He’s short.
He has a patchy beard.
He wears a plaid shirt and a trucker hat and all the rest of it.
I get out of the Subaru.
The driver reaches back a bloody stump.
I am a foot-and-a-half taller and 30 lbs. more muscular than him. At least.
He didn’t realize it before. Everybody looks more or less the same behind the wheel of a car.
There’s more talk of me being gay.
I take a step towards him.
He runs back to his truck.
As he retreats, I sort of yell at him in this resounding, preternatural death-voice. The modest subtext of my thesis: “You fucked with the wrong asshole, shithead.”
The driver tries to get the truck going.
The engine hiccups. The starter won’t catch.
There’s an aluminum bat in the trunk of the Subaru.
I retrieve it.
I stride toward the truck.
The driver is getting antsy now. He peers at me in the rear view mirror. He hops up and down in his seat, stomping on the gas pedal.
I fall into a trot.
I lift the bat over my head.
I bring the bat down on the windshield of the truck, exploding it into glinting stardust.
The driver shrieks like an insect.
I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I hit the truck again with the bat. I’m screaming like a pope, howling like a holy ghost. I hit the truck again with the bat.
The truck roars to life.
We go.
44
Violence begets violence. Ultraviolence is another matter. Hermeneutics of suspicion vary like words for snow in Eskaleut. And while violence in its pure form is certainly variable, it’s not as volatile. This includes physical violence as much as the violence of Psyche and especially Rhetoric. Consider this climatic passage from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s The War Machine:
The first theoretical element of importance is the fact that the war machine has many varied meanings, and this is precisely because the war machine has an extremely variable relation to war itself. The war machine is not uniformly defined, and comprises something other than increasing quantities of force. We have tried to define two poles of the war machine: at one pole, it takes war for its object, and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe. But in all of the shapes it assumes here — limited war, total war, worldwide organization — war represents not at all the supposed essence of the war machine, but only, whatever the machine’s power (puissance), either the set of conditions under which the States appropriate the machine, even going so far as to project it as the horizon of the world, or the dominant order of which the States themselves are no longer but parts. The other pole seemed to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower “quantities,” has as its object not war, but the tracing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed by States.