Only the merit scholars hear him.
A lot of the students have dropped acid or eaten psychedelic mushrooms and are either petrified with fear or gibbering like chimps.
I’m somewhere between sobriety and drunkenness and I’m listening to a Walkman. Already I have reverted to my natural primitive state.
9
One of my roommates makes a commotion in the middle of the night and disturbs my sleep.
He misses his parents.
I had been dreaming about Hawaii. I vacationed on Maui and Oahu and the Big Island as a child, but I haven’t gone back in years, confined to the liminal dustbowl of the Amerikan Midwest.
The older you get, the more tropics matter.
I turn on the lights and wake everybody up and sort of guarantee my roommates that I will kill them if I hear one more peep and so forth. I direct most of my aggression towards the homesick freshman, whose name is the same as mine, I discover. Then I turn off the lights and go back to sleep.
10
Instead of a dream, I experience a memory.
My only memory. The sole backstory of my character and identity. Everything else may or may not be a fiction.
The memory doesn’t have anything to do with me. And yet everything hinges on it.
It goes like this:
A velour curtain of night slams into the grass.
My stepfather ambles onto the patio and stares into the middle distance. The weight of his jaw seems to tug on the bags of his eyes, drawing them into a grotesque pretense of mourning and absolution.
The stars come out. The sky is a scintillating dome.
There’s a party inside the house. A family gathering. Maybe something else. Maybe nothing at all.
Somebody joins my stepfather on the patio. A young man with long teeth.
Smiling a tall smile, he glances back and forth between the middle distance and the sky and the aged man’s face. My stepfather might know him.
“Beautiful night out,” says the young man.
My stepfather grumbles something.
The young man looks at him hard and squints at the horizon. “What’s out there?”
My stepfather grumbles something.
The tall smile wavers at the edges. The young man says, “Is something out there? Are we going to be ok? Why are you looking out there?”
There was a silence.
Then my stepfather says, “Because I fuckin’ wanna look out there! Fuckhead!”
They continue to stare into the middle distance.
Soon my stepfather is alone again.
He stays that way until sunlight robs the distance of its precious interior.
11
I arrive at my first class fifteen minutes late.
Things happen fast.
The professor tries to cane me and I punch him and snatch his bamboo stick and beat him like a jungle monkey I’m trying to domesticate and all of the students whoop and cheer and they really love it.
After awhile I get kind of embarrassed for the professor and give him back the stick. I apologize for being tardy. “I was never tardy to classes I taught,” I assure him, uncertain if this is true. “Well. Better to be absent than tardy, I always say. Nobody likes disruptions.”
I sit next to an attractive young lady. She gives me a look and I give her a look and my endorphins retreat backstage and there is a hollow, abstemious sensation.
The ceiling panels fizz with electricity.
The professor gets up and tries to dust off his clothes and arrange himself into some semblance of presentablility.
He’s a mess.
His shirt is untucked and his spectacles are flattened and broken and his belt isn’t working and his hair and beard have converged into a feral, rumpled mass.
Clutching his waistband so his pants don’t fall down, the professor gets in front of the class. He tries to introduce himself, then breaks down and cries.
He gives up. “It doesn’t matter who I am or what I’ve done,” he admits.
He hands out the syllabus.
As he reads through it, he breaks down and cries again.
And again.
And again and again. Nine times, by my count. I ask the young lady next to me if this is accurate and she says she counted eight breakdowns.
The ceiling panels sound like they might explode.
I smile with one half of my face, invoking the attractive dimple. “What class is this?”
But somebody has told her about the other dimple, which is more like a scar than an insignia of promise and futurity. Otherwise she would have fallen under my power.
It is likely that everybody at the University knows about the other dimple now. I resolve never to smile again.
At some point the professor tells us we can go.
We go.
Nothing happens to the ceiling panels.
12
On the way to my next class, I stop by the library to see if, per my request, they have stocked copies of my latest book, a work of cultural theory.
The librarian says they ordered copies.
I don’t believe her.
I look up the number and go to the stacks.
It’s a big library and it takes me awhile to find the right aisle, but I can’t get to where the book is supposed to be because somebody’s shooting a porno.
I don’t know if they’re students, staff or faculty. They’re young but they look old, or vice versa. Lots of body hair and imperfections of the skin. Decent muscle tone.
The film crew uses archaic camera equipment, clunky and heavy and loud, with massive flashbulbs that erupt like solar flares.
I wait for the scene to end. The protagonist has trouble with his extremity. The director keeps cutting to provide him with words of encouragement and dirty pictures to arouse him.
Resolute, I squeeze my way down the aisle to get to where my book should be.
The further I go, the more bodies press against me.
It’s difficult to breathe.
I don’t like this smell.
There is it. The book.
It’s on the shelf behind the protagonist. If I’m careful I should be able to reach up and remove it without detection.
I reach for the book.
The protagonist makes a sound.
I reach for the book.
The protagonist makes another sound.
There’s a commotion and everybody gets into position.
“Stop,” I say, reaching for the book.
Nobody stops.
The protagonist makes another sound, seconds from accomplishing the proverbial College Try.
I can’t reach the book.
Unwilling to play the rabble-rouser, I escape the pornographers and flee the library so that I can get to class on time. I don’t want to make a habit out of turning my professors into spectacles of pathos.
13
Redundancy is the only viable reality. Sometimes we may substitute “redundancy” with “recurrence.”
I go to the rest of my classes and the day threads into weeks and the weeks thread into months.
14
The semester (un)folds like an origami in flames.
15
After I finish my last exam, I remember that I have a family. A wife and kids. I blame the epistemological slippage on memory and especially history. As I articulate in my first book, a manifesto intended to both counter and facilitate a certain Icelandic philosopher’s “aesthetic of impertinence,” “History is that which hides in the deepest graves of our brainyards and dies for good the moment we try to exhume it.”