He frowns. “Wine. Chardonnay.”
I wince.
He lifts the goblet with two hands and takes a dirty sip. “Who the hell are you?”
I tell him who I am. The Provost shakes his head.
I walk across the office and sit in a chair on the other side of the desk. It takes me about 15 seconds to get there. I can’t see him because his desk is too tall and the chair is normal-sized and hence too short.
I get up and stand on the chair. Now I can see him.
“Are you standing on the chair? Please don’t stand on the chair.”
I step off the chair. I don’t sit down.
I can see him.
“Who are you, sir?”
I remind him.
“What can I do for you?”
It takes me about an hour to explain my situation. It shouldn’t take this long. My situation is cut and dry: I was In, then I was Out, and now I need to know how long it will take me to get back In. But when I talk at length to administrators I deploy a lot of techno-jargon and magniloquence.
The Provost goes through nearly two bottles of Chardonnay during my monologue. He offers me a glass on at least six occasions. I don’t drink white wine and politely decline the offer every time, with the same response, and the same expression, in the same tone: “No thank you. I don’t care for white wine.”
At last I say, “How long will it take?”
The Provost doesn’t know. He doesn’t think anybody will know. He thinks it’s rather strange that I had my Ph.D. taken away in the first place. He’s never heard of such a thing. Even stranger, he thinks, is that I returned to college to get the Ph.D. back. “Is this common praxis in the industry?”
I scrutinize his obtuse eyes. They’re not bloodshot, but something’s wrong with them. “You never leave your office, do you.”
He peers around the office.
I leave the office.
The girl on the stairs is still there. She passed out.
I sit down next to her and watch her sleep for awhile, admiring the tilt of her eyebrows. Then I wake her up and we go play Frisbee golf. It’s fun. I win.
20
When somebody cuts me, I bleed syntax.
I might say this aloud: “Why is every young lady who attends or works at the University named Shorty? Even the tall ones.”
“Shawty,” somebody replies.
“What?”
“Shawty. S. H. A. W. T. Y.”
I turn up the volume on my Walkman.
21
Metaphysics.
Translation: science that is aware of itself as such.
This certificate of existence hemorrhages like a stuck thunderpig. It loses momentum the moment it begins to pick up speed. Reality is only real by way of the art of misperception and disavowal. I will be the first human being to live forever. All of the (Big) Others will do likewise. Muscle memory is an illusion as memory in general, corporeal or cognitive, is deceitful, if not treacherous; ultimately that flexed bicep has nothing to compare itself to, no prototype, no former, weaker, less vascular embodiment to scrutinize in the mirror. All old, expensive colleges do the same thing: the sharp tips of their administration buildings and church spires tear holes in the sky that relinquish the goat’s milk of Paradise. These observations transcend mere exuberance. As a child I enjoyed moments of isolation and lackluster cant. Tabula rasa. I own eight Bunsen burners, twenty-six abacuses, forty-one protractors, and a deranged Grizzly bear. Tabula rasa. I avoid anaphora and aporia like the plague. And yet they plague me. In mind. On paper.
I have prelapsarian tendencies.
Viz., I am a firm and sagacious believer in the narrative of failure.
Narrative as thoroughbred fiction. Narrative as lived experience. Narrative as desire and production and the death of meaning.
I have been told that my rictus grin reminisces a scar. This scar is essentially a toolkit for existence.
It takes a long time to figure out how machinery works, but once you accomplish a rudimentary understanding of the machinery, you are in a good position to break that machinery. It doesn’t matter if you put it back together. The option for destruction lingers like a forsaken ovule.
As the reviews editor for a prominent academic journal, I receive many queries.
As a human being, I receive many queries.
Even when I retreat to liminal, would-be secure interstices, the queries continue to roll in.
It is my privilege and my duty not to answer anybody.
Unlike rhetorical devices, answers are overrated.
Answer a question and sooner or later another question will air its dirty laundry.
22
I am in class now.
Intro to Film Studies, I think.
Nobody’s listening to the professor. The content of his lecture is too hard, or too boring, or too Old Hat, or too irrelevant, or too verbatim from the textbook.
As always, I am sitting in the back, in the corner, by the window, staring into Oblivion.
A man turns to me and introduces himself as Bill.
Bill isn’t sitting in a seat.
He’s standing near the window, as if banished there.
Has he been standing there the whole time? Or did he get out of his seat during the lecture and sneak beside me?
He’s undernourished.
He’s middle-aged.
He’s wearing a tweed coppola.
He reminds me of Andy Capp. My grandfather used to love that comic strip.
I inform Bill about my grandfather’s deep and reverent penchant for Andy Capp.
Bill is polite enough. I stand up and we shake hands and talk about the weather.
The professor gives us the evil eye.
I return the act of aggression with a look that says GO FUCK YOURSELF OR I’ll KILL YOU!!!
The professor understands. His book on astro-pragmatics was ridiculous. I wrote a scathing article in protest and critique of it just three years ago. The article met with terrific acclaim and more or less tanked his career.
The evil-eye melts into his skull.
Bill and I converse in very confident yet very reserved tones. I learn that he spent some time in Hawaii.
“I’ve spent time there too. Do you like poi?”
He tells me he’s Hawaiian.
“Oh. Do you like the Brothers Cazimero?”
He reminds me that he’s Hawaiian.
“Oh. Have you stayed at the Royal Hawaiian? The pink palace on Waikiki Beach. It’s the oldest hotel on Oahu, right? I used to stop there every year on my way to Kyoto. My kids came along sometimes. They loved it. I can’t remember if my wife accompanied us. You can’t believe the breakfasts they served at the Royal Hawaiian. All fresh fruit. Then, after breakfast, me and the girls would go surfing. There’s a coral reef in the bay, though, like a rhizome of knives, and we couldn’t wipe out; if we wiped out and fell in the water, the reef would tear us to pieces. So nobody wiped out. We became expert surfers instantly. Had the reef not been there, had it been safe to surf, and if falling off of the board would not have entailed certain death, it probably would have taken us weeks, perhaps months to learn how. I may have never learned. There’s something to be said for epistemological prudence.”
Bill says, “I’m not sure if prudence is the right word.”
I say, “No? Well something like that. Anyway you should check out the Royal Hawaiian. I’d live there if I could. I—”
“Do you like pornographic films?” interrupts Bill.
I cock my head. “Do I like what?”
“Pornos. You know.” Bill makes a gesture that, I gauge, represents what a pornographic film involves.
“Do I like pornos?”
Bill narrows his eyes.