Chapter 11

Gavin spent a couple days thinking about how to cancel his non-date with Rona.  Of course the obvious thing would be to catch her after class on Wednesday, but wow, awkward.  The other option would be to contact her through the school’s registration website.  Even more awkward. Attention: you have a new message from your instructor.  He’s standing you up. 

He searched online for sensory deprivation and Bloomington and found the website for the place they’d be going.  Indiana Isolated, it was called.  Great.  Evidently, the process entailed being suspended for one hour in a light-proof, sound-proof tank of highly salinated, body-temperature water.  And why would he want to do that?  He clicked on the link called benefits. Floating in the tank, it turned out, would improve digestion and cell reproduction, facilitate relaxation, and enhance inspiration and creativity.  

He definitely needed to cancel.

On Tuesday night, Santa Clarita College called.  Gavin was sitting in the living room, watching some show about drag queens and listening to Sinder and his philosophy friend Dan argue about free will. Pretty much a normal evening at their apartment.

The first time he heard Sinder and Dan have the free will debate, he thought  one of them would be like, People can make their own decisions! And the other one would be like, No, everything was decided in advance!  Lots of heavy pronouncements about fate and destiny and God.

Actually, the free-will argument was all about physics. Dan, who was this blond, Midwestern football-player type of guy, believed that every single action in the universe could be predicted, not by God, but by a supergenius who was really, really good at physics. This supergenius knew the movement of planets and stuff, and whether two cars would crash into each other.  But he also knew single thing you were going to think and say and do, based on how the particles and electricity moved in your brain.

Dan believed, at least he said he believed, that all decisions were an illusion.  Our actions were choreographed moves in a cosmic dance that had been set in motion when the universe began.  That was the argument against free will.

Sinder took the pro-free-will side in the debate.  That’s because he studied ethics. Ethicists had to believe that humans controlled their own actions; otherwise it would be a giant waste of time for them to go around telling everybody how to act.  Sure, he said, physics can predict lots of things, but not everything, not our thoughts and behaviors.  

“Okay, so I’m thinking of a number,” he said to Dan.  “You seriously believe that a scientist a million years ago could have predicted I would exist in this exact time and place, let alone what fucking number is in my mind? That’s just juvenile.”

After that they started throwing around a bunch of words like entropy and quantum mechanics and Heisenberg uncertainty principle.  Gavin figured he understood  about forty percent of the conversation, just enough to work with in case they asked him to weigh in.  It all sounded impressive, sure.  But Gavin had once gone a couple dates with an actual rocket scientist, and she said that philosophers might have memorized a bunch of big words, but they didn’t know jack shit about physics.

Then Gavin’s phone began buzzing and flashing: Santa Clarita College. Just the words on the screen gave him that roller-coaster feeling in his stomach, like he was about to go over the drop. He hated phone calls like this, delivering news, maybe bad news. Let's see. It was 8:28, which meant 5:28 California time, which meant that someone had stayed late to call him.  They would contact the top candidates first, right?  And leave the losers like him to the bitter end.

He carried the vibrating phone into his room and sat down on the edge of the bed.  He felt safer there, surrounded by orderly things. His books were alphabetized, his album posters were framed, his closet lacked a door but his shirts hung neatly in it. In this room, the news would make sense, whatever it turned out to be.

“Is this Gavin Johnson?”  Gavin didn’t even bother reminding her of the Cheng.  It wouldn’t matter if this was going to be the last time he ever spoke to these people.   

“We’d like to fly you out for a campus visit next week,” the voice said.  “Thursday and Friday.  Excuse me.”  She was yawning.  “You will be interviewed by the college president and the dean of Letters and Sciences. Please prepare a fifty-minute public lecture on your recent scholarly work.”

Gavin sat on his bed and stared at the phone for a few minutes after the call was over.  Well, now at least he had a really good reason for cancelling with Rona.  With his flyback next week, there was no way he could spend half a day in Bloomington, lying around in saltwater in the dark. No, he was going to spend all weekend getting ready.  He would wake up early each day, go online to find standard questions for flyback interviews, practice answering them, review the key points of his dissertation, study up on the conventional arguments about Stump that he was arguing against, reread Kristeva’s book, write his lecture, prepare for the obvious arguments that would be launched at him in response, review all his Freud and Marx and Jameson and Foucault because you know some uppity grad student would ask about them just to show off.

He started pulling books down from his shelf, making stacks for postmodernism, psychoanalysis, political theory.  One more of Stump’s plays and books about them, though Gavin could basically recite these in his sleep already. The most recent printed copy of his dissertation draft, housed in one of those oversized three-ring binders in his desk drawer.  A stack of important articles he had printed off the MLA database.

He sat back down on the bed and looked at the piles on his floor, breathing hard.  His flight was in eight days—he counted eleven, twelve, thirteen theory books plus six of Stump’s plays—that was a little more than two a day.  And then there was the lecture.  It should probably be on The Divine Sharpness, since that was the one everyone knew, but after Marjorie’s reaction, he was scared to talk about it.  He couldn’t do abjection in Time Slide—that’s what his MLA talk had been about.  Maybe No, No, Not Now?  It was better known than Time Slide but less than Divine Sharpness. He could reread all three of them tomorrow before class.  Right now, he should check the MLA database to see if there were any new articles he had missed on Stump.

His head hit the pillow and he stared at the bumps on his ceiling, more like cottage cheese than popcorn.  The top of his closet door pivoted from the right to the left side of his vision, smooth like a steering wheel.  Yeah, the room was spinning.  It was okay—it just meant he was stressed out.  He took some deep breaths in through his nose, out through his mouth, like they had told him to in that yoga class he took in college.  The closet door was moving more slowly now, a lazy circle instead of an urgent one.

Ah, fuck it.  He was going to go lie in the saltwater.

Sinder and Dan were still arguing in the living room. The drag queen show had switched to a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the drag queen show.

“I’ve got a flyback to Santa Clarita.”  Gavin pointed at his phone like that explained everything.

Dan held up his hand for a high-five.  Gavin managed to return it pretty well, using this trick one of his students had taught him where you looked at the guy’s wrist instead of his palm.

“Well-played, man.” Dan really had been in a fraternity, so when he said stuff like that, he wasn't being ironic.

“Well played?” Sinder didn't move, just stayed slumped on the couch with his arms crossed over his narrow chest. “Dude, you don’t even think he did anything.  It was all fated from the beginning of the universe.”

“You think he did something,” Dan said.  “Why don’t you fucking congratulate him?”

“Yeah, congratulations for what you did.” Sinder nodded like he had just won the argument.  Next to him on the couch in a pile of books about stuff like vegetarianism and whether you should give away all your money to the poor.  Dan was sitting in a pile of books, too, but since he wasn’t Gavin’s best friend, Gavin didn’t know what Dan’s books were about.

“Thanks,” Gavin said. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be studying for your exams?” 

“We are.” Sinder held up a book to prove it: Decisions with Consequences. “You can borrow it when I'm done. ”

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