“Bullshit!”
It
was scrawled in red pen in the margins of a photocopied article. Gavin had broken into his old office on the
way down from the memorial service.
Okay, broken in sounded more
exciting than it was. Really he’d just
let himself in with the key that was still on his keychain, but he wasn’t
supposed to have it anymore. As though
anyone was going to spend their last afternoon in town trekking to campus
security, which was, oddly, way off campus, just to get the five dollar deposit
back on their office key.
The
shelves were as dusty as ever, same ancient journals. Someone had added a
beat-up copy of the Norton Anthology of
English Literature Volume One, but otherwise, everything looked pretty much
the same.
The
article was lying on the one of the empty desks towards the back. Something about lesbian identity in the late
Middle Ages. The margin notes didn’t say
“bullshit” just once. They said it over and over, like five times just on the
first page, first written out in plain lowercase, then in all caps, underlined:
BULLSHIT!
Gavin
sat down in the rolling chair, always too low for the desk, scanned the
article.
The category lesbian thus becomes an ontology. —Bullshit! The term lesbianism suffers from an excess
of meaning, overflowing its boundaries and contaminating the words and ideas
surrounding it. —BULLSHIT!!!
And
sure, of course it was bullshit, but not, like, especially. That was just the
way you thought when you were a student. Someone would write that lesbianism
was an ontology, whatever that was
supposed to mean, and you would be like, no
way!!! You are such an asshole!!! That’s how he used to feel when he read
Grover Maloney’s writing. All that stuff
about the false dichotomy of Bo and Mi, how they were aspects of one unified
whole, the stupid comparisons he made to show their fundamental similarities. It used to drive Gavin fucking crazy, like he
wanted the run the whole book through the paper shredder. He would scrawl in
the margins, No! Wrong! Idiotic!
Now
he couldn’t imagine getting so worked up about something like that. Or really about anything. What could possibly
make him angry enough that he had to express his rage through marginalia? Now he would just head to the bar—they
actually called it a saloon in Fancy,
Kansas, for real—and have a couple beers, and everything would be fine. You could only stand so many bad feelings in
one lifetime; no point wasting them on frivolous crap.
He
dropped the article into his lap and stared across the office—not a long ways,
five feet maybe—at the computer. The
screen was covered in a thick layer of that dust that you could only see when
it was turned off. He wanted to wipe it
off, looked around for a box of tissues, but of course there was nothing nice
like that.
Somebody
needed to take care of this office. Not
like he ever had. You couldn’t feel any
kind of ownership over a room you shared with twenty other people. But now, with some distance, he felt bad for
it. Like it was a forgotten childhood
toy, roughly used and then left to collect mold in some basement.
He
went to the bathroom down the hall, ran a big pile of paper towels under the
faucet and squeezed the water out, got another stack of dry ones. Back in the office, he wiped the dust from
the computer screen, scrubbed the sticky film off each letter on the keyboard,
the coffee stains from the top of each of the four desks. He even moved the journals and the Norton Anthology
so he could run the wet towels over the bookshelves. He dried everything off,
threw all the wet and dry towels in the garbage in the hall, so he wouldn’t
mess up the fresh new liner in the office wastebasket.
It
looked a lot better when he was done, still plain and ugly, but at least
clean. It smelled better, too, with the
dust gone and the door open, less stale and sad. He sat down, breathed deep through his nose, looked
at gray wall, the blank computer screen, the photocopied article, bullshit, bullshit.
Then,
rushing over him, the feeling of being a student. The fuzzy pleasure of uncertainty, of
pretending to be an expert, of not really being one. Of being a child, dreaming of the day you’d
become an adult, a man: a professor. Maybe
you’d be unhappy, like your own professors were, but that didn’t matter.
Unhappiness was a sign that you were living the life of the mind. If you were miserable, you were probably
doing something right. It had seemed—what? So
glamorous.
Sobs
erupted out of his mouth, unexpected, loud wailing noises. He put his face on
the desk, felt its cool, clean surface
on his forehead. Cried until it was
foggy and smeared, until his eyes stung and his voice was tired.
He
stood up, wiped his face with one of the unused paper towels. Kind of
laughed. Funny to be standing alone in
the English building on a Saturday, crying into the silence of an empty office
in an empty hallway. “I’m okay,” he
said, like there was some concerned party outside the door somewhere.
Then
he began to sob again. He closed the door, leaned his back against it, slid his
butt downwards until he was sitting on the stained carpet. He held his head in
his hands and let out loud womanly wails. Like someone had died, but it wasn’t
about that, exactly. It was just. That
thing Frick had said, the last time they had spoken—what was it?
Academia is a test of
resilience.
Yeah,
it was that. Academia was a test of
resilience and Jeremy Frick was dead. And now Gavin couldn’t remember the point
of being resilient anymore. What goal was his resilience propelling him towards? To get out of Kansas, maybe land a job
somewhere a little better, New Buffalo even.
Maybe move up to some kind of respectable east coast university in a
pleasant town by the time he was forty-five or so, if he kept at it. That was the dream, wasn’t it? His dream for the last ten years, and he knew
it was hard, that you had to keep faith and stick with it through hard times
and whatever. But when was it okay to give it up? There had to be a point when
resilience stopped being resilience and turned into a kind of lemming
situation.
He
pulled his head up from his hands, sat up straight, wiped his face with his
sleeve. Stood up, a little woozy, sat in the chair. Then it was like the floor
disappeared, and he was sinking. Down, down, down. The computer was still in front of his face
but he could see through it, through to blackness beyond it, engulfing it. Like
the spaces between atoms were spreading. Like something was become consumed by
nothing.
Knock knock.
Knock knock.
Gavin
shook his head a little, blinked his eyes.
The computer became solid again.
Knock knock knock!!
Someone
was outside the office door. He looked over, saw his own reflection in the
window, his eyes all swollen and puffy, his hair sticking up. Then he looked higher.
It
was Kat. Katherine Curtis, Renaissance
drama. All in widow’s black, though
actually she always wore black.
She
was banging on the window, fast, hard, like it was an emergency. He didn’t feel ready to stand, but he wheeled
the chair over to the door, opened it.
“Fuck.” She was leaning over him, putting her hands on his face. Warm, a little damp, smelling like some kind of musky lotion. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,
I’m fine.” It wasn’t exactly true. But then, he was alive, well-fed,
healthy. Safe. He had a place to live. He owned a car. He had a job.
Of course he was okay.
Of course he was okay.
No comments:
Post a Comment