Paper Thin Walls Pt 2

It was a week before I made it back to the carrel. Everything that week had a peculiar keenness. For once I wasn't disheveled as I taught my classes, I stayed after chatting with students, encouraging them on their various projects and passions. I noticed a young woman in the class had taking a liking to me, a short curly-headed brunette who wore her hair short with obvious spunk. Upon reflection, I could recall how she was often eager to participate in class, to stir me from my lecture and develop a conversational, seminar vibe. The second class of the week I let the classroom shift: students spoke up from different corners, popcorn popping in a delightful, chaotic medley of experiences, interpretations, and insights. Students provided novel, perspicacious observations on the readings, on subjects and ideas I had learned four, five, six years before. It was new to them, often radically new, and seemed to stir me from my slumber even more.

After the second class a handful of students gathered at a coffeeshop near campus. It became clear that in my absence, they had built up a support web for one another, a study group that gave them the environment they wanted in the classroom in which they bounced around in open criticism and playful condenscencion of one another. At first, I was eager to join in, to offer my own ideas and wizened critique and udnerstanding; but in no great length of time I sat back and sipped my coffee, heavy with cream, soaking in their vigor and camaraderie. I inserted small comments, used one of their computers to dig up articles they might find interesting. The brunette--her name I recalled was Jezebel but all her colleagues refered to her as Bel--schemed her way into leading class discussion the next week, staring at me with uncanny confidence. Her fellow students liked the idea and they, with syllabus in hand, began revamping the next month of classes, setting up their own alternative. 

Spring had begun eeking its way forward, drawing out the days with pleasant, sunny intensity. Night had set before I left, carrying with it the last breaths of a hesitant winter. I had only my jacket and scarf which I tightened around me. My stomach quaked with sloshing coffee, my fingers jittery with caffeine. Jezebel--I refused to take the more familiar appellation which seemed, somehow, unchaste--caught up to me and offered me a ride. She pointed to a second- or third-hand sedan, the chassis rusted around the wheels and a stubborn passenger window that I assumed refused to wind entirely. I said no, that I was going to work at the library--a short stroll--and put the caffeine to good use. I rarely drank coffee, but something about the evening had suspended that abstainence and suggested its import. She smiled and I responded in kind, perhaps too much so, and walked away, her warm brown eyes on me--I imagined, at least--until I reached the corner.

I quickly regretted the decision. The cold snapped at my ears, at my ankles along my too-short thrift store trousers, and crawled under into my jacket sleeves insidiously. I quickened my clip toward the library, feeling a brazen malignity in the night. Shadows danced as cars passed, taking on brief, perturbing forms just before fading. They took on an unwelcome sharpness, just as everything had since my last late night in the library, and I felt the urge to break into a run. The steady lights of the library façade--a brick firmament testifying to the heavenly status of education--apparently banishing the phantoms. I tugged at the door with undue force and let the suction drag me in. It was quiet, the public terminals near the lobby almost empty, and one lonely student at the front desk with a notebook half-hidden behind the desk. It was Friday just after midterms and the only sound was the faint fluttering of pages and the hushed high whine of the archaic ventilation system. The student at the front desk noticed me and shoved his notebook entirely under the desk in a feeble attempt to conceal this small breach in regulation.

I avoided the wide main staircase for an access stairwell, brilliantly lit by humming fluorescent lights. My quick steps and hard shoes echoed in a mumbling chorus on the linoleum and unforgiving walls. Upstairs, I stepped into the bathroom, the same soft humming my company as I washed my face and forced my breath to slow. I felt feverish, my forehead washed of its beads of sweat, and my eyes widely staring back at me through the silvered pane. Straightening, my hands roughed dry on crinkly towels and tugged at my shirt and jacket--damp creeped along the cuffs of my jacket--hoping to feign some composure to myself. Laughter lay somewhere inside me, bottled up with anxiety and a strained, unnatural tension. I chuckled with numb ambiguity, unnable to make light of myself. Several deep breaths later I stepped out into the hallways toward my carrel.

I expected his light on but only a series of blackened windows met me. I forced my hand steady as I inserted the key and turned the handle. Everything was as I left it, all in its rightful place, and I breathed deeply again. I pulled out a frayed spiralbound notebook, a stack of books from the shelves, and one of my awaiting black pens. Cracking the topmost book--some critical reading of Tocqueville, if I recall correctly--and let the words rise up to meet me. They were dense and warm and provided a hard, certain texture to the unnerving ethereal quality that had chased me thence. After the first several pages, the words took on a peculiar foreign attitude, as if somehow infected or modulated the way the ocean floor shifts underneath a passing wave. I could see the words, but as they sang in my mind they took on unnatural yellow tonalities; they became slippery and lolled around with sickly, oceanic weight.

I closed the book and opened another, not even glancing at the title. The words roiled as if boiling, intoning themselves in unimaginable ways. They were the words of dreams, juxtaposed with alien meanings the way one knows Arabic or German in a dream, speaking and understanding in perfect fluent clarity only to wake and feel that knowledge evaporating away. I tried to focus, to ead each word with its own anglophone certainty, its Saxon or French root. The letters and syllables each a constituitive building block on the next. Again and again, even flipping through my spiral notebook with growing anxiety and inescapable surreal fear, the words became a heady, abyssal sound. Alien phonemes of geologic age meant nothing to me but each iteration brought on new vertiginous depths, each haunting me with ineffable meaning.

The door slammed behind me, sealing my keys, coat, and scarf within while the reverberation echoed through the floor. I ran, holding onto banisters and tracing my finger along walls on my way to the exit. Incandescent bulbs flickered, revealing the shadows beneath the light, hidden between pages, tucked like bookmarks between the covers in every cranny of the library. My feet tripped themselves in my haste, fearing that I might step on some tangible specter waiting to grab hold. The student looked up, shouted something at me, as I broke into the sharp, cold night--his words chased after me, carrying that otherworldly annunciation--and I felt liberated despite the dark. Icy air stabbed at my unaccustomed lungs as I raced through campus, heading into town, following the trail of street lamps and the raucous vigor of youth. 

I stumbled past my apartment entrance, wheezing and frustrated. I checked my pocket for my wallet and strolled, bent half-over, into town. In a dimly lit bar, the dance floor rustling to life at the other end, I downed a double whiskey and grabbed my beer. Someone nearby whooted in my honor, either oblivious to my frantic state or confusing it with something celebratory. I grabbed a pen from my pocket and a stack of napkins, thinking I might record the events. My hand seized in stark fear above the napkin, fearful of what letters or strange glyphs I might inscribe. As the whiskey gripped my stomach, I was able to attend to the surrounding sounds, the rumble of words redefined by software and the conversations hollered between friends and strangers. They were clear and comprehensible. Words loaded with their own meaning but ultimately a human meaning, something my mind could grasp and comprehend. I sat alone for several minutes, ordering another beer and whiskey on the rocks that I sipped with gradually steadying hands.