Authors: Lydia Cooper
I drive back to campus because the only rules for normalcy I have involve going to the university. I need to find out who left the message in the box. I climb the stairs to the English department floor. My palm squeaks against the over-polished metal railing. Outside the glass door with the stenciled words “Department of English” in some faux-Old Germanic script, I stop and wipe my palms on my thighs. Then I stick my iPod earbuds in my ears and push through the door. I don’t know how to ask. The office is open from 8
A.M.
to 5
P.M.
every day and the department secretary won’t necessarily have seen everyone coming and going. She takes long breaks, heading across town to Panera to chat with her friends, while a student worker sits behind the desk and reads
Us Weekly
.
Maybe the graduate students will know. Maybe it was one of them. I have almost reached the graduate student office when a finger touches my scapula. My whole body flinches. My heartbeat thuds in my neck and pain grips my scalp like fingernails dug hard into my skull. I take a breath and let it out.
I pull out an earbud and turn around. It’s the department secretary, wearing blue polyester and smelling like overripe peaches and greasy sausage. Her little shiny marble eyes stare up at me and her mouth is moving. “ — Brandis?”
I realize she has been saying my name. In my left ear, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in E major swells to a crescendo.
“The dean called again. He wants to see you at your
ear
liest convenience.”
I can almost hear the dean’s inflection in her voice.
I swallow. “Okay.” It comes out faint, cracked in the middle.
Her little face crumples when I answer. She starts to smile. “He’s been calling
all
morning, you know. I’m so glad I finally caught you! I’ll just tell him you’re on your way.”
She trots off. Her small bottom twitches under the shiny synthetic fabric of her suit skirt. I watch her go. I didn’t mean, “Okay I will go see the dean.” I can’t go see the dean.
She doesn’t understand.
But she’s on the phone already. She glances up and smiles at me. Her mouth is moving, the lips pushing in and out like she’s chewing.
“Who else leaves me messages?”
The sound of my voice is loud. It sounds metallic, echoing. I wonder if something is wrong with my ears.
The secretary ignores me, just holds up one finger and keeps talking.
After she hangs up the phone she leans forward. Hair falls over her left eye.
“What was that now?”
“The dean and my dissertation director,” I say. “Who else? Who else leaves me notes?”
“No one that I know of,” she says. She smiles at me. Her lips are shiny with semiliquid gloss. She looks fake, painted.
“Someone else left me a message,” I say. “Was it one of them?” I point to the grad student office door.
Her little mouth wrinkles around the edges. “As far as I know, Ms. Brandis, the only person leaving you messages all day is the dean. Maybe you should ask
him
.”
I imagine talking to me feels like licking soap to her. She is not helpful. I think that she would walk a far distance to avoid noticing anything about me, or talking to me. She is not likely to be an observant source of information.
I turn and walk down the hall toward the stairwell.
One time — I must have been thirteen or so, down to one psychiatric visit a week — my shrink
du jour
asked me if I ever felt happy, or sorry for someone else, or scared. I told her she was wrong to imply I didn’t feel things. “It’s just that other people feel with their emotions,” I told her. “And I only feel with the nerve ends under my skin.”
She gave a snort of laughter so hard her glasses slipped down her nose. Then she straightened her glasses and smoothed her hand over her mouth. “That was a good one,” she said. “You got me with that one.”
But I hadn’t meant to tell a joke. My face felt hot and I wanted to punch her in the mouth.
In retrospect, I should have explained it better. It’s not that I don’t feel things. It’s that the emotional center in my brain feels like it’s a million galaxies away but the world around me is pressing in on me, hot and sticky and loud, full of bright colors and breathing and textures. By the time I figured out how to explain myself I was seeing a different psychiatrist who didn’t care about feelings, only about dosages and fifty-two minute sessions. In my adolescence I went to more psychologists and psychiatrists than most kids go to football games or sleepovers. I understand the way my mind works better than tax attorneys understand the month of March, but sometimes I wonder if a big part of my problem isn’t just that I never learned the basics that most kids learn at those games and parties. I mean, I figured out how to tell jokes. I just never learned how to laugh at them. Sometimes I think I could have turned out so much closer to normal if I had just been forced to act like a normal kid.
I thought going to college would help me learn to blend in, find my rhythm, my way through the feelings other people translate as emotions. But it didn’t work out that way.
As I walk down the hall, snatches of conversation from open office doors drift out. Faculty isolated in small offices with a single windowpane, a few plants, seventeen thousand books, and a rotary telephone that went antique in the ’90s. Someday I will live in one of those offices. It will smell of damp mold and dust and I will leave the door shut.
The dean’s office is in a red brick building with wide white-painted steps. I climb the steps and go inside, my sneakers squeaking on polished parquet. My footsteps slow. I know it’s illogical, but I am convinced that as soon as I walk in he will see it in my face, the fact that I’ve gone closer to the edge than I’ve been since I was ten. He knows me well enough that he should be able to see it. I almost turn around and leave. But I tell myself that he’s not a very perceptive individual. And that’s true. He’s a solitary man, the dean in his glistening dean’s aerie. In many ways he’s as close to antisocial as a normal person can get.
I walk down a carpeted corridor to an office sporting a brass plaque that reads
The Office of the Dean
. The dean’s secretary looks up when I come in, one hand pressed to her ear. “I’ll tell him you’re here, Mickey.”
I go over to a rack of magazines and glossy brochures. Travel in Spain! Summer Abroad in Scotland! Declare a New Major!
“Mickey? He can see you now. Just go on in.”
His office door is a big wooden slab fitted flush in its frame. I wipe my palms on my pant legs and push it open. The office has tall windows on two sides, but the blinds are pulled, the only light an amber glow from a frosted glass globe to the side of the desk. Waxed plastic plants in woven planters, rows of leather-bound books with uncreased spines, and dust-free cherry wood bookshelves. It is good, in short, to be dean.
I pull out the chair facing the desk and sink down onto a faux-leather seat cushion with brass tacks. The leather lets out a fart-like sigh, and I let out a nervous laugh.
The dean sits far back, one leg crossed over the other, his elbows pressed to the armrests of his orthopedic swivel chair. His hands rest loosely in his lap, knuckles like walnuts under papery skin, small polished fingernails.
He leans forward and his face emerges from shadow a piece at a time, like a geographic puzzle sorting itself out, lines and creases and planes and hollows. An aristocratic forehead and neatly combed graying hair. Wire-rim glasses. And his dark heavy-lidded Semitic eyes that always look on the brink of tears. I’ve never seen him cry.
He clears his throat. “It’s your brother’s birthday tonight.”
I unzip my hoodie, then reconsider and zip it halfway up. “To be precise, it’s his birthday this morning as well. But don’t worry, I understand the subtext here. You want me to play big sister tonight. You’re sounding the depths, testing the waters of crazy. The ebb and flow of hysteria. Am I right?”
He clears his throat again, a syncopated two-syllable rearrangement of phlegm. “So, how are you.” A proposition, not a query.
I zip my hoodie up to my neck.
A flash of bone and stringy flesh, a smell like old fish and maple syrup.
I look at one of the fake plants. The woven planter has a plaster base like a real planter, ready to catch the life-carrying water that will never be poured out on this polymer construction. I wonder if anyone has written a psychological study on the verisimilitude of fake plants. I stare hard at the plant. My eyes burn.
I’m not good at this, at lying. I cough. Then I spread my mouth wide, separate my teeth. I’m going for happiness, but for all I know I look like a badger having a stroke. “I’m peachy,” I say. “Dandy. Absolutely tip-top. How are you?”
My father watches my face then sits back, dissolving into darkness.
“I’m — doing well.” He pauses. “So you … I mean to say, will you be present tonight? For your brother’s birthday?”
I hunch my shoulders. “Mom already told me in no uncertain terms that I’ll be present and accounted for. Say, separate bedrooms seem to be hell on your marital communications.”
“Yes,” he says.
I look at him.
He doesn’t say anything else.
The glossy desktop reflects his shadowy image. I don’t know what to say. “Um, if you need a shoulder to cry on — ”
He turns to look directly at me. His face, disembodied by shadow, moves into the sepia light. The skin near his eyes wrinkles. “A shoulder.”
“Well. It’s the thought that counts. That’s what they tell me anyway.”
“That is what they say.”
“Okay. So, I’ll be there tonight.” I reach for my backpack.
“One other thing,” the dean says.
“Come on, a
nother
complaint? Dad, seriously, they’re a bunch of assholes.”
“No, not that. I just wanted to say that I spoke with Robert Telushkin.”
The dissertation director. The bullfrog with a whiskey voice.
I don’t say anything.
“About what Bob Telushkin said, ah, you should know that — he and I may differ in many viewpoints, but your — your scholarship is good. You should know that.”
I don’t know what he means at first. And then I figure it out.
“It’s okay, Dad. You don’t have to console me. I know I’m not like the other kids.” I sigh. “And he’s not wrong. I’m not going to succeed much in life with my, uh, problems. But I’m fine with that.”
He doesn’t say anything.
I stand up. “Seriously. I am.” I don’t know if he believes me. I don’t think I believe myself.
Even gods decompose
. “Don’t worry about me.”
“No,” he says.
I don’t know if he means that he won’t worry or if he means to negate my adjuration, that he
must
worry. As I leave his eyes follow me, a glimmer of white from the gloom.
When I go outside a light rain has started to fall in drifts like seaweed. Mist beads on my eyelashes. When I blink cold dribbles race down my face. I think of the plants in my father’s office and realize that the rain on my face is my own mummery, the verisimilitude of tears that I will never produce on my own.
I stand outside the administrative building watching students hustle past. They call to each other, wave, fling arms around each others’ necks or slap each others’ backs. A skateboarder leaps the fountain to a scattering of applause.
Beyond the fountain is the university library, a brick and concrete monstrosity that looks like a Cubist ziggurat. I look around but no one seems to be studying me. Whoever left me that note was on campus, knew my campus schedule. Knew where my office was.
I check my watch. Hours to kill until my brother’s birthday dinner. The library is safe. No corpses in the stacks, no incriminating questions that people will remember when the city detectives arrive at some point in the future. Just … information. The blank substance of knowledge encoded on a page.
I head past the fountain to the library and push through the security alarms, metal detectors to prevent the theft of the mildewing tomes that exist in multiple copies in every academic library in the lower forty-eight states. The library always smells musty and acrid, like sweaty shoes and Xerox machine toner. I’ve heard my graduate student colleagues joking that the only reason people come here is to fornicate in the stacks, but that has always struck me as suspicious. The library’s fug is no aphrodisiac I would recognize.
I go up the winding steps to the third floor where pale light filters through flyspecked windowpanes, the mustard-yellow carpet is worn thin as old linen, and the stacks of books smell like damp paper. Unlock my study carrel, log onto my laptop, and sort through stacks of printed-off digitalized illuminated manuscript pages from a ninth-century book.
I put my thumbs on either side of my nose and press. A calcified knot of pain sits just behind my left eye.
The slick threads of his hair against my fingers, the spongy feel of his bloated skin when I pressed on the slit at the base of his skull.
My fists convulse. I sit back sharply and bump into the desk. The pen rolls across the desk and falls to the floor.
I open my laptop, pull up the library catalog, and scroll through entries for Nietzsche’s works. Then I leave the carrel and wander through the stacks, running my fingers over the crumbling spines. The library carries very few foreign-language copies, and I don’t see any copies of
The Gay Science
in the original German. When I turn to leave, I see a book wedged beside a Germanic translation of the Bible and a travel guide to Vienna. A thin blue volume with faded letters. I can only make out the “
D
” and the “
issenschaft
.”
My cell phone rings. I blink. Look at the phone.
My mom.
Shit.
She’s calling about the dinner. You would think, from how much energy they are expending to enforce my presence at my brother’s birthday dinner, that I am wildly unpredictable. But I’m like clockwork. Dysfunctional, broken, and self-isolating clockwork, but still. I always come home at the same time every day. Then I go for a long run. Then I shower. Then I study or work on my dissertation. Then I check my e-mail and go to bed.