When the dirt was being dropped on the lowered coffin, cars began driving off, back to the funeral home, where they could be exchanged for brightly colored minivans and SUVs. A few stayed until the very end, when the steamroller arrived from some discrete corner of the yard and began flattening the mounded earth. I had wandered off in order to avoid being conspicuous, but had continued to watch from a nearby parallel road, standing next to a mausoleum, carved with a serene Christ in place of the center columns. The dead man’s sister and mother stayed until the end. I had lost sight of the retarded man in the dispersion, and now I walked down to the funeral home employees, who were disassembling the canopy.
“Why was that man here, the one on the bike?”
“Him?” said one. “He’s the dead guy’s brother.”
#
This is the part where the Greek chorus comes on stage and says a word from our sponsors. Trying to force an idea out of an emotion just leads you to death. Even children understand dying, and Christ as caryatid suggests we don’t get it ourselves. This is all the meaning I can get out of it.
Immanence
He’s standing on the subway platform, reading from a book of poetry he published himself, making too free use of repetition and alliteration, and something in me wants to tear off my clothes and join him. I want to drop my suitcase where I stand and push the revolution forward with him, I don’t want to document this, write about it, use it for my own purposes--this exists only for itself and not for contemplation.
I am running along the side of the road and it is dark. Something flickers and gleams, moves around the tall grass to my right, and I pull up only to resume my stride; it is not an animal but a piece of trash, blowing in the wind, when suddenly it rears up, a goblin, a ghost with eyes staring at me, and I regain my calm again as I realize it is just a mylar balloon printed and shaped like a moth. There is still a chill around me, however, as I move closer in my involuntary course toward it, as I realize the balloon is tied to, commemorates a child’s death, the wooden cross littered with plastic flowers and other balloons. The demon facing me hisses shrilly, shrieks, and a bus runs by on my left, inches away, inaudible in the general roar of nighttime traffic but easing on the brakes two hundred yards from the intersection ahead.
I do not want to be this person. The child was not my own, not claimed by me in death, not known to me in life, but there is nothing to prevent it from having been. The madman on the subway platform is my kinsman in life underground, as are the housekeepers and old men, too scared to drive, too poor, too unstrung to drive across the surface. My car lies somewhere as a twisted pile in someone’s junkyard. I do not know why. It is possible that I wished it gone, just as I wished myself an exit from function just as sharp, as clean and as definite.
Let us be honest. I do not feel guilty about the child. They are unhurt, and I doubt I would feel lingering shame even if it were otherwise. The child was the pretext, rather than the reason, for pushing my car into the tree. In the light of my subconscious, we must conclude it was no accident. This subconscious drive, I have decided, is what draws me to the subway performer--and, for that matter, to the grave of a child. They, together, present the polar opposites of what I, so recently, was; namely, the conscious obedience to the subconscious contrasting with the utter disregard for self-consciousness altogether. This, I feel, represents two entirely irreconcilable states which are nonetheless both preferable to the present condition endured by so many.
This monograph has run too long. I suddenly see ahead the subway, running impossibly above the ground, approaching the intersection to which the bus is headed. A collision is immanent. I cannot help feeling responsible, but realize the futility of that emotion. For the time, I am the poet, but the child cannot be far away now.
Insect
I frankly haven’t the slightest idea what the difference is between a moka pot and a cafetiere, but I’m going to pretend I do.
“Delicious,” I say, setting down my cup. “Way better than that stuff you get at Starbucks.”
Everyone else nods their heads in agreement, but I can’t help but wonder if they’re just being polite. Jason is pouring cream into his cup with a practiced hand, letting the white stream fall from the pitcher’s lip in a smooth and slender column that blooms across his coffee’s surface like a carnivorous plant photographed in stop-motion.
“Did you hear about Tibet?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, “Terrible.”
“What’s really shocking,” says my boss, “is the complete ignorance of, well, most of America about what’s going on right now.”
“Terrible.” chimes in Jason. “and what with the death of newspapers, soon practically no one will be able to easily come by a well-formed opinion.”
“Did you hear the New York Times might be going bankrupt?” my boss asks.
“Now that,” Jason says, draining his cup, “would be a tragedy.”
Our biscotti has arrived and I’m reluctant to take the first piece. Is Dr. Burns paying again? It makes me feel awkward, because and despite the fact that she paid the last time--and this was at her invitation. Jason, for all his savior faire, did not appear to know how a Turkish coffee tasting was really supposed to go last time, and did not question when Dr. Burns ordered for all of us. Tracy, similarly, followed the doctor’s lead and silently acquiesced when she took the check from the waiter dressed in a vest and what I took be MC Hammer pants. At any rate, it’s not too weird for the boss to pay, right? After last time, I had gone home and dug out a 1984 copy of Emily Post, but that wasn’t much help. There was no heading for “Research Assistants” nor did I find a chapter on “Student/Professor Luncheons.”
“Now, really,” Dr. Burns is saying, “biscotti is an Italian invention, but I like it with coffee, don’t you?”
We agree. That’s what I like about my boss, didactic, as, I suppose, all professors by definition are, while unpretentious, which would not be so difficult if she hadn’t apparently picked up so much stuff entirely tangential to classical antiquities. An SUV pulls up outside and we can see it through the gauze curtains that are drawn across the floor-to-ceiling windows. Jason makes a face as we see a single occupant extricate himself from the cockpit and step heavily to earth.
“Did you hear they’re going to put a new bike path in, connecting the university and downtown?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, “it’s a pity it won’t be done until after I’ve graduated.”
“What was the completion date?”
“2016.” I say, because I remember exactly what I read in the newspaper three weeks ago.
“And, what, what with the bureaucratic hold-ups and stuff, what’d you say it takes a year or two past that?”
“Probably,” we all agree, Tracy, Dr. Burns, and I.
Jason has a fine shell of cynicism, and I have to keep reminding myself that he’s twenty-seven, far older than he looks, and already has a B.S. from another university. Still, I can’t help but wonder if in this case the pessimism is part of a self-conscious faux-erudition, much like my affected use of the word “pity.” We’re in a coffeehouse, eating loukoum, and we know it.
“It’s a shame people don’t ride bikes more,” says Dr. Burns, “but I think a lot of it has to do with the lack of bike lanes; it’s just not safe downtown.”
“And decent places to lock up,” I add, remembering a headline I’d seen in Slate that said something to that effect.
“Right.” Jason says, and embarks on a long and, frankly, brilliant explanation of the history of the ups and downs of bicycling in America, all the way back to the draisine, the penny farthing, and Susan B. Anthony. This starts him and Dr. Burns on a discussion of rational dress and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Jason is like the friend your mother gushed over when you brought him home one day for lunch, the one you vowed would never again set foot in your house lest he again open the door
for your sister or address your parents with a “sir” and “ma’am.” Sure, you’re their one and only son, but can’t you look at Jason and see how nice and well-mannered he is? He’s the research assistant Dr. Burns would have hired had she the decision to make over again. I came armed to this fete with my own conversational topics and various bon mots fresh-picked from wikipedia, but I can’t seem to find an opening where I can bring up my knowledge of fletcherization or the LaGrange points.
What Dr. Burns has done is managed to upend my comforting knowledge that all specialists are just that, and no more. She is the only liberal arts professor I know who keeps a chart of the periodic table of elements taped to the back wall of her office, and what makes it worse is that while she’s being pretentious, the façade has a perverse edge: she really never needs to refer to it, having committed the bulk of its information to memory. Its presence is a deceptive consolation, not a boast. In high school, I comforted myself when faced with the well-worn trench I had dug in the 84th percentile by deciding that the high achievers were thoroughly one-dimensional, while I was a Renaissance man. The first few semesters of college had confirmed this: the psychophysics professor who knew all there was to know about the transduction processes of the eyeball, but was stymied by a question I asked about lacrimal glands; the literature professor with twenty-seven published articles on Wordsworth who nonetheless had difficulty mentally calculating the number of years between 1798 and 1832. Dr. Burns made her name in analyses of 5th century Athens, but had on the side of one of her many bookcases a poster depicting Ernest Rutherford, below which was written, “In science, there is only physics; all else is stamp collecting.” If, say, psychology was being accorded the intellectual status of philately, I could only imagine that extolling the virtues of a Grecian urn was somewhere on par with nose picking.
“Did you hear in the news they found a new painting by Hunt?” Tracy is asking.
No, we all say, tell us more.
“It was in someone’s attic. They’re cleaning it up right now, but it might go on tour after it’s spent some time in New York. I forget exactly what the article said.”
My recent subscription to the New Yorker is serving me in very poor stead right now, as I know nothing about this. There was an interesting interview in Architectural Digest a year or so ago about restorative processes, but I can’ remember enough details to bring up anything useful. My grasp of details is, in fact, on loose footing no matter where the conversation turns: it has only just occurred to me that the loukoum we’re eating (or rahat, as Dr. Burns informs me it is called in Romanian countries) is, in fact, Turkish Delight, which up until now had only been something I had known about in connection with a showing of Kismet my uncle had once taken me to at a community theater.
“You know there’s a show in Britain about the Pre-Raphaelites?” Jason asks. Tracy’s indeterminacy has given him license to reference television, but he still adds, “I heard about it on the BBC. Apparently Germaine Greer really bashed it or something.”
I brace myself. Dr. Burns, while hardly the bra-burning type, and never one to succumb to the faddish practice of plastering rainbow-colored triangles to her office door, has her own firm views on gender, and I know that whatever I do understand of what follows will probably be something I can only limply assent to. I’m slowly realizing that any self-assessment I might have had regarding my progressive opinions are going to need to be revised; what counted as dangerously outré in Tennessee barely qualifies as baseline-civilized in any outpost of academia north of the Maxon-Dixon line.
“Try the burek,” she says.
“I thought that was phyllo,” says Jason.
“Phyllo is the dough, yes,” she says, “but you use it to make any number of things.”
“Like baklava,” says Tracy.
“Right.” Dr. Burns takes another sip of coffee. Her cup is smaller than ours, filled with the thick sludge of which our more familiar beverages are a pale American comparison. Americano, as I learned during our last meeting here, is itself a dilution, espresso watered down until it approaches the strength of your familiar Krups.
“I was talking to my friend in culinary arts the other day,” says Jason, “and apparently there’s a sugar shortage.”
“Well, that depends on who you ask,” says Dr. Burns, “it really has to do with all the ethanol being produced now. Domestic production is fine, but other countries are using cane to make ethanol, which produces a shortage overseas.”
“And there’s a drought or something in India,” says Tracy, putting down his burek and, I suspect, relieved to be able to contribute something again.
“Right,” says Dr. Burns, “but the real issue is the ethanol. And, unfortunately, America is such an economic power that foreign governments will probably try to limit their own people’s purchases in order to have enough to sell to American corporations.”
It’s statements like these that make me wonder why she even needs a research assistant. True, I’m handy at cleaning the coffeemaker, but the evidence of her discriminatory abilities regarding the brewed bean are causing me to suspect that even there I am incompetent.
“But the ethanol,” Jason asks, “it’s important to push ahead on that, right?”
He’s hesitant, but I’m even more cautious. We narrowly dodged the bullet with the advent of the SUV outside, but discussions of fuel economy will inexorably confront me with the fact that while I’m convinced global warming is real, I just haven’t been sold on the idea that humans are solely responsible. It’s a feeling half-way between the atheist unable to convert to his friend’s religion and the twelve-year-old’s sight of his peers in the school shower: I know I’m inadequate and an outsider, but surely it’s only a matter of time before I become one of them?
“Well, what we need to do is get rid of the trade agreements and pay whatever the rest of the world is paying,” Dr. Burns tells us, “and stop using our consumption-monopoly as a way to manipulate the price.”
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” Jason says.
Dr. Burns then tells us about a plan by an Israeli entrepreneur to sell electric cars on a cell-phone model, in which the company owns the vehicle but customers pay per mile. Not once have we addressed a topic about Aristotle or the Penelopesian War. Jason and Tracy, I know, are both well-versed in classics, having had Dr. Burns in the past; Tracy even worked as a field intern for a while, going to Greece to help dig stuff up. He’d maintained a passing connection to her since then, remaining the perpetual student and taking scattered part-time classes at the college with no real major in mind. Jason had transferred in after I had, and had apparently made such an impression on Dr. Burns that he was included in this attempted round table as a matter of course. His grasp of quantitative analysis was a big factor, I knew; while I had entered the classics program to escape the threat of ever having to take any math more difficult than introductory algebra (from the Arabic al jabr), Jason’s previous degree was in computer science. Far more than its practical applications, the worth of this accomplishment was the demonstration that here was a liberal arts student who could crunch the hard numbers and think the concrete thoughts. For someone whose master’s thesis had involved Fourier transforms in the authentication of Tuscan frescoes, this was an invaluable accolade.
“I doubt they’re going to come to any real solution anytime soon,” I interject.
Everyone looks at me, and I realize I’ve made a mistake. The comment was negative, pointless, and, worst of all, I have no real reasons with which to back it up.
“I mean,” I stammer, “the corporations are backing gasoline cars too much; there’s no way we’ll be able to move forward as long as they’re showing a profit on their F-150s and Escalades.” That was safe, I thought, but I could see from their faces that they assumed I’d next be decrying the HPV vaccine or public housing.
“I think,” says Dr. B
urns, “that the profit margin on the new hybrids is actually quite high.”
“And the tax benefits are only getting larger,” Jason adds.
“Well… good,” I say. “I hadn’t realized.”
In a way, I think they are over-reacting. But I also realize that I will never display the intellectualism required in this circle. There is a difference between being a Renaissance man and being a dilettante. We sit in silence for a moment more.
“God,” I say, swallowing my food, “this corek is really chewy. I’m practically having to fletcherize it.”
#
When I bring a stack of copies into Dr. Burns’ office the next Monday, I place the Tyson article on top.