Ann Arbor, 1988
The scene: the basement of the Undergraduate Library at the University of Michigan, the most hideous concrete mistake of a building ever architected by man, i.e., the UGLi.
It’s 2 a.m., Tuesday.
The UGLi is a raucous place, loud conversation, coffee, beer, music, a little dope in the bathrooms, some isolated studying here and there. Popper’s not studying. He’s in his cubby, half-sleeping, half-reading William Blake. Not for class. Popper likes to carry certain books around and announce before anybody even asks: This book? No, actually this isn’t for class. And it’s not pleasure reading either. There’s no such thing as pleasure reading. It’s all pain, pain—and more pain.
If you trap the moment before it’s ripe,
The tears of repentance you’ll certainly wipe;
But if you let the ripe moment go
You can never wipe off the tears of woe.
She’s a mere four cubbies away. At first he spies only the back of her head, her blond-brown ponytail rising above the plywood like a beacon. He ducks beneath his desk and eyeballs down the row of legs. Her running shoes are off her feet, one socked foot scratches a naked shin.
Blake admonishes, nay, threatens—
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Popper stands up and laps the cluster of cubbies six, seven times, as if pursuing great thoughts. All the while, surreptitiously, observing her in this basement light, in this noisy purgatorial fluorescence. Each time he passes, he peers a little closer over the rim of her cubby. Never has a square of plywood held so much promise. Details? At present she is eating a Butterfinger. Very unique candy bar. Famous yellow wrapper. Concentrate. Don’t babble. Tell your head to stop babbling. She places her index finger and her middle finger over her mouth when she chews. She is reading intensely. He can almost see her eyes move across the words. God, if I could only read like that. I read two sentences and my brain wanders to Tegucigalpa. Her face, describe her face. Why is it so hard to describe a face? May as well describe a soul!
(Question for Creative Writing Professor (adjunct), Tish O’Dowd Ezekiel, author of a good, sad novel called Floaters, which refers to those small black wings that rain down our eyes:
POPPER: Professor O’Dowd Ezekiel, why is it so hard? Why are things like trees or cars easier, when we spend much of each day staring into faces?
PROFESSOR O’DOWD EZEKIEL: Ah, but do we, Mr. Popper? Do we really ever truly look at each other, see each other? It would seem to me that we spend our days not looking into each other’s faces.)
Body easier. Legs easier. Breasts easier. Always. Because men are inherently infantile? Something to do with our relationship to the memory of our mothers? Hers? Only rising hints of sweatshirt. Small undiscovered planets? You know they’re there, but they’re so distant they may as well be conjectures.
Retreats to his own chair. Spies low again. She crosses her legs, one way, then another, then uncrosses them. For no recordable reason, Popper thinks of the word lethe. He gets up again and approaches the dictionary, the great dictionary that stands alone in the middle of the room, beneath all that buzzing light, like a weird pulpit nobody ever sermons from. Popper flaps the pages of truth and/or metaphor. The stream of oblivion in the lower world, hence, forgetfulness.
Maybe I’m spelling it wrong?
Ah, Lithe. Supple, bendable, that’s better. Supple, an exciting sort of word. Back again to his cubby headquarters. Use it in a sentence. I hope you don’t mind my saying hello. I find you beautiful but also lithe, not to be confused with lethe, which means something else entirely, having to do with memory, or rather loss of it, yet as it is, I can’t forget you. Are you by any chance a dancer?
She gets up to talk to a friend sitting in another cubby. The friend’s face hidden, nothing but a mass of curly hair.
“How’s it going?”
“I’m so bored of psychology I could go on a shooting spree,” Mass of Curly Hair says.
Gripping Blake for courage, Popper makes his move and drops the note on her desk. He notes the title and the author of the facedown book. The Need for Roots. Simone Weil. Never heard, must look him up.
And flees to the bathroom. Popper, hiding in a stall, waits. In the bowl, a forlorn unflushed turd the color of knockwurst. But even in there, he hears her laugh. A blasting, honkish, gooselike sound. The UGLi goes quiet. He’ll learn this. How this girl could laugh entire rooms—banquet halls—into silence.
Lindy, seriously, look at this, some doof’s writing notes.