by Rachel Cohn
“Going rogue,” said Azra.
“Yes!” I hoped Dash didn’t drop out of Oxford. If I visited him there, I could hang out with Azra, too. Dash could learn to like her and her boyfriend. He didn’t even like Christmas when he met me. Now he’s practically obsessed with it.
Her phone buzzed with a text message. “It’s getting late and my parents want me to come home. Maybe I’ll see you at the next Daunt event?”
“For sure!” I said. “What’s your number?” She typed her phone number into my phone and called it, so we’d each have the other’s number on our phones.
“Do you think our boyfriends will like us being friends?” I asked her.
She laughed. “Probably not! They’re so competitive.”
“Should we, like, girl-power fist-bump or something now?”
“Absolutely not. See you again soon, I hope.”
Azra left. I sat alone in my pub chair by the fire, completely content. It wasn’t just that I’d made a new friend. It was that I’d had an adventure, in a foreign country, on my own, with none of my family present. If sometimes I worried that Dash was suffering from depression, I realized that what I was suffering from was suffocation. From my family. I thought I came to England to be with Dash, but maybe why I really came here was to be away from them. To find my own way.
I knew I’d better get home to Mark and Julia’s before he called Interpol to look for me, or to see how they were holding up with Morrissey. But I had one more Daunt task to complete.
I took out the Daunt notebook from my bag and wrote.
Dear Father Christmas,
Please let Dash be okay, wherever he is. Please let him know how much I love him.
Love and sticky toffee pudding,
Lily
PS—I’d also love a BritRail pass, and more time to explore England.
PPS—You seem slimmer and less jolly than American Santa. Perhaps you’re not getting enough cookies from the Eurokids?
I finished writing and then tossed the letter into the fire.
six
December 21st
Even if the voice was unfamiliar, when the figure emerged from the darkness, his face was at least semi-familiar. His hair was messy, his nose ring the kind that bulls in cartoons wore, creating a perverse gold smile beneath his nostrils.
When he saw me, he laughed. Then he exclaimed, “As I live and breathe, it’s Salinger! I’ve found Salinger!”
Now I knew why he looked at least semi-familiar: He was in my literature seminar. But I couldn’t remember him having ever said a word. Including his name.
He took my inability to respond in stride.
“Oi,” he said. “What a right idiot I am. Name’s Robbie. But since I acquired that name for all the wrong reasons, you can call me Sir Ian instead.”
It was already enough to have my solitary moment of extreme self-doubt paraded into. If he was only going to tease me, I would find another park within which to break down.
“Sir Ian? Seriously?” I spat out.
Sir Ian was unflapped. “Hardly. You should call me Sir Ian, but not out of seriousness. You’re the one dressed like a toff, so I feel I should at least have the benefit of a knighthood if we’re going to rail against life’s meaninglessness.”
I felt the need to clarify. “I wasn’t railing against life’s meaninglessness just now. I was railing against my own meaninglessness.”
“Noted. And if you note it as well, it will be duly noted.”
Again, I couldn’t tell whether he was making fun of me or showing me he was on my side. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I’m out for a walk, trying to reacquaint myself with unbastardized trees. Which you might have figured from the fact that I’m wearing the clothes that people of our generation usually wear when they go to take a walk. Yourself, however … ?”
I had to grant him the fact that my ensemble required some explanation. “I was at a literary scavenger hunt that started at Daunt,” I told him. “Our first stop was the Keats House. It ended up being my last stop as well.”
This got an approving look from Sir Ian. “Took your eyes off the prize, did you? Keep up that behavior and you’ll never be an Oxford don.”
“I think at this point Keats has a better chance of becoming a don. I didn’t just take my eyes off the prize—I jettisoned my team as well, which contained two people I love and one I would gladly leave to the hounds, had I the chance.”
Of course, the moment I invoked Mark, I imagined him smirking at my abrupt departure, telling Lily I was no match for a literary escapade and therefore had won her heart under the falsest of pretenses.
I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—
“Let’s continue to walk.” Without waiting for a reply, Sir Ian plunged farther into the haphazard copses. I kept step, and he continued to ramble as we rambled. “Historically, when two men, at least one of them avowedly homosexual, meet in the moonlight within Hampstead Heath, it is not for a reasoned discussion of their failures. But I sense if anything’s going to speak its name between us, it’s precisely that. Am I mistaken?”
This was not the first time that my amiability to same-sex congress had been thus polled. Which was, at least, what I assumed was happening. To make sure, I said, “Translation—you’re gay, you thought this might turn into a hookup, but you’re realizing we’re instead going to dive together into the pit of despair?”
Sir Ian nodded. “Something along those lines. Although once I realized it was you, I sensed that carnal assemblage was not an endeavor we were going to pursue. Word of your girlfriend’s Advent calendar spread among the classes; mostly it was spoken of disparagingly, but I defended the act as sweet. Granted, this was largely because it reminded me of what my grandmother used to do for me and my sister when we were little, not something I’d want from a lover. But still, sweet.”
“She is sweet,” I said. “I fear I’m bringing the sour.”
Sir Ian patted me on the shoulder, as if he’d been around the block a few times whereas I had merely taken a few steps down my front staircase. “Sweet and sour are not antithetical,” he assured me. “I happen to think they complement each other nicely.”
“I get that,” I assured him back. “But I’m also no fun when I’m despairing.”
“I think that’s healthy.”
“You do?”
“Well, it’s far better than thinking you are fun when you’re despairing. Those are the people to watch out for. You can revel against despair, but you should try not to revel within it.”
“True,” I said.
We came to a bend in the path and veered leftward. Sir Ian seemed to know where he was going. After a minute or so of nighttime silence, he said, “May I ask how you’re feeling now?”
The walking was helping. I didn’t feel as closed in. And maybe talking to someone other than myself or the trees was helping as well.
“I’m more than marginally calmer,” I reported.
“Excellent.”
“And how are you feeling?”
Sir Ian shook his head. “Like shite, truth be told. I feel I’m supposed to be doing something other than what I’m doing. Which is, I must say, a horrible way to feel.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Bottom of the barrel, my friend. Choking on the dregs.”
I knew I wasn’t one to speak; still, I found the sentence coming out of my mouth: “But you’re going to Oxford!”
Sir Ian let out a mockery of a Waugh-is-me laugh. “Ah, yes. Therein lies the irony. Or maybe therein lies the joke. You see, I fought my way into Oxford with the sole intention of burning it to the ground. Not literally. But I thought I and I alone would be the one to expose the hypocrisies, start the rebellion, throw enough dirt at the pristine walls that at least some of it would stick. I was going to disrupt all the stuck-up, unfair traditions … without having any idea that there’s already a long line of disru
ptors who’ve tried, and are still trying. You know why I didn’t talk in class? It was my way of not being part of the system. Yes, you heard that right, my newfound chum—I thought the best way to rebel was with silence! And do you know what happened? Nobody noticed. I at least had the wisdom to know that signposting it—Hey, world, see how silent I’m being!—was even more grossly stupid than my original strategy. So I left. I bet you didn’t even realize I was gone from class, did you?”
I had to admit I hadn’t.
Sir Ian nodded; it was exactly as he’d expected. “I haven’t been to school in a month, Salinger. The mental health professionals have been very kind in granting me a ‘leaveof absence’—as opposed to a ‘leave of presence,’ I suppose, which was exactly what my first few months at university were. Ladbrokes would not put the odds as favorable toward my return. But that only leaves me with the question of what next. Let me tell you, it’s very hard to pick up the pieces when you have no effing idea where they landed.”
“Under the couch, in that corner you can’t reach,” I offered.
“Or out the window, buried by the dog.”
While my tone had been joking, his was forlorn. His pieces truly had fallen into unreachable places. Which made me think of my own disrepair.
“I thought I was smart,” I said all of a sudden. “I really thought I was smart. But after the last couple of months, I’m not sure. And that’s paralyzing, isn’t it? To discover you’re bad at the one thing you thought you had going for you?”
Sir Ian studied me now—studied me to a degree that nobody I’d met at Oxford had cared to try. “Salinger, you are not striking me as un-smart. If anything, I would rank you among the articulate. And I do not bestow that designation lightly.”
“So why are we messing it up? Why aren’t we the shining stars of Oxford?”
“I fear we are a hairsbreadth away from bona fide whingeing, but I’m going to indulge your question by diving underneath it. Because that question isn’t really the question you want to ask. You don’t really want to be a shining star, do you? You’ve gotten close enough to those stars to see they shine like gold, not light—light being the thing that stars should rightfully be made of. You’re disenchanted with all that, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. I didn’t want to be gold. I wanted to be light.
“Scream it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, come on. You were perfectly happy screaming before. So scream it now: I am disenchanted.”
I hedged among the hedgerows. “It’s stranger, knowing that you’re hearing it.”
“Indulge me.”
“I AM DISENCHANTED!” I belted out. Unseen birds flew away in response.
Sir Ian appeared satisfied. “Now: I am disappointed.”
“I AM DISAPPOINTED!”
“Good. Now, side question: Have you worked hard?”
So much reading. So much studying. So much worrying.
“I’ve worked my ass off,” I said.
“I suspected so. And because of that, I can point out that your disappointment is directly tied to your disenchantment. It’s not that you’ve disappointed Oxford, Salinger; Oxford’s disappointed you. And because you are of a certain nature—a nature I happen to share—you’ll be prone to turn that against yourself. Don’t.”
He made it sound like a simple equation. As if my body wasn’t my mind’s accomplice in the backlash, infusing me with a panic that broke through the dams of my rationalizations. As if there was a definitive way to protect myself from myself, an armor I could put on without the mind also knowing how to take it back off.
“How have you managed?” I asked. “How do you avoid turning against yourself?”
Sir Ian sighed. “I haven’t. I turn against myself all the time. But my advice is still sound. It’s easier for a surgeon to treat a patient than to operate on himself.”
I decided to share with him something I’d been thinking about a lot lately. It hadn’t felt right to talk about it with Lily or Gem—they weren’t in the same place I was in, which was another way of saying their minds weren’t working in the same way mine was. And the people at Oxford hadn’t been that welcoming to my thought patterns, either.
Now I put it all out there, hoping Sir Ian would understand.
I told him, “The one positive thing my father said about me going to Oxford was that it would ‘build character.’ I imagine that’s a phrase that’s been used for centuries there. And I believed it. I wanted my character to build. But it’s like the message got garbled, and instead of building character, we’re all dead set on building a character. Like, we have this idea of who we’re supposed to be, and that’s what we’re building—no matter whether or not it corresponds to the person underneath. And social media’s only made it worse. There, the character building is out of control. You can split yourself off into multiple characters if you want, some of them lovable, some of them attack dogs. I liked to think that I was better than that. That I knew better. But now I wonder if I fell for it just like everyone else, only I happen to be really bad at it. I am a bad actor when it comes to playing myself. What do you do when you discover that?”
“I think maybe … oh, I don’t know.” Sir Ian shook his head, stopping himself.
“No,” I insisted. “Tell me.”
“It’s just so sappy.”
“Let the sap run,” I said, even though I was mostly allergic to sap, unless Lily was the one tapping it.
“Fine,” Sir Ian said. “If I were going to give you more advice that I myself can’t seem to take, I would tell you that in order to build character, you don’t invent a new self, you instead build on what’s already there. The good parts. The things you love. As horrid as it sounds, at a certain point—i.e., the point we’re at now—you build your character on the foundation of all the things you love.”
The things I love.
I thought:
I love Lily.
I love books.
I love words.
I love my family when it recognizes me.
I love the fact that I am trying hard to learn as much as I can.
I love Holden Caulfield, not because he’s a rebel but because he’s in so much pain.
I love Seymour Glass even more, mostly because I’m not entirely sure why.
I love the song “Bloodbuzz, Ohio,” mostly because I don’t know what the lyrics mean but when I’m listening to the song, I feel like they fit into my soul in exactly the right way.
I love poetry even if it scares and confounds me a little bit. Okay, a lot.
I love New York so much, especially when I’m away from it and don’t have to deal with things like tourists, garbage pickup, and the price of a grilled cheese sandwich.
I love Cate Blanchett even if she scares me a little. Okay, a lot.
I love Carly Rae Jepsen because she doesn’t scare me at all, and instead makes me want to dance and feel at the same time.
Those are things I love. Not entirely in that order. But #1 and #2 definitely at the top, in that order.
And then I thought:
So?
I’d kept walking, and when I looked to Sir Ian, he wasn’t next to me. I stopped and looked around, but it was all just darkness and leaves.
“Sir Ian?” I called out.
“Don’t worry, I’m near.” His voice came out of the darkness. “You were thinking about the things you love, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. The fact that it took so long for you to realize I was gone means you have a pretty solid foundation on which to build character.”
“But I also have stress and doubt and fear.”
“Most human beings do.”
“But it overwhelms me at times.”
“Just as it overwhelms most human beings. Life, dear Salinger, isn’t in the vanquishing, it’s in the navigation.”
We were far from any lamps, far from any signs of the city. I could hear it in the distance,
but so faintly it could have been my mind playing tricks.
“Can you come back out now?” I asked. “It’s seriously spooky in here.”
In response, he said, “Have you ever been to a Christmas tree farm?”
“Excuse me?”
“Indulge me, Salinger. Have you ever been to a Christmas tree farm?”
In New York City, the closest thing we had to Christmas tree farms were parking lots full of kidnapped pines.
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“Do you know what the trouble with a Christmas tree farm is?”
“No. What?”
“It should be a forest. Any assemblage of trees should be a forest. In the same way that trees should not be shoved into the center of your parlor and asked to stand alone. No tree ever grows up wanting to be a Christmas tree. I can almost live with a big tree in a town square; at least there it has its outdoor dignity intact. But to tame a tree and keep it indoors? That’s not the spirit of any season I want to be a part of.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you … but I don’t see how this explains why you’re hiding in the dark.”
“It’s the reason I come here, Salinger. Especially this time of year. For a moment, take yourself away from all the Christmas trees and put yourself in the forest. Oxford is a Christmas tree farm, and your time is better spent in the uncultivated wild, making your own stance. You might not get as much attention. You may never shine like gold. But you will grow to be yourself. Be okay with being alone, Salinger. Make sense of it. Figure out what your heart wants … then go to it. It’s not the gilded prize or the biggest present that we seek, my new friend—it’s the forest.”
I couldn’t say I fully understood this, but there was definitely a door within me that was opening to the understanding, a heart waiting to usher it in.
In the meantime, I had smaller goals.
“Can you at least tell me how to get out of here, Sir Ian?” I asked.
“I’m going to leave you now, but I’m sure I’ll see you later,” Sir Ian responded. “You’re on your own … until you’re not.”
I heard the sound of his departure then—not footsteps, really, but the sound of branches being pushed aside, then falling back into place.
