Innocence

by Lucy St. John

Chapter 11

  “Me?” I repeated, somewhat defensively. “Looking?”

  The guy nodded, smiled, then narrowed his eyes, as if scrutinizing me. It felt uncomfortable, yet thrilling at the same time.

  “Everyone is,” he answered.

  “So what are you looking for?” I asked him, moving closer to him, there in the dark corner that became a strange place of calm amid the cacophony and chaos of the party.

  He shrugged. “An end to all the bullshit, I guess.”

  “Bullshit?” I repeated.

  He jerked his head toward the half-drunk people at the party. By then, couples, including Sonya and Josh, were in intense hookup phase. And the ones who weren’t were in intense party phase -- drinking their faces off, as the practice is known.

  I gazed around the room, trying to see what he was seeing. But my eyes kept stopping on Sonya as she pushed her ripe body into Josh’s lanky, lean frame. His free hand – the one absent a drink -- dangled down, feeling its way around the small of her back and along the curve of her hips. Her own free hand was down at his thigh, and Sonya was slowly, sexily moving it higher and higher, toward his manhood.

  Before I knew what was happening, the John Lennon dude had stepped behind me, pressing his front to my back and leaning his clean-shaven face so that his cheek nuzzled my neck, his breath warm on my shoulder.

  “What do you see?” he whispered, turning his mouth toward my ear, his deep voice and hot breath sending a wonderful shiver down my spine. And with it, an unaccustomed thrill echoed down there.

  “People,” I answered, turning my face toward his.

  “People,” he repeated, his animated eyes lighting at our word play. “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know,” I began uncertainly, then added, “having fun?”

  “Fun?” he challenged, then nodded toward the party people as if we were unseen anthropologists observing a new civilization.

  “Look at them,” he whispered, his voice in my ear providing narration as if this were a National Geographic special, as my eyes panned the room.

  “Drinking in excess to dull their senses,” he continued. “Suppressing their inhibitions and insecurities. Allowing baser urges and instincts to take control. Adopting new personas outside of their own personalities. Personas that they will conveniently assign to alcohol in order to disassociate themselves from all responsibility for their actions. You call that fun?”

  I looked out at the scene as described by my new, strange acquaintance. Yet all I could think was why couldn’t I allow myself to be one of them? More to the point, I stared at Sonya, her hands high on Josh’s upper thigh now, and his hands low on her rounded hips. And I wondered why couldn’t that be me?

  “It’s college,” I finally stated. “People are cutting loose. You can’t be against freedom.”

  He grunted a laugh. “Freedom,” he sarcastically said. “These people wouldn’t know freedom if they fell over it.”

  My eyes were locked on Sonya and Josh. He was leaning down, his long hair shielding both their faces, but I was sure they were kissing. Kissing and rubbing and feeling each other’s wonderful bodies in a blissful, unrestrained exchange of passion.

  Yes, I thought. Freedom. Fucking freedom!

  “They look pretty happy to me,” I answered.

  “Which ones?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “You made an observation,” he pressed. “Obviously it’s based on something.”

  He turned his face to me, noticed the sightline of my stare and followed it to Sonya and Josh in their erotic embrace.

  “You’re jealous,” he said, his voice ringing with both satisfaction and recognition.

  “No!” I insisted, swinging my face to his, both of us so close. The heat of my anger rising to my cheeks.

  “That wasn’t a tell,” he smiled.

  Bastard!

  “You probably shouldn’t play poker,” he added, his self-satisfied grin widening.

  I gritted my teeth and girded to hurl a sharp-witted response at this infuriating man.

  But I had nothing. Zip. Nada.

  I turned away from him, my angry, narrow eyes falling once again on Sonya and Josh. I didn’t know who I was most mad at – my John Lennon wanna-be, my oversexed roommate or the gorgeous guy with bad bathroom habits whose invitation had landed me in this dorm room dilemma.

  “So what do you see, Smart Guy?” I huffed.

  He raised his face to the crowd, panned the room, then lowered his mouth to my ear once again.

  “I see a roomful of mimics,” he began. “They’re not free. They’re slaves. Slaves to what their pop culture upbringing has led them to believe college is all about.”

  As he spoke, my brow furrowed in thought and my eyes narrowed in renewed concentration, as I began to see the college kegger tableau before me with new insight.

  “Don’t you see?” he continued. “They’re acting out a scene from Animal House or any one of a dozen other college movies. They are attempting to live up to the stories they’ve heard about college and Old State. All the myths passed down by parents and older siblings and upperclassmen friends. None of it is their own experience. No more than a mime aping human action and emotion is genuine.”

  My eyes roved the room. My God, I thought. Maybe this guy is right. It did look like a half-assed college movie. The claustrophobic room jammed with coeds, sexual energy and alcohol was a scene, not true sensation.

  Or perhaps I was simply telling myself this since I was the detached observer of the scene, not a participant in the glorious sensation of it all.

  “I don’t see an ounce of free will on display,” he concluded, his whispered words sinking right into my soul. Whatever he was saying seemed so important somehow, as if he were mainlining the secret truth of the universe. I felt like I should be writing it all down.

  “I really don’t,” he continued. “They’re all just going through the motions of what they think they should do, desperately trying to live up to some artificial, manufactured ideal. Most of them will go through life the same way. They’ll get a degree for a job that may or may not exist in our economy. They’ll meet a member of the opposite sex. Eventually, they will get married, more out of some conventional obligation and social pressure to procreate, than any real profound, deep and intrinsic connection that some call love. They’ll have their two-point-whatever offspring. They’ll live in the suburbs, go to soccer games and later, get divorced when all the acting and pretending finally falters and nothing – no amount of food, booze, pro sports, Hollywood movies, Disney vacations, Internet porn, prescription drugs and conspicuous consumption – can fill them up. And then, they’ll collapse in on themselves like the hollow, empty vessels for broken dreams that they have been all their lives. Finally, the pantomime ends, and everything turns to shit.”

  What the fuck? I thought.

  I had never heard anyone talk this way. Ever. But it sounded brilliant. It rang with truth. I looked out at the party and saw a bunch of scared, desperate people attempting to pull off their best approximation of what a college party should be. Because none of us really knew for sure. We were all just going by what we had seen in movies, on TV and heard from family and friends. We were all clueless, really. So everyone was just acting. Mimics.

  Holy shit!

  I turned to him. He studied me.

  “Do you see it now?” he asked, his eyes reading my thoughts.

  I stared back at him in awe, then nodded. He cracked the semblance of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

  “Yes,” I whispered in astonishment.

  “YES!”