Changing the Subject

by Stephen-Paul Martin

  All night I could hear the wind slamming into my car. I felt afraid and woke up several times. But when I felt my dog’s head in my lap, the fear dissolved, and I went back to sleep. I woke at five. It was cold, so I started the engine and got on the road. I turned on the radio. Between bursts of static, I heard that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were also dead, along with many Capitol Hill Republicans, and I wondered if they’d been hit by lightning too. But I couldn’t get any more news. The static was blocking everything out.

  Soon I was driving east and I could see the sky getting lighter. The road was still climbing, but after running east for half an hour, it leveled off and I knew I’d come to the top of the mountain. The predawn blue of the sky felt like a blue I’d seen more than half a century before, two thousand miles away. The sudden connection between times and places made the sky seem deeper, as if it were gazing back at me and feeling the same connection. I wanted to rest in that feeling forever. But suddenly the road was lined on both sides with old brick buildings.

  I stopped, got out of the car, and walked up the street. There was no sign that anyone lived there. At the end of the street I turned right. There was nothing but rocks and scrub vegetation. I turned around and saw the same thing in the other direction. The town was only one street. And apparently not even that. From where I now stood, in back of the buildings, I could see they were flat, held up with blocks of wood, like painted stage props. As the sun began to rise, filling the street with light, my suspicions were confirmed: the town was unreal. I told myself it had to be an abandoned movie set, and sure enough, as I walked back down the street I saw something I’d missed before, an open three-ring binder with pages turning fiercely in the wind, apparently a screenplay, though most of it was missing.

  I sat and read what remained, lines for characters named Phil and Connie, parts of a witty conversation about fall-out shelters in the early 1960s. I laughed at first, but soon I started getting angry, thinking back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s face on the picture tube making a speech, pushing the world to the brink of mass destruction. Then I thought about Bush and got even madder, especially since the radio fragments I’d heard the day before made it sound like Americans all over the nation were mourning his death, and now they were no doubt mourning the deaths of other Republican leaders. Why would anyone mourn for people whose actions had done so much to ruin the world? I was glad that I wasn’t in touch with the rest of the nation.

  At the other end of the street I came to a small café that seemed to be real. I went inside. Ceilings fans made slow shadows turn on broad white floorboards. Two of the walls were exposed brick floor to ceiling, decorated with posters featuring criminals wanted dead or alive, all tastefully framed as if they should have been hanging for sale in a gallery. The refrigerator in the back of the building seemed to be working, stocked with eggs, bacon, bread, and other breakfast foods. The grill was working too, and soon I was standing with a spatula while eggs and bacon popped and snapped and bread got brown in the toaster. The morning light was refracted by the dust and cobwebs in the windows. The cold wind blew the door open and closed. I’d never had a better breakfast. It was so good that when I was done I got up and cooked another one, and another one after that, amazed that I didn’t feel bloated.

  I heard music playing softly from a room above the café. I found a small staircase in a hallway in back of the kitchen. My dog ran ahead of me up the stairs, then started barking furiously in the room above. I entered the room prepared to make an apology. But except for my dog barking at the wind in the drapes, there seemed to be no one there. From a CD player on a nightstand by a bed, I heard the same music I’d heard the past few nights. I had to admit that the DJ was right: the music sounded like jazz being played on the moon, where the sounds were free to perform in ways that the fierce gravitational pull of the earth prevented or confined, a composition designed for the absence of an atmosphere, taking the place of an atmosphere. I tried to make my dog sit, but he started barking again and ran out the door. I got up and followed him down the stairs, through the café, and into the street. It was already dark. A half moon lit the mountains in the west. The music from the second floor window stopped and the light went out.

  I got back in my car and drove down the mountain. The moonlight made the driving fast and easy. I reached the desert floor an hour before dawn. I stopped for gas. Finally the convenience store was open. The girl at the counter was tall and dressed in a white sweatshirt. If she’d had glasses, she would have been the waitress in the café. She looked at me as if she’d never seen me before, and I knew that if she were really the same young woman, she would have recognized me. But then it occurred to me that without her glasses, she couldn’t see me clearly.

  I said: Hi there. Do you have any maps?

  She said: Maps? What kind of maps are you looking for?

  I said: Maps of the region. A simple road map will be fine. Do you have one?

  She said: Let me check.

  She went back into a small room furnished with a gray metal desk and a row of metal file cabinets. I heard her open a drawer. I heard her mumbling to herself. Her voice became a voice in my head, the voice of an old friend in a phone conversation a week before, when he called to say that he’d finally gotten a cell phone. After struggling to make out his words mangled by satellite transmission, I asked him to call me back on a real phone.

  He said: This is a real phone, and right now I’m on my way to the bank. I’m talking to you from my car. It’s the first time I’ve ever driven and talked on the phone at the same time. I used to think it was dangerous when other people did it. But now that I’m doing it myself, it really feels cool.

  I laughed: I can’t believe what I’m hearing. After all the times we ridiculed people for getting caught up in hi-tech fads, here you are, caught up in a hi-tech fad.

  He said: Right. But now that I’ve got a cell, I can’t imagine living without one. I mean, I can get in touch with anyone from anywhere at any time.

  I said: Yeah, but they can get in touch with you whenever they want to. You’re a moving target.

  He laughed: When people get in touch with you, you feel like a target?

  I said: I just think it’s important to have chunks of time when I’m not hooked up to the rest of the world.

  He said: Sounds to me like you’d like huge chunks of time when you’re not hooked up to the rest of the world. Why such a need to be out of touch? I mean, I haven’t heard from you in months.

  I said: I’m always dealing with people at my job. When I’m not at work, I need time to myself. I—

  He cut me off with something I wasn’t prepared for: You know what? I’ve been thinking about the way you keep to yourself all the time. And it seems to me you’ve got a Noble Victim Complex. I heard someone talking about it on TV the other night, and he was saying that—

  I said: I’ve never thought of myself as a victim. It’s just that I—

  He said: It’s just that you isolate yourself from what’s happening in the world and then complain when you think you don’t get what you deserve. But never mind, I’ll change my wording. How about a Noble Outcast Complex?

  I said: Actually, I think words like outcast are too extreme, too theatrical, at least when they’re applied to people like me, who haven’t really been cast out of anything. It’s true that I’m easily annoyed and try to avoid things that annoy me or give me anxiety. But really, if you’re not annoyed by all the idiots glowing with hi-tech happiness, it probably means you’ve become one of them—

  He said: In other words, you’re not just easily annoyed; you’re also paranoid.

  I said: I feel like the main character in Invasion of the Body Snatchers—not that asinine remake that came out during the Reagan years, but the ‘50s original, starring Kevin McCarthy—and I’m talking to someone who used to be my friend, except that now he’s become a pod person, with headphones in his ears and—

  I stopped because I could tell tha
t at some point in the past five seconds, our connection had been broken, and before he could call me back I went outside and took a long walk. I saw people on cell phones everywhere, eyes bright in a trance of hi-tech happiness. I knew I had to get out.

  The pain of that moment brought me back to the present. I looked around the store. Everything on the magazine rack was in black and white, as if I were back in the 1940s and cell phones, TVs, and computers didn’t exist yet. But if I were back in the 1940s, I wouldn’t exist yet either, so I turned my attention back to the girl in the office. I was suddenly afraid that she might pull out a cell phone, calling her boss to see if there were maps in the store. But then she was back at the counter saying she didn’t have any maps.

  I said: Where can I get one?

  She said: I don’t think you can find any maps around here. At least, I’ve never seen one. What would you do with a map in a place like this?

  I looked at her in silence. I thought of telling her how pleased I was that Bush and the Republicans were gone, but I wasn’t sure what her political feelings were, so I kept my mouth shut. The moment stretched out and curled up like a dog preparing to sleep. I told myself that if I could gently nudge it awake, it might open its eyes and playfully lick my face. I felt confident. I decided to try something bold. I said: By the way, my name’s Phil.

  I extended my hand. Of course, I hadn’t given her my real name. But I wanted to see if using the name Phil would make her use the name Connie, confirming my belief that words were nothing in themselves, mere sounds in the air or marks on a page that became significant only in relation to each other.

  She reached into the pockets of her apron, pulled out her glasses, put them on and blinked three times. Without shaking my hand, she leaned forward, narrowed her eyes, looked at me closely and said: Can I help you with anything else?

  I wasn’t sure what to say so I said: Do you have any dog food?

  She said: For you or for your dog?

  She burst out laughing. I started to laugh but something about it felt wrong, so I told her to have a nice day and got back on the road. I drove for several hours. The sun came up but before long it was setting. I wondered if the death of time meant that the world itself was ending. I didn’t think so. But I did think that things were out of balance, that the human race had been abusing time for so long that time now existed only to give space the time it needed, and it seemed to be needing less and less, perhaps because it was now taking the two-dimensional form of a landscape photograph, framed as a decoration above a mantelpiece in a room in a world where the human race didn’t exist. For maybe ten seconds I saw the photograph clearly. But the image became something else then something else then something else, as if it existed solely for the purpose of changing itself, dissolving when I came to an old hotel.

  I stopped and went inside. The check-in clerk was snoring with his head in his arms on a dark wood counter. I quietly slipped a key off a hook and tiptoed up the stairs in the back of the lobby. The room was on the top floor, three flights up. It had a great view of the desert, the moon fading into the dawn above the silhouettes of mountains. I watched until the sun was almost up. Then I got in bed.

  I’ve never liked hotel bedsheets. They always feel stiff and formal. But the sheets in this bed felt like I’d been using them all my life, which made the process of falling asleep so delicious that it seemed to be happening over and over again, the same dissolving image of a half moon in a window framing the silhouettes of mountains. Then suddenly I was awake six hours later, pleasantly rested and ready for breakfast. As I went downstairs I could smell bacon and eggs from the café beside the lobby. The place was charming, with brick walls, old wooden tables, and broad oak floorboards. Patterns of light and shade played in the folds of lace curtains tossing slightly in the breeze. Three men wearing dark robes and conic black hats were sitting in three corners of the room. I sat in the fourth corner, completing the pattern. The three men ate with such pleasure that I felt I was eating their meals, and after a few minutes I was so full and satisfied that I knew what I had to do.

  First I would find a part-time job. Maybe they needed help at the desk in the lobby. Maybe they would offer me free room and board and a little spending money on the side. Next I would get to know as many local people as possible. Once I’d become well known in the town, I could serve on the town council and before too long become the mayor. Then I would get a law passed banning cell phones, turning the town and perhaps the whole county into cell phone-free zones—and ultimately into media-free zones. With any luck, I could even restore the missing fragments of time. It was true that I’d never been in politics. It was true that I had no appetite or aptitude for the kind of semi-human interaction politicians need to master. It was true that there might be state laws preventing local politicians from banning destructive technologies. It was true that the town might not exist anymore. But what choice did I have? Though I knew that cell phones would be obsolete within ten years, this would only mean that the phonies had been given something even dumber to waste their time with, that the nation had become even dumber than before.

  I walked out into the lobby and woke the guy at the desk by touching his arm. His head shot back in alarm. He looked at me like I was crazy. For one long moment I thought he might have a gun, a badge, and handcuffs. But when I told him I wanted a job he nodded with obvious pleasure. He smiled as if he’d found his long-lost brother.

  FOOD

  Stopping in the middle of a sentence, distracted by thoughts about food, he closes the book without marking his place, even though it’s not time for a meal, even though the sentence was holding his interest, making the claim that mainstream reality doesn’t exist anymore, that at this point we can only talk about mainstream unreality, an assertion that’s not as simple as it sounds, not when the distinction between real and unreal has been relentlessly blurred by the mainstream itself, to such an extent that the mainstream exists only because real and unreal have become interchangeable terms, generating a confusion so pervasive that it hardly seems to exist, functioning as a background noise that you notice only when it’s not there anymore, but such moments of silence are unusual, difficult to recognize and even more difficult to sustain, provisional in a way that makes you feel insecure, like you need more control, the power to make such moments happen at will, as if the creation of silence were a skill you could learn in a classroom, but when the lesson appears on a blackboard, and the words are as precise as any professor could possibly make them, there’s something that won’t fall into place, something that still makes trouble, something that even experts are confused by, experts like Professor Food, a man who’s been teaching long enough to know what he’s talking about, long enough to know that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, standing in front of the classroom with a piece of chalk in his hand, saying things he’s learned to say by saying them over and over again, things he didn’t fully understand until he said them, as if unspoken words were like uninflated balloons, a figure of speech he enjoyed when he first came up with it, though he’s not sure now if words and balloons can really be compared, but he keeps producing the words and the faces facing him keep writing them down, concerned that what they don’t write down might work against them later, though some of them are distracted by what’s outside, by colors and faces and words on walls of billboards moving closer, blocking out most of the view from the classroom windows, making the classroom clock seem larger and louder than it really is, magnified seconds made of magnified nanoseconds ticking away, or not ticking away but stretching out and curling back on themselves, serpents flicking their tongues and flashing their fangs and eating their tails, while underneath the clock a student wants to raise her hand, a blond math major wearing high heels, a lumberjack shirt and a baseball hat, an outfit that makes a statement by refusing to make a statement, making several statements at once that cancel each other out, and she’s wondering why the billboards keep getting closer, wondering why the lesson is
always the same, word by word and phrase by phrase not a syllable out of place, but she’s not sure how smart it would be to say anything, since the first question would show that she’s not focused on Professor Food’s lecture, and the second question would imply that he’s too lazy or too dumb to come up with anything new, even though Professor Food has already justified his teaching strategy, announcing on the first day of class that every class would consist of exactly the same lecture, word by word and phrase by phrase not a syllable out of place, since his goal was to make sure students fully understood the material, not just in their brains but in every cell of their bodies, and he claimed that this could only be done through repetition, as if the lecture were an elaborate mantra, hypnotically seeping through the conceptual and emotional superstructure of the mind, slowly undoing toxic patterns of thought and feeling locked into place so firmly that nothing else seemed even remotely possible, but of course there was really no question of repetition, because the lecture on second hearing would be different from the lecture on first hearing, different the third time around than the second, different heard for the fourth time than the third, different on the fifth day of class than on the fourth, and besides, Professor Food firmly believes that it’s crucial for students to learn to cope with annoyance, since so much of life is annoying and you can either be pissed off most of the time or you can preserve your sanity by mastering the annoyances, in much the same way that a surfer masters a wave, but the blond math major doesn’t like surfing at all, so instead of raising her hand she gets up and leaves, just as Professor Food turns and writes the word blackboard on the blackboard and the students bend over their desks and write the word notebook in their notebooks, everyone so focused that they don’t know at first that she’s just gone out, but the sharp sound of her high heels in the corridor gives her away, a sound so compelling that after ten seconds it’s hard to tell if she’s approaching or moving away, a confusion that builds as the sound continues, reaching a point where advancing and receding are about to become the same thing, destroying one of the basic oppositions that time and space depend on, threatening an even more primal condition, the distinction between possible and impossible, which means that too much is at stake, activating the occult mechanisms of universal correction, which instantly turn the blond math major 180 degrees, sending her back down the corridor toward the classroom, leaving Professor Food with no doubt that the sound is getting larger and larger, haunting him with an image of high heels punishing a floor tiled like a chessboard, a design that’s always made him nervous, not because it reminds him that he’s never been good at chess, not because the game includes menacing metaphors like checkmate and stalemate, but because the floor reminds him of other floors with the same design, places where bad things must have happened, though he’s never been able to say what they were, and he doesn’t think it would help him if he could, especially since he’s never been convinced that he needs any help, except that at times apparently harmless sounds affect him more than they should, especially when combined with aggressive illumination, light with a purpose, like the light that’s all but replacing the afternoon sunlight in the windows, buzzing fluorescent light from walls of billboards moving closer, smiling faces clever phrases calculated colors, counterpointing the sound of high heels coming closer and closer, turning Professor Food toward the classroom door, just as the blond math major sticks her head back into the room, giggling nervously, trying to be sheepishly cute and act like nothing is going on, which loosely speaking might be true but strictly speaking can’t be true, since something is always going on, even if it’s on a scale too small for human perception, and the difference between something going on and nothing going on is on the verge of dissolving, threatening yet another primordial condition—the distinction between what is and what isn’t—leading the blond math major to sit back down beneath the classroom clock, scribbling furiously in her notebook in response to Professor Food’s description of a blond math major scribbling furiously in her notebook, not quite understanding what she’s writing, and she ends up mixing Professor Food’s words with her own words, half transcription half translation half misunderstanding, but three halves don’t make a whole, making instead an unstable condition, like a table with a missing leg, like a story no one seems to be telling, focusing on a prominent quantum physicist, a woman whose parents got rich by writing advertising jingles, money that’s helped her move to a place where jingles don’t exist, a huge Victorian house on the western shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia, and she’s used her family fortune to build an amazing device, something that looks like a pile of junk but allows her to reduce herself to the size of subatomic particles, things with weird names that exist for less than a millionth of a second, but a millionth of a second seems to take decades when she finally makes herself small enough to look the subatomic realm in the face, an image that she thought was only a metaphor when she wrote it in a recent journal article, but now that she’s there it all appears to be just like what she left behind, people in houses waking up and eating and talking and laughing, trees bending in the breeze, jazz in low-lit basement clubs, aisles of food in labeled cans and bags, rattlesnakes making figure eights in desert sand, mystical dancers making figure eights in desert sand, planes that look like hammerhead sharks dropping bombs on a Third World country, people in observation balloons delighted by panoramas, drivers on freeways getting pissed off and giving each other the finger, out of work middle-aged men forced to take jobs delivering pizza, café conversations in which people keep changing the subject, but she tells herself that it’s all so small that no one else even knows it’s there, and when her device brings her back to the top-floor lab in her Siberian house, windows facing miles and miles of the deepest lake in the world, she can’t quite bring herself to begin a scientific paper, knowing that she’d be laughed off the face of the earth if she wrote what she knows, but over time the frustration of having to keep quiet about a momentous discovery drives her to contact an old college friend, an avant-garde filmmaker whose parents died in a famous ballooning disaster, and through an eager exchange of emails they plan to make a documentary film about the sub-atomic world, protecting themselves from the scorn of the scientific world by framing the film as a work of fiction, but fights over details jeopardize the project, and one late afternoon, after a vicious disagreement about quarks and leptons, the filmmaker feels like someone trapped in a prepositional phrase about food, the very same phrase that appears in Professor Food’s lecture, scribbled into the notebook of an attentive young man in the front row, an astrology major with short black hair and a long white beard and a varsity sweater, someone who would surely be every teacher’s dream if he weren’t listening so aggressively, changing what he’s listening to, transforming a detailed discussion of symbolism in ice cream commercials into a detailed discussion of movie trailers, the way would-be actors and actresses avoid waiting on tables by making stupid movies sound brilliant, thrilling, profound, stunning, breathtaking, cultivating a seductive and authoritative manner of speaking, showing that even the most vacant nonsense can sound impressive if the speaker knows how to use her voice, something that has disturbing political implications that need careful attention, except that now the astrology major is transforming Professor Food’s remarks on the need to protect animals from human violence, the need for an ongoing critique of humanity’s master species complex, into a playful description of puppies in cardboard boxes, offered in shopping malls throughout the nation, bringing love into thousands of homes that would otherwise be dominated by Republicans or born-again Christians convinced that rhetoric about national security or family values is more than just the latest official installment of toxic nonsense, more than just an indication of how brain-dead the USA has become in the past thirty years, though it’s foolish to assume that the USA has ever been smarter than it is now, and perhaps a more accurate way to approach the problem is to focus on what happens when a military superpower becomes obsessed with amusing and orn
amenting itself with hi-tech devices like the cell phone that won’t stop ring-toning in the astrology major’s pocket, the kind of intrusion that used to make everyone giggle, but it’s become so commonplace that no one notices, least of all Professor Food, whose discussion of substitute gratifications appears in the astrology major’s notebook as a team of mountain climbers returning from a remote summit speaking a language no one has ever heard before, an image that affects the astrology major so physically that he feels like he’s walking down an urban street on a chilly day at half past noon, a sidewalk of squares that keep repeating themselves, exactly the same size and shade of grey, and he’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t know how long he’s been walking, except that he knows he’s moving south, south becoming deeper south becoming deeper and deeper south, reaching a sky-blue boundary beyond which motion is no longer possible, the place where the sky comes down to meet the pavement, something that he’s always thought was an optical illusion, or perhaps an optical metaphor, but now he walks face-first into what feels like blue plate glass, and there’s nothing to do but turn and walk in the opposite direction, a sidewalk of identical squares repeating themselves, a trance of motion making the north appear to recede forever, except that he’s suddenly face to face with a plate-glass boundary again, a blue so flat it’s clear that on the other side motion doesn’t exist, a firm indication that north and south aren’t what they were before, so he tries walking east and bangs his face against the same blue boundary, and he tries walking west and the squares of the sidewalk end at the same blue boundary, forcing him to conclude that profound changes have taken place undetected, that the open transparent space he used to take for granted has been severely compromised, but instead of just waiting there at that suddenly rigid boundary, fondling his crotch or picking his nose, the astrology major slips quietly out of the classroom as soon as Professor Food turns to write something about mountains and language on the blackboard, chalk scraping across the flat black surface with the sound of skates on ice, a sound that follows the astrology major down the corridor, past paintings of smiling men and women who gave the school money, all posing with the same mountain meadow in the background, beyond which in the corner of his eye the astrology major expects to see a blue observation balloon, bobbing pleasantly between clouds that look like brains, reminding him of a trip he once took through mountains and meadows, taking shelter from a sudden storm in a cottage empty except for three unlabeled cans of food, waiting out the storm for days, becoming so desperately hungry that he smashed open one of the cans and ate what looked like a human brain, smashed open a second can and ate what looked like a human heart, smashed open the final can and found himself inside the can looking out, but the memory collapses into the light at the end of the corridor, imagery on walls of billboards waiting outside the doors of the school, quickly convincing the astrology major that there’s no point in leaving the building, that at least the classroom is still a media-free zone, an assumption that crumbles when he slips back into his seat and Professor Food’s lecture becomes a commercial, flashed on a screen descending from the ceiling, separating Professor Food from the blackboard, apparently triggered by an outside source beyond Professor Food’s control, an ad that begins with the sounds of battle, Custer with bullets and arrows whizzing past him, surrounded by Sioux and Cheyenne braves and hundreds of dying soldiers and horses, and a voice-over says YOU CAN’T ALWAYS RUN AWAY FROM YOUR PROBLEMS, as Custer looks to the sky and sees three flying saucers cutting through the blinding sunlight, suddenly becoming Tylenol tablets, and the voice-over says BUT YOU CAN FEEL BETTER ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN’T ESCAPE, and the tablets fill the sky with the sound of many rivers, spinning down one by one into Custer’s mouth, just as an arrow goes in one ear and out the other, and the general falls with a smile on his face, the camera zooming in on his teeth, which gleam like symbols of eternal happiness, entering the astrology major’s notebook as a harsh condemnation of a right-wing think tank, the Project for the New American Century, the un-elected group that secretly governs the nation, people the astrology major has never heard of, and he puts his hand up wanting to know more about them, but Professor Food calls on a finance major who’s always making excuses for cutting class, a bald young man whose eyes suggest that he’s permanently baffled, frustrated because he can’t find the right medication, looking especially troubled now because the wall of billboards advancing in the windows reminds him of a Shakespeare play, something about a king who talks to witches, and the finance major can’t recall if it’s Hamlet or Othello, but he clearly recalls that woods were approaching a mad king’s castle, and he also remembers the mad king’s wife, pushing him to kill his way to the top, and the finance major wonders if Professor Food has such a wife at home, someone who talks in her sleep revealing her husband’s murders, but the thought of Professor Food killing people is so absurd that the finance major comes within seconds of howling with laughter, stopping himself only by writing in his notebook that he knows he’s inventing Professor Food, that he’s always inventing Professor Food, assuming all sorts of things about his private life, assuming that he’d rather lecture than have a conversation, that he likes gazebos better than discos, that he hates politicians and thinks that voting is meaningless, that he doesn’t take any drugs but uses popcorn as a drug, that he thinks world leaders who declare war should be on the front lines fighting, that he prefers puppies to children because puppies don’t grow up to become people the way children do, that he wishes he could see just one cloud that didn’t look like a picture of a cloud, that he dreams of living in a sparsely furnished hut on the coast of Norway, that he got mad when George Bush was allowed to leave the White House without being tried for crimes against humanity, that he likes frozen sunsets filled with the silhouettes of factory smokestacks, that he thinks the beach would be fine if there were no people there making noise, that his first wife didn’t believe in ghosts and his second wife did, that he thinks people who kill animals for the fun of it should get the electric chair, that his current wife wears high heels during sex because it makes her feel taller, and the list of assumptions might keep getting longer, as if it existed only to keep getting longer, but the finance major can see Professor Food watching him, reading his thoughts, a phrase which reminds him of Professor Food’s claim that all reading is misreading, that the best we can do is accept that we’re misreading everything, a claim that pissed off the finance major when Professor Food emphasized it in his opening lecture a few weeks before, but now the finance major finds it comforting, since it means that mind readers like Professor Food will always be wrong, reading their own concerns and tendencies into what they think they know, never seeing beyond themselves, but the comfort fades when the finance major begins to misread his own thoughts, begins to assume that he’s always misreading his thoughts, an absurdity that’s upsetting at first, but soon begins to seem funny, and this time he can only shut down his laughter by leaving the classroom, rushing to the drinking fountain, only to find that it doesn’t work, so he staggers into the men’s room and tries to drink from the sink, only to find that it doesn’t work, so he turns and drinks from the toilet, drowning his laughter, giving himself the hiccups, and he feels like he needs fresh air, but when he stumbles down the corridor hoping his hiccups aren’t loud enough to get him in trouble, he sees that there’s no way out, that the billboards are coming closer, that the smiling teeth in the ads are getting sharper by the second, so he goes back into the bathroom and drinks from the toilet again, drowning his hiccups, then walks back into the class like nothing has happened, just as Professor Food says that nothing has happened, but the claim that nothing has happened apparently makes a great deal happen, music suddenly playing from hidden speakers in the ceiling, big hit songs that sound like ads that sound like big hit songs, all of them playing at once to become one song, lyrics that fasten themselves to the mind like parasites, seeming at first to be about boxes of laundry detergent left on the moon, then about weeds pushing up
through cracks in abandoned swimming pools, then about windows made of hamburger meat, then about dusty globes in libraries closed because of budget cuts, then about ancient ruins that serve as landing sites for lightning bolts, and Professor Food swats at the music as if he were swatting at flies on a hot summer day, snarling and foaming at the mouth and cursing wildly, making up a whole new set of profanities, replacing words so badly overused that they’ve lost their offensive power, words like fuck and dick and shit and cunt, but his obscene anger only makes the music louder, driving him to grab two books from his desk to cover his ears, and the words in the books are used well enough to absorb the invasive sound, though once the room is quiet again the binding snaps and the pages crumble, making two heaps of dust on the floor, a very sad sight for a lover of books like Professor Food, but he doesn’t have time to think about what’s just happened, not when he sees that the finance major is just about to raise his hand, probably with a question that won’t have much to do with the subject at hand, like the time he wanted to know the name of the Shakespeare play with the witches, even though at the time they were discussing the Bay of Pigs, so Professor Food calls on the smartest girl in the class, a chemistry major who wears exactly the same thing every day, torn jeans and a t-shirt that features a map of Alabama, and everyone hates the way she’s always got her hand up, answering questions so brilliantly that no one remembers the questions, dominating the classroom with her voice, making everyone feel inferior, Professor Food included, except he knows that no matter how forceful her ideas are, he could easily put her in her place by exposing the true reasons for most of her opinions, her recent claim, for instance, that Anchorage and not Juneau should be the capital of Alaska, since Anchorage is a larger, more centrally located city, which sounded like flawless logic to the rest of the class, especially since her voice was calm and confident, but Professor Food could have pointed out that the chemistry major grew up in Juneau and hates it, has always thought of Anchorage as an escape, but not a total escape, since Anchorage is still in Alaska, still a symbolic extension of her nuclear family, revealing her inability to separate from her parents, something she tries to disguise by always wearing an Alabama t-shirt, connecting herself with a hot and humid state that’s worlds apart from the frozen wastes of Alaska, but Professor Food can see through the deception, which is evident in the way the two states are spelled, since Alabama begins and ends with an A like Alaska does, another sign that she can’t psychologically separate from her parents, a dirty secret that once exposed would threaten the credibility of everything she says, but Professor Food knows that he himself has dirty secrets informing his decisions about what to teach and how to teach it, and he’s pretty sure that the chemistry major can see beyond his pedagogical surface, that she wouldn’t hesitate to make him look silly if he tried to cut her down to size, so he does little more than nod and smile when she talks in class, even though he knows that he’s tacitly affirming distorted information, which doesn’t disturb him as much as other people might think it should, since he believes that all information is distorted, serving the needs and interests of those who call it information, a term which insists on its own authority, its right to be right, an attitude which Professor Food is eager to place on the right wing of the political spectrum, though he knows that lefties can also be dogmatic, and some of his best left-wing friends are self-righteous people, and in his stronger moments he’s willing to admit that many people would describe him in the same way, but he tells himself that you have to stand for something, even if what you’re standing for is your belief that all beliefs are nothing more than patterns of syllables, a point that Professor Food frequently makes when the chemistry major gets cocky, but this time she’s chewing bubble gum, blowing a gigantic bubble, popping it, yawning and looking outside, recalling what she used to enjoy looking at, beyond the wall of billboards getting close enough to spit on, beyond the campus’s old stone buildings covered with ivy, beyond the quaint college town, its well-preserved nineteenth-century houses, beyond the abandoned factory district on the edge of town, the jumble of blackened buildings and obsolete smokestacks, beyond the motels beside the freeway, beyond anything that the word beyond might mean to her, finally deciding that Professor Food’s reduction of all knowledge to a pattern of syllables is in itself just another pattern of syllables, and she narrows her eyes and licks her lips and prepares to raise her hand, but suddenly there’s laughter, not the aggressively defensive laughter of students who think they’re way too cool to be thinking about Professor Food’s ideas, not the secretive laughter of students passing notes or texting about things that have nothing to do with the class, but the high-pitched cackling that comes with evil experiments in dungeon laboratories, maniacal scientists in long black robes surrounded by steaming vats and bubbling alembics, a sound that bothers her because it seems to have come from nowhere, because it doesn’t look like anyone in the classroom is laughing, and also because it seems to have come from a deep understanding of the lesson, something she’s apparently unaware of, and she can’t stand it when other people catch on faster than she does, leading her to think that maybe she’s better off dropping the class, so she gets up and walks out in the middle of a sentence about alchemy in the Middle Ages, missing what Professor Food regards as the centerpiece of his discussion, the claim that the physical universe is a language words can directly affect, not so much because they allow us to construct plans that bring about actions and changes, but more because of their musical powers, the incantatory play of images riding on syllables, transforming the harmonic vibrations at the core of subatomic space-time, even if the term core is wrong, suggesting a solid center, when current speculation suggests that in the subatomic realm terms like solid and center have no meaning, and even though the chemistry major is beyond the range of Professor Food’s voice by the time he starts talking about space-time, she knows all the words by heart, and all of her objections to the words by heart, the primary objection being that she doesn’t think Professor Food has any business lecturing about something outside his field, though she found it intriguing at first when Professor Food began each class by denouncing specialization, claiming that it produced arrogant, narrow-minded people trapped in disciplinary ghettos, but after hearing the same argument so many times she’s begun to think that Professor Food is only trashing specialized expertise because he’s insecure about his own expertise, because he can’t quite master the subject he claims to know best, so instead he’s mastered ways of changing the subject, secretly making it something it’s not, an academic sleight of hand that’s no longer fooling the chemistry major, and she thinks it might be fun to play with Professor Food’s insecurities, but now she’s passing a room where a bald man wearing a blazer is giving advice to a long-haired student wearing a blazer, a young man gripping the sides of his chair, nodding eagerly whenever the advisor pauses, a situation that normally wouldn’t hold the chemistry major’s interest for more than a second, but there’s a photo-realist painting of a moonlit cactus above the advisor’s desk, and there’s a large aquarium filled with tropical fish on a small gray file cabinet, and three feet away from the student’s battered sandals there’s a chocolate milkshake spilled on blood-red carpeting, and a ceiling fan is turning lethargically throwing shadows across the advisor’s desk, throwing shadows across closed Venetian blinds, throwing shadows across a white wooden bookcase empty except for an old black boot on the bottom shelf, and the pattern of shapes and colors and motions holds the chemistry major in place for fifteen seconds, and each of those fifteen seconds feels like fifteen minutes, and each of those fifteen minutes feels like fifteen hours, and each of those fifteen hours feels like fifteen days, but near the end of the fifteenth day the chemistry major farts, breaking the spell, and she finds herself moving forcefully toward the door at the end of the corridor, a rectangle of harsh illumination that hurts her eyes, thousands of fluorescent lights throbbing above towering walls of billboards, ads for anything and everything b
locking out the college town she used to see through the window in class, not just blocking it out but replacing it, or at least that’s the claim that several billboards make, ads for cell phones featuring people whose eager expressions suggest that making mobile small talk is all that matters, and the chemistry major is the only student on campus who hasn’t jailed herself in a cell phone yet, another reason Professor Food respects her even though he doesn’t always like her, but now she’s up against more than she can handle, staggering away from the harsh blasts of light in the doorway, rushing down the hall and down the stairs to the fire exit, but only getting the door half open before the blasts of billboard light force her to slam the door shut, leaving her with no voice, not even a voice to talk to herself with, though other voices talk in her head, urging her to buy herself back from whatever she can’t afford, and she staggers back into the classroom knowing she smells like someone who’s dumber than she was a few minutes ago, one of the few times in her life that she’s been aware of feeling anything like mental insecurity, though the feeling is quickly replaced by astonishment, the realization that something is radically different in the classroom, that Professor Food’s lecture has taken an unforeseen path, and he’s claiming that human beings have no moral right to exist anymore, that whatever people have done to each other for the past ten thousand years, it’s nothing compared to what they’ve done to the rest of the planet, which means that the only responsible action at this point is for the human race to destroy itself, a claim that the chemistry major would normally find absurd, but in the present situation the claim itself doesn’t seem nearly as important as the fact that Professor Food has stopped repeating himself, a change that she can’t account for since it happened when she was out of the class, a gap in her understanding that makes her feel even more insecure than before, adding to her fear that she probably looks like someone missing an obvious joke, that all her classmates can see how stupid she looks and feels, but no one even notices that she’s back, their eyes drawn instead to what Professor Food has drawn on the blackboard, something that might be a magical diagram, a woodcut from a medieval book of spells, a sign that conjures fires of purification through destruction, though Professor Food himself doesn’t know what he’s doing, only what his hand has done with a piece of chalk on the blackboard, an image drawn with artistic skill far beyond what he’s normally capable of, a picture of himself drawing a picture of himself drawing a picture of himself drawing a picture of himself, smaller and smaller scales of representation, culminating in a picture of a blackboard that’s really a mirror sketched in so carefully that it mirrors all the scales of representation, forcing Professor Food to face his own face in a distant reflection, and behind his face he can almost see the mirrored student faces facing the blackboard, as if he were nothing more than a talking mirror, getting consumed in the endless play of reflections, digested by what the students think he’s teaching them, digested by what he knows he’s not really teaching them, and the gap that forms between what they think and what he knows gets hot, gets impossibly hot, more than impossibly hot, and it can’t contain itself, flashing into quickly spreading fires that burn down the classroom, burn down the walls of billboards crushing the classroom on every side, quickly spreading all over the school getting hotter by the second, flames that sound like applause, flames that pause to enjoy what they’re doing, flames that leap and dance, composing a shadow play on the flat white sky, flames that seem comprised of all of history’s conflagrations—Rome Chicago San Francisco Dresden Hiroshima—flames with no connection to firebirds rising from their ashes, wildly approaching what might have been there before, the college town, its tidy rows of nineteenth-century houses, the abandoned factory district, blackened buildings and obsolete smokestacks, motels with their neon signs by the freeway flashing their vacancy, as if there would soon be nothing left but the vacancy, nothing to reduce to print and pictures, nothing to cut and paste and frame and sell, only a sentence twisting and turning away from where it began, making and remaking itself through changes in speed and focus, a tale that’s eating its tail, a tale untelling itself in the telling, feeding on the eyes of someone feeding on what he thinks it means, someone getting distracted and turning away from the page to find food.