She clicked around her documents, inserted a page break, and copied and pasted the grading rubric from an old assignment. Dorothy always distributed a rubric. The text was boilerplate, slightly modified from another instructor’s materials. Your paper should do more than pose a question, it said. It should offer at least tentative conclusions. She hated that she had to ask the students for something she was so bad at herself. But it was easier to defend her judgments when she could point to a set of standards, an authority outside her own fancies and impressions. More than once Dorothy had ended a meeting with an unhappy student by pointing back at the rubric and shrugging helplessly before its power. She liked to imagine God musing over His spreadsheet at the end of the semester. Locusts, C; Fires and Floods, B+. Interruptions to the Food Supply was failing, but might do better next semester. Plagues and Viruses got points for participation. How Death of the Firstborns would do depended not only on the despair experienced by those who lost their own child but on how much panic could be stirred up in the houses of those who were skipped over. If it were up to Dorothy all courses would be pass/fail.
She did a quick Google Images search for “tsunami”—students responded better to handouts when they included pictures—and dragged to her desktop and then the Word document a computer rendering of the Statue of Liberty half-toppled in the icy New York harbor. And now, on to the reading. It was Revelation week for the students of the Apocalypse. Dorothy took from her backpack a hardcover parallel King James/New International Version Bible and flipped to the end. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, the prophet wrote, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
The sea, like death itself, would be overcome. If creation had involved dividing the land from the sea, there was a certain sense in the last chapter doing away with the sea altogether. The sea, after all, was where life began; without the sea there would be no possibility of beginning again.
Next she pulled a tattered handout from her bag: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the sermon by Jonathan Edwards, which she loved for its rich and rumbling cadences as much as for its decisive passion. Their foot shall slide in due Time. She assigned it hoping that the students would learn that hell was not something waiting at the end of life but something that could open its maw at any moment, pull you in, and devour you whole. That the threat of destruction was here and now, as was, supposedly, the reward of paradise.
At the appointed time, Edwards said, God would no longer hold them up in these slippery places.
It had been some time now since Dorothy had felt herself to be held up. She and Rog had an ongoing debate about whether the times they were living in were truly, world-historically exceptional. Rog’s position had always been no, the times may be bad, but the fantasy of living in an exceptionally bad time was another version of the eschatological fantasy that one had been blessed with the great fortune of being born not somewhere in the long dull middle (muddle) of history but at its culmination, its apex, its Most Exciting Finale. These days, Dorothy was pretty sure that she actually was living at the end of something, or too many somethings to say. But as an end, it didn’t have the texture of kairos, of, as Frank Kermode wrote, “a point in time filled with significance.” It was instead the gruesome slog of chronos, of “passing” or “waiting” time. Ends came and came and they did not end. They sputtered and limped along. The walls of the world crept with something scabrous and bacterial, something that hovered between life and death, something that dripped and dribbled out and was flushed away. The word the doctor had used was “blighted.” It sounded like something the government bailed out, a Midwestern crop failure. The dictionary on her phone said that “blight” referred to a plant disease. But Dorothy was not a plant. Of that much she was certain.
She returned to the screen and fiddled with the size of the image. Whether the statue was drowning or bobbing in the waves was impossible to say; either interpretation was a forecast of a future scenario that had evolved from unthinkable to just possible and was now likely/probable within the next ten years. “Everyone” knew this and the knowledge weighed on them and they went on acting more or less as before, which in Dorothy’s mind was not evidence of stupidity or lack of care but some mixture of impotence and courage. Her therapist called it denial. “It is necessary to fully grieve for the lost future before one can build a different one,” she had said the last time they talked about it. When Dorothy asked how long it took to fully grieve, her therapist shrugged in a way that seemed overdone, like she was playing to the balcony. Then: “It takes some people their whole lives,” she said, in a tone so beige that Dorothy could not be sure if she meant to imply that a life of mourning was an exercise in nobility or a pathetic waste, or both, or neither.
* * *
—
The air was dry, and she inserted a finger into her left nostril, turning it, screwdriver-style, to release a single flake of snot. She rolled the nose shaving between her thumb and forefinger and it crumbled like plaster. Dorothy brushed it to the floor and smoothed her shoe over where she imagined it might have fallen. Her legs were itchy. She shoved a hand down her pant leg and scratched, then repeated the procedure on the other leg.
She took out her phone and checked her email: the usual junk and students asking for extensions. And this, a note from a student explaining that she would not be in class the next day because the leaderless environmental activist group of which she was a member was doing an action with a group on another campus. The student signed off with the word “together.” As in, “Together, Jessie.” Dorothy did not reply. She did not feel together with Jessie. She felt sympathy with Jessie’s principles while also feeling that Jessie was dangerously close to exceeding the maximum allowed absences, and was going to get her grade docked by a third.
Dorothy used to love email, used to have long, meaningful, occasionally thrilling email correspondences that involved the testing of ideas and the exchange of videos and music links. Email had been the way that she and the people she knew or was getting to know had crafted personas, narrated events, made sense of their lives. That way of life, alas, had ended. Long emails had ceased being the preferred mode of storytelling among her peers, or perhaps they no longer had so much to say to one another, and emails, though sealed with perfunctory hugs and kisses, had become businesslike. Sending a thoughtful email that she had drafted over several days and edited would, she knew, be a form of aggression; it would be foisting unpaid labor, a homework assignment, on a friend. She herself liked homework, but it was unreasonable to hope for such an email: There was too much television to keep up on, and if you wanted to know what someone was doing, you could usually find out on social media. Still, Dorothy had not stopped checking, expecting, or wishing that a good message might be out there, waiting in the ether just for her.
* * *
—
The itch traveled down to her calves. Maybe it would help to imagine that the itch was caused by the feet of tiny angels.
The tiny angels were dancing?
The angels’ feet were tiny, but were also shod in tiny pitchforks.
The angels were actually devils and they would dance on her skin until the end of time. Not in pairs, not slowly, but in an orgiastic mass, a packed club floor of ecstatic bumping and grinding, a chemical frenzy. She opened the Times app, squinted at the headline, closed it. A lot of people Dorothy knew said that they didn’t want to have children because they couldn’t count on the world existing for them. But Dorothy thought that the world simply was whatever children were born into. At least, that was the kind of thing she thought in theory. When she imagined the children of the future, the metaphorical children, they were floating on rafts roped together with the fall coats everyone had thrown away because there was no more fall, just as there was no more spring, although come brutal winter they would need to suture all the in-between-season coats together for w
armth. Perhaps she should be more together with Jessie. The children of the future would ask what she had done. They would request an accounting of her preventive measures. Their laughter would be high-pitched and malnourished.
“You signed an online petition?” they would say.
“I typed my name,” Dorothy clarified.
The raft children rolled their doe-like eyes. “Next you’ll be telling us you composted,” they said.
“No,” Dorothy said, to the tops of their sweet heads. (They were looking at their phones, where some raft scandal involving parties with whom she was unacquainted was unfolding.) “I didn’t like the smell.”
* * *
—
She messed around with the scale of the box, dragging the corner to make it big, then small, then she heard a scratching and looked up. At the far end of the table a pen, attached to the hand of a youngish man with a trim beard and round, wiry glasses, was moving rapidly over the lined pages of a marble composition book. The young man or old boy was half-hidden behind a tottering pile of books, but Dorothy could see that he wore a wrinkled shirt with a collar and that his nose, which was pointed down to the page like an arrow, was conceited and very finely shaped. She couldn’t see below his waist, but assumed that his boots were scuffed enough to indicate frugality and use but not so scuffed as to suggest rough use or poverty. He stopped writing for a moment to rub his forehead, and Dorothy saw, to her amazement, that the elbows of his jacket were patched. He looked like a stock image of a young professor, which suggested he was, in fact, an advanced graduate student, someone engaged in the time-honored pursuit of faking it till making it. At the summit of his pile was the familiar Hackett edition of Kant’s Third Critique, a tome that managed to appear imposing while still calling to mind the color of berry nail polish. It was by far the thickest book on the pile and ought to have been placed at the bottom to ensure the stability of the tower, but the student had either an imminent need to consult it or a desire that it be seen, or perhaps he found its presence inspiring in some way, like just having in plain view its greatness (as personified by its cover) goaded him osmotically to his own higher greatness. Dorothy strained to make out the titles of the other books, but she couldn’t read the spines and didn’t recognize the colors or typographies. The student must have felt Dorothy’s eyes because he looked up and before Dorothy could look away their eyes met and where Dorothy expected to see coolness or contempt, or perhaps a hint of sexual interest/flirtation or at least curiosity/assessment/rejection, she saw only a blankness; the student stared right through her, his mouth a little slack, so soft and unguarded it was obscene, and all the while his hand continued to move across the page. Then, with a decisive vigor, he shook his pen—it was a fountain pen—and returned his disinterested but committed gaze to the unblank page. He gripped it like a chisel and bore down on the tip with all his meager weight.
It was the shake of the pen, efficient and practiced, that made Dorothy begin to suspect that the student was slightly performing his role, relishing the appearance of intellectual labor, aware, more than she had originally surmised, of having an audience. At some earlier times of life Dorothy might have assumed that the show was somehow tailored to her, that it meant something about how he as an individual felt about her as an individual—whatever individuality he could conjure from her books, her clothing, appearance, expression, etc.—but by now she had come to understand that most social interactions were matters of function and role. She was there but she was not there. Like the love of one’s parents, or being someone’s type, or being born into the generation destined to witness the end of the world, it wasn’t personal.
The Kantian, if that’s what he was, again bent over his notebook, with his head slightly turned toward the wall. His hair was very short, it had been trimmed with an electric razor, and Dorothy could see an angry red pimple on his otherwise soft, ghost-white neck. She felt a rush of inexpressible tenderness, a longing to cradle him and kiss the spot where the razor or perhaps the toxins in the environment or perhaps his own genetic propensity to blemishes had oiled and irritated the skin. At one time Dorothy would have been curious to know what he was writing, would have wanted to soak up secondhand his painstakingly constructed argument, but now, faced with his raw youth, concentrated in the red spot on his neck, her only impulse was to scream: Save yourself! Before it’s too late! With sadness she turned back to her screen, which had gone dark. Out of the corner of her eye she watched as the student raised his gaze to the ceiling and tapped his chin with the pen. A ridiculous gesture.
She jabbed the space bar to wake up her computer and saved her document to the cloud. Did her comrade of the stacks feel joy as his pen moved over the page? Did he bask in the oceanic feeling of his mind expanding as it synthesized and surpassed the wisdom of the ages? He seemed to be filling the notebook faster now, turning the pages hurriedly as the pen scratched and flew, as if compelled by some angel of his own to get down the words before they ran away. Dorothy comforted herself with the thought that his flow of writing would have to stop, that even if his thoughts continued unimpeded he would run out of room in the notebook, and she was just losing interest in the whole pantomime of success when the student raked back his chair, threw his books in a twill duffel bag, and departed, as if he had suddenly remembered an appointment for which he was terribly late. He trotted away lightly, but his right shoulder was pulled down so far by the weight of the bag that he reminded Dorothy of a broken marionette, and the figure he cut under the harsh yellow lights was solitary and doomed. Without him the stacks were creepy and deserted, and she missed his company.
* * *
—
An hour later she ascended from the bowels of the library. It was raining heavily, and with one wet hand she held down the broken rib of her umbrella, lest her fellow pedestrians be impaled on the cheapness of her consumer goods. She tried to visualize the mountain of things such as umbrellas she had thrown away in her lifetime and multiplied that by three hundred million people in America alone, catching a vertiginous glimpse of the garbage sublime. It was as advertised: a feeling of passion and terror.
She was half a block from the subway when the rain suddenly ceased. She stopped to shake out her umbrella and the canvassers emerged from the mist like rainbows, shedding their plastic ponchos and taking the first steps of their eager sidewalk tangos, one skinny in round wire glasses with a toothbrush moustache and the other pink and bearish with a belly that he pushed forward when he walked, like it meant that he could be trusted.
“Do you have a minute for the environment?” the moustache asked. His tone was a master class of contradictions whose overriding effect was to signal that he was aware of the absurdity of his performance and was, like Dorothy, just trying to make it day by day in America. Unlike waiters, who never dropped their masks, the best canvassers foregrounded the awkwardness of the situation to create a temporary bond of fellowship that dared you to defy their good humor.
“I already donate,” Dorothy lied.
“Thank you!” Moustache enthused, holding his palm out for a high-five. “Have a rocking day.”
She looked up at the sky, as if something very interesting were up there—and then it was! Up in the clear yonder, where the clouds had vanished so quickly they seemed to be guiltily fleeing the scene of a crime, was—a rainbow! An actual ROY G BIV of celestial wavelengths! God had seen her lie and declared it Good! He parted the heavens and smiled His favor upon her!
Instead of slapping Moustache’s hand forcefully, and thus producing the distinctive clap of a successful high-five, Dorothy’s hand limply tangled with his. All of their fingers were damp.
“It’s cool, it’s cool,” he assured her, snapping and hitting his fists together in a fluttering jig. “Next time!”
Dorothy wiped her hand on her pants to rid herself of the interaction. She was at once mortified and stupefied at how easy
it had been, and as she descended the stairs she looked back, fearing and a little hoping that Moustache would have realized his error, and followed her underground to collect what she owed.
* * *
—
Down on the subway tracks two rats were fighting for an empty fun-size chip bag. The victor ran away with the bag between his teeth to lick the crumbs of salt in private. The raft children would mock her mercilessly for what she had done with the canvassers. Worse, they would mock her for feeling bad about it. “Nobody cares about your ten dollars a month,” they would say as the sunlight broke through the tattered sails, dappling the weathered logs of the decks. “You should have chained yourself to a power plant.”
There was no land in sight, so she had time to justify herself while they sailed along—the rafts had sails, they were sail rafts. “I found it draining to live zagging and zigging from exhaustion to emergency and back again,” she said. “I craved the simple privacy of not being a political actor.” The rats came back into view. Maybe they were different rats. By their smirks it was clear that the children did not accept the possibility of an apolitical life. “I had to buttress the borders of my self,” Dorothy said, “which was regularly assaulted to the point of porousness by digital media.” By their grins it was clear that they had long ago given up on wholeness. The seas, which had been calm, were starting to get agitated, and the children were losing interest in her. The waves rose up and the older ones tied the little ones to the masts for safety. “I hate group work,” Dorothy tried. “My personality is all wrong for cooperative action. For action in general.” Those who were not too busy securing the sails twisted their mouths with scorn in her direction, making clear that they who navigated the choppy seas because Dorothy had been too burdened by her bad personality to overthrow the government were not in the business of forgiving and exonerating. “Whatever I did,” Dorothy concluded lamely, “I regretted it.” The children had no patience for self-pity. They pointed to their raft and answered in chorus, “We live on a raft. Our exhaustion does not toggle with emergency. We live one hundred percent in an emergent state.”
The Life of the Mind Page 2
