Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  The sun had just cleared the hills to the east when I reached the Wisconsin River and the ferry at Merrimac. It was a whole lot smaller than the boats back home and connected to the far bank by a cable. The ride was dull and yet by the time we reached the terminal, and I saw for the first time the roads I would get to know very well, I felt much better about things. The air was cool and the sun came and went behind a screen of fast-floating clouds.

  At Waunakee—“The Only Waunakee in the World” if you believe the sign—I picked up County Q and followed that south toward the windward side of Lake Mendota. At the junction of County M there was a long, steady grade. Cresting that hill, I saw on the horizon the mirage of a city. It lay beyond a blue lake. In the center, the dome of the capitol, colored ivory in a shaft of sunlight that split the clouds, stood on a hill above a squat skyline. Nothing about the vision looked real, but I rode toward it anyway, trusting the map.

  PART II

  ROBOT WORLD

  11

  ROSEWALTER

  The courtyard bustled with human traffic: kids wrestling suitcases through doorways, mothers cradling electronics. There were rows of bike racks filled with rows of bikes, locked at odd angles, a comforting sight, but the obvious carelessness and neglect with which they were arranged convinced me that I wouldn’t leave mine there. The door beneath the stone arch bearing the name Rosewalter was a glossy brown and tacky to the touch, as I found out when I planted my hand on it, just below the Wet Paint sign.

  The door opened on a second set of doors, which in turn opened onto a lobby of black-and-white-tiled floors. Bulletin boards hung on two walls, bare except for the odd thumbtack and the silhouettes of flyers faded on the cork by the sun. The maritime smell of fresh varnish, and the walls with a fresh coat of crisp white, obscured the traces of the last class, I supposed, and left a blank canvas for the new one.

  Two guys came jogging down the stairs carrying tennis rackets. “How’s it going?” one of them asked me with such familiarity that I thought I must’ve known him from somewhere.

  “Great,” I said, but not until after they were out the door, the word echoing up the stairwell.

  At the third floor, I popped through another set of doors, with the word Neough above them on a wooden placard, and followed the numbers on down the hallway to 304, the ratcheting sound of the bike’s freewheel clucking assurance.

  The room looked more cramped and bare than it did in the picture in the brochure. It was half the size of my room at home. The mattresses were stained and sagged. The desks were small. There were two closets and two short, pine dressers just inside the door. I opened the desk drawer. It was empty except for a concert ticket, torn in half. Some memento the previous resident had wanted to save but didn’t think enough of to take with him. I threw it in the gray metal trash can on my way to the window. The fire escape was tagged with a red hexagonal sign that said “Stop! Alarm Will Sound.”

  I tried the mattress on the east wall. The springs shrieked so I dropped my bag on the other one. From the halls I heard shouting and a collision and thought about how different all this would’ve been if Grey had been there. Probably we would have dropped all our junk on the floor and gone to find Callie and then all gone out to have a look around, see this new place and get some idea of what it was going to ask of us. Then I thought about how if Grey and Callie were here I would always be hanging out with them and not meeting new kids. I thought about Mr. Reed. If I had asked him if it was for the best that I was down here by myself, I had no doubt he’d have said yes.

  I got antsy just sitting there, waiting for something to happen, thinking about everything I didn’t have and feeling like a refugee or a war orphan or something, so I struck out into the hall, down the stairs past guys and their parents hauling stuff in and out of the elevators in rolling canvas bins. It seemed like everyone had both a mom and a dad with them. I tried to picture Pop trailing behind me with a lamp in his hand.

  Outside I walked along the drive and down the first street I came to, which curved eastward and up a hill that wasn’t high but was steep and I felt in my legs the exhaustion of three days on the road. At the top of the hill, shaded on three sides by maples was a brick building with a domed roof that I recognized as the observatory from the brochures, though it looked better in person. Turning north, I could see the entire lake, which was strange to me. I felt that a lake that you could see all of at once was—as nice as this one might have looked in the sun—was, well, inferior to Superior. But there were more sails than you’d see in a similar stretch of Superior, and the green water and white caps against the red bluffs on the far shore were a pretty sight.

  I turned the tarnished knob to the door of the observatory, expecting that it would be locked. But it wasn’t. I opened it, stepping into the most amazing room I had ever been in. The curved walls were covered with bookshelves from the polished wood floors to a brass rail that ran the circumference of the room below the iron railing of a walkway that circled around at the height of the domed metal roof. The functionality of the space reminded me of Grey’s sail loft, a structure devoted to its purpose, and I thrilled at the thought that the whole university could be made up of such buildings.

  I didn’t see anyone inside and thought about calling out so nobody would think I was busting in or anything, but it was as quiet as a library and I didn’t want to disturb the silence. Walking along the shelves, I scanned the spines of the books, mostly reference works, guides and charts, with Roman numerals as titles. I followed the circle of the room to a rolling ladder that was anchored to the brass rail above my head. I climbed the ladder and found myself on the walkway around the dome, and followed it until I got to the narrow rectangular opening through which the telescope looked. The telescope itself was a remarkable thing, at least twenty feet long. It was rotated by an elaborate mechanism of cogs and pulleys that looked very old but impeccably maintained. I stood on my toes and looked backward down the lens into blackness, gray black concentrating into a center of pure black. I turned and poked my head out of the opening and saw pretty much the same view I had from outside only higher, and then somebody from below yelled out, “Hey.”

  Looking down, I saw a lady standing in the center of the room, shading her eyes to look up at me. She lowered her hand from her face and I saw that she was wearing glasses on a chain. “You’d better come down from there,” she said.

  I did and could tell from the change in her attitude that I’d scared her, but she wasn’t scared anymore. “You’re really not supposed to be in here,” she said, and as I got closer I saw that she was younger than I had thought at first, quite a bit younger.

  “Sorry,” I said. Up close, she was cute in the kind of way that people who don’t try to make themselves cute can be.

  “Are you a student?” she asked, pushing her glasses back onto her nose to put me in focus.

  “Going to be,” I said, one of those times when you kick yourself, because I could’ve just said yes.

  “Do you need something signed?”

  “Signed?”

  “Your registration form? You’re an Astronomy major?”

  “No ma’am,” I said.

  “Physics?”

  “History.”

  For some reason she laughed at that. “Well that’s good, too, isn’t it?”

  “I hope so.” I looked around. “Do you run this place?”

  Again she laughed. “No,” she said, “I’m a graduate student.” Her laugh was getting on my nerves, but then I didn’t know what a graduate student was so maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. I think she could tell she’d hurt my feelings because she said, “Do you want to see it move?”

  The truth was I was feeling kind of dumb and wanted to leave, but she’d been nice not to call the cops or throw me out so I said, “Sure.”

  We climbed a narrow stairway that actually spiraled up through the mechanism to a platform with what looked like a tractor seat bolted right in front of the eyep
iece. “Sit there,” she said. I did. She turned a key that unlocked a lever which she pulled. The entire room seemed to move. She gave me a look like you would to a kid going on a fair ride for the first time, half “isn’t this great?” and half “don’t be afraid,” which annoyed me because I was neither scared nor particularly excited to be on the thing. She kept her eye on a pointer at the base of the assembly that tracked a series of numbers and dashes. “We use the coordinates on the floor to orient the lens in the direction of the object we want to look at. After that we adjust the azimuth of the cylinder using this lever here. Nowadays,” she said, “this is usually done by computer, but this is more fun, don’t you think?” She pushed the lever forward and the platform stopped. “Now look through there and tell me what you see.” I put my eye to the eyepiece and saw nothing but empty sky, shimmering and bobbing in magnification.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You’re looking in the direction of the Crab Nebula and yet you can’t see anything. Do you know why that is?”

  “Because it’s not dark out?”

  “Exactly. Come in any Wednesday night when it’s not cloudy and you can look at anything you want.”

  She told me her name was Elise.

  When I got back to the room the door was open, and I heard voices coming from inside. I stopped at the doorway and saw my future roommate, Dennis Shipman, for the first time: sitting on the bare bunk between his parents, learning how to write a check. He was a small, pale kid, as short as Pop and skinnier, with skin like onion paper and vanilla-yellow hair combed in a part as straight as any line segment.

  “No, no,” Ship’s father said. “Don’t write ‘dollars.’ It says dollars on the check over here so you don’t have to do that. Cross it out.”

  They didn’t notice me, so I leaned against the doorjamb and waited for them to finish.

  “He can’t cross it out,” said his mom. “He has to write another one.”

  “He can’t write another,” his father said. “They cost money.”

  “He’s got to write another,” she said. “We can’t cash that one after he’s scribbled it all up.”

  The father looked at the check and said, “Write another one.”

  I knocked then. Three raps with the back of my hand. Ship jumped to his feet like I’d caught him abusing himself, and his parents watched him in case he tripped and busted something before they turned to see who was at the door.

  “304?” I asked.

  “Excuse me,” the mother said, probably thinking, the way I must have looked, that I’m a deliveryman.

  “Room 304?” I asked again, more unsure than the first time, because now they had me wondering too. His mother took a blue piece of paper out of her purse and scanned the page.

  “Zimmermann,” I said, “Tom,” before she could get to my name.

  “Yes,” the father said. “Dennis. It’s Tom,” and made a gesture that told us we were supposed to meet in the middle of the room. They watched him walk toward me and shake my hand as though they had practiced this before, too, like with the checkbook.

  “There you go, you two,” the father said.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said the mother.

  “Where you from, Tom?” asked Mr. Shipman.

  “Here in the state, sir. Up by Superior.”

  “Cranberry country,” he said, so loud I swear to God I jumped.

  “Yes, sir, I think you can get them up there,” I said.

  “In the store,” his mother said, standing and sorting her keys between her fingers.

  The father was not in the same hurry. “Bet you’re a beer drinker,” he said. “I know a place.”

  “You can’t drink up here, Dad,” Dennis said, though that wasn’t true.

  “In my day, the RAs would turn a blind eye,” Mr. Shipman said.The mother looked at me. “Some other time,” she said.

  I would find out later that Mr. Shipman had done pretty well for himself in bowling equipment and Mrs. S. was the trophy that comes along with that kind of success. “We remember our years in college a little too well,” she said, as she steered Mr. Shipman toward the door. I caught a whiff of her perfume on the way by. It smelled sweet and European.

  “What was the rush?” I asked him after they were gone.

  “She doesn’t like to fuss,” Ship said. “You know they got racks for your bike downstairs.”

  “Not for this one,” I said. “It’s invaluable. I practically sleep with it.”

  He sat on the bed that didn’t squeak and asked, “Which one do you want?”

  “The one you’re on is fine with me.”

  He stared at me, then got up and moved to the other bunk without saying anything about it. The springs moaned when he sat down.

  Opening the top drawer of one of the dressers I found Ship’s boxers folded and arranged according to color, light to dark. I dumped the contents of my bag in the other drawer.

  “Is that all you brought?” he asked.

  “It’s all I have.” I lit a cigarette.

  “Can’t smoke in here,” he said.

  “Who says?”

  “It’s in here,” he said, holding up his copy of the residence manual. When I reached for it he pulled it away with a smile on his face and I figured out he made it up.

  “Liar,” I said and blew smoke in his face.

  He threw the book at me. It fluttered and fell at my feet. I knocked him over a chair and then we were rolling on the floor, him clawing at my face, until I got his shirt up over his head and pinned his arms behind his back.

  “Quit it,” he said.

  “Give,” I said.

  And he seemed just about to, when there was someone yelling, “Hey, hey, hey,” and tugging at my collar, pulling me backward into the air and away from Shipman’s throat. Thinking I was getting ganged up on I spun around ready to slug whoever it was and saw a round, fleshy head sticking out of an enormous white T-shirt. “Get him off me, Howie,” Dennis said.The fat guy looked at the paper he was holding and said, “Zimmermann?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

  “Howie Klug, your resident assistant,” he said. “What are you doing to Shipman?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Not much,” Dennis said.

  Howie glared at him. “Let me give you two a quick heads-up,” he said. “You know what’s sure to get an RA written up around here, surer than if some guy from his floor jumps out a window? That’s having to switch guys out of their room ’cause they can’t get along. You know what happens to me if I have to switch two residents?”

  “What?” Dennis asked. He’d gotten his shirt off his face and was clawing at the furniture to get to his feet.

  “I don’t know,” Howie said. “This has been my floor for three years and I never had to switch anybody. Whatever’s up with you two, work it out, and if you can’t work it out, seek professional help. Get unpacked, make your beds, and turn in.”

  “I haven’t got any sheets,” I said.

  “What? Why haven’t you got sheets?”

  “I kind of had to travel light,” I said.

  Howie cussed under his breath and left but came back about an hour later with a folded stack of bed linens of different colors and tossed them on a chair while Dennis was dropping socks into drawers and slamming them shut. “I asked around the upperclassmen,” Howie said. “You’ll have to give them back when you get your own. The sheets go to Johnson in twelve, the pillowcases to Larsen in nine, and the blanket’s Anderson’s over in Frautzer.”

  Dennis didn’t talk much for the rest of the night, though he didn’t have the will to ignore me altogether. Over the next weeks, me and Ship—as I and eventually everyone on the floor came to call him—worked out a truce. I agreed to smoke in the room only when he was gone and then only by an open window. In exchange, I reserved the right to never talk to him again unless I felt like it. Of course, I didn’t tell him about that part of it. He believed he had won total victory, when the truth was I v
iolated my end of the bargain whenever I felt like it and at the same time never let him forget the power of the silences I imposed upon us. As I did that first night, lying awake in the dark in our new room, listening to Dennis Shipman cry himself to sleep.

  12

  REPUBLIC

  The day you pay your tuition is the day you’re on your own. No one to tell you where you’re supposed to be or when you’re supposed to be there. You can major in Modern Dance or Molecular Biology, make dean’s list or flunk out, as far as anyone knows or cares. That kind of freedom can be welcome, if you grew up with one person in your life who is always telling you what to do. It can also be intimidating—if you’re used to one person always telling you what to do. Especially when you’re walking west toward the edge of campus for course registration with no clue of what to do when you get there.

  Shipper, red-eyed from the night before but also anxious for me to forget the fight ever happened, wore a canary-yellow Lacoste tennis shirt and yellow plaid Bermudas, with matching watchband. He had, by my count, three of them, the watchbands, in patterns of blue, red, and yellow, and two pairs of shorts in each color. If that had been the worst I could’ve said about him we might have become friends. But it was not. And what was worse was enough to make me despise him. Ship was a man who understood that he could get what he wanted provided he was careful not to want more than he could get. In my case, all he wanted was for me to like him, which was reason enough to not like him.

  The Stock Pavilion to which we were to report was just that, a stock pavilion, a low structure of stone and wood with the interior shaped like a rodeo ring and a floor of dirt and sawdust. A network of ropes directed us toward a row of tables with letters of the alphabet above them. When the clock struck 9:00, the line surged forward. Some kid let out a loud “Moo,” and there was laughter and then another moo from somewhere down the row, and then everyone was mooing.