by Chris Lynch
Fabian led on the way up to the third floor of the admin building, but I am definitely leading the way down. He’s fallen off the pace, and when I hit the bottom floor and burst out into the fresh air, he is nowhere near me. I breathe deep and heavy as if I have barely gotten safely to the surface after a deep-sea dive.
“What did you say?” Fabian asks, exiting the building with a lot more breath to spare. It makes him sound more calmly rational, but that’s an illusion.
I’m looking down, focusing on the buttons of the vest, which are fighting me as I try frantically to free myself. “You saw it. I’m so glad you were there. The whole thing was fixed. The day those two soccer freaks came to the team as walk-ons who could kick the ball a mile without costing any scholarship money at all, I was a goner. What a snake that guy was.”
“A snake? Are you referring to the athletic director? Mr. Peter Evans? Pete? The guy who just served us gingerbread men that he made himself?”
“That’s the guy.”
The buttons are frustrating me into a frenzy now, refusing to budge, making me feel so trapped and unable to breathe properly.
“Hey, hey, hey, stop that,” Fabian says, rushing up and smacking my hands down. I stand still like a good boy while he does some button-whisperer thing that makes them open up for him at the slightest touch.
I feel my chest become a little less constricted as he takes the vest off me.
“It wasn’t like that, Keir,” he says. “And he most definitely wasn’t like that. You were treated with respect and consideration, hosted in the office of a very busy guy, who, as far as I can tell, didn’t have to bother explaining anything to you at all.”
I pivot and start my angry stomp back down the hill.
“See,” I say, “once again, you just don’t understand this stuff. That man just stole my scholarship. Four years. Stole my ticket, my education, my chance. Stole my life, basically, is what he did, because I gambled everything on this plan, everything. This was the life that had to work, because I cashed in the other one to get it. How can you not understand that?”
“I can, Keir, I can absolutely understand.”
“How could you ever possibly understand?” I bark loudly, the fat syllables rolling down the hill in front of me.
For a few moments the argument dies down, which is probably good. But as I keep up my fury stride, I sense that he’s not just quiet, he’s not there.
I stop and turn to see him thirty yards behind me, his arms straight down by his sides, the vest he loaned me dangling from one hand.
“What?” I yell.
He stands.
“What, Fabian?”
He stands. Foot traffic passes him going up and coming down, left and right.
“Are you coming?” I call. Nothing. “Fine, stand. See ya.”
I head on my way again, rage and gravity propelling me at a good clip. I pump the brakes some. I slow right down. I stop, and I growl, and I reverse direction.
He’s all smug and satisfied as I come trudging all the way uphill in surrender.
“You make me feel terrible, Keir, watching you, listening to you. Miserable stuff.”
“You?” I say. “I marched all the way back up here to listen to you tell me how terrible it is for you?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t want to tell you that, forget that. But I have to wonder, is this how it went, how it’s gone, in the past for you?”
“There is no past for this. I was never cut from any team before. Never.”
“But it didn’t happen this time, either. You were not cut. You got thrown off, as a result of your actions. That’s a critical difference. The critical difference. Did you not hear that?”
“Coach was going to cut me anyway. Already made up his mind.”
“He says he wasn’t. He says he was planning to give you more time to prove yourself. Mr. Evans said that was what he wanted as well. Nobody wanted you to fail, Keir.”
“No, but they wanted me to do what I told them I didn’t want to do. They tricked me, lured me into coming here to play defensive back when they knew I wanted to be a kicker. Then when the soccer jerks fell out of the sky and dropped a bomb on my whole plan, my whole second plan . . . the writing was on the wall for me.”
“Well, they say otherwise, but it doesn’t matter, because you’ll never know, because you made the decision for them.”
“Yeah, then if they really wanted to give me more time to prove myself, then why don’t they just go ahead and do it? Take me back on the team. I’m right here. All they’d need to do is ask, say, ‘Sorry, Keir, it was just a misunderstanding and we’ll get past it.’ ”
It’s his turn to breathe heavily for some reason.
“Because it was not a misunderstanding. And because you practically forced them. Teams, of any kind, consider assaulting teammates to be among the most serious of treasonable offenses. Nobody would ever give you a chance to do that twice. If it were me, I wouldn’t take you back either.”
And there we have it.
“Right, okay,” I say, raising my hands in surrender. “You too, I guess. Anyway, you get your private room back like you were expecting before I blew it for you.
“And don’t expect me to come crawling back up the hill again,” I say, marching back down the hill again. “Because I won’t.”
“Ah, cripes, Keir,” he says, and I’m happy to hear his goofy loafers slapping the ground as he runs after me. Victory is sweet. Not to mention increasingly rare.
“Did you ever even read the commitment you signed with the school?” he says in the same pest voice he was using before I defeated him.
“I’m sure I did.”
“Right, then you know that they were never guaranteeing you four years. Those agreements are reviewed at the end of each year to make sure you keep up academically, athletically, and as a citizen who isn’t playing football for the respectable college by day and breaking into houses, terrorizing the townspeople by night.”
I whip over in his direction as he says this, looking for what he’s getting at.
Turns out he’s just getting at what he was already getting at. “But none of it matters if you get fired. They don’t owe you anything.”
I look away from him again, but I don’t have any back-lip this time, and I don’t have the fight left for it.
“I came so far for this, Fabian,” I say.
“I know, man, that’s rotten. But look on the bright side: they’re paying for this semester, which I think is generous and which, might I say, you would not have gotten without my forcing my way into the meeting to save you from yourself.”
I nod, three times, four, then five, then eventually I don’t bother raising my head back up.
“You were quite a thing to see in action,” he says, and I lift my head because I’m so demented I think for an instant that this is a good story. But I see his sorry befuddled grin, and my head drops once more. “I think if you were left to your own devices, by the time you crawled out of the room, you would have owed them a pile of money.”
“I appreciate everything you did, and everything you tried to do for me. Despite how it might seem. I am grateful.”
“Well, now you have a semester of breathing room to get yourself right. Concentrate on getting a solid foundation laid down academically and socially, while working out your finances for next semester and the three great years coming after that.”
“Yeah,” I say, meaning nothing. Because I’ve got nothing. No money, and no clue how this system even works. This sad state of affairs exists, of course, because somebody always took care of all the details for me. And I was always happy to let him.
It felt like a great arrangement at the time. Now look at me. Or better yet, don’t.
We reach the bottom of the hill, where a road splinters off to the right toward the chapel and the Yurt beyond it. Straight ahead leads to the halls of residence.
Fabian starts veering right while I’m prepared to let gravity
and momentum take me home, a junk car being rolled the last hundred yards after running out of gas.
Until I’m veering. I am being tugged rightward by the tail of the shirt, which I pulled out as soon as I didn’t have to play dress-up. This could be a magnetic force, or something more biological, a homing instinct, but Fabian’s shirt seems committed to going where Fabian goes.
Or it could merely be that Fabian is tugging me.
“Come to the Yurt. You might enjoy it,” he says.
“Aren’t you going there to do work of some kind?”
“Work? At a Writing Center? No, no, no, a place like this isn’t where people come to write. It’s where they come to refine their skills in the equally important craft of assing around publicly, the way real writers do. And if the crowd is made up largely of other assing writers, all the better.”
He’s still towing me, even though there’s no longer any need. I’m happy to check out the place finally. Happy just to be invited along.
“I’m not an assing writer, however.”
“Hey, you never know. You could have the makings of a massive assing writer. Personally, I’ve seen a lot of the right stuff in you already.”
I’m not quite keeping up with him verbally, though I often don’t. There’s a fairly strong sensation of ridicule coming across nonetheless.
• • •
The Yurt looks like a flying saucer built by lumberjacks. It’s round, with vertical dark wood slats forming an exterior skin, and a band of sly squinting windows running all the way around. It looks like it’s wearing a gray felt hat. It is the last college structure on this side of campus, planted midway between the tired-looking old stone chapel and the point where the woods become truly dense. If you kept on going that way, the next stop would be Joyce’s beloved glacial erratic stone.
There are flyers and posters tacked up and completely covering the outside surface for about three feet on either side of the door. The door itself is rounded on the top and appears to be arching a big eyebrow above the level of the roofline all around it. There is little activity in the leaf-strewn space around the Yurt, and just some soft words over spare jazz music coming from within it.
It is a strange and strangely isolated little place. Right away I feel at home here, in a way I have been hoping to feel at home since I left my home.
Then I’m caught up short just as Fabian pulls the door open and ushers me in. It’s there again, in big yellow painted letters orbiting the room.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
“What’s that doing here?” I demand, as if Fabian had some explaining to do.
“Why wouldn’t it be here? It’s poetry. This is the Writing Center. Poetry is writing. . . .”
“Yeah, but that one. That exact one. It’s like it’s following me. I never saw it before in my life, and now I’ve already seen it twice since I’ve been here.”
He nods at me, smiling. “The ghost of the plowman poet stalks Keir Sarafian!”
“Shush,” says the only other person in the Yurt, a guy with straight long nearly-white blond hair, hunched over a mixing desk and a microphone.
“The campus Internet radio station also uses the space. Campus radio takes things a lot more seriously than the Writing Center, I can tell you.”
“I didn’t even know we had a campus radio station.”
“I think that’s one reason that they’re so serious. Nobody really pays them any attention, because for them it’s all about the gear and gizmos more than what they do with it. Just proves my point that technology is a fad, and it’s only the words that endure.”
“Yes, like these enduring words. They’re starting to give me the creeps, like they’re stalking and talking to me personally.”
“Well, maybe,” he says, doing a slow-motion pirouette like he’s seeing the words for the first time. “I mean, the title is ‘To a Louse.’ ”
“What does it mean, Fabian?”
“It’s the singular of ‘lice.’ ”
“The rest of it, if you don’t mind?”
“Well, basically it means that a person would be much less of a shit if he knew what he really looked like.”
I’m doing the same slow spin move, reading the words again, then again, trying to feel them better, to see if poetry itself could honestly have the kind of power that can make a guy see things differently.
“So then it’s the school motto or something? Has the place got a tradition of attracting assholes, is that it?”
“Yes!” the guy at the radio controls barks, before adding a shush that also sounds like a bark.
“I’m outta here anyway,” I say, heading right back the way I came. What was seeming homey a few minutes earlier now feels claustrophobic, airless, and unwelcoming.
“Where are you going?” Fabian says, walking right behind me.
“Going to live in the forest,” I say, thinking that that would be the ideal situation if I could manage it.
“Want company?”
“No,” I say. “I definitely do not want company. The trees and my thoughts will be plenty.”
“Okay,” he says, dropping back, then heading to the Yurt for whatever it is he gets out of the big stupid coconut of a place.
I am just about to enter the woods proper when I stop and call out to him.
“I was wrong about the thoughts and trees. I don’t want to be alone with them. And I think they feel the same way.”
We tromp through the woodland, being largely quiet aside from the crunch beneath our feet. It has the effect of talking something out just the same. Better than the same, because sometimes the words themselves can turn out to be your biggest nemeses when you are trying to sort your way through stuff that wants to resist sorting.
“Who was she?” Fabian’s voice comes light and stunning, a forest thing with wings and knowing.
“Who?” I ask because that is as much as I dare to ask.
“The girl you loved so much that you couldn’t have any girlfriends. Was that who Gigi was? Is that why you dream her, like when you called out her name?”
I walk faster, much faster.
“I told you,” I yell out, “that was just a sound I made. Gigi was not a name, it was a sound.”
The sound of her name. For the love of God, that is the thing, some power, that makes my heart break open again at the sound of it, break right into the two hearts all over again. I am petrified at the combined torture of both of them slamming my insides mercilessly, trying to kill me. For no reason other than that I loved a girl so much, insanely much. And that I still love her absolutely, irredeemably. Guiltily. It’s this, causing life to become a pounding, throbbing nightmare until I need to flee from it.
Which I couldn’t even do. I know this now, am terrified by it, and am running this very minute because of that fear, as if I can somehow elude this thing by shifting and dodging and sprinting through the woods more maniacally than anyone would have thought possible.
• • •
“I’m sorry,” Fabian says as I stare down at him. “I promise I meant nothing by it but to try to understand your troubles a little better.”
It took him ten minutes to catch up to me, and between the healthy dash through the cool piney air and the bit of isolation to clear my thoughts, things are already significantly better than when we last saw each other.
“I don’t have any troubles. But thanks.”
He nods amiably, folds his arms in a relaxed manner.
“I’m very glad to hear that, Keir. What with the difficult meeting this morning, the turmoil that I know you suffered through all last night, and the generally accelerating erratic behavior leading to here and now, and finding you squatting like a well-dressed gargoyle on top of a great big boulder, I might have drawn other conclusions. So thanks.”
“It’s a glacial erratic,” I say.
“What, your disorder?”
“No, the rock. It’s a
glacial erratic, which I think means I am behaving precisely the way I am supposed to. As long as I’m residing up here.”
“Okay, that’s it, then. You have finally found the place where you belong.”
“I have,” I say.
He finally appears like he’s reached what could be called fed up. He unfolds his arms, holds them straight up in the air, turns, and walks briskly away.
It makes me anxious, to see him go. It’s not the end of the world, to have Fabian Delmonico march away from me in a conclusive way, but it manages to have an end-of-the-world feeling to it anyway.
“Can’t you be happy for me?” I call at the point where I lose sight of him for the trees.
“I can’t, Keir. I’m not going to lie to you to make you feel better. Especially since it won’t make you feel better, just like nothing seems like it’s going to make you feel better. I can’t pretend I have you figured out. I can’t even pretend to know you, really. I don’t actually know anything about who you were even the day before you showed up at the residence halls.”
It’s getting very cold very quickly up on my rock, my glacial erratic where I belong.
“Maybe there was nothing before that day, Fabian. Just, maybe that.”
“Okay,” he calls. “You popped into existence right there. But you had some football scholarship money when you did. Now you don’t. How do you figure to apply for any kind of tuition aid or loans or anything if there’s no you with an educational transcript, a previous address, a family . . . ?”
“I’m an orphan,” I snap.
“You are like hell an orphan. And on behalf of all us real orphans everywhere, you can go fuck yourself. I’m going to leave now, in the hope that you are like a tree that falls in the forest and if there’s nobody there to hear it, he doesn’t make a sound like an asshole. Now, I don’t know whatever you did back there, or whatever happened to you. But the only rock-solid certain thing I do know is that you have to call your father. And if you don’t, then I’m going to do it.
“Good-bye and enjoy your rock.”
and a hard place