The Undergraduates

by Steven Snell

  A fervent energy fills the amphitheatre. People clapping and cheering and smiling and whistling. I breathe the energy deeply and collect it. I tilt my head and shield my eyes to look to the sun and feel its heat against my face. The sun with a halo of rain about it. I close my eyes and lower my hand and continue breathing, the drumming and chanting and dancers still in me and the ovation still lingering. A thought appears: I’m not a deliberate machine. I’m not a deliberate machine. I’m not a deliberate machine. I’m not, I’m not. I’m. I focus on the heat. My lungs in my chest. I’m not a deliberate machine. I’m fumbling about, defining, shaping, turning away from, being shaped by, embracing, letting go. Ebbs between pessimism and hope, and there is no resolution between me and anything else. I don’t need to follow a path. I don’t need to think about will. I need to let go. Let go.

  Let go.

  I shield my eyes again and open them to the halo. I put on my socks and shoes and stand and shoulder my coat and take a deep breath and look straight ahead smiling and start to walk away from what I shouldn’t be, what I won’t be anymore, that part of me dead now behind. I need to believe in hope a little.

  8.

  I’m sitting on my windowsill watching people below pass by. My right foot hooked under my left knee, my right shoulder against the window pane. It’s bright outside. People up and down the sidewalk, in and out of shops and cars. A girl riding her sky blue bicycle with groceries in the front basket. A guy holding his girlfriend’s hand and a paper coffee cup in the other. An old woman in a bonnet picking through a garbage can. She finds a bottle and unscrews it, spills out the remaining fluid, shakes it and passes it into her shoulder bag of cans and bottles.

  My phone rings. I turn and pick it up from off my bed. It’s Cynthia.

  “Hi, Cynthia.”

  “Hello my favourite.”

  Cynthia has a voice that sounds like she smokes but never has. She attempted it once when she was living in France but she felt she looked tired so she stuck to drinking red wine at cafes while reading Michel Foucault.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “Like a helium hot air balloon on fire.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “I’m still caught in an updraft.”

  “Watch out for telephone poles on the way down. … What’s up?”

  “The ceiling.”

  She bought a camera a while ago to take pictures of trees and flowers and people and weather so she can enlarge the prints and paste them onto her apartment walls. She wants more life in her room but doesn’t have the discipline to feed a fish or water a plant. She’s not into the health lifestyle, just emotional comfort.

  “Shawn, the gloomy weather has ceased.”

  “It has.”

  “Are you bored? I’m bored.”

  “You could say I’m bored.”

  “So I’m bored and you’re bored. We can be bored alone, or we can go do stupid things around this stupid city and make fun of stupid people. Being pretentious always makes me feel better.”

  You’re right I tell her. “I’ll come pick you up. I drive; you take pictures. See you in thirty.”

  “Okie dokie!”

  I push End on my phone and slide it into my rear pocket. I go the washroom and brush my teeth and put on a sweater. I go to my kitchen and make toast and start eating it and wonder why I bothered brushing my teeth and shrug. I finish eating and put my dishes in the sink. I grab my keys from off the counter. I put my shoes on and exit my apartment and down the stairs and cross the street and push a button and unlock the doors to my car get in and drive the seven blocks to Cynthia’s apartment.

  I met Cynthia in first year. I was walking down a hallway looking for a place to sit and study. She was at a table with a girlfriend. I motioned with my chin and asked “taken?” She smiled and said, “Please.” I sat and pulled out a textbook and note pad. I started to take notes but I started to overhear her conversation with her friend and just wrote random sentences. She was saying how she could never be a Catholic because they believe autoerotic practice is a sin and “I can’t get behind any group that thinks masturbation is evil. Really. And let’s be honest, making finger painting a sin has nothing to do with eradicating self-pleasure to have a greater clarity towards God but rather implicit motivations for authority over not only our minds but our bodies.” She talked about this as though it were urgent issue. She continued on about how the Portuguese eradicated the Mayans not because of their superior technology and ship building measures. That was merely secondary. Rather, there’s little as powerful as the word of God and a boat load of men who’ve been cooped up on a sailboat for months. “A congregation of blue balled men? That’ll fuckup any civilization.” I laughed. She looked at me and said, “Sorry, you’re not Catholic I hope.”

  She’s standing on the curb. She’s wearing fitted black jeans and sneakers and a three button brown cardigan with an orange scarf wrapped around her neck, sunglasses hide most of her face. Her blonde hair is back as it always is, beautiful as she always is.

  I pull up to the curb and she smiles and steps to the car, opens the door and gets in.

  “Salute.” She leans over and kisses my cheek.

  “Hello.”

  “So?”

  “And?”

  “Sew buttons,” she says. “How’s life?”

  “It’s unfolding as it does.” I put my car in gear, look over my shoulder and pull away from the curb.

  “Where to?” I ask.

  “A place for photography, of course.”

  “Hard things or soft things. Buildings or people?”

  “I’m on my period, you choose.”

  “Thanks.”

  She looks at me raising her eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “It’s just blood, Shawn. You held my hand the last time I had food poisoning while I puked in the bathtub and shat in the toilet.”

  “Let’s be clear, I was holding your hand between you having the runs.”

  “And rubbing my back while I was throwing up into the bathtub.”

  “And remember what we agreed to later on your couch?”

  “What? My period is a completely different body function.”

  I smile and look sideways at her. “Anywho … what’s new with you?”

  “The Temp.”

  “Still in love with him?”

  “Mmm … I levitate when he fucks me.”

  Cynthia’s boyfriend lives in Haiti. They’ve been together since second year. He’s a civil engineer but doesn’t wear white socks or pleated khakis. The latter is how she first described him to me. She and Haiti have an open relationship. They tell each other it’s for the best. They justify it through their youth; they realize their need for sexual interaction. “The weight of a body on you, you can’t not have that in your life,” she said. They told each other sex is okay, they just don’t want to know about it – as long as it’s just sex. That’s what they agreed to. When it, or if it ever becomes more than fulfilling a niche in his or her life, then there needs to be discussion. They’ve been together for three years, no discussions.

  Cynthia works at a small marketing firm, a small office, three staff, one temp.

  The Temp may break the three-year silence.

  “You should see his cock.” Her voice sounds like she just learned how to swim.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  Cynthia looks out her window. “We all learned in first year Philosophy Plato’s axiom on the principle of specialization.”

  “You sound like Alex.”

  “How is Alex?”

  “Good, broke his arm.”

  “Oh no.”

  “He was skiing and biking.”

  “Ah, that’ll do it. Give that lovely fucker a kiss for me.”

  “I will. Now continue with Plato.”

  “Right. Each individual has a unique purpose deemed to her at birth. In fulfilling that purpose one finds internal unity and happiness. I thought
my purpose was Haiti. Now I’m not convinced. I think now it’s becoming The Temp.”

  Cynthia reduces her men into loose nominal titles. It’s how she allows herself to remove the personalities from the uglier situations she gets herself into. She says it’s how scientists removed themselves from the gravity of nuclear annihilation to work on the Manhattan Project. An experiment involving a hypothesis based on a methodology to inform an outcome. Various procedures by which independent and dependent variables were verified and falsified to arrive at a solution. The intent to confirm the hypothesis. Then blueprints and test detonations and the four tonne bomb hoisted into the Enola Gay and flown over a town and dropped and a naked girl running from hopelessness screaming towards a photographer.

  It’s more politically savvy to speak in these terms than saying the project was to create a bomb to annihilate the savages to confirm the United States’ economic and technological global supremacy. That’s what Cynthia says.

  She adjusts her watch moving it up on her thin wrist and places her hand on my thigh and continues, “Unfulfillment and depression comes from the suppression of one’s talent and thus failing to cooperate with others based on your specialization. A divided individual is an unhappy individual. Sex isn’t about a physical release. It’s pragmatic cerebrally and physically exchanged masturbation. At least that’s what Plato suggested, and I wouldn’t place myself above Plato.” She turns up the volume on the radio and looks at me. “Did I mention that he can make me orgasm with oral sex?” She points. “Pull over!”

  “Here?” I ask

  “Quick, Shawn, I see a tree that needs to go on my wall!”

  9.

  Cynthia’s taken her photos. We’re on a faded park bench watching the trees sway above. I’m sitting, her head is on my lap, her right hand strokes the ground near my feet drawing loose geometrical shapes in the soil. We’re quiet. She rolls her head to stare at the branches engulfing the air above us.

  I glance to where she’s gazing. “Tell me about the trees,” I say.

  I look down at her and brush her hair off her cheek. “Thank-you,” she says. “The trees…”

  An older man in white sweatpants and a white sweatshirt and white headband jogs by.

  I watch him as he passes us, then from him to the water rushing past the shore and then the cars up and down the street on the other side of the river, then back to the water and up to a falcon hovering in the breeze. Then the trees.

  She regains her thoughts. “Branches, they’re hierarchal, an assemblage of vectors originating at a trunk – the beginning … the origin, the purveyor. The trunk is the oligarchy feeding and orienting the populace, the branches reaching out, maybe trying to run away. … Roots on the other hand –”

  “I like when you talk politics,” I smile.

  She smiles back. “Roots, they’re the beautiful multitude. A greater unity, a sort of democracy where multiple connections seek a whole. They’re not stratification of class like branches. … Trees, they’re still the most beautiful objects I’ve seen. …Reds and yellows and oranges and greens in a bounty of harmony and contradictions. I love them.”

  “A lot.”

  “So very much so.”

  I shift myself up on the bench. Cynthia adjusts her head on my lap and continues. “But I tend not to think of roots because I can’t see them, just branches and their leaves on the ground and soil and bugs crawling on their limbs and bears scratching their hide against the bark. They’re such a perfect ecosystem we often walk right past. They’re so much more than framing for new homes.”

  I nod my head.

  She smiles and grasps my ankle and squeezes it. She lifts her head and kisses my thigh, sweeps her hair back and rests her head back down on my lap.

  We’re here, my back against the faded park bench and the river over rocks as if sliding down a body and the trees sway with organisms and the leaves rustle in a slight breeze like Cynthia’s chest rising and falling with her breath and nature just being.

  Shadows inch along. We stand and walk slowly back to the car, her arm wrapped around mine, her head on my shoulder.

  We drive back in that comfortable silence and watch the city muffled by the slide guitar of The Red House Painters on the radio. Cynthia calls this “our driving and drinking but not at the same time music.” It compels thought and driving and drinking are the best times for contemplating.

  She turns on her camera and holds it up to her eye. She takes a picture of an overflowing trash can. She takes a picture of my foot on the clutch. She turns and counts street trees and road signs and a bird swoops and lands on a branch. I’m driving just below the speed limit and no one is passing me. Cynthia takes a picture.

  A girl along the sidewalk with her cat on a leash.

  Inside my mind I laugh and a thought enters. Domestication, when humans began to control plants and animals in order to increase their utility. Pyramids, the wheel, bridges, shelters and crop rotation. Before that, nomadic, hunter-gatherer, mobility based on seasons and following food and game. How far we’ve come.

  The girl picks up her cat and motions to cross the street. I slow and the laugh inside my mind appears in a smile on my face and I nod for her to cross. She gives me a thank-you wave and hurries across the street.

  I slowly push down on the accelerator.

  A billboard.

  A cyclist on an orange bike.

  Banners on median light standards.

  A yellow fire hydrant.

  A row of newspaper boxes.

  Dailies, weeklies, condo marketing.

  My mind continues to wander.

  If culture is a unique product of all past influences, what is now?

  I up-shift into third gear.

  Where have we been?

  Heritage parks, hotels with theme-rooms, homes with vinyl siding stamped to look like cedar shakes. Simulations of real or simulacra of things that never existed in Time. Pictures and plaques in place of once erect buildings. History a product of current projections of what’s now in style, of the past now valued. Culture as a marketing brochure, a commodity. In and out of style like big hair bangs or martinis or boot cut jeans.

  Cynthia touches my shoulder. “You okay?”

  “I think so.”

  “What’re you thinking about?”

  I tilt my head to her. “Something about things having no place in history… what’s real, what’s not, what exists but isn’t real.”

  “Elaborate.”

  I take a long breath through my nose and slowly exhale. “I don’t know… What are we driving by that has a past?” I downshift and roll to a stop. I look left and turn right onto a narrow street fronted by four and five story apartment buildings.

  “This place feels ahistorical,” I add.

  “Yah.”

  I look at Cynthia and then back to the road. “The city murdered and its chalk outline is the buildings going up around us with brick podiums to look like a warehouse district.”

  She opens the window and sticks out her arm and moves it as if wing in the cool air. “Hmm.”

  “A city built as if nostalgic for something that has never existed.”

  Cynthia nods. She says, “We used to hunt and kill and attempt to satiate our grumbling stomachs. Now we eat the scraps, images bestowed onto objects with lifestyle tag lines, bigger, stronger, fitter, faster, be a better consumer. I think we’re utopiated, drugged on the opiates of utopian images of whiter teeth and more horse power and streak-free cleaning products and – ”

  “22-storey condominium towers in a once and now replaced chic warehouse district of upscale designer living.”

  “My apartment is an opiate,” she laughs.

  Cynthia leans her head against the seatbelt shoulder strap and looks up to the sky.

  We drift. In my car, through this afternoon, through time, through thoughts.

  We drift.

  We drift without destination.

  We drift and seek the murky, the fr
agments in life.

  We seek.

  We drift.

  “I want something authentic,” she says to her reflection in the passenger window.

  “… Something with meaning –”

  “With history, with a sense of the past, with a belief in the future grounded by a million nows. Past, present, future with a natural trajectory.”

  We drift. We hope, we try to avoid sterility, skyscraper condominium gated communities and hand sanitizer and plug-in air fresheners and cough syrup laced tissue and coffee to go cups and fake nails and sun tan spray and and and the pornography of everyday life.

  “Shawn?”

  “…”

  “Shawn, hello?”

  “What? Sorry. What?”

  “You just drove past my apartment.”

  I clear my throat. “I totally meant to do that.”

  “Right,” she says smiling looking at me.

  I loop the block and pull over and unlock the doors.

  She opens the door. “Thanks for the trees and recycle bins.” She leans over and kisses me on the cheek and steps out. “Ciao, bello.”

  “Bye, babe.”

  She closes the door and I watch her walk up to her building and unlock the entrance door and turn and wave and I wave and drive home.

  10.

  Cynthia’s camera is hanging around my neck. It’s windy. Standing lenticular clouds above me. The air is cool on the back of my hands stuffed into my pockets. I haven’t seen a person for five hours, since I left the gravel parking lot and crossed a swinging bridge and started hiking up this mountain. A half bottle of water and two bagels later and I’m the only person left on planet earth. I told her that I was going to drive up to Banff National Park and get away from the grey city life and touch nature and reconnect and take pictures for her walls. Driving home last evening after a day spent in the autumn sun to turn to rain and cool and it felt like I had a cold coming on and laid there in bed thinking I needed a day’s break from the city’s citiness. I needed wilderness and its moisture or a cloud stumbling over a mountain peak. I lift the camera to my eye and take a picture.