The Undergraduates

by Steven Snell

  We toss and ride and feel and breathe and roll and want and fuck, a thousand naked souls climbing the Pyramid of the Sun seeking some higher thing and moaning and moaning and cuming and shaking and ending in a way we haven’t ended before, then I close my eyes.

  The fourth and the fifth of September. The fourth and fifth of any month abutted. A Wednesday and a Thursday, any two consecutive days. The Gregorian calendar as a kid.

  When I woke, I’d start at the line that delineates two calendar days. As the day passed I would move laterally from the line delineating two days, the line between the third and fourth. The day was spent moving through the fourth box towards the fifth day, the line between the fourth and fifth. At night, when I would go to sleep, I’d have reached the line separating the fourth and fifth boxes. The line was no longer a division between two days, but a space in Time, a geometric and physical thing. As I slept, the line splitting the two days would be something. Time stopped at the line. Night, darkness, sleep, Time was not time, but space. It was a single black line but this one-dimensional thing became a location.

  It was a tragic grade-two day when I learned that the Gregorian calendar only represented reality, an illustration of it, it wasn’t literally reality. It was simply designed to give order and structure to time. A human construct. Get to work on time. Feed the animals on time. Start the machines on time. No longer was my life so purely represented in an object hung on a wall. I learned time, my life, was just an arbitrary thing. My course wasn’t plotted. The calendar only defined what days off I had from school. The days that were summer holidays, Christmas, Spring Break, Canada Day. The calendar, a man-made illusion. I still search for Space.

  There’s a book by Mr. Edwin Abbott called Flatland. It describes a world of interaction through varying dimensions: one, two and three. It reveals human’s influence in the three-dimensional realm. All lesser dimensions are ruled over. I’m a god to the two-dimensional. Place a coin on a table. Draw a circle around it. Slide the coin and it’s trapped. Two-dimensions. Lift the coin. Three-dimensions. I’m a god, but a mortal to the Fourth Dimension. Pluck out my organs without invasion, in and out without incision. I’m a lesser being.

  Maybe something more exists, the sun is not the centre of my universe. Perhaps there are large bodies existing around me. I’m just numb to it because my limited human senses can’t pick-up another dimension of Space. Something is there moving in and out of me, harvesting me. I could be just an alfalfa field.

  I open my eyes, Karen’s nestled into me. I look at my watch.

  “It’s almost ten.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Damn!”

  Karen kisses my cheek, sits up and looks down at me.

  “I don’t feel like driving home.”

  I nod, just slightly, recognizing what she’s saying without saying it.

  She turns and steps to the floor and looks back at me smiling.

  Take a picture.

  I watch her.

  I watch Karen pick up her dress from off my bed and pull it over her head. I watch as she passes it over her black hair, down over her breasts, over her stomach, her black pubic hair, down to her thighs, her knees. I watch her pull her hair back and twist it into a bun. She pulls on her sweater. I watch her crawl towards me and kiss me and say good-bye again as she does until another time, another day of the week. I hear the door close behind her.

  I’m lying here naked except for my watch another married woman gave me when her husband wasn’t around enough. I roll to my side and push myself up and swing my legs over the edge of the bed. I stand up. I look at myself in the mirror beside my door, only long enough to reflect me down to my thighs. What do I look like as a whole person? Does my chest go with my knees, my shoulders with my ankles? How do I look standing naked before someone? I’ve never been openly assessed, at least never objectively. But what I feel feels sufficient. I wonder about my beauty.

  Beauty.

  Beauty.

  A girl in Montreal once told me that I should not worry about that, but how I externalized it, took my sense of self and projected it out into the world. How I own myself. That’s what she said. Her name was Fiona. It was one of my fonder memories of Montreal. Seventeen floors up from Sherbrooke East. We tossed paper airplanes from my hotel room balcony. The next morning, we wandered the streets holding hands looking to see how far our inventions flew. Some made it down to Rue Michael, others not much past the entry-way into the foyer.

  We met looking through the wares of a street vendor and dated for the weekend but never had sex. We only kissed once and that was to say good-bye. We were kids who pushed each other on playground swings. We drew with crayons in colouring books and built houses and spaceships out of mini soaps and mini shampoo bottles. We went to bed late and constructed forts out of hotel sofa cushions and blankets and towels. I returned to Calgary and she went back to Edinburgh to continue her research on a feminist perspective of Neptunism. She told me that water was primary to all aspects of life. She showered for 40 minutes both mornings we stayed together. I thought it was part of her research but she said it was because she spent so much time on Georgian Bay in her youth. Showering was her fetal position, her safe place back to when the world was innocent and her biggest concern was reporting back to mom and dad for dinner. Then she went to Scotland to turn those youthful memories into theories.

  I turn from the mirror and step into the bathroom and remove my watch off and place it beside the sink. I turn on the shower and wait for warm water and step in. I wash my hair and my body and then lean against the tiles and breathe in the moist warm air. I sit down and tuck my knees to my chest and watch my feet turn red. I think that this is as close as I can get to fetal. I put my chin to my knees and picture Fiona. Her laugh, her sneakers. I’ve never heard Karen laugh. I shake my head. Time passes. Gabriella enters my mind and I hear her laugh and I don’t want to hear her laugh. I focus back on Fiona. I focus on the warm water and the pieces of me I hand out to others, take back, given back, forced back while the water runs down my body, between my legs into the current, along the tub, down the drain and washes away pieces of me.

  17.

  “It was as though I was 15 again. Fucking her was like humping a soapy wet facecloth you pull at your cock with – don’t tell me you haven’t tried it, Shawn.”

  Jacob is foaming my latte.

  I shake my head. I haven’t.

  He continues, “I remember when the female body – well, women in general – confused me. My early erections? I thought my penis was broken. It took a few years but I figured out why when I got an erection it pointed up and not straight out. I thought something was wrong. Thank-you Sex Education and seeing a diagram of how a vagina was angled to take an upwardly pointed penis.”

  “Glad you got it figured out.”

  “Me too.”

  “What happened last night?”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered which way the vagina was angled!”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad. She just lay there. Inert, like this mechanistic, gaseous body. It’s as though she was afraid of her own sexuality! She was so engaging and beautiful but holy hell there was a disconnect between her being clothed and nude.”

  “Well, perhaps a) you’re crap in bed or, b) she’s got some baggage.”

  Jacob gives me the sideways glance.

  “So it’s B then,” I state.

  The girl is Sarah. He told me he met her a few weeks back but last night was the first time they really talked. She sipped her coffee until it was cold, sat reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and occasionally looked over at Jacob working behind the counter, smiled and returned to her novel.

  Jacob hasn’t had sex since he finished grad school. He became unintentionally celibate and then summer came. Summer isn’t for sex, he believes. The only time someone should sweat is when someone is running. And the only time someone should be running is away from something. That
’s Jacob’s dictum. Then it was autumn and autumn is for sex. That’s his other dictum.

  Jacob shuts off the steaming wand and pours the frothy milk into the mug of espresso.

  “I tried all my moves, Shawn.”

  “Even knighting the Queen’s Bishop?”

  “Which one is that move again?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “They’re your moves!”

  “Yeah, well, she had none. No moan, no movement. Absolutely nada. Just bite me. Claw me. Dig your fucking nails into my fucking back. Something! Shawn, I would have preferred sliding a glass rod in and out of my urethra.”

  “What?”

  “They do it in the army.”

  “What?!”

  “True story. … Humping her paperback novel would have been more stimulating.”

  “You just prescribed ‘pounding the books’ a literal meaning.”

  Jacob sprinkles some cinnamon on the latte and hands it to me. I remember reading somewhere that men are less likely than women to wash their hands after masturbating.

  It’s quiet in The Barbershop today. The sun is angling in half way across the table I’m sitting at. A remixed Being Boring by The Pet Shop Boys is playing over the speakers. There’s a couple in the corner, each working their way through coordinated sections of The Globe and Mail newspaper. There’s a homeless man somewhere between awake and sleep holding his coffee lounged in a blue soft chair by the front door. Jacob’s co-worker is sitting in a barber chair smiling, we assumed messaging her boyfriend. A man holding a bowl of coffee is scratching something on a yellow note pad. A girl sits looking outside as though anticipating the arrival of someone. The entrance door opens breezing the posters and local advertisements on the cork community message board beside it. The morning passes like a ripple to the shore. I look at Jacob.

  He finishes pouring coffee into the grinder and says, “It was like that dream, you know the one, where you’re out grocery shopping, debating what to have for dinner.”

  “I don’t know that one.”

  “Yes you do. You’re in the dried goods aisle and you’re walking up and down looking for a dinner you don’t want to put much effort into but everything is packaged exactly the same and not helping your decision making. There is no one thing leaping off the shelf of boxes and cans and plastic wrapped nutrients. And then you come across something totally different. Its packaging entices you – it cries out from the blues and reds and greens and all the other spot colours advertising agencies use to make their products more special than the ones butted up against it. This one, this one is the revolution!”

  I raise my mug and take a sip of my latte raising my eyebrows.

  Jacob continues, “So you pick-up the package of revolution and start heading towards the checkout counter. But as you’re walking down cereal and pasta aisle five, you notice people are looking at you with an incredulous look. What, you think – did I take someone else’s cart? You check, no. Fly open? No. Is there something hanging out of your nose? You wipe it, nothing. Then all of a sudden it clicks. You were so busy debating between the rice vermicelli and the black-bean and garden vegetable chili when you finally decided on the cream of carrot soup that everyone in the entire store was naked. Buck-naked under florescent lights.”

  “That’s not right.”

  “Florescent lighting is pivotal to the story.”

  “Ah.”

  “Then all of a sudden you’re the great outsider, the anomaly, the first pimple on a pubescent face! Christ, you think, what should I do?! So you start tearing off all your clothes! You just want to fit in, be accepted! But the more clothes you peel off, the more that cover your body! Layer upon layer every era of fashion appears on your body! But not just last year’s ruffled cotton look, no – from the beginning of time! Fur, fig leaf, wool, leather, plate armor, chain-mail, old cotton, newer cotton, those whacky Renaissance tights, a hijab, a bustier, a burke, a three piece suit, a two piece suit, a Speedo, tie-dye, acid wash, bell-bottoms, a military commissioned one-piece jumper suit, Gore-Tex, sweatpants with a logo spread across the ass, a thong three inches above your pants and so on and so on, until you are removing post-contemporary clothing, Alexander McQueen runway haute couture and 2001 Space Odyssey! But the faster you remove your clothes in order to find some sort of acceptable fashion – nudity! – the more you realize you can’t! You have to get naked just like everyone else but there’s nothing you can do to fit it! So the Márquez reading girl takes you to her place and it’s the worst sex you’ve had since grade-school. It’s sad, Shawn. Very sad. But don’t judge me, or I’ll judge you. Something like that. I don’t know; it’s in the Bible somewhere. I think Jesus or Mel Gibson said it.”

  “Ha! You’re a collapsed iron lung.”

  “A very precious one.”

  Jacob turns to help a customer.

  Jacob has never believed in god, not ever. Both his parents sang in the choir but it was for “community, it’s just what they did”. They never went to church as a family. He dated a girl once whose parents believed in an Anglican belief sort of way so he went to church for Christmas Eve once to “do the right thing in a Spike Lee sort of way.” The mother fell asleep during the service. At Christmas dinner the following night he was saying thank-you for a memorable Christmas. It was the nap he was referring to. Jacob got farther away from God and more so religion when he began his research at university. Jacob’s master’s thesis was a culmination of theories critiquing the implications of capitalism on the nuclear family unit. He read Das Kapital twice but has little time for Marxism. He read fragments of anarchist literature but believes humans have some compulsion for power structure. The more he read, the more critical he got not only of the economic system imposed on families but also the other narratives that are supposed to guide us and give us shape and meaning in our lives: love, work, family, religion, etc.

  He wrote a paper in third year sociology about the Epic of Gilgamesh through a lens of Freudian psychoanalysis. He argued that because Gilgamesh did not capture the flower of immortality as it was thrown into the well, those adherents to the parable would have suffered from masculine inadequacy and fear of the yawning well tunneled deep into Mother Earth. Inadequate hand to grasp the flower, large well. Small, inadequate penis, large vagina. This illuminated that Gilgamesh must have been grossly under-endowed. And no society dominated by warfare and man’s inherent desire to seek and hunt and conquer would want to believe in a narrative where god has a small penis. He therefore reasoned that Christianity is so prevalent today, not because of some geographic determinist model of access to animal husbandry and distinct growing seasons at the right climatic zones but because when rulers were deciding what myth to portray to their unlearned masses to ensure adherence to their system of values and beliefs and later leaders around the world justifying carpet bombing other countries because their god is better than their enemies’ god, the believers in Christ out-voted the Gilgamesh rank because no male leader wants guidance by a small cocked god. A large penis is not only a symbol of fertility but also the shape of all weaponry: bullets, swords, canons, guns, missiles. No army wants tiny weapons.

  This is what he argued. He got a talking to about the threshold of academic conduct and an A.

  I can’t remember when, it could have been high school but Jacob told me once to question everything.

  I asked him where I should start.

  Yourself, he replied.

  His co-worker returns to behind the counter and Jacob takes the broom out of the closet and starts sweeping in front of the counter. He sweeps up to me and stops.

  “Plans for the rest of the day?”

  “To be determined.”

  “Unrelenting excitement?”

  “I’ll make you proud I’m sure. … I’m off.”

  I stand and shoulder my pack. We hug and say bye and I nod to his co-worker and she smiles back and I exit the café.

  I’m standing on the sidewalk. It’s bright out
and I shield my eyes with my hand. I feel the warmth on my face. It feels good, very good. I walk to the pocket park near my apartment. I unshoulder my bag and sit down on the bench. I close my eyes and feel the warm sun on me again. My face begins to feel lighter; there’s a levity in me. My body warms. I peel off my sweater and lay it over my pack and close my eyes again, warmth, I’m warm; warmth, it takes me to some other place. Some other place. Maybe Seattle. Seattle. It was warm the last time I was there, a warm spring day, the entire weekend. We walked the break wall and she told me about her home town, its secrets, her favourite places. Places to sit and people watch. Places to walk. A place to skinny dip. I inhale and smell the ocean, its salt, its life. I can smell Gabriella, lavender, her sheets; I can smell meals made in her kitchen. We’d cook and talk and eat and do dishes and maybe stop talking and do other things.

  A breeze picks up, I open my eyes to watch the sky sink and turn grey. I pull on my sweater. I shoulder my bag. I walk home.

  I lean against the counter in the kitchen, my arms crossed on my chest. I look to where Gabriella and I hung photographs beside the front door. We went through old magazines and found non iconic places that made us feel something. We covered the wall with them. Afterwards she said I had an obsession with graffiti. “See how mine are all of places that are bright and sunny? Your places are all dirty.” That’s what she said. I replied that dirtiness is a social commentary. “Whatever,” was her mocking response. That began the conversion of my apartment into our apartment, though I didn’t realize it then. She said I had no storage space. I said I just wanted a simple place. She didn’t know what that meant. I said more open space than not. She replied, “Leave the rest of the decorating to me.” She bought matching bedspreads and an area rug for under the bed. “Your floor is so cold in the morning,” she complained. “Eventually we’ll have to paint. I just don’t understand your paint colour scheme.”