by Junot Díaz
She sat down on a stool and ordered a vodka and soda. Sipping her drink, she gazed numbly in front of her, the way she looks numbly ahead while taking a public bus. Just like the experience of riding a public bus, a strange man read her refusal to make eye contact as an invitation to speak. In this case, it was the bartender.
“Have you tried our new vodka yet?” He brandished a tall glass bottle near her face. The label was on heavy white stock; the font looked imperial. “We just got it in from Poland,” the bartender said. “I’ll pour a sample in your next drink.”
From his excitement she guessed that she should be excited too.
“Thanks,” she said.
M. chose that moment to be beaten into the room by the wind. His coat was furry with rain and she could see bits and pieces of his hair where they’d splintered out of his knit cap. He pounded his boots against the floor mat. She waved hello with an arc of her arm and hated herself for it.
“Hey,” he called across the room. “Order me a beer, will you?”
She tried, but the bartender wasn’t interested in just a beer. Even her second guess, “whatever’s on tap,” wasn’t specific enough. There were six different beers on tap and each of them had special qualities; by the time he was finished explaining each one, M. had shook out his hair, hung up his coat, taken a seat, and asked to hear it all again.
She felt as though she’d hailed the last train to Dunkirk and they hadn’t even spoken yet. The two men parried hops and malts while she sucked her drink to the dregs. Though she couldn’t fathom what it might be, she must have done something right because at least the bartender mixed her another drink with no more demands about the new vodka.
When M. had his beer at last he turned to her. “So how’s it going?”
There was a cautious note in his casual tone, and he kept an arm on the bar between them.
“Good,” she said. “I mean things are good, just a little weird sometimes.”
“Huh.”
“How are things with you?”
“Great.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I’ve been working on this paper with Professor Niemeyer—you know him?”
Naturally, she knew Professor Niemeyer, he was only the foremost linguistics expert on this side of the country. Everyone knew him; many grad students saw the slim chance of getting to work with him as the only reason to apply for this postdoc.
“He liked my work on Husserlian bracketing. You remember that paper I did? Anyway, we’re doing a piece together. It’s kind of like a precursor to my bracketing work, a textual study on this ancient Greek story for The Journal of Linguistics. I mean, I can’t even speak ancient Greek but that’s kind of the point, creating your own meaning, right?”
“Wow, that’s great. You’re doing it for The Journal of Linguistics?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t sure if I was ready, but Niemeyer thinks I am.”
“That’s . . . amazing. I didn’t know you were working with him.”
“If you haven’t seen me around, that’s why. He’s keeping me pretty busy. Between that and my DJ gigs I’m barely sleeping. And I haven’t had time to catch up with anyone, including you. How’re you doing? You’re doing something with ethnic studies, right?”
“No. No. I studied philosophical theory. With you.”
“Of course. We were in those tedious sections with Hubel, oh my God, I’ll never forget, they turned me off of Kant for life.”
“Then why would you assume—?”
She stopped asking her question because M. was going red, like an iron poker gathering heat from a fireplace. Besides, he was talking over her, going on and on about the sections they’d taken together. Instead of listening to him she tilted her head to the side, so she could hear the noises in the bar. A pool game had started up behind them. She focused on the thwack of balls hitting balls, and the grunts of men achieving their own small victories.
She listened for so long that even M. fell silent, and it took only a few of those silent moments for him to get nervous again.
“So you said you wanted to talk to me about something.”
“Right.” She shook her head back in his direction. “No big deal. Something weird happened in one of my undergrad seminars, I wondered if you’d ever experienced anything like it.”
“Hmm.”
“I was giving a lecture and some kid got up in the middle of it. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about, in a really loud voice. So I threw him out of class and he withdrew the same day.”
“Wow.”
“Weird, right?”
“Well . . . yeah. What were you talking about?”
“Barthes. Has anything like that ever happened to you?”
“Barthes? He got angry with you over Barthes? I mean, even a kindergartner can understand Barthes”—he was laughing, and it took her a long moment to locate the name of the emotion that she was feeling.
Anger. That was it. M. was making her angry.
It took her a long time to understand Barthes, not in a superficial way but down to the soul, because she didn’t think that there was anything simple about Barthes’s direct approach or his furious clarity. If M. had any sense he’d know that. But M. didn’t know he was insulting her and he wasn’t kind enough to care.
“So I take it nothing like that has ever happened to you.”
The ice in her voice surprised both of them. M. stopped laughing and shifted around on his stool. “No,” he said without looking at her. “It hasn’t.”
There was silence for a moment, and then they spoke of other things. M. mentioned a girl he’d been dating. She hadn’t asked, so it felt like he brought her up on purpose. He sounded smug. It left her feeling even angrier than the crack about Barthes.
When she got home that evening, she was drunk, but not drunk enough to forget the evening. Instead of falling right to sleep she stretched across her bed, fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling until she was too tired to go through the motions of washing her face and brushing her teeth. While she dozed, she felt the overhead lights twitching behind her eyes.
Days passed. The first frost was late. She rejoiced in the dry crispness of the air and the velvety dark of longer nights. Even the rain, with its icepick sharpness, seemed like a glorious way to stretch out the autumn. When the snow came, smothering the rust and gold, there would be no more mossy smells from the earth and no more ink-line paintings in the sky. Though she’d always loved the snow, with each passing day she loved the autumn more. With every thought that arose unbidden she remembered what she was missing outside.
Two weeks after meeting M. she went to the department office to drop off some paperwork on a new data-privacy policy. The secretary, whose nameplate read JANET, was banging away on her keyboard. Janet didn’t look up when she walked in; she was hunched over with her hands clawed atop the keys. Janet hit them with the audible noise of a puncture wound. The keyboard popped around her desk like a firecracker.
Janet remained oblivious so she kept watching, wondering why the bizarre scene seemed familiar. The keyboard, the claws, the noise—after a few fruitless moments a memory sprang to the front of her mind. Janet typed on a computer like her mother did. Even though her mother knew, as Janet must know, that computer keys liked softer strokes.
She’d explained this to her mother seventeen years ago and the lesson hadn’t stuck. Maybe it was because she was only fifteen at the time; her mother had trouble believing that there were things she knew better than her mother ever would. It turned out to be the last year she spent in her parents’ house, the last year she was nothing more than her mother’s bright, beloved kid.
They were having an adventure that day. Her mother was always up for an adventure. So they’d set off for the public library, giggly with excitement. Her mother had gazed at her with pride: her daughter was going to show her how to use one of those new desktop computers.
She’d turned on the monitor and pointed out the mouse. Her mother
liked the mouse. Her mother had oohed and aahed as she sketched over the foam pad with it, making tipsy circles on the screen. Then her mother began to type as if the keyboard were a typewriter: with hard, emphatic strokes.
She’d pulled the keyboard away from her mother.
“Mom,” she’d said. “You don’t have to slam each key. Watch me.”
Her mother had been offended. She’d snatched the keyboard back.
“You can be soft if you want to,” her mother had said. “Maybe that works for you. But the keys won’t listen to me unless I’m strong with them.”
It was such a strange thing to say that it flash-froze in her memory. All of the philosophy in the world couldn’t explain her mother’s reaction to her in that moment. She must have had an odd look on her face when Janet finally looked up at her.
“Yes?” Janet said. “What do you need?”
“Here’s my data-privacy form.” She passed it to Janet, who studied it with raised eyebrows. “And while I’m here. Would you mind checking the number of students I have in my Thursday seminar? Class number is A316. I’ve had a little trouble with the computer in that classroom.”
“That’s strange,” the secretary said. “Can I see your ID?”
The university issued an ID to everyone who studied or worked on campus. Every door of every building had been activated to open at their touch. It was like the plastic-card bodies were filigreed not with raised type but magic. She carried her ID everywhere, so that she might open all of the doors, but she was unused to having strangers demand it from her. She gathered her patience and fumbled in her bag.
While she was rooting around, she tried to remember if she’d seen Janet before. Most of the others had grown accustomed to her face; maybe Janet was new or a recent transfer from a different department. That could also explain the childish typing. Perhaps Janet wasn’t familiar with the office equipment.
When she found her ID she passed it to Janet, who glanced back and forth between the card and her face.
“You look different now,” Janet said.
“Hmm,” she said.
“But we were all younger when they took these pictures,” said Janet, marveling at her ID under the light of the desk lamp. “We all looked different.”
If she looked different in her ID picture, it wasn’t because she was so much younger last year, it was because the photographer didn’t have the proper lighting. She knew this only because he’d told her as much. It was his way of apologizing for the fact that her face on the ID was an orange smudge.
“These color filters,” the photographer had said. “They’re designed for lighter skin. I hope that’s not a weird thing to say. I don’t see color, myself. But the camera does, and if I had known I’d have brought different ones.”
“If you had known what?” she’d asked him.
“I mean, they said philosophy department,” he’d said, laughing.
She didn’t like his joke.
She cleared her throat and said to Janet, “So, those numbers for my class?”
“Right.” Janet handed back her ID, pushed her chair over to the computer, and proceeded to bang away with such agonizing slowness that she was tempted to wrestle the keyboard from Janet’s claws and do it herself. Centuries passed. Empires rose and fell. Then Janet turned with a bright smile and said, “Twelve.”
Her knees wobbled. She grabbed the desk ledge before the sudden sway in her back tipped her over.
“Really? Twelve?”
“The seminar on the politics of the quo-quo—”
“The quotidian.”
“Yeah, that. Twelve enrollees.”
Janet tilted the computer screen so that she could see it. The number winked from the bottom of the nest of spreadsheet boxes. Twelve.
“That’s . . . interesting. Can I see the names?”
“Sorry, miss. Those are in a separate file that I don’t have the authority to access. New privacy policy. You should have access, though, since you’re supposedly the teacher.”
Supposedly. “Yes, but I’ve been having computer problems in that classroom.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Aren’t you going to offer to contact the computer technician?”
The secretary blinked twice. “Is that what you want?”
“Is that what I want?” she sputtered. “What I want is for things to work. What I want is students who know how to behave . . .”
“Me too, honey,” Janet said. “Me too.”
The secretary was looking right at her, and since she felt like her outburst was inappropriate, she backed out of the office and made her way down the hall. When she got inside the seminar classroom she sat down in the chair and leaned back as far as she could without smashing her brains across the floor.
Then she whiplashed herself upright and confronted the computer. It was an ancient beast; it’d probably arrived with a dot-matrix printer. The hard drive churned rigorously, grunting as it pulled up her class list. She tore the mouse to the bottom of the pad. Eleven enrollees.
She stood up, marched down the hall, shoved open the department office door, and threw herself into the room. The brass doorknob hit the wall with a bang that echoed down the corridor.
“You again?” said Janet.
“Me again,” she said. “I checked the computer. There’s no way it can be twelve students.”
“Huh,” said Janet, lifting her eyebrows with the exquisite slowness that now seemed familiar. “I thought you said that computer didn’t work.”
“I don’t know what’s going on with it. I only know that it was showing a different number of students in that course and that the discrepancy is important.”
“You’ll have to email the tech folks and set up a repair appointment,” Janet said.
“That’ll take a week,” she said. “Will you pull up the file again?”
“I’m working on something else right now,” Janet said. “Maybe you can come back?”
“Look, this is important”—the exhaustion in her voice made her cringe—“I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.”
Janet kept banging on her keyboard.
She glanced over at the window. The gray flesh of the sky. Against it the sleet jumped out in steel-bright daggers. With no more leaves to marvel at, this would be the only color she would see for the rest of fall. She was still watching the gray when Janet realized that she hadn’t gone away.
“Hey,” Janet said.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“You wanted your class file. I pulled it up again.”
She peered over Janet’s shoulder at the computer screen. By squinting hard she could just make out the number before the blinking cursor—that absolutely wrong number of twelve.
“Can you pull up the names of the students?” she said.
“That’s now outside my jurisdiction. Only the course instructor, which is what you say you are, and the department head and the dean have the authorization to see those names. Privacy.”
“I know what the new policy is,” she said to Janet, and the exhausted whininess was gone from her voice. In its place were coldness and anger, and a sort of detached hatred so deep it wasn’t fathomable to her.
It was a voice for taking a hostage, she realized, but who was being taken?
“As I mentioned earlier,” she said, “there are some problems with the computer in my classroom. So how can we solve this problem?”
“Maybe you could come back when you’ve calmed down,” Janet said. “You seem angry right now, and it’s making me uncomfortable.”
“I think my question to you was quite clear,” she said to Janet.
Janet stared at her in silence.
The identity of the hostage was also quite clear. She felt a certain lightness at the revelation of her fate.
“What are you going to do?” she said to Janet.
“I think I need to call someone,” Janet said.
“That’s a great idea, Janet
, calling someone who can help me get the class list.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant calling someone about your behavior in this office. You don’t belong in here right now.”
She laughed. She threw her head back, opening her throat. It was a vulnerable thing to do, giving someone like Janet access to her softest part, and if Janet could do anything to physically harm her she would have been afraid. But Janet had already harmed her in all of the ways that Janet could harm her, and it had only shown her what she already knew to be true.
“Call the department head,” she said. “Call the dean.”
Her voice was still low and furious. Janet wanted to call security, not the department head or the dean, so she backed out of Janet’s office in order to call Chair Mikael Sbocniak herself. Janet, picking up the phone, was staring at her as she backed into the hallway, and into the embrace of her big laughter.
She turned as she stepped out. She started to run, and those last words of Janet’s—you don’t belong here you don’t belong here you don’t belong here—jangled in her mind, taunting her with their truth.
Unfortunately, Mikael Sbocniak and Ernst Lichtenberg and Tomas Ulriksen won’t understand why those words are true.
So she must tell them something else.
Standing at her apartment window, she can see a bird plucking at the mud hole next to her building. A tree had fallen there in the spring, so the mud hole was still raw and jagged and new, and the snow last week had turned it black. When those first flurries fell, the temperature was too high for them to freeze on the ground. That snowfall was a victim of circumstance, like so much of the avant-garde.
But those flakes prepared the way for the next ones, which are supposed to arrive today. It’s a good five degrees colder than it was a week ago, and tomorrow will be cold, as well. This time the snow should stay.