Pile of Bones
Page 7
“You told me in the car that pilsner gives you unholy gas.”
“And that was true.”
“I’m going to open all of the windows,” Andrew said.
“Good idea,” Shelby replied. “While you’re up, can you put the Brie in the oven?”
“You brought Brie?”
“It’s amazing with Triscuits. Which I also brought. No thanks necessary.”
I could start a fire in the oven, he thought idly, while unwrapping the soft cheese. I can see the headline now: Promising grad students maimed by Brie.
When he returned, Carl and Shelby were mired in their favorite debate: whose discipline was clearly better.
“History deals with things that exist,” Carl was saying, “or at least things that used to exist: fortifications, weaponry, governments. English is totally subjective.”
“You sound like these essays.”
“Historians actually have to dig around in the dirt.”
“When’s the last time you were near dirt?”
“I’m more of an archivist.”
“Literature has to be read within its historical context. I’m as much of an archivist as you—I just don’t use an indecipherable method of notation.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Chicago style!”
“Are you kidding me?”
Carl looked up. “Andrew, what do you think?”
“I think that none of us are getting jobs, so it doesn’t matter.”
“I can’t believe you just went there.”
He sat down. “I’ve been thinking—”
“Don’t become a librarian,” Shelby interrupted him. “I know it seems like the greatest job in the world, but the competition is just as fierce.”
“That’s not it.” Andrew blinked. Some of the fuzziness had vanished, and he could remember more about the previous night. “I’m still thinking about the fibula.”
Carl stared at him, still holding a Funyun. “Dude. No parking.”
“We’re not in public. This is my house.”
“He has a point,” Shelby said. “The rule of anachronism cuts both ways. Talking about work or school when you’re in Anfractus weakens the power of the city. Parking, when you’re not actually in the park, weakens the fabric of our lives here.”
“Maybe it brings us closer to being citizens.”
Shelby gave him a look. “Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know. It seems more interesting than marking forty-five versions of the same essay. In Anfractus, things are different. We have a quest—not some job that barely lets us break even, but a real quest, for the first time ever.”
“You don’t just become a citizen,” Carl said. “It’s not like applying for a student loan. Once you cross that line, your life here is over. Anfractus claims you.”
“A person could do it gradually, at first.”
“What would you tell your dad? I’m going to live in a made-up city?”
“At least finish your thesis,” Shelby said, only half-joking.
“I just—” Andrew stared at the carpet. “Sometimes I don’t know why I’m doing this anymore. Going to class, spending hours in the library, trying to write something original when I know that my ideas aren’t impressing anyone. When I’m in the park, I have a purpose. Lares talk to me. Things actually happen.”
Carl touched his shoulder. “You’re just in a funk, man. Besides—none of us has the resources to become a citizen. We wouldn’t survive the night.”
“Speak for yourself,” Shelby replied. “I’ve spent nights in the city before.”
“Right.” Carl took a sip of beer. “In the arx, surrounded by sagittarii.”
“There’s no place that isn’t dangerous at night.”
“The Arx is impregnable.”
“That’s not historically—”
“The Brie’s ready.” Andrew rose. “I’ll be right back.”
He lingered in the kitchen, spreading warm cheese on Triscuits, listening to them debate who would die first once the sun went down. He poured himself a glass of wine. It would clash with the coffee, but he didn’t care. He needed a distraction, something to keep him in this world, rather than endlessly wondering about the other.
Dad might even believe me if I said I was going to live in a made-up city. We used to build cities out of sofa cushions.
He remembered storming the love seats and leather sectionals, then fleeing to the bunk bed section, which provided the best cover. His father would chase him, brandishing a fluorescent light tube like a bastard sword. I’ll never yield the Papasan chairs! Not even under torture! And they would run in ever-expanding circles, around the legion of recliners and glass-topped tables that formed the boundaries of their kingdom. Even now, when Andrew found himself in strangers’ living rooms for the first time, he always wanted to arrange their furniture into a citadel. They were rarely amenable to it.
He brought the plate of Triscuits back to the living room. Shelby was viciously circling something on an exam. Carl saw his wineglass and nodded in approval. The next hour was a frenzy of eating and underlining. They managed to reduce their piles. Carl was only marking historical précis, which required fewer comments. After the third essay, Andrew stopped trying to explain what a caesura was. Gradually, marking-and-drinking became just drinking.
“I want to write a song for my exes,” Carl said, half-reclining on the couch.
“To apologize?” Shelby asked.
“No. I’m a great boyfriend. The song would celebrate their best qualities. Like, my ex Trish worked at Cinnabon, so I’d sing about how she always brought home icing in little containers. You could stay up all night after huffing one of those.”
“Access to icing was her best quality?”
“Definitely one of them.”
“My exes don’t need a paean. They need a curse—something I could plug all their names into at once, to save time.”
“Really? There must have been a few good ones.”
Shelby refilled her wineglass. “Brent cheated on me, and stole my Costco membership, for some weird reason. Simon gave me mono. Extreme Kim broke into my car just so she could reposition all of the mirrors. Who does that?”
“Did you dump her?”
“Sort of. I wasn’t firm enough about it, though. She still thought we were dating when she saw me dancing with Stacey, who was just a friend. Things got ugly—hence, the breaking and entering that occurred later.”
“You have to be firm about these things,” Carl said. “I have a speech.”
“That’s cold.”
“Not at all. It works. I cover all the essential points and, by the end, we both know that it’s over. There’s no ambiguity.”
“I never really know when it’s over.” She sighed. “There’s always that moment, where you look at the other person and think, ‘Maybe we can turn this around.’”
“You never really turn it around, though. You just end up exposing an uglier angle.” He shook his head. “Better to make a clean break.”
“With footnotes.”
“Endnotes.” He looked at Andrew. “What about you, buddy? How do you end things?”
I don’t begin them, he thought.
The truth was that most of his relationships had been short-term. He’d meet someone for coffee. They’d tell him what a good listener he was, not realizing that he was too nervous to talk. Coffee would devolve into quick sex, and then he’d find himself back on the bus, slightly disheveled and amazed that he’d been naked with another human only a few moments ago. He remembered their apartments, their bowls and teakettles, the hospitality of their animals, even as their names faded. He remembered their smiles and the shock of being in their hands, the odd trust that you could feel with a stranger.
But mostly, he remembered waiting for the bus afterward. For a moment, he’d expect to see the lot of them walking down the street. He’d give them a questioning look. Did I forget something? They’d all kiss him.
“Andrew?” Carl asked. “What are you thinking about?”
“The bus always comes.”
“What?”
“Never mind. It’s not important.”
Carl got up. “I have to piss. Then we should stop by campus. I have some interlibrary loans waiting patiently for me behind the library counter.”
He disappeared into the small, turquoise-tiled bathroom. The fan rumbled to life once he’d closed the door. Shelby turned to Andrew.
“What was that all about?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Your spacey comment about the bus always coming.”
“I never know what to say when people ask me about relationships. I just wanted to change the subject.”
“I don’t believe you. I could tell you were thinking about something.”
“I’m always thinking about something. Last night I was awake until three A.M. thinking about how humans probably learned their pack instincts from wolves. The night before, I couldn’t get to sleep until I’d declined the noun gladius in all five of its cases. My brain is a hamster wheel plugged into an electric current. There’s no use in trying to figure it out.”
She shook her head. “No. Something’s going on with you. All this talk about becoming a citizen, abandoning your life here—”
“It’s just talk. I don’t really do things, remember? My faucet’s been broken for three months, and all I need to do is buy a tiny piece of rubber from Canadian Tire in order to fix it. Simple as replacing an elastic band. Instead, I jammed a screw into the place where the handle used to be, and I use a wrench to switch from hot to cold.”
“That’s more than a little odd.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“I can drive you to Canadian Tire.”
“I know that too. I just—” He shrugged. “It’s like, whenever I think about visiting the store, I can see all of those aisles full of bright, necessary things wrapped in plastic, and they start to spin, like some wheel of misfortune in my head. All the colors blur until I can’t see straight. Then I have to turn out all the lights and watch an episode of Big Bang Theory, just to remind myself that people as socially dysfunctional as me actually exist.”
Shelby smiled kindly. “Maybe we need to get you a pair of blinders, like they use for skittish horses.”
“Could I decorate them with stickers?”
“I don’t see why not.”
He sighed. “I keep dreaming about lares.”
“I dream about all sorts of park-related things. Our subconscious minds are still plugged into that world, even when we’re on this side of the park.”
“The dreams are becoming—vivid. And I saw something yesterday, when we were at the cafeteria. Nobody else noticed, but I saw—”
Carl emerged from the bathroom. “Were you talking about me?”
“What’s it like to live in your world of delusion?” Shelby asked him. “Are there imaginary tabloids that discuss your every move?”
“Of course. There’s even an academic journal: Carl Studies.”
“Good luck getting council funding for that.”
He shrugged off her sarcasm. “Right. Let’s make some coffee and walk to campus. If we take our time, we might even sober up on the way. We’ll hit the library and the computer lab—”
“I hope you’re referring to your own department’s lab.”
“Come on. LCS has the best printer.”
“The fact that History still embraces sketchy ink-jet technology doesn’t mean that you can use our printer whenever you feel like it.”
“Nobody’s going to notice.”
“They will if I tell them.”
“Where’s your grad student solidarity?”
“Pony up some cash for a new printer cartridge, and I’ll think about answering that.”
Andrew brewed another pot of coffee. He had only two travel cups, so he poured his into a Dodd’s Used Furniture mug instead. He’d just have to walk carefully. They gathered up their marking, then left the house. They must have been an odd sight, passing around a box of Triscuits while they walked down Albert Street, one of them carrying a chipped porcelain cup. Shelby led the way. Andrew lagged behind, distracted by all the branches and debris that a recent storm had knocked to the ground. Carl talked about the paper that he was working on: a study of Byzantine buttons and their role in courtly culture. He was applying for a travel grant to visit the Royal Ontario Museum, which would result in endless blurry photos of silk scraps and stonework.
As they continued up Albert, the parliament building loomed in the distance. It was a grand Victorian edifice, which saw surprisingly little use throughout the year, except when it was being toured by schoolchildren. The sky was clear, which meant that people were gathering on the edges of Wascana Lake, sharing ice cream or riding rented bicycles. The bugs were starting to come out but hadn’t yet formed an impenetrable curtain. Andrew sipped his coffee while Carl and Shelby forged ahead. The phone number of Dodd’s Used Furniture, printed in Comic Sans beneath a picture of an easy chair, reminded him that he needed to call his father. Neither of them was especially skilled at carrying a conversation, but they did enjoy watching Storage Wars together on speakerphone. They would talk during the muted commercials, then return to the narrative, laughing at the same parts.
They crossed over to Broad Street, which led them to campus. Most of Plains University had been built after 1966, in the brutalist architectural style: heavy on concrete, sharp corners, and balconies that resembled darkened honeycombs. The buildings huddled close together, in an effort to keep students from freezing when they had to go outside. In a province where the temperature routinely dropped below –30 degrees Celsius in the winter, it was essential to minimize your exposure to the elements. Nobody walked anywhere. If you were willing to put on a snowsuit and a balaclava, you’d always have the streets to yourself. Now that they were in the middle of summer, people wore as little clothing as possible. Students generally put on shorts at the first sign of thaw, in spite of the chill wind that persisted. They soaked up the sun desperately, knowing that it wouldn’t last. Torontonians or Vancouverites would have regarded snow in May as a freakish portent of doom, but in Regina, it barely turned heads.
The campus reminded Andrew of a city-state, where boundaries and jurisdictions were often vague. Newer buildings encircled the older colleges, which were Lutheran and Jesuit, respectively. First Peoples University stood some distance away, still technically a part of campus, but separate enough to maintain its isolation. In contrast to the maze of concrete that was Plains, First Peoples University had no angles; it was smooth, a wave frozen in glass, gleaming as the light rushed through it. Andrew loved to visit their library—it was like being inside a silent quartz filament—but Shelby tended to avoid it, for fear of running into her mother. The two of them were engaged in a long-standing battle over her thesis.
They entered through the Innovation Centre, which contained both the university bookstore and the global food court. It was late enough that everything had closed, save for the soup place that had pioneered “chicken barley” as its most popular hybrid. Andrew liked the campus at this time of day. Most of the frenetic undergrad activity had died down, and the students who remained were attached to their laptops, mainlining coffee. Light flickered from the student gallery. He couldn’t quite make out what was being projected, but it had something to do with tractors and face painting. They walked past the computer store, whose various tablets had all been locked up for the evening. Andrew smiled at the orange clock next to the stairwell, which had been frozen at half past six for years. He liked to fantasize that it was the clock from the movie Labyrinth, and that if he stared at it for long enough, David Bowie would m
aterialize and give him directions to the goblin city.
As with most universities, you could gauge the operating budget of each department by what building materials they used. The science wing was new, a mixture of polished concrete and glass with elevators that announced each level. Formulae had been etched into the walls. As they neared the Faculty of Arts, the floor abruptly changed to linoleum. Missing ceiling tiles reminded him of the Mr. T sliding puzzle that he’d had as a child. He wanted to arrange the dimpled panels into something more interesting, but there wasn’t a ladder in sight. He contented himself with studying posters. Queer Student Alliance. Spanish Club. Weekend Bible Study. Shadow students high-fived, held hands, or pumped their opaque fists in the air. Promotional materials for the university itself featured bright-bordered testimonials, with diverse youth frozen in the act of reading or picking up a baby.
They reached the Douglas Wilson library, which was virtually empty this late in the evening. Only the dedicated were stationed at computers, avoiding essays by repeatedly checking their social media profiles. The librarian at the information desk was reading a copy of Alan Moore’s Top 10, oblivious to the student who’d just burst into tears because he couldn’t get his flash drive to work. Andrew gazed up at the faux vaulted ceiling, which lent a devotional character to the study space. Whenever he entered a library, he became fiercely aware of his desire to vanish into the stacks of print, to be declared a missing title. Although most of his students favored electronic media, he could never escape the smell of mellowing adhesive, the moth-wing texture of aging leaves. Carrying a stack of hardcover books made him feel invincible.
Carl approached the circulation desk. He flashed the smile that routinely got him out of paying fines. Andrew had never mastered this particular strategy. He was about to say as much to Shelby, when he noticed her staring fixedly at the bank of computers.
“What is it?”
“She’s here.”
“Who?”
She grabbed his sleeve, pulling him behind a pillar. “Her. Ingrid.”
“The girl from OkCupid?”