* * *
Until that Monday in his intro class’s third meeting of the semester, when he was passing out notes to accompany his lecture on Cartesian dualism, and dear God, there she was, sitting in the third row. While panic rose in his throat, he fought the urge to look in her direction until he thought that his refusal to move his head within a certain arc was becoming conspicuous, and then he allowed himself one glimpse at her, hoping at first that he might have been wrong and that it was really someone else, but she was still her, the memory of her face from that night suddenly clear now that he was presented with it.
She sat with her pen and notebook out, legs crossed, looking athletic, attractive, and, shit, younger than he remembered. He tried not to stare in horror. For the next hour, his mouth operated independently to deliver his remarks while in his mind he went through all the various ways he had ruined his life. What was the legal age of consent in this state, he wondered for the first time ever, his panic allowing some space for self-disgust. Encountering her now, after forgetting her, was like seeing a figure born out of a dream, a statue hewn in an unlit wing of his subconscious and then carted into view.
At the end of the lecture a few students stayed to ask him questions about the syllabus, and she lingered in the back of the pack. Oscar felt an odd mix of embarrassment and terror as he answered the other students’ questions as quickly as he could. And then they were alone.
“Hi, Professor,” she said. She held her books clutched across her chest. She had black hair that curled around her face like a set of parentheses, a small, mouse-like nose. She wore a loose-fitting rugby shirt, and her legs were clad in black yoga pants stuck into Red Wings.
“Hi, look...” he said, one hand on the back of his neck, the other jammed in a pocket, and came up with nothing. “Well, actually why don’t you start off this interaction?”
“This is interesting territory,” she said.
What a strange thing to say, Oscar thought.
“I’ll be honest with you,” Oscar said, “I don’t remember anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Not much.”
“What does that change for me?”
“I guess I’d just like you to appreciate my confusion. My position.”
“You have nothing to worry about.”
“What happened—shouldn’t have. It was...not proper. Given these circumstances, I mean, it appears.”
“Oh please. I was completely sober, by the way. And whatever happens now can’t retroactively alter the nature of the situation at the time, which seemed fine to me.”
Oscar couldn’t believe it.
“Did you know who I was?” he said.
“You mean, what your job is? Yeah, I knew, because you told me.”
“So you must’ve not told me who you were.”
“You mean that I was registered for your class? Yes, I told you that. You didn’t seem to care.”
Her eyes were dark brown, but as she spoke they took on a liveliness that Oscar couldn’t place between malevolence or playfulness.
“Really?” Oscar said.
Oscar lowered his voice despite the fact that they were in a large, empty room and shot his eyes left and right in an almost comically conspiratorial gesture, despite himself. “Look—surely you understand how this has the potential to—reflect poorly on me.”
She pulled her head back a little and regarded him. A look passed between them. “I’ve got to get to my next class. I’ll see you Wednesday. Try not to freak out.”
She turned and left. Oscar stood there stunned for a moment before ripping open his laptop to find her info in his class registration, which had headshot photos of all the students.
He said her name out loud when he found it, and in a flash that chamber of his memory was flooded with light, and he remembered her introducing herself to him at the bar.
“Dawn.”
She was a junior. That meant that unless she had skipped a grade, she was probably at least nineteen, maybe even twenty-one. So it appeared that he would not be going to jail. All that remained in jeopardy were his career, reputation, and self-respect.
With the shrugging horror of a man who had just narrowly avoided being hit by a bus, he realized that there was probably nothing to be done other than to pretend all of this had never happened. He resolved to never speak with her outside of class again.
* * *
Later that night, after grading papers, Oscar sat at his little desk hunched over his laptop under a pall of vengeful anger, eleven pages into a Google search trying to find more info on Paul St. Germaine, when there was a knock at his door.
Dawn stood right there on his doorstep.
“Hi! Can I come in?” She slipped past him before he could even register his shock. One of the St. Germaine videos was playing in a window on Oscar’s laptop. On the screen, St. Germaine leaned back in his chair and said, “And why is it that you should be punished for the sins of the universe?”
“What’re you watching?” Dawn said.
Oscar nearly leaped over the couch to clap closed the computer.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Is that the guy you were telling me about?”
“God—I told you that? Wait a second, why are you here?”
Dawn sat down on his couch, looked around at his empty walls, dropped her bookbag at her feet. “Come on. Stop pretending you don’t like me.”
“I barely know you.”
“You liked me enough to sleep with me.”
“I was blackout drunk.”
“Sure, but I could still tell.”
“Dawn, I don’t know what you think this is, but it was a huge mistake for me. I really think you should leave.”
“Oh, screw you too, then.” She did not seem actually upset. “And you finally remembered my name!”
“I could lose my job.”
“Anyway—nobody knows.”
“You don’t know that! We were in public! Also, and I’m extremely uncomfortable with what I’m about to say, but...how old are you?”
“I’m twenty-two. Had a bit of a late start.”
Guilty relief hit Oscar in a shudder of something like pleasure. He hadn’t broken the law. He hadn’t committed the crime that he allowed himself to finally consider the name of for the first time, now that he was innocent of it: statutory rape. “Holy shit, thank God,” he said, momentarily covering his eyes with a hand.
He went and sat down on the opposite side of the couch.
“This is where you show me yours,” she continued. “No way you’re thirty...”
“I’m twenty-nine, actually.”
“See! Totally within the realm.”
“Dawn—you are my student.”
“Well, yeah, I guess there is that.”
“Which reminds me, I expect that you’ll transfer out of my class.”
Dawn laughed. She pulled a water bottle from the side pocket of her bookbag and took a sip. She drew her legs up under her on the couch. “No way. I find philosophy very interesting. And you’re a great teacher.”
“I’m okay.”
“Yeah. You’ll get better.”
A silence.
“You know, I found your paper on JSTOR. Compatibilism. Fascinating stuff. Are we going to study that later in the semester?”
“In intro, only tangentially. We look a little deeper in my metaphysics class.”
“It just seems a bit like cheating to me, to look at freedom and determinism and think, how about both?”
“Well, I know what you mean, but of course it’s not that simple. For instance, as I mention in the paper, we can look at what Harry Frankfurt has written about the principle of alternate possibilities—” Oscar caught himself. “One second. I have yet to ascertain what you’re doing here.”
&
nbsp; Dawn returned the water bottle to her bag. In one motion in which she placed her hand on the middle cushion and then dragged a knee along behind it, she crossed the couch and kissed him.
Oscar pulled his head back for one moment to say, “Ummm,” and then she kissed him again and then he grabbed the sides of her head but not to move it away.
This type of situation was, he understood, totally unprecedented in his life, but he still thought that he would have mustered a little more willpower, or really any at all, to make what he knew to be the smart and moral choice. But he also understood, instantly and with full peace, that he wouldn’t be able to reclaim control of this situation, and probably never had any in the first place.
They didn’t speak. Memories returned to him of how it was the first time, the smell of her hair, the way she flipped her leggings off her foot while removing them. Everything else she left on. Soon she had unzipped his fly and he was inside her. They moved like that for a while, and then Oscar said, “Wait,” and stood up and bent her over the arm of the couch.
After a minute like this, lost in a reddish energy that had moved in to surround him, he looked up and caught his reflection in the blackened window, and he didn’t like the face that he saw.
“Here,” he said and led her to his bedroom, moving quicker than his conscience. She took off the rest of her clothes and lay down while he swept laundry off the bed and took off his shirt and fumbled for a condom from his sock drawer.
“Hurry,” she said. Then he was on top of her, entering again, and her fingernails dug into his back.
The entire time, Oscar thought, Oh no, oh shit.
Dawn said something quietly into his ear that he could not make out.
“Like this,” she said, and took one of his hands and placed it softly around the front of her neck.
Oh no, oh shit, Oscar thought, as he tried squeezing, first only slightly and then a little more. She looked into his eyes, and what he saw there was cause for concern, but he pushed it away. He squeezed harder and heard a change in her breathing.
“Oh fuck,” Dawn said. Oscar felt her start to climax. He shifted his weight and added his other hand to her neck and came powerfully.
He slumped to her side in a heap. She turned against his chest and continued to buck and spasm for a few moments, making sounds. He huffed for breath.
A minute later, after they had both quieted down, Oscar said, “Did I...did we...do that last time? The part at the end.”
“We did,” she said.
Rather than think, he fell deeply asleep almost immediately.
12
Just as the first time, when he woke up, she was gone. It was 2:00 a.m. He got out of bed and looked around. Again there was no evidence of her ever having been there. He still had no phone number for her. He sat down naked on his couch and opened his laptop to compose an email to Dawn’s university address, which he pulled from his class list, and to which school authorities would have unfettered access, if they ever desired it in the future.
From
To
Subject: Office Hours
Hi Dawn,
Are you available to come to office hours tomorrow? There’s something I’d like to discuss.
—OB
His cursor hovered over the send button for a moment and then, with the terrified bravery of a defeated general plunging his sword into his own abdomen, he clicked it. He wasn’t sure why he did this but he told himself that he would figure it out later.
He found two beers in his fridge and drank them both quickly in an attempt to ease the constant dread that he had thought he would be more used to by this point, and got into bed and lay there and stared at the ceiling.
When he was a boy, he could lie awake in bed for an hour flexing a finger in front of his face and thinking, Am I making this happen? What exactly is going on here? He found it especially bewildering, in a wonderful way, that he could think the thought, “Move, finger,” and the finger wouldn’t move, but when he actually moved his finger, it required no such verbally imperative thought, and in fact seemed to happen with no type of thought at all on his part, or at least none that could be represented or described in another thought.
As he got older, though, his childish fascination metastasized into something else entirely, and now sometimes when he lay awake, the involutions of his own consciousness trying to perceive itself could drive him almost to tears. The thought of his own existence terrified him; not because he was afraid that it would one day cease to be, although that idea certainly wasn’t cheery, but rather the inexplicability of it, the indescribable needlessness of it. He was embarrassed with the simplicity of the idea, and so never tried to give it the full weight of investigation that those in his field were supposed to be able to muster, and he never mentioned it to others, but it presented itself during these hours as the only question worth answering.
These thoughts would come only at night, and each time he would think, How am I not obsessed with this all the time? How do people function? But of course in the light of day, he would resume his routines immediately.
His night-thoughts and his day-thoughts were more than just entirely different sets of thoughts; they were entirely different modes of being. Even when during the day he paused to suss out a point in a paper he was reading or to spar with an astute student (in other words, when he was “doing philosophy”), his thoughts had a way of functioning alongside language: solving problems, achieving tasks, figuring things out through dialectic. But in the dark, his thoughts became unhinged from physical or linguistic application and floated above him as a meaningless terror.
At 4:00 a.m., he rose from bed to check his email to see if Dawn had responded. She hadn’t. He urinated and then drank another beer standing up in his kitchen, to combat the dry mouth. He lay in bed and masturbated as a purely utilitarian gesture, trying to coax some more dopamine out of his brain in order to get to sleep.
* * *
When he awoke again, the first thing he felt was surprise that he had actually fallen asleep. Still in bed, he checked his email.
From
To
Subject: Office Hours
2?
A number and a question mark. Not much to analyze. Trying to be cool, to combat her flippancy with some of his own, he wrote back, Sure, and sent it, and then immediately regretted it. It would be obvious to her that he was trying to armor himself, trying to compete, although he had no leverage at all. He may as well go to her on his knees.
The morning was a waste. He thought he might be able to escape into the paper he had been trying to develop, which was a further explication of his first one on compatibilism, but he found it impossible to focus and soon gave up. He paced back and forth in his kitchen trying to summon the bravery to examine the university handbook to see if relations with students were expressly forbidden or just highly frowned upon, but could not. He considered calling his father to check in, but could not. He rode his bike onto campus, taught his one class, and then went to his office to wait for her.
* * *
Oscar’s “office” was the size of a rich person’s closet. The room was a simple rectangle barely twice the size of his desk, which bisected the space, and there was one small window that looked out onto a small courtyard. The effect was claustrophobic rather than nookish, which was not conducive to a vibrant mental landscape, and Oscar used it only to hold his mandatory office hours twice each week. He kept a few books on the shelves: one of his three copies of The Republic festooned with sticky notes, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and Schopenhauer, a personal favorite.
At exactly 2:00 p.m., Dawn walked in and shut the door behind her, although it had been open. She sat down on the other side of the desk in one of the two Windsor-back chairs, thunking her bookbag into the other.
“Hi, Professor,” she said. She wore jeans a
nd a wrinkled white blouse.
“Hello,” he said. “Could you just—?” He held up one finger. He stood and went to the door and opened it again, and then returned to his seat.
Dawn made a tiny sound through her nose that was something like one-tenth of a laugh.
“This is your office?” she said. There was a note of familiarity in her tone that Oscar thought was unearned.
“I don’t like it either.”
“It’s not that bad. Get some art up maybe. A nice lamp.”
“I really only meet students here. I do most of my work in the library.”
“Ah,” she said, raising her eyebrows and looking around, waiting for whatever was about to happen.
“Obviously this is weird. I’m sorry about that,” Oscar said. “But I’ll be direct and admit that this is coming from a position of pure self-interest, as I like my job, and I don’t want to lose it. Did you tell anyone about what happened with us?”
He used the word “happened” to try to contain it in the past. A single incident.
Dawn smiled and looked down slightly, seeming either amused or annoyed. “I mean, look, this is college. Things get said, people talk. Everyone’s drunk all the time. It’s hard to keep track of who knows what.”
Oscar received this with pursed lips. He went back over to the door and closed it softly, and then returned to his desk and looked Dawn directly in her eyes. He recalled that her eyes were brown, but in this lighting they appeared to be nearly black.
“Yeah, Dawn, listen. Here’s where I’m at. My mother just died a terrible, undignified death. I loved her very much but never expressed it well. She and my father were on the way back from giving away all of their money to a cult leader who had promised to cure her depression, which I may or may not have inherited; I mean inherited the depression, not the money, which is gone. My father is now relying on me to help him find meaning in his life again, or just support him financially, I’m not sure, because his relationship with my sister is even worse than his relationship with me, which is terrible. I made twenty-two thousand dollars last year before taxes, I’m very lonely, lately it’s become clear to me that life is a period of meaninglessness broken up by moments of pain and bookended by nothingness, and I think my career may be in jeopardy here, so I’d like for you to please tell me honestly, because I need to know—did you tell anyone about what happened between us?”
A Philosophy of Ruin Page 6