by Lisa Alther
After two dozen of these runs, in which they agreed and I differed, or in which they agreed and I pretended to agree, interspersed with runs in which we all genuinely did agree, I could no longer tell what was shorter or longer than what. I would see a card as shorter. The others would call it longer, and before my very eyes the card would quiver and expand until it did in fact look longer. Or it would waver playfully back and forth between long and short.
Soon I was feeling nauseated, and my eyes were burning.
‘The same,’ said the first girl, about a card that had originally looked longer to me.
‘The same,’ said the second.
‘The same,’ said Eddie.
I widened and narrowed my eyes several times, as the size of the card fluctuated. Then I fell out of my chair and collapsed on the floor, sobbing.
Eddie knelt down and helped me up, saying, ‘Now, now Ginny. It’s just an experiment. Where’s your Spinozan detachment?’
I collapsed on her shoulder and wept while she patted my back consolingly. The senior running the test came up and said, “You really did quite well, Ginny. You stood up to the others sixty-five percent of the time. The average so far is forty-three percent.’
‘What average?’ I asked between sobs, looking up.
‘The average number of correct responses the subject gives in contradiction to the pretend subjects.’
‘Pretend subjects? You mean this whole thing was staged?’ I turned on Eddie in a rage.
‘We thought you’d figured it out by now,’ the senior said. ‘You mean you hadn’t?’
I raised a fist to slug Eddie. She put an arm around me affectionately. I pulled away.
‘I’m sorry, Ginny, but it had to be done,’ Eddie said.
‘Why did it? You could have at least told me.’
‘If I’d told you, it wouldn’t have worked, would it? And you are in search of Truth, aren’t you? Or doesn’t that extend to the truth about yourself?’
I stomped out of the lab, my vision so strained and blurred that I bumped into the door casing. Back on my hall, I went to the bathroom and threw up. Then I went to my room and drew the curtains and climbed in bed and pulled the covers over my head. I stayed there until the following day, missing my appointment with Miss Head and several classes as well.
Christmas vacation came and went. Mid-winter faded into early spring. The snow cover melted and ran off the flagstones in rivulets. Still I hadn’t spoken to Eddie. She had humiliated me in front of her artsy friends. I knew they were snickering behind their hands about the weakness of my character as I passed them en route to the library or to classes. I had decided never to speak to Eddie again. When I encountered her in the dining hall or as we entered our rooms, I turned my head away. She respected my pique and didn’t make any effort to approach me. Sometimes I heard her in her room singing Bob Dylan songs. Occasionally I would deign to read one of her ridiculous editorials in the campus paper demanding that the college government abolish curfew, that the trustees run a camp for ghetto children on the campus in the summer. A couple of times when I was sure she was out, I crept through her sloppy room and out her casement window to a flat roof where I could sunbathe nude and undisturbed in the late April sun.
Mostly, though, I studied. I had no friends except Miss Head, saw no one except in classes and at meals. I was too busy pursuing Truth to have a social life. Under Miss Head’s tutelage I was exploring the topic of free will versus determinism as handled by the eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers. Determinism was winning out hands down. I was pleased. I was making mincemeat of Eddie’s principles of social action.
Otherwise, however, my courses were not going well. Schopenhauer in Philosophy 240 was saying distressing things like, ‘No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore for this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.’
In astronomy I was going to the observatory every night and watching a galaxy group called the Hydra cluster; the light I was viewing had left there two billion years earlier. In short, I was looking at the past. The concept unnerved me. With outrage I studied the red shift of its spectrum, which indicated that the galaxy was moving away from me at the rate of 38,000 miles per second.
And in physics I was studying the subatomic particles — mesons and neutrinos — whose existence was proved only by the wakes of tiny bubbles they left as they shot through liquid hydrogen. Some were too short-lived to do even that, with life spans of ten millionths of a billionth of a billionth of a second.
I brooded over the vast range of electromagnetic radiations on either side of the tiny band that could be discerned by human sense organs. They made me absolutely furious.
But the last straw was Einstein’s theory of relativity. It scandalized me that even time could not be counted on, that its perceived duration shifted in relation to the orientation in space and motion of the perceiver. Suddenly I was surrounded by modern science with forces and particles I couldn’t see or hear or taste or feel. I felt bombarded — by a hundred different kinds of electromagnetic waves and subatomic particles, by fractions of time too minute to measure, by light rays that had left their source before life even existed on earth. All these things were showering down on me. Yet Lord Kelvin had promised me certainty in return for studying physics. ‘When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it,’ he had said in introductory physics last year. I felt betrayed.
In the depths of my despair, who should arrive at my door but Bev Martin, my next-door neighbor, the freshman from Iowa. I had scarcely seen her the entire year — a few times when I had been up at dawn to finish a paper, I had caught a glimpse of her down by the lake shore in a navy sweat suit jogging through the snow, bathed in the purple sunrise. I at least saw Miss Head occasionally. Bev saw no one.
Which was why I was startled when she appeared in my room for a chat that evening as I was agonizing over a chart on the age of the universe, the Milky Way galaxy, our sun, the earth: According to it, mankind was too recent an arrival even to merit mention. I was sick with indignation. I looked up impatiently, waiting to find out what Bev wanted from me, a miserable mote stirred up by Eternity’s spring cleaning.
‘I wondered if you’d like to go into town with me for supper tonight.’ She was blushing and looking at the floor and chewing her chapped lower lip. Her eyes were wide and terrified. It was obviously difficult for her to ask me.
But I said promptly, through gritted teeth, ‘I’m sorry, Bev, but I just don’t have time. I have a Decartes paper due tomorrow and I haven’t finished it.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘But thanks. Some other time maybe.’
‘Sure.’ She scuttled out.
That night as I was preparing to go to bed, I walked across the hall to the bathroom. Inside, I glanced under the stall doors to be sure there were no concealed rapists, as Mother had taught me to do at an early age. The door of the bathtub enclosure caught my eye. Behind it an arm hung almost to the floor. I pushed open the door. Slumped in a chair beside the tub was Bev. She smiled up at me weakly, her hyperthyroidal eyes glazed over. A Miltown bottle lay on the floor next to her. I picked it up. It was empty.
I looked back and forth between Bev and the bottle. I considered the topic of suicide. Suicide: On the one hand, it could be regarded as a plea for help. After all, why had Bev done this here rather than in her room where no one would have found her for weeks? A person attempting suicide, in the view of many specialists, didn’t really wan
t to die, but was rather adopting this desperate tactic as the only remaining means of exerting an impact on an unresponsive environment. It was only a passing aberration. Thwarted, the person would in many cases go on to live a long and productive life.
Bev slumped over in the chair. Her eyes were half shut.
On the other hand, a person’s life belonged to her alone, and she had the right to end it if she so chose. Robbing someone of this right, stifling this expression of a person’s desire for greater autonomy, might very well deprive that person of the self-respect essential to the conduct of an existentially meaningful existence. Interfering in someone’s suicide while claiming to be concerned for that person’s well-being might actually be undertaken solely to spare the rescuer from having to confront doubts about the value of his own existence…
Bev fell onto the floor.
And of course there was an entire school of psychiatry that felt…Eddie walked in in her bathrobe. She bent over the sink to brush her teeth. But then she stood back up and stared at me in the doorway of the tub stall.
Walking over, she took in the situation in one quick glance — Bev slumped on the floor, the empty bottle in my hand. Looking at me for a moment in disbelief, she raced from the bathroom. When she returned, she pushed me aside and knelt beside Bev. She slapped her face hard several times and soon had her sitting up and drinking glass after glass of warm salt water. Before long, the entire floor of the stall, and Eddie and Bev as well, were splattered with vomit.
A couple of doctors arrived and whisked Bev off to the infirmary. I went to bed and pulled the covers over my head. I dreamed that night of the seashore. Miss Head in a tweed suit was sitting on the sand in a carved Victorian chair with a needlepoint seat. The metronome sat ticking at her feet, and she nodded her gray bun in time. She played Handel’s ‘Water Music’ on her cello. As she played, the waves broke rhythmically and washed up around her feet. Her chair, her cello, and herself were sinking into the sand. The breaking waves consisted of dilute blood. Occasionally, along with seaweed and shells and flourescent blue Portuguese men-of-war, the waves would toss up a mangled human limb or a staring eyeball. Miss Head observed these without interest and never missed a beat.
The next morning in nineteenth-century philosophy we studied Schopenhauer’s remarks from The World as Will and Idea: ‘We must without reserve regard all presented objects, even our own bodies, merely as ideas, and call them merely ideas.’ In physics the next period we busied ourselves with the concept that all objects, organic and inorganic, were merely empty space with trillions of particles chasing each other through the void, and that even these ‘particles,’ taken a step further, were nothing more than energy waves and probability functions.
I decided to skip lunch. I had lost my appetite, possibly forever. As I walked to the biology lab, where I hadn’t been since the previous year, I re-created in my mind the picture of Bev slumped over in her chair with me watching her, paralyzed. I tried regarding the scene as merely an idea originating in my own isolated brain, as Schopenhauer suggested. Then I tried dissecting it into energy waves and probability functions. Neither exercise worked. I continued to tremble with guilt and horror at not making time for Bev when she asked me to, and at my subsequent paralysis in the face of her despair.
No one was in the lab. I put on a white coat. I took a bacteria smear from a Petri dish and dyed a small portion of it. Then I slipped the slide under a microscope. I watched as the stained bacteria fluttered and shuddered trying to assimilate the poison dye.
After a valiant struggle, one by one, the contaminated cells released the contents of their vacuoles, the enzymes they used to digest foreign cells, thereby destroying themselves.
I shifted the slide to inspect the unstained bacteria. They were quivering and were edging away from their dying fellows. None of them, in spite of their exterior membranes, would go unaffected — all had channels that led from the soup deep into their own interiors. And under an electron microscope, I knew that those seemingly impermeable exterior membranes themselves would dissolve into a series of perforations.
I knew, too, that radioactive tracers applied on a tree stump shortly turned up inside all the neighboring trees. Bev’s action was not a self-contained incident; its reverberations would affect us all.
I washed the slides and hung up my coat. As I walked back to the dorm, I plucked a leaf off a forsythia bush and stared at it as though I had never seen a leaf before. Its atoms and subatomic particles were identical to those making up my fingers. Those atoms combined to form molecules that were identical — in the leaf and in my fingers. The molecules formed amino acids — identical. The acids formed proteins and enzymes and hormones — similar in the leaf and in my fingers. The enzymes in grasses closely resembled those in an elephant. The sap flowing through the forsythia bush in composition was almost identical to blood, which in turn was identical to dilute sea water — from which all life came, to which it would return. And in that sap were substances similar to those distinguishing human blood as type A or type B. Our earth was a burned-out hunk of mineral ash, but we — this leaf and Eddie and Bev and I — we were star stuff. Our bodies were almost entirely made up of light volatile elements. We had origins far greater than the cinder we inhabited would indicate. What affected one segment affected us all. I shuddered as the vision of Bev and me in the bathtub stall passed before my eyes.
I left my books in my room and grabbed a notebook and a quilt. After listening at Eddie’s door and concluding that she was out, I opened it and crossed her room, tiptoeing over full ashtrays and stacks of magazines and newspapers. There was a new sculpture on her window seat since the last time I’d sneaked through — a polished mahogany carving of a woman’s torso, from neck to upper thighs. The body was voluptuous, solid and firm, not flabby. Eddie herself might have been the model for it. Bev’s body floated through my head in contrast — long, lean, gawky, angular.
Trying to dispel this persistent mental picture of Bev slumped over dying while I debated the topic of suicide prevention, I opened the window and climbed out on the roof. It had walls on two sides, and so was partially protected from breezes. A third side was a low wall that overlooked the courtyard and the lake. I stood behind this wall and looked down, down, five floors down to the stone courtyard below. A rehearsal was underway there for the May Court, to be held the next day. The May Court was a Worthley ritual involving various rites of spring and dances around the statue of Artemis, virgin huntress. A May Court Mistress and attendants were elected from the student body each spring. In keeping with Worthley’s liberal tradition, the queen was usually handicapped in some way — an amputee or a member of a racial minority. This year’s queen had had a radical mastectomy and wasn’t expected to survive the summer.
I spread the quilt and removed my clothes and lay down on my stomach. I read at random through my notes, marking here and there with a pen, trying to get an idea for a term paper for my nineteenth-century philosophy course.
Soon I realized that I’d been reading and rereading two passages. I’d underlined each with my felt pen a couple of dozen times, until the underlinings had overlapped to form a big wet blue blotch that was soaking through the page. The sun was high and hot, but I felt as though dark clouds had moved in front of it. My body was clammy, and my teeth started chattering. I dropped the notebook and rolled over on my back and wrapped the quilt around me and lay still, my eyes closed, unable to move. I felt my lips turning blue. My stomach was a knot of panic. I kept taking deep breaths to still the fear.
I heard a noise. I couldn’t open my eyes to trace its origin. I heard a voice, Eddie’s, saying, ‘Christ, Ginny, you look awful. Are you all right?’
I couldn’t move my lips to answer her.
‘Ginny?’ she said with alarm in her voice.
She was somewhere near my head. I heard my notebook rustling. She was reading to herself the quotes I had underlined from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard:
‘“Do w
e not now wander through an endless Nothingness?” “Philosophy has tried anything and everything in the effort to help the individual to transcend himself objectively, which is a wholly impossible feat; existence exercises its restraining influence, and if philosophers nowadays had not become mere scribblers in the service of a fantastic thinking and its preoccupation, they would long ago have perceived that suicide was the only tolerable practical interpretation of its striving.”’
‘Jesus,’ she said quietly.
I was shivering spasmodically under my quilt. I breathed in deep irregular gasps. I was perfecdy aware of doing these things, but I seemed incapable of stopping them or of doing anything else.
‘But Ginny,’ she pointed out, as though I were sitting up conversing with her, ‘you didn’t underline the rest of that Kierkegaard quote. Did you read it? Shall I read it to you?’ Undaunted by the absence of an answer, she read it: ‘“The scribbling modern philosophy holds passion in contempt; and yet passion is the culmination of existence for an existing individual — and we are all of us existing individuals. In passion the existing subject is rendered infinite in the eternity of the imaginative representative, and yet he is at the same time most definitely himself.’”
She stopped reading. I heard some movements to one side. Then she asked matter-of-factly, ‘Ginny, could you please put some of this baby oil on my back? I was out yesterday, and I’m getting burned.’
Wonder of wonders, I tossed off my quilt, sat up obediently, took the lotion from her, and began rubbing it into her smooth reddish brown back.
Then I lay back down on my stomach and wrapped up in the quilt and resumed my shivering.
‘Shall I put some on you? You’re looking pink, too.’
When I didn’t answer, she crawled over and removed the quilt and started anointing my back. She covered my arms and shoulders and hips and legs with the oil as well. It was as though she were rubbing life back into me. Where her hands had been, my flesh glowed with warmth. She pushed me, and I rolled over cooperatively. She rubbed the baby oil into my chest and breasts and abdomen and legs. My shivering subsided. The lump in my stomach began breaking up under her hands like a frozen pond in the spring. She crawled down to my feet and massaged them. Then she crawled up to my shoulder level and patted oil on my cheeks and forehead and across my upper lip. Then she lay down next to me and cradled me in her arms, my head on her chest right over her heart.