The synth came chugging on the drums’ heels, and Gaby was right there on the beat. She dipped low into the melody. She knew every inch of the song, where it curved and where it rode straight. Brian, who Dorothy had not seen the entire night, materialized and grinned with the unmistakable pleasure of watching the person you love do something they excel at. Gaby raised a fist in a pantomime of the motion a singer makes onstage in front of hundreds of thousands but the way Gaby did it expressed her knowledge that she was in her own living room entertaining a handful of diehards and drunks who hadn’t drifted away into other conversations, and happy to be there. If Dorothy still loved karaoke she would be falling in love with Gaby all over again, but she didn’t. Dorothy was in her bathysphere, and Gaby was in her stadium.
“I’m just a lonely pilgrim, I walk this world in wealth,” Gaby crooned. “I want to know if it’s you I don’t trust. ’Cause I damn sure don’t trust myself.”
What was the world behind the song, Hans Castorp had asked, which the motions of his conscience made to seem a world of forbidden love?
The answer was death. It was always death. There was no other song, really. The variety of earthly music was merely a reflection of the infinite ways there were to die. There were love songs, of course, but since love could kill you, they counted as death songs, too. The particular genius of this song was how fast it moved. It hurried like it was late to its own funeral.
Gaby’s lip snarled imitatively. She was cute, like a lap dog. “So when you look at me,” she sang. “You better look hard and look twice. Is that me, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?”
Dorothy leaned into Rog.
“That was the song I meant to do,” she said. “I put in the wrong one.”
“This is a great song,” he said.
From behind them a guy Dorothy had always hated for being such a sloppy drunk started whooping. “She’s killing it!” he yelled, and Dorothy had to admit that she was. She imagined Gaby holding the song down with one hand and beating it in the face with the other until the song relented.
The lines of words fled from the screen, replaced, in a fair trade, with Gaby’s voice, straining for power. Dorothy had been embarrassed by her mistake but now she saw that there was no reason to be embarrassed. It was good that Gaby had done the song, Dorothy decided. It didn’t have to be her who did what could be done so well by someone else.
Ten Days Later
There was a printer in the department office she could have used, but Dorothy always printed in the library. Partly this was because she was always in the library and it seemed like the time wasted trekking over to the office was worth the money she spent on the print card, and partly it was because the minutes Dorothy had to spend standing by the office printer, waiting for it to print, were torturous. At any moment a professor from the department might come out and find her there, and accuse her, as had happened on two prior occasions, of being a student. Nor did she like the feeling that the secretary was keeping track of how much or what she was printing. It wasn’t anybody’s business what Dorothy did on the printers.
She got twenty free pages a week, anyway, so she sent the document from her laptop to the print queue, and, leaving her laptop open on the table, she crossed the library to the printer station, where, keeping one eye on the laptop across the room, she typed her university ID and password into the user interface. A message popped up, stating that she had exceeded her weekly print quota. She went back to her table, rummaged through her bag, retrieved her credit card from her wallet, navigated to the university I.T. site, and put twenty dollars on her account. Then she hit Ctrl+P again and went back to the printer station. In the interim, a girl with a Roman nose and baby pigtails had occupied the printer station. She was printing something on two sides with a lot of images that was coming out at a very slow pace, so Dorothy went back to her laptop and sent her document to the other printer. That print station was farther away, so this time she took her laptop with her, holding it open as she walked, though she left her coat and books and wallet behind. When she selected her job and entered her password, a message popped up saying that the printer was not able to print.
She looked at it. A large black plastic machine. Inscrutable. It looked like a filing cabinet attached to a calculator. A handwritten note taped to the outside warned users from powering down, so she popped open the tray without turning it off.
No visible jam.
No one was working at the librarians’ desk, which didn’t matter, because typically the librarians weren’t very helpful about printer issues; their advice was always to try another printer in a different part of the library. If that failed they would send you to another library altogether. Their philosophy seemed to be that if no one used the printer for an unspecified amount of time, eventually the printer would sort itself out and get up and running again. Wait and do nothing: This was the kind of advice Dorothy was basically sympathetic to. That meant that she didn’t need to take it, because she could give it to herself.
She tried hitting the printer. Not too hard; not hard enough to draw attention. Just a firm tap. The machine turned itself off.
This was exactly what she had been talking about with her first therapist that morning.
“It’s not only the institution that’s against me,” she had said. “It’s all the stuff in it. It’s like whatever I touch malfunctions.”
The therapist had nodded and furrowed her brows to signal that she heard Dorothy but did not agree with her interpretation.
“I make garbage,” Dorothy had said.
“That sounds like self-blame,” the therapist had said, mildly.
Outside the window: magnolia trees that had bloomed early and were now frost-covered. Inside the office: figurines, statuettes, a menagerie of urns and finger bowls, some pottery. Of course the therapist couldn’t understand what she meant. There was nothing in here that even plugged in.
The main computer lab was down on the ground floor of the library. Dorothy, conscious of energy waste, took the stairs. The lab was a U-shaped ring of desktop computers under yellow fluorescence, rather like a corporate business center. A few kids were playing videogames, with headphones. Others were typing. Dorothy logged on to a desktop computer next to a student playing a first-person racing game. The asphalt zoomed up like a tidal wave, curving back and forth under a blue sky scattered with puffy clouds. Dorothy tried not to look at the game screen because doing so made her carsick, but the vertiginous rise and fall of the road in her peripheral vision pulled her back. No wonder her students didn’t do the reading. How could reading compete with this addictive sensation of nausea?
She located her document in the cloud and sent it to the printer in the lab. She walked over to that printer and entered her password. The high whine of the printer started up and died. The printer was out of paper. She checked the clock on the wall and decided that now would be a good time to go out for a few minutes to collect herself and buy a can of motor oil so she could come back and burn the library down.
* * *
—
There were reams of paper stacked up by the printer. Dorothy messily tore one open and began loading the paper in the tray. Her therapist had directed her to think about all the things in her life that did work. She paused loading the paper to check her email on her phone, which had the effect of summoning a gray-haired librarian. Just looking at her green sweater made Dorothy itch.
“Students aren’t supposed to do that,” she said.
“I’m a professor,” said Dorothy. The claim, or having to make it, felt ridiculous. Of course the librarian didn’t believe her. She didn’t believe herself. She looked down at her clothes. They were shabby and studentish. Her hair was unwashed. She was probably shiny.
“Why are you printing here?” said the librarian. “You should print in your department office.”
“Are profe
ssors not allowed in the library?” asked Dorothy. Her voice came out more sarcastic than she intended, and the librarian glared at her with actual contempt.
The university really did despise her. Just look at this librarian—a librarian! A keeper of knowledge!—and her ruthless face.
“That’s a real question,” Dorothy said. “I’d love to follow the rules, if only someone would tell me what they are.”
The librarian took a step back, as if Dorothy were some subway lunatic. Her shrug said, It’s your life. She removed a handful of paper—Dorothy had, typically, overdone it—and shut the printer tray door. She pushed a button to test. Efficiently the printer rolled out a sheet of hieroglyphics and bars of varying thicknesses.
“There,” she said, like she had just wiped up some milk spilt from Dorothy’s bottle. Dorothy looked into the future and saw herself, forty, forty-five years old, a contingent member of the faculty, waiting on the printers, absorbing the admonishment of the croney librarian, and thought how naïve she had once been to believe there was anything glamorous about the life of the mind.
* * *
—
Two undergraduates with buzzed haircuts were taking selfies in front of the bathroom mirror. Dorothy offered to take their picture together but they refused in such a way that indicated Dorothy’s total miscomprehension of the scenario. Dorothy shut the stall door and locked it. There was a spot of red on her underwear. It was bright, like war paint.
The toilet seat was a little damp so she stood up and wiped herself and the seat and laid down two strips of dry paper. At the sinks the students were weighing the respective merits of socialism and communism. When Dorothy looked back at her own undergraduate conversations they seemed inane and juvenile, delusive, but these students made her feel hope, or maybe it was desperation. The children will lead you, she thought. Oh God, please.
She sat down on the covered toilet seat. Maybe, Dorothy thought, there was an abrasion in her vagina. A paper cut. She positioned her phone between her legs and took a photograph. The sound was all the way up and the camera made a loud shutter sound, as if film was advancing. The students continued to talk about the means of production. Because the flash had caused a garish bright spot that whited out the image, Dorothy touched through to the camera settings, turned off the flash, and took another photo. She zoomed in and moved around in the image.
No evidence of any surface tear or abrasion.
The blood must be coming from the inside.
This is my life now, Dorothy thought. My life as a bleeder. I bleed between periods, or have one continuous period, that stops and starts after a few days, but the stops are not “stops,” they are simply moments in the cycle—bleeding is the constant state.
Her last period had ended after three days, and now this—whatever this was. The twenty-eight-day cycle had always been more a myth than a reality, a matter of averages or chemically enforced norms dressed up in lunar hocus-pocus, but there had been something coherent and reassuring about it. It was symbolic. Three weeks off, one week on. The week symbolized the creation, and destruction, of the world. The fact that the twenty-eight days existed as a myth or standard or average had made Dorothy feel that her body, or some statistical version of it, was connected to an axis ancient and foundational. But in the new era there were no symbols or organizing metaphors. The body was ruled by irregularity. All was chaos. In a time of chaos, one had to be prepared for everything. That was it: She had to prepare. She pushed the button to get to the home screen, touched the Notes application, and made a note:
Buy panty liners (pink individual wrappers)
Dorothy rooted around in the zippered bag she kept in her backpack, but all she came up with was a tampon. She didn’t want to put in a tampon now. She wasn’t sure how much blood was coming. There was always the risk of toxic shock. Also, she hadn’t completely abandoned the hope of a surface tear.
Dorothy took out her phone again and looked at her email and then the news and then her email again. Danielle had sent a long message about the final paper but Dorothy didn’t feel that it was appropriate to write to a student with her pants down. Danielle wouldn’t know, of course, but she would know, and it would change how she interacted with Danielle in the future. It would be hard to shake the feeling that Danielle had seen her do it. It was one thing to read emails from students in bathroom stalls, but she could not be emailing students from bathroom stalls. It was important to fight the geographic creep of technology. It was important to do some tasks in some places, and other tasks in other places. Dirt is matter out of place: Mary Douglas.
She dabbed at the stain on her underwear with toilet paper to dry it; it was already mostly dry. She wrapped a piece of toilet paper three or four times around her underwear, looping it into an informal napkin, and pulled her pants back on. She flushed with her foot and used her elbow to bang open the stall door. It ricocheted against the neighboring stall. She ran her hands under the hot water and shook them under the dryer. One student was now sitting on the counter applying makeup. The other was talking on the phone. Whereas before they had seemed two members of some exclusive coven, now they acted like strangers. Dorothy let the door bang behind her.
* * *
—
Standing in the dim lobby, half-hidden by a marble statue of a dead founder, Dorothy opened the podcast app on her phone and thumbed in her second therapist’s name. The icon showed the therapist smiling and wrapped in her usual shawl, in front of a brick wall. She was cut off at the shoulders. Two hundred and twenty-eight listeners had given her an average of five stars, but Dorothy knew you couldn’t trust reviews. She scrolled down and clicked on “Episode 2.1: Precarity and Preparation.” The therapist, whose voice sounded slower and smoothed out, like an audio engineer had taken a rolling pin to it, explained that this episode would feature an obsessive-compulsive barista who had gone into debt outfitting a doomsday cabin. Then a hissing white noise took over, transporting the listener into the windowless office that Dorothy knew so well.
Outside it was windy and some trash, a piece of wet paper, got stuck to Dorothy’s knee; she peeled it off with her bare hand and it got stuck to her hand and then she flapped it off and it was gone. She raised the volume to hear over the squall of traffic. The subway was late and while the barista enumerated her latest bulk acquisitions and her recent purchase of a firearm, Dorothy researched the history of “obsessive-compulsive” in her phone’s browser. A seventeenth-century bishop had identified obsessional thinking as a “scruple”—trouble where the trouble is over, a doubt when doubts are resolved. The nineteenth century had drawn a distinction between obsession, “in which insight is preserved,” and delusion. The problem with the barista’s situation, of course, was that it was impossible to say whether she was delusional or not. Things were definitely not okay in the world; the question was whether they were not okay in such a way that a cabin could make a difference.
The train car was crowded and Dorothy rode with her cheek against someone’s green hiking pack, listening to the barista explain the sores on her hands, which were obviously chapped from repeated washing, as an allergic reaction. When the therapist began explaining the meaning of ego defenses, Dorothy hit Pause and took out her earbuds. The problem with the show, Dorothy was realizing, was that unless you got extremely lucky and someone happened to achieve a cathartic breakthrough on the day you were recording, most of the episodes were guaranteed to fumble or amble toward nonconclusion. What she had heard hadn’t even offered the satisfaction of gawping; the anxiety was too ordinary, even if the manifestation was extreme. (Who wasn’t preparing for the end of the world?) It didn’t seem like that could be the point of the show—to faithfully document an ordinary suffering interiority with no expectation of event or transformation and the barest glimmer of insight—but if it wasn’t, Dorothy had no idea what the point was.
At Gaby’s stop, the man s
itting beneath Dorothy (she was holding on to the bar above), made a move as if he wanted to get up. He was a half-century old, Caucasian, in a baggy suit; when she stepped back to let him pass, he slid his hand around her waist.
“Don’t touch me,” Dorothy shouted, and the man slipped past and disappeared. Everyone looked at her, then quickly looked away. She pushed out the door and saw a group of teens farther down the track horsing around near the yellow line. After the train pulled away, one of them dropped or threw a soda onto the tracks, and Dorothy averted her eyes from what she feared could be an imminent tragedy and jogged up the stairs into the bright light.
* * *
—
The temperature had risen ten degrees since the morning and Dorothy stripped off her cardigan while she walked. It was three o’clock and the sun was still strong. Dorothy thought it was strange that Gaby didn’t want to wait until Brian came home to take the misoprostol, but she had told him it was “female business,” and though his feelings were hurt, he was ultimately fine with it. It was her body and her choice. “He and I have talked a lot about Sherman’s birth,” she had explained over the phone. “I was glad he was there, of course, and I know that he had to be, but in another way it would have been better without him, with just me and the midwife and the doula.” When Dorothy asked how it would have been better, Gaby said, “Witchier.”
If witchy was what Gaby was going for, Dorothy didn’t think they should be terminating her pregnancy in the afternoon. It was too healthy, too sanitized a time of day—like Gaby was violating some essential twilight prerequisite necessary to the ingestion of substances and the mystical powers of creation and destruction. Maybe Gaby was just more in touch with the bureaucratic nature of the event, the essential rightness of its occurrence during routine business hours. It wasn’t like a clinic would let you schedule a D&C for nine p.m. Gaby answered the door in a red sweatsuit that was more expensive and flattering than Dorothy’s fancy dresses. “It’s my abortion outfit!” she announced.
The Life of the Mind Page 18