Cynosura

by Tito Perdue

  The dog, a tiny one, had mounted into the girl’s lap and was sniffing at her place.

  “Ha. Okay, good, good; now take out your fiddle and let’s see what you can do.”

  Quite well, for an eighteen-year-old in her first semester. The man was pleased. And, too, the Sun that had chosen to follow her about was glinting off the little brass fittings of her buckled shoes. As feared, he fell in love with her all at once.

  Twenty

  He conducted certain classic experiments (to pick up where I had left off), and by November he had begun to trespass into the more advanced lectures just across the hall where he first saw and was seen by the man who wrote this diary. I let him get away with it (trespassing into my class) until he began to run into trouble with quantum theory. He was unusually well-dressed for what presumably was just another dunderhead youth, and looked as if he had just stepped out of a steam bath after a twenty-mile run. He wore a long-sleeve pale green shirt that bore an insignia on the pocket. He wasn’t dangerous-looking, exactly, but at the same time wasn’t the type whose mother you’d want carelessly to insult. I called him to the office and sat him down. He had chosen, wisely, the upholstered chair that had served so many of my student interviewees over the years. The other chair was of wood and lacked any sort of cushioning at all. I had used it myself in my own student days and had held on to the thing for sentimental purposes only. The chair actually wobbled on the imperfect floor that had both high places and, consequentially, low ones. As this was not the chair he preferred, I’ve described it in some detail.

  “Why are you so impatient at your age to jump into this quantum business?” I patronizingly inquired.

  “How old were you?”

  I was nonplussed.

  “Right. But you need a bit more mathematics for this course. What, you don’t have enough to do already? Maybe we aren’t asking enough of our students.”

  “It’s enough for most of ’em.”

  “I ween. And so you wish to become a scientist, is that how it is?”

  “No, sir. I just want to get a head start on it.”

  “That’s nice. But what do you want to do eventually?”

  “I’m switching to philosophy next semester.”

  “So you’re abandoning chemistry, then?”

  “Yes, sir. I figure I’ve already learned the main thing.”

  “And what is that? I’ll need to know.”

  “That life is just a molecular accident. But I think life is better than that.”

  “Alright. But you’d have a better chance for a good job with chemistry, however.”

  “I got a job now.”

  “Washing dishes?”

  “No, sir. Landscaping.”

  “Ah! Now I see why you need philosophy. By the way, I’ve noticed how you always sit way in the back of the room when I’m talking. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know enough algebra for the front row.”

  That was it, the moment I chose to give up my condescending ways with this boy.

  “And so where are you from, actually? If I may ask.”

  He listed the town, a godforsaken soybean community in the central-east section in what otherwise was a pretty good state. But must I forever go on with these sarcasms of mine?

  “Can I offer you a cup of coffee, then?” I mooted, nodding toward the well-sooted and highly experienced coffee maker on the hotplate, an article that reminded me of my fourteen months under house arrest. “I’ll have to make it from scratch.”

  “I guess not.”

  He sat without moving, his two eyes converging on just one of mine. The right one to be precise. Made me nervous, I admit.

  “You’ll have to forget about everything that’s rational or even just commonsensical if you really want to get into quantum stuff.”

  “That’s okay, I don’t care about rational chemistry, anyway. Matter of fact, I spit on it.”

  I moved my papers out of range. “So you plan to be a philosopher who’s irrational?”

  “Best place for it.”

  Nonplussed again. A witty quantity. More and more these days, we docents are astounded by the quality of our students, the two or three with promise on the one hand and all the others on the other hands. He continued staring at me, which is to say until his glance diverged off to the side to pick up my oil portrait of Humboldt half visible behind an untidy stack of journals and student papers. I owned, still do, a scale model spectrometer made of gold (brass, actually) which the imbecile thought was real.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” I asked suddenly, without good reason. (He seemed to have everything else.)

  “Not yet.”

  “A quantum girlfriend I think you need, and irrational as well. But I still don’t know why you wanted to see me.”

  “I just wanted to ask. Since everything, no matter how big it is, can always get bigger, can small things always get smaller, no matter how small it is?”

  “Well! It stands to reason . . .”

  “There’s a fellow up in Connecticut has figured out how to break quarks down into some really small stuff.”

  “Interesting.” (Nonplussed again.) “But just now I have to get ready for my next class and . . .” I stood at that moment and asked the varlet to come visit me again someday.

  Twenty-one

  Two hundred miles southeast of here, the girl was slicing open her morning grapefruit, and after covering it in sunflower seeds was gustatorially—she wouldn’t want to be seen doing this—was gustatorially devouring her morning calories, some one hundred fifteen of them. She had gained better than two ounces over the last days and had fallen into something closely related to mental depression. And yet, an hour or two on the cello and she had reason to hope those ounces and maybe more might leave her and not come back again. The possibility that somewhere someone was more beautiful than she . . . That hurt. She weighed one hundred twenty-one now, but the perimeter of her bust still wasn’t twice her waist’s.

  We were speaking of the boy, six feet two inches tall, somewhat introverted, possessed of superior speed and a good left jab that could have done real damage to any of the local negroes who might be tempted to jump on him in any of the dark alleys that led to school. No one bothered him, however, and after six weeks (at $1.75 per hour) of planting longleaf pines in soil that probably wouldn’t sustain them (the University was vain about its grounds) he left science and switched over to philosophy with an emphasis on history. He had read Toynbee (the abridged version, anyway) and had been introduced to Spengler, Evola, and the others. His interest in chemistry wasn’t hindered by that, however, and he continued to visit me when he found himself in the vicinity. (Drawn, I believe, as much by the laboratory’s peculiar odors as by my perpetual presence in the place.) I had learned to keep a fresh pot of coffee over the Bunsen burner.

  “So you’ve opted out of science, then.”

  He blushed.

  “No, sir. But . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Science is about matter and space and so on. Unconscious things.”

  “Unconscious things. Things without spiritual content—is that you mean to say?”

  He nodded slowly, his eye at all times on Herr Humboldt.

  “Some would say that everything is conscious. Or is the expression of consciousness. You’re a philosopher, no?”

  “Emerson, you mean?”

  “No science without consciousness. Science is merely what goes on in someone’s brain, yes?”

  “Yes, sir, I know about that. The world is just a mind and the dreams it dreams.”

  “Makes a person dizzy, no? Thoughts like that?”

  “It did at first. But maybe it doesn’t matter, if the dreams are good enough.”

  “And so a fine reproduction is just as good as the real thing?”

  “Cheaper, too.”

  I laughed out loud at the boy. His face was glum—it always was—and in his right hand he carried three heavy books, not to mention the fi
rst-year chemistry text authored by myself.

  In December he bought himself a car, an experienced appliance with lots of problems. Having brought it home, he washed and polished it, changed the oil, and carried out other procedures recommended by the blackguard who had sold it to him. The boy had known in advance that he’d be cheated, of course, but had refused to waste time learning how not to be so cheated.

  He would drive out into the country, finding it impossible to do any serious thinking anent so much autumnal beauty. Each colored leaf, like every drop of water, contained at least some little trace of everything in the periodic table on his apartment wall. And the hills of Tennessee, representations of aspiration, seemed to offer jumping-off places to better universes. Mahler’s music came to mind. He liked to imagine the nature of things in the most ancient times of all, unpredictable fruits and vegetables and a green plashing sea breaking like glass on Cenozoic shores. Time was old.

  He drove back slowly to inhabited regions, a discouraging project always. He passed a spate of girls, a smiling race as insubstantial as a specimen of air trapped between one’s finger and thumb. They strolled like men, most of them, whereas he had no respect for girls who hadn’t learned to move in at least three directions at once.

  Eleven weeks into English Literature, he accepted a failing grade in order to get out of it. Truth was, they were indifferent to literature, those people, and were much more dedicated to social rearrangement. Some people were richer than others, some better-looking, some more intelligent—they hated it. So he transferred to Archeology, hoping to share in the excavations then taking place in and around Mycenaean Gla.

  He learned to do without sleep, making up for it on weekends. Between days and nights, he preferred the latter. He had a kerosene lamp and a hundred books (one hundred four, actually) on loan from the library. He had a hundred-year-old Cambridge atlas, a copy of Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft, a magnifying glass, a mousetrap, a typewriter, and a slide rule. He had sought a doctor’s prescription to keep him awake and another to belay his libido. His room was uncanny, much longer and narrower than need be. He had six suits together with two black shoes that formed a matching pair. Using mirrors, he could trim his own hair. His part-time salary was small, and yet he was able to put a percent of it into an account paying 3.2 percent. But mostly it was the stock market that entranced him, an impossibly ingenious way for feeding off the accomplishments of others.

  I never said he didn’t have vices, many in fact, as judged by standard values. His arrogance was obscene, and after twenty years of error he had freed himself of compassion on behalf of weak people. And in short, he desired a Spartan world in which power, genius, beauty, and assertion held sway.

  He was cold and getting colder, precocious to an unhealthy degree, and immune equally to hostility and friendship alike. No one bothered him, not until the day a pretty girl bumped up against him in the chemistry lab and began apologizing at needless length.

  “Oh!” said she. “I’m so sorry!”

  “No harm. But I don’t plan on getting married.”

  She left, giving the boy a rueful view of her pretty ass.

  But mostly he was absorbed in the uncanny vapor swirling about the chemistry lab. He passed through a green cloud wafting down the hall, a highly vaporous product as bilious and as thin as an equal volume of ordinary atmosphere. He stood at attention as the ten billion little molecules (not the exact number) ran away from each other to the corners of the world.

  Twenty-two

  He worked his way through a day and a half of mid-level mental depression, and then on Thursday jumped up and reported to class. There were more girls here than other people, all of them “in season,” judging by their makeup and kit. There was no question but that ladies’ skirts were at least three inches shorter here than in the non-academic world. His eye was keen, and in one case he saw where someone’s garter’s belt was affixed to the top of someone’s hose. This sight, in combination with the girl’s serious and rather naïve face, was like a preview of paradise, wounding him to the soul. But he needed to give attention to the lecture, and after a few minutes proved able to do so.

  Came noon, he resorted to the cafeteria, a capacious arena full of yet other girls and hoses, lips, and legs and smiles aplenty, and laughter. The food was superb, at least by comparison with his usual groceries. He invested in a piece of meat and, consumed with guilt, consumed it. A man of his type ought never take advantage of people paid to cook, not unless he liked the person and was willing to sit at the same table with her.

  It came the hour for him to earn his own salary, a not-unpleasant sort of work that had him planting tulip bulbs in a decorative area that bordered the entryway to campus. He tried to estimate the colors those bulbs would produce and proceeded to organize the planting to replicate the Confederate Flag. He came across tiny animals in the soil who desired to go on living. The Sun was in a granular phase, but he daren’t stare at it for long. An hour of it, thoroughly exhausted from his all-too-many activities, he crawled into a shaded area, finished off his soft drink, and lay him down to sleep.

  He dozed till almost three o’clock and then ambled over to the concrete-block warehouse where the school’s tractors and other equipment were kept. He had some respect for the maintenance workers, a burly people with large hands and unclean fingernails. He had seen one of them lift up a rattlesnake and decollate the thing by using it like a whip. He had respect, too, for the supervisor, though his hands had become soft and pudgy after his years behind the desk. Passing over his timecard, the boy waited to be paid.

  “I seen you,” the man said. “I shouldn’t never ought to have hired you in the first place.”

  “How come?”

  “Sleeping on the job. I don’t cotton to that kind of thing.”

  “Yeah, but I got as much done as anybody else!”

  “That right? Then think how much you could do if you didn’t work at all.”

  “Okay, that’s what I’ll do, then. Will you give me a raise?”

  He almost laughed, but chose instead to toss a glance to the atrabilious-looking man dithering with something or another, a broken water pump belike, over at stage right.

  “Says he wants a raise. Tell you what, I don’t even want to see you over here anymore. Hell, I don’t even want to see you anywhere else, either. Not over there and not over here, not in the cafeteria, and not downtown, either. You get my drift? I figured you would.”

  The boy took his wages and counted it. He could have made better money begging for dimes or polishing the hundred-dollar shoes belonging to fraternity boys.

  He returned late to his room and, after listening at the door, leapt inside. No one could see his face or try to speak to him in this holy place. He might be smirched in the filth of higher education, but in his pocket he possessed some forty-one dollars more than the same time last week. A letter was awaiting him, no doubt another naïve missive from his people who still imagined they knew what was best for him. He couldn’t count the times he had offered them his own advice, which they had always deflected.

  He showered and undressed and hung his clothes up to dry. He had intended to jump into Chapter Nine of his chemistry text, and did. Those compounds and elements, they had their quiddities certainly. But was it owing to will? No. In all this world (he had decided) it was only what transpired within a choice area of cerebral matter that really mattered. Was there even a hundredweight of such stuff in the entire universe? He returned to his periodic table, a work of genius, his rain-damaged copy gotten for seventy-five cents.

  It was raining now. He did so love it, to turn his cherished green leather couch to the window and read and smoke and think in company with a dense grey downpour that promised to obliterate the quotidian world. He had been learning about the extraordinarily complicated events “bookended,” he said, by the twentieth-century’s two big wars. Fields of dead people, loving couples losing touch with each other, the last sur
viving copies of so many luscious volumes lying at hazard in the bombed-out streets. He was just twenty years old, but already he ranked “beauty,” or “truth,” or “the singularity” (some called it), or “god,” or the “ineffable,” or that undeclared “monster” (others sometimes called it) always lurking just on the other side of the hill; already he ranked these much higher than two-footed things carrying umbrellas in the rain.

  “What is it with you after all? And why are you so anxious to be the most unhappy man on Earth?”

  (He was consulting with his nervous counselor. Me again.)

  “I got the best score in class,” he said. “So why did you give Duane a higher grade!”

  “Why? Because he tried harder.”

  “And so I get punished for being smart?”

  “Get used to it. I had to.”

  He stood, walked two paces, and then came back. Three books lay in his lap, though I could see the title only of the topmost one.

  “Strange taste,” I said. (Against my advice, the rectum had been dipping into works on theoretical and practical magic.)

  “I like this book!”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well! He talks about history without putting it through a humanitarian filter.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well! He doesn’t worry too much if a lot of mediocre people get killed in wars and such.”

  Oh, boy. Evil by nature, he was appareled that day in a suit of some kind, a poorly-fitting affair that was no worse, however, than what the more advanced members of the faculty affected. His tie was long and ran down into his pants. From the time on his watch, it seemed not to be functioning at all.

  His hair was short, shorn with a lawnmower. A slide rule was affixed to his belt while a rosy red kerchief spilled from his vest. His attire was conservative and hilarious both, if not in that order exactly.

  “The girls like you?” I asked.

  “Naw! One of them maybe.”

  “Oh?”