Mr. X

I believe that I had a dim grasp of the first few problems. All the rest were in a mixture of Old Icelandic and Basque. I kept falling asleep for two-second, three-second naps. Occasionally I covered a page with doodles or scrawled the random words that limped across my mind’s surface. At the end of the hour I tossed the question sheets and blue books into the heap on the table and went off-campus to guzzle beer at a student bar until the return of unconsciousness.

My recurring dream descended once again.

All the next day I lay in bed listening to the slamming of car doors and shouts of farewell. Because I didn’t remember going to the bar, I did not understand that I had a monstrous hangover. How could I be hungover? I almost never drank alcohol. To the extent I was capable of thinking anything at all, I thought that I had come down with some spectacular new variety of flu.

Memory returned in dreamlike, photographic flashes. I watched my hand add a caricature of Professor Flagship’s face to the body of a lion with stubby wings, protruding breasts, and a bloated penis. For a second, Simone Feigenbaum revolved her lush little body above me, and I thought: Hey, that happened! I opened a blue book to a fresh page and in neat block letters wrote, THE MAIN CAUSE OF PROBLEMS IS SOLUTIONS. I remembered tossing my test papers on the professor’s desk and watching, many hours later, a stiff, disapproving bartender swiping a cloth over five inches of polished mahogany and setting down a glass crowned with foam. I realized where I was and what I had done. It was the Saturday after final exams, and the campus was filled with parents picking up their sons and daughters. Other students, myself supposedly among them, were taking the bus to the airport.

The universe in which people could pack bags and climb into their fathers’ cars seemed unbridgeably distant from mine. I huddled in bed until the window was dark and the last car had driven away.

By tradition, our instructors posted exam grades in a glass-encased bulletin board on the quad before the college mailed them out. After the break, the board would be surrounded by students looking up other people’s grades. I expected to see my English and French results on the coming Monday, history no later than Tuesday, chemistry on Tuesday or Wednesday. I had extravagant hopes for chemistry. Calculus, the one that terrified me, probably would not show up until Wednesday.

The Grants expected me to come into O’Hare on Sunday afternoon. I was to call them Saturday to confirm, and my ticket was already waiting at the airport. When I felt capable of rational speech, I put in a collect call to Naperville and spoke an escalating series of whoppers about an invitation to join a friend in Barbados, and if they didn’t mind … My friend’s sister had backed out, so I’d be taking her place, the tickets were already paid for, and the family didn’t mind because I’d bunk with my friend and save them the price of a room …

The Grants said they’d be sorry not to see me, but spring vacation wasn’t far away. Phil asked if my friend might happen to be of the female variety. I said, no, he was Clark Darkmund, the name of a cherubic, porn-obsessed Minnesotan who had been rotated into the single next to mine after disagreeing about the merits of the philosophy expressed in Mein Kampf with his former roommate, Steven Glucksman of Great Neck, Long Island. Yes, I said, Clark was an interesting character. Great conversationalist, too.

‘How did the finals go?’ Phil asked.

‘We’ll see.’

‘I know my Ned,’ Phil told me. ‘You’re going to surprise yourself.’

After dinner in a student bar, I walked back to the campus. When I turned onto the path to my dorm, a German exchange student named Horst who looked like an Esquire model hastened up out of nowhere and appeared beside me. Had he been cherubic, Horst would have resembled Clark Darkmund, but there was nothing cherubic about him. He smiled at me. ‘Here we are again, alone in this desolate place. Now that you are sober, let us go to my room and undress each other very, very slowly.’

His proposition deepened my gloom, and my response surprised me even more than it did Horst. ‘I have a knife in my pocket,’ I said. ‘Unless you disappear right away, your guts will freeze before you know you’re cut.’

‘Ned.’ He looked stricken. ‘Didn’t we have an understanding?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll count to three. Here goes. One.’

He summoned a charming smile. ‘That object in your trousers is undoubtedly far more magnificent than a knife.’

‘Two.’

‘You do not remember our conversation of last night?’

I shoved my hand into my pocket and closed it around the remnant of a roll of Life Savers.

Horst slid into the darkness with a regretful moue.

The next morning, transparent sunlight streamed down from a sky of clear, hard azure. The crisp shadows of leafless poplars stretched out across the bright snow.

Accompanied by my own crisp shadow, I walked into Middlemount and wandered around, sipping at a container of coffee and biting into an apple danish. Church bells announced the beginnings or endings of services, I didn’t know which. I inspected shop windows and otherwise goofed off. The church bells broke again into speech. Through down-sluicing light, I walked back to the college and at a crucial junction experimentally turned left instead of right and soon found myself at the edge of what appeared to be an extensive forest. Weather-beaten letters on a wooden sign nailed to the trunk of an oak read JONES’S WOODS.

At the time, all I understood was that if I walked into the woods I would feel better, so I left the road and walked into the woods.

I felt better, instantly. I seemed to be magically at home, or if not precisely at home at least in the right place. Across crunching snow packed so hard it scarcely registered my footprints, I wound through trees until I reached a ring of maples and sat down in the center of their circle, more at peace with myself than I had been since my arrival in Vermont. My anxieties dwindled, and my life was going to be all right. If I had to leave college, that was all right, too. I could always wait on tables at Inside the Outside. I could marry Simone Feigenbaum and be a kept man. Squirrels with fat winter coats raced down the trunks of oak trees and skidded across glassy snow. Eventually the light began to die, and the trees crowded closer together. I stood up and walked out.

Monday morning I went into town and bought a long salami, a square of cheddar cheese, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, a bag of Cape Cod potato chips and two smaller bags of peanut M & M’s, a quart of milk, and a six-pack of Coca-Cola. Back in my room, I wrapped slices of salami and cheese in bread and washed down spoonfuls of peanut butter with Coke. Then I put on my coat and hurried to the quad to find three of my grades posted on the board. In English, I got a B+ on the exam and a B+ for the semester; in French, B and B, disappointing but not entirely unexpected. History, in which I thought I had done well, was a disaster. My C on the exam lowered my semester grade to B–. One of the conditions of my scholarship was that I had to maintain a certain average, and I’d been counting on a B in history to balance Ds or even a potential failure in my other two courses.

I stepped back from the bulletin board and noticed something move off to my left. Horst was watching me from beside a pillar at the top of the library steps. His attitude, of an almost regal patience, suggested that he had been there for some time. He drew a gloved hand from the pocket of his duffel coat and gave a slow, ironic wave. I lowered my head and took the nearest path in the opposite direction, on my way back to the right place.

Once I had entered the clearing, worries about examinations and grade-point averages floated off into the transparent air. For a disembodied time, I became a recording eye. Squirrels repeated their comic turns. A fox stepped out between the maples, froze, and rewound itself as if on film. When the air began to darken, I reluctantly got to my feet.

Tuesday morning, I cowered starving in bed until 11:00 A.M., got up to gulp milk from the carton and gnaw at cheese and bread, climbed back in bed for another hour of deep-breathing exercises, and finally managed to propel myself into the shower. There was the slightest possibility that our chemistry grades might be announced that afternoon. Most professors posted their grades before 3:00 P.M., and shortly before that hour I hurried into the quad and inspected the board. My section’s chemistry results had not been posted. I rammed junk food into my pockets and on the way to my sanctuary went into the brick cubicle of the dormitory post office to check my mailbox.

Wedged like a letter bomb behind the glass door of my box was an unstamped, cream-colored envelope addressed to ‘Mr Ned Dunstar.’ It bore the return address of the dean of student affairs.

Dear Mr Dunstar,

I regret the necessity of informing you of a troubling matter recently brought to my attention by Mr Roman Polk, the Manager of Food Service Personnel at Middlemount College, in which capacity Mr Polk supervises our full-time kitchen staff and those members of the student body for whom Food Services Placements have been awarded in accordance with the conditions of their Middlemount Student Support Scholarships.

Mr Polk informs me that you have failed to meet seven out of ten of your last Food Service Placement appointments, furthermore that you were absent on sick leave upon nine previous occasions. This is a matter of concern to us all.

We will meet in my office at 7:30 A.M. on the first academic day of the coming term, January 20, for a discussion of Mr Polk’s charges. You remain a valued member of the Middlemount community, and if for some reason Food Services was an inappropriate placement, another might be found. In the meantime, I wish you success in your examinations.

Sincerely yours,

Clive Macanudo

Dean of Student Affairs

When I emerged from the little cell block housing our mailboxes, who stood in the cold athwart the cement path, resplendent in a long, forest-green loden coat, fresh comb tracks dividing his thick hair? Horst might as well have been wearing a Tyrolean hat with a feather jutting from the band. He glanced at the letter protruding from my coat pocket. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Stop following me, you creep.’ I tried to walk around him.

‘Please, forget about the other night.’ Horst moved in front of me. ‘I made a silly mistake and misinterpreted our brief conversation of the day before.’

Evidently I had spoken to him in the student bar that Friday and forgotten about it later. That was fine with me. I had succeeded in forgetting most of Friday’s events as they were happening, and I certainly did not want to remember anything I might have said to Horst. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But if you don’t stop following me, I’m still going to cut you.’

‘Please, Ned, really!’ He stepped back and raised his gloved hands in surrender. ‘Only, you do not look well. I ask as a friend, are you all right? Is anything wrong?’

‘Here we go,’ I said. ‘Count of three, remember? One.’

‘Ned, please, you don’t own a knife. In fact, you are about as dangerous as a bunny rabbit.’ Smiling, he lowered his hands. ‘Let me buy you a cup of coffee. You could tell your problems to me, after which I will explain how to fix them, after which I will bore you with mine, after which we will drink a beer and decide our problems are not so serious after all.’

‘After which we will go back to your room and fix your boring problems by taking off our clothes.’

‘I’m not talking about that,’ Horst said. ‘Honestly. I am simply offering to be of help.’

‘Then simply get out of my way.’ I walked straight toward him, and he got out of my way.

Later that afternoon, I sat frozen at the base of a giant oak and attended to the deep, nearly inaudible sound, as of powerful machinery at work, filtering up through the snowpack. Snatches of high-pitched music resounded either from the air itself or from the movement of the air through the branches. The music-laden air filled with grains of darkness, the grains coalesced, and the darkness blotted out the light.

Wednesday morning, I saw my guitar case propped beside the door. The sight immediately suggested the inspiration of adding to the music of Jones’s Woods. I jumped out of bed.

Having breakfasted on sour milk and Cape Cod potato chips, I edged into the quad, keeping a weather eye out for Horst. He did not show himself. Neither did my chemistry results, although Professor Medley’s conclusions had been posted on the board. While the names of everyone else in my section were followed by letters indicating their grades, after ‘Dunstan, Ned’ appeared only the nongrade ‘Inc,’ abbreviation-speak for ‘Incomplete.’ I stumbled back to my room and rammed the day’s nourishment into my coat pockets, remembering as I did so the summons from On High. Once again I entered the glum post office and found an official envelope pressed against the glass window of my box. Clive Macanudo: The Sequel. This time, he spelled my name right.

Dear Mr Dunstan,