Daria, Poem Unlimited
by Project Pegasus
Chapter III: Love Letters
I hung up my phone without a response from Jane.
"No good?" Professor Courtet asked.
I shook my head in response.
"Coffee?" he asked. Coffee was his answer to everything, just as other people turned to God. For him, the reflexive impulse to offer coffee was the equivalent of saying, "I'll pray for you."
"Thank you," I said, my voice bleached out from grief and exhaustion.
He opened the spout on his thermos and poured me another cup of coffee. I marveled that his thermos seemed inexhaustible, like a gift from a goddess in return for his love. Had he asked the goddess for eternal life, he would have lived forever but without eternal youth. Had he asked for the most beautiful woman in the world, a thousand ships would have been launched against him to retrieve her. But because he would have asked for a thermos that would always pour a hot cup of coffee, he would have been given just that and nothing more.
I sat composing myself, the gush of emotions and tears having been dammed up for the moment. Leaky eyes, a leaky bladder, a delicate stomach always too eager to put its contents on display, I tried to steady my unbalanced body, which was full of holes and forever sloshing around chaotically.
If you really want to know, I have always been jealous of Quinn's peerless self-possession, her rational body with its prefabricated dimples, self-disciplined and circumspect hair, and her tiny, tiny pores. Master of her body, a fairy-like sprite, she was both the subject and object of her own self-creation. I used to think that she lacked depth; now, I understood that she was wise enough to never leave the magical island she had fashioned for herself using Waif as her template. Shallow though she seemed, she had the uncanny ability to use pore refiner and lip-gloss to tame the disorder of the world around her; her foundation to smooth over and hide the imperfections and blemishes of her own limitations; and her wardrobes to camouflage the internal contradictions of the path she had chosen.
At that moment, my mind was uncertain where its loyalties lay: with my body or me. For now it was able to follow it's own agenda: without Ingmar Bergman to preoccupy it, it only had Jane Lane. Jane's unresponsiveness did not stop me from me keeping her company, reminiscing about trips on the T to the outlying suburbs to see theater performances held in a local Unitarian Church. One time, we arrived late and the ticket taker, an old woman sitting at a fold out table and working with a cash box without a lock, refused to charge us an admission fee. Only after insisting did she accept our money but promised that if we wanted to come back the next night for free, we were more than welcome to. In her excitement, she forgot that night was the last performance of the play. She ushered us quickly and surreptitiously into the back of the theater, as though it were Sunday morning and it pained her for us to be missing the pastor's sermon. It was the last night of their production of Doug Wright's Quills, a play about the last days of the Marquis de Sade. After the show was over, the cast having taken their bow and the lights having come up, we both pointed out the irony of using a house of God to celebrate a man who, bereft of his writing instruments by his jailers, resorted to using his own feces to compose his S&M fantasies on the walls of his jail cell, how the next day the imagined jail cell would go back to being the walls of the church, minus the messages scribbled in scat. We also pointed out the irony of being hungry young intellectuals in the intellectual capital of America but even with student discounts being too poor to afford tickets to the symphony, a museum, or a more prestigious theater. There was also the irony that, given a choice, we would have probably chosen to attend the tiny, informal Unitarian church, especially since they had the added advantage of selling Little Debbie snack cakes during intermission.
That night after the play we returned to Jane's dorm room and we shared a half a bottle of Arbor Mist and shots of tequila. We laughed about all of the irony of that evening and the general ironies of irony: Harold Bloom's insight that Shakespeare gives his most ironic creature, Hamlet, an ironic God, a dilemma that causes Hamlet yearn for a earnest and wholly immanent God, a yearning he expresses through irony; the irony that the fruits of the Enlightenment's pursuit of freedom and equality have been the absolute loss of freedom and equality. We quibbled about the niceties of irony such as whether irony ceases to be ironic when irony is the anticipated response to everything. We couldn't stop laughing as we poured ourselves shot after shot of tequila long after we had emptied the bottle of Arbor Mist. We were still laughing when Jane raced from the room to retch up her stomach's cocktail of fruity wine and suspect tequila, suspect because it came in a plastic bottle and was corked by a aluminum twisty cap. I was less apt to be condemnatory toward the poison that had been polite enough to take up residence in my body. When she came back, she flopped down on the bed and passed out. She had had enough of everything for the night while I was still willing to run my hands along the dark face of irony, staring into its eyes, waiting for a sign of recognition.
I looked outside once more as the light filtered through the blizzard and into the empty classroom.
"Professor Courtet," I said breaking the silence, "I can really make it home all right. It's nothing, really"
"That's what the Donner Party said," he quipped, "I wouldn't keep you if you think you can make it to your dorm. If you don't want to stay, how about I walk you back?"
"I actually got lost trying to make it here."
"Oh my," he said, concerned. "I shouldn't have joked like that. Are the white out conditions that bad?"
"They're pretty bad, but I took a different route to buy my cigarettes," I said holding up my smokes, "That was what did it."
"Those things really will kill you. Why don't you stay here tonight?" he asked, hopeful.
"I think that might be a good idea," I said, not knowing how to react to his kindness or the goofy, poorly inhibited smile on his face.
We began to gather up our things. I noticed, among his pile of papers and his coffee things, that his copy of the school newspaper had indeed been turned to my silly comic strip, the one Jane illustrated and I wrote. We took the stairs down to the bottom of the building and as we approached the glass doors, I looked through the snowstorm, across the lonely courtyard to the Old Glover faculty building that was huddled with its stone back to the wind, ice and snow capping its roof. Professor Courtet gave me a wink and a smirk, as much as to ask if I were ready to go. I nodded back to him and braced myself. He opened the doors and, with the frost battering us from all sides, we raced headlong across no man's land toward the distant building.
"I'm sorry for you friend," Professor Courtet said sympathetically.
"Thank you," I managed to say. I was sitting on his green army cot, which he deftly, almost magically, set up for me. He was silent. I knew he would never try to draw out anything from me so I volunteered. "I can't believe he's dead."
"It's never easy when these things are so sudden."
"I mean," I said to rebut, "I can't believe it because I can't believe that he joined the army in the first place."
"What was he like," he asked before immediately adding, "If you don't mind me asking."
"No, of course I don't mind," I assured him. I thought a moment. I felt like eulogizing Trent, but all I could feel was disbelief, as though I wish he were alive just so I could chastise him. "He was immature, irresponsible and had enormous dreams he wasn't willing to work for. He was a daydreamer who would start things half-heartedly, if at all. He was lazy, but that wasn't his problem: he lacked nerve. He knew that if he gave himself fully to his work and was found wanting, it wouldn't just mean that his life was a failure, but his whole existence as well." I know that I sounded like a fussy mother, but Professor Courtet said nothing, allowing me to vent. "I know why he joined the army: he was tired of the responsibility of judging his own value, tired of living the conundrum of being a musician who couldn't create music. He didn't just lack creativity; he couldn't even figure out what side of the guitar he was supposed to play from. He wanted to give the responsibility of figuring out who Trent Lane was to somebody else. The army was happy to take over that job."
Analyzing Trent dispassionately, like a moderately interesting character from a minor author's novel, had stayed my tears. Perhaps I thought that by analyzing him, I could bring him back, just as Karin reappeared without fail at the beginning of each replay of Virgin Spring despite being brutally raped and murdered half way through. When I realized that there was no way to do the same for Trent, my tears began to well again.
"Shit," I said bushwhacked by my own tears, knowing my stratagem to outfox myself had failed. "But I don't really know why he joined the army," I admitted, "He wouldn't speak to me before he joined up for some reason."
It was dark outside now. I was tired and still my flu would not release its grip on me. I wish that I felt like eating, like drinking or even like smoking, but all I felt was a never-ending limbo brought on by my illness and an overdose of Dayquil.
Professor Courtet, with nothing else to do, began to rummage through his trashcan. He fished out a plastic bag and moved his desk chair beneath his office's smoke detector. He deftly tied the bag around the neck of the detector, as though he were performing an act of euthanasia on the quasi-sentient mechanism. I did not feel much like smoking, but my not smoking would seem positively rude after his act of compassion and minor defiance against the administration's fire safety safeguards. Cigarettes never taste so good as when they are not supposed to be smoked. I lit up and passed a cigarette and my lighter to Professor Courtet.
As he accepted I asked him, "How is it, being a professor?"
"It has its perks," he said after mentally weighing the pros and cons. "In some ways, it's like you're a glorified babysitter and a petty courtier engaged in never-ending castle intrigue. This is especially true in the humanities where the fights are never so fierce as when the consequences of the battles are so negligible."
I smiled, appreciating his honesty.
"Of course," he continued, "You meet some characters: everyone from charlatans to the true believers, the secular priests, the zealots, to the jaded hipsters and affective cynics."
"So," I said, "its like high school with no jocks."
"Or cheerleaders," he added.
I puffed away again before adding, "It's just that I've been considering going to graduate school."
"Oh my," he said mischievously, "Another novitiate wanting into our little cult."
"As long as the only time I have to wear a robe and chant is at commencement ceremonies, I think I can live with that."
"The vow of poverty becomes easier to live with when you realize that you qualify for government assistance, but just between you and me, the vow of celibacy becomes unbearable around the sixth year. Survive that and you'll make it. The part about not eating meat on Fridays never gets easier though," he said with a wry smile on his face. "In all seriousness though, are you sure you want to do this?"
"Why wouldn't I?" I replied, a bit taken aback by the directness of his question.
"I wouldn't want to discourage you," he assured me, "But sometimes it's not all it's cracked up to be. Every year, our funding is siphoned off almost as a foregone conclusion, symbolic really of what's happened to our cultural relevance. I just want to make sure that you know what you're getting into."
"This is something I have to do," I said impassively, not with conviction but as a fact to be declared. "When I was in high school, I understood the world and everyone in it. I knew that people were deluded, petty and fallible. The adults acted like a bank account or a corner office or an imported German car could filter out the complexity and downright stupidity of life, and their kids who couldn't afford a German car or who hadn't earned a corner office yet could just as easily bide their time by substituting them with trinkets bought from the mall. I understood that some were deluded enough to believe their own lies, and those who couldn't always keep the façade up supplemented it by treating others like shit. I understood the world when I was in high school; I had everyone's number, and now that I know I was right about everything, I'm sorry that I figured it out so soon. Perhaps applying for graduate school is like my act of penance."
I took a fresh cigarette from the box. Putting it in my mouth, I lit it with the ember from the burned out stub of the old one. "And I was the worst of all," I went on. "I wish that I took satisfaction from chasing after boys or being reassured that my reflection in the mirror confirmed my existence and self-worth. Instead I implicitly assumed that I could evade the complexity and stupidity of life by outthinking it, by being smarter than it all."
"Sometimes the evasion is more deadly than what you had to evade in the first place," Professor Courtet added, perhaps from concern, perhaps speaking from experience.
"I just need to know that I'm doing the right thing," I said, repeating myself. "But I can't tell if this is just another evasion, an attempt to sidestep the world, or if this will bring me back in touch with it all."
"Well, I wish I could tell you for sure," he said, "But we both know that you are the only one who can decide such a thing." Wanting to lighten the mood, he pulled out the newspaper from under his stack of books. "If you do decide it's what you want, you've gotten off to a good start with your comic strip."
I blushed a bit. Jane and I had pirated one of Dostoevsky's most complex creations and then plopped him in our silly comic. We called our collaboration, "The New Adventures of Old Raskolnikov." The comic imagined what would happen if the anti-villain of Crime and Punishment were cryogenically suspended after an accident at the Siberian penal camp where he was sentenced to hard labor at the novel's end and then thawed out by a team of Raft scientists who had mistaken him for a baby wooly mammoth. For some inexplicable but, within the logic of the comic, self-evident reason, he becomes a student at Raft. And of course, hilarity ensues.
"What do you mean?" I asked, hoping he was not being sarcastic.
"Well," he began, "The theories or literary interpretations that stick in your mind are the ones that come from a unique perspective. You can detect the reek of a scholar's own obsessions mixed up with academy-speak in the best criticism. What's more, you are obviously an excellent judge of character, something that is indispensable to criticism as well as negotiating the labyrinthine and Byzantine world of academic politics."
"Why would you say that?"
"I mean, your characters come to life. What's more, the comic is a perfect microcosm of college life, a Wonderland of the overeducated. Your Socrates is at once the specious and malicious logician, but also lost in ecstasy like a scholar first losing his virginity to logic. The academic debates between your Mad Hatter as an anti-foundationalist and Don Quixote as an intellectual conservative are pitch perfect. Your Hamlet is played up as a self-indulgent poseur and ham. I like your Raskolnikov the best though. He is very human: cynical but vulnerable; fanatical but in doubt of everything and everyone; painfully self-aware in some areas but blind as a bat in others."
"I'm glad you like it," I said, a little overwhelmed. I did not want to admit it to him, but at first I had thought of Raskolnikov as sort of a weird amalgamation of Jane, Professor Courtet and me. The more the series went on, the more I began to realize that our Raskolnikov lacked Jane's wit, adventurousness, balanced perspective and cool detachment. The more comics we created together, the more I realized that our Raskolnikov was like the product of the neurotic exchange of energies between Professor Courtet and me. Our Raskolnikov was like a bastard child whose features and lineage I hoped Professor Courtet would not recognize as his own.
"In some ways I feel like I know Jane through her drawings. Please tell her I'm sorry for her loss." He took another look at the comic before setting it aside. "Well, I am proud of the work you have done in my class, Daria. You have the mark of an academic. It's unmistakable like the mark of Cain."
I suppressed a smile. "I just hope that it won't be held against me if I decide to apply to grad school," I said, my pride shimmering through my practiced monotone.
I could feel myself growing tired, my slog through the blizzard, my presentation, and my inflection slowly overcoming me. And then there was Trent, his heart stopped, body cold, his unit packing his body in ice to impede the onset of decay. Jane and I would attend to his corpse and bury it in the night, outside of the city walls and against the wishes of the tyrant. We'd give him a proper burial despite, or perhaps because of, his absurd death. I put out my cigarette and fell quiet.
"Tired?" Professor Courtet asked.
I nodded my head. He began to gather up the scattered books and papers on his table. "I'll hole up in the professors' lounge. Papers to correct. Get some rest," he said, getting up to leave.
I wanted to ask him to wait, to delay him another moment. It all made so little sense. But before I could even formulate the parameters of inquiry, define the terms or propose a tentative thesis, his footsteps had already been swallowed by the silence of Old Glover. The whirl of the storm outside wanted to tell me something. It seemed to want to assure me that I would have another chance to ask my questions. It told me that the answers would most likely never come but if nothing else, at least I was not dead in the world. Improbable, near-extinct surprises still existed, perhaps even miracles, was the the rumor that ran through winds outside. The chance, the impossible possibility of rediscovering myself was enough to allow me to endure another night of infection and grief. But the storm itself was dying out as I began to drift into sleep. Certainly the storm had not been disingenuous, but could its promises to me outlast its own fitful existence or was it as misled as I was?
I awoke early the next morning before the dawn broke. The lampposts provided umbrellas of light, revealing a world sealed and silent. I left Professor Courtet's office and headed toward the professors' lounge. I stole in quietly, Professor Courtet's snoring pulsing in tune with my shuffling steps. I passed the couch he slept on toward the alcove which housed the tiny kitchenette. I searched the cabinets until I found the oversized drum of generic coffee grinds. I always remembered making that pot of coffee, how I purposefully used six meticulously measured spoonfuls of coffee to five cups of water to make the brew especially strong. Later in graduate school, I would learn to gauge the strength of my coffee with a barista's precision. At the time though, with only the most careful precision did I level off each spoonful before adding it to the paper-basket filter. As I was leaving the lounge, the coffeemaker began to gurgle and stir to life behind me.
Making him a pot of coffee, I mused--now he will know for sure that I love him.
