Academe

Just a beginning, but here's my sketchy start of something.

The guide walks backwards, the way they always used to do. Kate had read an article recently—where was it?—which mentioned that college campuses were doing away with this practice. Too many guides had been injured over the years, tripping backwards over a piece of uneven pavement by the library entrance or an exposed root on the path along the science building, drawing blood, concussions, loss of consciousness. Or was it that the imminent risk of such a fall had proven too great a distraction for the parents on the tour, already fearful and on edge about entrusting their own children to this campus full of unseen perils and walking hazards? This seems plausible enough—she notices the assembled parents warily watching their tour guide’s blithe backward walking, so young and so light footed, already free of her own parents influence. Were these parents fearful of the guide’s fall, or secretly willing it, the way people secretly hope that the worst will happen, to lend credence to their fears, the way Kate sometimes has to keep herself from flinging something vitally important (cell phone/briefcase/car keys/infant child) off the cliff when she hiked on steep trails to “get away” from it all? At any rate, the article reported, the parents were not paying sufficient attention to the merits of the Universities on display (or the colleges’ liability insurance rates were soaring) and so some Consortium or other decided to have their guides turn their backs to the audience from that moment on. And so came the end of an era. Or something like that. But the memo seems to have escaped the attention of the Admissions office at Brookshire College.

The campus is small in her dream, and the layout oddly cramped—Kate is surprised to find it bearing such a resemblance to both her windowless urban high school and the liberal arts college where she’d gone for graduate school. Her subconscious has cobbled together a strange assortment of cheaply made portable buildings arranged around red brick and ivy administrative buildings. Kate is the only one on the tour who has come on her own, no sullen kids hanging as far away as they can manage and still participate, no hovering parents embarrassing her with their shrill engagement, their endless questions about the food or the library holdings or the changing facilities in the new state-of-the-art sports center. She is a lone wolf, slinking through the tour…does anyone notice her? Not the parents who are too amped with anxiety to notice anything other than their own painfully vulnerable children. Not the children who are not able to actually perceive anyone over 35—to them Kate is relegated to terminal adult status: boring, unfashionable, and mercifully invisible. Like the parents however, she fears and hopes for the worst. She dreads running into Jonas here, but after all isn’t that why she has come? Why else would she be here in her dream, halfway across the country at the college where he teaches (according to Google), smiling a frozen polite smile while a blithe blonde coed enumerates the ways in which living on-campus has its benefits? Luckily, or unluckily, she has not seen him yet.

Not true: She sees him everywhere; he is every young male grad student with an untucked button-down shirt, a tweedy ill-fitting jacket with elbow patches, mis-matched socks, studiously tousled hair. He is hand-rolling a cigarette by the library; he is sitting in the commons reading Nabokov, Borges, Sebald; he is carefully demonstrating the only two chords he has taught himself on the guitar to a wide-eyed undergraduate and her slutty looking roommate. He is wondering which one of them he will sleep with first: virgin or whore? They are both sizing him up as well, making their own calculations as he closes his eyes for a particularly soulful strum. Kate wants to call his name, to see if he looks up, but she doesn’t want to be rude and interrupt the tour guide.

But if this is truly a dream, why is she so inhibited? Why not just cry out his name, why not just get it over with? For one thing, there are too many of him. It’s as though she is in a fun house campus, where hidden mirrors reflect back a multiplicity of Jonases. He could reject her in stereo! She would like to know how he has managed to stay so young, while she has aged in the 10 years since he left. No doubt he is older, paunchier, has grown a beard, has office hours. Has an office. Which building, she wonders?

The tour has gone on without her, and she must run to catch up.