The Thrill of Phenomenology
[Note:
This is the penultimate DRAFT only.
Please do not quote.]
1
He was a fool and a moron, but I never wanted to see him dead. All I wanted was a little slack between us, a space. That’s why I was there, in that paper landfill he called his office, in the faint light of an icy dawn. The key he gave me long ago. I planned to slip in, take back what was mine, get out. He’d get the point. No talk needed. Just a little distance.
But, 6 AM or not, he’s there. “Oh,” I murmur, and as I see his current condition, “oh” again. The door clicks shut behind me. He’s there, but not all there: slumping onto his keyboard, with both arms hugging the base of the monitor, like he wants to pull it off the desk. As if someone had blown his brains out, but without the spatter. I freeze into the jittery shadows, holding my breath. It is no dream. I’m about to speak his name, but pull back. Let sleeping senior professors lie, I always say.
I’m thinking I should get the hell out, but instead of moving I’m fixated on him, on the curve of his back. His sweatshirt hunches up at his neck. A tail of dark flannel sneaks out at the waist and drapes over the chair edge, weightless as a shadow. It could be the same shirt he wore last night. The image makes me shiver, reminds me why I’m there. This is not wrong. I remember to breathe, and step in toward the desk. Light folders and papers float on dim stacks, a million words submerged and smudged, silent in darkness. But one folder, lying next to him on the desk, shimmers red. I already know what’s scrawled along the tab: CONSCIOUSNESS. In it, my words. To own them again, I have to lean around him like a wife reading over his shoulder. A shiny black mug rests on one corner of the folder, empty except for a metal teaball. I ease the teacup aside like a dead rat, wipe my fingers on my jeans. Inches away, he smells like an old sneaker sprinkled with Obsession. I take the folder. My words.
As I straighten up, hugging my half-bodied dissertation, I have to see the scene again, repeating in the reflection of his dark monitor. At the bottom of the screen, his halo of Jerry Garcia gray. My face, round and startled and pale, hovering above like the double sunrise in 2001. The gray glass washes out the difference between us, between his raggedness and the mathematical strands of my own dark hair, throwing my why-me face and his bald spot into a single deep well, a common dismal fate. I feel sick, uncanny, as if something had fallen out of a movie into my world. The room stills. Thought icicles. Absolute zero.
A second, one endless thick beat, falls. Colorless dark books loom around us, stacked from floor to ceiling. Way off, I consider gagging, and suddenly I’m filled with one thought: Get out. I take a step back, into this maze of lost time. And another, and then I’m in the hall, pulling the door shut behind me. Empty still. I am trembling, freezing all through.
I tremble all the way to the apartment, yawning compulsively, and do not stop even in the cocoon of my down comforter. The scene in the office drifts in fragments around me. What was he doing there? What was he doing there? Slowly it seems less and less like one of his mind games, like discussing Heidegger in total darkness or Sartre while sitting on your hands. Slowly it seems less like a nap. The smell is still with me, a bad mix of man smell and something else. Something like Christmas or old lace. Slowly it surfaces that I might well have seen my advisor – the Mr. Chips of consciousness, the jerk of my grad school life – that I might have seen him dead. Maybe still warm, maybe cold as ice, but all his fires out. I had stood there without seeing. Or hearing either – I can remember only streaks and shadows, and one red thing. I was so busy not stepping on overdue books, not losing it, that I throttled the main conclusion. Maybe.
And for two hours the strange shivering will not stop. It moves around like a cat caged in my ribs. But maybe not.