Chapter 2: First Night in Berkshire
Arrival in town; I meet Flap at the Commodore; a disorienting stroll through what's become of the campus.
I watch as the train departs the station, leaving me behind, making my arrival as real as it’s ever going to be. The few other passengers who also disembarked, if they were ever there, are gone now, vanished in the shadows of crooked towers I don’t remember having seen before. I gather my roller-bag and start rolling it down the ramp attached to the platform, and then across the parking lot, clutching the law firm’s letter.
I hold it out in front of me, like I expect it to provide its own illumination, pointing the way through streets that seem to have grown steeper and more jumbled since I was here last. It’s always been my tendency to cast natural and built landscapes in terms of animation, but I can’t remember ever having seen a town or city that tipped inward quite so vertiginously, like the etchings of an Austrian opium addict at the end of the nineteenth century. It feels unstable; the streets ripple like paintings or tapestries of streets floating in water. I feel like a smudge among them, my perspective zoomed way out, up by the rooftops, watching myself with dispassion.
Stumbling through them, the sense of surrounding water intensifies, as often happens to me when a thought about some specific aspect of the environment is proven true. I exaggerate my accurate perceptions to the point of inaccuracy, as I believe I put it once in an interview with an alt-weekly that’d recently begun publishing exclusively online.
Refreshed by the memory of my own long-ago wisdom, and the context of certainty in which it was offered, I give in to the nautical mood that’s been fomenting around me as I follow a thick salt breeze whose incongruity in what I remember as a mountain town several hundred miles from the coast doesn’t hit me until I’m right up against the railing on the boardwalk, looking out to sea.
I walk along this railing, allowing my original sense of purpose here to ebb away. To mimic in body the resignation that has begun to take hold in my mind, I stuff the law firm’s letter into the front pocket of my roller-bag, to be accessed later on.
Another phrase I’ve often used for the mode I’m entering now is suspending disbelief to explore the zone I’m apparently already in, as I often do while exploring the terrain of a new animation, trying to immerse myself in a place I’ve never been before, but rather one that I, in a sense I’ve never understood nor even really tried to understand, contain. A subconscious country for which my conscious mind is the continent.
*****
But this feels different. In no way do I feel that I contain whatever Berkshire has become. It does not feel ancestral or primal or secretly familiar. It feels strange, all the way through, in a way it never was before, and in a way that New York never felt. I roll my bag along the deserted boardwalk, looking out at the black, lapping water, lit only by a few ships—barges or tankers, maybe—way out on the horizon. They seem distant, like whoever’s aboard has never heard of the coastline I’m standing on, and would disbelieve any report of it, were one to come in over the radio. Like I can see them due to a fluke or a flaw in the system, an open space that was meant to stay closed, and if they came out onto their decks to look in my direction, they would see only open ocean.
And perhaps that’s why they’re all belowdecks now, I think, though of course I can’t see if this is so. Perhaps they know they’re passing a stretch of ocean in which there are things—doomed coastlines, resurfacing shipwrecks—that, if they want to complete their journeys, they must prevent themselves from seeing.
This notion—or the fact that I’ve been induced to come up with it—bothers me. I feel it rendering any sane return to Berkshire less and less likely, as if seeing the ships is already doing to my mind what I imagine the sailors fear that seeing me might do to theirs.
Suddenly desperate for shelter, I scan the boardwalk, eager to find anyplace that seems open. A lit interior to wait inside of, at least long enough to give those ships a chance to pass by.
I lean against the boardwalk railing, inhale the sea air, and picture an animation in which a character goes into a building and, though it appears as though he reemerges, it turns out that he never does: the former exterior gets folded into the interior, wood-paneled ceilings running out to replace the sky, windows forming in the far distance, beyond which a further distance is faintly visible, though never to be reached, just as the view outside a window must remain always a view.
As I walk toward the only lights I can see, the coast to my right, the notion of the animation itself starts to close in, hardening, becoming real faster than it should, in direct rebuke to the maddening slowness of actual animation. By the time I’m at the doors of what looks like a defunct hotel, part of a resort, perhaps, I can’t tell if this animation is something I’ve just thought of, or one I’ve actually seen. Perhaps one of Arp’s early works, I think, from before he left Europe. I hesitate at the jammed automatic doors, afraid that, if I go in, I’ll end up in the endless room I now can’t stop picturing, a room that comes into being by first insinuating itself in the minds of its prisoners.
I picture Arp in a studio in Prague or Budapest working on this film in secret, in the dead of night, drawing or sculpting with all the lights off, lest the secret police kick in the door and drag him to the woods. In the corner of this studio, which I find I can picture just as vividly as I can my own abandoned studio in New York, lies the disembodied head puppet he used in his first major short, in which an ancient dowager in an empty castle roams room to room, talking to this head on a stick, which kisses her lovingly whenever she presses it to her face or neck. Some critics speculated that the head was Arp’s, though, at that time, no definitive images of him had yet been seen.
The castle grows cold and stale, the room full of what I want to call stillborn air, and I turn to see that I’ve pushed my way in through the jammed automatic doors of the hotel, rolling the divider with my shoulder, the cold metal kissing me just like Arp’s head in the film.
*****
I try to get my bearings in the lobby, regarding the bar with a metal grill locked over the bottles, a plaque for a Big Ideas convention called Thought Experiment covered in dust on the hostess stand near the entrance. The walls beside the check-in desk on the other side of the lobby are decorated with standard issue paintings of sailboats and fishing rods and a happy, family-friendly boardwalk, cotton candy and popcorn in cardboard cartons. The notion that this is how the boardwalk is meant to look, or even how it still does look during the day, makes me feel even less settled than I did before seeing it.
I clench my roller-bag and hoist my backpack higher on my shoulders and remember that I’m still a traveler, a new arrival here, and some instinct prompts me to look back at the check-in desk, as if this hotel had been my destination all along. As if the law firm’s letter and the attendant story of my coming here to inhabit the house of a newly dead man were all part of some paperback I’d been reading on the train, a gothic thriller in the vein of Dracula, and the truth is that I’m a prominent young futurist who’s come to this remote seaside resort for the sake of attending the annual Big Ideas convention, and the lobby’s empty simply because I arrived a day early to finalize my lecture in peace.
This story starts to gain traction—I like to indulge the specifics of alternate lives, drawing them out to see how far they go, as if I might one day come across one capacious enough to switch over to entirely—so, when I hear a voice from behind the closed doors of the conference room, I think, oh, I guess I wasn’t the first one here after all. Maybe the meet and greet is already underway.
I look back at the shuttered bar, wondering why it hasn’t opened yet. Then I again adjust my grip on the roller-bag and enter the conference room, where all the seats are empty save for a few scattered individuals, sunk low and staring downward. On stage, a large man in a rumpled blue suit and bright red sneakers paces around, feinting back and forth with the mic crushed in his hand as he says, “And that was when, buried in the rank interior of a conference room much like this one, but with—as I’ll explain in a moment—endless gunfire going off just behind the paperboard walls, I told the mother of all jokes! The joke about existence itself, about the essence of humor stemming from the very fact that anything at all exists, rather than not-existing, which—as I explained in that other hotel, all the way out in Butte, Montana, if you can believe it—always struck me as the natural state of things, though of course, in that state, they wouldn’t be things at all! Nor would they, or we, or anything, even be in the first place!”
He pauses here and looks out at the mostly empty auditorium, as if expecting rapturous laughter. He scans the seats, lingering on each one, until he gets to mine, where his eyes remain, drawing me into them.
“Spine?” he asks, getting off the stage, mic still in hand. “John Spine?”
I haven’t heard that name spoken aloud for so long that I look behind me, wondering who he means. If there were anyone else nearby, I think, I’d wait for him to speak to that person before responding.
But, as it’s just me and him and those several silent souls on the far edges of the auditorium, we’re soon face to face, and I feel my head tip forward and backward, nodding when he asks again if I am who he says I am. “I knew it was you!” he blurts, the mic picking up his voice and blowing it back through the speakers. “It’s me, Flap! You took my slapstick seminar at Berkshire, no? I saw your film, man. Heavy shit.”
He pauses, his face darkening as he stretches his hand over the mic, cutting it off. “You heard what happened, right? To Arp?”
“Yeah, I heard,” I say. “I…” I’m about to tell some version of the story of the letter and the house on campus, as much to remind myself as to inform him, but he claps me on the shoulder before I can.
“Have you eaten? You look kinda… I don’t know. Buy you a fish and chips?” He leads me out, past the silent dregs of his audience, who don’t stir as we pass by. When he nods at a plush chair in the lobby, I settle into it, gathering that he means for me to wait here.
*****
I remain in this chair while Flap goes through a side door off the lobby and returns, ten minutes later, with two platters of fish and chips and two bottles of lite beer. I don’t ask where he went, though I can sense something defensive in his demeanor, like the reason I’m not asking is because he’s silently warning me not to. Like this hotel, and maybe the whole resort surrounding it—it’s too dark, obviously, to say how far the grounds go—is his preserve, to be accessed, as far as I’m concerned, through him alone.
He leads out of the lobby and through another side door, diagonally across from the fish and chip shop, as I’ve started calling it, and onto a patio lit by freestanding outdoor torches. We sit down in plastic chairs facing the waves and unwrap our parcels. Mine contains two breaded filets, a pile of fries, a lemon, a plastic container of ketchup, and one of tartar sauce. Not bad, I think, as I pry the plastic tops off the condiments and settle them among the fries.
“Sorry, they didn’t have forks,” Flap says, squeezing lemon over his filet with one hand while already holding it with the other.
Who didn’t? I want to ask, but, again, hold myself back. I think of my ever-evolving Goals For Art document, grown by now to thousands of pages, to be published, as I decided upon the completion of The Pale Oaks, along with my first retrospective at the MoMA, whenever that finally happens, or finally would have, if it’s true that I’ve now exited the world in which such things inhere. I’ve designed five or six covers for the book, and positioned it on the Featured Artist table in a digital mockup I made of the MoMA gift shop. I open it, mentally, and read this entry:
A scenario of ambient fear, of fear itself without being fear of anything tangible, is always deeper and more resonant than a scenario where all the fear emanates from something specific, and is thus ‘only something, not everything.’
I look back at the hotel behind us and wonder if this is exactly such a scenario. I tell myself that it is. This again makes me want to ask Flap what we’re doing here, where the food came from if there are no other people around, but, again, I resist. I squeeze lemon over one of my filets, dip it in tartar sauce, and take a bite, picturing the dreary stragglers from his show doing likewise, in whatever rooms they inhabit.
When we’ve both chewed and dipped and sipped from our lite beers for a few minutes in silence, Flap wipes his fingers on the armrests of his seat and says, swallowing, “So, like I said, you seem on edge, kinda. Rattled. What’s up?” He eyes flash wider in the torchlight, more tender than I’d expected.
I feel like I can trust him. “I just…” I say, looking out to sea, wondering if this is my one chance to ask something clarifying and, if so, whether I’m doomed to waste it. I eat more fish, pensively, then try again. “I just didn’t remember this being here.” I gesture at the waves with the stub of my filet.
Flap drains his lite beer and nods. “Yeah, it wasn’t. Waters rose. Been happening all over, not that you’d ever hear about it.” He shrugs, and leans back in his plastic chair, causing it to buckle. I’m afraid he’s about to collapse, but he seems confident, like he’s done this many times. He looks at me again, with that same compassion I’m starting to remember from ten years ago, when I took his slapstick seminar.
“I always liked you,” he says. “You were the bright kid in class—you ever teach? Every class has only one bright kid, let me tell you—and I liked your film, as I said. You touched a nerve, man. That’s why I’m out here with you tonight. You have that look—I don’t know if you know what you look like—but I’ve seen a lot of people with the look you have. Bewildered, shaken up, like they’ve landed someplace and can’t remember what they fell from. Those smudge-people around the edge of my show just now?” He nods in the direction of the hotel, to remind me about his show. “They all turned up here like that. Like they’d survived something awful… and let me tell you, man: they had.”
He licks his lips and watches a barge cross part of the horizon, its outline visible as a rectangle of red lights, before continuing. “If that’s not how you feel, stop me. If it is, I’ll tell you what I can.”
I don’t stop him.
We both look out to sea and he says, “Lots of different things been happening. Waters rising,” he gestures to the barge with his empty bottle, “and resorts like this one springing up beside them, designed to look old, so folks trick themselves into believing the waters were always there. No limit to what people can come to believe, provided they want to. Ask anyone in town, they’ll tell you this place has been here since the 40s, and they’ll tell you stories and show you pictures to prove it. Hell, they’ll swear their own parents came here on their honeymoon, fifty, sixty years ago. They’ll give you details about their own goddam weddings in the auditorium we were just in.”
He swigs from the empty bottle, puts it beside him, and says, “Stick around here long enough, and you’ll come to believe it, too. Trust me. Me, right now? I’ve been back less than a year and I’m already not as sure as I’d like to be.” His eyes turn imploring now, like he wants me to convince him of what he’s telling me. Like a comic, I think, whose set has started out on rocky footing and is now desperate for a big laugh to validate all the material to come.
“In different towns, different parts of the country, shit’s going down. Shit that never gets reported on. In Butte, Montana—maybe you heard part of the act I was doing in the conference room, or maybe you saw it on YouTube from another night—I was on tour, holed up in a Holiday Inn, when a shooting broke out in the mall next-door. This was last year, when shootings were a huge thing, all anyone was talking about, I don’t know if you remember, but, anyway… the shooting grew and grew until, and I’m not exaggerating here, it consumed the entire town. Like a war. Seriously. Look up Butte, Montana and you won’t see any news of this, but try going there and…”
He pauses again, picks up the empty bottle, taps it against his knee, and puts it down again. “Try going there, and you’ll find a dead town. Like every single person dead, every building burned. Nothing but a literal pit of chemical waste. I’m not kidding.” He looks over at me, again flashing that partly sad, partly pitiful gaze, like he needs me to agree with what he’s saying before he can continue. “I made it out, but just barely. I took this puppet with me, this puppet they—I have it in my room, I can show you sometime… they said it did the killings, like they tried to blame it all on the puppet, like they’d just totally lost whatever final thread might’ve held their story together, and so they just went all in on…”
He trails off here, picks up his empty bottle again, and gets to his feet, saying, “Sorry man, I’m only supposed to have one a night. Not even one, but I let myself have one. And, anyway, sorry, but I need another. Take a walk with me?”
*****
I can tell that if I walk with Flap, my night will trace the course of his unraveling, but I can’t, in the moment, picture a concrete alternative. Also, something tells me that I’ll learn more about what’s going on here from him than I would from anyone else, and that it might be worth knowing as much as possible before I get too far into whatever new life I’m apparently in the process of beginning to live.
Research, I tell myself.
So, I extend the roller-handle of my bag, stuff my fish trash in a can riveted to a post on the boardwalk—Flap’s remains piled beside his chair—and follow him across the grounds of the resort, past a stable of golf carts, and through a parking lot that abuts the street I must’ve taken over here from the train station.
“There’s a place I know on the edge of campus,” he says, his voice low, like he’s afraid of being overheard. “It’s usually open, even after the Decline of Empire—that’s the one actual bar downtown—is closed.”
He leads through unevenly lit streets, falling into shadow off to the edges, suggesting a network of side- and backstreets that I don’t remember from a decade ago, when Berkshire was a largeish college town, but by no means a city. At one point, the ground rumbles like there’s a subway underfoot, but I don’t mention it, and try not to wonder what it means. Tomorrow, I think. So much will be clarified tomorrow.
Flap hurries through the dark and I drag my suitcase hard to keep up with him, trying to blot out a growing mixture of curiosity and dread at the unilluminated districts surrounding us, and the questions of who gets to illuminate them, and when, and why.
“I bet none of this looks familiar,” he pants, as we stop at the edge of a crosswalk and wait for a surprisingly long line of traffic to pass. Unmarked trucks and cars with tinted windows, some bearing a tacky, outdated BerkshireArts logo. “And it shouldn’t. A lot’s been shifting around. All these trucks? They’re carrying supplies to building sites. New stuff’s going up, other stuff’s coming down, or came down over the past few years… what I survived in Butte? The war? Everyone here’s been through something like that, but never the same thing. Now they’re trying to build a new world, at whatever cost. Before the old one catches up with us here.”
The light changes and we make our way across, past trucks idling in both directions, their headlights merging into an orb of halogen.
*****
The edge of the campus begins on the other side of the street. I feel like I should remember walking down this hill, out of the grass and onto the concrete of the town to get a coffee and scone after a long night in the animation studio, but nothing comes to mind, or nothing more than the feeling that something should.
“It’s just over here,” Flap says, hustling up the hill, his pace even faster than it’s been so far, like he saved the last of his energy to power through this final stretch. My suitcase snags on a stone and I trip. The ground knocks the wind out of me, and I lay there, unable to yell, as Flap disappears over the top of the hill, leaving me alone.
I heave over onto my side and try to survey the surrounding buildings from this vantage, even as my suitcase rolls down the hill, back toward the street we just crossed. From here, I can see the old dorms and the annex of the gym that houses the swimming pool, all of it patchily boarded up, with open windows between the boards. Most are dark, but some have lights on. I don’t see anyone out by the smoking benches, even though I’m pretty sure there are a few weeks left in the semester.
I’m lying on my side, like a plastic soldier dropped by a kid who’s discovered a flashier toy, when Flap comes up behind me and puts a thick hand between my shoulder blades. It shocks me out of the trance I’d begun to fall into.
“You okay?” he asks, as I roll over and let him help me up. He seems surprised to find me here, like he’d thought I was with him wherever he went, or like he’d already forgotten I was back in town.
Brushing off my pants as the dizziness passes, I nod. “Yeah, sorry. I tripped. I…” I turn in the direction my bag rolled, but feel too tired to wrestle it out of the street. It feels consequential to just let my bag go—like I’m signaling to the universe that I’m ready to live an edgier life—but I can’t find the strength to go back down the hill and face the trucks. I feel like one more encounter with them, a single clear glimpse of their drivers, and I’d go all the way over some cliff I’ve now reached the edge of.
I shrug. “Never mind. What’d you get us?”
Flap smiles and pulls out a beer—not a lite one this time—and a packet of corn chips for each of us, opening his and taking a long swig before saying, “Thank God the commissary was still open. They don’t have posted hours. You never know, these days. Sometimes it closes for like a week for no reason.”
He sets back out up the hill, and I follow him.
*****
We make it to the top and pause to survey the other side, sloping down into the valley where the river and woods surrounding the town take over from the suburban sprawl, which, unsurprisingly, has also grown in the last decade. Somewhere down there, I think, though I can’t quite believe it, is the little house I rented with Sarah, my first girlfriend, the summer after we graduated, before she went to do a Fulbright in Hungary and I never saw her again.
“Old memories?” Flap asks, starting to slur as he cracks another can.
I nod, and feel myself approach the verge of asking him something.
“Me too, every time I come up here,” he cuts in. “Top of the whole campus, you know? Best place to think. Ever since the place closed down—I don’t know how much you know, or what you’ve read, or where you read it—but ever since BerkshireArts officially closed its doors to students, it’s been filling back in. Kids need a place to hang out together, right? Leave home, see the world, what have you. They’ve been moving back into the empty dorms, studying on their computers, God knows what, all different things, I guess,” he drains the next can, stuffs it in a bush, and reaches into the bag for another. “I guess they’re studying whatever they want. These days, feels like everyone’s got a different Internet, you know? Like no two people see the same thing, even on the same site. And maybe they, these kids I mean, maybe they’re hooked up to some really weird shit, like from other worlds, or worlds within this world, military, psyops, black magic… who am I to say?”
He stops here, and I see the comedian in him come out, a little grin curling around the edges of his mouth as he waits to hear the effect of the line he’s just delivered.
I’m not sure whether to laugh or act scared or impressed, so I just smile and nod, vigorously enough that I can hear my neck crack.
This seems to satisfy him, at least enough to go on with his routine. “If you’d seen what I saw in Butte, the level of sheer fucking carnage that went down—and I’m not saying you haven’t seen anything like that, fuck if I know what your story’s been these past ten years, though I guess I’d say I doubt it— you’d realize how unlikely it is that I’m here at all, that I got out of there intact—I’m telling you, no one else did, not one person in that entire town—and so what I’m saying is…”
I notice myself drinking to keep up with him, taking each new can he hands me from the bag, which appears still to be nearly full. My thoughts fragment and soften along with his so that, by now, I can’t gauge how much sense he’s making. When we were sitting by the water, I felt like maybe Flap would be one of my main friends here, but now I have the sense that tonight will be the only time we speak like this. That, by tomorrow, he and I will drift apart, nearly back to the estrangement we’d been in before tonight, when I’d occasionally watch his specials, or clips from them, on YouTube, but never thought to reach out, nor did I ever consider the prospect of seeing him again.
“…and so, after I made it back here, and that’s a whole other story how I made it back, never mind that for now, I’d have to get out the puppet to tell that story… what was I saying?” He looks at me, his eyes super-intense, like there’s something crucial he’s on the verge of making me understand, something that perhaps even he doesn’t understand entirely, but I can’t hold his gaze. I look down at the library, past a copse of trees we’re now almost level with, and wonder if the book of interviews I did with Arp, as a companion piece to my thesis film, is still in there, as it was when I graduated. I bite down on the beer can to snuff out a nascent animation of the books in the library whispering to each other in the dark, revealing secrets that no daytime borrower will ever be privy to.
“And so I found a few other teachers, I mean people who’d taught here back when I was around, and I guess when you were around too!” He laughs and burps, grabbing onto a tree to keep from falling. “Here, let’s sit on the steps a minute,” he gasps, tipping down the hill and over in the library’s direction, pulling me by the shirt.
We settle onto the steps as the day’s first light starts to creep over the video lab directly across the quad, just as it did at the end of almost every night of my senior year, when I was buried in the basement of that building, shooting my stop-motion adaptation of Kafka’s The Burrow and washing up against the edge of my first psychotic break, as the Burrow-like nature of the building’s basement grew ever closer to overwhelming whatever barrier existed between my inner and outer life.
“And with those other people—filmmakers, writers, fashion designers, cats who’d had careers in New York and LA before all this shit went down—we started offering classes, you know, just as a way to make a little money, pay our rent at the Commodore—that’s the resort where you found me, where most of us live—and anyway, some of the students, weirded-out as they were, and still are, started coming to our classes. Logging off whatever alien channels they’d synced up to on their laptops, pulling out their headphones, and actually showing up. We’d talk about whatever we could, whatever knowledge we had of the world as it used to be, when we—or, I, in my case—could still tour, do shows in a different city every night, play for a real audience, watch them drink real drinks…”
He reaches into the bag, deep enough this time to indicate that his supply is starting to dwindle, and hands us both new cans, even though my old one is still mostly full. I open the new one and start drinking from both, feeling the point of no return, in terms of tomorrow being ruined, come and go.
“So we’re all teaching here, you know,” Flap says, gesticulating with his non-can arm in a way that explains how he got his name, even though I read somewhere that his birth name really is George Flapman, “trying to keep the place alive and get a few bucks from the kids—and don’t ask me where they get the money, because the answer is I don’t know—trying to think aloud about how we could seed the ever-growing town, or now city, of Berkshire, with some fucking artistic merit—there’s a new comedy club downtown, actually, on the edge of what’s kind of a Chinatown now, and there’s the Decline of Empire, as I mentioned, which also has a mic and a pitiful little stage area—when, out of nowhere, this crew of, I don’t know what to call them, vigilante administrators, rolls into town in a flotilla of black cars, sets up shop in the President’s House,” he gestures with his beer at the detached map library, on the other side of the quad across from the arts building, behind which the President’s House is located, “and calls all the students and whatever teachers were around to a formal meeting here in the quad, and announces that BerkshireArts is being formally incorporated.”
He throws his can down the steps, and opens another, letting out a long, satisfied belch. “They roll in, and they’ve got like security man, like motherfuckers with guns, and announce that they’re now in charge of the college, and that it’s now open for business and,” he takes another long swig, his eyes swiveling over to me to make sure I’m swigging too, like he can only say what he’s about to say if he’s sure I’m drunk, “and they insist it’s nineteen eighty-six again. Or, not again. Like nineteen eighty-six, period. Like none of the decades after that, all the shit that happened,” he flaps his arm again, to indicate all the shit’s that happened, “like none of that shit ever happened. Like we’re still sixteen years from the millennium, worrying about the fucking A-bomb.”
He reaches deeper into the bag, scraping the bottom now, and takes out a plastic bottle of bourbon, which he takes a long pull from before handing it to me. My hands are shaking, but I get ahold of it and take a pull too. I can’t decide whether to be irritated or relieved that he’s asked me almost nothing about myself. As I ponder this and hand the bottle back to him, it also occurs to me that, by tomorrow morning—and, in a sense, it already is tomorrow morning—I may well remember none of what he’s told me tonight.
“Anyway,” he goes on, getting to his feet and setting off across the quad without checking to see if I’m following, “that’s the deal now. Been that way all year. We can keep teaching here, making enough to live on fish and chips at the goddam Commodore, but only if we accept that it’s nineteen-eighty-six. They killed Jane Reynolds, great experimental video artist, don’t know if you remember her, but she was just like ‘fuck this bullshit, we know what year it is,’ and they shot her stone dead. Right here in the quad. Made us all watch.”
He finally turns to check if I’m following. I trip again, but right myself more quickly, despite the waves of nausea that have started to rip through me, making the walls of the student union, now in semi-daylight, buckle. He leads past the student union, around what looks like a ramshackle market, with teenagers in shorts and hoodies setting out rats and snakes and random cuts of meat in plastic bags, then along one of the formerly ritzy streets where the full professors lived, until we reach the mid-century modern residence at the very end, on the outermost edge of campus, before it verges off into the woods.
He burps here, fumbles in his back pocket for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and, trying to light the cigarette as it trembles between his lips, says, “Oh, and shit, man, don’t know if you heard, but Arp died. At least that’s what they say. Did I tell you this already?” He looks at the house, where I spent half my weekend nights during my junior and senior year, drinking wine and watching movies and talking with Arp in endless cascades of confused but sincere thought about the nature and purpose of art, with the energy that only a twenty-one year-old with dreams of becoming Great can muster.
Flap shrugs. “God knows what’s really going on, right? But they say he died, man. Up at the Pale Oaks.” He looks into the woods behind the house, grimacing. “I know you two were close. Sorry if you didn’t know.” He pauses, drops the cigarette he never managed to light, and says, “Didn’t you have luggage before? Like a bag or something?”
*****
A silence passes between us here, the night rolling away, just like my bag did. I shrug and say, “Don’t worry about it,” then look to the house, wondering what my plan is now, whether it’s still mine even without the law firm’s letter.
Flap yawns and says, “Man, I shouldn’t’a done this. I never do this anymore, for good reason. Got shit to do today. But I was happy to see you. Glad you’re back man, though I can’t say I envy you having to start from scratch in this goddam place. If you wanna teach at Berkshire, I can probably hook you up with something. There aren’t really semesters anymore, just like people offering whatever classes they can, whenever they want. The kids have no place to go. Their hometowns are fucking… I told you about Butte, right? Anyway, I’m gonna head back to the Commodore.” He yawns again and looks me over, like something’s slowly dawning on him as the drunk wears off. “You got a place to stay?”
I look back at Arp’s house, and almost start in with some of the story of what I’m doing here, or what I think I’m doing here, but the weight of the night overwhelms me, and I can tell I don’t have the strength. “I’ll be alright,” I say. “I’m just gonna wander around the neighborhood, clear my head.”
Flap hesitates, uneasy, but I can see the tiredness has also overwhelmed him. He claps me on the shoulder, smiles weakly, and says, “Alright man, just be careful. Shit’s weird around here. In the ways I told you, and in other ways, too. Seriously. You need a place to stay, come back to the Commodore.” Then he turns and stumbles off.
*****
I wait until he’s made his slow, unsteady way back into the campus, wondering if my life, like his, has been spared a horrific fate that’s claimed the rest of the country. When he’s gone, I fall to my knees and start rummaging in the bushes for a key.