June - The Liars 1 страница

"Happiness is only real when shared."
Chris McCandless, Into The Wild

Chapter One

It was clear that I still had a lot of learning to do. I knew it when I went to my old school again and wandered around, even if I couldn't put it into words yet. But I had rejected the notion of sitting in a classroom like I had before because I knew no one could reach me that way. I always wanted to be quiet in a room full of people, to fade to the back, and not be noticed. I was good at being invisible, and since my problems stemmed from filling that emptiness, I needed to avoid sliding under the radar. Typical classroom settings were out. But I still knew very little by myself when faced with the harsh reality of the world. Nothing was sticking with me, nothing fully comprehended, and I found very little motivation. I knew nothing about my job, even if I was performing it well. I didn't understand our mortgage, even if I still made the payments. As much as I knew I needed people, I also needed to figure out how to do this by myself and to organize my thoughts inside my head. What I had needed was a teacher, not to be a student in a class and share the attention span, in order to learn these things again. The Professor said he would give me that. Liking the proposition and the words he was using to describe my ennui, I began to listen again. Other than Gerard, he was the only other person to use that phrase that I knew. It made him stick out in my mind, if his short stature and unruly beard hadn't done so before.

When the year was in full-swing, he was a philosophy professor. He had developed a focus in philosophical French literature from having worked with those authors so much in his graduate studies and would sometimes be guest lecturer for the English Department, "when they dared to have the bug-eyed Jean Sartre on their syllabi." When he wasn't discussing ennui with English Lit majors who took themselves too seriously, he was the head of the Philosophy Department. This job required a lot of time spent organizing first year drinking games that included memorizing dialogues, spelling bees ("just try to spell Heidegger while hammered. You can't, you just can't"), and quoting the best debate lines from ancient texts, Locke, and Hume, while watching current political debates on television. He taught the entire first year cohort virtually by himself, so he knew that he had to have fun with them if they were ever going to get any learning done. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the professors he organized as head of the department. The Professor was usually forced with the delegation of classes and the paperwork that was involved with organizing a carrel of academics who usually drank too much black coffee under a veil of cigarette smoke and debated whether or not their research work even existed. They stressed his ennui, and he tried to avoid being in his office as much as possible. He preferred students and some of the "perpetual learner" profs he had met in the English Department, along with the actual philosophy itself.

Recently, he had developed a highly popular and in-depth reading course with a few third and fourth year students, which focused on the interpretations and misinterpretations of philosophers concerning the existence of god. This was something that captivated his personal and research time a lot, and it showed from the way he gestured and spoke with a renewed force. He enjoyed getting into debates about the existence of god and the actual usefulness of religion. "Whether or not we are right can sometimes mean absolutely nothing, especially if being wrong and being right about his existence lead to the same end. If our arguments about the existence really help no one, then I believe it is pointless. But I keep poking at his wound that has never been closed with God, because I want to see what is there, because I think there is something that can be useful. " This type of discussion was something usually tackled in the upper years and graduate work, and I felt flattered that he was sharing it with me. It meant, in spite of not finishing my degree, that he took me as someone smart enough to handle this. Although I didn't say much back and merely nodded for a lot of his diatribe, he seemed relieved to be speaking to someone that wasn't a first year. He knew, at least, that I had not been coddled from the pen of high school and actually knew a little bit more about life. I knew ennui, I knew Gerard, but standing next to the Professor I knew I had a lot more to go. When I walked him to his car, I noticed the Jesus fish that had legs (making it into the Darwin Fish) on his bumper and he smiled proudly when I noticed it.

He began to gush again, realizing our short walk together was nearly at an end, and I would soon be off. He told me that the atmosphere of academia changed entirely during the summer months, and this was where he was most at home: teaching summer school. I had to re-evaluate my old assumptions of summer school being for failures, because according to The Professor, it was a contrary situation, indeed. This was where the dedicated students came out. After all, who would willingly pay money, give up their spring and summer months, and sit around and talk about dead white guys? Only the people who lived and breathed this stuff and who wanted to learn. It took dedication to finish off exams in April, in that deluge and flood of emotion and stress, only to sign oneself up again to get back to the grind. Starting in May, summer school was now The Spring Term, and it was the best term in which to learn according to The Professor. No one was around, there were no distractions, and if you were lucky, you could go out for your daily walk undisturbed, at the same time every day just like Emmanuel Kant, and then maybe read his texts under a tree, in the shade.

"I am convinced that this is the only way to learn, and to make it count. Everything is regenerating, including the brain. You can change your thinking in a few months, change yourself and, therefore, your world entirely if you are not careful," he commented with a sly smile, and then turned his attention towards me. My heart caught in my throat, unsure of what to say back to him. The gulf of knowledge between us was huge, and ever since I met him, so was the lack of dialogue on one side. I didn't know what I could say that could compare to him, ever.

He didn't let me wait too much longer. He began to praise spring and summer for other reasons, including the fact that it made people believe in the plight of strangers. There was something about the sun, he speculated, that made people care a lot more. He nodded to me, thanking me once again for the help I had given him with his books that I still held in my arms.

"Did you know that people have done studies where they purposely act in distress to see if someone goes to help them and they keep track of how many people assisted? It's appalling how many of us just walk by. This was how Kitty Genovese happened, and we have still not learned from our mistakes. Except for some of us, that is. It's not like I even had an emergency. Just books!" he said, and thanked me again.

To finally bridge the gap of conversation, I told him it was his books that caught my attention. I had wanted to read Madame Bovary for a while now. I also mentioned, very quietly and briefly, that we were all linked in some way. "To pretend you're a stranger is a lie, because our actions all affect one another."

From here, I began surprisingly talkative. The Professor asked me more about the books I was interested in, why it was Madame Bovary and not anything else. When we had exhausted his bagful, he began to ask from memory, pulling out invisible catalogues and indices of his mind and asking me what I knew. Eventually, he unlocked his car door and tossed his books in the back, but did not get in. He leaned against the roof and then asked me what I was doing here.

"I was just walking around. I had some time to myself, so I figured I would come here."

"So you're not a summer student?"

I shook my head. He gave the roof of his car a little slap and said, "Damn. For a moment there I figured you were in an upper year course of mine, and that was why you approached me. Weirder things have happened with my students. But when you knew who I was reading, and were able to humor me through that entire mess of thought, and then comment with how we're all linked, it only made me certain you were a student. It's all very academic. You're educated for sure. Did you go here at some point?"

I shook my head, then corrected myself. "Kind of. I was in photography and a few art history courses a few years ago. I failed out."

I grimaced, admitting my failure. The Professor already thought I was completely well-read and worldly, but it almost didn't seem fair. I may have seemed "educated" but I had not read a lot of the books he was holding. Even if I knew their title and they were familiar to me, that didn't mean I knew the contents. Most of the things I was saying to him were repeated from outside sources. It didn't seem completely fair to take credit for that, since I had not formulated it myself. And besides, I had failed out. That should have proved all he needed to know. I held my breath until he answered, hoping that he wouldn't say, "figured" and then drive off. After what seemed like ages, he began to tell me about Einstein and how he had failed a lot in school. "You know, before he discovered that whole theory of relativity business. Maybe you've heard of it? Past failures shouldn't make that any less incredible. Einstein once said that 'you can't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, or it will spend its whole life feeling like an idiot.' Good advice. Maybe you weren't meant to do photography."

It was now my turn to stop and pause for a few moments. I appreciated his advice on failure, but that option was never even on the table. I could never consider giving that up. It was my passion. Gerard and I had discovered it was my passion, and I was not letting that go. The Professor seemed to sense that the quiet I possessed was not contemplative, and went on, motioning with his hands.

"It's a fine art, don't get me wrong. You've probably had shows and sold pieces. That's what probably gave you the confidence to come back here and major in something like that. But, they don't teach you photography here. They have people talk photography at you and vaguely point you in the right direction. It may look good on a transcript, but it's not exactly..." he scratched his beard to try and find the right words.

"Fulfilling?" I said, feeling better about his viewpoint. He had described the classes here exactly right. We didn't do photography; we studied other people who had done it. It had always been a person looking in on another person looking in. The classes had made us all into voyeurs, but not necessarily photographers. I tried to articulate my own opinion to him and he nodded along excitedly.

"Exactly. See? You know what I mean. I didn't want you to think I was destroying your dream or anything, especially since we've just met. Hi, by the way. I don't really know if we said that yet." He smiled, and then extended his hand. He told me his name then, but I didn't grasp it right away. I had already taken to calling him The Professor inside my head, and I realized that I wanted him to stay this figure. He had reminded me of a sculpture that Gerard had pointed out to me earlier that morning, and I wanted to extend this artistic metaphor into the waking world. Gerard had moved his attention towards sculpting after his time with Kandinsky. Similar to O'Keeffe, when parts of his body began to fail him, he took comfort in what he could touch and not necessarily what he could see. Rodin's The Thinker came to my mind, and as I considered The Professors name, I could only see the statue. It was as if it had gotten up, donned clothing and a beard, and then began to walk around, carrying piles and piles of books. He was The Thinker, or rather, The Professor. It was just that and nothing else.

"I'm Frank," I told him. He began to gush about my name, mentioning Saint Frank Aquinas and all the other philosophical influences with Frank as some part of their name. I nodded along, knowing about some of them from Jasmine and Alexa.

"See?" he declared. "You're educated, even if it's not in photography. Maybe if you ever consider going back to school, which I think you should, it would be for something else."

In spite of the minor praise he was giving me, I tried not to respond to his remark. That uncomfortable feeling from before was coming back. I sort of kicked a stone around me, and said in a low voice that it was not in my mind right now, that I couldn't afford it. This seemed to work The Professor up even more. "You don't need to pay for education, you know. You've clearly gotten something out of your life getting this far. For free. How did you get this far?"

"I had... friends," I said, but it felt weak and feeble. I looked around at the parking lot and sighed with frustration. How could I even begin to explain this to him? I was running out of time and the sun was going down. He kept glancing at his watch as we talked, too, and we were both probably running late.

I wanted to say more to him, I wanted to confess what I had really been looking for as I began to walk around the campus, but I didn't know if I could. How much would he understand? How much could I trust him? I liked him, I really did, and from the way he was talking to me, he seemed to enjoy my company as well. He wanted to extend me further company; he wished I was one of his students. It was The Spring Term, and he was as eager to learn as I was. We both stared at one another in the middle of the parking lot, shifting from side to side. I knew this scenario - I knew it all too well. I thought back to winter, and how Gerard had invited me into his home, given me a spare key to his apartment, gotten me to do dishes before we did art lessons. A few months could change your mind, The Professor had said today, and I knew it to be a valid fact. But how much could someone change within a few years? Within their entire life? I thought moments like that only happened the once, and then they needed to be cherished forever. I couldn't even conceive of The Professor without tying it to Gerard somehow, to ennui, and to art. There was no sexual tension between The Professor and myself (he was wearing a gold band on his finger, anyway), but that didn't seem to matter. He was still offering me something so tempting. I kept thinking of Gerard and the winter, about how I had gotten this far in life already, and how it apparently wasn't far enough. That thought was depressing. I had been working so hard for so long, only to realize that I was not done. I kept making the Professor into an art project, into Rodin's The Thinker, because I needed to keep Gerard and all the work I had already done around. I still needed to keep my distance from this huge mountain I still needed to climb.

I suddenly didn't want to proceed with this relationship anymore, realizing what it could mean. But could I even call this a relationship? It wasn't a big deal - yet. I wanted to call it off before it became a big deal. We were just talking in a parking lot, but we were all linked, so it had already developed into a relationship, whether I wanted it to or not. Technically, using Jasmine and Lydia's logic, I was as linked with the stranger that walked by me on the street. I thought about that for a second, and realized how Gerard had once been L’Étranger in Paris. Yes, I realized. This was a relationship and it had already reached that critical point. It was a big deal. A split second of interaction could change your whole life, and I knew this to be a fact, too. Even if I didn't continue with what The Professor was offering me, something had still changed. Even if, seven years ago, I had not gone back to Gerard's apartment, he had still thrown paint on us. We were still there, together, and we were connected even if by some fluke of circumstance had torn us apart. I felt better, realizing this, and I knew I had to go forward, because it was the only way to go.

I still needed to confess, "While I know these titles of books, I haven't actually read them. I just know them. My friends..." it still felt weird referring to Gerard and Jasmine that way, "they would always read them and then tell me about them. I haven't read a lot, not really. But I know the gist of it."

He nodded, taking in the information. I thought he would send me off, but instead behind his beard grew a mysterious smile. "Ah, now there's your problem. You have to read those books, not just covet them. But no worries, academic sin can be easily redeemed." He looked at his watch again, out of habit, and noticed I was shifting in my place. He was usually the fast and kinetic one, seeing me squirm in the same way made him pay attention to body language longer. "Where do you have to be right now?"

"Home, I need to see a few people to just check up on something."

"Those friends?" he smiled. He seemed to know that there was more to what I was saying about the relationship than friendship. I smiled back and nodded, and he touched his ring finger subconsciously. "What are you doing tomorrow?" he asked.

I told him about Mikey's work, though I did a poor job of explaining it to him since I still didn't get it myself.

"Hmm, a job in an office. Good work when you can get it, but draining, no doubt. Can you email? No, wait, I'll tell you what. Since it's books we're struggling with here, it's books where we will start. Meet me here again tomorrow, but a little earlier. When do you finish this unfortunate office job?"

I told him four, and he seemed quite please. "Brilliant! My class ends then. Meet me at the library at four-thirty or so, and then we can begin."

"Thank you," I told him, my smile growing. The knots in my chest were gone, and I had been feeling better than I had in weeks. I had a plan, now. I had something to do. I extended my hands and we shook again, making it official.

"This is going to be fun for me too, remember," he said, but I barely heard him. I had about fifteen minutes to zoom home before I broke my curfew. With only a minute late, I was just in time.

Since I usually carpooled with Mikey, getting to the campus and then getting back home again afterward was going to be tricky. Since I was also known for making up excuses so I could go out and drink, it was imperative that he needed to come with me for the first visit to ensure that I really was going to meet a professor. Not just any professor, I insisted, but The Professor. My story looked even more contrived when I couldn't even remember his name as I explain to Jasmine where I was going and what I was doing. Not to mention that a professor, who probably got paid more than I could ever dream of getting paid, was agreeing to meet me in a library so I could presumably get a free lesson? It sounded even more inconceivable. But I had described him in full detail: from his beard and tucked in blue shirt, to his book choices and academic preferences, right down to the Darwin Fish on his car. I even threw in the reference to Rodin's The Thinker and to the Heidegger drinking game, making my details about the event so convoluted that they seemed too bizarre for me to make them up. Jasmine almost seethed with envy, missing the atmosphere for herself, especially since people at her magazine became even more of the slackers they already were in the winter. Her only intellectual outlet now was her sly emails to Meredith as they worked out the intricate details of their plans. Her envy I took as a good sign, however. If she was jealous of the thing I was doing, that meant the thing was real. I still didn't even really know what the thing was myself, or what we were actually doing. I had no real idea of the authors he took an interest in, and I didn't exactly think we were going to discuss God. He got that out with his classes and research. He said he usually wanted to "change perspective" every so often, but left it at that. The mystery of this new perspective kept me up late at night, and I relished that I was not thinking about drinking or illness.

When Mikey pulled up to the library with me and saw the little man with a plaid green shirt and the full beard, he nodded to me and let me out. He told me to call him again whenever I was done and he'd come over and get me. I felt like I was in high school all over again and getting a ride to and from extracurricular activities, but I didn't care. The Professor waved at me and then we were off in our own little world. The pillars of the building just by the parking lot he said reminded him of Athens, and already, I was no longer present. I breathed a sigh of relief, one that I had been holding all day.

"Have you ever been in here before?" he asked. "I know you did some classes here, but photography does not yield very many criticism books that the school is willing to buy."

I cringed. Ever since Professor Smith, I had absolutely hated the word criticism. It seemed so pointless and like a waste of time and resources. Why bother constantly critiquing someone else's work just for the sheer sake of it? I understood if you wanted them to get better, genuinely. When Gerard or Vivian would suggest another angle for me to take a photo from or another way I could draw the same picture, they were doing it because they wanted me to be at my best. When Gerard was teaching me things, he would poke and prod at me, ask me why a lot, but even if my response wasn't exactly what he wanted, he wouldn't push. He knew, at the end of the day, that I was going to do what I was going to do. Eventually, through practice, people got better. But a lot of critics that I had studied in school, or at least the ones that appeared in newspapers and sometimes Jasmine's magazines, seemed to like to tear stuff a part for fun. I could never understand that. When you were tearing apart the life's work of a dead or deteriorating author who had no time to correct their work, what was the point? Just to make yourself look better? There was no helping anyone constructively with articles like that. If they hated the piece so much, then they should produce their own. I didn't like tearing things down, without people building alternatives instead. So I hated criticism and my stomach did doubting flip flops as he mentioned it.

"You got quiet. I don't like it when people get quiet. What's going on?" he asked.

I tried to explain my feelings on criticism, especially in the art world. He listened to me empathetically and we even moved aside in the library so he could concentrate on what I was saying. Just when I thought I had him on my side, he declared, "Good, good. But you are speaking with emotions, not reason."

"So?"

"So is not a definitive argument," he said seriously, then laughed. "But I do like it when I see a man actually using his emotional logic versus his reason. It is so rare in this culture and it should be celebrated. However." Just when I thought I had gained his approval, he changed his trajectory. He was just as kinetic as the first meeting, as if he himself also drank too much coffee, and his mind seemed to correspond to his jerky hand movements. I was beginning to realize that when I met him before, it had been a fun introduction. Now our conversation was becoming a serious intellectual battle. "Emotional logic is okay with creative forms. Feeling is excellent there. But when you deal with critics or just simply books on criticisms, you cannot discard them because they make you feel badly. If you think that is their purpose, then they will have won. Do you want them to win?"

"I, uh, no, I guess not," I said, unsure that this was even a battle I had agreed to participate in.

"Good then you need to learn how to fight with them, with their own words. In order to beat the enemy, if you wish to represent them as such, you need to learn to speak the enemy's language. You need to learn to read theory and criticism. Even the ones you hate. Even the ones that you are so convinced are batshit crazy that you just can't even fathom - you must read them. Remember that in any battle, you are never as strong as your body. You are only as strong as your knife. In this case, your knife is arguments, words, and maybe a little bit of feigned crazy. You need to figure out what you're going to say back to those books."

"Say back to them? Half of these critics won't accept my answer. I don't know them, especially if they're in a book, and half of them are dead anyway."

"Yes, but you do not need direct communication with them. You don't need a Ouija board," he said, winking and nudging my shoulder. I had been getting tense, and his small jokes made me take a deep breath and try to listen to him more. If this was a battle, it was a relaxed one, or he was jovial because he was winning. "All of philosophy, and all of theory really, is a big conversation. People are having discussions all the time. That is what an allusion is, that is what a footnote is for. These are references, and references form communication and conversation back to ancient times. Wait - do you hear that, right now?"

He put his hand into the air, as it to catch the sound and put it into our ears. I listened to, but I heard only the quiet sterility of the library. Being spring and a nice day outside, there was no one around. There were a few clicks of a computer keyboard and shuffling of trolleys, but nothing else. I looked at The Professor and he was smiling.

"You can't hear them talking because you haven't read enough yet. I walk into a place like this and it's not quiet at all. It's screaming with voices, with opinions, with plights, and with pleas. I have read too much in my old age and it all blurs together into one giant fugue. Do you listen to Bach? Listen to Fugue in G Minor, it is beautiful. It is the song I listened to on repeat as I wrote my dissertation. It will never get old, because a fugue contains the world. This library - oh, this library, it is beautiful, but it is exhausting. "

He sighed, and set his sights over and above the stacks. I waited for him to usher me along, but we stood there, off to the side by the out-of-date computers, completely still. I tried to strain my ears a little bit, convinced I hadn't given it a good enough shot before. I had read books. I didn't read as much as Jasmine or Gerard seemed to, and definitely not as much as Alexa, but I had read. There was the Rimbaud poetry, The Tempest, and Frida's biography that I had done this year alone. Not to mention Gerard's books that he left at his place when he was in Paris. I would read those a lot because they still smelled like him for the first year after. But I realized that even for most of those art books he had, I was looking at the pictures and reading the little snippets underneath. I was looking at summaries and key points, and then waiting for good quotations from the two of them. I wanted the gist of things, and they were my own little encyclopedic articles. If I didn't know something, I asked Gerard and when he was gone, I had asked Jasmine. They had fed me all I knew, but it was spoon-fed and pre-chewed. I could not get the actual essence of the book out, and I only got on interpretation. I had read Lolita now and I saw all of the problems, but I saw them in a different way from Jasmine and Gerard. They stuck with the unreliability of the narrator, and while that was a huge part of it, I had been fascinated by the butterflies that appeared in the text. Nabokov himself had been a butterfly collector, and I knew there had been something more to this. The hunting and pinning down part of the art seemed so barbaric to me, but when it was coupled with the display of the catch, the beauty and delicacy of the butterflies was inescapable. This was what Humbert Humbert had done to Lolita. He had grabbed the butterfly and stuck her on a pin to watch, to look at. I saw something different in that book, something that Jasmine and Gerard didn't tell me to find, and I began to rethink what I already read in the past with a new confidence. I stood silently with The Professor and I waited to hear their voices. I thought I heard what was the screaming of the drunken poet Verlaine at his lover Rimbaud, and the breaths of ecstasy as they came from Humbert Humbert's lips the exact way that they shouldn't have. I also saw things, too. Like the brief glimpse of a butterfly out the corner window and spilled dark red wine on a bed in Paris. When I opened my eyes again, after hearing the smallest murmurs of those voices, The Professor smiled at me.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14