I smiled.More like “working.”
Sorry buddy I’m at that new bar by your place with some history folks. It’s cute here, we should check it out.The bar was at this recently opened hotel. It was just a few blocks from me but I hadn’t been. Safie was always better about putting in the effort and exploring. But I’ll see you in the morning.
The morning?You will?
Department meeting.
Nooooo.Sent. Then,At least we’ll be together.
I put the phone down, picked it up, checked the time again, put it back down. How much practice did the soccer team need? I said I’d be working late before I thought it through—I just kind of blurted it out. I felt bad—Tyler seemed so worried about falling behind. In any case, now I was stuck waiting.
I pulled up the college website and searched the calendar of activities for info. Nothing. I found the page for the soccer team—also nothing helpful. There was a tab of player profiles. My finger hovered over the keyboard and then I clicked, scrolling until I found him. Tyler Cunningham, starting defensive midfielder. A photo popped up: face disappearing into a cartoonish grin and a deep squint, one eye peeking open. It was not a flattering shot; it was odd that he wouldn’t mind it being up there. I read through the accompanying paragraph. He was a sophomore, from Charlotte, North Carolina. He had played in high school, on a good team it seemed—they’d gone all the way to state.
I shut the browser, anxious to be found snooping around about a student on the college internet. Could they track these things? I reopened the site and clicked through all the other players, scattering a trail of cyber breadcrumbs. When I was done with that, I went through the women’s team as well, just to be safe.
Finally, at eight, I gave up, hungry and annoyed. Clearly, Tyler was not coming. I’d wasted a night for nothing. I closed up my office and stepped into the dim light of the hallway. Outside Walton Hall, the campus felt deserted. The sky had gone charcoal. A slap of thunder cracked the silence and a torrent of rain unleashed—great. I dashed under an overhang. I could sit out the storm, but I’d squandered enough of my night. I lifted my backpack over my head to shield myself from the lashing rain and ran into the dark and silence of campus.
The second greatest mystery of the universe is other people.My sister Cassie said this to me one night. I must have been ten years old, she fifteen. Our parents were away for the weekend. A quick business trip for my father, my mother along for some sightseeingand a break from us kids. I don’t remember where they’d gone, but they left money for a pizza and put Cassie in charge. We were in the backyard, plunged into darkness, stretched side by side on two beach chairs Cassie had dragged across the lawn. The warm fuzz of music floated around us from the small battery-powered radio our father kept as part of his hurricane supplies. The radio was, as he constantly reminded us, “for emergency use only.” Cassie found it in the garage when she went looking for the chairs and together we pawed through the cluttered kitchen junk drawer, searching for a fresh pack of batteries. “Seems like they should be a little more accessible,” Cassie said, and dipped her voice to a stagey baritone, “in case of emergency.”
The night sky whirled above us. Cassie was taking astronomy. The class was known to be for aspiring dropouts who wanted an easy “A.” Cassie had joined that crowd the previous year, much to our parents’ dismay. While my mother was terrified Cassie would get pregnant, my father worried—with Cassie’s loose hair falling like rope around the shoulders of the drab green jacket she refused to take off, even in the height of summer—that no one would want to date her.
If Cassie had taken the class to be with friends, it turned into something else. As we sat together late into the night, she pointed out constellations and told me what they’d been learning about quantum mechanics, the idea that something could be in two places at once. We could see the pulse of one of Saturn’s moons, and when a shooting star made its blistering arc across the heavens, Cassie explained that it had died out thousands of years ago. What we saw was merely its last spark echoing across the chambers of the Milky Way. I strained my eyes to track the fizzing star until it faded from view. We sat in silence for a long while.
Finally, I asked the question on my mind—“Do you think we’ll ever find out if there’s really life on other planets?” I felt it was kind of silly of me to wonder, but I knew Cassie wouldn’t think so.
“I’m not sure,” Cassie said. “As much as scientists have figured out, I would still say almost everything about life is unknown. Starting right here on Earth—forget about other planets.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just like, the state of existence—of being alive—is ultimately mysterious.”
“Really?”
“Totally.” She laughed and then, after a moment, said, “I think the second greatest mystery of the universe is other people.”
“What?” I had no idea what she meant.
She laughed again. “Just like, you can never really know another person, like what they’re thinking or feeling. I mean, you have your ideas of something, like being sad, but you can’t know exactly what sad feels like to someone else. Or happiness, or love. Not truly.” She reached over and ruffled my hair. I had already entered the stage of dodging our parents’ attempts to touch me, but I smiled beneath her hand.
“Okay,” I said. “Then what’s the first greatest mystery?”
“Ourselves,” she said. “Obviously.”
CHAPTER 2
That night I had a dream I was walking to campus. I saw a house I didn’t recognize and then I realized: It was my childhood home, where I lived until the abrupt move my freshman year of high school. How had the house transported itself from Florida to Ohio? The door was cracked open and I walked in. Everything looked exactly the same, nothing out of place. Suddenly, a great storm erupted and a flood rushed through. I raced, frantic, through the halls and rooms, looking for my parents. The tides rose to my ankles, then calves, then thighs, until the swirling floodwaters produced a kind of vacuum effect and I found I couldn’t pull myself free. The heavy scent of the water, earthy and acrid, filled my nose and throat. I woke in a tangle of bedsheets, damp with sweat. I pulled myself free and checked my alarm clock. Shit—already running late.
I didn’t teach on Wednesdays, but had to go in for the English Department’s monthly meeting. (The life of the mind is mostly just meetings.) The week before we met, Susan would send out an agenda with a request for further items. An avalanche of proposals followed, most of which had nothing to do with our department: sexist rants about the clothing choices of female students, with suspect references to “rap music”; indignant demands that something be done about the noise from the Computer Sciences construction project; and convoluted plans for overhauling the campus recycling programespecially urgent in this, the dawn of theAnthropocene. Last year, after a spirited but unsuccessful campaign to have our meeting extended by an hour, one of our more senior colleagues, Mary Ackels, sent a desperate plea that we intervene in the “devastating tragedy of the Congo.” For emphasis, the email’s several thousand words were written in a wide range of colorful fonts in various sizes. While Safie was impressed with Mary’s formatting skills, I remained unsure of what use the Congolese might find a bunch of semioticians and Mark Twain scholars in Ohio. Each month, Susan relegated these addendums to a section of the agenda titled “Further Business.” We never got to this section before Susan adjourned us for the following month, when all those unaddressed items went missing and a new crop of hopefuls took their place.
We met in a conference room on the top floor of Walton Hall. A bank of tall, mahogany-framed windows looked out across a densely wooded grove at the south end of campus. The beautiful view depressed me. After a year staring out those windows watching the seasons change, I knew that the leaves of the great black ash trees, today crisp and resplendent, would soon enough fade, desiccate, and die. I felt I was watching my own life pass me by, and I didn’t like the looks of it.
The assembled were talking in twos and threes or poking at their phones. Susan sat at the front, arms folded across her middle, leaning back from the conversations around her. I scanned the room. There was a seat next to Colin—ugh—and then I saw Safie waving me over and lifting that gigantic bag she brought everywhere from the seat beside her.
“You’re a good friend,” I said. “Why haven’t we started? Susan is such a stickler about time.”
“Hal hasn’t shown up yet.”
“Hal? I thought we were rid of him.”
