Bomb Cyclone and its Effects on Harvard - 18
A Novella
6
It was in night the creeping inner smile shined forth. The inner liquid consciousness which is all the time still slacking at the corners of your awakeness. A wickedness interned from its creation in your bowels. Realizing that night, even though the awareness had silently been with me - that certain forms of horror would always be with me, and with all others who were stripped the same way. In a sense, it was akin to a PSD which would always hang over my shoulder, laughing and skittering even if my eyes tried to forget.
Frightful, even having a name that my mind would not pronounce, because what was that shutter that took everything else to its core? Thus, I woke in the bathroom, to wretch from my retches – all akimbo to a darkness that was inside of me since that moment, again and again.
A figure came beside me but did not utter anything in words - a stony silence.
And then he spoke:
“What is it that you are not telling me?”
And it was in that phrase, him in his commandment, that set a tremolo. I knew why he and my mother had left. It was he in his transfiguration that bemused and complexified and infuriated. It never had occurred before, but would remain with me ever afterward.
A final vomit went down the bowl, and I pulled out the tissue paper. It was at that point that turning to him felt natural.
“There are lots of things I have not told to, but there is one which drives me to do this.”
Then I looked up at the he-ness of his face And wondered why anyone would wish it to intrude. I tried away the few tears that had cropped up though I did not realize they had returned.
“There are some things which should remain private.”
“Not if you are a novelist, even though you might the decontextualized them for hoi pollio.”
“Should not it be the hoi polloi?”
“No, the is in the meaning – 'hoi' - as one cannot say the the plebeians.”
“I should have started Greek.”
“It is called koine in its own tongue. Koine is replete with the fascination for the world that it comes from, a state of diglossia. A Latinist would never allow such things to monopolize the discourse, Greek is too opulent a language for law and commerce.”
A smile graced my lips, despite all that had occurred.
“You must have studied both.”
“Badly. I am a math syndic - feign on such nether shores as it will allow me to - seeing the richness of genius, even if I do not have such gifts.”
“Why not? Must have at least engineered a doctorate.”
“And proved tiny things which are of no import. As for why - that you will have to ask the magistrates of genetics, I only know that I do not have the gift, and have learned to live with that. Brightness is not genius, though to come hand in hand.”
This, I thought about, but could not reason it quite yet.
“My objective is to attend Harvard. But my scores are not quite there, and though my extracurriculars may help, I do not see much - or any - hope.”
“Then apply someplace else, Harvard is not the be-all and end-all of this world, and I think that a book with your thesis could win a number of friends, who also had not gone to one of the Ivy Leagues.”
“I thought there was only one.”
“Every discipline has a group that is selected for the maturation of maturity, and excellence.”
“I am not trying out for soccer.”
“No, but not every author is from Harvard. And certainly, not all novelists are from Harvard. Strunk and White are from Cornell, which explains its role in this world.”
“But - Cornell is a culprit in Ivy League.”
“And often ignored because of that.”
“All too true, it sort of ritual to ignore. Though your generation thinks that it is all right to be dropped off at school in a bus, with a nom de plume, and be transported away in a hearse with a nom de guerre. Nothing is better than speaking up against the NRA for your thesis.”
“I rest my case, as a lawyer might say.”
“You are so annoying, and yet have wonderful advice.”
“Your mother is not so annoying, but does have the gift of packaging up her wisdom.”
“Why do you think you separated?”
“It was my fault entirely.”
“Really?”
“Just ask her.” With a merry twinkle in his eyes that said he had his own viewpoint, but it was walled within his memories.
“There was a film whose classic line was ' I just want to quit you' and the hollowness that surrounded this declaration.”
“I must be getting old, because I think that as a recent film.”
“When we translate an old teacher – we used The word ' perspective' a great deal, especially when she was talking about one of her teachers and the fights between Nabokov and Edwards.”
“I am so glad that my perspective on Brokeback Mountain has the same weight as the writers of Lolita and To the Finland Station.”
My giggle became a half-stunted guffaw, and then skipping chuckle, and outright laugh. But then I stopped. “For the record -” in a serious tone as I could muster, “I think that you wrote both the novel and the words. Because for the life of me, I cannot think of either my mother or the interloper as being so witty as you, though I have at least one friend who is.”
With a deep reluctance to admit it: “Yes I was both the writer and the commentator, by turns. The man who would be described as your father simply made a few remarks, mainly on things related to the war of that time. He did not think of the results of his efforts, thus he was easily distracted, far too easily distracted. The vision of a novel just simply never took hold of him. Whereas I had a purpose, which was far too lusty for my good. When the stalwart creed did ebb and bend, so too did the results seem meaningless.”
“You wrote a book to get into bed, is that what you are saying?”
“As an author from New York City once said 'You write a couplet to get into bed' - I had a more determined purpose.”
“Which was?”
“At the time a child seemed like a very reasonable option. Do not ask me why.”
“As the comic standup in a film about Shakespeare said: 'It is a mystery' though I do not know why anyone quotes that line.”
“And you just did.”
“And I know, and even I do not know why.”
“Then that is the mystery. Now We have something we have to do, so that is shop clothes which are presentable to a principal, and register you for the last few weeks of school.”
“That is the most depressing thing I have heard this week, could we just go by where I am staying right now and get my things?”
“We are still going to have a shop, it is not every day I get to register a daughter's school.”
Maladroitly curtseying.
“I am glad that there was no time to cater to your bad habits.”
“I have plenty of them, it is a weakness that I atone with every passing fortnight.”
“I have holes, you have goals.”
“I have now and again. More often have ideas which go nowhere.”
“I will never understand how someone forms a goal early and does not keep the lesson.”
“I cannot say, but I believe it has something to do with hormones, and the effects they have on behavior. Research is the agon of our misery and destruction, but chemicals make us feel.”
“Why have you hidden this for so long?”
“Why have you hidden things in your life?
“Why hide things?”
“You do not know what they are then it is easier to hide them.” A retort Stopped forming in my mouth, thus he continued: “In the world of cuisine, the hardest meal to swallow is a dish, as is said, that we make cold.”
“And what exactly does that mean, those who soothsayer, or is it just something that you fill in the gaps in your elaborate goading?”
“It means that you know what it is you were hiding, so you hide it well so that you can think do not know what it is, but you do.”
“That is recursion.”
“Do you know what that means? Do you know what any of your pronouncements actually mean, or do you just sponge and reiterate to seem larger than you are?”
“So what does recursion mean to you?”
“Recursion is when you call the operator on itself, endlessly.”
“Why is this important?”
“Because recursion is what opens the door in logic to infinity, and it makes certain statements that we cannot ignore. Which means of course many people ignore them.”
“I have heard this from literature or the humanities.”
“Yes you have, you just do not know it - but that is what college is for.”
“Yes – yes - to prepare me for the world.”
“The world does not care, it is other human beings who care, and in some cases care a great deal.”
“I wish there were fewer people.”
“We tried that, in the 19th century - the problem is that a few people can engage in the higher order thinking, but most people cannot.”
“Does that have to do with things?”
“It means that, on average, we get more things done if more hands are working on them. Even if many of them are doing negative work.”
“Negative work?”
“They are discovering things which are not true. Even if they are published.”
“How to sort them out?”
“Eventually the good work is useful, and the other work goes by the wayside, even if eventually it will be found useful at some later point in time. The people who do useless work receive awards, and praises - and are omitted from the annals of history.”
“You sound very harsh.”
“I am merely reporting – a tip to journalism - on how things work, you can do what you wish with this bulletin.” Voici vos informations. “It is a matrix, you can be important and forgotten, unimportant and forgotten, important and remembered, unimportant and remembered. Most people want to be important and do not care whether they have made any progress - being remembered is the hardest thing, but being important is the most sought-after thing.”
“Anyone can get people to talk about them, even if we are talking about the fact that they are being talked about. And what are you?”
“Largely - I am unimportant and forgotten, making it to the illustrious position of being a lecturer in a small college - which is about my level of inducement.”
“But what can be called a 'wisecracker' or some such.”
“Even if not a zany one.”
“Everyone wants to be a comedian.”
“There is a difference between the class clown and the class comedian, in our definitions of buffoonery.”
“What is the difference?”
“The class clown shows up naked to graduation, the class comedian is the one who convinced him to do that.”
“A Harlequin in drag. Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien. ”
“Better than being a mountebank undiscovered.”
“What is a – mountebank?”
“An imposter, or grifter - does no one watch The Sting anymore? You should have learned that in French.”
“I think in French we would use charlatan. I have heard of it – The Sting that is.”
“Seldom will you spend 2 hours of unadulterated amusement.”
“Why didn't you do some great?”
“I did, after a fashion suited to Vernor Vinge.”
“What? Is it published?”
“In a way - convince your mother to have you. Which she did, but for other reasons.”
I raised my eyebrows like Mr. Spock.
“She had you as a witness. One body is easy to explain, if you don’t leave clues around, two much harder to.” He made a small humorous grimace.
“I have a question – were you the only person in the pile of papers my mother gave me?”
“No, it was part of the arrangement we made.”
The Sting was stung, in repeated affirmation – suffixed with round recursion in iambic pentameter translating from dactylic hexameter with an extra spondee.