You Wouldn’t Think So, But Here We Are

Goddamn. Lost again on this endless campus, with its Escher stairwells, its minarets, its Starbucks cafes, frisbee fields, its many quads—a regular hexadecagon of quads. I walk around a double-blind corner and find two empty loading docks and a row of empty industrial kitchens. I know I’m already late, but I can’t help myself. I climb the cement steps up to one of the kitchens, draw close, and peer through the dusty windows. A desiccated mop wig is curled over the mouth of a bucket, and I see great silver-gray oven doors with grime trailing out the corners of their closed mouths. Dust upon oil upon dust on the floor. It reminds me of something I don’t care to remember, and I jerk my head back, stumble, and look at my watch.

I have been on this campus for thirty years, but all I remember, all I really know, is my warm, green office, and the admin lady down the hall with the stiff copper hair, the three dimly lit floors, the ramp hallways, the Coke and snack and candy machines, the grad office swamp, and Wendy Douglass, who empties my garbage pail and borrows my books once a week. Wendy has read more of those books than I have, I’m sure.

But, one unfamiliar parking lot, and I’m all turned around. I have no idea where I am.

You haven’t got time for exploring. Why would you do that? Why would you stop to look at an old kitchen? You haven’t got time to be curious. Cody Brandt is dropping off a revision of a revision that you have yet to read, and there’s no time to spoon around these hallways and hillocks like an escaped freshman. Move your old ass. Shit to do.

For what feels like the eighth, or tenth, or dozenth time, I accost a passerby, and ask, “Do you know how to get to Bolton Hall?” or, “Do you know what street this hallway leads to?” or, “Are there elevators in this building?” “Is there a restroom nearby?” “Am I walking from or toward Adidas Avenue?”

I text Cody Brandt for the third time. I call and leave a voice mail because the texts sound both chipper and slack: “Hey there, Cody. Running a little late. Be there soon!” “Yo, CB, I’m a little turned around. Gimme a few. I’ll be right there!” “Hi, Cody. I’m def on my way. Shouldn’t be more than my usual ten minutes late.”

Def?

So, I call Cody Brandt to say I’d gone to West Campus for a faculty senate meeting, and that I’m unfamiliar with that part of campus, parked in a lot I’d never used before, left from the wrong exit, and here we are, all out of joint. “Don’t go anywhere,” I said.

I walk up the steep hill that the red-headed kid suggests, and I enter the tall red building with the pale green windows, just as the kid said I should. I take the rightward hallway, find the elevators, and wait. I check my phone for messages and see I’ve got something from Lou, but don’t open it. Nothing from Cody Brandt. I check the mute button on my phone, to make sure I don’t miss any more texts or calls.

The elevator takes me to the top floor and there I find The Western Wing. I gaze out at the vast campus through the Coke bottle windows, past the two great minarets, Turquoise Mother and Marble Mother, and it only vaguely occurs to me that there have never been these minarets on this campus even though I know what they’re called and have heard the muezzin call students to prayer hundreds of times, no doubt. I look past the Slave Cemetery and the Anthropologie store and can see the bones of all three hundred-some slaves, and I see three employees in the store folding things, and I see myself holding a package I shoplifted for Lou. I gaze past mulberry and poplar and maple and sycamore and pine branches, and finally, I see two of the twelve eastern windows of Bolton Hall. There it is! If it weren’t for the fact there are cameras everywhere, I’d throw a touchdown signal, maybe hop a little. There I am, in my green, green office, and I’m sitting at my desk, skimming the living hell out of Cody Brandt’s revised revision. The essay is about cross-dressing in 1950s television shows, and then it morphs into the subject of the illusions manifested by Project Blue Beam, and then the sentences begin to snake across the page and then warp and weft like yarn, and the ink turns green. The revision keeps revising till it becomes a short story about a nervous accountant who works for the Mafia. I see the admin with the copper helmet xeroxing copies of Cody Brandt’s paper, while Cody Brandt paces just outside my door, watch-watching, huffing, and then thumbing an angry email to the chair. Cody Brandt has seen my texts but is fuming, won’t answer them. Cody Brandt is pink with rage.

But I’m there, Cody. I’m there, unable to stand and grasp the doorknob, or flick on the light, or holler, “Come on in!” because my body is less substantial than smoke and my lungs carry no air. My flesh is over here, in this tall, red building, behind pale, green glass, looking out at the million paths that seem to lead everywhere, but not to Bolton. There is no possible path to Bolton from where I am, Cody, and the two of us are just going to have to live with this, I’m afraid … In fact, I’m nearly 100% certain that once the elevator delivers me back down, and I’m out the door, I’ll get lost again. And who could blame me?

Cody, Brandt, Cody Brandt, when and if I see you in the flesh, I’ll tell you all about this stupefying campus, of all the unlikely things I’ve discovered. For example, did you know this place has a morgue? An actual morgue, kid. And there’s not just one football field, but four! Who knew? I know for a fact, because since I left my car, I’ve had to walk across three of them, and I see the fourth from where I’m now standing. And there’s this building that is always night.

Kidding?

Hell no, I’m not kidding. You walk in at one in the afternoon, turn right around and look out the glass, and the sun has set, the sodium lights are amber, car lights are full beam and not a soul but yourself will wander the glossy corridors of that tomb as you look for a door that leads to 1:00 p.m. Believe me. I’ll show you—if it so happens that I can find it again.

But here’s my problem, kid. I’m afraid I’ve done this before. Stood here before, seen the second eye of Bolton Hall, from this vantage, and thought to myself, “Just keep heading west by southwest. Use the compass on your phone if you have to. It’s less than half a mile.” You see, I do vaguely remember doing this before, at least a couple times, and stumbling upon azalea gardens or tennis courts, or ice cream shops, or dank basements, or empty offices. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into the wrong room and interrupted classes and been given the fisheye by nervous professors, and wide-eyed students who look vaguely familiar, but who clearly don’t seem to recognize me.