Our Bird, Born in a Fire
a Novella by Marshall Piotrowski
a Novella by Marshall Piotrowski
It’s a special and rare student who brings their own pedagogy into a classroom. It’s an even rarer one whose pedagogy assumes the lead-heavy responsibility of advocating for Lucifer himself. For most students and teachers there are select, strategic moments to introduce this occult activity into the classroom. But in the heart and mind of Jason A. Mason (he/him), every day and every minute is a fantastic time for him, brave soul indeed, to sing Satan’s glory. We, the intelligentsia, thinks Jason, must never take an argument, or ethic, as a given. We must constantly grapple with the basics, and if that doesn’t happen in college, well then where the fuck else will his dear classmates, whom he is only ever looking out for, learn what it is they truly believe?
January 25th, 2017
Professor Rachel Stamos (she/her), PhD. (Political Science, Cornell University, after a B.A. in Political Science, Amherst College), world renowned scholar on the efficacy and weaknesses of the global human rights regime must, like many professors, significantly dilute her vocabulary and syntax for the undergrads here at Manifest Destiny College, a small and expensive (but only moderately prestigious) private liberal arts school in Madison, Maine. She does this not because the undergrads aren’t smart, because most of them really are (and even better they actually want to learn, which she could hardly say about most of her former students at Cornell and Yale, who mainly wanted a degree from Cornell or Yale). No, Dr. Stamos has to tone down the jargon and clean up the complexity of the ideas she teaches in Global Conflict and Peace Studies 277: Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid, because after more than twenty years of becoming constantly more an expert in the field, her mind actually uses all that jargon, because she can and does speak and think of convoluted global-scale theory as easily as the rest of us might discuss concepts like pizza or denim jeans. This morning, well into the second week of spring semester, for class (which unfortunately for the non-athletes in the room starts at 9:10AM) Rachel leads a discussion on the Rwandan Genocide, specifically on how and why the international community allowed it to happen. Here comes Jason A. Mason:
“So, just to play devil’s advocate here for a second,” (audible groans emanate from at least seven different seats in the class of forty), “and I hope this doesn’t come off as toooo offensive, but like, wasn’t this always going to happen? Why should anybody try to intervene in a situation like this when, when the feelings between the Hutus and the Tutsis were just, just so, well… tribal?”
Several gasps echo, hanging in the air like stunned mosquitos. Murmurs steadily grow. Dr. Stamos asks everyone in the room, with her eyes and her hands—which are making the ‘calm down’ sort of flat-palmed (palms turned down) up and then down quelling motion—to calm down.
“What I’m proposing to the classroom here is, is shouldn’t we just let genocide run its course, like a virus?” is what Jason then decides to whip up for his hungry classmates.
Shouting once again ensues. There are calls for him to leave the room. There are eight hands in the air from six students who feel more than ready to shut this little shit down with their own words or fists if needed. Dr. Stamos can’t help but laugh just a little bit in her own brain. This kind of student comes around every two to three years or so, in her experience, but she’s never had one as bold and/or oblivious as this. She doesn’t dislike him at his core, and he’s been very nice and jovial to her, what with him being the type of student who actually wants to be seen by everybody as a teacher’s pet. And he’s not actually stupid or anything, just severely misguided as to his role in the classroom.
Once the shouting dies down Rachel calls on Micah Swanson (they/them), who is the type of non-binary person constantly misgendered in both directions, to take this one.
Micah starts: “Well, Jason, there are times to play devil’s advocate, and there are times when you’re in human rights class, so maybe stop voicing literally evil opinions?”
Ooooos and little snorts ring through the enclosed, stuffy, gray-carpeted room, humming off the white boards which cover nearly every square inch of available wall.
“Micah, I understand why you’re upset. Jason,” Dr. Stamos redirects her gaze down to the dark-haired boy sitting directly in front of her, “I think Micah might have a point. You do realize you are arguing, arguing in favor of genocide, right?”
“Well…I’m just playing devil’s advocate. And I wasn’t really arguing for genocide as much as arguing against intervening in it.”
Many students are simply stunned. Baffled. A few are considering trying to transfer to Colby or Sarah Lawrence or to some other more prestigious college again. The class sits in a sad silence. Jason’s got a shit-eating grin on his face that this time really does annoy Rachel. She looks at the clock, as she sees many students doing, and realizes it’s 10:12AM, two minutes past time to dismiss. The sound of students shuffling around outside in the passing period is audible. A few peek into the classroom from a small rectangular window in the top right quadrant of the door.
“Alright class, homework is chapters seven and eight of Donovan and that two-paragraph proposal for your research papers we talked about. I’ll see you on Wednesday!”
Students scuttle out of the room, talking amongst themselves about the nightmare of a junior they share a major and therefor many classes with. Jason does not shuffle out. He stays behind to chat Rachel up about the absurd cuteness of a dog he saw online earlier that morning.
Tonight, at home, Rachel eats a broccoli, chicken, and rice dinner. It is a bit bland but very healthy, supposedly. She works on the book she’s writing. Jason plays League of Legends in his dorm room. Micah tries their best to catch up on homework in the library. Victoria Reyes (she/her), 37, vacuums the classroom where somebody argued in favor of genocide earlier, as she just learned after uncrumpling and reading a note she found on the ground. Victoria makes the absolute bare minimum wage, and she is unknowingly developing cancer from a combination of over-exposure to cleaning chemicals and an anti-circadian sleep cycle, both of which she was granted when Manifest Destiny College contracted her employer, Cleaners of the Sky, to clean up nightly after a bunch of rich college kids. Cleaners of the Sky absolutely does not offer health insurance or PTO. Kenneth Joy (he/him), 28, barista, employee of Tres Bien, Chef, a popular college campus food contractor, burns the fuck out of his hand on the steaming wand, accidentally, because he got distracted on the 187th latté he’s made tonight in the college café by a funny thought. Sadie Murdoch, one of only three freshmen in GCPS 277, calls her mom, crying over homesickness and over not actually learning all that much while she sinks further into debt by the millisecond. John Waltonot (he/him), PhD (Sociology, London School of Economics, B.A. Sociology, Brown University), president of Manifest Destiny College, reads the numbers he recently had the college pay to get crunched in anticipation of next month’s Board of Trustees meeting, and they don’t look good. Too many smart, poor students on full scholarships (almost 2% of the student body currently), and not enough rich, less-smart full-pricers (about 20% of the student body). He was signed on as president precisely to change these sorts of things, to shore-up the financials of this fiscally leaky dingy of a school. He lives (at no expense) in a very nice home on a large estate, complete with very expensive art, all of which is owned by MDC, reserved for the president’s delight. Tonight he decides to call Magnus Carter (he/him), who is the CEO of Strong, Simple Capital, LLC., an absurdly successful hedge fund. Magnus is of course a very rich man and a key MDC Trustee, and an MDC alumni (1987). John is going to call Magnus to see if Magnus feels emotionally, spiritually ready to make his big gift to the school, the one that he’s openly talked about making for about ten years now.
“John, I appreciate the call, and I’ve seen the numbers too. Not looking good. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We need to raise tuition, yes, again, finally hike it up above 70k, time to rip that goddamn band-aid, and we need more full-pricers, fewer no-payers, or we’ll go under within five years. Guaranteed. I can tell by the numbers. John, you know I’m a businessman, a numbers guy, you know I’m right about this. By the way, how’s that entrepreneurship minor coming along?”
“Sure Magnus, I mean I see the numbers too. I have to be blunt though, I’m calling tonight because I’m wondering about, DREAMING about your big gift. It could really save the school. You’ve seen all these other liberal arts schools going under, right? That could be us Magnus. I know you want a building but—”
“A big building John. A big, beautiful, busty building. A building I’d like to fuck, a building everybody would like to fuck. Even those asexuals. I know you’ve got some of them over there. Let’s get them horny. I want a big state-of-the-art building, a building with bells and doohickeys and labs and microscopes and rare books and genius professors and full-pricers and a god-damned Center for Entrepreneurship John, like we’ve been talking about. And I want it to have my name on it John, I want it to be called The Excellent Magnus Carter, MBA, Center for Excellence. I’m just not sure I’m quite spiritually, emotionally ready to give the money quite yet John; you know I like to be courted. You know that John. So, say, what’s the dinner and entertainment going to be at the Board of Trustees meeting next month?”
“Oh, yes, um, well I haven’t seen the final menu yet, but I heard it will be along the lines of wild caught salmon and organic, orange-glazed asparagus, and purple-mashed potatoes with a gold-infused hollandaise, all of it grown and caught and mined right here in Maine, Magnus. But… Magnus, I know we’ve been talking about this building for a long time now, but we could Secure Our Future Existence as an institution, and an increasingly prestigious one at that, if you’d donate all that money, 40 million we’ve been talking about, remember? if you’d donate it to the general fund instead, so that we can use it wherever we most need. Would you think about maybe doing that instead? We’d be forever grateful to you, as we already are—”
“John, John John…. I like your drive, your style John, how you came right out and asked outright what Sam never would, like you whipped your cock out for me, and I’m almost inclined to agree, what with those granday cohonays on you you dog, but I want to make a building with my big gift John, and I want it to either look like a pair of big old, suckable, squeezable tits, or a cock any man could be proud of. I want that building John. I want it to be excellent. I want to get a hard-on that lasts for well over four hours when I see it. It’s got to be phallic John, or otherwise pneumatic. I’m excited to see the sketches you’ll have ready for me next month. And excited is an understatement if you know what I mean. And make sure the salmon isn’t dry, John. I don’t like dry salmon. Have them cook it inside a wrap of tinfoil, a sealed wrap, so it doesn’t dry out. Or otherwise flash-fry it. In a very hot pan for a short amount of time. And is it caught in one of those filthy nets or on a fly rod? I’d like it more if it was on a fly rod. Ideally a bamboo rod. And preferably on a dry fly. I’m no fan of streamers.”
Micah Swanson, in addition to being a full-time student in their final year at MDC, also holds the position of Chair of the Student Board for All Things Academically Inclined (SBATAI), meaning they have been loaded up with responsibilities usually reserved for faculty and administrators, in exchange for an excellent thing to put on their résumé, and a personal sense of importance. Micah is one of four student representatives to the Board of Trustees, a responsibility of which they had their first experience at the last convening of rich people in November, and they quickly learned that their job was both to schmooze millionaires and to be on the look-out for whatever extra-stinky bullshit the greedy fuckers might try to unload on the school. In November, Micah had brought to the lizards’ attention that nearly all of the students and most of the faculty desperately wished to change the name of the college to almost anything other than the extremely problematic current name. They were laughed at and promptly misgendered in both directions by the moderator of the General Musings roundtable, one of many sessions held that week for the meeting of the Board of Trustees.
Most liberal arts students never see the pampering, the courting, the extreme sucking up to rich people that defines any expensive private school’s meeting of the Board of Trustees. The mornings begin with an excellent catered breakfast bejeweled with expensive coffee; there are waiters waiting on people, bussers bussing. There are craft-sausages and moist, perfectly cooked scrambled eggs that have been cooked perfectly with added crème fraiche, for moisture and tang, served on fine china, and lunch is catered as well, usually featuring some sort of nice beef, and dinner is at John’s huge home, also catered, and there is always an open bar with exclusively local spirits, and there are drunk rich middle-aged trustees hitting on undergraduate student representatives, and there is valet parking, and there is a star professor or two who might give a speech, and there is either an alumnus musician or poet who will perform for everyone, and once the trustees are nice and liquored up and already digesting salmon caught on bamboo fly rods and egg yolks and clarified butter emulsified with edible gold, there will always be that special time of the night when the president, liquored up just a bit himself, will stand in front of the joyous, pampered mass, and even the valet workers and the bartenders might listen in at this point, listen in to the college president’s terribly embarrassing plea for more donations, for all these fine philanthropists to Dig Deep, deep into their souls and bank accounts, to give as much as they can so that the great Western Tradition of the Liberal Arts may live on for generations to come, and just look at these great and dare-I-say beautiful students here among us, these scholarship kids, who would probably be working as sorry valet parkers or bartenders or waiters had it not been for your past generosity, so please keep it up! Look at Micah! She, I mean he is on a full ride! On a scholarship that our own Magdalene Hughes here donated! And what an investment Magdalene made for Micah. She wants to go into International Aid work, and we couldn’t be prouder of him. Micah’s surely going to save our world from war and ecocide, and maybe even genocide for that matter, for in a world as heinously complex as ours is here in the 21st century, we’re so lucky to give scholarships to good kids like Micah so that he can go and save the world using the Liberal Arts Education we so graciously gave her. And there will be applause, and more attempts to sleep with undergrads, and then everyone will drive home drunk. And God Bless Manifest Destiny College!
Gloria Iverness (she/her) and Elise Warner (she/her) are witches. They cast spells, brew potions, and tea, and kombucha, and they own crystals out the wazoo—they know what every tarot card means and indicates, and they predict and sometimes even make the weather. They read the stars like you’re reading this. Gloria and Elise are witches who also study sociology.
“Elise, we only have a few weeks to summon what we’ve been speaking of. We need to time this just right.”
Elise and Gloria are doing homework and plotting together in a small study room in the library.
“We can pull it off. Should only take a week and a half of daily ceremony. Nothing too complicated, just some crystals and salt runes in a circle, a candle or two, something fragrant to burn, and we’ll need to memorize the incantation, hold hands, and speak in unison over the circle. I’ll text you the words in a sec.”
“Gloria, our bird is going to be huge, and when it’s all over the trustees are definitely gonna know how deep their greed runs, they’re gonna fucking smell it hahahahaha.”
“I can’t fucking wait!”
After scrunching and unscrunching their faces at each other, and giggling, Elise passes Gloria the electronic cigarette they co-own. Gloria takes a deep puff and blows the minty-vapor down a large sweatshirt sleeve to hide if from the sight of the librarians, who in-fact know and see their fat clouds of nicotine vapor but don’t really care enough to stop them.
Sadie Murdoch is going on a walk. She’s listening to the songs of the band Franz Ferdinand, listening to hits like “Take Me Out”, which she considers to be the best walking song of all time. As in to walk to. She’s walking by trees, and she’s walking along the river on which the campus is built up against and along, and the sky is gray but it is not cold outside, a strange conundrum for a January day in Maine. She dressed a little too heavily and now that she’s been walking for a while she’s lightly sweating under her clothes. She sits down on the grassy bank of the river and tries to meditate. She starts with a body scan, from head to toe, and notices that her body is in more pain than she thought, especially her neck and lower back, which sort of throb at a low volume. Being in college means sitting a lot. Even more than high school did. After the body scan she begins the process of mentally counting from one to ten, with each numeral coinciding with an in- or exhale, and after she reaches ten she will start again at one. She knows her mind will wander. This is kind of the point. One through ten is sort of a clean slate against which it will be easier to identify and then let go of whatever thoughts pop into her head. Sometimes it’s a horny thought about her and her ex-girlfriend, and she’s learned the horny thoughts are probably the most difficult to return to her counting from, but when she does let go of the horn and returns, it’s all the more powerful for her practice. Sometimes it’s the sad, occasionally suicidal ideations, those pesky little fucks, that distract. They aren’t plans or anything, just simply the low-grade intrusive type stuff, like “Maybe being dead feels nice,” or “At least I wouldn’t have to do all this homework if I was dead”, and these used to worry her greatly, but after asking her friends back home in Maryland if they have the same thoughts, which they do, she’s decided they’re maybe more indicative of mild to moderate depression than anything super dangerous or urgent.
Sadie almost dropped out of school this morning. Her mom, however, successfully talked her down. “This is really common for a lot of freshman sweetie, I remember my first year how bad the homesickness was, but it got so much better after that first year, and it will for you too, I promise,” she had promised. She also promised she’d come visit next month, take the train up, and that she’d take Sadie into town for a nice breakfast and dinner, get her out of the cafeteria. That final bit is what really convinced her.
two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, I’m ugly, no I’m not, nine, ten, one two…
The river is nice. It is calming. Rivers are the most tangible representation of time anywhere, and they seem to be almost everywhere. They make it just so easy to see. And as Sadie watches the waters flow by, she sees how they are bringing her mother closer to her with every cubic foot that goes by. This water will be in the Atlantic soon enough. Sadie misses the Atlantic. Madison is an inland town, and freshman are not allowed cars. “Maybe I’ll get Mom to take me to the coast,” she thinks.
three, four, five….
Micah Swanson is crunching numbers. They are analyzing SBATAI’s monetary account, seeing how much they will have for the end of semester Pizza Bash, a day full of pizza: cheese pizza and pepperoni pizza and sausage and mushroom pizza and deep dish pizza and thin crust pizza and even vegan and gluten free pizzas, which will have little signage near them signing “For Real Vegans Only” and “For Real Celiacs Only” and pizza with lots of vegetables on it and pizza with no sauce except for olive oil and garlic and pizza with pesto AND red sauce and some with just pesto. This pizza will be for students. This is academic pizza. This pizza will be the driving force behind the sure academic success of the students of MDC. The stressed stomachs of tired students will be stuffed with bread and cheese and sauce or otherwise oil and garlic and vegetables and on these filled stomachs the students will learn complex theorems, build compelling graphs, speak in foreign tongues, write sentences with not only semicolons but with em-dashes too—this pizza will save the students; these students will succeed. Micah will receive little thanks. This pizza comes every semester, so there will be no surprise. Students will be eating less for several weeks in order to fully cash-in on this promised event. The students will be nonplussed and full of ‘za. They will all finish what they need to get done, maybe.
Sadie is done with her meditation practice, and she’s still blissed out from it. She’s still on the riverbank. She’s just sort of quietly sitting there. But, I’ll say it again, she’s no longer meditating. From an outside perspective it’s hard to tell a difference. But now her mind is almost entirely blank. Blank until a hunger thought pops up. It’s pizza night at the Tres Bien, Chef cafeteria. Sadie arises.
Elise Warner is from Florida. She’d never left Florida before coming here. She’d never seen mountains before, or even pine trees really. Or snow. Or true cold weather. She loves the snow but hates the cold. She hates the cold but loves dressing in many layers, like Stevie Nicks. She loves Stevie. Fleetwood Mac generally but Stevie especially. Elise has been a witch ever since she found out she has witch-blood. Her grandmother on her mom’s side. Found out when she was thirteen. Then she bought a spell-book. The spell book included a spell to help plants grow, and the next day she cast it on her flowerbed, her own designated one, and they both grew twice as large and beamed all together. The flowers were evolvulus, Blue Daze. The butterflies like them. After that she knew her power. She’s never turned back.
Jason A. Mason is from L.A. baby! They city of angels, the place where stars collide, the place even palm trees most desire to be, or so they think, until they get there, ready to become famous and wildly appreciated, only to choke hard on smog and nerves. It’s a tough place baby, and not everyone is really a star. Some people want to be stars and then get to L.A. only to learn that they’re really just Big Time Losers. Sad. It’s better to be from there than to move there. Despite Jason’s close secretarial and attornal relationship with Lucifer, he’s actually a pretty innocent kid. He likes video games, and he likes masturbating to just his own hottest memories, no porn needed. That stuff’s super problematic anyways. He has a good relationship with his parents, and he likes to bike everywhere he needs to be, not only out of fun or for the movement and the fresh air, but because he’s quite environmentally conscious. As in he’s Green. Recycles. Four minutes showers. Natural shampoos. That sort of shit. J.A. Mason wants to love on somebody; the guy just wants to dote. Maine is treating him quite well, two-and-a-half years into living there. He doesn’t go home in the summertime anymore. His parents understand. He had an undergrad research gig last summer analyzing the impact of Right to Work laws on the working class. He cares about that kind of stuff. His student-based pedagogy really is unfortunate though.
Elise and Gloria join hands.
Our Bird, Our Bird
Born in a Fire
Our Bird, Our Bird
Fulfil Our Desire
Sweet Bird, Kind Bird
Bog These Men Down in Mire
Fierce Bird, Dark Bird
A Judge and A Flier
Huge Bird, Huge Bird!
Rain Down Your Inner Fire!
“Okay, that was great. We’ll just need to do that every night for the next two weeks.”
“Amazing. Let’s schedule it out?”
Cafeteria ‘za is shitty. It’s way too bready. And you can just tell that the ingredients are the cheapest they could legally find, each applied with haste and without much tasting. The cheese was truly slapped on sort of a thing. Amazingly though, pizza, even when cheap and rushed, is comforting to most students. Makes their bodies sink just a little bit. Sadie’s certainly is. Sinking into comfort. Sinking into pizza-bliss. It’s a small concession on a long day, a day in which at least three different futures came and passed. A day in which worlds shifted, in which Sadie practiced her practice, and did it well, and found her spot on campus, on the river, and what a spot! That spot has ducks, and the trees there sway, frogs ribbit, and osprey fly overhead, and Sadie quelled both sad and horny thoughts, and she made it through. And her reward? Shitty, comforting ‘za.
Sadie’s from D.C. Actually, outside D.C. Maryland. Bethesda. Home of videogame manufacturers, evil men, evil women, good men, good women, good nonbinary people, and crab, and brackish water. Lots of crab in the brackish water. And Old Bay Seasoning. And everyone there is way too obsessed with Maryland’s flag. They wear it on clothes, put it on stickers. Sadie’s dad had been a congressman from Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District. They hailed from Des Moines. Bo Murdoch, Sadie’s dad, grew up in a union household. Bo’s dad, Aloysius Murdoch, in the heart of the Great Depression, organized quite a few of the other farmers in the area to go on strike, to literally dump their milk onto the ground, not only as a symbolic gesture that said dairy-farmers were getting screwed, but also to literally tank supply and therefor raise prices. Aloysius spent weeks going around to different farms, trying to convince their farmers to unite, to throw out their milk, and often found out how deep the puritanical feelings against “being wasteful” ran in the heartland. He got into fights, got his jaw bloodied and broken, got called a scoundrel and a “stupid kid” (he was all of twenty years old at this point) and had several shotguns pointed at his face. Mostly he was called a commie. Nobody could ever find it in themselves to pull the damn trigger on this handsome, brown-eyed face though. Good thing too, because by 1932 Aloysius was heavily involved in organizing all farmers, not just dairy people, across Iowa and even in Nebraska and Minnesota, into withholding their crops from market, into forming armed groups to threaten the bankers and the bankers’ lawyers, who had been swarming the Midwest, looking to collect on the loans they made during WWI, loans the president had encouraged the farmers to take out in order to buy and farm more land. The idea there was to secure a warring nation’s food supply, but once global markets reopened post-war all those farmers suffered heavy losses even before the stock market crashed, so yeah those bankers and their lawyers certainly weren’t welcome and a good armed mob of angry farmers did wonders in running them out of town, but this of course led to huge, long, armed standoffs with Law Enforcement, always such heroes of the people. Sheriffs called the unionists “hoodlums” and threatened to send them to jail. But soon enough there were pickets and road closures from Waterloo to Davenport to Onawa and Sioux City, which is to say all over the state of Iowa. Newly hired ad hoc deputies were being told to “shoot to kill” as groups of farmers formed outside of jailhouses, intending to break their fellow picketers out, and there was a lot of discourse in the newspapers concerning peaceful vs. violent protest, and about the need to respect Law & Order, and a lot of shaming of the farmers participating in the so-called “Riots”, and there were peace negotiations which seemed successful but which were followed quickly by even more Sheriff’s deputies being hired and trained and told to kill.
The movement never quite succeeded in making the material realities of the farmers better, at least directly, but they sure as hell raised awareness about the plight of the American farmer, and the farmer generally, and within less than a year FDR was passing laws such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to limit their production. While some leaders of the movement railed against these New Deal policies as concessions, Aloysius was tired, had spent nearly a whole year worrying he’d be assassinated by either a neighbor or the state, and took his Department of Agriculture checks and worked less than he used to. Finding himself in a new foreign state of working less than 60-70 hours a week, the young man started reading more and more books, and became enthralled with them, with novels and political and economic theory, and at some point loaned the land he’d inherited to a friend of his while he went to study Economics at the University of Iowa, all the way east in Iowa City, and it was there on the banks of the Iowa River that he met Candace Clancy. They later married. Candace studied history and found Aloysius to be a fascinating subject himself. She wrote her first book about the Farmer Strikes and pulled heavily from the interviews she conducted with her husband. She began the book during college and finished it a year after graduating. Candace came from a small town in the rolling hills of the northeast corner of the state, a town named Decorah, which sits on the Iowa River as well, well upstream of Iowa City. She, like most of the town, was beautiful and Norwegian, and she and Aloysius wasted little time in getting to know the ins and outs of one another. The finishing of the book and Aloysius’ return to Des Moines and Candace’s coming along happened in the year of 1940, and it became painfully clear that Aloysius would likely be drafted for the war, and so rather than waiting he quite impulsively, without consulting his wife, volunteered for the Marine Corps and was promptly shipped off to the Pacific to see and be part of unspeakable things.
Oh! Gloria Iverness, Gloria Iverness, a most wonderful witch! Gloria hails from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Santa Fe is about as old as currently standing cities get in the U.S. There is an energy to Santa Fe which easily translates to successful witchcraft. There were days in the Sangre de Cristo foothills of spotting lizards, coyotes, deer, rabbits, tarantulas and rattlesnakes, scorpions and black bears. Gloria’s relationship to the many predators of the foothills is complicated, because while she loves them, she also lost not one but two cats to the outside. The first, Barney, just a kitten at the time, was taken by a large owl in the night, and the second succumbed to the venom of either a black widow or brown recluse, both of which are numerous in the area. Gloria’s now a vegan and the inspiration behind the end of semester pizza bash food restriction signage, since two years ago some meat-eaters who felt like being healthy for once in their lives ate all the vegan ‘za. That won’t happen again, hopefully. Gloria is a senior and will be transitioning almost immediately from her B.A. program into a Master of Social Work program at Columbia. She’s a do-gooder, and a talented witch. Neither her nor anyone close to her is quite sure how she became so talented. She has no family history of said things, as far as anyone knows or speaks of. She likes to whisper in her mind Oh Gloria Iverness, Gloria Iverness, a most wonderful witch as a sort of motivational and validating mantra.
Gloria spearheads the campaign to change the name of Manifest Destiny College to almost anything else. One of her petitions to change the name to “Artichoke College” received signatures from over fifty percent of the student body. For a school that applauds itself for its progressivism, the whole place is certainly based on some pretty racist, backwards-ass shit. The freshman seminar course for example, the type where the whole freshman class reads the same books, to get on the literal same page, is called “Westward, Westward, We Shall Roam Where No Man Has So Yet Dared” which is just kinda fucking nuts when you think about or say it.
Oh, Gloria Iverness, Gloria Iverness has led student pickets, sit-ins, art builds, and even made local news by organizing nearly the full student body to stop showering for weeks, leading to such noisome classrooms that Dr. John Waltonot arranged for clothespins to be distributed to all faculty and non-participating students. Many of the faculty were participating too, of course. In all of this though, Gloria has refrained from using her witchcraft to intervene, as she’s always trying to see how much power she possesses without magic, should it ever disappear someday. She’s soon to graduate, and she wants to see things really change, or at least, to see the administration and trustees who have demonized her over the last few years get shit on.
“Destiny, so nice to speak with you again. How are the sketches coming along?”
“Hi Dr. Waltonot. I’m still working on both, but I’ll certainly have them ready for the Board of Trustees meeting. Not that I want to get too ahead of ourselves with the architecture, but it’s going to be hard to have the, uh, head, be much larger than the, uh, shaft, physics-wise, and with the other sketch, I’m just worried that it’s gonna be tough to really squeeze some noticeable, uh, knockers into the space we’re dealing with. It would be a lot easier if we could take out the buildings immediately east and west of the student union building.”
“Just do what you can. Between you and I, I’m seriously hoping we won’t ever have to build either of them. Say, are you related at all to Harold Famestar? I used to see him at college parties in the ‘80s.”
“Ummm, yep, yep, uh, yeah Harold’s my dad.”
Victoria Reyes loves to dance. Victoria, when she wakes up at about 4pm, will make a cup of coffee, drink it, and then dance for a half hour with her two sons, Ernie and Chris, eight and ten (years old). She loves Michael Jackson, and disco, and she loves the 90s club mixes she finds on YouTube, and she loves Boys in Braids. She likes other boy-bands too, but B.I.B. is by far her favorite. While most boy-bands comprise of at least four members, B.I.B. managed plenty of success with just three: Jackson Ring, Thomas Flamemaker, and Harold Famestar. Thomas and Harold’s last names are of their own creation, but they are also now their legal names, or were. Thomas passed from a cocaine overdose. It was international news for almost a week, in early 2005, in a hotel in Las Vegas, just a week before B.I.B. was to have a year-long world reunion tour. It was also in 2005 that Victoria Reyes made her way to the U.S. from Guatemala. She and her parents saved enough money to hire a coyote to get them across the border, which took no less than seven months, and they saw no fewer than seven truly horrific things along the way. Victoria was only fifteen when they crossed. She heard about Thomas’ overdose while they were in Mexico. She cried for maybe an hour before she saw the fifth of the seven horrible things she saw on that journey, and that conversely stopped her crying, just the vulgar shock of it.
Victoria loves dancing with her kids, and she loves the rain, and she loves cloudless nights because on those nights she can stargaze on her breaks, and she loves the snow, thinks it’s beautiful, which is great because there’s a lot of it in Madison. She loves having Fridays and Saturdays off, because she can go to her sons’ soccer games. Victoria and Ernie and Chris also dance to Britney Spears, and they all love Selena. Ernie loves Selena more than he thinks he should admit to anyone at school. Victoria’s got a strange, worrying lump in her breast, but she’s been putting off going to the doctor because she has no health insurance, and because she’s feeling very tired nearly every waking moment.
Professor Stamos is the last person to class today.
“Hey, Dr. Stamos! We were about to get started without you!” Jason jokes. Snorts ripple from Micah’s nostrils. Jason thinks they’re laughing with him.
“Sorry class, I got pulled over on the way here. No ticket though.” Rachel smiles out at all her young pupils, who she genuinely loves. “Let’s get started, huh?” She turns around to start writing on the whiteboard with a dark blue expo marker. Her whiteboard-handwriting is not the best but not bad enough to be illegible. In fact, it makes most of the students feel better about their own handwriting. She speaks slowly as she’s writing out what she says. “All…. Humans… Have… Dignity.” She turns back around to face the class and is greeted mostly by warm smiles, with the biggest, toothiest one coming from Jason’s face. “So, innate human dignity,” she begins, “is the idea,” she writes the word ‘idea’ under the first sentence, “that the entire international human rights regime is based upon. And this is basically true for both the individual rights model as well as the group rights model. This idea that all humans have dignity is really the keystone in the whole framework. Who wants to elaborate on what we mean by dignity?”
Hands shoot up, but Jason just starts talking: “Well, if dignity,” he says the word with a mocking tone, “is something we all have, isn’t it really just something that none of us have? Doesn’t it nullify it if we all have it?”
Groans, snorts, side-talk, Rachel’s calming hand movements. “Well Jason,” Rachel decides to take this one herself, “would you argue that none of us have skin, since we all have it? Are we all skinless?” She says this all in such a nice, non-aggressive tone that all the other students can hardly believe her self-control, and they feel bad about themselves again.
“I mean, I could imagine myself arguing something like that, for the sake of the argument, but no, I guess not…,” Jason replies with a hard blush. He does not, however, sink in his seat or on himself.
“Again, anybody want to elaborate on dignity?”
To Rachel’s surprise, the normally quiet Sadie Murdoch is the only one with a hand raised. “Sadie?”
“Well, I think it’s just, like, the idea that no human being is greater or lesser, or more or less, um, deserving of stuff than any other, that we’re all noble and, um, deserving, and yeah, that’s pretty much it…” Sadie trails off and both she and Rachel are terribly proud of her for speaking in front of the class.
“Yeah Sadie! That’s pretty much exactly it. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of dignity is: ‘The state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect.’ And while this is certainly true, what universal human rights does is extend this to mean that all people are worthy,” she writes this word on the board as well, “of not just honor and respect, but also of food, and water, and shelter, and all sorts of important things. Now, there are some rights to things, and some rights from things,” she makes a big blue T-chart with ‘To’ above the left column and ‘From’ on the right. “Now, I had you all read the Universal Declaration before you came to class, and it includes both. Does anyone want to share some innate things people have the right to?” There is a stark silence, and no hands raised. “Feel free to just call them out.”
“Article 3 says ‘the right to life, liberty, and security of person,” one student calls out. Rachel writes this in the ‘To’ column.
“Article 13: Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.”
“And what’s part b?” Rachel prompts, scribing clause A on the board.
“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Hey, Dr. Stamos, why does it use ‘his’ pronouns here?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty bad, huh? Anyone remember when the UDHR was chartered?”
“1948” Micah calls out.
“Yeah Micah, the 1940s! This document is a relic, and it’s representative in many ways of the power structures of the time.”
Jason’s got his hand raised but Rachel’s still turned around writing the word ‘His’ on the board, so he puts his hand down and starts speaking: “So, theoretically, could I argue in an international human rights court that only men have a right to these things?”
Nobody likes the way he’s grinning. Rachel turns around to look at him. There are notes and whispers being exchanged.
“Jason, I think you’re forgetting about Article 2.”
“Hey, Kenny, wanna roll up another one for us? That was good shit, and now I’m posted here ahahahahahah.” Kenneth thinks Rog looks pretty funny as he says this and so gives a big smile.
“Sure thing Rog, one blunt coming right up!” Kenneth Joy starts the blunt by cutting open the cigarillo, dumping the ‘guts’ of it into a designated guts jar, the contents of which get dumped on some lucky outdoor fire once a year in the early summer, and sets aside the wrap while he starts grinding up weed in a sapphire-colored metal ‘herb’ grinder. After that everything happens very fast, and there is a pen involved and a licking and a rolling and he wastes no time in lighting it up with a small red Bic lighter.
“Rog, I had one order today,” Kenneth speaks while exhaling his first puff, “that was for a quad-shot, almond milk, dirty chai, with two pumps of lavender syrup, and quote: ‘extra foam if you can please.’”
Roger and Kenneth laugh big belly laughs at this report.
“I don’t know how the fuck you hold your face together with shit like that,” Roger remarks, sort of laughing his words.
“’S’no easier than waiting those damn tables, and at least once I make their drink they fuck off until the next day. How do ya take some crazy or angry order and go back later, like, three four times with a straight face?”
“Dude, speaking of which, today some family came in, definitely visiting their sorry kid at the college, and we could tell when they walked in they were Bad News Bears, like just the way the dad was walking made that clear, and his face was all red and angry, and the mom looked like she was damn close to overdoing it on the Xanax, and the poor kid was making herself about as small and quiet as she possibly could, and so I goes up to them and I says, ‘Hi there folks, I’m Roger, I’ll be your server today, how are we all doing?’ and dude says all angry-like, ‘Well Roger, we’re doing just fine, but I couldn’t tell you how you’re doing, and you’re a part of “we all”, which is what you said.’ I mean, holy shit dude, this guy reminded me just like my uncle Jeremey, I mean, what an asshole. And of course they ordered with a bunch of substitutions, and claimed they ordered something whole else when I WROTE THAT SHIT DOWN, and yeah, you guessed it, dude said something rude to wifey and kiddo that we all overheard ‘cuz it was so loud, and then of course he tips all of $3, like one dollar for each of them after they sat there for a whole hour and ordered $200 worth of shit.”
“Rog, that is exactly what I mean. How’d you hold yourself together man?”
“Just barely, just barely, it’s all par for the course, ya know?”
“Pass that?”
“Oh shit, yeah, sorry, here ya go.”
Jason A. Mason’s walking around the campus at 2pm on a Thursday in late January of 2017, and as he rounds the corner of the old gray-stone humanities building he finds a crow with a broken leg and wing, and the thing is wailing a bit and hobbling around on its good leg and wing, doing circles really, and the campus at this time is strangely quiet, and Jason looks around to see if anybody else can help him decide what to do. There is no one, but this bird is so pitiful that he absolutely cannot just continue on with his walk, so he high-tails it up to the Squeaky Cup, which is the on-campus coffee shop, and he goes in and runs up to the counter, causing at least four and a half head turns, and he says to the barista, “Hey, Kenny,” panting and sweating, “Kenny, I need a shallow bowl or something, with water, it’s for this crow that’s hurt. And, do you know what sort of food crows eat? This one could use some help. Like cheese or meat or spinach?”
Kenneth’s already got a white plastic soup bowl full of water lidded and wrapped tight with plastic wrap by the time Jason’s finished his “cheese or meat or spinach” bit.
“Here’s the water, but Jason, birds eat bugs, and like seeds I think, you know that right?”
“Oh yeah, thanks!”
And just like that Jason’s out the door again and heads return to their original positions. Jason walks quickly back to the injured bird, panting a bit, taking care not to mess up the water situation and when he gets back Micah Swanson, Elise Warner, and Gloria Iverness are huddled loosely and not-to-closely around the wailing thing. Jason says excuse me but can I just get past you here and he unwraps the bowl and sets it down by the bird, who sort of half snaps at him. The four undergrads sort of back up and give it space, and it shoots them a nasty glare but then reluctantly starts drinking from the bowl. Micah Elise and Gloria are all kind of staring at Jason in a bit of awe.
“Thanks Jason, that’s really nice of you,” says Gloria, sweetly.
“Oh, yeah, no problem! I’m gonna go find some bugs,” and he speeds off again, this time into the forest, readying his hands to become shovels and containers.
Micah Swanson is neither rich nor poor. They are only at MDC—which, like most private liberal arts schools without outsized reputations and healthy endowments, is notoriously expensive—on account of a nearly full-ride scholarship, the Magdalene Hughes Scholarship for Promising Students, which is awarded to only two students from every year. The recipients of the award are chosen by a small group comprised of the Dean of the College, two faculty members, and Magdalene Hughes herself, who is getting awfully old and confused these past few years. Rachel Stamos was on the committee the year they chose Micah as recipient. The decision is largely based on the students’ personal essay. Micah’s essay was wonderful, as if written by a poet, which Micah is, and instead of being much about Micah, it was in fact a brilliant, lyrical critique in full verse of the personal college essay as its own institution. This moved the whole committee to tears, and they promptly decided MDC needed Micah there, needed Micah to satirize and edify their own problematic institution.
Micah grew up in Tacoma, WA, reading a lot of hometown-hero and notorious alcoholic Raymond Carver and getting called a faggot by just about everyone. Micah said it back too of course. Micah grew up with four really solid friends and about twenty less-solid ones. They’re not in consistent contact with any of the twenty-four Tacoma friends anymore. It’s not a big deal. Micah’s best friends are Elise Warner and Gloria Iverness, who all lived in the same hall but in different rooms their freshman year. None of them are stupid, just occasionally short-sighted when it comes to the world and what is happening in it and what their actual problems are. All three really want, really desperately want to help people for the rest of their lives once they get out of this place.
When Micah was about seven they were at an Albertson’s with their mom and saw a man get caught trying to steal some salt, just one of the small black Morton’s cylinders, and he, to Micah, pretty clearly lived in the streets, and Micah watched the grocery store security guard pin him down to the ground and within all of two minutes there was a policeman there to take the poor guy off the jail or maybe just somewhere else. Two people, probably a couple, asked the security guard and the policeman to let him go, offering to pay for the salt ten times over, but the security guard said the man was a “serial kleptomaniac,” as in he’d stolen some salt before this, a few times, and had gotten away, and that he needed to learn a lesson and get a job, and Micah could see that their mom was shaking, and she cried tears of upsetness in the car, and explained to Micah that what they’d just seen was not OK, and she even used the terms ‘state repression’ and ‘state violence’, which Micah only pieced together that the state in question was not just merely Washington when they were about seventeen and about to go off to MDC.
Micah’s stressed. Micah’s overworked, undersleeped, overeating and underhydrating. They’re sweating hard when they sleep. They’re having dreams of ex-girlfriends and the parents of ex-girlfriends, of finding themself and their exes and the families of their exes in dangerous brainwashing compounds in the woods kind of scenarios, of running through woods from said compounds with their exes and their exes’ families to get away but they’re being chased by brainwashers-on-mountain bikes with air cannons that brainwash with the air, and just as they get to the small village with magical anti-brainwashing shield-borders Micah gets shot with the air-cannon and their vision starts to melt like a strong acid-trip and suddenly they’re on a grassy hill in front of a tan-painted and red-shingled bandshell and an orchestra is just getting started on a song, violas and cellos wailing and shivering as Micah wakes up in a soggy bed and a sodden mood. Not that that specific dream is recurring, but aspects of it are. It’s one example.
Aloysius Murdoch saw death. He saw planes crash into boats, watched boats shoot at other boats, saw boats shoot at planes and planes shoot at boats and planes shoot at planes above boats, and he saw dead men in the water and in the air plummeting to the water from their shot planes, and he saw boats go onto shore and saw the young men storm onto booby-trapped beaches and he saw men murder and murdered on land, under palm trees. And if all of that hadn’t changed him we’d have real reason to be worried, but of course it did. He, along with a whole generation of men and women and children all over the world, witnessed things that his brain just couldn’t cope with, saw death and destruction on such a scale that he became physically shorter by a whole two inches. His bones actually shrunk, leaving him with many loose, long tendons and ligaments and muscles that took much longer to shrink than his bones had. He spent a fair while out there, and whether Candace stayed truly faithful, and whether Aloysius stayed truly faithful, is unknown, and they never asked, just went right back to being in love when he returned, which is when she got pregnant with little Bo Murdoch, a baby destined for the halls of congress.
Bo grew up popular. Bo grew up in Des Moines. He made friends with everyone he met, which became a big stressor on old Aloysius and Candace when his birthday would swing back around every year. They had to find large uncropped fields and place large catering orders and buy plenty of booze for the adults, many of whom considered themselves as personal friends of Bo’s too. These were great events, and by sixteen Bo was being encouraged to start molding his life around the prospect of running for congress in not too many years, and a ‘Friends of Bo Murdoch’ fund began collecting money for his future races by the time he was turning seventeen.
Bo was no sports-star, no rock-star, and no math-star. He was simply a Socializer of the highest order, a person who from a young age found he had no embarrassing tics or mannerisms or neuroses, found he had a handsome face and found that people liked talking to him and even spilling their guts to him, so by the time he was twenty-two and freshly back in Des Moines from his time in Iowa City (a city that also fell full-flat in love with him) he knew most of the town’s secrets, knew the inner-dynamics of each family, and knew what everyone really needed, and he fully intended to squeeze those needs right out of the nuts of Washington, and he ran for Congress soon as he was twenty-five and legally allowed.
By this time Bo was married to Miranda Borcherd-Murdoch, mother of our own Sadie, and a hell of a bank teller. She’d met Bo in Iowa City, at the university, where she’d been studying English Lit. Miranda took the job as a bank teller for the thrill of it. She kept a loaded sawed-off behind the counter and dared god to send her a robber, and she liked to say in her own head “they’d all see if they could handle her”. God never did send one though, so she returned to reading cheap spy and western paperbacks to satisfy her fix for action, which was an old habit of hers going back to her childhood in the tiny college town of Grinnell, Iowa. There was not much to do there but to help out on her parents’ farm, and she didn’t mind helping, but the books her grandparents would buy for her in Iowa City, where they lived, and whom she lived with during her university years, enriched her life deeply.
When Bo Murdoch—who was eventually as much a product of decades spent in D.C. as a product of Iowa—finally croaked (pulmonary embolism), there were two funerals. One at Arlington National Cemetery, attended by many powerful people, and one back on Aloysius and Candace’s old farm, then cared for by Bo’s little-mentioned little-brother, Jared Murdoch. Jared had been running the farm since Candace and Aloysius died within two weeks of each other, Aloysius via stroke and Candace seemingly via fatigue and heartache, which all of that happened sometime in the mid-90s, just before Sadie was born.
Both of Bo’s funerals were quite large, and Sadie and Miranda attended both, and both were hard and both helped them heal just a little bit.
All manners of powerful political Americans showed up at Arlington (which is where half of Bo was buried, with the other half on the farm, though I’m not sure exactly how they split him up), from members of the House of Representatives and the Senate to Supreme Court Justices to the then current, now former President, who let both Sadie and Miranda know they could have a bright future in the Democratic Party should they so ever choose, and all they needed to do was get in touch, and so both of them now have a phone number that would supposedly get them in touch with Barack Obama. Neither has ever used it.
Sadie personally almost always felt terribly bored when hearing of her dad’s work, and is absolutely further left than the donkeys in blue, but she hopes to cash in on the Obama favor someday with regards to a future at the U.N. or the State Department.
“Someday soon we’ll all be wasted on just breathing the disgusting air, and we’ll all be walking around like drunks and stoners.”
“Aren’t we all already drunks and stoners at this school?”
“Sure but I mean the whole world.”
“Oh yeah, sure, I mean, unless the air is actually just carbon monoxide and we all just collectively die-off from monoxide poisoning.”
“Ooh, ooh, or, or, the president just really loses his mind one of these days and nukes our own country.”
“Elise I’m pretty sure there are at least two people and/or systems in place to stop that from happening.”
“But what if he’s a witch Micah, what then huh?”
Elise and Gloria crack up at this while Micah takes a pull of the joint before handing it to Gloria. The three are in the forest, just after dusk and a mediocre curry and rice dinner from the Tres Bien, Chef cafeteria, which is colloquially referred to as The Galley, on account of the strange maritime interior design decorating the space.
“No, no, no,” Micah replies, “no way he’s a witch. If he was a witch you’d think he’d use a beauty spell or a smart spell on himself.”
The three friends are practically rolling off their stumps.
“Can we stop talking about him?” asks Gloria.
“Yes, of course, and we should stop. He’ll still be here tomorrow.”
“Ugh.”
“Hey, witches, how’s the spell coming along?”
“We’ve been on track,” replies Elise, confirming with Gloria’s eyes that this is correct, “but we won’t really know until the day of. Either we summon a big poopy bird or we’ve been wasting a lot of time.”
“I think it’s going to work though. I have a good feeling.” Gloria smiles as she says this.
The three of them get up from the stumps, thoroughly stoned, and begin the walk back to the dorms. Gloria walks in front, with her cellphone flashlight guiding her through the pointed darkness. Micah follows, and Elise is behind them, also using her cell-phone flashlight. Micah just places their feet exactly where Gloria’s had been, Micah’s own shadow stretching out in front of them, this formation being a years-long practice of the group. They will all return to Gloria and Elise’s room, watch an episode of two of something, likely Broad City or High Maintenance, which either way will encourage them to return to their conversation about a potential post-grad move to NYC, and they’ll all daydream of life in the big city, and then Micah will retire to their single room down the hall, and they’ll all bump into each other in the shared dorm bathroom again to brush their teeth and pee their final pee of the night, and then all three will be asleep within half an hour, and Micah will have sweaty stress-dreams again. Gloria and Elise almost never remember their dreams, unless they are especially important and/or sexy.
Miranda’s in town. She’s taking Sadie out for dinner, as promised. They’re at Groovy’s Pizzeria, which is the type of place that serves thick, cheesy, greasy pizza that is in no way supposed to be thought of as deep dish/Chicago style. This is just pizza, and it’s not thin. It’s slightly disappointing, but only slightly.
“How have your classes been this semester?”
“Umm, they’re alright. I’m liking my Spanish class but it’s hard, and I like psych, I’m thinking of majoring in it, and my Westward, Westward is fine, but we spend most of it just critiquing the course and the school, which is fine but doesn’t make anyone much excited to be here, and my human rights class is wonderful except for this one kid who only plays devil’s advocate and talks way more than anyone else.”
“Oh well honey like basically every college in America comes equipped with one of those. You’ll deal with much more annoying people out in the professional world, so just consider it practice. I’m sorry, that sounds annoying though. Tell me more about psych!”
The two talk easily with each other, and they’re glad to be in each other’s’ company. They both have the same strawberry-blond hair and are about the same height. Sadie is obviously Miranda’s daughter, or niece at the very least. Sadie will stay with her tonight at her Airbnb, a good chance to get some space from the roommates, who’ve been very sexually active recently and so are always looking and hoping for Sadie to be gone, but only for that reason because they really all like each other. The three of them live in a classic double room with three beds, one bunked above another, a.k.a. the dreaded ‘forced triple’. They get along well for sharing such a cramped space. And it’s a good thing too because Sadie hasn’t made any close friends other than her roommates. That lacking is probably the hardest thing for her right now. She has some people in a few of her classes she talks to, but nobody to be obligated to seeing what they’re doing on the weekends, and her roommates will typically go to whatever off-campus party is happening, and Sadie will typically stay in her room and do homework or read a book (usually something Miranda recommended) or watch a movie or tv show on her laptop. She is lonely, and lonely is a sad solitude.
“You workin’ on anything especially interesting honey?”
Harold Famestar is regarded globally as a miracle, in that the world watched him do so many drugs in the late 90s and early 2000s that it really is a miracle he never overdosed (or so the public thinks) and that his organs are still kicking, which they are. Nobody’s mad about it. He’s very well liked all over the world. He still performs sometimes.
“Dad, I have this client, a college in Maine, that wants me to sketch up two different potential buildings: one that looks like a big penis, and one that looks like a big pair of tits.”
“I bet they go for the cock.” They both laugh hard.
“Yeah, but Dad I don’t even think they want to follow through, so what am I doing? I can’t build a good reputation drawing up buildings like this and then not even end up building them.”
“Hun, I know this account might sound stupid but remember that damn razor commercial I was in, how stupid it was? I’ll tell you right now it was worth it, and sure, I had all sorts of people callin’ me corny for that one, but we’re out here working, and sometimes we just gotta sell some shit!”
“So I should really sell these buildings?”
“Give the damn balls some hair and give it foreskin, give the titties some nipples, give ‘em all a hard on, and they’ll recommend you to every person who ever needs a building, and those colleges are always needing new buildings. You’ll be in the big money soon enough, I can tell. I’m proud of you sweetie.”
“I saw you on TV last week, you look good. Still going to meetings, right?”
“Every day baby, every day.”
“Good Dad, I’m proud of you too.”
When Jason got back to where the bird had been, nobody and no bird was there, and he dropped the small pile of worms he’d dug up out of his hands and back onto the ground. And he sort of stunned himself when he immediately began to sob, like a heavy ugly snotty sob.
It’s Friday, and this is a party. This is a party hosted by students of a small college and for students of a small college in a small town in Maine and so naturally everybody knows almost everybody else there, which in terms of social-anxiety-inducing this party is Queen, the Motherload, and everyone at this party who already deals with social anxiety is using substances to try to loosen themselves up a little, but are actually just becoming very intoxicated which will cause them to do and say things that in the long-run will only exacerbate their social anxiety. Sadie Murdoch, for example, coaxed out of her room by her roommates, coaxed several blocks off-campus to the “crew house”, which is not an official house for the crew team but rather a house where three of the four residents row crew for the college, has already downed an entire bottle of prosecco by herself and is working on a second. She will, by the end of the night, throw up in front of a girl she has a crush on, cry about it to her roommates, and will have to be supported by one roommate on either side for the short walk home. Jason A. Mason will make the mistake (and who hasn’t?) of having several mixed drinks, a bong hit or two, and a cigarette, which will send him right to either the toilet or much more likely (as there is only one bathroom in this house) to some unlucky bush or patch of grass. Gloria and Elise will not overdo it and will instead maintain a steady level of tipsiness throughout what for them will be a splendid night. Micah is in their dorm room watching a documentary about something they’re mildly interested in. They came to enough of an understanding about their own social anxiety last year to know they won’t have much fun at this kind of event, no matter how fucked-up they get. The song that gets the crowd moving the most at any party like this will always be “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire, or otherwise probably something by Kanye or Cardi or the Talking Heads. This party began as a nervous pregame between hosts, and the first group of guests arrived at around 10:00pm, and quite awkwardly that group did not know the hosts whatsoever, and this group was comprised entirely of freshman who could not legally drink and so arrived with no booze whatsoever. You can bet that the small talk for those first seven minutes after they were the only guests was extraordinarily strained. People began to arrive quite rapidly after those seven minutes though. The word about this party was spread through a facebook event titled “Flower Shirt Party” and so thankfully almost everyone arrived in a Hawaiian shirt made of cotton or rayon, except for some of the more serious indie musicians, who refused to don anything more fun than black Dickies pants, a dark turtleneck, a denim (blue or black acceptable) jacket and a tight, rolled, black or green or yellow or gray beanie. There are five such musicians spread across two closely connected and slightly overlapping cliques.
The awkward conversations between old lab partners, eye contact between exes, the attempts at making crushes notice crushees, will last approximately two hours before the police arrive and demand that everyone get home safely, for there has of course by this time been a noise complaint or two. And it will all happen again, likely at another “sports” house (no frats or sororities at MDC), every Friday and Saturday night of every school year until either the school closes on its own accord or until quite devastating external circumstances either close the school or make partying itself a death-wish. Toxic air, perhaps?
There is another human rights class period. Jason is silent. He doesn’t even try to make any case for evil. He’s still in the frontmost, centermost seat. He’s got a Monster Energy on his desk. Dr. Rachel Stamos chocks it up to a hangover or just a bad day. He’s got a look in his eye that suggests to Rachel that he’s not entirely present. He didn’t rack any bad jokes before class began. He’s almost sullen, somber. The class gets through the entire hour with not a peep from the devil. The class gets through its entire discussion on children in cages without the question being brought up of whether kids being in cages is actually all that bad. Micah thinks it’s refreshing, but it’s also sort of eerie. Rachel is admittedly a little bit worried by it. She’s seen depression sweep her students from the very Earth. She’s always worried she’ll miss or ignore the signs, that the world will lose another young human. So after class she asks Jason to hang back. Once most of the students leave she wastes no time.
“Jason, are you doing okay today? You seem pretty down.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, thanks but I’m fine, it’s just this bird, is on my mind. I can’t find it. I’m worried about it.”
There are rich adults arriving on campus. There are students dressed in their most expensive dress clothes, escorting the rich adults under clear plastic umbrellas. There are middle- and working-class people preparing food for rich adults and umbrella-toting students. There are professors preparing speeches about the liberal arts. There are a cappella groups discussing laryngitis remedies. There are scrambled eggs on silver platters. Coffee is being poured into porcelain mugs. It steams because it is perfectly hot. There are consultants preparing presentations. There are valet contractors preparing to work a party. There are checkbooks being both protected and sought after. There are sketches of vulgar buildings being finalized. There are dead salmon marinating in soy sauce and grated ginger and there is edible gold flake being tardily purchased. There is an old chef screaming at a young sous. There are college presidents (just one actually) having anxiety attacks, popping Xanax.
Now these rich adults have had breakfast. They are gathering with the college president outside of the Student Union Building. There is a young architect showing her vulgar building plans. There is a young they/them hiding inside their dorm on their witch friends’ suggestion. There are mothers twirling with their sweet children. There are stoned baristas making lattés dangerously fast. There are hedge fund executives with rock hard cocks. There are freshman children of dead congressmen trying to build new friendships. There are spokesmen for the underworld happening upon conglomerations of rich adults. There are all of these people peering up to see what the hell just blocked out the sun. There is Jason A. Mason, wondering how the bird he was worried about grew so impossibly large, now flying low over the campus like a Cold War stealth bomber. Gloria and Elise apply the clothespins to their noses, their giggling mounting on the uncontrollable, their young hearts racing faster than ever before.
So, I know I said before that a river is the quote “most tangible representative of time anywhere”—but what if that was wrong? What if rivers are, in fact, the greatest, most tangible, palpable evidence against the linearity of time anywhere? Sure they always “flow”, but they ALWAYS flow. I’m not talking about seasonal brooks here. Rivers always flow, but if they always flow, where do they go? That water will be evaporated and brough back to the river, or somewhere else, but it will always flow. Yet it goes nowhere. The river itself doesn’t ‘go by,’ just individual water molecules do. But there is more water and sometimes the same water. The river remains. Even if it is dammed it will continue to flow above the dam, and the dam will have to let it flow below eventually as the pressure from above will continue to build upon the dam. Is it actually “flowing” though? How can it both “flow” and yet always be there? Even if the land it “flows” atop changes and sinks the river will still be there, in the fall line. It will flow faster in spring and early summer and slower in late summer, winter, and fall. Even if you make like Chicago and make the river flow backwards it is still a river. But it never stops “flowing”, so does it ever flow? It is there. And some answer about time also always being there isn’t going to cut it. That doesn’t solve this. I know I’m doing it poorly, but do you understand what it is that I am trying to talk about here? A river is always there. It is always there. There is always a river. It flows nowhere, from up to down, but then that water goes up again, or out, while the river stays put, still flowing, and there are bugs and fish in the river, and rocks, always more rocks, and Sadie’s still meditating on the bank, or maybe she’s done meditating and now simply enjoys the scene, listens to birds, listens to the constant riffle, the trickle, the flowing. How are you really sure it’s different water than it was a second ago? And if that river is gone then there is another one. But it is not gone because the first river is always there. Maybe language just won’t work here. Language is so tragically insufficient sometimes. And I’m not always great at talking. And sure, Sadie might be counting one to ten, one two three four five six seven eight nine ten, but what about when she starts counting one (1) on every breath? Every breath is simply One. One. One. Each breath is One. Inhale is One. Exhale is One. The river exists, sits as much as it runs. Whole cities are built around it, colleges, around knowing it is always there, was there before the city, before the college, and still will be after. One. Do you understand? One. I’d like to know if you do. Breathe. One. Tell me.