stranger came up and asked for directions. Then she cried. She didn't want me to notice, and to tell you the truth, I was a lot more interested in what you'd have to say, because Star wasn't about to tell me anything at all. But it wasn't you, so I made a mistake. Obviously.'
'I guess so,' I said.
My flight was announced, and Phil pulled me into an embrace and told me he was proud of me. Laura's hug was longer and tighter than Phil's. I told her I loved her, and she said the same to me. I surrendered my ticket, stepped into the mouth of the Jetway, and looked back. Phil was smiling and Laura was staring at me as though memorizing my face. I waved goodbye. Identically, like witnesses being sworn in at a trial, they raised their right hands. Other passengers swept forward in a confusion of ski jackets and carry-on bags and urged me down the Jetway.
• 10
• Middlemount closed around me like a fist. In the week before finals, I sank deeper into the old pattern, rushing under metal skies between classes, the meal job, and the library, often falling asleep with my churning head on an open book. Sometimes it seemed as though I had passed from one frozen night into another without the intervention of daylight; sometimes I looked at my watch, saw the hands pointing to four o'clock, and could not tell if I had missed some badly needed sleep or a couple of classes and an appearance before the pots and pans.
On the first day of finals I had the English and French exams, history on the second day, then a day off, chemistry on the next, and calculus on the final day. Through Monday and Tuesday I can remember coming into the bright classrooms, taking my seat, getting the blue books and the exam sheets, and thinking myself so far behind that I was incapable even of understanding the questions. Then the words began to sink in, the darkness to lift, and soon, as if more by radio transmission than by thought, coherent sentences declared themselves in my mind. I took dictation until the blue books were filled, and then I stopped.
On Wednesday night I fell asleep at my desk. Raps at the door jolted me awake. When I opened it, I was startled to see Simone Feigenbaum, a girl from my French class, standing in front of me, dressed, as always, in black. Simone was from Scarsdale. She smoked Gitanes and was in the Bob Dylan—Leonard Cohen crowd. The thought that she probably wanted to borrow a textbook evaporated as she flowed in and put her arms around me. In the midst of a lengthy kiss, she pulled down my zipper and reached, with a sly, comic bravado, within.
My clothes windmilled away, and hers flew off over her head. We toppled into my narrow bed.
Instantly, Simone Feigenbaum was zooming over, under, alongside my body, her breasts in my face, then her stomach, then her buttocks, then her face was in my face and both of us were working away like pistons until I seemed suddenly to turn inside out. Her breasts nudged my face and I got hard without ever actually getting soft and we did everything all over again, only slower. And so on, repeatedly, until my thighs ached and my penis was waving a limp white flag. I was eighteen, and a virgin besides, technically speaking.
Around six in the morning, Simone slipped out of bed and into her clothes. She asked if I had an exam that day. 'Chemistry,' I said. She produced a vial of pills, shook one into her hand, and dropped it on my desk. 'Take that fifteen minutes before you go in. It's magic. You'll amaze yourself.'
'Simone,' I said, 'why did you come here?'
'I had to make sure I screwed you at least once before you flunked out.' She opened the window of my ground-floor room and jumped down into the crest of snow between the dormitory and the path. I closed the window and slept for a couple of hours.
I swallowed the pill on my way to the exam. Another bright classroom, another menacing desk. During the distribution of the blue books and question sheets, I felt as if I had taken nothing stronger than a cup of coffee. I opened the blue book, read the first question, and discovered that not only did I understand it perfectly, I could visualize every detail of the relevant pages in the textbook as if they were displayed before me. At the end of the hour I had filled three blue books and completed all but one of the extra-credit questions. I floated out of the classroom and gulped a quart of cold water from the nearest fountain.
The calculus exam was twenty-two hours away. I took my guitar into the lounge and spent the afternoon playing better than I had thought possible for me. I skipped dinner and forgot about my meal job. Instead, I remembered the bridge to 'Skylark' and the verse to 'But Not for Me.' I knew who my mother had met on the sidewalk outside Biegelman's—me, the real me, this one. After six or seven hours I said, 'I have to memorize the math book,' and returned to my room on a wave of applause.
When I opened the calculus textbook, I found that I had already memorized every page, including footnotes. I stretched out on the bed and observed that the cracks in the ceiling described mathematical symbols. Someone yelled, 'Dunstan, phone call!' I floated to the telephone and heard Simone Feigenbaum asking me how I felt.
Great, I said. Had the pill done any good? I think it did, I said. Did I want another one? No, I said, but maybe you could come back to my room.
'Are you kidding?' Simone laughed. 'I'm still sore. Besides, I have to study for my last exam. I'm going home afterward, but I'll see you after the break.'
I levitated back to my room and stretched out. Sleep refused to come until seven in the morning, when absolute darkness swarmed from every wall and corner and escorted me into unconsciousness.
Someone who may or may not have been me had possessed the foresight to set my alarm clock for an hour before the exam. The same someone had shifted the clock to my desk, forcing me to get up when it yowled. Once I was on my feet, I reeled to the showers and stood beneath alternating blasts of hot and cold water, realizing that I had slept through both breakfast and lunch, in the process missing two tours of duty before the pots and pans, and would have to survive the math exam before satisfying my hunger. I rummaged through my desk drawers, discovered half a packet of M & M's, an entire Reese's peanut butter cup, and the greenish, salt- flecked remains clinging to the bottom of a potato chip bag. I rammed this gunk into my mouth on the way to the exam. Professor Flagship strolled from chair to chair, handing out thick wads of paper covered with mathematical formulae. He said, 'This is a multiple-choice examination. Check off the answers and use the blue books for calculations.' To me, he added, 'I wish you luck, Mr. Dunstan.'
I believe that I had a dim grasp of the first few problems. All the rest were in a mixture of Old Icelandic and Basque. I kept falling asleep for two-second, three-second naps. Occasionally I covered a page with doodles or scrawled the random words that limped across my mind's surface. At the end of the hour I tossed the question sheets and blue books into the heap on the table and went off-campus to guzzle beer at a student bar until the return of unconsciousness.
My recurring dream descended once again.
All the next day I lay in bed listening to the slamming of car doors and shouts of farewell. Because I didn't remember going to the bar, I did not understand that I had a monstrous hangover. How could I be hungover? I almost never drank alcohol. To the extent I was capable of thinking anything at all, I thought that I had come down with some spectacular new variety of flu.
Memory returned in dreamlike, photographic flashes. I watched my hand add a caricature of Professor Flagship's face to the body of a lion with stubby wings, protruding breasts, and a bloated penis. For a second, Simone Feigenbaum revolved her lush little body above me, and I thought:
The universe in which people could pack bags and climb into their fathers' cars seemed unbridgeably distant from mine. I huddled in bed until the window was dark and the last car had driven away.
By tradition, our instructors posted exam grades in a glass-encased bulletin board on the quad before the college mailed them out. After the break, the board would be surrounded by students looking up other people's grades. I expected to see my English and French results on the coming Monday, history no later than Tuesday, chemistry on Tuesday or Wednesday. I had extravagant hopes for chemistry. Calculus, the one that terrified me, probably would not show up until Wednesday.
