His mind drifted off for a while, bogged down in the netherness of the infinite dark around him, and once he emerged from the mental fugue, he found himself thinking about the last lines of his translation of a short poem by Desnos:
Then, after four hours of captivity in the black box, his bladder finally gave out on him and he wet his pants in the same way he had done as a guiltless, smiling little chap in diapers. What a disgusting thing to do, he said to himself, as the warm liquid coursed through his underpants and corduroy trousers — but also, at the same time, how much better to be empty rather than full.
He remembered peeing with Bobby George one afternoon in the Georges’ backyard when they were five years old and Bobby turning to him and asking: Archie, where does it all go? Millions of people and millions of animals peeing for millions of years, why aren’t the oceans and rivers made of pee instead of water?
It was a question Ferguson had never been able to answer.
His old childhood friend had signed a contract with the Baltimore Orioles the day after he graduated from high school, and in the last article Ferguson ever wrote for the Montclair Times he had reported on the forty-thousand-dollar bonus that came with the contract along with Bobby’s imminent departure for Aberdeen, Maryland, where he would be starting at catcher for the Orioles’ short-season A-level team in the New York — Penn League. The kid had managed to put twenty-seven games under his belt that summer (and bat.291) before the draft board called him up for his physical, and with no student deferment to prevent him from serving his country now instead of four years from now, he had been inducted into the United States Army in mid-September and was currently nearing the end of his basic training at Fort Dix. Ferguson prayed that Bobby would be shipped off to a comfortable post in West Germany, where they would put him in a baseball uniform and allow him to play ball for the next two years as a way to discharge his patriotic duty, for the thought of little Bobby George tramping through the jungles of Vietnam with a rifle on his back was so repellent to Ferguson, he found the thought almost unthinkable.
How long was the war going to last?
Lorca, murdered by a fascist death squad at thirty-eight. Apollinaire, killed at the same age by the Spanish flu forty-six hours before the end of World War I. Desnos, killed at forty-four by typhus at Theresienstadt just days after the camp had been liberated.
Ferguson fell asleep and dreamed he was dreaming he was dead.
When power was restored at seven o’clock the next morning, he staggered back to his room on the tenth floor, stripped off his damp clothes, and stood under the shower for fifteen minutes.
The previous day, twenty-two-year-old Roger Allen LaPorte had sprinkled his clothes with gasoline and set himself on fire in front of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the U.N. With second- and third-degree burns over ninety-five percent of his body, he had been taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital, still conscious and able to speak. His last words were: I’m a Catholic Worker. I’m against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action.
He died not long after the blackout ended.
FRESHMAN HUMANITIES (REQUIRED). Fall Semester: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato (Symposium), Aristotle (Aesthetics), Virgil, Ovid. Spring Semester: Assorted books from the Old and New Testaments, Augustine (Confessions), Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Spinoza (Ethics), Molière, Swift, Dostoyevsky.
Freshman CC (Contemporary Civilization — required). Fall Semester: Plato (Republic), Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Politics), Augustine (City of God), Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke. Spring Semester: Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Marx, Darwin, Fourier, Nietzsche, Freud.
Studies in Literature. Fall Semester (in lieu of required Freshman Composition course because of F.’s good score on A.P. exam): A seminar focused on the study of one book—Tristram Shandy.
The Modern Novel. Spring Semester: A bilingual seminar with books read alternately in English and French — Dickens, Stendhal, George Eliot, Flaubert, Henry James, Proust, Joyce.
French Poetry. Fall Semester — Nineteenth Century: Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Nerval, Musset, Gautier, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Corbière, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Laforgue. Spring Semester — Twentieth Century: Péguy, Claudel, Valéry, Apollinaire, Jacob, Fargue, Larbaud, Cendrars, Perse, Reverdy, Breton, Aragon, Desnos, Ponge, Michaux.
It didn’t take long for him to decide that the best things about Columbia were the courses, the professors, and his fellow students. The reading lists were superb, the classes were small and led by tenured faculty members who took a special interest and pleasure in teaching undergraduates, and the other students were sharp, well prepared, and not afraid to speak up in class. Ferguson said little, but he absorbed everything that was discussed in those one- and two-hour sessions, feeling he had landed in a kind of intellectual paradise, and because he quickly understood that in spite of the many books he had read in the past ten or twelve years he still knew close to nothing, he diligently read all the texts that were assigned, hundreds of pages a week, sometimes more than a thousand, stumbling now and then but at least skimming the books and poems that resisted him (Middlemarch, City of God, and the dreary pomposities of Péguy, Claudel, and Perse) and at times doing more than was asked of him (plowing through all of Don Quixote when selections totaling only half the book had been assigned — but how could one not want to read all of that best and mightiest of all great books?). Two weeks into the fall semester, his parents drove in from Newark and took him out to dinner with Amy at the Green Tree, the inexpensive Hungarian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue Ferguson had grown so fond of that he’d renamed it Yum City, and when he started talking about how much he enjoyed his courses and how astounding it was that his main job in life now was to read and write about books(!), his mother told him the story of her own grand adventure during the months before he was born, confined to bed with nothing to do but read, all the excellent books that Mildred had recommended, dozens of works that Stanley had checked out of the library for her and which she still thought about today, so many of them so well remembered after so many years, and since Ferguson could not recall ever having seen her read anything except for a handful of thrillers and some books about art and photography, he was moved by the image of his young, expectant mother lying alone all day in the first Newark apartment with novels propped up against her ever-growing belly, the bulge under her skin that was none other than his own unborn self, and yes, his mother said, smiling warmly at the thought of those long-ago days, How could you not love books after all the books I read while I was pregnant with you?
Ferguson laughed.
Don’t laugh, Archie, his father said. It’s what biologists call osmosis.
Or metempsychosis, Amy said.
Ferguson’s mother looked confused. Psychosis? she said. What are we talking about?
The transmigration of souls, Ferguson explained.
But of course, his mother said. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. My soul is in your soul, Archie. And it always will be, even after my body is gone.