It took just as long, mingling on the outskirts, to learn what had happened to me. I'd been gone no longer than a semester. I'd come back to the standing, eternal crew. Almost the same roster, down to their names. The only difference was that nobody hung out anymore. Folks were busy, needing two books and ten articles by age twenty-five to keep one's head above professional floodwaters.
Or perhaps the press was less industry than embarrassment. Conversation dropped to hushed flusters when I tried to join in. My offers to stand this year's successful master's candidates a round of beers were met by a chorus of "Sounds good" that dissolved in polite postponements.
One day, a grad I had several times exchanged nods with stopped me in the hall and began, "Mr. Powers, could I get you to sign this paperback?" At last it struck me. I'd betrayed my old mates. I'd done the unforgivable. Let myself get old.
After that, I read increasingly to Helen from my English office.
Books were about a place we could not get back to. Something in my voice when there might give her that little interpretive leg up.
The building's vague ache of background radiation emanated from one room, up on the third floor. I managed never to walk past it, but it swelled in my avoidance. I hadn't stepped into that room since I turned adult. I sat two flights below, in my office with its Magritte fireplace, forgetting. As if forgetting were something that could be actively engineered.
I gave Helen Blake's "Poison Tree." Way premature. I wondered what I could have been thinking. I was thinking, not of the lines, but of the day I got them:
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
"What does that mean, Helen?" I never let up on her, with this whole meaning thing.
She struggled to form the generalization. She made things up now, when she didn't know. I took that as a great step forward.
"It means, things that you say…" I prompted her. She could usually complete a sentence form with some paraphrase of the words just fed her.
"Things that you say disappear."
"And things you don't say…?"
"Things you don't say get bigger."
Forget wealth versus poverty, belief versus doubt, power versus helplessness, public versus private. Never mind man versus woman, center versus margins, beautiful versus horrifying, master contra slave, even good against evil. Saying or not saying: that was where experience played out. Going away versus getting worse. What things came down to.
I needed at least to see if the room still existed. Enough time had passed. Standing in the doorway and looking would not kill me.
I climbed the patched stairs, light-headed and short of breath. I did the two floors in a deliberate, directed haze. Automatic. On muscle memory alone. I pushed my body forward, the way a sixteen-year-old dials the phone to ask for his first-ever date. The way a doctor sentences an 11:15 clinic appointment to fatal path reports.
I mounted without thinking. Thought would have inhibited action. I'd reach that room only if I got to it before I knew where I was going. I pulled up in the middle of an ordinary classroom, deserted, on the small side. A blackboard bore the message "Thurs. 3:30-5:00," ringed by a smeared white corral of eons-old microorganism skeletons. The linoleum floors had darkened into a color somewhere between the Forest of Arden and the wine-dark sea. A circle of warped wooden chair-desks had been hastily abandoned. Waneth the watch, I would someday try to tell Helen. But the world holdeth.
Nothing had happened here in this room's hundred years. Nothing that bore remembering. I started to shake. Each breath set off a body-length shudder. I could not imagine how things had gotten so cold. The two dormer windows we always had to open, even in winter, because the radiator could not be shut off, demurred above me, closed.
I don't know what I wanted. Some spectral second glance at the teacher in action. The chance to ask why the world refused to answer to the poems he'd made us memorize. I needed to revise the place— first love, discovery, vocation, eighteen. To do take two. The update. Correct the shape, improve the story I'd made of where I'd been.
I should have tried something out loud. Something from one of those beaten-up anthologies, the crumbling bastions of the spent, pre-posthumanist tradition. Taylor could recite all the way back to the foundations. We would not be civilized until we could remember. He died knowing stuff he had committed to permanence at an age when the rest of us were learning Engine, engine, Number 9. Whole cantos, half-chapters from books even the titles of which I had forgotten.
A bell rang, one of those forlorn indicators of ten to the hour and class change. I left on command. The scrimshawed wood corridor complained at my weight, for some reason still insistent after all these dry-aired winters.
I hit the head of the stairwell, Middlemarch under my breath. I rounded the landing, unlocking. Maybe I never looked. Maybe I always navigated by toe-tap and hope. Halfway into the second flight, I heard a creak that wasn't me. I sighted down, along my path. It was A., the page-boy mirage I'd seen late at night, while proofing copy.
This time I knew her name. I'd tracked her down to an official departmental photograph, which led in turn to her CV. I'd learned that she was a second-year master's candidate. She had graduated from college the year my third book came out. The fact appalled me.
Seeing her again, I realized how often I had seen her since, from the end of endless halls. Only now A. was real, bounding upstairs, a meter in front of my descent. She exuded blue, robin's egg, adventure, the cerulean tidal pool. She breathed like a sleeping child, like the held breath of friends gathered in a too-small house on the eve of holidays.
I snagged on her face as she glanced up, scanning mine. Instant, reflex presumption; it made me ill. Yet I knew her.
I had to keep from greeting her. My pulse doubled, cutting my intelligence in half. My skin went conductive. In the time it took me to drop another step, a bouillabaisse of chemical semaphores seeped up through my pores and spilled out to wet the air.
She must have known. She looked away, giving no indication. Her face stayed in absolute neutral, a gear beyond adopting. Two quick strides and she skipped past a near brush with literature.
I bottomed out at the base of the stairwell. I stood, winded, like a hawk-reprieved mouse. Like an agoraphobe giving a plenary speech. I would have laughed at myself, had I been able to catch my breath.
Not only could I no longer write fiction. I could no longer live fact. I'd lost fundamental real-word skills while away. The same skills I was trying to instill in Helen.
I had learned too much cognitive neuroscience. The more I read about how the mind worked, the flakier mine became. The symptoms had been coming on for a few weeks. Faces touched off self-fulfilling panic: how will you remember this person's name? Some days before, I'd crossed a street to get to the five side when looking for an address ending in zero. Monitoring my own processes, I felt myself pitching into the ditch alongside the famous test-case centipede after the reductionists asked him how he kept track of which leg moved next.
For months, my bedtime stories had spun a decameron of long-term potentiation, recategorizing, neuronal group selection, transmitter and junctional molecules. Now, for some reason, my low-level structures, blinded by the harsh light that life's interrogation used to extract its confessions, decided to pull an Aschenbach. A Humbert Humbert. One of those old fools in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Restoration comedy, nineteenth-century epistolary vicarage farces. I meant to make an idiot of myself.
By the time I got back to the office, my replay of the woman ascending a staircase had become one of those late-show reruns you wish they'd get a new print of. A.: the face, the name, the stranger I'd been writing to, all my writing life. All those friends whom I, confused, thought dead. The grave where buried love lived.