Maybe then, I thought to myself, primly, I could finish.
I did the crossword for a while, made a tiny bit of progress by asserting that Plato was Greek, and then wandered out onto campus. I didn’t feel like seeing the new movie or going to the new specialty-beer bar that had just opened up across the street.
Instead, I found myself pulled to the main quad of campus, an area of green that, with spring, was only just starting to lighten and brighten from beneath the layers of cold, dark wetness. Some kind of vigil was going on. Rows and rows of students were sitting with candles, wearing gloves and hats. It was colder than I’d expected. I was shivering in my coat and scarf, and Julian, the documentary maker, was tucked warm in a dark room with technology, and Arlene and Fred were going to “dinner,” which often meant they were just waiting for me to leave so they could return to the apartment and have loud sex. Twice I’d come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one’s roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound, realizing that maybe through the fog of her pleasure she’d heard the front door open and close.
So there I was, at this vigil. I knelt down. A man on a podium was talking.
“What’s it for?” I whispered to two women wrapped up together in a bright-blue sleeping bag.
“The war,” they said.
“Which one?”
“All of them,” they said.
“How many are there?” I said.
One shrugged. “At least three.”
I tried to count the wars in my head. I could count two.
“What’s the third?” I hissed.
“Sssh!” said the sleeping-bag pair, in unison.
“So,” said the man at the podium, a man with a beard and a knit cap, “as murderers, we too should be punished. Look around! Look harder! Look at what you’re not seeing!”
“Why are we murderers?” I whispered to the two.
“Duh,” said one.
“It’s a wake-up call,” said the other. “Most of us forget we’re even at war at all.”
I nodded. In fact, I could hardly hold the thought about forgetting in my head. It seemed destined to be forgotten.
“Brring!” said the man at the podium. “I am your inner alarm clock. Brrring!”
The group rose to its feet and began marching, with candles, down the main walkway of campus. The duo, bundled in their sleeping bag, moved in a lump ahead of me. I began walking too. I knew no one in the war/wars and hardly thought about them, and when I did, I wore the guilt and outrage like an accessory I could remove the same way as a nice pair of earrings. I would let the outrage adorn and better me and then slide the wires from my earlobes and tuck them away in my jewelry box. I felt ashamed of this even as I did it over and over, and one could reasonably argue that the fact that I felt ashamed about it and still did it made it worse. At least the Litman kid had beliefs.
We walked in clumps, heads leaning forward. Was there a group plan? Should I call my one journalism friend? But more than anything, I was pulled by the movement of something happening, something where I could join a flow and participate in some way without notice.
We walked for fifteen minutes, and at times the man from the podium, now with a megaphone, would call out “Murderers!” and the crowd would respond “Yes!” and then the feet would pick up. I hid my face in my scarf.
On campus a few weeks earlier, there had been a real protest, a sincere protest, one I had attended with Arlene, who did seem able to remember that we were at war and had adopted a soldier online to whom she sent electrolyte-enhanced water and peanut butter cups and moisturizer for the desert. She wrote him long letters in response to his letters and once even spoke to his wife on the phone to make it clear she was not flirting. “I have a great boyfriend,” I heard her say, as I was walking into the room to retrieve my latest attempt at the crossword. “Fred.” She was tugging at a curl, and her brow was furrowed with concentration and concern. “I truly mean no disrespect,” she said. At that sincere protest, with Arlene shouting next to me, our shouts visible in puffs of cold, I’d felt a momentary crush of panic, like for one second I got it, grasped the stakes, understood that people my age were living a completely different and precarious life on my watch, but then it was over and the crowd dispersed and we went to have potato skins at the food co-op. “But what’s a person to do?” I’d asked Arlene, scooping up fake bacon bits with a bit of crisped peel. “Give up everything?”
She dabbed her mouth with a napkin. It was just the two of us. Fred was away at a track meet in Akron.
“No-o,” she said, slowly. “Give up something?”
At this second rally, I continued to follow the sleeping-bag twins as they rustled along the sidewalk. This protest had a completely different feel than the last one, more like we were sleepwalking into a dream where death was only a Jungian symbol made into a colorful illustration on a tarot card. It was, by now, probably ten-thirty, and the regents were asleep in their white houses. We walked off campus, down a residential street to an empty dirt lot buttressed by two tract homes. Soon the lot would grow a house that exactly matched the ones on either side.
“Go!” said the man with the megaphone.
It was like watching a dance in slow motion. As if they’d all planned it in advance, which clearly most of them had, the marchers began shedding their clothes. The night was thirty or forty degrees, probably less, but off came the sleeping bags, the sweatshirts, the hats, the scarves, the shoes. I wasn’t sure what any of it had to do with dead soldiers, but it certainly was interesting. “Off!” yelled the man, and soon there were over a hundred naked coeds, their clothes in heaps. “Show your true selves!” he yelled, and they put their bodies on the lot, which I now realized was probably the largest plot of dirt around, since the campus was covered in concrete, brick, and grass, and all the students rolled in the dirt—“This is what we need!” he said—and they were rolling, and kissing, and kicking aside clothes, and warming up skin on skin, and shivering, trying to reclaim a decade long past. I was now standing in the veranda of the next-door neighbor’s house, which, as far as I could tell, had a still-up neighbor in it, due to the flickering light of the flat-screen TV I could see through sheer white curtains. Did the neighbor know that one hundred nubile twenty-year-olds were rolling in the dirt next door? I thought not. It seemed he was watching Law & Order.