Ivan had drunk some apple wine with Imre, so he could talk about me. If you wanted to talk to Imre about anything, without it turning into a competition, you had to give him wine first. But so much wine was not enough. They found another bottle, but no corkscrew. Ivan knew a trick from his father: you wrapped the bottle in a towel and banged it against a wall. Instead of a towel, they used Imre’s sweater. Instead of a wall, they used a modernistic fountain. The bottle smashed into pieces.
Ivan and Imre walked three kilometers to buy more wine, drank it, and went back to the department to do email. In the computer room, Imre dropped the bottle and the rest of the wine spilled everywhere, seeping out into the hallway. The men’s room was out of paper towels. While they were mopping the hall with paper towels from the women’s room, a German number theorist turned up and started talking to them about his work. Now Imre was waiting at the fountain. Ivan had promised to go with him to Universal Studios—he had figured out a way to get in without paying the thirty-five-dollar entrance fee. He wanted to write to me more in-depth, but he couldn’t until he heard my voice.
? ? ?
I turned off the computer and went to Copley Plaza with Ralph, to help him buy suspenders. I had trouble with the revolving doors. I kept thinking about how, if someone said to pay thirty-five dollars, or to use a corkscrew, I didn’t try to outsmart them. How would I get anywhere in life? How could anyone ever be interested in me?
Passing the women’s perfume, cosmetics, handbags, and sunglasses, we took an escalator down to the men’s department. The men’s department made no sense, the way nothing seemed designed to surprise or delight you, and everything looked the same. How could anyone choose between so many gray jackets? But I kept touching the broad solid shoulders and, even though there was something ridiculous about their sobriety and self-importance, I felt a wave of longing.
The suspenders had to go with khaki pants, a navy jacket, and a burgundy tie. It was hard to hold the three colors in mind at the same time. We both liked red suspenders, but not with a burgundy tie. Like a fool, I asked Ralph the color of his shoes.
“Black,” he said.
“Black shoes, navy jacket,” I mused. We looked at each other with identical stricken expressions: “Brown shoes.” We went to the shoe department. That was the beginning of the end, not just because shoe shopping was always sad—what was “Cinderella,” if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?—but because the shoes were past the pajamas and underwear. The pajamas were where we really lost everything—our sense of purpose and of who we were. The shoes had at least been related to the suspenders. Here, colors were irrelevant—or not irrelevant, but bearing different meanings. There were boxers printed in red, NO NO NO, with green glow-in-the-dark letters that spelled YES YES YES.
? ? ?
Another day passed. Ivan’s computer log-ons migrated from Caltech to UCSD, then UCLA. Time and again I tried to write to him, but was paralyzed by the thought that anything now depended on what move I made. Wasn’t that what he himself had said: that there was something he wanted to tell me, but only if I said the right thing first?
I couldn’t work or sleep. I didn’t understand what the point of anything was, or what was supposed to happen. I was writing all the time, either in the spiral notebook or on the laptop, as close as I could to nonstop, often noting down what time it was, because I wanted to feel that I had all the time accounted for. Of course, it wasn’t possible to account for all the time. By the time you had written down what time it was, it was already later than it had been.
I wanted to tell someone what was happening, but I didn’t know how or who. I couldn’t tell Svetlana; she would talk about Satan, or say I should forget about Ivan because he had a girlfriend. But what if there was some other connection to be made there—what if that wasn’t the only thing in the world? I told an abridged version to my mother. I could hear that it didn’t make sense. As a story, it didn’t make sense. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t read.
? ? ?
I made an appointment with a counselor at the undergraduate health clinic. In the waiting room I picked up a pamphlet titled Facts and Myths About Acid Indigestion because I usually enjoyed myths, but these were lousy. “Peppermints are good for acid indigestion.” A nurse said something that was almost definitely supposed to be my name. I followed her to a door with a brass plate that read CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY. Inside, a white-haired man with a pink face sat behind a desk surrounded by wooden blocks and plastic pigs. There were no other animals—just pigs. Ivan had mentioned pigs in his emails, several times. Was there something about pigs that I didn’t know?
“Please, have a seat,” said the child and adolescent psychologist, gesturing toward a range of chairs, some child-sized, others, I supposed, adolescent-sized. I sat in one of the larger chairs and told him everything. I told him about the sleeping and the talking and the reading, about the exchange of emails, about my confession and Ivan’s reply. It took a long time.
“How did you respond when he told you about his girlfriend?” the psychologist asked.
“I didn’t write back,” I said.
He nodded vigorously. “Then what did this fellow do?”
“He wrote to me again. He said that he had more things to say to me, but he had to hear my voice first.”
“Meaning that he wanted to speak to you on the telephone?”
“Excuse me?”
“He had to hear your voice, meaning that he was going to call you?”
“Oh—I think he was just asking me to write back. I think when he said ‘voice’ it was, um, metaphoric.”
“I see. Your writing voice.”
I was embarrassed almost beyond speech by the phrase “writing voice.” “Yeh,” I managed.
“Have you spoken on the phone with him since he left?”
“I’ve never spoken to him on the phone at all.”
“What? Not even once?”
“No.”
“How about that! So you’ve never heard his voice, either. Except, of course, his writing voice.”
“Well, we’ve spoken together in class, and sometimes a little bit afterward.”
“That’s right, you had that class together. In Russian. But other than that?”
I shook my head. “Just the, um, writing voice.”
“How about that,” he said again. “What will you do now? He wrote you a second email. Are you going to reply?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I want to, but I don’t know how. I don’t know what’s a good thing to say and what’s a bad thing.”
The psychologist leaned back in his chair. There was a long silence. “You know, Selin,” he said. “I don’t like the sound of this at all.”
I was surprised—I hadn’t known he was supposed to like or not like the sound of things. “No?” I said.
“No,” he said. “This whole thing reminds me of the Unabomber.”
“The Unabomber?”
“The Unabomber.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just keep thinking about the Unabomber.”
“Because he was a math major?”
“Oh, that’s interesting. I wasn’t thinking about that.” He jotted something on a notepad. “I was thinking about computers, that this is all about power and computers. That’s where the power is, in the computers.”