When he said that, I felt ashamed. “That’s not true,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”
We spent the next two hours doing the kinds of pointless things we always did. We walked back to the river, and when it did finally start raining, we ran into the lobby of the DoubleTree hotel and sat on the floor in the glass elevator and watched the rain. Sometimes someone called the elevator and it went up or down. Nobody seemed to mind us, or told us to leave. When the rain stopped, we went to Chili’s and ordered an Awesome Blossom: a gigantic battered deep-fried onion cut into petals. We ate about a third of it. Then it became impossible to eat any more.
One of the most remarkable things about the giant sculpted deep-fried onion was its powerful resemblance to an artichoke. Ralph told me about the onion and artichoke theories of humanity, which he had learned in sociology class. According to the artichoke theory, man had some inner essence, or “heart”; according to the onion theory, once you had unwrapped all the layers of society off of man, there was nothing there. Seen from this perspective, the idea of an onion masquerading as an artichoke seemed sinister, even sociopathic. In later years, the Awesome Blossom became known to contain almost three thousand calories and was named the Worst Appetizer in America by Men’s Health, at which point Chili’s took it off the menu.
? ? ?
By the time I called Ivan, it was one in the morning.
“How sleepy are you?” he asked.
“Not very. How sleepy are you?”
“Not very.” Ivan wanted to come back to my dorm—to see how I lived. I didn’t want him to see how I lived, but there didn’t seem to be any way to avoid it, and anyway what good would it do to hide?
I hung up the phone and looked in the mirror. Nothing I had done in the past two hours had had any kind of positive effect on my hair.
Ivan knocked on the door. His eyes wandered around the room, lingering on Albert Einstein. It seemed to me that he had some negative thoughts about Albert Einstein, but if so he kept them to himself.
Hannah came out of our bedroom yawning. Her hair looked flawless, as usual. “What’s going on?” she said. She said she couldn’t sleep. I knew it was a fake yawn, and it wasn’t true she had been trying to sleep—she could always sleep. She introduced herself and started asking Ivan a billion questions. When she ran out of questions she started just listing the names of different math TAs and asking if he knew them.
“Was she the hypochondriac?” Ivan asked afterward. “I wanted to try to make her worry about the dampness, but I was afraid she might have been the wrong roommate.”
“No, she’s the hypochondriac. Our other roommate wouldn’t have talked to you.”
“She wouldn’t have talked to me?”
“I mean, she’s shy—she wouldn’t have asked you questions.”
“Oh, I see. I like being asked questions.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “Why is that?”
After a moment Ivan burst out laughing, and I felt proud.
We walked to the river and sat on a bench. “It wasn’t a good arrangement for you to call me,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t able to work. I didn’t get anything done.”
I tried not to show how happy I felt when he said that.
“All the lights are pointing toward you,” Ivan said, looking at the streetlights on the opposite bank, reflected in the river.
“Those ones over there are pointing toward you.”
“Really?” he said. “Not to you, also?”
“No, to you.”
“Well, you’re right, I feel that they’re pointing to me also.”
I felt a wave of physical attraction toward him. He was sitting in an uncomfortable-looking position, leaning forward, with his legs pressed together and his arms crossed in his lap.
We sat there for a long time, wondering if it would rain again.
“How long do you think we’ve been sitting here?” Ivan said.
“A long time,” I said. Near the riverbank, something stirred in the reeds. “What animal could that even be?”
“A fish,” Ivan suggested.
“We could have been sitting here long enough for the fish to evolve.”
“It’s possible. By that point we would probably evolve, too. What would we evolve into?”
I felt my body tense up. “I don’t know,” I said.
It was three now, and too cold to stay on the bench. At the same time, it was also too cold to move. It felt almost as if, if we sat there longer, it might get warmer again—it might actually become earlier rather than later, and things might still turn out differently than they had.
? ? ?
We went to Ivan’s room and listened to records, one after another. Each record was so particular and specific—almost arbitrary. What if a few notes were different? Would that make it better or worse?
Ivan slid toward the floor, hands clasped around his knees, and leaned his head back against the sofa. He watched the ceiling. The room grew lighter. I knew I shouldn’t be staring at him like that, and turned to look out the window. That’s what windows were for. The sky was mauve, and so were the concrete buildings. The brick buildings were a soft, glowy orange. The river was like an endless silver scroll.
I looked back at Ivan, to see if he was asleep. He was still looking at the ceiling, in a half-vigilant posture that seemed to say: Don’t worry about the ceiling—I’ve got it covered.
I tried to analyze the feeling of fatigue. There was heaviness in the legs, a faint ache behind the forehead and in the eyes, and something in the shoulders. Everything sounded both loud and distant. I stood up. It felt like getting out of a car after a long drive. I placed my palm on the cold glass. In the empty intersection below, the red light turned green. The time on the clock radio was 6:26.
I had left a handprint on the glass. It overlapped with a clock tower. I wiped it with my sleeve and sat on the floor next to Ivan. I, too, leaned my head back and looked at the ceiling, at the corner where it met the two walls—a delta like the place where a woman’s legs meet. I sat up. Ivan sat up. He stretched out his legs, took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Are you tired?” I asked.
“Nah, not really.” He put his glasses back on. “I think my body has accepted the fact that the night is over and it didn’t get to sleep. How about you?”
“My body accepts it, too.”
“I’m starting to understand you better,” he said. “You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, and you don’t drink. Are you always like that, or just around me?”
I thought it over. “I eat and sleep more when you’re not around.”
“But no drinking.”
“Actually when you’re not around I get hammered every night. With my real friends.”
“Really?”
“No.”
He sighed. “I’m not saying we have to get hammered, just one or two drinks. I honestly think we could bypass a lot. I see you don’t mind staying up all night—but alcohol is exactly the same. You just bypass the suffering. Otherwise it’s really similar. You suddenly see connections that you missed before. Something breaks down. I don’t know what to call it—those blocks, that obstruct a connection in your mind.”