“Inhibitions,” I said.
“Yes, exactly,” he said. I felt my face flush. “I don’t mean,” he added, “that you never talk about sex, and then you get drunk and suddenly you can talk about sex.”
“Right,” I said.
Time passed. I was thinking about how much time we had, and how little, at the same time. At some point, Ivan asked if I liked doughnuts. This question struck me as absurd. The clock in the tower struck seven, then seven-fifteen. Ivan said we might as well get breakfast. We conducted ourselves through the riot-proof hallway to the elevator.
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The pale morning air was incredibly fresh and eager to penetrate the lungs. We crossed the street to the cafeteria, which was empty except for one table where six guys in sports jerseys were sitting. You could see that they were talking loudly, yet the overall quiet was undisturbed, as if their conversation hovered just over their table, like in a comic strip.
Ivan took some of everything: scrambled eggs, a pancake, ham, fried potatoes. He filled two glasses with orange juice from the machine. I put Cheerios in a bowl, took a banana, and poured a cup of coffee. We sat down. I sliced the banana on a plate, then transferred the slices into the Cheerios.
“We have nothing to say,” Ivan observed.
I nodded.
“We’ve exhausted each other. We’ve proved that we’re both finite personalities.” He sounded annoyed. “How long can we continue this? We make up something for each word, like a dictionary, then we repeat the words. But when the words are used up . . .”
I had no idea what he was trying to say. “Language is infinite,” I ventured.
“There’s a finite number of words,” he said. “Just infinitely many combinations.”
I told him that Chomsky said the number of words was also infinite. “Because you could have an antiaircraft missile, and then to fight it an anti–antiaircraft missile missile, and then an anti–anti–antiaircraft missile missile. Missile.”
“Yes, okay. Maybe we can talk like that from now on.”
“From ‘from now on’ on.”
He didn’t laugh.
I pushed the Cheerios around with my spoon. There was only one letter—o—but infinitely many combinations. Ivan moodily ate his eggs, pancake, ham, and potatoes, and drank the orange juice.
“Okay,” he said, pushing back his chair. “I guess now you can go home and sleep or whatever. Whatever secret things you do when I’m not around.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. You can go do your secret things, too.”
“Yeah, I have lots of secret things to do.”
We threw out our trash, put the trays and plates on the conveyor belt, and went outside.
“See you later,” I said.
“Yeah, eventually,” he said. “You notice we’re not very good at getting in touch.”
“We’ll get better,” I said.
He frowned. “You can call me, too, you know. You don’t have to wait for me to call.”
“Okay,” I said sadly: so, he wasn’t going to call me. “I’ll call you, next time.”
“Good,” he said, and turned back toward his building.
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I tiptoed into the bedroom, hoping that Hannah wouldn’t wake up. There was a rustling sound. I froze. Hannah sat up, yawned, and stretched elaborately. “Whoa—did you just come home?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you sleep?”
“I didn’t sleep. I just sat in a room all night. So I’m kind of tired.”
“Sounds like you need to get some rest,” she said, jumping out of bed.
“That’s the plan,” I said, climbing from the top of the dresser to the upper bunk.
“Right now? You don’t even want breakfast?”
“I already ate.” I pulled the covers over my head. Hannah clopped around for a while, talking about her keys. Finally, she left. I lowered the bedcovers, took out my copy of Little Dorrit, and stared at the first page until I fell asleep.
I woke up at three. The cafeteria wouldn’t open for another two hours. I went to the student center, where I bought a tuna sandwich on a baguette and gnawed on it for a while. The consumption of that baguette seemed to require some kind of ear muscles that I had lost during the two-million-year course of human evolution.
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I found a book of fables and read two fables about harts. They both ended badly. In “The Hart in the Ox-Stall,” the hart hid from the hunter in an ox-stall. The hunter noticed its antlers sticking out of the straw and killed it, proving that “nothing escapes the master’s eye.” In “The Hart and the Hunter,” the hart deplored its legs for being less handsome than its antlers. Later, when it was running from a hunter on its legs, its antlers got tangled in a tree and it got killed. The moral was: “We often despise that which is most useful to us.” In general, the hart’s biggest problem was antlers. Or no, it wasn’t antlers at all, it was hunters.
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Svetlana turned twenty and had a party. I debated for a long time what to get her, settling in the end on a big bunch of sunflowers. Their bigness didn’t register with me at the florist’s. The flowers actually seemed to grow as I walked back through the square until, by the time I got to her party, their bright yellow faces were almost the size of human faces. The idea of putting them in a vase was insane, like stuffing nine people into a vase. We ended up using someone’s decorative plastic wastebasket. Fern filled it with water from the shower down the hall.
Most of the Serbo-Croatian Club was there—they had brought slivovitz. There was a lemon cake. All I could think about was that, the last time I had talked to Ivan, he had said he would try to call that night. The cake was better than it looked. I talked to six Orthodox Jewish guys who were going to be in Svetlana’s rooming block next year. All were suffering from food poisoning. Because of a holiday, they had had to eat chicken soup that had been kept on a warm stove all night, just below boiling temperature. “It’s the perfect way to grow bacteria,” explained Jeremy, who studied microbiology. When I left, Svetlana was conversing animatedly in Serbo-Croatian with a guy wearing plastic-framed glasses. She sounded different when she spoke Serbo-Croatian, somehow lazier but at the same time more lively.
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