COLLEGE BOY - DRAFT 2 (first draft: 3/19/01)
CHAPTER 1 (2.23.05)
For some reason he could not fathom, the phrase beaten to within an inch of his life ran repeatedly through his mind, like a fragment of a newspaper headline pasted on a schizophrenic's wall, as he sat staring out the vast picture window. The wind cycled through layers of intensity, giving a contradictory impression of violent motion combined with utter stillness on the other side the half-centimeter-thick double-paned pressurized glass window. It was like watching a feeding frenzy in an aquarium full of invisible sharks. Even if a car bomb were to explode outside, he imagined, it would not have likely made a dent on the miles-deep silence that weighed on him. He wondered if deep sea explorers felt the same psychic pressure when looking through their portholes at the bottom of the ocean - though their artificial environment protected them from it, the fact of the nearness of the crushing weight, bitter cold, and limitless darkness must oppress them almost as much as if they were naked in it. Similarly, though the inside of his house provided the highest level of modern comfort, simply looking out into the silent turbulence filled him with a sensation of suffocation, of drowning.
Watching the wind bending the trees and rippling the ivy beneath the window, dispersing a dust of crumbled leaves, topsoil and auto exhaust like a Saharan storm, he thought for a moment that he hated the wind, hated it with a luminous, scalding fury. No, it wasn't the wind he hated, it was this damned miserable old house, once so palatial but in the course of decades more and more like some abandoned hospital. Finally he settled upon a sour realization that what he in fact hated was none other than himself.
This self-hatred went beyond mere deprecation, beyond more melancholy, beyond the self-absorbed impulse to suicide; it went beyond any self-pitying victimhood; beyond the pale or scope of any recognizable human emotion. This hatred he felt for himself was like the molten rock boiling out of a crack in the Earth's crust; the fiery magma that, once vomited from the planetary core upon the shores of the vapid sea, congealed into black and bitter rock that cut the feet like knives. He felt as if he looked at himself through a microscope and therein found some particulate substance that was solely detestable. He felt an abhorrence toward himself as nature is said to have for vacuums.
As he watched the leaves, the flyblown raddled leaves his discursive mind told him, borne on the back of the wind like flotsam, he attempted to fathom exactly when this inclination toward self-hatred had begun. He found no particular memory or image from his past with which to mark it; maybe it was rooted in some childhood privation, some schoolyard injustice he failed to remember. In its peculiar tenor he appreciated the hatred he felt towards himself as a force of nature that had to have existed since the beginning of time. He felt somehow bound to the natural order by this miasma of self-loathing, as if some spiritus mundi looked out at him from every wingéd eye with the very same relentless, remorseless criticism. The hell he occupied was beyond judgment - like all true hells, a hell of one.
The phone rang with a humorless electric bleating, like a robot child being tortured. He lifted the receiver without looking away from the window.
"What." He listened for a while to the tinny voice rattling in his ear like a bean in a gourd.
"You don't have the report because I haven't written it." He let the voice rattle on without listening. "And you will continue to wait." He hung up on the caller in mid-rattle.
Rising out of his comfortless straight-backed wooden chair, he crossed over to a glass paned cabinet in the anteroom, from which he brought a crystal decanter full of amber liquid. He poured two fingers neat into a highball glass, tasted it - yes, it was the good Scotch he remembered decanting some time ago - and after a slight pause, poured two more.
He drank the Scotch quickly, pinching the bridge of his nose in the manner of one suffering a great tiredness. He looked through the great window at the sweeping view of the bluff that backed the house, overhanging a distant curve of road. Green and white variegated ivy, broken randomly by stunted cypress, juniper and dogwood, shivered in the wind as if stirred by hordes of rats. He remembered running down the bluff as a child with a reckless lack of concern for his own body; now the very thought filled him with nausea. He patted his pockets in search of cigarettes, pulling a crushed, empty packet from the pocket of his shirt, the cellophane crackling forlornly.
The prospect of heading into the disconcertingly unstable air outside made him nervous; he chewed a fingernail as he searched the kitchen for his car keys. He found them next to the sink; as he scooped them up he caught his reflection in the window, superimposed on the tumult outside. His face looked drained of all color and light.
He descended the ill-lit back stairs to the garage, pressed the switch that opened the door, and climbed into his black Peugeot sedan, which he had inherited along with the house. The engine sputtered and then turned over reluctantly. Pulling backwards out of the garage, he spun the wheel hard about, shifted forward, and started off down the sloping asphalt strip that eventually joined the arterial which ran around the base of the hill he owned.
there seemed to be almost no one else on the road; turning off the winding tree-lined arterial onto the nearest boulevard, he noticed a policeman sitting parked near the intersection drinking coffee and reading from a clipboard; an elderly woman in a tan overcoat and plastic rain bonnet sitting on a bus bench; and hundreds of ash-colored doves weighing down the telephone wires into slack parabolas. The dashboard clock said 2:00 PM; the grey cast of the sky seemed to rob it of any sense of depth, while the incessant wind prevented any sense of nearness.
He drove half a dozen blocks to the Mac's and parked in front of the entrance. The clerk behind the counter, a man in his 50's with a Royal Marines tattoo on his forearm, was leafing through a pornographic magazine ["HOT BROADS - NO HOLES BARRED", he thought it said] which lay open on the counter before him. The magazine seemed to exasperate rather than arouse the clerk, but perhaps that was the only expression the clerk was capable of.
He cleared his throat and the clerk looked up, blinking and squinting as if the light were too bright, unlikely as that seemed.
"Two packs of Players please...and a lighter." He remembered the Zippo he once owned, which had been stolen by his ex-wife, like so many other things. The clerk bagged his items, took his $20 note, and gave him the change, all without looking up, saying "Thank you." What he could have been thankful for was a mystery. He made a noncommittal noise in reply, took his items and left.
The drive back up to the house seemed as unfortunately brief as the trip away had been. The wind had let up somewhat, but left a muddled, edgeless chill in the air, as if a fog were about to set in. Walking up his front steps, he spotted the slight figure perched on his porch rail. He sighed deeply, glad that his cigarettes remained inside his coat.
"I'm a little bit busy to talk right now," he called ahead, as a buffer to hold her at a distance. She seemed shrunken into herself even more than usual; as was her habit, she was poorly dressed for the weather, but wrapped her arms around herself with loose apathy as if uncaring. The thought crossed his mind that the years had not treated her well.
He stood in front of her, slightly out of breath. She attempted to smile as if to ingratiate him, but it came off more like a grimace. "I got kicked out of the program," she said in a flat voice. "If I could just sleep on your couch a day or two, I'd -- "
"You have your nerve," he said in a voice he intended to be hard, yet instead which came out in a hectoring whine. "I'd be mad to trust you in my house again after last time. In any case, all accounts between us were settled long ago. Surely you remember." He absent-mindedly rubbed the ring finger of his left hand.
"I promise I'm clean, I haven't used in over a month, and I've given up nicking things. Honestly." She sounded as if she already knew he would say no, when they both knew it would have been redundant for him to even say yes, as that was the foregone conclusion. He turned away without another word, not bothering to invite her in.
He felt nothing as he stood in the doorway of the bathroom, watching her shower her pale body. He noted the bruised trackholes inside her elbows and knees, on the backs of her hands, between her breasts. Vicious scars dotted with suture marks ran up the insides of her wrists. None of it moved him. He continued to feel nothing as she later crawled into his bed; when she reached out to touch him, he pushed her hand away, with neither violence nor gentleness.
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