It was day again, but it had really all been one long mutant day, and we had shattered the peace. We'd been sucking energy out of the morning, out of the rising sun and the evaporating frost, hanging onto the previous night's binge. We'd been trespassing. We weren't supposed to be still be up, up so early, up so late.
On Tuesday I slept through all my classes, waking in the late afternoon, hacking from a slight cold, maybe allergies. Could be all the smoking. I was stiff but the shower doesn't help much. I stood with my mouth open under the spray, trying to wash out the truck mouth taste. It was already getting dark when I scurried over to my eating club to catch the end of dinner. Out back, over a cigarette, someone asks me how my thesis is going. "Mind body problem, right?" "No," I say. "It's Hume and induction now." A couple of cigarettes later I say a few goodbyes and head over to Julian's room to see who's around. Julian and all those guys were a year ahead of me, most of them philosophy majors, all of them major stoners, people who could talk about visualizing four-dimensional time-space manifolds while high on acid. These guys are doing blow now too.
I came in on Julian and Ivan playing poker on the rug. Julian's room is too small for a card table. They've got a mirror on the floor with them and a cut up little pile of blow on it. Ivan won the hand and crowed, rudely lording it over Julian, and then scratched out a few lines, snorting one in each nostril with a rolled up twenty dollar bill.
"Want in?" said Julian.
"Do I need to buy a share?"
"Nah," said Ivan. "You can just get the next eight-ball."
In the end were up all night playing poker for lines. The game is a sham but it gives us something to focus on. Ivan keeps complaining about a burning drip from his sinuses, irrigating his nostrils with some saline contraption. "You're neurotic," I say. "Always with the paraphernalia."
Julian got if possible more jovial, more jovian. He seemed to fill up the room. We had this running joke about Julian. My roommate Ralphy says Julian is the devil, the way he calls our room at all hours and tempts me into skipping out on my homework and instead playing foosball or Robotron with him and these other guys at all hours.
He swiped a bunch of quarters meant for children with muscular dystrophy from the counter at the Wa Wa market, just to play vids with. Another time he borrowed and lost a priest's robes. The list goes on and on.
All during the poker game he's got the two of us in stitches telling stories and keeping up his running gags - lots of innuendo about buggery and castration - but it's mostly all in tone of voice, turning our own words back onto us, and a form of unrelenting dullness he calls "boring humor" that consists mostly of baseless assertions and mindless repetition. If someone mentioned truckdriving he'd say "I used to be a truckdriver." If you complimented the sunset, he'd day, "Thank you. I made it." It was too stupid to get mad at and, trust me, eventually it seemed funny to us.
We're all sitting there staring out, watching the part of sky we can see out the dormer window turning a noticeably lighter gray, when Julian says, "Anyone up for a walk?" "Sure me," I say, "I'm antsy." "No thanks," says Ivan. As Julian and I stand up I notice how stiff my legs are from sitting in the same position all night.
Julian puts the mirror on his desk and turns to me: "A line for the road?" "Twist my arm," I say. He cuts out two short chunky lines from the pile, mostly gone now, and I do both of them in my right nostril because the other one is glued shut at the moment. They've been switching off for the last hour at least.
On the first snort, I feel a metallic tang in my sinus and after the second a medicinal drip hits the spot in the back of my throat where coughs start. When Julian folds his bulk over the desk and chops out two more little rails for himself, I say "Think it's still cold out?" "Let's check," he says and we crawl out the window onto the roof.
The chief attraction of his room is this roof-porch, with its gentle slope perfect for reclining out of sight from the proctors and randoms passing by. We even sat out there in the winter, nearly everyone bundled up and shivering, me wearing just a sweater and keeping cool by embracing the cold and preaching to the others not to remain so tense and hunched against it. It's too stressful. Look at me, I'd say. I'm not shivering. You get used to it. They never believed me, but whatever.
"Wait a sec," says Julian and he ducks back into the room through the window, his legs slipping on the shingles briefly. He comes out again in a minute with his ceramic bong, a cartoon skill. The other night we'd watched a candlelight vigil for open stacks stream past below the overhang, and we dedicated our bonghits to the overthrow of apartheid. "Bonghit for Divestiture?" Julian asks me as he passed the waterpipe, his face pursed and impish, like a kid kicking a pile of leaves. "Sure," I say as I reach out to take the skull. "Fight the power."
So we're sitting out there watching gray things turn watercolor pastels when I say, "Weren't we going to go for a walk?" "Oh, right." Julian gives me that look again and we both laugh till we scare each other with our twisted cackling. We go back into the room where Ivan was now sitting on the bed, reading Julian's "More Tales of the Leather Nun" comic and working his right knee in an incessant nervous jiggle. Julian grabs his frisbee and we go out into the hallway quietly, trying not to wake anyone.
Down two flights of stairs and outside I notice I'm actually pretty tired, but at the same time still wired, my muscles twitchy, like a hunted rodent. I call this feeling twired. "I'm twired, J.," I say, and he sounds it out while staring at me absently for a sec before he nods.
We head off across the oblivious campus, angling toward Cannon Green, and pick up our last puzzle, about whether knowledge is indeed nothing more than a justified true belief, but we wander off into quibbles about semantics and the exact meanings of the words we're using and end up lost in a thicket of the kind of skepticism that renders almost any line of inquiry useless.
We crisscross in our double drunkard's walk, east from the Green, then over and down through the arch at 1879 Hall, across Washington Ave. to the Woody Woo Fountain, and then roughly west toward where we started. I can tell Julian is wound up tight because he keeps aiming the Frisbee and flicking his wrist, making like he wants to chuck it at a tree or something. He says, "See that squirrel?"
About 50 paces away on the gravel between the two Greek temples sits one of those black squirrels you only find around here. I say "Yeah," and Julian slings the disc at the squirrel, smacking its hindquarters with a loud thwack. I'm surprised how loud it sounds in the stillness of everything else. We freeze in astonishment as the squirrel races to a tree, scampers up the trunk, and starts wailing - moaning and crying like a human child in pain. It's pitiful and Julian gives me this guilty look. It's crying these long drawn-out sobs that makes ice shoot down my spine. We both get paranoid at the same time. It's now obviously morning, earth tones and all. Joggers will be along soon. I can't get over how Julian had flung that thing like an uncoiling spring. The caveman accuracy of it frightened me. We get out of there, hurrying back to Julian's room with the wails of the injured squirrel still clearly audible.