Hell

By Nicholas Rombes.

The campus, as they say, was falling apart under the weight of bad ideas.

It seemed as if everyone had run out of good things to think.

First came a wave of poor ideas and then: poof. Nothing.

Nothing, until . . .

. . . the phone buzzed. It was Mel again. Probably. Or Lisa. Me-lisa. I’d blocked Mel’s number so she’d taken to calling from others. Tricky. This one read Anna.

Then dead air on the phone. Mel and her hang ups. Her dead spaces.

Mel was set to defend her dissertation that winter. “Jane Austen as a Male Writer.”

She was feeling her oats. She had so many problems. I wanted so much to be one of her problems.

We’d met at the end-of-semester English Department party in the mailroom in the Burrowes Building, where all the failing departments were housed.

Late April and breeding Lilacs out of the dead land and all that.

Mel was the only one wearing a mini-skirt.

No one in grad school dressed like that.

It was a time for putting all our ideas into our research, not our clothes.

We’d let ourselves go, as they say.

But not Mel. Full makeup. A red skirt and a white sequined top. At first people thought it was some sort of feminist or post-feminist performance art, an ironic intervention, Mel as a walking embodiment of a Barbara Kruger woman.

A visit from Mel warped everything into her orbit. Mel exerted a special kind of gravity that put all your problems temporarily on hold.

When Mel was with you, there was only Mel.

I buzzed her up.

She breezed in and past me and right to the fridge. She held out a Vernors ginger ale in a can.

“You have anything stronger than this?”

For a while I thought Mel and I were in love.

The old-fashioned kind.

The kind they don’t tell you about anymore.

Mel was into aerobics and said she’d been a semi-pro kickboxer before grad school. She showed me pictures once. She had a dime-sized mole beneath her right ear that was hard not to look at at first. I pointed to the cupboard above the fridge where the vodka was and she mixed it with the Vernors.

“Gluten free. Huh,” she said, examining the label.

She knew I was stuck and trapped in a dead dissertation topic on Flannery O’Connor, trying to ferret out any remaining untapped feminist readings from her stories, just when she was going out of fashion. “The kids don’t want to read about religion. They don’t believe in Heaven and Hell anymore. The Misfit and all that. He’s too symbolic for them. Flannery’s a dead end.”

That’s what we were all doing, basically, circa 1994, struggling to align our ways of reading to the prevailing ideologies of the time. When it worked it was brilliant and beautiful. Everyone knew, for instance, that Stacey’s research on the gendered ambiguity of Medieval pageant tapestries was going to be a certified home run. But when it didn’t work—when the ideas went stale—it was dismal as it could get, like being trapped in a cage with a dying wild animal that had once been powerful except your dissertation was the animal.

Mel stood up and went over the balcony.

The cracked glass sliding door was open and a nice breeze was coming in.

“Crash here tonight?” she asked.

Mel was wearing her usual gray sweats and what we used to call a tank top, and before that a wife beater. She smelled a little bit like chlorine.

“You feeling them yet,” she asked.

“Them what?”

“The effects.”

“Of?”

“What’s coming for you! Like a storm—the calm before the storm. The effects of calmness. Of peace. Are you feeling them yet? The effects of the calm before you’re torn to shreds?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to lie and I didn’t want to tell the truth.

About the effects.

That yes, I was feeling them.

*

“What a dick,” Sarah, who had taken to wearing her grandmother’s period clothes, said. Moth-eaten calico in super-faded yellows.

The dick, our professor.

Who had just entered the seminar room.

In his usual nasty puce wool sweater.

Pocked-face from acne or alcohol or both or something else.

Maybe a childhood disease.

Or an alien rash of some kind.

He often smelled of sulfur.

How old was he, old enough to have been a child when such afflictions still scarred us?

I didn’t think he was a dick.

He was something worse than a dick.

Six of the eight of us were there, six grad students in English sitting death-row like around the glossy seminar table. Mel was there, and so was Adam. And George and Amy and Carson. And the one whose name I can’t remember.

Professor James Begnal always spent the first half-hour or so of each Wednesday afternoon seminar on V. Woolf and J. Conrad shuffling in and out of the room forgetting things and then remembering them. So, it was easy to talk without him hearing or knowing or caring. And that room, the way it changed shape, literally, right in front of us. More shape shifting than any modernist novel narrative trickery and yet no one said a thing. Begnal was a notorious Woolf hater and he was our professor right at the moment it was no longer acceptable to be a Woolf hater, especially if you were a professor of Modernist British Literature. I saw this and wondered at the fact of his hate unfolding there in front of us. Would we get tangled up in his hate, too, I wondered.

“He’s such a fucking coward,” Sarah said, looking at her nails.

“God yes,” said Amy.

Amy didn’t have a finger that didn’t have a ring.

She was George’s temporary one-and-only lover and was usually on his side but sometimes slipped and her real voice voiced itself. She’d scissored her hair short and with severe bangs à la Catherine from Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden which had come out with hoopla and derision a few years earlier. Begnal had this disgusting tic where he spittle-spoke in a very clipped way when he was angry and he was angry most of the time. His lectures—he was one of the old guards who still lectured in seminar rather than giving it over to the students—were staccato and precise, as if he was reeling off facts (“Woolf had no idea how to capture a male character’s voice and it shows on each page”) and not unshaped opinions.

He had this way of articulating questions as statements. “See how Conrad’s use of delayed decoding in Nostromo is a more sophisticated and superior version of what Woolf attempts in Mrs Dalloway.”

He was obsessed with Nostromo, which had become the soon-to-be-wrecked ship of his mind.

The seminar was from 3 to 6 Thursdays, with a 10-minute break at around 4:30. A twilight hell. If you needed to step out before then to use the restroom or whatever you’d have to brush by Begnal, as he’d position his chair right near the door.

Root beer colored, sad corduroys, butt-worn.

Birkenstocks with colorless, dandered socks.

Mussel breath.

An ill-patterned beard on a face that was not prepared to grow one.

Oh, Begnal! Although he’d never forbid you from leaving you could feel him seething, and upon your return you could expect him to single you out with some unanswerable question like, “What did Conrad do with his first draft of Under Western Eyes?” At first these tactics intimidated and even frightened us, but as the semester wore on the fear faded and by the end it was a badge of honor among us to be scolded.

The light at 6 pm was, honestly, beautiful on campus, spectral, and we’d walk out together onto the wide lush mall that sloped gently from Old Main to Atherton Street. In September and October the weather and light were just right and the towering elms would sway and make that gentle hissing sound in the sun and wind.

Zeno’s was the darkest drinking spot, down the old worn marble steps into the basement beneath Mast Shoes where it was cool and low-key. You could hear the people trying on their shoes above us on the creaky floor. We got a table at the back. The darkest corner of the darkest bar. A few of us had split off, so it was me and Mel and Amy and George.

“I don’t see it,” Amy said. “How he possibly got tenure.”

“That was back in the day,” said George. “Everybody got tenure.”

The thing about George was that he was one of those likeable egomaniacs, so confident in his opinions and uncaring of others that what he said was attractive rather than repellent.

“Gave tenure out like candy,” Mel said.

“Practically had to molest disabled kids not to get it,” George said.

“Had to fuck your students in broad daylight on the steps of the library not to get it,” said Mel.

“Sarah’s on the grad grievance committee and she says there’s a thick file of complaints on him going back ten years but the union’s blocked them from central administration. She says they’re mostly about capricious grading but there are a few about touching,” Amy said.

“Inappropriate?” I asked.

“If it’s in a file, is there any other kind?” Amy said.

“Then Sarah should make copies,” I said.

“She has but she’s afraid to do anything with them.”

“Give them to the Daily Collegian. Anonymously.”

“She can’t. The editor and her had a thing and now he hates her.”

“So?” I said.

“He’s also Bengal’s nephew.”

*

A quandary of unthinking seized us. Stopped us in our tracks. It was hard to find our way back or to get behind any idea long enough for it to take hold. The English Department brought in a white speaker during this Frozen Time to talk about the subversive use of Black vernacular in Joy Williams’s stories and several English faculty wrote a letter of protest—with unfortunate spelling errors—that was published in the Daily Collegian.

Everybody was saying no to everything.

And then yes.

And then no.

There was confusion on every level.

Even the white speaker’s heart wasn’t in it, you could tell.

She read her paper ashamedly and skipped the after-reading reception. She took the first train out.

In retrospect, it’s hard to think of a better time in my life, or a more suitable time for living. Everything was up for grabs. The stupidest ideas found purchase on our campus. One time our department spent a thousand dollars to bring in a postmodern theorist who delivered his lecture shirtless while running on a treadmill rigged up to project his real-time vitals on a big screen behind him. The point was lost on us, which was the point.

It was around that time that we all went camping at that derelict park by the river to listen for owls. It was Theresa’s idea. She said her dad was an ornithologist at Cornell, which turned out not to be true. George said he was going to bring a new kind of drug that was available in very limited supplies only once every few years, like those cicadas that emerge from the ground, but he ended up bringing a terrible, tasteless moonshine instead that gave us headaches.

We were all into celibacy for reasons I can’t remember, so we didn’t have any fun except listening for the owls that never sang and watching for the supermoon that never showed itself and waiting for the high from the clear moonshine that never came. Our smelly rented tents from the rec center collapsed sometime during the night in a harsh wind that came up from the river and so we all slept huddled together out in the open in a mess of sleeping bags, blankets, bungee cords, and tangled nylon. No one thought to bring flashlights or lanterns and so our light extinguished with the fire.

Falling in and out of sleep I thought I could hear the stars crackling in the night.

In the morning, sore and coffeeless, the light pale and cold, Theresa got us lost on the way back to her car and we found ourselves in an area that didn’t seem park-like at all, but rather hostile, alien, the landscape erupting in sharp, slate outcroppings like the scales of some enormous buried dragon.

We got so turned around, do you remember?

It was like it always is when you’re lost, a bit funny at first—the camaraderie of it all—and then not so funny.

The longer we were out there the less familiar everything looked, as if the world—or at least that part of it—was slowly becoming alien. Something was sucking the reality out of it. The trees seemed taller and odd-shaped, growing at weird angles that suggested a baleful intention. The colors drained into grayscale. The ground was so hot we could feel it through our shoes. Theresa was the one who spotted the red beetle the size of a softball that made an awful clicking sound when we approached it. It squirted something on her arm, a stream of yellow shit.

It was strange what happened in Begnal’s seminar the next Wednesday. Theresa was sick, unfocused, pale, feverish, lethargic but it was worse than that. In her sickness she was becoming something else, something it would take months to fully emerge. Even Begnal, from within the deep grotesqueries of his narcissism, sensed the change that had come over Theresa. A kind of thicket of thought seized us in that seminar and everything ground to a halt, even our thinking which became wounded somehow, leaving bleeding trails behind it.

 

Only later would some of us come to recognize, dimly, what zone we had stumbled into on that camping trip, a zone of epic significance that all our denials could not stand up against.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Rombes is author of the novels The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing and The Rachel Condition, as well as the 33 1/3 volume on the first album by the Ramones. His new book on the Gus Van Sant film Gerry is part of Bloomsbury’s TIMECODES series.