“I don’t get why you’re looking so glum,” Hideo told her. He was spread out on the floor of his living room, with labels and scissors and cases, while Minerva perched on his futon. His goldfish swam in lazy circles in an aquarium that was tucked under an open window. “From what you’re saying, it’s all good. Tremblay’s personal papers should make for one excellent thesis.”
“It’s fabulous stuff. I mean, an unpublished manuscript stowed away for years, just waiting to be read. It’s like finding out Shirley Jackson left a whole novella tucked in a closet.”
“Well, I’d think you would look less stressed, not more.”
“I’m not more stressed. I’m getting organized, that’s all.” She sipped the Yakult she’d fetched from Hideo’s refrigerator and toyed with the foil lid.
“Is it any good? The manuscript?”
“I love the opening pages. It’s Tremblay, through and through. Although some of it reminds me of stories my great-grandmother used to tell. I flipped through it quickly, I couldn’t read the whole thing, but she talked about lights in the trees. It’s the same stuff they said about witches in Mexico.”
“Collective unconscious,” Hideo replied.
“Sorry?”
“You know, Jung. An ancestral memory shared by all of humankind. Patricia can tell you more about it.” He stood up andstretched his arms. “Smoke break.”
“Hideo, you should quit.”
“I tried it. The nicotine patches didn’t work,” he said, fetching his cigarettes.
They went down the hallway and he held the door open for her. Hideo’s apartment was located on the first floor of his dorm, but August Hall had been built in the seventies and possessed none of the charm of her beloved mansion. It didn’t have the beautiful sight of Briar’s Commons, either. In front of August Hall there was a lonely elm tree and a row of bushes.
Hideo leaned against the tree and took a puff of his cigarette.
“Quit cold turkey,” she suggested. “I did.”
“I don’t have that kind of willpower.”
“It wasn’t willpower, it was self-preservation. Finances were tight, I didn’t have enough money to buy lunch and smoke during my first year at university, so I skipped meals and picked cigarettes over food. I lost ten kilos that first year and by the second I realized I was crazy. I quit the whole stupid thing.”
Although, in its place, she seemed to have picked up a coffee-drinking habit. She needed a cup. Too bad Hideo didn’t partake of that beverage.
“Like I said: willpower. I have an addictive personality, so if I didn’t smoke this, I’d be doing something much worse. It’s in my nature.”
“So said the scorpion to the frog,” she replied. “It’s a highly deterministic outlook on life.”
“You don’t believe in natures, then.”
She stuffed her hands in her pockets and shrugged.
“When are you headed back to the Willows?”
“Tomorrow,” she said, clenching her fists.
Although she’d told Hideo that she wasn’t stressed, this was not entirely true. She was restless, which was not the same, yet it was also not a state of bliss and satisfaction. The sources of her restlessness were hard to pinpoint. Some of it was the constant thought of the thesis, the newly discovered manuscript she must copy and analyze. But there was also the campus itself, lonely at this time of year, with the few resident directors who remainedand the skeleton crew doing maintenance or manning the library.
She did not mind loneliness, she embraced it at times, yet there was a strained feeling in the air. Something felt off.
Just your usual fucking chronic depression,she thought, and immediately tensed at the mere idea of diagnosing herself. Others liked psychology babble. Minerva did not.
“By the way, I talked to Hannah, and she said you need to move Thomas Murphy’s boxes into your basement for storage. They should have never been left in his room.”
“You’re kidding me,” Minerva said. “They’re big boxes to be lugging there.”
“We can take them together, tell me when.”
“Can’t Thomas come and pick them up and save us the hassle? The basement at Ledge House is full of junk.”
