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“Oh, she never had it,” the woman says. “All she does is work and she, like, doesn’t care if you have a life. She basically lives at school and does nothing but read and write. She’s a machine. But she’s off her goddamned rocker.”
Maggie Shill reaches over to the panelist at the end of the table and picks up his paper. She tears it in half down the middle and drops it on the floor.
“In the end, it’s just words on the page,” she says, staring out at us, eyes blank. “Just words on the page that vanish into the air.” Then she walks out of the conference room.
“Kill me,” the woman next to me groans.
I DECIDE to get one drink at the hotel bar before I go back to my room and indulge in watching some shitty TV and zoning out.
“Daniel, hey.”
I look up to see Andre, a cute grad student I’ve known for a few years. He started at Penn a year or two after I did and then transferred to University of Michigan when his dissertation advisor took a job there.
“Hey, Andre, good to see you.” He gives me a hug and sits on the stool next to mine. “I should have known you’d be here—U of M’s really close, right?”
“Yeah, Ann Arbor’s only about a half hour from here. You’re in Michigan too, now, right?”
“Yeah, up north of Traverse City. Crazy.”
“Ooh, already saying Up North. Very Michigan of you.”
“Sorry?”
“You know, Up North?” At my vacant expression, Andre says, “Up North is the northern lower peninsula, like where you live. Of course, everyone in Michigan will make a different argument about where exactly you can draw the line that indicates where Up North begins. It can get very heated.”
I smile and shake my head.
“Fucking Michigan,” I say.
“How’s the conference treating you?” Andre asks.
“Dude, I just saw someone totally go off the deep end,” I say, and tell him about Professor Shill.
“Oh wow,” he says. “Well, that’s what being a workaholic with no personal life will get you. You invest that much in paper and ink that can’t give anything back to you and you end up losing your shit by forty.”
Shit, when he puts it like that it sounds so depressing.
“Speaking of which,” Andre says, his hand brushing my thigh, “are you here alone?”
“I am.”
“You wanna…?”
Andre and I slept together at the last two conferences where we saw each other. He’s sweet and really cute, with dark skin and long eyelashes and an adorable way of squeezing his eyes really tightly closed when he comes.
I shake my head. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”
Andre grins. “Whoa, did Dr. Mulligan actually meet someone?”
“Never mind that,” I say. “Thanks, though. It was good to see you.” I kiss him on the cheek and leave cash on the bar. He winks at me and finishes my drink.
BACK IN my room, I sink onto one of the beds without even taking my shoes off. I want to go to bed, but I had the nightmare again last night, so I turn the TV on and start flipping channels.
It’s always the same. I’m walking to the subway from the bar after I get off work. It’s dark and I can see the orange light of the subway entrance a block in front of me. Then, in that way dreams have of making fears concrete, the space doubles, then doubles again, until with every step I’m getting farther away from the subway, like I’m on one of those moving sidewalks at the airport and it’s pulling me backward. Then the street narrows into an alleyway and every step I take is like walking through tar, every movement exaggerated.
I see their shadows before I see them, even though there’s no light. They’re cast long on the walls of the alley and the sound of their laughter echoes down to me. I turn around to go back the way I came, but it’s a dead end—a crumbling brick wall that goes up and up until it disappears into the night sky.
When I turn around they’re right there, two of them in front of me and one to my right. They’re bigger than me, bigger than real people. I come up to their stomachs. They start saying things, silly dream things and scary dream things and things they really said.
The first punch splits my cheek to the bone, then a shove knocks the wind out of me when my back hits the brick wall, snapping my head back with a wet clunk. My vision goes double, but dream double, so now there are six of them, a sick tessellation of swinging fists and kicking legs and pain. I fall into one of them with a punch to the gut and he steps back in disgust, letting me fall to the alley floor. Only, now, instead of the filthy concrete, used condoms, needles, and fast food wrappers, the floor is made of Pennsylvania schist, the rock sparkling with flecks of mica. All I can think is that it’s beautiful, like a spill of dark glitter. Then they’re gone.
