Snuck Past Death and Sleep

By Benjamin Norman Pierce

Set as Cold War sneaks to it send, "Snuck Past Death And Sleep" tells the story of four loners who meet at an insular Midwestern college that they will waken and terrorize. Lynn and Craig are non-traditional students. She enters college later in life to break through life long isolation; while he entered as a year-early whiz-kid and has bogged

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReadersMagnet LLC
• Release date: Jul 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781950947690

Benjamin Norman Pierce

Benjamin Norman Pierce was born in Denver, Colorado at 4 degrees of Virgo, Scorpio Ascending, in 1962, moving to Wausau, Wisconsin on his 2nd birthday and leaving on his 23rd. He has been a professional dish-washer for 15 years, a trade he entered in the process of earning B.A. in philosophy, history, and creative writing from the University of Minnesota, Saint Cloud, in 1989. He lived in Sophia, Bulgaria for two and a half years, teaching history at First English Language Gymnasium of Sophia, participating in the expatriate writing circles there, and taking time to learn painting. He currently resides in Nottingham, a co-operatively owned house in Madison, Wisconsin, and is a frequent participant at open-mike readings.

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Snuck Past Death and Sleep

Copyright © 2020 by Benjamin Norman Pierce. All rights reserved.

Published in the United States of America

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-950947-68-3

ISBN eBook: 978-1-950947-69-0

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

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Contents

I.Sleepless Heart Is All I Got to Keep Summer 1987, to about 8/22

II.Another Second Closer Saturday, 8/22/1987 to Monday, 8/24/87

III.The Dates We Keep Tuesday, 8/25/1987 to Wednesday 9/2/1987

IV.Off The Nightmare Cruise Thursday 9/3/1987 to Saturday 9/19/1987

V.More Sight Or More Blindness Friday 9/25/1987 to Thursday10/1/1987

VI.More Sight Or More Blindness Friday 9/25/1987 to Thursday10/1/1987

I.

Sleepless Heart Is All I Got to Keep

Summer 1987, to about 8/22

1

Lynn Ritchie looked up from her battered shoes, to her left. Her gaze swept a low, knobbly patch of green between dwellings, the first sight to catch her eye since leaving her own dwelling that morning.

The houseless lot had been here far longer than Lynn. This place supposedly held a house until 1930, leaving only a few apple trees grim, tall, and still enough to survive all active claims on the property.

Lynn spotted a pair of tiny red sneakers catching the last of midnights’ rain from the tree leaves. The yard was still a place that held the sun and let the children of the neighborhood escape the dim of light bulbs and T.V. screens back home.

Must be years since I’ve so much as set foot on that grass she mused.

She’d played here, during a couple of the periods of childhood that she’d had friends. During the summer before second grade, the whole yard had come into play, and sometimes the boys would try to drive them off to play baseball.

Occasionally, the girls would insist on being included, and then the game would last until dinner or maybe someone’s temper deferred them from finding a conclusion to the match. None of this occurred in sequence; there were days when the kids played baseball and there were days when people chased about the yard.

Then, it was time for school, and with rules brought on them from outside, it was important to have a scapegoat. The next summer was not always reason enough to allow her back to the abandoned yard.

In fifth grade, the yard shrunk, and the trees were the real focus of activity; they were houses or jails, or some structure where doing took place. The yard became a place of distraction to be avoided if one wanted to play one’s role. She had found herself on that far periphery more than once, and here the sequences of acceptance and exile seemed clearer.

The distance of time died with the coming of that clarity; Lynn felt the yard once again; as though a naked tree loomed just beside her. Sharpness found her eyes; she refused the scent of fallen brown apples. Her pupils stabbed back to the sidewalk. She wished that she would have found time for the mirror this morning. Something filled her view, and she began walking again.

The grey skyward factories of the industrial park burst into view, on schedule, at the head and to the far end of the next block; giving way to smoke well above any point Lynn had ever viewed.

The factories had always bounded Lynn’s world; another school district lay on the other side, and one walked with the factories to the back to reach downtown.

For three years Lynn had music lessons five blocks or so past the factories, but she had almost always bussed past them; to a home in the heart of some area past the industrial park.

Maybe ten times in those years three years or maybe less, she’d had to wend through this borderland to her instructors’ house.

Now, she thought, I’m going to go through them again, and it will be regular.

The College just didn’t matter to most of the townsfolk, and Lynn had been no exception. She had always been dimly aware that Wasserman was in town, but the town had many sources of income that did not regularly bring one into contact with students or faculty; and Mother had always worked at the radio station.

Lynn had little contact with Wasserman, except for a year of concerts in High School, and a field trip for citizenship class before that.

She’d even known it was a place she might go. For years Wasserman had always been a possibility if more immediate ones ceased to prove adequate.

That’s the point. she reflected. I know I can eat and sleep under a roof, now. I was never in any danger. I could have kept up a car if I’d really needed one. But I’ll never really know anyone that way. I’ll never know what I can do with music, or what else I can do.

She would become familiar, to some degree, with the patch of town that she knew existed between the factories and the college; right now she saw a smear of lawns and white fences between the towering grey stacks and the Music Building.

There was a bus stop at the end of this block, but Lynn did not like being on this sidewalk; this was half her reason for walking this time instead of taking a bus. She plunged kitty corner into the industrial park.

The factories held few reminders within their midst, and once she passed through, she found no landmarks to remember the ten-something trips to this area.

She switched blocks, putting herself on a street that had the same houses as any other part of town, yet that she could never have passed before.

She scanned the new block for adventure, resting her eyes on the far corner.

Lynn spotted a small greasy spoon, Ada’s soup bowl.

She realized that it actually had a parking lot, half empty, that was large for such a minor enterprise.

A waste was her first thought. Then she noticed the twin cement islands with rusted, uprooted pipes at two places in the lot. She looked closer at the facade, sure enough to think words: a garage, a gas station.

She resolved that if her class schedule allowed, she would see if Ada’s was good enough to be a regular stop. It would be a place, she ventured, where she would find few of her professors or classmates.

That could be a real blessing she noted.

Lynn passed by some more houses and corners and storefronts that she was not yet able to recall in sequence or exact location.

Then, there were houses with patchy lawns, and garbage cans with TV dinners and beer bottles spilled into punctured trash bags.

Paint flaked from the houses, beer signs nestled in some of the windows, and a variety of cardboard and wooden signs announced vacancies and terms of residency. She knew, though she’d heard few tales of this place, that she was in the student ghetto.

I would never live like this. She resolved. Will the kind of people who do get to know me? It had never become clear to Lynn exactly what differences people chose to turn into divisions. If I don’t think that way, others are less likely to she resolved, wanting a more quiet, more broadly viewing head to hold her eyes.

Occasionally she spotted a mowed lawn with toys, and with a paint job that had happened in her lifetime. Sometimes these family dwellings were jammed between two apartments and they usually had high wire fences, like they were besieged and threatened with invasion and conversion at any unguarded moment.

She saw the college in bits: first, a parking lot that she glimpsed half a block away, and then a five story structure of red brick, and then a map of the campus kitty-corner from her path. She swerved, and jaywalked to meet it.

Her eyes swept the signs and roof letters of half a dozen buildings.

There were a lot of halls named for people, though the Music Building named itself straightforwardly. The Admissions Office also bore no name past its function, and it was just past the tall red brick structure named Langdon Hall.

She noticed that the lawn in front of Langdon burst forth in four or five spots with crab-apple trees that had just begun to give their scent up to the wind. She walked around this red brick tower, knowing that if she entered she would explore long past the time she could allow for delay.

The Admissions Office was a stunted skyscraper; two stories of black glass topped by overhanging cement. There was also a yard-high cement lozenge that read WASSERMAN COLLEGE in a proud arch across the top, in curved letters ending with spikes. Beneath this, was a circular engraving of the skyline one might actually see approaching Wasserman from the direction opposite where she actually stood now.

All four faces of the Admissions Building were skirted by what seemed like Morning Glories on a trellis along the wall, and marigolds growing in abrupt interruption of the lawn.

She entered, to find several lines. There were signs overhead, ancient tagboard announcements of where each line lead. The nearest stated ‘Entrance Forms’. She pulled a manila envelope from her purse, and entered that line.

She peered through her hair to the glass divider awaiting her, snapping her gaze to the back of a strangers’ head before she caught her image in the divider. Lynn saw no sign that anyone had noticed anything unusual about her at all. She stopped a nervous tune her throat wished to hum.

After a dutiful period of measured distractions and little forward steps, she was before the window. She pulled out the forms she had received just last noon.

A wrinkled face stared at her with impassive cheeks and lips, and fixed eyes. Are you a continuing student? asked the functionary.

No. she wondered whether there was more that she should tell, and decided she would have to be asked even the obvious.

She knew it was much more embarrassing to advance information that was not asked for or needed, than to be called to account for some forgotten detail.

The eyes fixed themselves to the forms, this time with sharpness; tracking a valued clue or two among the jotted answers.

Truman High, from town. Not a transfer student, either.

Lynn responded with a nod brief enough that it could be politely ignored. She thought it was.

She almost spoke then about her talk with the councilor, but saw the eyes move again with more sure smoothness than speed, to a computer printed list.

She felt her chest pinch, and eased it as little by assuring herself she’d done all she needed to.

A little hymn of distraction lay swallowed in her stilled throat. She sucked this through her nostrils and into her clenched chest: I don’t have to do anything but wait for her to check the work they’ve done. I don’t need to speak to her.

You talked to Ms. Loftgren, I see. Aged, seasoned hands dipped below the counter, and produced a pair of forms, and the promised catalog. There was a smile acknowledging smoothly transacted business.

There are some desks if you enter that corridor to your left, and turn right. That will let you register for classes on the 24th of August. You will receive a fee statement by September 7th. Thank you.

Lynn gave a flit of a smile, and moved to the corridor and to the collection of desks without fully noticing the trip. She sat down, noted a dozen or so other islands of hunched shoulders, focused brows, and scraping pencils.

Lynn had been alerted to several good possibilities from Ms. Loftgren, and narrowed them down to the three classes that she’d have time and money for.

She sketched in Intermediate Saxophone, knowing from the catalog that her previous instruction would get her Instructors Consent. However, she also filled in a spot for Advanced Saxophone, resolving to speak to the instructor to see what was possible. There would be five days either way, at 2 PM if she settled for Intermediate, or 9 in the morning if she could swing more.

Worth it she told herself.

Lynn took Introduction to Philosophy, at two, certain that it would suggest a lot of possibilities of other classes, whatever she learned in the class itself. She was uncertain exactly how it would be conducted, and was a little surprised at the variety of classes the department offered.

She had a vague recall that there would be discussion; perhaps she’d meet people. It met on Monday and Wednesday only, and so that time would be open other days.

I’ll know that anyone interesting there will be free at that time. she resolved. If nothing else happens I can do the classwork on the days the class doesn’t meet.

That priority became more certain with her final class, and she penciled in Ballroom Dancing, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4:30. Lynn also noted that it would leave her a little time between after the Saxophone class ended, if she took the Intermediate class.

Lynn had done all she could do. She had brought stamps, and addressed her manila envelope to the University. She inserted her complete forms, and remembered seeing a mailbox two blocks away, but couldn’t remember the last bus stop she’d passed. Lynn wasn’t sure whether a bus came right to campus, though it seemed likely.

She resolved to find out soon.

She remembered from her previous visits that the Student Center served coffee and had a deli.

Knowing that the mailbox would not move, she decided to spend some time doing nothing; her tasks were now as complete as they could be.

Now focused on a bus stop, she wended her way to the Student Center.

Lynn saw that a road led through campus, all cement stuccoed walls, with balconies and wide windows on the third floor, and a patio, she remembered, on the other side.

Lynn entered a bank of glass doors, and found that she had carried herself without effort of memory to the snack shop. She purchased coffee and a sandwich and a few small doughnuts.

Lynn also remembered the area with plastic topped round tables and vending machines in the basement, and found this place just as easily now, noting that the three pinball machines were gone or moved.

Since it was Summer, there was only one other figure, a stout, denim-clad man with his feet resting on a second chair, and his mind buried in a paperback book; a backpack taking up the third of three chairs at his table. He looked older than most students, she noted, and then forgot him, as she found her own table halfway across the room.

She set down her snacks, and let them dwindle away like the hour or so that she spent there.

The absence of the pinball machines freed her from any thought or memory of the quiet distance that had usually followed the end of band practice here.

She left the stranger, never having really interrupted his solitude. She arrived only a minute or so before the bus, for once without planning it that way. She traveled back to her apartment, to dinner, and to sleep.

Over the rest of that summer, there was anticipation and outcropping reminders.

She arranged to quit three of her four shifts at work, was reminded of the 24th of August daily by her calendar, even for the previous month where only her birthday blotched the numbered squares; that was the sharpest reminder of all. Lynn made several final decisions on which saxophone class to take.

Finally, she resolved to make an appointment with the instructor for advice as well as possible approval for the advanced course. She called a secretary, and effortlessly made an appointment, taking the secretary’s suggestion of the 23rd, a Saturday. Lynn was surprised that a professor would give up a Summer Saturday, especially that close to new classes.

For the whole month of August, whenever she saw that wall, there were two large blocks filled with red letters, the day between them more like a blank for proper spacing, gouged out of the rest of an unmarked month.

2

Paul Jorkinn found the words didn’t connect anymore. He lifted his gaze from the tabletop, his hands, and the book. Now there were white bedroom walls, bookshelves, and a bed and drawers all arranged with a special neatness he had learned and used only once before, knowing that soon he would move and leave much of it behind.

He couldn’t see the titles of his books or records, and with all else boxed up or folded away, only the posters on the wall hinted at his personality; a steely gleaming icon reminding him that he, too, had worshiped noise and leather and shine when he first had found buying power. The faces and corners of rooms and other worlds on the other posters spoke of the quieter songs of his current favorites, and most striking was that none of them managed or tried to be idols.

Only that one, half forgotten, was still begrudged that dignity, only in hindsight.

This just doesn’t reflect everything I listen to. He thought absently If I was trying to show who I was, I was dreaming. Yet he had gotten the posters one at a time, and to replace others that had run their course, one way or another. And then that distraction had run its course.

He knew he couldn’t finish even the current chapter of the mystery. He put it on his desk, and looked at the forms that could be done anytime today or tomorrow, but that were here now.

He was graduated, and ten days after that, his birthday had already come and gone.

18, not 17 he reminded himself again.

It was his last summer before college and then whatever came after; in many ways the first Summer where important questions had now become pressing as well as great.

Paul had a sense that he was ready to seize all but a few of them with some help; that he was already geared towards taking the initiative.

Reconciled that the Summer before senior year had truly been the last vacation, he picked up the stack and used the desktop to even the papers out. He selected a pen from the jar and began with the certainty that he began an adults’ business.

At first, the form vanished under his hand, covered by answers he no longer thought about; name, parents, the address he had almost always lived at, that he would soon leave; his controlled epilepsy.

There remained a blank, empty of any familiar question, and it stopped his pen after he’d made only a tiny smear.

ROOMMATE PREFERENCE

Just about smoking, he told himself. No coed rooms, no discrimination by race, so what else…?

He had not expected it but the opportunity was there. He had planned around it’s absence, never questioning. Change seized him as automatically as habit had, and he wrote ‘gay’.

Shit, I had better get everything right. I’d better know all the answers now. He thought.

The ink was the least permanent feature of his act; even in pencil, he wouldn’t erase it now that it was done. The shade he could keep for himself was a broader reserve now; still dark and not walled to times of retreat but no more to be narrowed back again, this wider range of shrouded decision.

Some of the questions did surprise him, and he didn’t know them; the value of his parents’ house, whether it was mortgaged and how much his parents earned. Half a year ago, he had been attracted to Wasserman because it rated its dorm fees per need, and took the trouble to review individual applications. Now, this created more complications than it eliminated.

It cost him the rest of the day. Several options occurred, including telling them. That had always been the most paralyzing option, the one that made other actions possible. He decided he’d think on it after dinner.

Jim cooked that night. Ever since he and Rae had decided that Jim should do half the cooking, he had always served soup with whatever else he made, and after some initial tragedies, he made it well.

Tonight, it was minestrone, the main course. The ingredients were too fresh to have come from any can; the work must have been considerable.

It was a hearty smelling, strength promising swamp that he could not easily let past his lips. Never had he written that word down before, about himself. What if…

The biscuits, fresh, high as mountains and light as clouds, were worse; they had to be chewed and once they cooled this was a grim, sorejawed chore.

Rae smiled a close-lipped grin usually reserved for clients and general contacts; not one of the warmer ones reserved for occasional use around the home.

You should really get to your forms. For college, I mean. It helps being early, and you should always get every edge you can.

Rae’s voice was a modulated tool for work; she could only offend or scare with it if she actually chose to, for habit would never allow error. Yet it felt like she was trying to coax him, to make him give in.

She had given him his tall slenderness, and could look him straight in the eye.

Uhm, yeah. I got them done today, like I said. Did I really leave them on the table? Did I really remember to stuff them into that book? He remembered both. Then, one small cleverness came through the steam he felt. In time to give it to the mailman in fact.

Pretty nervous, son? joined Jim. Father fixed son with a set of warm, watery blue eyes they both shared, but one set embedded in wrinkles of time and understanding that the other knew he would only later acquire.

Uh…

I mean, you’ve scarcely touched your food and you forgot to bring the mail in after you gave him the forms.

Jim grinned, now seeing that there was confrontation in the observation.

But I know how that is. Once you mail them. It’s out of your hands, and you wonder what you could have done better. Believe me, the reports are like that, every one. If I didn’t have a team working with me, that I trust and have known for twelve years, I’d sweat bullets every month!

Paul realized that he was sweating. He wanted the meal to end, and he wanted the solitude that would be allowed him, since it was his turn to do the dishes.

Jim rubbed a scalp with Paul’s’ own brown hair, but clipped just a little shorter, faded by more sun, and highlighted by grey. There was a lopsided grin that the son had never acquired; two achieving parents had led him to his thoughts rather than his actions for his sense of distinct being. Also, for many years now, a secret to keep…

Yeah. I triple checked them. I’ll have to. I’ll forget all this by the time I wake up, but I’ve just gotta get in! Then, he used his one gambit, one he’d learned from seeing Jim use it: a little verbal flourish to top the insight and therefore close the topic.

So, now that I’ve let the mailman launch it out into the great unknown I can’t decide anything anymore so I guess I can’t decide wrong.

They laughed, and moved to filling in the details of an impending weekend with Jim’s brother Walt and his kids. This was a welcome alternative to the crosstown silence of Rae’s soured family.

As they finished dinner, and brought the dishes to the sink, they gave him every assurance that he could do it, and that they’d be behind him if something went wrong, and what he heard was spoken with genuine kindness and belief.

Yet they couldn’t assure him that he’d be able to reveal his lie, or that they’d understand his hidden truth. He’d told so many little lies and given so many little acts that had seemed too small to notice at the time; words and actions that would fall into their full meaning if he told what they had hidden all along.

Then, when they knew how much he had done to shelter himself, would they know him anymore?

The last dish left the water and he could only find the plug. He left the drain gurgling away, his thoughts no lighter for his hour alone.

Before bed, he remembered that there were tax forms in the study. He’d wait till Jim and Rae were gone.

The next day, he really did give the mailman a sealed envelope with the exactingly scrutinized documents. The tax forms had given up the questions he didn’t dare ask, because of that one small word. He already had the experience to make the search momentary. Yet he’d lost a day, appetite and sleep.

It was done. Other questions came into his mind. Will they honor that? Will anyone else put that down? He had.

That was one reason he had chosen a college in another state.

What would he be like? Maybe he won’t know that we both answered the form…

Paul spent odd moments the rest of the summer thinking of ways to breach the subject. It wasn’t hard, he’d thought of how to bring it up before. He never found a way to balance the comfortable retreat of ambiguity with the solid, bracing completion of a clear confession.

He always planned before on how to use a shared past, a number of commonalities breached, invisibly, by this one secret difference. Now, there was no foreknown, prelived sharing of time.

There would only be a stark present, and two unguessed lives, two mysteries, joined only by the possibility of this one thing.

An acceptance form came in due time, assuring him he would have to decide for himself whether he had affected his situation; whether he should act anyway. The form told him only that he could enroll for classes, and that he had gotten into one of the economy dorms.

In the end, he could decide only that he wouldn’t breach the subject without clues, that he would hope to know what to do then.

Summer days rose and fell, the sun taking its time. There was his visit to the church, as usually happened once or twice a summer. He went alone; Rae had stopped going more than monthly shortly after they’d moved to their current house, and Jim only went at Christmas and Easter when they all went.

Old accusations filled the place, but alone Paul could always silence the remembered words; Pastor Wallace’s words that surely found him though the Pastor locked eyes on no-one.

An hour after evening services, the last traces of sermon and perfume were always gone. The absence of the ghostly sermons left a private peace if he did not overuse the church. More often he was awash with inner quiet, the voices of friends, warm light on his back.

There was Pauline who knew all his secrets but one, Tim who had been along for anything Paul could call an adventure, Pete and Mike whom he’d known longest; even when they’d all been different people. A few others who’d hung around this last year.

All of them but Tim had new campuses to worry about, and no-one thought twice if Paul seemed anxious at times, as they did. His secret, as always, blended into every word and act.

Only if he was alone would there be a vagueness that solidified into a hard, dark obstacle; one that weighed and had to be carried. One that dispersed over and over into sunlit days, but that always took back its shape and weight for the hour or two it demanded as tribute.

In time, summer leaked closer to autumn nightfall, and there came a time to pack his car and drive; for the dorms were already open and in two more days there was registration: lines of strangers like him, already meshing in their milling, crowding a gymn to make a next life from only a list of college classes.

He drove a day and a night, and wished he had left earlier; evening came sooner now and he had not noticed or planned for it. He spent most of his trip shrouded by the lengthened night.

He drove; there were patches of road where he noticed his fatigue or his boredom. Twice he noticed himself pulled up to the speaker of a drive–in restaurant. Through it all, there was an aching heaviness in his gut, an anticipation he could always touch.

Then, a green sign bathed in the heatless dim of his headlight, welcoming him and all others in proxy of the townspeople. His head wanted to slump over and plunge his wrinkled lids and burning eyes into a warmer darkness than the car held.

His gut stabbed him awake, and he knew it would disperse only sometime after he had earned sleep, in his appointed room at the dormitory.

His car drifted ahead into a strange town that he would have to call home for four years, shrouded and looming in the gulf behind his headlights. He looked for something he knew, something he could feel about. There was only one thing with shape, solidity and weight that he could find: the meeting with his roommate and the decision of how far to welcome the stranger into his den.

3

Craig Loomis woke to the thousandth day in the dark dust of his room, though he didn’t know it. To him it was three years that were themselves somewhat less than a third of the time he had been at Wasserman. He’d been a teenager for nearly the first third of his time at college, but that seemed a lifetime ago, if he thought of it at all.

This morning, he didn’t. His first thought was to consult the clock; his second was surprise that it was the first morning since April that he’d seen. He hadn’t blown the day yet by any stretch of the imagination, and before he could decide to get a few more hours of sleep, he jolted upright.

The last five years he had barely registered in time to return to Wasserman. Twice in that time he had to get permission to register late, and he didn’t know for sure that there would be a third.

All the secretaries knew him, though few acknowledged it off of campus. He’d passed them by many times, at the stores and at the movie house, and they didn’t ever nod or smile, and few did more than focus their eyes elsewhere.

He lurched into the bathroom and pawed on the light wondering when it would burn out and how long it would take him to replace it. Forgetting that, he brushed his teeth ‘till they were almost white, and scraped away dark stubble that could have been a beard with another day of sleep. If the mirror told him that he’d had achieved another beard, it would last at least until Thanksgiving; possibly to the next summer.

He showered, but cut it short when the hunger began to gnaw.

Dripping, naked but for a dingy blue towel, he lurched to the refrigerator, and yanked it open with a broad, hunched shoulder.

There were eggs, some bacon that would not last much longer, some hamburger, and a small, black little radish. He resolved to make a real breakfast without losing the whole morning doing it.

To succeed, he knew that he would have to avoid any project that occurred to him until he had eaten his food.

He glanced at the sink, and saw that the weeks’ dishes were still under control. He took two eggs, and the bacon over to the stove, and dropped the meaty strips into a pan. As soon as the bacon began to sizzle, he went to his cupboard to find a dish.

There he saw some boxes of cereal, and wished that he had milk. He spied a box of oatmeal that had just outlasted the final days of winter, and he resolved to polish it off.

Along with the oats, be brought a bowl and a dish to his tiny wooden table, and found his last

clean silverware.

As soon as the bacon was crisp, he broke the two eggs into the grease, and resolved to get some more groceries after he had undertaken the needed work at Wasserman. He left the eggs long enough to fill a pot with just a little too much water, and soon the oats were boiling and then coagulating.

He remembered that the library at Wasserman would be open for a few hours, and that if he expedited his business at the Admissions building in time, he could get a book, and escape the apartment for a time. He thought about how small downtown and the campus had become, and how alien any other part of town was.

There had been his routine factory work at the start of summer, but he had quit that, as always, after half the Summer was gone.

He knew that the fatigue of working all or most summer would carry on well into the school year. For four or so years, the inertia of summer in a still apartment in a friendless town had seeped into the school year, always lasting a little past New Years. A lot of people had graduated, and he was now going to school with people who had been starting grade school within a year or so of him learning to drive.

He and they knew less and less about the same things, outside of class, and he had begun to pay to enter parties, and really read the posters for public events at the end of the week. He saw that the eggs were browning around the edges, and that the oatmeal was almost satisfactory if a little soupy. With nothing but water to drink anyway, he knew that it was better for oatmeal to be runny than dry.

The bacon had cooled a great deal, but it still had flavor, and he had eaten mostly bread, he was fairly sure, over the last few days. After the meat, the eggs and oatmeal had enough flavor that he could absently scoop them down without effort or much thought; it occurred to him once to remember salt as well as butter and milk. It was enough to make him remember his backpack on his way out the door.

To his momentary surprise, it jiggled with the weight of his smudged, ancient journal, bought for its voluminous 500 sheets, three-quarter filled in three years, and with a few comments added every so

often afterwards.

Last spring he’d gotten some ideas worth saying, that hadn’t belonged in any papers. He might just nudge the notebook within view of exhausting the paper behind the fourth subject divider sometime in the coming spring, if his classes awoke him this year.

He found his denim jacket, donned it with a sort of shrug, and loped to the Admissions building, vaguely noting the stab of the sun into his eyes. On his way, he noted that the trees had blossomed since he’d seen them in May. He regretted for a second that he didn’t like crab-apples, or that they weren’t apple trees.

Then he remembered that he would make a grocery run later that day.

The familiar path soon brought him indoors, to the softer glare of the fluorescent lights. Their hum was rhythmic and so he often thought of them as actually soothing to his sore orbs. It was the only comfort the Administration Building allowed him; the tasks there would wear on him like slowly abrasive streams of sand; and that if things were smooth.

He was one of the first people in line. There was a glance of denied recognition.

Returning? the question was bitten short, and there was a flicker of expression as though its taste had proven a little too tart.

Yeah. Loomis, Craig. A pair of hands flicked over a keyboard, eyes glanced to the screen, and without looking away, one of the hands disappeared under the counter, and returned with a single piece of paper. Almost the only status that he had earned was that being a returning student who had fulfilled all nonelective general and major requirements, he had a very short form to fill out that would get priority. He was also given the Fall timetable.

Silently, he left for the room where he knew they kept desks for form-fillers. He put down the required data, and resolved to think about classes over a full dinner. He left the soft-lighted gymn, knowing that he sought something to do, and just behind that thought, seeking another exit from the way the day burned his eyes. He past the chipped wooden drop-box, half regretting that he didn’t have his forms ready yet. He’d seen even seniors pass the drop-box by, never knowing it was there to save them stamps or trips back.

He went to the library, and found that he had two hours to look around before closing He had taken care of his fines with part of the last paycheck he had gotten that summer, and now was glad of his promptness.

He drifted through the science fiction section, seeing nothing of the spines his eyes glided over. He had to have the stimulation of classes to be interested in it, he knew. Then he resolved to try a mystery. If he could find one that would build its excitement slowly, that wouldn’t tell of a larger corruption faced by the hero solving that one piece of it, he knew, it would sneak up on him; the only way a book would capture his attention in most of his moods.

Craig tried, all the same, to care about anything large or different. He grabbed a spine at random, saw silvery letters and a rendering of a vast city and a flaming spaceship. But the shadowed quiet of the library, the empty little July calender his mind recited, called it a lie.

He drifted down a familiar pair of turns, and found something about a British mansion, and the mysterious death of a friendless hermit. No inheritors, No friends, No servants promised the blurb.

No-one cares. Damned puzzling for the inspector, though. Just a puzzle to solve and no-one left he can save. Something to understand, nothing to make a difference. His search, for that day, was over.

He drifted into the student center, remembered a more crowded past there; teeming with people and things they’d done.

One by one, and then in a great flood, he had watched them drowned in a sea of hairswept faces; the murmur of voices that did not speak as he did and could not be heard by him apart from their hum. Now, there was one scrape from his footsteps, and that instant of alertness seeped away into a basement so familiar he did not notice he’d arrived, until he sat down at one of the clear-topped tables. Other rooms, the smoking lounge, were still filled with little talismans of past decisions and opinions of Craig Carter Loomis from younger days; there, some old mark of something or another; mementos enough to mark and now forgotten often cleared from the smoke and dark there.

He saw a year and an old friends’ name scraped into the plastic, from before they’d met. He opened the book, and resolved to get a snack after trying the first chapter or so.

Pages turned, and little events mounted; a few questions seeped from them. There was the smell of coffee, and he realized he’d finished about half the book. He glanced for an instant, and saw a woman, only a few years younger. The coffee steamed from her grasp, and she had another hand crammed full of food.

He thought he saw too much lipstick, and he saw paleness. Loose, limp, brown hair flooded and curtained the rest. Slim shoulders and hips gratefully not burdened with large breasts.

He remembered how it would be again when the school year returned: On weekends there would be high schoolers with musical instruments storming the vending machines. Mostly in crowds, and occasional a lonely straggler gathered to the others only by thick basement walls.

There had always been a straggler his first year, and then he didn’t see her again. In those days, someone or another that he was sitting with would observe and pass comments.

This room was one he’d escape, from time to time, to study and now it was itself a place of escape. Now the memory of the departed stung too much, and he forced himself to remember the present and the stranger who had come with it.

She sat half a room away, distanced by miles of quiet shadow. No memory of her flickered, and the

book beckoned.

Events and questions cemented into happenings. Inheritors were found, and to his disappointment, their fates became linked with the outcome of the inspectors’ lonely little search. The woman drifted into notice again for a second, and then into oblivion.

The book dwindled into a little dark box that would have only one way out, soon. There were enough pages that he knew that the janitors would come to sweep him from the building before he could finish. He knew there was a last bus to a store too far to walk, that would save him some pennies, and probably allow him time to finish much of the book.

He hunched on his coat and backpack, and drifted to the bench where the bus would stop. He remembered briefly that he had anticipated the closing of the building more than an hour ahead of time, and so he found most of the book gone when the bus came.

He arrived at the store knowing all the inspector would, and a little more. He remembered milk, butter, salt, and apples, and then grabbed a variety of vegetables.

His fingertips delved the lint of his empty pocket, searching for his absent wallet. This was not the first time; he always carried a checkbook in his backpack, and he signed over the needed amount.

Soon, he rode the bus with perhaps five others, and his groceries seated next to him. He tried rereading a section of the book that he sharply had remembered, but found that it was less charged once he’d been given the few secrets the book had held at that point.

He knew the bus routes well, and was able to exit a few blocks from the dark apartment. The sun had long gone down, and when he got to the stairway, his eyes had grown used to the dark.

He didn’t think to switch on the light as he climbed; in that dark place he had become indifferent to whether his bulbs were left glowing for days on end, or left hanging and burned out for weeks.

So long as he didn’t have to look for something he really needed.

His key slipped into his fingers, and he pushed open the door with his free arm.

Uncradling the bag from his left arm, he shouldered it onto the table. He noticed that he was still holding the book. He placed it where it would be noticed and hence returned by the due date. Absently he pocketed his key with the other arm.

He put the milk and butter in the refrigerator, and left the rest in the bag, on his kitchen table.

He noted gratefully that he was tired, peeled off his pants, and slid from the wide, wall-less darkness of the room, to the warmer darkness under his blankets.

A few weeks later, he awoke to another morning. It occurred to him that it was dangerously later in the summer, and so he forced himself to dress, and walk to the nearest newspaper dispenser on campus. He saw that he had time before the next registration, but little enough that he could miss it if he got lazy again. He resolved to buy a calendar.

He effortlessly drifted to the right time and place for a bus that took him downtown, to the bookstore he knew best, and found one splashed with colors and silliness; mostly cartoons and some passing comments on various holidays. It would be easily visible and some time would pass before he would learn to blend it into the wall.

He thought about finding a drugstore he had frequented his first three years in town, one that had large milkshakes for under a dollar. Then he remembered that he was trying to prepare himself for the promptness and rigor that would be demanded in less than a month.

It occurred to him that he had not chosen his classes, and at once he made a decision: There were some basic classes he would have to get out of the way if he were to graduate. If he could clear them away, if he could carry the moments’ promptness through the semester, he would be freer to take other classes; perhaps conclude a major.

At home, he found a pencil, and attached it to the calendar with a string, and hung it on his bathroom mirror. He would remove it to his bedroom when he had gotten into school, but for now it would force him to be aware, and would give him a time to check the days off that he couldn’t avoid.

First, he knew that he had to get rid of the second of two Phy Ed electives. He’d often wondered whether he could cut a deal; now he wanted to see what he could do with the most palatable opportunity. He gazed through the catalog; saw Ballroom Dancing.

He wrote it out on the schedule he had gotten earlier that summer. Even if it would be a large class, he would be assured priority over any underclassman in any class.

He balked at the idea of confronting the math requirement, and thereby resolved to kill it off at a stroke; he took geometry and history of math.

Then, he felt that he needed a class that would let him read. He had taken many literature courses, but not 19th century Romantic Novels; he added it to his complete form.

Finally, he found his alarm clock, and set it from his watch, and plugged it in, by his bed. He set it for 9:30 A.M. He had resolved to start early in the year and in the morning this time, hoping to grow acclimated.

He found, in the last three mornings before registration that he actually beat the alarm by a few seconds. In that time, he slept despite the fact that he left his light on, and missed it burning away as he slept.

One of those days, he went back to sleep, but twice he got breakfast for himself, and once he ambled to the library for another novel, even remembering the mystery about the inspector and the hermit. He was awake, fully so. He had once again conditioned himself to class-day mornings.

His clock and the calendar on the bathroom mirror had left their marks, and as the days grew closer, fear that he would not wake up in time goaded him awake, and slowly solidified into a cold weight under his ribs that grew lighter only if he got out of bed and worked it off. He was almost able to believe he would be allowed another semester of classes, and was able to haul himself along despite the weight his doubt.

It would have to do. Another school year began, and he sloped over to Wasserman with his forms.

4

Smeared with dust and windowgrime, the sunbeam still lit enough of the bed that it was possible to read and write; it would not be necessary to wheedle a light-bulb from one of the boredom–grated clerks at the end of the hall.

Thats’ all I need from you his mind told them, Just don’t charge for the sunlight.

Filker, Edward he wrote. He left his middle initial out from now on, he had decided. This form was the first chance he had had to make that decision. His last name just didn’t merit the use of a middle name to distinguish him from other Edward Filkers. It was what he wanted to be known as; it sounded right and any additional name spoiled the sound.

Part of paying for college myself is that I will keep what I like, get rid of the rest, and pay them good money and time to add whats’ missing He realized that he’d thought this before, that it was becoming a mantra, a cliche.

Cliches are what other people use to tell me to stop thinking he reminded himself.

Yet it was good advice, and one of his bitterest resentments was that he still resented some good ideas because they had been drilled into his head by fiat and epigram like they couldn’t have stood on their own, if they’d let him think about it.

All in the past he told himself. Permanent address demanded no decision from him, and so he got it out of the way. The rest, he saw, might take a little thought. He skipped ahead, until he found what he most cared about on the form, besides the fact that it would get him into Wasserman.

ROOMMATE PREFERENCE: GAY he wrote. It was like endorsing a check to him, or signing your name on the owners’ line; just about the only reason he was filling out the rest. I’ll give you what you want, you give me what I want.

Ed leaned back, rested the back of his long head in his hands. The short bristle felt good; the luxurious tail starting at the nape made it feel better. He liked picturing himself without a mirror.

Some people look like themselves. With a little work, I do.

He closed his eyes, saw the hair, saw blond stubble that would never be a beard or be cleaned off. He saw the boyhood he had kept trapped on his face, that he had held onto so shortly in all other ways. He saw short, wide bones as hard as the muscle they held; the collection of faded blue jeans, the denim vest, the pink triangle pin.

Dude will know where I stand from square one came a rehearsed thought. Easier for all concerned if they take my request seriously, but one way or another, I’ll work something out.

He felt warm and light inside himself then, sure that he’d have his niche and that he’d have to fight for only a little of it, just enough to be sure he still could.

He lay back on his bed, and the dark little room held nothing to disturb him. After a time, the stillness ended, and he hungered.

He finished the forms, knowing the delays that rested in him just below his hopes. He searched for the last place he had tossed his sneakers, donned them, and left to find a hamburger.

5

Amelia Magnolia Rosser passed by the door leading to the window was currently called Entrance Forms; she knew that in a month or so it would be called CASHIER, until the next semester began. She had worked behind that window for her first five years with unfailing vigor and sharpness, and it had won her the right to work behind the window now only as often as needed to break the monotony of her desk job. The younger, newer employees viewed it as a willingness to stay in touch with the lower ranks in the office, and there was something to be said for that idea, Amelia always thought.

Mostly, she knew, if you wanted something done right, you had to have a say in all stages of the process, but had to concentrate on one stage yourself.

She had saved endless extra appointments at the front desk, by knowing when the right information was had somewhere in the college about the student. She had seen that many more appointments were made within some deadline or another, and this, finally, saved even more appointments from being made.

The overall system had been overhauled three times during her years here; once, to become more than a teachers’ school, again with the G.I. Bill and the beginning of Wassermans’ largest endowments, and again because of computers, and she had overseen each change.

Always, though, there was never enough knowledge from the past to avoid the use of common sense. Keeps this job alive she told herself. At least once a week, I have to think things out.

She wondered, just a second, what it looked like outside. perhaps she’d take a glance.

She entered a corridor that led to an exit, and that also bent, to become another corridor; the offices here were safe from the intrusion, or even the notice of passers by. Astutely, Amelia herself had invented the policy whereby an appointment with any of the officials in this back corridor were held in a nearby lounge.

The walk from the office was actually a change of environment rather than an annoyance, and it kept the corridor free of anything but routine paperwork: except all of the informal advice and the extra work and exceptions she had so willingly invited upon her self these many years.

She found herself before her cubicle, unlocked the door, and flipped on the light. That smear of glow was all the day and night she’d know for hours yet; the one curtain here forgotten.

A brief scan found, without second thought, that everything was in order but the pile of entrance requests from out of town, and those were todays’ work, that would be put in order by lunchtime. She had not had to scan the forms from town for many years; she herself had been part of arranging for the local high schools to automatically communicate the top ten percent and the scholarship recipients to Wasserman.

This assured Wasserman a reliable minimum of talented students from in-town, allowed the counselors there to be able to recommend a good college nearby to the children who were eligible, and had made for broader exchange programs of young faculty, campus facilities, and so on. In any case, she reflected, it did save a lot of transcript hunting and paperwork where local kids were concerned.

It saved the admissions committee a lot of time; at Wasserman only about 75% of the out of town applicants had to be reviewed by the admissions committee. Amelia Magnolia Rosser and a handful of other experienced administrators could and often did automatically okay acceptance of new students.

She had definitely earned that privilege, unusual as it was, for she had proven her sharp and scrutinizing judgment when she was on the Admissions Committee. She had often spotted hidden strengths in students who might not have made it otherwise, and weaknesses in promising scholarship holders and athletes.

In time, it was seen by the powers that were, the trustees and the other top administrators, that the sharp second opinions functioned quite well on their own as accurate first opinions; and the admissions committee had dwindled down to the second guessers of maybes and clear exceptions.

It was a smooth day for several hours; most had included the requested two letters of recommendation that would largely assure admittance, and she had to check relatively few references.

There were a few cases where transcripts did not bear out what was claimed on the forms, and these were rejected out of hand; a j-file plummet except the SASE and the fees; a forlorn pile that left little at start and finish.

Then, the first break with routine came, from out of state, and from a part of the form she had never before concerned herself with.

ROOMMATE PREFERENCE: GAY, it said, in large letters.

She certainly knew, commonsensically, that there had been homosexual students at Wasserman long before the subject need be, or would have been allowed to be, considered.

She knew that every so often, in the last few years, that there were letters to the editor in the campus paper calling for some reform or another; she even distantly recalled something about a support network from one of the campus ministries. Never had she been involved in a request that the school use its facilities and discretion to gather and organize gay students.

This is a request for a dormitory roommate she grasped He’ll be living in the same room with someone.

She did not allow this insight to delay her one instant more than the instant needed to see it. She looked across the rest of the form, and it was in order; this persons’ financial situation, in fact, was a model of what was needed to be granted special rates.

He was a transfer student, and his overall record was more than acceptable; there seemed to be a few essay contests thrown in with an above average grade point.

Yet Wasserman’s admission form asked some revealing questions, including the lowest grade, and the lowest quarter Grade point average that the applicant ever had. Amelia had seen it come in handy, and here were some very low figures, as well as a history of two previous campuses. Enough to warrant calling references.

Three calls happened, so routine that she soon forgot all but one detail that itself rarely stuck out: The boy had had a very bad first semester in school, and did not begin exceptional work until the second half of his sophomore year. Another year had passed, and he had maintained his better level of work. She knew the story well.

Worth a double check she reflected but a lot of people make it past the double check. They just didn’t ask the school to actively support a homosexual lifestyle.

She read the letters or recommendation, and noted their enthusiasm for originality and a sense of practical application in this student. One was from a department chair, another from a councilor.

Again, a little better than normal she noted. Well, he’s in. He just isn’t going to have anything done about his roommate preference. We aren’t here to seek out homosexuals. It’s just not going to come up, unless he brings it up himself.

Lunch came, and a new batch, before it happened again. This time, in smaller, lowercase letters. Not only in the same year, but the same day.

This one was fresh from high school A junior high award for a poem, a few honors piled up throughout senior high, enough to place him in the top fifty percent, perhaps, of Wassermans’ students. She noted that he had a medical condition, a minor one, before a double check revealed the request.

Two of them. She had learned long ago the difference between firmness and obstinacy and when she got around to remembering that insight and