Part of me wishes to grill this professor about the particulars of this abrupt course correction – just as part of me is certain he’s in worse shape to drive than I am – but curiosity presents far too strong an allure, and anyway it takes all of a second or two to appraise the situation and determine he likely knows nothing.
“Everett! You with us or what?” Faraday calls out, standing to push in our bar stools, as we’ve finished our final beers and he’s dusted off approximately three quarters of the nachos. And in the dim depths near the bar’s back wall, we can just make out Professor Winslow, somehow chatting with those patio hipsters right now, however improbably, as he slowly turns and raises a single hand to indicate no, he’s just fine. And so the two of us are off, myself and this peddler of college level English whom I scarcely know.
The vehicle in question is a metallic powder blue Infiniti convertible with cream colored leather seats. As we climb into his admittedly fine auto, the thought strikes me that all of us, no matter who we are or where we live, how much traveling we are prone to undertake, we can still strike off at random and within a half hour arrive somewhere entirely foreign to us. Thirty minutes in any direction – this is all it takes to transport beyond the familiar, a notion readily lost amid the drudgery of our everyday routines.
Of course, I am now well beyond a half hour’s reach of anything familiar, and that is okay to the same degree this distance has heightened the bizarreness. Before he’s even turned over the engine, for example, Faraday reaches behind us, and I hear what sounds suspiciously like the plastic button of a mini cooler being pushed in, the lid slid backwards. This impression is further confirmed when another distinctive aural clue, that of someone yanking indeterminate objects out of swishing ice, reaches my ears, followed by most of these actions in reverse leading to the moment he’s returned to an upright position with a pair of cheap beer cans, and extends one in my direction. Sure, why not. I’m confident he knows what he’s doing.
“So you’re the journalist Tom was telling me about?” Faraday shouts, a man well accustomed to driving a convertible, though we’ve only just now backed outward from the slanted slot and pointed our noses to the road out of town. “Doing a profile on the…”
“Yeah,” I roar, the volume serving greater purpose as we begin to pick up a little steam. He nods, though technically this exchange confirmed very little.
After bounding across the railroad tracks and reaching the dead end that is Mt. Chester Road, facing the lake, Professor Faraday pays cursory attention to such trivialities as a stop sign, microscopically slowing down as he veers to the right, then floors it. Now we are reaching deeper into this unfamiliar terrain, featuring mostly high grass marshes rolling gently downward to the brown murk of Waccamol on our left, and the expected assortment of squat brick residences, vinyl sided ranches, crumbling wooden shacks and trailers in even greater states of disrepair, both standing alone and grouped in bunches. But also surprising pockets of opulence, beginning with tricked out and expanded upon mobile homes with such impressive landscaping and lawn trinket arrangement it might almost bring a tear to the eye, to imagine the care and dedication some retired old lady lavished over her ostensibly humble abode. All the way on up to modern two and three story castles, some with gates, bespeaking of a multistate corporation’s CEO, or a highly sought after surgeon.
This being near a body of water and everything, there are of course boats on trailers in seemingly half the backyards, not to mention those with docks extending into the lake, the gently bobbing vessels tethered to them. Eventually, however, we drive past all visible vestiges of the water, right around the time that mileage signs for Odisto begin to appear. The first bears the number 6 beside the name of this town, and even while motoring along at nearly a mile a minute, unable to speak unless shouting over the roar of the wind – and this music Faraday is cranking, which appears to be a Moody Blues greatest hits album of some sort, doesn’t help – the ten minutes and some change which pass in silence from this point onward are admittedly excruciating. Finally, over a series of undulating peaks and valleys in the road, and a speed limit creeping down to 45 and then 35, passing a curious rash on both sides of small ranch style homes with enormous expanses of yard, but virtually nothing else in their spare, sunbaked lawns, the Infiniti slows to a speed which will permit actual conversation.
“So what do you teach up there at Greenlee, anyway?” I holler in a voice which feels perfectly reasonable under the circumstances, yet would nonetheless represent screaming if, say, sitting in someone’s kitchen.
“English 310,” Faraday says, peering over at me from underneath the green plastic visor with that curious gambler’s intensity he’s displayed throughout, almost humorless in a sense, as if explaining what horses I should bet on, or which slot machines were primed to hit.
“Did you have that famous poet? I forget his name – famous guy?”
“What, uh, Lazlo? Rupert Lazlo?” he bellows, looking suddenly like an irascible old crank with his curly, brownish grey hair tumbling out from the visor, no less his red, sun whipped face.
“Yeah.”
“Christ no, that was way before my time,” he manages in much more reasonable tones, as we are turning left at the first intersection and are by appearances bound to be leaving Odisto soon after entering it, without my having a chance to view the town proper. “But, you know, any English professor worth his salt is expected to be well versed in Lazlo. And of course doubly so for us considering where we teach. Although I half suspect the reason he goes through these little waves of trendiness has as much to do with his, eh, let’s say extracurricular antics as anything else.”
“His antics?”
“Well, yeah, for instance there was of course the time he tried to off himself eating a couple hundred aspirin.”
“That happened at Greenlee?”
“Oh yeah, that happened at Greenlee. Also the time he jumped out of a third story window – actually, it was right above where the Village Grill is now, though back then it was this bar called Tea And Biscuit Tavern – and anyway he landed right in the street, the main drag there, really fucked up his leg. On and on with this stuff.”
“Was he trying to kill himself then, too?”
“No I think that was more of a case of his being hopped up on whatever and just goofing around. He had a houseful of people if I remember correctly, some kind of party in his apartment. He was waylaid for quite a while after that episode.”
“Hmm,” I nod, still trying to patch this strange mosaic together in my head, “okay, but what about his poetry?”
“Not bad, you know, all things considered. O betwixt our bones this cloudless night/ the silence carries legions. That sort of thing. The general scholarly impression or whatever you want to call it being that…all these nature references, you know, are really metaphors for losing it over some chick, and gradually going batshit as a result. I mean, I could phrase it better for the classroom, understand, but you get my drift.”
We creak past a number of tall Victorians with dirt and pebble driveways, close to the road, most of them suffering under the weight of years and a canopy of trees. Glancing down, I happen to notice that the car stereo didn’t come factory installed, the only incongruous piece in this otherwise pristine, nearly new ride. It’s one of those late 70s/early 80s models with the six levers you mash in to preset radio stations, and is otherwise affixed with only a cassette player – presumably, the source of our music.
“What happened there?” I ask, pointing at the gadget with a laugh.
Faraday tilts his head by barely perceptible degrees, down and to the right, just enough to make out whatever I’m pointing at without taking his eyes off the road. “Ah, who the hell knows. This car was just a year old when I bought it, and the stereo was already fucked up. Chester just happened to have this one in his barn.”
At each intersection, we pause to pay our respects to the obligatory abandoned stop sign, although every block features greater fields and fewer houses, and wilderness proper soon greets us once more.
“So how do you know Tom Bowman, anyway?” I question, when it becomes obvious we’re not going to enjoy, at least at this early pass, much fluid dialog without my constant prodding.
Though refraining while within town limits, the professor now finishes off the last of his beer, and reaches around to gently rest it on the floor behind him. He also nods as if expecting this line of inquiry, eventually, and says, “Tom I met as a man, so the saying goes, about town. He was never one of my students. Mine is a third year class anyway – not that there’s anything about the material which would require having a couple years under your belt. But such are the stunts one is expected to perform.”
“I’ve heard rumors that Tom could have gone Ivy League. That he had a full ride.”
“And I would believe that. He’s a pretty sharp dude,” Faraday tells me, “and…I think it’s safe to say that the basic impression is that he’s sort of just dicking around. He was dicking around down here – distinguished though our, ahem, heh heh, literature program might be – and he’s dicking around over at EDU. Not that this is an unheard of phenomenon for persons of that age bracket. Or any age bracket. But…in all fairness this is probably a little too trite, and not quite on the mark.”
“Really? How so?”
“Well look at it like this,” he continues, while turning left onto a mostly forested street, as far as I can tell, which almost immediately begins a sharp curve to the right, albeit with a huge chunk of asphalt missing at the apex of the arc, for some reason, a patch dotted in like pointillism with giant white gravel specimens, “he mastered this scene around here pretty damn quickly, and I’m willing to guess the same applies wherever he’s holed up right now, too, in Dayton or whatever.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning that he figured out immediately that what all of this bullshit is really about is networking. Nobody’s going to tell you that of course. In high school it’s study, study, study and up here in Collegeland it’s finance, finance, finance. Pay through the nose and level up a degree or two. Are there legitimate trades to be learned? Yes, I suppose so. Padded with a mountain of horseshit you have to swim through first, however. Because in actuality what you are paying for is the network.”
Soon after we fully round the bend in this side street, a pinkish purple stucco monstrosity looms on his side of the road. A thin strip of forest creeps in like a curled finger from the far side, partially shielding this house’s backside, but otherwise the huge expanse of lawn is completely devoid of landscaping, or any vegetation for that matter – and I know, somehow, before we even pull into the driveway, that this will be Professor Faraday’s domicile. Granted, just two other homes exist further along this short, crooked rural road, before it abruptly terminates against an impenetrable strand of trees. But I am only aware of these particulars after glimpsing this glorious beast of a house, long after my split second intuition is forged. Confirmation arrives when he turns onto this freshly concreted drive, clicks his remote for the garage which is, oddly enough, located not at either end of the house, but rather about three quarters of the way in, scanning from the direction of our approach, south to north.
“My ex called it the maroon mansion,” Faraday notes with a sick, wheezing laugh. I would say he’s read my mind, except he has obviously suffered plenty of barbs concerning this place’s appearance, “actually, I think she picked that up from the neighbors, but…well, what the fuck ever.”
As we coast into the garage, he kills the engine and hops out, leaving the garage wide open in his wake. Continues with this train of thought, further explaining, “all I can say is the color looked good during the planning stages. Even Anne agreed with me on that one…”
But by this point, my mind has already latched onto the next outrage, which in this instance is a winding spiral staircase just beyond the Infiniti’s front bumper. Comprised of unfinished wood fresh from the lumber yard, it leads up to a landing of sorts that, in turn, feeds into the home’s second floor. Still, this bizarre layout is in many respects less horrifying than the angle of ascent, which to the naked eye looks dangerously steep. I have to imagine that’s a broken neck waiting to happen, against which the wrought iron railing offers precious little resistance.
The garage itself is all drywall and smooth, unblemished concrete, with almost no visible junk and only a few hanging tools, such as a metal broom and rake, on hooks off to one side. Appearances would lend one to believe that he’s only recently moved into the place, although something I can’t quite put my finger on, possibly something he’d said, has me thinking that he paid to have this house built, and that a few years have passed in this current state. I would contemplate the matter longer, too, except that Faraday’s already standing on the lone step leading into his kitchen, and has the door open, is already looking back at me with an expression that suggests he’s wondering what the delay is attributable to and what I could possibly be pondering.
Once inside, I encounter an identically spotless kitchen, with a round wooden table just inside the door opening to a breakfast nook and then the sink, stove and refrigerator beyond. The obligatory sliding glass door with a back patio beyond, of course, and a greyish white tile floor beneath where we currently stand. Despite the lack of clutter, however, the same strange aura persists here, that un-nameable sense that this place isn’t so much immaculate as it is unused. Kind of like an RV someone tidied up three years ago but has occupied only a weekend per summer since. I’m trying to figure out how to determine any of this without asking forthright, and decide instead to dart around the issue with other, hopefully leading questions.
“So…you said there was an ex? How long’s that been, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Three years, believe it or not,” Faraday declares, eyebrows launched upward to a degree that would imply I have known him, somehow, and would have expected a different answer. Presently, he is standing on the other side of an open fridge door, as I pace around with my hands clasped behind the back.
“Hmm,” I nod, situated between the kitchen and living room now, an area which continues to display distinct, well, feminine touches, ones I’m assuming didn’t fall under the professor’s purview, such as floral patterned couch, fake flowers in vases, a lavender tint to the walls. He’s dusting, at least – or somebody is, anyhow – but I have a hard time believing he spends a ton of time loafing on that couch, marking papers as the television cradled in this giant wooden entertainment center flickers unattended. “Nice place you got here.”
“Thanks, yeah, I…,” he grimaces, and stoops slightly to scratch one leg, “as you can see I’ve got a number of projects in the air. Spinning plates, whatever you wanna call it. Things do come together eventually, of course. Ever so slowly. Everything takes so goddamn long, though, that’s the frustrating part but I, uh…Oh! I’m sorry – what about you? What’s your story? Ya married?”
“Divorced,” I explain, then use the weighted pause that follows to calculate time, as this is a subject left progressively less and less examined over the years, “it’s been…wow, about a decade now, actually, a little over.”
“Okay, so you know the drill,” Faraday nods in confirmation, adjusting his green plastic visor from the current coordinates, wedged between the table and the breakfast nook, now, apparently en route towards one of the two nearest doors. I observe he’s taken a litany of alcohol out of the refrigerator and placed these bottles or cans on the counter, although I’m not sure to what purpose. And before I ask or he can explain, he’s continued onward, out to the garage.
I use this opportunity to examine his house further, much of which betrays that distant female touch. And yet am startled into a harsh cackle when, beyond the front door and its tiled, square landing area, replete with a bristly rug bearing the simple legend HOME, a buffer between the heavily carpeted stairwell leading straight up to the second floor, I round the corner into another sizeable room. One which might ordinarily be a den or a study, but has absolutely nothing in it, not a single object or decoration. The thick white Berber carpet is as ornate as this barren corner gets, for even the pair of windows, one each on the east and south sides of the house, lack so much as a simple shade or curtain. Then I hear the kitchen door close again and figure this is my cue to return.
“So, yeah, you know,” Faraday announces, breezily, toting the cooler he presumably just removed from that convertible, “maybe a little happy hour action, then a six pack or two at night to wind down here at the house. Some schoolwork on the weekdays, that’s about it.”
“Mmm hmm,” I agree, though this doesn’t sound like my experience at all, “exactly.”
“Yeah so I’ve got the fire ring out back,” Faraday shouts, as he’s now dumping tray after tray of ice cubes from his freezer into the open cooler on the floor, having long since filled it with the countertop bottles and cans arsenal, “figure we’ll mosey on out there, get a blaze going, I don’t know,” he pauses to lift one Coors Light can from the cooler, popping it open as he then extracts a healthy pull. “Possibly Bowman and his fellow miscreants, who knows…,” he mutters in closing, trailing off as he wraps up this little operation and leads the way, cooler in his free hand, to the sliding glass door.
Still, despite the hilarity of this scene, the professor clearly has money, and this is a potentially luxurious home. Luxurious now, even, despite its sparseness, and stemming from what I continue to theorize was a self-constructed blueprint. As such, considering the house, the convertible, his likely salary at Greenlee and a general sweeping tendency witnessed elsewhere around this lake, I’m not exactly surprised to see he has a boat resting on a trailer, sitting perpendicular to the house, between it and that thin tendril of forest.
“Oh, that,” Faraday says, with a dismissive wave in the vessel’s direction, either reading my mind, or divining the rather obvious focus of my gaze. But then after setting his cooler down beside the nearby fire pit, returns to where I am and careens to a halt beside me, hands on hips, as he regards this white ski boat with its navy blue stripe down the middle. “I’ve got a better one than this, actually, but it’s in the shop. Sweet little cabin cruiser. Or really, there’s nothing little about it whatsoever. The windshield’s cracked all to hell, that’s about it. But this thing here,” he laughs and whistles through his teeth, all the while shaking his head like a disappointed parent, “might as well call it a…fishing raft. I mean you could ski behind it, I guess, but…I don’t know, maybe I’ll check on that windshield tomorrow…”
His trailing voice unites with suddenly moving feet, though, as he now meanders off in the direction of the wooded area. Suspecting that he’s on the hunt for kindling, this hunch is soon confirmed when I hear the expected snaps and crunches, the sound of a rustling figure in the brush beyond my sightline. With nothing else to do, I shrug to an audience of no one, and meander over to these pine green metal chairs strewn around the fire pit. Inside the rusty ring, I see a collection of damp looking twigs and cardboard already, while elsewhere, all over this region of the yard, random logs look to have been tossed while blindfolded. For the first time, however, I am actively contemplating the prospect of a nice blaze, and am hoping the forecast isn’t as dim as it might appear. A general gloom and the early onset of evening this time of year aren’t doing the already cool temperature any favors.
Judging from Faraday’s merry expression as he returns with an armload of combustibles, though, he at least believes there will be fire, and this is reassuring. Then again, it would seem he does this sort of thing all the time, so I have scant reason to be nervous. Cheeks ruddy either with exertion or delight or both, he drops the entire pile at his feet, like the opening of the valve, then squats to begin assembling this fire. He pulls a book of matches from the breast pocket of his shirt, and, with his back to me, only turns his head far enough that I can see his mouth move as he shouts, “what is you’re working on, again?” And then before I have a chance to respond, nods at the cooler beside my chair, adds, “help yourself, by the way.”
And then nodding to the cooler beside my chair, adds, “help yourself.”
“Thanks,” I reply, and lean over to grab the proffered beer. Cracking it open with another of these nerves generated shrugs, explain, “but ah…well, I’m one the field jockeys, you might say, for Sports Unbound,” I reply.
“Sports Unbound? What in the hell’s that got to do with these dismal backwoods? And Tom Bowman?”
“Weeeeelll I also as it so happens, you know, freelance a little bit,” I say, adlibbing in a sense, although this line is becoming more natural the farther I integrate myself here, in this scene, “I’m friends with one of Tom’s relatives. He’s just kind of my conduit you might say to this college slash small town America piece I have earmarked for another magazine.”
The professor is struggling with his own slapped together project, if body language is any indication, although I do witness a couple puffs of smoke. And anyway he is grinning, I can just barely discern, with raised eyebrows as he notes, “stick around this crew long enough, and I’m sure you’ll have plenty of material.” But then in slightly more serious, inquisitive tones, he asks, “you written anything I would have read, though?”
“Probably so, yes,” I answer, truthful if with a forthrightness I probably wouldn’t manage minus a buzz, “if you’re into sports at all, that is. Not that you would remember it.”
“Eh, somewhat. What about you, though? Are you actually into sports?”
“I used to be,” I admit with a weary sigh, “well, I guess I still am, to some extent. It’s just this mindless diversion you find yourself staring at sometimes. Eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night, I mean, you’re at some bar by yourself at the end of a long day, you just wanna have a couple of drinks and a really late dinner in peace. Otherwise it’s just turned into this statistical abyss. Less and less about anything normal people would find interesting.”
“Hmm,” Faraday says, standing now, smacking his hands with force on his pant legs, in an apparent move to dust off any ash. “What’s some of the stuff I would have read? And statistical abyss how? That’s sounds kinda interesting.”
I rub my chin while contemplating for a few seconds which moments of the admittedly limited highlight reel I might wish to share, before responding. “Well, I was pretty proud of this one article for a little while, on the slugging percentage stat in baseball. Overrated. That’s something you might know which is also exactly what I’m talking about.”
“Nnnnnnn. Ehhhhh,” Faraday shrugs and shakes his head.
“Recently I did this pretty in depth profile on Sugar Ray Leonard, too. And strangely enough I like covering women’s golf and women’s tennis, although for whatever reason I can’t get into the WNBA at all.”
“It’s because they’re so mannish,” he shoots back, without missing a beat, which is all the more striking in that this thought had already occurred to me on numerous occasions, although I was afraid to ever say so out loud.
“Well but so anyway there’s always somebody who has dug into the stats deeper than you. It’s a bottomless void. And at some point I think you do kind of have to draw the line and say, you know what, who gives a fuck? Who won the goddamn game? It’s like my colleague the other day was trying to tell me Joe Montana’s stats weren’t really all that spectacular. To which my response is, well yeah, but he won some big games. He won the biggest games, over and over again. Isn’t that the point? Does it really matter how or why this happened?”
“I need something drier,” Faraday states with a pained grimace, trudges off toward the house.
While he’s gone, I begin to contemplate the gnawing pit in my stomach, where dinner should instead reside. When working, it’s not all that uncommon for me to skip breakfast and lunch both, to subsist on one meal. And in this I’m by no means alone – it’s essentially the default mode for my peer group at work, at least those of us who are single. Somewhere along the line we realized that eating breakfast only made us hungrier throughout the day, and that this fed into the observation that a huge lunch while chained to a desk job was an enormous mistake. Therefore, the lone meal. But what a dinner this is! Typically anywhere from three to seven members of our loose horde uniting at some modern, sporty grille on the outskirts, near our office, although even if solo, the routine doesn’t change much: a few stiff drinks and the largest platter an appetite will allow, a combination that magically, along with the somewhat-to-very late hour, combines in the precise alchemy needed to permit passing out pretty much as soon as we arrive at our respective homes, rise to do it all over again.
Faraday returns with a stack of newspapers and ads culled just now from parts interior, clamped tightly with one arm flung across the top and another cradling the packet underneath. He’s also clutching one of those fireplace starting gadgets in his top hand, the red and black plastic click stick, and is chuckling darkly to himself as he breezes past me, kneels to attend the task at hand once more.
“So, right…the statistical abyss…I think I see what you mean, there…interesting, interesting…,” he mutters.
These vague assurances leave me feeling the exact opposite, however. “Sorry if I was rambling a bit, there,” I laugh, “I keep telling myself I don’t care about this crap anymore, and it’s mostly true. But every so often…”
“That’s cool, that’s cool,” he cheerfully grumbles, standing as this vague teepee of materials he’s assembled, however improbably, bursts at last into flame. Hands on hips he appraises his handiwork, then bends to regard me from underneath the green plastic visor. “It’s in our blood. Whatever the hell we’re doing. Presumably we’re drawn into these inane pursuits for some reason, and, well. Hmm. We can get as burned out and pissy as we want but on some level it’s still there.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I agree, chuckling and then sighing as one conjoined blur.
“Lord knows I keep telling myself to mail it in, but can only ever partially, uh…”
Whether he is finished with this thought or not, this conversation is derailed by an eruption of corroded muffler, as two vehicles burst onto the scene in a flash. It seems as though they’ve only just rounded that gravel corner in the road and are in the next instant upon us, so swiftly I half tumble out of my chair craning to face this advancing force directly. Driving side by side through the open lawn on the side of Faraday’s house, and in this descending twilight I can only initially make out the one closer to me, a faded blood red SUV with flaky rust patches around the edges. Not until they have parked and killed the engine on their throbbing music do I realize the other car is my rental, and that collectively we’ve just been invaded by an army of seven or eight.
“So there’s that,” Faraday concludes, offering a tight smile before he turns his attention to our newest arrivals.
Darkness descends upon the proceedings in more respects than one. Apart from a couple of grinning, “what’s up?” style nodding gestures from Benny and Tom, respectively, I sit in silence while night settles in – and am okay with this. At the intersection of that place where you’re both more than a little drunk but also feeling out of place, not sure what you’d have to offer conversationally even if you were of fully sound mind and body, I’m happy to absorb the swirl of random chatter around me, further enhanced by some surprisingly decent classic rock music someone is streaming from a phone. This allows me to vacillate between paying attention and zoning out, entertained absently by the fire and the tunes, although it does occur to me that if I want to capture authentic quotes on future outings, I might want to employ the digital voice recorder. Much to my relief, though, somehow an enormous bag of sour cream and cheddar potato chips ends up on the wire mesh table beside me, which I half devour.
“What amazes me is that it takes a guy two minutes, tops, to shower properly, but you’re still filthy! All of you! All the time! You can’t even manage that!”
Some girl is ranting behind me, in the glow of car headlights someone left burning despite the security lamp blazing on the backside of Faraday’s house. And meanwhile, an interested male is asking Tom Bowman about the whereabouts of his sister.
“Yeah…I don’t think she’ll be down this week. Her leg’s still in a cast from that snowboarding mishap.”
“How’d you manage, anyway? I know you asked those guys to call off work at the last minute, but did even bother?”
“Are you kidding me? I had this all planned out weeks ago.”
I’m half wrenched around in my chair and am able to witness both participants of this exchange. Tom’s conversational partner is an exceptionally lanky figure I’ve not seen before, possessing what appear to be abnormally long arms. He has curly obsidian hair and a too wide, tall toothed grin, is wearing a long sleeved black shirt to combat the tumbling mercury of this late spring night. While not exactly an expert on what females find attractive these days, it strikes me as unlikely that Tom’s sister, wherever she is, reciprocates this interest. As for Bowman, he seems tall, handsome, well dressed and witty, and his popularity would appear to float beyond the reach of questioning, wherever it is we travel. Alicia or no Alicia, I’m guessing he does alright. But then again, who knows, I could be wrong about this – it’s already becoming apparent that painting any sort of in depth character portrait about my intended subject might prove nigh impossible, because there will forever be too many people around, too many distractions. At this rate, I might never know much about the guy.
My brain hurts just to dance around the edges of properly considering this stuff. Even as sleeping arrangements have not been discussed, and I also find that subject too exhausting to contemplate right now. As it’s not yet 10pm, and the prospect of either outlasting a bunch of people and seeing how this plays out, or crawling away and finding some quiet corner of the house to crash, or asking Faraday outright if I can stay here, all collectively fail to inspire me in any fashion, I’ve attempted to slow down my canned beer consumption to a trickle. Which is easier said than done considering there’s a cooler within arm’s reach and nobody’s really much talking to me. I could of course figure out who has my keys – in all likelihood, that would be Brad Davis – and motor off into the night, although this doesn’t seem like the wisest idea available for plucking from the cosmos at this moment. Although I am now thinking, maybe Brad could drive me somewhere himself, an idea that suddenly gains traction as a magical, glowing, heaven sent epiphany when he somehow materializes before me, standing with his back to the fire, arms behind him as well, as he’s turned and facing the crowd with some curious mixture of boredom, longing, jealously and contempt splashed across his features.
“Heh heh. How’s that paper coming along?”
I think he glances at me briefly, judging from a barely perceptible tilt of the head, although the glint of that insanely bright security light, reflected from his glasses, makes this impossible to confirm. But then the slight uptick, in essence confirming my perception, and a return to glaring at the masses. “Eh, enough progress for one day, I guess. I finished a page. Well, half a page. I’m really kind of hoping this Professor Faraday might give me a few minutes of his time tonight, though, actually. I hear he teaches English, so…although you’re a professional writer, right? I mean, I know we talked about this earlier, but…”
“Tonight might not be best,” I tell him.
“Oh!” he exhales, sharply, chin drooping at an angle which finally reveals his beady, though apologetic eyes. “I’m sorry! I just thought…”
“No, it’s cool, it’s cool,” I chuckle, waving him off, “it’s just that I’m kinda…but anyway – what are you taking, again?”
He clears his throat and replies, dutifully earnest, “well, I hope to major in engineering! It’s kind of a family thing, a thing…uh…with my family. But, ah, you know…they want to you to have, like, this well-rounded, um…so…Greek philosophy. It’s a paper about Greek philosophy. But I’m telling you, whew, I’m really…” He trails off with a shake of the head, to indicate his level of sorrow.
“Well, trust me, it does get easier,” I tell him.
At this moment, a pair of slender, sharp looking blonde girls, college age, toting clear plastic cups filled with dark brown mixed drinks – I’m speculating that these are alcoholic, anyway, in what seems a fairly safe assumption – approach the fire in tandem, giggling at a volume as high as their murmured discussions are low. And though none of this is even obliquely connected to Brad, though they’re not paying him the least bit of attention, he sidesteps twice to his left, away from them. His discomfort is making me squirm, somehow, and I feel the need to bumble through a coda, to combat this uneasiness.
“Like I was saying earlier, if you would’ve seen how I started out my college days…wow,” I conclude, shaking my head, now, lost for a moment myself, within a few painfully select memories of those days.
“What’s your deal tonight, anyway?” a crotchety sounding Faraday croaks behind us, his tone arresting enough that all three people in front of me turn to view the scene over my shoulder, and I do the same. “You think I haven’t noticed? You’ve been sipping on bottled water all day, but you still kinda look like hell!”
Tom, the obvious target of this broadside, is surrounded by a handful of people, as is the professor, although half the width of the lawn separates them. Faraday stands in place grinning, which slices through the harshness of his delivery, and also suggests a continuation of some running jest. For his part, meanwhile, Bowman smirks and shouts, “yes indeed! Whoever said you weren’t my mentor? I’ve been trying to keep up with you – and failing!”
And yet Faraday is not far off the mark, somehow, even if he’s misdiagnosing the particulars. Despite refraining from alcohol for this hush-hush sleep deprivation stunt, he’s looking exhausted already. Not for the first time today, I’m wondering what the record is for such a stunt. Wired drug users apparently stay awake for days on end, and since those chemicals clearly don’t feature any health benefits, it seems obvious that doing so without the drugs wouldn’t kill you, despite urban legend claims. You would presumably simply be unable to go on at some point. For some reason I will always remember that when the Baltimore Orioles began their 1988 season in historically miserable fashion, one of their announcers volunteered to go without sleep until they won a game – and this is the first thought which leaps to mind right now, contemplating the subject. It seems like a topic we should have heard more about, and have a definitive answer concerning, though this does represent a curious gap, one which I don’t remember discussing with anyone, ever.
Without much else going on at the moment, I extract my phone from a pants pocket and begin researching the subject online. Though the world’s leading encyclopedic site, this black hole of knowledge which will somebody eat up every extant printed word, has its fair share of highly vocal detractors, I find it useful and reliable, so long as you verify that the listed links connect to reputable sources themselves. And much to my surprise, the documented record for days without sleep is just over eleven, achieved by a high school student, Randy Gardner, clear back in 1964. Since then, others have laid claims to punching through this mark, though none supplied the necessary proof, nor done so under constant clinical observation as had this Gardner.
As is often the case when sucked into the time evaporation portal of the internet, a phenomenon millions if not billions of sleepless adults can relate to, in bed with their electronic devices for hours beyond those intended (said devices having superseded the television in some respects, though this too is often flickering still in these same bedrooms, an undercurrent of light and further background noise we also can’t live without), clicking on each link in turn propels me deeper into this labyrinth, some of these passages dead ends, to be sure, but much of it highly fascinating, even as at some point there is no reasonable hope of remembering everywhere I’ve been, or returning to some of those pivotal entrances.
The next thing I know, during the course of nursing a single beer, and offering robotic small talk to anyone drifting into my periphery, the truck leaves, the security light is blessedly extinguished, and, while never observing the disappearance of any specific person, it’s after midnight and I notice Tom’s gone, Brad’s gone, and with the audible goodbyes of those two blondes – driving off with a third figure, some quiet, clean cut male who’d arrived expressly to whisk them away – it is suddenly somehow just me, Professor Faraday, Benny, and some crazy looking older man with a Kenny Rogers beard and this stringy, white and grey streaked mullet.
He’s sitting mostly around the other side of the fire, at maybe two o’clock to my six. As for the blaze, though sputtering at various junctures due to inattention, with Faraday now crouched beside it, feeding fuel, the flames are roaring to life all over again. Music still plays in much more subdued fashion from someone’s phone amid the peaks and valleys of empty bottles and cigarette packs on that table. Benny stands to my left, continuing to pound the sodas, and unless I am out of my mind, the old man in the chair sure seems to be rambling at length about having been on some reality show with Ozzy Osbourne.
Then again, I am not fully paying attention. Could not tune in 100% right now if I wanted to in this weary state, perhaps, while also preoccupied with thoughts of tomorrow. Somehow I am going to need to mine a sports angle from this odyssey, although that might prove difficult if today is any example. A hearty meal first thing in the morning goes without saying. I intend to both find a little more time for picking Tom’s brain and also brushing up on sleep deprivation, which might prove a useful thread somehow if I can bring it back to sports. But next on the agenda, I am hoping, though not quite ready to come right out and ask, is the question of where I will crash. Maybe I can just sleep in this chair, though that might turn a little chilly if and when this fire ever dies.
“Just you and me, maaaan! Whew! We ran the gauntlet!” Benny is cheering, my exhaustion verified when it takes a few ticks to register that he’s speaking to me.
I glance up at his grinning, maniacal countenance, a gleaming apparition still, somehow, in his collared shirt and perfectly gelled hair, for all intents a well-dressed ghost right now. But he happens to also hold his beer bottle in the direction of mine for a toast, except that when I swish my can around, to gauge its possible contents, I realize it’s empty. “Wait a second,” I tell him, holding up the index finger of my left hand, while I reach for the cooler with my right. What the hell.
After the chiming canisters ceremony is complete, I take a couple token sips. And Benny might be right about our outlasting a bunch of other folks today, but I feel this observation demands qualifying. That net surfing odyssey did have the unintended benefit of slowing down my pace quite a bit. And I also have reason to suspect this strange old man and Faraday both may have started drinking even earlier than we.
Nonetheless, Benny’s endurance is impressive, and I’m compelled to ask, “have you kept up this pace all day? Non-stop?” Because as exhibit Z, he is in fact twisting off another cap even as I’m posing this question.
“You know it man!” he beams down at me.
“I have to admit this is quite a feat,” I tell him, “you’ve got me beat, even. What’s your secret?”
Benny gives every indication of pondering the inquiry with complete seriousness before replying. “To be honest with you, I think it’s ‘cause I work out so much. All the time. I always find a way to get some exercise in.”
“Workout, hell,” Faraday dismisses, and I can only tell he is looking in our direction based upon the flames dancing across the green plastic bill of his visor, “what it takes is practice! Anyone can rip off a good night, but…you’ll notice the three oldest, or should I say most experienced, people who were out here tonight are still in the mix. Everyone else is toast. We’re just getting started!”
“Ha ha, that’s right, babes,” Kenny Rogers with a mullet says.
Still, while I would certainly like to humor myself that the professor knows his material, there is probably a great deal of truth to Benny’s notion about staying in shape. “All the time? I ask, “what about a day like today? What could you have done today? I mean I know you guys disappeared for a while…”
Benny nods and explains, “I was just gettin ready to explain my routine. Six days a week. I exercise six days a week. Half the time I lift, the other half I run. So today? No. I always take Mondays off.”
“But this was Sunday,” I am compelled to blurt out.
He blinks a couple of times and replies, “yeah, that’s what I meant.”
