Slonim Woods 9 Read online

  Gabe got me a job driving the on-campus student shuttle from midnight to three a.m., which mostly involved me finding the highest speeds I could reach on the straightest back roads or idling in some dorm driveway, listening to Sufjan Stevens as I watched the wind buffet the pine trees. Once, while circling the campus, I accidentally hit a possum as it darted across the road. As I waited at a light, I kept glancing at my rearview mirror, where I could see its body bending and snapping like a beached fish. For hours, I had to drive the same route over and over, passing the circle of dark red blood that grew around the corpse as snow slowly began to fall, which turned the ball of dark fur into a pink lump. I prayed that no one would get into the van, forcing me to explain what had happened.

  Other nights, I recorded the midnight radio show I ran with Gabe and Max, The Endless Pajama Cycle. Max had the most eclectic music taste of anyone I knew, and we let him run the music most of the time. Otherwise, the three of us joked on air about school, riffed on imaginary scenarios, discussed our ideas about life, and took the occasional phone call from one of our six listeners. We would draft the strangest Facebook messages we could think of and send them out to everyone at school to drum up interest.

  In the upside down ocean of another utopia grows a neutral tree which is mostly calcified. In it is a steadily disappearing tabby cat whose misgivings are mostly undeserved. He tells you he is unsure if you can handle the destabilized bureaucracy of revolutionary red pandas on the road ahead. On your travels, you encounter an underground fighting force of axe-wielding badgers, a wise red hound who runs the moving forest with a compassionate fury, and a black bear who can only be awakened by the utterance of his true name. The badgers give you a traveling axe, which comes with a convenient carrying case. The hound shows you the ways of the forest, and gives you a bowl of finely ground mushrooms, only to be used in the direst of situations. Finally, the bear gives you a smallish transistor radio, the music of which is the only sound capable of penetrating his endless sleep, besides the sound of his true name. If you’d like to listen, click on this link. To take advantage of the magical transistor radio’s ability for two-way communication to call in, use these numbers.

  The rest of the time I watched The Office with Max and his friend Raven, who by the end of the year would begin dating. There wasn’t much time for studying, so I left most of it until the last minute—we all did. There was a name for it: “conference week,” when everyone actually wrote the papers they were supposed to have been working on all semester.

  * * *

  On one of many occasions just like it, I got back to my bedroom in the middle of the night and heard through the door Santos, Talia, and Isabella having one of their long philosophical conversations, which always seemed to be directed by Talia. I could never quite figure out what they were talking about or why it mattered so much to them: politics, how to be a good person, what they had learned in one of their philosophy classes. I turned around and headed to my friend Claudia’s apartment at the end of the hall. She let me in and we chatted on the couch in her living room for hours, not even noticing that the night had ended until the room started lightening up on its own.

  As the sky grayed, we banged around in the kitchen, suddenly ravenous. The cat Claudia had smuggled into the apartment, an aggressive unspayed gray stripey thing named Darja, rolled around somehow angrily on the linoleum. Pets were barred from campus and assiduously hunted down by campus security. Darja, so far, had survived undiscovered. Claudia plunked down at the small laminate kitchen table while I rooted around the fridge for eggs. Every Sunday morning back in New Jersey my dad and I would make breakfast together, so this should have been a cinch. I hadn’t cooked at all this year, if you didn’t count failed attempts at deep frying with Gabe. I threw an egg in the pan, then grabbed curry powder, cumin, and cayenne off the counter and dusted haphazardly. We ate greedily off the two cleanest plates we could find. It was delicious. With a little yolk in the messy facial hair I’d let grow in over the past few weeks, I looked up to see Claudia’s roommate Vita pass across the living room and out the front door, probably on the way to her first class of the morning. “I’ve got to go,” I said to Claudia as I grabbed my backpack off the floor and rushed after Vita. “I’ll see ya later.”

  In the greasy light of the hallway, I heard the stairwell door slam closed just as I exited Claudia’s. Damn. Our apartment was just down the hall, and it was well past time for me to take a shower and get my things together before class. This building was on the edge of campus, right on the line between Bronxville (the fancy, “just a hop, skip, and a jump from the city” suburban retreat for Manhattan elite) and Yonkers (the disenfranchised suburb of the Bronx). All of the brochures for Sarah Lawrence squarely located it in clean, flowery Bronxville, but its location would be more accurately described to me by one teacher as “Bronkers.”

  When I got back to my apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about Vita, her pale hair, how she’d looked when I saw her the other day ordering a cup of coffee at “The Pub,” our on-campus café, or how graceful she was when she played ultimate Frisbee, a sport I’d taken up partially at Gabe’s urging, but mostly because she was on the team. The other day I’d watched her run for a pass that was a bit too long, dive for the Frisbee, catch it in midair, and fall into a perfect roll. Someone told me she’d studied acrobatics and circus in Europe before coming to Sarah Lawrence, which felt simultaneously incomprehensible and inevitable.

  I pushed dirty dishes out of the way in our kitchen sink to make enough room to fill a glass with water. Vita would never like me, and why should she? Whenever I saw her, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I believed there was some quintessential person, a confident, impressive version of myself chained up inside, trapped by my fear, who said with ease the things that I imagined myself saying when I was lying awake at night. Feeling useless, I crossed the room to my dresser, tiptoeing so as not to wake up Santos, who was softly snoring in his twin on the other side of the room. By now the sun was glimmering above the hill for which the building, I assumed, had been named. I picked up a briarwood pipe I had purchased at an antiques shop on St. Mark’s, the touristy avenue where you could find a sanitized, nostalgic version of the East Village’s former seediness, packed it with a mix of tobacco and weed, and smoked by the window.

  I had my literature class at eleven a.m. Perched on the windowsill was a potted flower I’d bought at the Bronx botanical garden, now dead, and a surprisingly healthy weed plant I’d propagated from some scrap seeds. Shit. I have my literature class at eleven a.m. I hadn’t thought about that when I’d started almost automatically to smoke. I felt plastered to my bed. I looked at the ceiling. There was a rusty stain just above my head, from what? I was more than halfway through the school year, and it barely made sense to me how I had gotten here. I couldn’t quite track the days, and felt like I was floating through a strange version of life, a life that did not feel like my own. I certainly didn’t feel like I had earned it. I barely registered my classes as they came and went. In fact, my whole life felt like a class I hadn’t done the homework for, like there had been a day, or multiple days, of orientation I must have missed. Often I would nod off partway through a class, exhausted from lack of sleep, but I’d mastered the art of propping my head on my fist in such a way that it appeared I was paying attention, or so I believed. In Sarah Lawrence’s classes of ten to fifteen students, all seated around one big table, I probably wasn’t getting away with anything.

  The literature class I had this particular morning was different. Angela, the teacher, made books feel tangible, like soil to dig into, like they were composed of these vast, interlocking mechanisms that were impossible to diagram all at once. She made them sexy, somehow. In one class, she pointed out that the soaked-through napkin under a beer glass in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” not to mention the beaded curtain through which flies would pass, was a symbol for a ruined prophylactic. She used that word, “prophylactic,” which I couldn’t remember ever having heard, and others like it: “liminality,” “mimesis,” “diaphanous.” For the first time since before high school, I felt like I was actually learning. I was so excited, I’d begun actually reading all of the homework, which I hadn’t done for a class in years. In one of the individual conferences between students and professors that Sarah Lawrence requires, I’d shared with this teacher the one thing I thought made me stand out, the one thing I was good at: a poem I’d written. I’d chosen one about my mom. We’d ended up sitting in her office for hours talking about literature and family.

  I managed to swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand. I opened the top drawer of my standard-issue dresser. As I stared at the rows of socks and boxers, I could see the overwhelming array of possibilities before me: this next hour before class, this day, the rest of this year, the rest of my life. It felt like I didn’t know who I was. What was I defined by? What I thought other people wanted and a weed habit? I didn’t know what I was, but “stoner” didn’t feel right. Everything in my life suddenly was wrong: I had made the wrong choices, and now I couldn’t even relate to the things I owned, the clothes I was wearing, the thoughts in my head.

  I was standing on a precipice, in what my teacher would call a “limen,” ahead of me the branching paths of my future getting narrower and narrower, behind me an open field of seemingly random, inexplicable events that had led here. What would happen if I kept going in the wrong direction: chose the wrong pair of socks, the wrong underwear? What made anything happen, and over what did I have any control? I tried to narrow it down, and got nowhere, the anxiety mounting until getting dressed, much less leaving the dorm, felt impossible. I didn’t make it to class that da
y. I sent an email explaining that I was coming down with something.

  As freshman year was winding to a close and my nineteenth birthday approached in June, my romantic relationships, or lack thereof, felt more and more important. Summer was around the corner, and I spent the hot late-spring days sitting on the floor of my room with the window open, ripping printer paper into tiny squares, then folding those into intricate triangles. I’d read online about a Japanese tradition of making five hundred tiny pieces of paper into a giant swan and giving it to your beloved. I had been doing origami since middle school, making small boxes, then more intricate flowers, frogs, turtles. I would fold paper in school assemblies or under my desk in class. It felt better to do something with my hands than to just…be there.

  When I finally finished the swan a few weeks before the end of second semester, I walked it down the hall to Claudia and Vita’s room. Vita, I knew, would be going back home to California for the summer once the semester ended. The moment I knocked on their door, I realized how insane I looked. How would I explain this? What would I even say? I tried to hold the swan casually despite its delicacy. When Claudia answered the door, I quickly gave her a hug with one arm, holding the swan slightly behind my hip. As surreptitiously as I could, I sat down in their living room and placed the swan on the floor next to my chair. Vita’s bedroom door opened, and she sat next to Claudia on the couch, resting her head on Claudia’s leg. From that vantage, it was almost impossible for her not to see the swan. As we chatted about summer plans and the impending conference week, during which we had to produce a twenty-five-page paper for each of our three classes, I felt the cheap polyester couch inhaling me. Darja the cat wandered out from the open doorway and presented herself in the middle of the room. She was going through heat, which I’d never seen before. My cats growing up were boys, neutered. Claudia laughed. Finally, I saw Vita’s eyes narrow, and she asked, “Hey, what’s that thing?”

  I coughed. “Oh, this! Yeah. I’ve just been making it and I thought I’d show you. It’s an origami swan.”

  They both nodded. “That’s really cool, Dan,” Vita said. I didn’t know what else to say, or what I’d wanted. I’d thought somehow she would know it was for her. But she didn’t, and the conversation moved on. I couldn’t believe that for weeks I’d thought it made perfect sense to bring this monstrosity here, a physical representation of my inability to just say the words “Do you want to go out sometime?” Unsure what to do, I made up an excuse for going back to my apartment, hoping no one would notice the swan on the floor until it was too late and Vita had no choice but to take it home with her.

  A few minutes later, Claudia knocked on my door. Under her arm she had the swan, which she held out to me. “You forgot this,” she said. Later that week, I gave it to my literature professor as a farewell gift.

  * * *

  It seemed obvious that, if we could pull it off, the loose group of friends who had formed around the third floor of Hill House should try to find a way to live together in our sophomore year. When we talked about it in our apartment, Talia took the lead. According to her, Slonim Woods would be the best place to live on campus. We’d each get our own private room and would have a big modern living room and kitchen to share. We’d be pretty much at the center of campus. All we needed were eight people for the application, so we gathered them: Gabe, Max, Santos, and me from our original apartment; Talia and Isabella, Santos’s friends; Claudia from down the hall; and, finally, we rounded out the eight with Juli Anna, a friend of mine from poetry class.

  When sophomore year began, I stood on the second-floor landing of Slonim Woods 9, looked down on our living room, and thought, This is perfect. The floor was a strange gray-beige tile, broken in places. The walls were all exposed brick. Next year, my junior year, I would study abroad—by some fluke I had gotten into a school out in the English countryside, a concept so inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t think about it until it happened—but for now, I had everything I could possibly want. Our windows looked out on a cliff and trees, the curated nature of Sarah Lawrence. I still didn’t know Talia and Isabella all that well, but I was living with my friends. People I loved. People who were full of energy. People who were complicated but kind. People who liked to do the same things I liked to do, like play Super Smash Bros. on my GameCube and throw parties and dance on the coffee table.

  We did all of these things as the year began. Then Talia gathered us all in the living room to tell us that her dad was getting out of jail.

  * * *

  By coincidence, Talia and I had attended the same high school back in New Jersey. She was a few years older than me, so we’d never crossed paths. What I didn’t know, but would learn later on, was that she hadn’t finished high school. When her parents divorced, Talia’s mom, who according to Talia was evil and abusive, had stolen Talia’s younger sister, Ava, and devoted all of her energy to destroying Talia’s dad, Larry.

  Larry, we’d learned, was an incredible human being. He’d been a marine, and then spent years working for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He’d been a liaison for Mikhail Gorbachev when he visited the United States. He’d helped negotiate the end of the Kosovo War, and had a letter to prove it, thanking him for his invaluable contribution. He’d become close friends with Bernie Kerik, the police commissioner of New York, and was even the best man at Kerik’s wedding. However, Talia informed us, when Larry discovered that the commissioner was involved in some corrupt dealings, he went to the FBI. Just as Larry was taking the risk of going up against one of the most powerful law enforcement officers in the country, Talia’s mom divorced him. She then worked with Kerik to frame Larry for custody violations, landing him in jail and giving her an impenetrable case to take their two daughters.

  Talia, still in high school, had rejected her mom’s custody and emancipated herself in a show of loyalty to her dad. Minutes from the mall in Bridgewater, New Jersey, where I’d been seeing Sacha Baron Cohen movies, eating orange chicken in the food court, and trying out iPods in the Apple store, Talia was living in a homeless shelter.

  Talia had told me and everyone else all of this again and again. If you sat with her in the living room, if you tried to grab a plate from the kitchen cabinet while she was cooking, if she cornered you in the hallway outside the bathroom, whenever we might interact with her, it was like a lecture series on Larry and Talia’s misfortune you had signed up for. I blamed myself for my own discomfort around her—if I were a better, less selfish person like Isabella and Santos, I would’ve sat down to listen more often. But it was undeniable: Talia was a hero. Larry was a hero. And now he was getting out.

  * * *

  Talia’s dad arrived in the morning, and he wasn’t alone. The front door of Slonim Woods 9 opened to a landing, then up a few steps and you were in the wide-open living room. We knew he was coming. It was Talia’s big day, years of waiting building to this: the return of her father. As usual, most of us were strewn around the living room, while some were at class or seeing friends. I happened to be coming down from upstairs when the door opened. He looked small, at first. Maybe it was because he was still standing in the entryway. Maybe it was the backpack strapped to his back, which in some ways made him look like a schoolkid. He was round, I noticed, his head gleaming like a tan cue ball. As he stamped up the steps, with friends filing in behind him, his daughter rushed across the room and jumped into him, pressing herself into his chest.

  One of the men stepped forward and introduced himself as Lee Chen. Lee had a long, black ponytail reaching down the back of his dark suit. Behind him was an older man who seemed gruff, but whose eyes watered as he introduced himself as a detective and an old friend of Larry’s. Bringing up the rear was Iban, in his twenties, tan and sharp-edged, who Larry referred to as a “fellow marine.” These men made a point of shaking each of our hands in a sort of procession, as Talia disappeared further into her father’s thick arms, almost invisible in his embrace.