Moving Is Difficult

The Rutherford Common Room, at least the bottom floor, reminded me of a gymnasium in an elementary school. Like the gym in my elementary school—I think, it had been quite a while since then, to be honest—the floors were wooden, the lights were fluorescent and flickered, and there were a whole shitload of scuff marks.

It was a two-level room, the bottom of which resembled the home plate of a baseball diamond. Two of the were glass, and faced Eliot Hill’s footpath, with a nice view of the library on the crest of the University’s hill. The entrance to the common room, one of them, at least, led in through one of the winding hallways that went right by Rutherford Bar. Opposite the windows, there were a few entrances to the Bar.

The second floor – or first floor if you’re European – led to a game room that held a few disheveled pool tables. For the most part, the game room up top was empty, as most people at UKC would rather get blackout drunk than anything else. (For that, more than anything else, they paid three thousand pounds a year. They sure as hell didn’t get that amount of value from their education.) This semi-functional alcoholism was assisted by way of having a bar in every living quarters on campus. Along the walls of the Common Room were couches and tables, set up with chairs. I imagine that the intended use of this area was for students to study here, however, whenever I walked in I saw groups of people playing Dungeons and Dragons and drinking; talking football and drinking; playing poker and drinking; and sleeping after drinking.

I was there because it was time for the first dance rehearsal, and I was shitting myself in fear. Not because I was about to embarrass myself in front of people—I was counting on that, actually; I’d been working on an absurd accent reminiscent of the battlecruiser admirals in StarCraft—but because I’d inherited a very inconvenient gene from my father: The Not Being Able to Dance Gene.

And yes, I understood that this was a musical, and that, thus, I would have to dance. However, when I auditioned, I didn’t quite believe that I would get the role. I expected to get told “Yes, you were fine, but we found someone who was beyond fine and actually good, so goodbye.” That, obviously, did not happen, and I found myself in quite the predicament of being unable to move with any semblance of rhythm in a setting that required a person to have quite a bit of rhythm.

As such, the cast of Fiddler, the specific number of which eludes me at the moment because it’s been a year (oy) since then, stood in four lines in the middle of the room, facing Jamie the Choreographer, a guy who’d won a European dance championship and was now spending a lot of time with a bunch of schmucks who’d rather be drinking. And now, he stood in front of all of us, doing a dance that I vaguely remembered seeing from my synagogue days as a kid, when we had electives in Hebrew School, and one of those was Dance.

“So then you do one of these,” he said, kind of squatting and shuffling to the side. Think Zoidberg’s scuttle from Futurama, and then mix it with less jerky movements and more along the lines of stepping in time to “Hava Nagilah.” “And then raise your hand up like this,” he raised his hand into the air, palm up. Kind of the anti-heil Hitler. “No, don’t do that,” he said to one of the people in the line behind me. “That’s a Nazi salute.”

The room erupted into laughter and then started chattering like a group of five year olds getting ready for recess.

“Hey! Hey, no! Hey!” He shouted, trying in vain to get everyone’s attention. He clapped his hands, but it led to nothing.

Laura bolted up from the couch and shouted, “Hey!”

Everyone shut up.

She harangued the cast, and after a bit, we shut up and started practicing how to step to the side in time with the music.

Of course, I couldn’t get it. This was my people’s dance—in a way—and I couldn’t get it. “Pfff,” I said.

Jamie came over, rubbed his temples and said, “Okay, take a breath.”

I did.

“Watch my feet.”

I did.

I tried to do the same thing, stumbled a bit, stomped at the wrong time, and said, “I’m sorry.”

He rubbed his temples a bit more. “No, no worries mate, you’re doing fine.”

That was a lie. I knew it was a lie, because there was a massive vein pulsating in his forehead, and I knew, deep down inside, that I had failed yet another person in my life. I made a mental note to practice the damn dance five hours a day until I could step in fucking time to something that, by my odd logic, I should have been able to do from the womb.

Jamie moved to another group of people, and I turned to the other Papas. (A word:  For the “Tradition” dance, we’d been separated into groups like The Papas, the Sons, the Daughters, and the Mamas. The Sons were every guy who couldn’t grow facial hair; The Daughters were the youngest-looking/shortest girls; The Papas were the principle males/the two non-principles who could grow facial hair; and the Mamas were the girls who looked like they could be overbearing and ruin a day via a nice, long guilt trip.) Among them were Johannes, the Faroese Viking who once grew a beard the length of Darwin’s in the span of ten minutes; Simon, the gay Tevye; Marcus, the well-meaning but perhaps-unintentionally sleazy sonofabitch; and Jon, the man who volunteered to be a dead grandmother, and reminded me of Animal from the Muppets for some reason.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said.

“I can tell,” said Johannes. “Look,” he continued, displaying the proper way to move one’s feet in a circle, in time to music, without tripping over them.

I tried it again and, once again, gave up in frustration within a few seconds.

Luckily, though, there was a certain team spirit (probably brought on by the realization that if we failed something as easy as moving in a circle, Laura would have our heads on a platter[1]) about it all, and eventually, after about half an hour of tripping over my feet, I managed to not trip over my feet as much, and Jamie had finished tweaking the other groups’ performances.

We all lined up and engaged in linedancing. This was different than any Jewish dancing I’d previously experienced—but then again, most Jewish dancing I’d experienced was in a drunken haze in the basement and wasn’t very Jewish at all. The dance lesson lasted for a good thirty or so minute later until Jamie gave up and asked for help bringing his speakers and CD player back to his car.

The room emptied nearly immediately. Left in the room with Laura, Lucie, Kane, and a few other people in one bunch, I decided that now was the time to swoop in and beg forgiveness for my disturbing inability to dance. “Yo,” I said, walking up and clearing my throat. I pointed at the speakers and said, “need help?”

“Yeah,” Jamie said, wiping sweat off his brow. “You’d think there’d be a few more people offering to help an injured man move a stereo to his car.”

I helplessly shrugged.

---

[1] There’s a little, squeaky voice in the back of my head that’s saying I’m coming across as being mightily unfair to Laura. She was doing her job as a director, overseeing a horde of libido- and alcohol-driven actors and actresses made up mostly of freshmen. As such, the shift into Director Mode brought her into Janice the Ripper territory, and since I’m neurotic, I sometimes have a rough time separating professional (or amateur, since this wasn’t a professional production, though it could have been because it was really well done, as you’ll see if this goddamn blog ever moves forward) conduct from personal conduct. Basically: Never trust anything I have to say. Ever.

At The Venue

I planned on spending the night laying in bed and readingthe stack of Philip Roth novels by my bedside. American Pastoral, The Plot Against America, and Portnoy’s Complaint had all been assigned for the Ranting in Literature course. Todd’s intro to them, via e-mail, read:

There’s something about Jewish-American literature that lends itself to ranting. Maybe it’s because all the authors wanted to be comedians. I don’t know.

Anyway, you take a look at Philip Roth, here, and you find a rare example of self-hatred, and rants against the self and the author’s community. Roth, it should be noted, was raised by a charicature, and few things he has to say go beyond paranoid delusions. (Ha ha.) Seriously, though, he’s churned out some of the best contemporary literature around, and then he’s turned out some things that just suck.

Have a read of one of the books listed above – or all if you don’t have a life – and we’ll talk about them next week.

And so, since I was in one of my moods where I didn’t want to see anyone or spend any money (moods in which I am capable of writing scathing dark indictments of the modern existential hell, which are then deleted as I get out of the slump, read them, and think, “needs more space ships”), I readied my room for optimum readingness.

That meant turning on the desk light, turning off the main lights, throwing on the Beethoven String Quartets box set I’d borrowed and subsequently ripped from Nashville’s Public Library, and body-slamming the mattress while grabbing the first book on the pile.

The Plot Against America, if you don’t know, is an alternate-history novel. Remember that. It may be an important work in that it’s an author’s introspective look into what the American Jewish experience is by way of looking at what it could be, but at the same time, it’s an alternate-history novel, a genre which is usually relegated to the ghettos of the Science Fiction section in bookstores, frequented only by overweight tech guys in thick glasses and bad sweaters.

Anyway, it’s a book that wonders what would have happened if the possibly pro-Nazi Charles Lindbergh might have been elected President of the United States instead of FDR, right before the onset of World War II. (Relax, it SPOILER turns out the Nazis were blackmailing Lindbergh the entire time END SPOILER.)

So there I was, opening the book right as the quartets started when the phone buzzed on the window sill. I dove over to reach it before it fell out – since the window was the only place I could get reception in my room – answered it, and heard The Drunkard slurring out what was probably meant to be a sentence. There was some fumbling with the phone, and The Student said, “Hello. The Drunkard is quite drunk. He bought a bottle of Jack from the corner shop on campus and, well, yes.”

I squinted my eyes. “You don’t sound so sober yourself.”

“I may have perhaps been drinking a little bit in the past, yes.”

A “Woo!” sounded in the background, and then a crash. “The Drunkard,” said The Student, “may have just broken the closet in my room.

“Anyway,” he continued, “so The Drunkard said that you need to come out instead of reading.”

Screaming from the background.

“Sorry. Instead of being a fucking pussy. That’s what he said. Anyway, I think he’s at the point where he’d try to break in if you didn’t come of your own initiative, so it’s really just a matter of showing up in the courtyard in a bit and ensuring that no one has to break in to your block’s front door.”

I grunted. “This isn’t something I want to do, Student. I have books to read.”

“No, no that won’t do. You can read tomorrow. We’ll be outside.”

The phone clicked off.

I sighed. Rubbed my temples, and walked out of my room and down the hall to Giannis’s room. I knocked and, once again, the sound of heavy metal subsided and he shouted, “Yes?”

“’s Aaron.”

“Come in,” he said.

I opened the door and saw a massive, at-home laboratory. Chemicals bubbled in various glass containers connected by tubes and wires. Strangely-colored steam piped its way out of his window by way of a clear, plastic tube. At the base of it all, various USB cords connected the contraption to his laptop, upon which there was a rapidly-updating spreadsheet and, playing in the background, what I recognized as Iced Earth’s “Violate.”

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“This?” Giannis asked. He was wearing a white lab coat, thick goggles, and gloves. “This is my weekly assignment. Please, wear gloves at least. The gas, it, ah, melts you if it touches you.” He laughed.

I looked to the left and picked up a pair of gloves from the bed and put them on.

“So,” he said, “what’s up my friend?”

“Well, I was going to ask if you wanted to head to the Venue tonight, but...”

“Yes,” he said, sadly nodding his head and gesturing at the chemical lab that had been set up on his desk. “I cannot, I think. If I leave this alone, it will...” he made an explosion sound and grinned.

“So what is it?”

“It is a way to see how the skin samples will react to the drops of iodine.”

“Skin samples?”

“Yes. I have some from you, some from Chacko, some from Stasia, and—”

“Wait, what? I didn’t give you skin samples.”

“Oh, yes, I rubbed them off of you with the wire sponge when you were asleep in the kitchen one day.”

I rubbed my cheek. I’d remembered waking up with more pain than was usual one morning and wondering what was up, and it would appear that I had a mad scientist right down the hall. “That’s...”

“I’m kidding,” he said. He laughed. “I did that to Chacko. Would you like to give me skin? All I have to do is slice off a tiny, tiny bit.”

“What?”

“Violate” by Iced Earth popped on his playlist and through his speakers. My opinion of the Greeks plummeted from “super cool people” to “cannibals.” “What?”

Giannis laughed. “I joke. I won’t need skin for a while, and it will only be a tiny bit of rubbing. Maybe with wire sponge, maybe not. But no, I cannot go out.”

A puff of flame formed in one of the beakers in the chemistry set, and a smell not entirely dissimilar to burning rubber filled the room. Giannis sniffed the air, looked over at a spherical container with purple liquid and said several curse words in both Greek and English. He rushed over to the computer, typed violently at the keyboard, and I chose to leave.

A little while later, we were in the thumping, low-lit, sweaty confines of The Venue. Up on the raised section of the floor, there was a reedy-looking guy with huge headphones standing behind a DJ set. Something I’d noticed was that there was no such thing as a turntable, which made a certain amount of sense. Why bring in a case of vinyls when you could just pop on an iTunes playlist and toy around with the knobs on a soundboard?

People danced on the floor in front of the platform. A different song, that sounded much like the first one, blared out from the speakers, and my ear drums throbbed, my brain felt like it was trying to collapse in on itself to hide, and my liver cried out for death. The Drunkard, drunk enough to be tripping over himself, blinked and muttered, “Dear God, look at all of this.”

“I know,” said The Student. His face had turned pallid, sweat beads started forming at his hairline. His nose twitched. “All of these people, contorting themselves in a mass, writhing. They could be out there changing the world, creating new ways to look at it, but they’re—”

“Fucking hot!” shouted The Drunkard, pointing at a tall blond who seemed to be wearing not a skirt, but more a ribbon around her waist, and another, slightly thicker, ribbon around her chest. He dashed at her like he was Wile E Coyote and she was the Road Runner.

The Student and I were left waiting on the sidelines, watching as he hurdled to the girl in ribbons. In seconds, she turned around, slapped him, and kept dancing. The Drunkard, showing less in the way of ego bruising I could ever hope to see, shrugged and walked back to us. “Drinks! On me!”

We went to the bar, ordered, and stood there, clutching our whiskeys and looking out at the sea of people in the unnatural blue and red lights. I thought about how much of a neurotic anxiety attack this would spark in Philip Roth, maybe followed by a discussion in long paragraph prose about how his mother smothered him when he was a child, and how that turned him into the self-hating man he is today, and took another sip. Sometimes, I thought, I was entirely too introspective.

The Drunkard pointed at another girl – brunette this time – who also seemed to only be wearing ribbons, and said, “Student, go.”

“What?” The Student took off his glasses, wiped them against his shirt, and looked out again. “What do you mean, ‘go.’”

“Go to her,” said The Drunkard, swaying a bit, “go to her, young Padawan, and she shall take you up and—”

“Fine, Jesus, just shut up.” The Student slammed down his whiskey. “You couldn’t sound poetic if Yeats had possessed you. Stick to jaded journalism, it suits you better.” He cracked his neck and walked off towards the girl.

I turned to The Drunkard. “How’re things with the French?”

He gritted his teeth. “They’re bad enough to make me want to switch places with The Student.”

“Woah,” I said. “You can—”

“She called me a fatass Yank and then punched me in the gut.”

I turned. The Student stood next to us, sighing mightily and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I hate clubs,” he said. “I hate them so much. They’re loud, they attract the worst class of human being imaginable—”

“I go to clubs,” said The Drunkard.

“Exactly, and you are, by most definitions of the word, a terrible human being. I mean look at this, no one would ever, in polite society, tell someone they’re a fatass—and I’m not fat, look—” he gripped his torso “—I mean, I could lose a few, but, shit, look at that girl out there. She outclasses me by a good fifty pounds.”

I squinted. “I think I’ve seen her in one of the karaoke nights...”

“Who the fuck does that? Who the fuck thinks it’s a good idea to tell someone to fuck off? This is how fights get started.”

“Whatever,” said The Drunkard. He drank his whiskey and headed back into the crowd.

The Student and I meandered off to one side of the club, which I assumed was the ‘chill’ side, because it had couches that were slightly less stained than the couches on the other side of The Venue. People were draped across them in various stages of drunkenness and undress, and the music continued to thump at everyone from speakers that hadn’t been updated for, it seemed, twenty years.

We stopped in our tracks. “This isn’t a good place,” I said. “We should leave.” Against one of the walls was the paratrooper and Rebecca. They were bonding in a way that The Student would never have felt comfortable doing in public.

I looked over. His upper lip was spasming, and his eyes flashed between rage, shock, and despair. I shifted him 180 degrees and pushed him in the direction of the bar.

By the time we reached the bar, he’d recovered the ability to speak, and The Drunkard had stumbled out of the mass of humanity in the center just as the DJ up front hit pause on his iTunes and a massive whirl of obscenities went up from the clubbers before the music resumed.

“Well,” said The Drunkard, “that was a bummer. Fuckin chicks, man, they don’t know good when it comes and grinds against them.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“What? It’s the club, man,” said The Drunkard. He grinded with the air. It was not a pleasant sight, and it has since haunted my dreams. “You gotta do it if you wanna get the bitches, man.”

I said nothing. There was nothing to say. The Student made a disapproving sound that was similar to the hideous screeches put out by the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Drunkard recoiled a little bit.

At this point, an incredibly drunk girl with mascara running down her face, who was just a little shorter than I am with long brown hair, black top, and a black skirt came stumbling up to me with a very strange grin on her face. I’ve been told since then – by both The Drunkard and The Student – that this is the I’m-attracted-to-you grin, but it’s so alien to me that I don’t suppose I’d recognize it again.

She said something, and I suppose it was English – for there were English words in what she said – but the words were so mangled and jumbled, and in such a thick accent typical of God-Knows-Where, that I could not understand anything she said. She stood right in front of me, and I said, “What?”

She then pressed up against me and took a picture of the two of us. I was still confused, so I backed away and said, “Who are you?”

Then she got annoyed – I think – and wandered back into the crowd.

I shrugged. The Drunkard stared at me with a gaping mouth. “What the green Hell is wrong with you?” he asked.

“What?” I asked.

He pointed after the girl, who was now doing the same thing with another guy. “That. That girl. She was all over you. Why, I don’t know, but she was. And what the fuck do you do? Sit there, looking at her as if she’s a person.”

“I say!” said The Student.

“No!” shouted the Drunkard. “Both of you in here, you don’t understand the dynamic. People aren’t people. Everyone you see in here didn’t come in here for a fucking conversation, or to make a long-standing connection with another person. They came in here to fuck.”

“I didn’t,” I said, “I came in here to establish a long-standing connection with another human being and, also, for a fucking conversation.”

The Drunkard scowled at me. “Well, you came into the wrong place, didn’t you?”

“I was perfectly happy staying in tonight reading my Philip Roth novels and exposing myself to a surely-encroaching existential hell. You’re the one who forced The Student to call me and drag me here with threats of being called a pussy.”

“Whoa,” said The Student, “leave me out of this. I’m just... here.”

“You’re here,” said The Drunkard, “to get your mind off of the girl who ditched you to boink some greasy paratrooper.”

The Student gestured over to the corner from whence we’d run.

The Drunkard looked over there and, presumably, saw the paratrooper and Rebecca, still apparently trying to eat one anothers’ face of. “Ah,” he said. “Well, that sort of backfired then, didn’t it. Wanna go to another club?”

“Drunkard, what makes you think a club is the best way to handle the situation?” I asked.

“Because, God damn it, that is the way to handle it. You’re laden with adrenaline, and you have to hatefuck somebody! Trust me on this,” he said, grabbing The Student by the shoulders and belching, “this is the way it has to be. This is the way you get over a woman who looked into your heart and stuck it on a goddamn spit and sent it straight to Hell!”

At that, he let loose a roar and dashed into the mass of people just as some very fast, very bassy song popped up over the stereo. “Think we’ll be seeing him again?” I asked.

The Student was still glaring at the paratrooper.

I looked over and saw that they’d progressed from heartily making out to nearly schtupping on a couch. “Aaaaaall right,” I said, pushing The Student towards the exit doors. “I think it’s about time that we mosey on out of here.”

The Student started growling as we left, but shortly after we hit the fresh air outside, he calmed down. “That was less than pleasant,” he said.

“Indeed.”

We returned to Woolf in relative silence. When we reached his block, he took a respirator out of his jacket pocket, fixed it over his nose and mouth, nodded to me, and went upstairs. I dug my hands in my jeans, headed to my block, and cracked open The Plot Against of America and immediately went to sleep after the first note of the First String Quartet piped through my speakers.

The Epilogue to The Student's Second Tale

The Student finished his tale – further – by flopping completely forward on the table, and letting loose a prolongued sigh/moan combination. The group of us looked at one another in silence, each of us registering on some level that The Student was sad for one reason or another, but, because none of us were completely empathetic to other people’s needs, not quite getting why. After all, the man had recently returned from a trip to France where he spent time in France, speaking French, with French people, and thus, it seemed slightly incongruous to be sad.

Eventually, he inhaled deeply and sat back up, though he slumped just a bit. “Well,” he said, his voice devoid of humor, and sounding more like a nihilist’s upon waking up in the morning, “well.” He nodded. “Well.” He then spread out his hands in an invitation. “Go ahead. Tear it to shreds.”

The Writer pounded on the table.

Everyone looked at him.

The Writer sputtered some words, “What—did—how—there—show—characters?” He gave up trying to form a coherent sentence and simply made several gestures I’d never seen before, but he seemed to think were sufficient enough to convey his message. I looked around, saw my confused look on everyone’s face, and looked back to The Writer. He gave up even his gestures and just sat there making a sound that sounded like a cat sneezing.

“Well,” said The Traveler, “Student, I don’t know whether to thank you or turn you into the police: You’ve broken The Writer.”

“Huhzah!” shouted The Drunkard and The Stalker simultaneously, raising their glasses in the air. They looked at each other, then. The Drunkard with a look of concern—though I imagine it was concern for his own mental well-being, having just agreed with The Stalker on something—and The Stalker looking like he’d just crossed a line of his own. They settled their glasses down without taking another drink.

“I can’t help it,” said The Student. “I feel like shit,” he said, his voice raising just a bit, “Rebecca just dumped me—”

“Woah,” I said, “she dumped you?”

The Student slammed his fist on the table. “She dumped me!” he shouted. “For some Greek paratrooper fuckhead who wears God-damned gel in his hair!” He was standing now. The rest of us stooped in our seats, save for The Drunkard, who cheered on this bout of self-martyrdom at the hands of a woman.

The bartender shouted: “Oi, Yank, shut your fuckin gob or we’ll toss you out! The fuckin rugby’s on and—”

“Do you know how many pubs close in this country per week?” shouted The Student again. “Do you, you evolutionary fuck-up?”

The bartender’s eyes widened.

“Do you realize,” continued The Student, “how much of a fucking favor my friends and I are doing you by coming into this pub every Goddamn week instead of going to fucking Wetherspoons? So that you can continue to feature some of the best fucking ale I’ve ever had? Do you fucking understand that?”

The bartender, and the rest of the patrons, for that matter, stared at The Student as he continued to flail and spit all over the place in his rage. The Drunkard laughed and clapped like a seal. He was quite drunk by now.

“And yet, you have the fucking gall to assume you’re doing yourself a favor by playing rugby and attracting fucking benefits miscreants,” he here pointed at the men in track suits who were gathered around the TV, now staring at The Student, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, “while your business looks like it’s fucking failing because you’re in one of the most expensive areas in the city, and you don’t have the Goddamn business sense to make it classy? Or tie it in to the fucking Cathedral somehow? Oy gevalt, you’re insane! You’re mad! The mishegaas!

“So what if we’re loud? We blow like four hundred quid in here a week, and you should wish for customers like us! Now.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. “I think I’m going to buy a round for my friends, and one for you, as an apology for cursing so many times in one rant.”

A silence.

Someone scored in the rugby match. It went unnoticed by the men in track suits.

“Right oh,” said the bartender. “If it’s all right, I believe I’ll pour myself a whiskey and have a think.”

“That’ll do.”

The bartender, shaking a bit, poured himself a Jameson and leaned up against the back of the bar. When he’d sipped a bit of it, we went up, ordered our drinks, and returned.

After a little bit, the sports enthusiasts began talking about how the French were subservient to the English in everything, especially rugby—but in lower voices. The bartender still stood, confused, behind the bar, glancing around with a look that I’d seen before in a few people who were trying to figure out what to do with their lives; that not-quite-empty, but more overwhelmed wide-eyed and shocked stare around the room that accounted every nook and cranny, every piece of Americana and every vintage poster; all accounted for, and all weighed against the wishes of a younger self. All of that went through the bartender’s eyes, and I saw him shudder.

The Student sat back down and said, “So yeah. I feel like shit. Then, it’s like... academia. Really? The Ivory Tower is collapsing, but it’s still the only place where the Enlightenment is alive and people think that they can advance the state of human thought. How fucked are we?”

The Writer made a sound like a turkey mixed with a cow. He then shook his head and said, “But you’ve ruined a story by coloring it with your own existential angst and—dear God. I can’t believe I just said that.”

“Ha!” shouted The Drunkard. “Gayn cacken afn yahm, you schmuck.You just went back on your own modus operandi and—” he leaned forward, eyes widened, a giant sneer on his face, “—there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The Writer, defeated, screamed in horror, grabbed his hair, and bolted out of the pub.

“Well,” said The Traveller. “Um.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “Been reading Kafka lately?”

The Student shook his head. “No, but my deep alienation from the world knows no bounds, so I suppose Kafkaesque musings simply spew forth from my very soul without my meaning to. Indeed, were there an—”

The Drunkard clapped The Student on his back with much more force than was necessary, and the latter tipped forward. “My friend,” said The Drunkard, “we’re gonna go out tonight, out to—” he shuddered and gritted his teeth “—The Venue and we’re gonna get you hooked up with an incredibly drunk girl from Essex.”

“Oh,” said The Student, sighing, “good. I can’t wait to wake up and have my urine causing a fire in my insides.”

“Stop being overly dramatic.”

“So,” said The Traveller, “I think we’re all in agreement that The Student shouldn’t tell a tale while he’s in a depressive state.”

We nodded, raised our glasses, and paid up.

The bartender, it should be noted, was still scratching his chin in deep thought by the time we left the pub. The haunted self-analyzing look hadn’t left his eyes, and, if I was at all familiar with the typical length of a good existential funk (and I was), then I had a hunch that it’d be around five or six days before he got out of it.

The Student's Second Tale

The man who considered himself a warrior, a young man just beginning to reach his prime and just leaving the tumult of his teenage years, walked down an empty path through the hills of the kingdom. It was summer, and though the day was, by all accounts, cool, the young man, Arthur, found himself incredibly uncomfortable; his father's armor, given to him by his mother before Arthur left the household three weeks ago, was heavy, ill-fitting, and the combination of the stitches in the leather scratching any exposed skin and the chains in the mail forced Arthur to yearn for nothing more than a jackass so that he could get by without having to carry the weight on his shoulders.

At a distance of what seemed to be five, perhaps seven leagues, was the capitol of the kingdom: Oxham. He'd never been, nor had his mother, but his father had, once. It was before the war that took him far to the east - and before he returned with the chain mail Arthur now wore upon him. The only thing his father would say about the city was, "Aren't enough cows. Too many people. Not enough cows. People don't have nothing in their eyes what comes close to cows."

Arthur hadn't known what his father was talking about - and neither had his mother - but  now, years after that and after having been educated in Thought by a nearby priest, Arthur understood that his father had, most likely, seen things in that war that no man had seen, that led him to forsake humanity as soulless. The priest, obviously, disagreed with this notion of Arthur's father, and suggested wholeheartedly that Arthur pay it no mind. Still, that did not stop the priest from suggesting that Arthur not go abroad from their hamlet. The world, the priest said, was a, well, worldly thing. When questioned further, the priest would not expound, and forced Arthur to read from the hymnal instead of something more substantial.

Still, after a few months of such conversations with the priest, Arthur decided that his destiny lay not in the confines of his family's farm, or even within the cloister of the church, which the priest had suggested several times, but out there - past the Wood and out into what his mother referred to as God Knows What.

And then his father died and it all happened so fast. With the lack of a pater familias, Arthur's home deteriorated and his mother made ready to move with family in the next town over, a mile or so down the road. Arthur told her his plans and after a harsh discussion, she gave him his father's armor. He then went to the priest, where he had to use all of the meagre education he'd received in order to convince the father of the merit of his decision. Eventually, and after at one point being condemned to an eternity of hellfire, Arthur succeeded in being given a minor blessing and went on his way.

He spent the trek through the woods engaging himself in a minor internal monologue about what, exactly, he wanted to be. He guessed that he had a predisposition to war, since he'd asked for the armor instead of, say, some of the father's books, but that may not have been true (said a corner of his mind). Perhaps this request was one birthed by a desire to feel a connection - or protection - to - or of - his father. Books wouldn't provide that, but they would have provided ample fire-building material.

At any rate, by the time he left the woods, he decided that, damn it all, he was going to be a warrior. Moreso, he was going to smite the unjust. Who were the unjust? Well, he'd figure that out later, probably around the time when the king sent him on a quest of some sort. The reward of which, he thought, wringing his hands in delight, would surely be a princess. (Princesses, in his mind, were in ample supply, all were beautiful, and all swooned at whoever completed quests.)

At the current time, 4.5 leagues from the gates of Oxham, he came across a blind man sitting, his head lowered and a little snore emanating from his nose, at the side of the road. He was draped in tattered clothing, little more than rags, and held in his left hand a brown cloth satchel. His face was pockmarked and creased, and what little hair he had was in patches.

Charity being one of the virtues that stuck with Arthur, the warrior-to-be bent down and dropped a copper piece (bringing Arthur's net worth down by half) on the ground in front of the beggar.

Snapping awake, and a little drool flinging itself out of his mouth and onto Arthur's feet, the beggar felt around the ground near where the coin landed, touched it and said, "Oh hell." He moved his head around to the general vicinity of where Arthur stood and said, "I'm not a beggar."

"Then what are you?"

"I'm waiting to see the king."

Arthur looked up the road to the capitol, with its low buildings, save for the one, tall ivory tower.

“For shit’s sake,” said The Drunkard. “Really? Are you really doing this?”
    “Shut up,” said The Traveler, “and let the man tell his story.”
    The Drunkard grunted and sat back in his chair, sucking down half the glass of whiskey in one go.
    The Traveler motioned for The Student to continue. After clearing his throat, he did.

“That’s a ways away,” said Arthur, nodding at the capitol, “and you are simply sitting here. Are you sure you wouldn’t be more successful actually being in the same area as the king?”

The beggar cackled and rocked back and forth, slapping his knee in delight. “‘In the same area as the king,’ he says. Oh, that’s rich.”

Arthur cocked his head to one side.

“No one gets in to see the king,” said the beggar. “Not even me.”

“Well who are you?”

“Me?” The beggar puffed out his chest. “I used to be the red knight on the black and white horse.”

Arthur looked around. “I don’t see a black and white horse. And I sure as hell don’t see any red armor.”

“That’s why I used to be the red knight on the black and white horse. Had to give up the horse as a Regal Tax.”

“What?”

“Boy, you don’t know anything about the way this kingdom works, do you?”

“Apparently not.”

The beggar leaned back and took a deep breath, “Well, you’re lucky, because I have a chart of the bureaucracy.”

Arthur stood scratching his head for a moment. “Uh.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m blind. Wasn’t always part of it; I had to give something up that I valued in order to see the Grand Vizier, and I chose my sight. Here.” He dug in his bag and pulled out a crumpled and yellowed piece of parchment. It was rectangular, with colored squares linked to each other via black lines. Once, Arthur had seen a genealogical chart that the father had kept as part of his archive; this resembled the chart, but had more of a chaotic feel about it. More of a web. In the center of it all was a box highlighted red, and in the center of that box was GRAND VIZIER. At the top of the web was REGUS. Sprinkled around were various offices throughout the Kingdom of varying importance. The most commonplace - like sheriff, for example - were out at the peripheral of the web in smaller boxes, while the interior offices were in boxes that greatly increased in size as their job descriptions grew more nebulous. Looking over the entire chart at once made Arthur’s head ache. He realized, then, that his mission to endear himself to the king would be harder than he set out thinking.

He handed the chart back to the beggar and said, “So, what if I just wanted to, I don’t know, gain a little bit of status in the kingdom? Get just a bit close to the tower.”

The beggar laughed. “Kid, let me tell you something. Back in my heyday, I had princesses swooning all over the fuckin place. My name? The Red Knight on the Black and White Horse? My friend, that was more popular, on more people’s tongues than the Bible--in some parts of the country. But, did that mean that I could get any closer to the King than you, a veritable peasant, could dream of getting. To keep it short, nobody gets in to see the king; not nobody, not no how.”

The Writer spat out a mouthful of ale, which splattered on The Stalker, who made a throat-slitting motion with his finger. The Writer did not notice, and simply sputtered madly for a few moments, his arms flailing. The Student paused in his tale, looked at The Writer for a moment with his head cocked to the side and said, “Er.”
    When it became clear that the only thing The Writer was going to do was sit there and silently flail, The Student cleared his throat and continued on.

Arthur looked on towards the ivory tower in the distance. Could it be that the beggar was telling the truth? Could it truly be possible that the object of his self-issued quest was so insulated and so well-protected by layers of, for lack of a better turn of phrase, hurdles that in order to reach him, the King, one had to waste one’s entire life, and throw everything else aside? No, he thought. He would not dip to that much cynicism. He built himself up and took a self-inflating breath.

The beggar, once knight, seemed to understand what Arthur was doing by the sudden intake of breath and said, “If you want to proceed, by all means go ahead. Don’t expect to get anything out of it, though. You’ll just be lost in a sea of pompous, self-righteous imbeciles who ask you to prove yourself in incredibly inane ways.”

“What does that mean?”

The blind ex-knight shuddered. “Imagine, if you will, walking through a pasture full of cows.” He paused, an invitation to do so.

“Oh, right,” said Arthur. He closed his eyes and found himself in a sunny field full of brown and white cows, lowing at nothing but the breeze. They occasionally bent their heads and chewed some grass. Off in the distance, one of them pooped. Arthur’s face soured and he wondered what was wrong with his subconscious.

“Good,” said the ex-knight. “And now imagine that you must go up to each cow and study them, taking down every detail you see and writing them down in a special booklet. But one cow is not enough, you must do this for every cow in the pasture. You must do so to the point where you can differentiate them in the same way that you could between your family members. This is a task that takes you a year and a half, because you are a fast writer. And then, at the end of the task, as you say goodbye to the only creatures you have known for that year and a half, you return to the Sub-Minister of Agriculture who gave you the task, only to be sent to a slightly more senior Sub-Minister who looks over your work, deems it only ‘passable’ and then assigns you the task of doing the same thing, except this time for sheep.” At the finish of this, the man crumpled forward and shook his head. “Ech.”

“I take it you had to go through that.”

“And others I know had to go through much worse. One man of whom I’ve heard had to do the same with grasshoppers.”

“Grasshoppers?”

“Yes. They’re fast, you know. And they hop. Blend in with their surroundings much moreso than cows.”

“Still,” said Arthur, “I need to go on. This is my quest, to get to that tower and show myself as a worthy person in the eyes of th--”

The ex-knight sighed. “You’ll show yourself as no such thing unless you’re already one of them. Join their ranks if you want to be worthy; aspirants are a dime a dozen in their eyes.” He waved a hand in the air in front of him. “Go on, waste years of your life in order to join an order that has no effect on anyone save themselves and those immediately around them. I’ve learned not to talk to madmen. Only thing it cost me was my eyes.”

Arthur tried to apologize to the knight for seeming ungrateful, but it was if the man had gone suddenly deaf. After trying to reach out to the man, Arthur sighed, gave up, and continued on his way.

A day later (after having to traverse some unsteady ground when the road to the tower had been partially buried for a mile under a landslide), Arthur arrived at the outskirts of a small town called Bugford. In it, all of the houses were uniform and wholly unremarkable. Looking at them one moment, a viewer would find it nigh on impossible to remember any details about them in the matter of an hour afterwards. In fact, the most remarkable thing about the town seemed to be the red, wooden tool booth set up near the entrance of the town.

That is to say, Arthur assumed it was a tool booth. It was certainly booth-like. On the window there sat a pail. Behind the pail, inside the booth, there sat a man in a royal blue tunic. He slouched over, his head slumping like he was about to go to sleep; and, indeed, he was. As Arthur approached, the man would snap awake with a grunt, mumble to himself, and then slowly go back to sleep.

Arthur walked up to the toll booth and waited as the man snapped himself awake again.

As the man’s eyes focused and he wiped the drool off from his chin, he seemed to notice Arthur’s presence. “Oh,” he said, blinking rapidly. “Oh.” He ducked down underneath - Arthur presumed - his desk and pulled out a leather-bound ledger and an ink pot in which sat a quilled pen. The man cleared his throat and barked out, in a surprisingly authoritative voice, “Name?”

“Arthur. Of the--”

“That’s fine. Have a seat,” the man said, gesturing with one hand to the slightly raised ground to the side of the footpath at the side of the tollbooth and scribbling down Arthur’s name with his other.

Arthur did. In retrospect, he probably should have shown some drive in continuing with his quest, but, well, the man had such an authoritative voice. Arthur watched as the man scribbled for longer than it should have taken to simply write down a name followed by “of the--” and then, with slightly more confusion, as the man replaced the pen in the ink pot, blew on the fresh ink on the page, gently closed the cover, and began to go to sleep again.

This struck Arthur in a bad way. “Hey,” he said, “wake up.”

The man snapped awake with a grunt and said, “What? You? What do you want?”

“Aren’t you going to take a toll from me so I can continue?”

“A toll?” The man thought about this for a moment, then laughed. “No, no that’s not how this kingdom works at all. Taxes pay for tolls, sire. This is simply, ah, a registration booth, so to speak. Yes. And this is the register.” He patted the register.

“What’s the register for?”

The man blinked. “Well, to keep tabs on how comes to the town, of course.”

Inside the town, church bells rang.

“So that means I can come into the town, right?” asked Arthur.

“Oh, no, sire. That’s not possible quite yet. Regulations state that new entrants may only enter into the town between the hours of 12:00 and 12:01. Those bells, by the way, were the noon bells. It is now 12:02. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“But I don’t have a watch. I can’t tell when it’s noon.”

The man shrugged. “That sounds like something you could rectify by going into the town and buying a watch.”

“Can I go into the town and buy a watch?”

“Between the hours of 12:00 and 12:01, yes. Other than that, I’m afraid you’re stuck outside of the town.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Regulations.”

“But I just want to get closer to the King to prove myself.”

“Well, there’s a chancellor in the town this week. I’d be willing to bet that he could help you. Of course, what do I know? I live in a box.”

Arthur gazed longingly into the town.

‘That won’t help you,” said the man. “Nor will continuing to pester me. We’ve all got a job to do, sire, and my job is not to coach you into learning how to work with governmental regulations. My job is to open this register and write down the names of people when they come by, and, occasionally, I draw cartoons in the margins; though that’s not part of my job description.”

“So what do I do?”

“That’s none of my concern. If you want into the town, return here tomorrow.”

And so Arthur left. He returned the next day, only to find that it was 12:03 and had very much the same conversation with the man in the toll booth. And so on and so forth until one day, as his rations had been whittled away to essentially nothing, Arthur jumped out of a bored stupor at the sound of the church bells, ran up to the toll booth, blurted out his name, and waited as the man yawned, dragged a finger down the register until he reached the scribble that contained Arthur’s name and finally said, “Yeah, go on in.”

Arthur almost skipped inside the borders of the town to find that it was, well, depressing. Inside, everyone moved at the same pace. No one spoke to each other. The only sounds were the sounds of feet scuffing against the dirt roads and the wind going through the alleys between buildings. Arthur wandered the identical buildings, hoping to find some sign of the chancellor. Eventually he came to a building that purported to be a town hall and found that the chancellor had left due to excessive boredom. Slightly more broken than he was before, Arthur trudged to the market, restocked on some supplies, and went along his way.

Two years later, an emaciated man hauling behind him what we would know as a rickshaw carried along a man wearing a robe and a black square felt hat. Arthur, the emaciated man, now virtually unrecognizable save for the armor - his hair had fallen out in patches from exposure to various harmful elements, and his eyes were sunken in. The man in the rickshaw, who had a stack of leather-bound tomes with him, and wore a monocle, prattled on incessantly. He spoke few facts, and those he quoted were wrong. His subject of choice was the religious dogma and theological tenets of the world at large.

Initially, Arthur took this as an invitation to engage in a discussion, especially considering he had ample experience in terms of the methods by which the Church indoctrinated its followers and educated its members. However, after a minute or so of talking to the man, who referred to himself as a Doctor of Knowledge, Arthur noticed that the conversation was decidedly one-sided. He turned around in the rickshaw (he’d been tasked to carry the man around by a sub-vice-chancellor in a town a mile outside of Oxham) facing the man and saw that the doctor was staring at him with his lips compressed in a straight line, his eyes sunken, and his nose twitching.

When Arthur had been silent for two minutes, the man said: “Good, you are finished. I think, young man, you are mistaken as to your purpose. No, do not open your mouth to utter one syllable. You are not to express any views, you are not to ask any questions. As far as you should be concerned regarding your purpose: You are naught but an empty vessel which happens to have the ability to propel itself and, thus, my conveyance, to my destination. When we do reach my destination, you may or may not be asked what you think about all that knowledge I have imparted unto you, but the likelihood of that occurring is very much tied to your performance of a self-aware mule; which, by the way, you are failing at significantly.

“Now,” he continued, sitting back in the rickshaw, some of the hatred evaporating out of his eyes with the spittle that flew out of his mouth with the end of the tirade, “now, you will listen to my thesis as I continue to present it. I remind you, plebian, serf, peasant, that you are as far along in this process as you are because I am allowing you to pull me to my destination. Any comments you have will not only be unwelcome, but they shall also remain unanswered. I am a Doctor of Knowledge, and you are nothing more than a minor accident in the grand scheme of things.”

Arthur considered calling the man a pompous ass, but by the time he’d managed to recover from the onslaught of madness, the doctor had begun ranting about the inherent contradiction between the Church’s call to charity and the practice of tithing. (Arthur desperately wanted to point out that, in his experience, the tithing went to upkeep of farmers’ houses, but there was probably no chance that he was going to find the time to get that into conversation.)

And now, several months later, and no seemingly no closer to reaching the doctor’s destination (though Arthur did not know the destination, it must be admitted), they passed through a settlement composed of a small cottage, an abbey, and an out-of-place light house. The doctor told Arthur to stop in front of the abbey gates. Arthur did.

The doctor stood up out of the rickshaw and stretched. He then stared at Arthur for a few moments and said, “Very well, I thank you for your time these few months.” And then, he walked towards the gates without another word.

Arthur dropped the rickshaw. “Wait! What about joining you?”

The doctor slowly turned to face Arthur. “Are you still laboring under the impression that--yes, I can see you are. Alas, it was not to be. In my observations during our time together, I have determined that you are, sadly, not up to the task of taking up what I have to teach.”

“What? How can you know that?”

“I studied the way you reacted to my discourses. You didn’t pay nearly enough attention to what I, your senior, had to say. Thus, I can judge by your hubristic attitude towards those who know more than you about subjects which you could ever hope to know, you are not properly, ah, geared to understand.”

The Student let loose a massive sigh. Through the entire narrative, he’d moved from a sitting position in which he seemed like he was truly into the story to where he was now: essentially laying out on top of the table, slurring out words while, presumably, his brain tried to think of something else to add to the story. He’d long since finished his beer, and had begun sighing repeatedly between sentences and, as the story progressed, words. No one said anything, though, because we were afraid of The Traveler’s role as moderator effectively banning us from future roles in our contest.

             He waved his hands in the air. “Yadda yadda, more bullshit about the inevitable failure of youth to succeed by so-called conventional channels. Everyone has to know someone in order to get in to what they want in life. Academia is bullshit.”

The Prologue to The Student's Second Tale

We sat in The Sub-Pope’s Flock, in our usual corner, looking out the window at the Buttermarket Square as a few very determined tourists walked through the Cathedral gates, braving the snow and wind. Over the speakers mounted over the bar, an English folk band wrapped up a song about Plato or something and gave way to some new costumed freak named Lady Gaga. (Well, new to me. She’d apparently been making music for a few months. She looked like a Marvel villain on crack, and that was enough to make me ignore her.)

“You’re not going to start hanging out with them, are you?” asked The Traveler.

He sat across the table from me, wearing a red shirt with a black fist screened on and then some writing in Cyrillic. I assumed he’d picked this up from some market in the Eastern Bloc, but he wouldn’t say anything other than “I got it ridiculously cheap.” Come to think of it, The Traveler didn’t say anything about his trips over the break; he simply stated that where he went wasn’t that special, and what he did wasn’t that special, and any further discussion on the subject would simply be boring. I thought that whenever anyone said something like that, then it would be quite the opposite, but chose not to bring it up.

He was, I think, referring to the glut of undergrads with whom I acquainted myself by joining the cast of Fiddler on the Roof. I say “I think” because there was a good ten minutes of The Drunkard shouting that The Writer was a moron, and The Stalker making uncomfortable-sounding statements about everything going on. Throughout it all, The Student sent text messages on his phone to Rebecca. “What’s wrong with them?”

The Traveler shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well, you  know. Undergrads.”

I blinked. “I fail to see what the problem is. I mean, some of the chicks are pretty hot and, you know—”

The Drunkard burst into a gale of laughter. “Come on, man. Don’t bullshit us. You? You can’t talk to an attractive girl to save your life.”

“I—”

“Guh!” shouted The Drunkard, his mouth agape. “Guh, guh!” He looked like a fish. I hoped that I didn’t look that bad.

“And,” said The Student, continuing to poke away at his phone, “let’s not forget the surely present gap in intellect.”

“What?” I said. “That’s insane.”

“Not really. Think about it: What was your favorite movie as a freshman?”

“Anchorman,” I said.

“And now?”

“Inglourious Basterds, but I don’t see what you’re talking about.”

“Note that you’ve progressed from a film based on the humor level of dick and fart jokes and have moved to a World War II-Western hybrid with intelligent nods to German cinema of the 1930s and ‘40s that holds its characters to no black-and-white moral standard, and, indeed, shows that ‘heroes’ are just as horrifying as ‘villains.’”

“I bet I can find some people in the cast who liked it.”

“Yes, I’m sure, but that intelligence is buried deep within a sea if inanity and asinine likes and dislikes.” The Student clicked a final button on his phone and put it gently in his pocket. He shrugged. “Good luck finding them.”

“That’s... really fucking cynical, man.”

He cocked an eyebrow and took a drink. “I don’t see how.”

“Indeed,” said The Writer, “it’s in the general hu—”

“Shut up, corduroy-wearer,” said The Drunkard.

“What’s wrong with corduroy?” asked The Student.

“Nothing when you wear it,” said The Drunkard. “You’re basically a prof. But when The Writer wears it...” he paused, took a drink from his whiskey, and leaned forward, “it looks like he’s being eaten by a bear; and the fictitious nature of that fantasy makes me yearn that it were true.”

There was a pause around the table. The Stalker stood and slow clapped for a moment. The bartender looked over at us with a scowl and turned up the TV in the corner, and turned down the music. Rugby raised in volume and calmed us down for a moment.

“So,” said The Traveler, drumming his fingers on the table for a moment. “The reason we’re here is I figured that it had been a while – too long of a while, if I may say so – since we’d broken for winter and gone our various ways—”

“Without bringing The Drunkard along,” sneered The Drunkard to The Student, “because The Drunkard would be too destructive.”

The Traveler cleared his throat, “—and I decided that the best way to break in the new term would be to reinstate our contest.”

A general murmur of agreement went around the table, save for The Drunkard, who’d stood up – well, more like staggered up – and gone to the bar to order another Jameson. If we were a hive mind – and sometimes, on the rare occasion when I saw two members of our group with the same facial expression, I believed there was a certain amount of credence to this idea – then the hive would have gone with the idea, even if one member had been temporarily blacked out, i.e. The Drunkard.

The Traveler grinned. “Great, now, the hard part is remembering who’d gone last...”

“Well,” I said, “The Writer came up with that awesome sci-fi story.”

The Writer sputtered. “Aw—awesome? That... that dreck, you call that awesome?” He grew wide-eyed. “I just used a vernacular term.” He pointed at me. “Do you see what you’ve made me do, you bastard?”

I grinned. “The game is mine. And yeah, I loved it.”

The Writer flung his hands in the air and sputtered some more, gesturing between me and The Traveler; eventually he gave up and shook his head, took a drink from his ale.

“Kay,” said The Traveler.

“And The Drunkard had finished up his story about Lloyd,” I said.

“Cloyd,” said The Drunkard, returning to the table. “The kid’s name was Cloyd. Wonder what he’s up to. Probably dead on the side of Second Avenue.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“What?” asked The Drunkard.

“I’ll go,” said The Student.

“Is it your turn?” asked The Traveler.

“Does it matter?” The Student responded.

“Good point, the rest of us said.”