Book Six: Omaha
41. The day of my presentation. . .
The day of my presentation dawned clear and cold. I slept poorly. For luck, I had breakfast at the little workingman’s cafe down by the grain elevators on South Street, letting the hippie waitress mother me the usual twenty seconds’ worth. I arrived at my office early enough to watch the red sun break over campus, early enough to greet Denny Deaner as he marched in to claim his closet-sized domain. He returned my nod stiffly, his gaze no higher than my neck. I was standing at the window, thinking about Grace—the light at that time of day reminded me of the first time I’d gone home with her—when I heard Shemansky’s key tickling the lock. When he’d tried five different keys in two positions each and I couldn’t stand it any longer, I went over and jerked the door open. “Good morning,” I announced grimly.
“Oh! I didn’t see you,” was his shocked reply.
“That’s because this door was between us,” I explained. “It’s two inches thick and made out of wood, see?” I struck the door with my knuckles, and smiled down at him the way a leopard smiles at its lunch.
“I didn’t see you,” he repeated, scuttling past me. “Didn’t see you.”
“That’s called echolalia, Shemansky,” I informed him. “It’s a symptom of nervous degeneration. Maybe you should be in a home.”
“Echolalia?” I couldn’t tell whether he was putting me on; at other times I’d thought I detected a flicker of something like intelligence. “What’s echolalia?”
“It’s when your lalia rebounds off the wall of a canyon. How’s your paper on Shakespeare coming along?”
“Better than yours on Eliot,” he said, smirking at the pile of books on his desk.
“One would hope so,” I replied frankly. “If it wasn’t for the tape I made, my thing tonight would be only about two minutes long. It’s going to be a disaster, anyway; your pal McKinley will be so thrilled, he’ll probably retract his testicles and have a seizure.”
“A disaster,” my office-mate whispered with satisfaction, the back of his translucent neck wonderfully exposed. Silently I wished him well with his Shakespeare, since he was so obviously not cut out for the world outside the University. I could see him sacking groceries, maybe, or cleaning the urinals in a bus station. He appeared to have come to the office to stay, so I checked my desk drawer, to make sure the all-important tape was there, and left.
Since all my classes except for Leonard’s were on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, I could’ve stayed home to work on the paper that was supposed to accompany my talk, but I hadn’t wanted to spend the day alone. Anyway, I couldn’t see how I was going to make an argument of it. I’d found bits and snippets, so that I could say that this line of “The Waste Land” scans like this line of this song, and that line of “The Waste Land” scans like that line of that one; but my thesis required T. S. Eliot to have spent most of his spare time listening to the likes of Lucille Hegamin and taking notes. This was a major weakness, and I hadn’t found a way to fix it. I riffled the card catalog in the library and girl-watched in the Student Union; I graded a freshman paper or two, chatted with acquaintances, drifting through the hours in a haze of anxiety. That evening, as I was crossing the quad toward Andrews after getting my supper from the Student Union cafeteria, the blue light of dusk seemed to blend with the red light of morning, and I felt as if I’d been robbed of a day.
I had just re-entered the building—there are steps outside and steps inside the entrance, and a pair of inside doors that are usually propped open—when a little wheel-like object came clinking down the hallway, making a cheerful metallic sound as it rolled along leaving a narrow, shiny, beetle-brown trail. My mouth agape, I watched it pass my feet and hop on down the inside steps, bouncing off the door that had closed behind me and toppling tinnily over onto its side. Finally I identified the thing; it was a spool of tape from a reel-to-reel recorder.
“My tape!”
I glared down the length of Andrews Hall, but there was not a soul in sight. My heart hammered; I ran quickly down the steps and retrieved the reel. A curl of tape slipped from it and whispered to the filthy floor of the entry, and I moaned in panic.
“My poor tape! Oh, gosh! Oh, no!”
I hung the loose curl back on the spool and, turning the reel by hand, inched my way down the hallway. The lightest puff of stale Andrews air threatened to roll the weightless stuff over, and I had to brush off every speck of dirt that might foul the recording head. I also had to work quickly, before anyone came in to tread on it. I was bathed in sweat by the time I got halfway down the corridor. Where the little trail of tape turned and headed up the stairs, the reel had bounced, leaving merry loops and wavers in the strip of oxide; I followed, pausing at each step to straighten and tighten it, whoofing away dust and lint with gentle breaths. At the top of two long flights of steps, I gazed off down the third-floor hallway in despair. The tape went past the door of my office and trailed off into the gloom.
Teary-eyed, I shuffled ahead, winding as I went. Near the end of the hallway, when the spool was all but full, the tape turned right and vanished under a steel door. I pushed the door slowly open and flicked on the lights: mirrors and sinks, stalls and tile. The women’s rest room. I followed my tape to one of the stalls, where it dangled over the door, weighted with a tampon. I removed the tampon, panting with relief. The tape, it seemed, was whole. If they hadn’t messed up the recorder as well! I hurried to my office, carrying the reel tenderly under my flight jacket.
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