Chapter Twenty Four

The Tail was in a strange mood.  Maybe it was because he was 20, and alone in his dorm room on a Saturday night.  Maybe it was because he had nowhere to go, and no one to talk to.  Maybe it was because of some other, less discernible reason.

He was sitting on his bed with the door wide open.  He was sitting with his back against the wall, he was fully dressed, and on the bed next to him there was an open book.  His roommate was elsewhere, with other people, and in the Tail’s thoughts recurred the image of this roommate laughing at him, making sport of his mannerisms, and using his studiousness as the punch line for a joke.

        They shared a small room, just down the hill from the other side of campus, in a brownish, obviously collegiate dormitory, located somewhere in the greenbelt between the university’s back parking lot and the multi-million dollar stadium just off the canal.  It was the sort of place where newer students found a few infrequent friends, but not the sort of place where anyone formed lasting relationships.  

All of the rooms in this building were nondescript cubes with an attached bathroom and a window, looking out at a forested ravine.  His particular half of the room hosted his sagging bed and soiled sheets, a desk next to this bed, and a lamp upon the desk.  Between his desk and his bed were his ever-shifting piles of books, neatly stacked in their order of acquisition.  The most recently acquired books were on his desk, and the books almost due or overdue were stacked closest to the door.  There were no posters on his walls, neither were there any family photographs.

        His roommate’s half of the room was even more sparsely furnished.  This was because his roommate only occupied the room at odd intervals, and most often preferred the abodes of friends and girlfriends, the latter too numerous to name.  He barely saw his roommate.  He barely knew him.  But he knew that this other young man was off somewhere not studying, not worrying, and not being as miserable as he was.  They were friendly with one another, he and this roommate, but they were not close.  He knew, with despair, that they never would be.

        College, he thought.  What a sad continuation of high school.  The same popularity contests, the same jockeying for social position, the same hordes of vapid girls, all equally unimpressed by whatever enticements their male classmates could offer.  He had hoped for so much more after high school, but there he was, in a good school on scholarship, with few friends and fewer people to talk to.

        If it was the story of his life, then he was the villain.  Definitely not the hero.  Heroes got drunk for the duration of entire weekends.  Heroes had sex with girl after girl after girl.  And these heroes might have been dull people, but they had stories to outshine his own.  

That, in its way, was what hurt most of all.  He had thought he was coming into a world where he could finally be at the center of his own story, where he could finally be the decisive factor, but there he was in his dorm room, still a supporting character, and still absent from the bulk of the narrative.  He might have appeared, briefly, for the less important scenes.  He might have been comic relief.  But when all the fucking and fighting and drinking were going on he was nowhere to be seen.  He had not been invited to that particular party.  

Instead he was where he had always been, in a small room among books.  Never chugging anything.  Never inhaling.  Never fumbling with condoms.  Only studying his way into oblivion.

        He picked up the book lying next to him, and attended to the consequences of the Norman Conquest.  Something about the Magna Carta.  He had already begun his first year of Latin, and he planned to take a crash course in Greek that summer.  He was well past the introductory courses that most freshmen have to wade through, and well into the history classes more specific to his major.  Most of his professors were impressed by his work ethic and devotion to the discipline, and his understanding of certain subjects had already surpassed that of his classmates and instructors.  “He has a gift for this,” they said.  “He will make a great scholar one day, a great historian.”

He had already decided on a major in History.  He knew that his story cast a shadow in that direction.  The past was a place he wanted to call home.  The past was a story that he wanted to tell.  His story had been made to tell that story.  That story would be a way of telling his story.

        There had been a brief, painful moment at the beginning of that term when it seemed like his life was changing for the better.  Another guy in his dorm had a guitar.  Another guy played drums.  Another guy was learning to play bass.  They heard (erroneously) that he had been in his high school choir, and they asked him to sing in their band without even asking him to audition.  

Then, for an epiphany of two weeks, he had been in actual conversations with actual girls who actually found him interesting.  He mumbled into a microphone in a claustrophobic room, while girls had passed in and out of their practice space.  He had inhaled Alice in Chains.  He had fumbled with Nirvana.

        But then came an actual performance at a local bar, playing with several other bands that also didn’t know what they were doing.  He came to the microphone and froze, unable to meet the gaze of all those people beyond the stage, all of them so much cooler and calmer than he was.  He didn’t feel like he belonged there, on that stage.  He didn’t know what he was doing, and he was so terrified, so shatteringly afraid.  After a fevered discussion, the guitar player assumed singing duties, and it was all he could do not to run off the stage, and hide.  After the show, they all agreed that he hadn’t been much of a singer anyway, and that was it, it was over.  

The incident remained as a breathless set of memories.  A story he would never tell.  For a short span of time he had approached so closely to happiness – to acceptance – that even he dared not believe it, but in the end embarrassment had been waiting in the wings, an embarrassment that foreshadowed the loss of his cool friends and the lovely girls who had, only for a moment, noticed him.

        The other guys in that band had already dropped out.  Some of them were dealing drugs.  Others had visions of rock stardom.  One of them had moved to California.  Yet whatever their disasters, they all had stories to tell, and these stories were all better than his own.

        The Norman Conquest.  So many books so many books so many books.  A beautiful girl with blonde hair passed by his open door and smiled.  It might have been that girl he always saw in the library, or he might have been imagining things.  Just the same, her smile remained in her wake, a smile seared across the forefront of his consciousness.  He was petrified with fear.  William the Conqueror.  She was so beautiful.  Land holdings.  He could talk to her.  The Roman Legacy.  What was her name?  Lisa?  Judy?  Rose?

        In Medieval England they probably didn’t have any beautiful blonde girls to distract William from all his conquering.  The women of that time would have been diseased and dying, illiterate and entirely uneducated.  And most men would have been too busy with their pillaging, torturing, and religious pondering to hold the kind of romantic notions espoused in tales of chivalry.  That is if they weren’t busy expiring before the age of 40.  

They weren’t made for longing, those men.  Life for them was too short, and often too painful.  They were all filthy and crawling with lice, sweating their way through uncomfortable clothes and armor.  They lived in a beautiful place, largely devoid of people.  There were no cars, only badly maintained roads, and no tall buildings.  And you had to be strong then, or if not strong you had to be brutally stupid.  If you weren’t strong or stupid you were lost.

        He tried to imagine himself in that time, walking amongst the hovels and castles of The Great.  Could he be strong?  

He knew that it was too difficult to be stupid.  It was too hard to deny his ego on that point.  He knew that he had to do something.  He had to go find her.  Judy, maybe.  Or Lisa.  He had to put the failure behind him.

        He rose slowly from his bed, closing the book.

        His breath came out too fast as he walked into the hall, looking for the beautiful blonde girl and not finding her.   He thought about the way that girl had looked at him in the library, and he hoped he wasn’t confused about her identity.  It was almost certainly her.  Almost.  She had passed his door so quickly that it was hard to tell.  She had the same smile, that same look of native cunning.  She had walked the same way, and she might have seen him in the dorm before.  He wanted so much for it to be the same girl.  He wanted to be lucky for once.  He was tired of pushing the boulder up the hill.

        Outside his small room, there was a hallway leading off to either side.  The blonde girl had walked onward to his right.  There were only a few rooms before the end of the hallway, and if she had taken the stairs at the end of that hallway he would have heard the echoes of her footfalls.  He walked quickly toward the stairwell, pausing beside open doors so that he could listen for a female voice.  Maybe she was in another young man’s room.  Maybe she was occupied.  Faithless women.  Betrayers.  But how could she have betrayed him?  What promise had been given?  

Only a smile in a library.  Only a smile in a hallway.  Perhaps it wasn’t the same girl.  Perhaps it was another girl.  Perhaps he was just tired from reading.  He had to grow up, he told himself.  He had to be strong - stupid even.

        At the end of the hall he heard a girl’s voice in one of the rooms.  Another young man’s voice answered her.  There was a moment’s pause, and then the girl said, “Not here, OK?  Your roommate’s coming back any minute.”  He didn’t know if that voice belonged to the girl from the library, since he had never heard her speak.  He wanted it to be another girl’s voice.  He wanted her to be a stranger who had smiled at him, and nothing more.

        In the end he had only books and the Story that books represented.  Every book was a piece of the story, and that story was continually depressing.  That, he then decided, was to be the story of his life.