The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 66: October 2

Today I was walking to class when I heard a couple fighting on the sidewalk. The other pedestrians and I craned our necks to eyeball the participants, but cautiously, so we wouldn’t get busted. Looking is impolite. Space is tight in this city; loved ones have to take it to the streets, sometimes. They deserve a little privacy.

The two fighting people quickly rumbled into view; they resolved themselves into one person fighting with herself. She wore a giant maroon sweatshirt advertising a mid-western college and a sagging pair of chinos. Despite her other-college varsity gear, her rant was about Columbia. “Fuck Columbia University! Fuck Columbia University!” It was her fight song. If only all cheerleaders suffered from psychotic breaks, I thought. They might help their teams to win more games.

I noticed a few people on the sidewalk, despite themselves, smiling. Columbia University is the gleaming beneficiary but also the occasional victim of its city circumstances. The students and faculty fight like everyone in New York fights for money and for space. Also the university was expanding into a new neighborhood, igniting local protests. Most of the pedestrians on that sidewalk had probably thought at one time, or were thinking right now, Fuck Columbia University!

This woman was the voice of the people.

I crossed Broadway. I was far enough away that I could now safely look at her. She was just another anonymous and lumpily dressed outraged person until she wasn’t. The body was foreign to me, and so was the voice, but I recognized the face. The face belonged to a student of mine from many years ago, a woman who’d come to my office and was so depressed that when she cried, her tears moved slowly down her face, her whole being enervated to the point where even gravity failed to have an effect on her.

I stood on the street corner. I thought about chasing after her, but she was churning swiftly through the neighborhood — she was already almost a block away — so instead I entered a coffee shop. This is why I was on the street. I was going to a coffee shop, and I was buying a coffee, and then I was walking to class, and then I would teach, and then during office hours I would reassure the students who needed reassuring, and I would be tough on the students who could take it, and if someone cried in my office for reasons unrelated but maybe sort of related to the imperfect short story they’d written, I would tell them that fiction makes you cry, the fiction you read though more often it’s the shitty fiction you write that makes you cry, and I would also be thinking, You poor person, you have no idea what awaits you. A life awaits you, like a serious fucking life. This is what I would want to say. And then I would go home to my serious fucking life, and it would be so ridiculously unserious; it would involve soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed, and I would think how lucky I was to have this unserious life, i.e., to be forced to do somewhat or even thoroughly banal things every day. Because what awaits you if you don’t? What kind of life awaits you then? A life where you don’t calmly think, as you’re scraping up the crystallized juice rings before showering before getting dressed before buying coffee before teaching class before reassuring people their hard lives would only get harder, Fuck this whole existence. You’re running down the street and you’re screaming at a university to which you no longer belong, you’re wearing a sweatshirt not even branded with the insignia of the university on which you blame your breakdown, the university to which you are no longer affiliated, because you are so deeply unaffiliated that you are barely even affiliated with your own face.