Eric walked into a lecture hall built for three hundred students but only about half full, and sat closer to the front. That way he didn’t have to see most of the people and could pretend there were fewer of them. Others around him sat in all sorts of relaxed ways – they carelessly spread their things all about them and some put their feet up on the backs of the seats in front and rested tablets against their knees. Eric didn’t feel comfortable doing any of those things. He sat stiffly and politely with his back straight and his eyes fixed ahead. He looked as though the airspace around him was restricted. On the one hand he knew that he was in the right place, but on the other hand he had an overwhelming sensation of having intruded on someone else’s affairs. Someone said “Hi, Eric” and sat down next to him. You’d think this would have broken him out of his trance, but it didn’t, because you see, his name wasn’t Eric. He politely responded to the greeting and smiled absently.
Eric had a nagging feeling that he was not speaking the right language. In fact, the more he reflected on it the more he became convinced that something about his verbal interactions was definitely not right. He hadn’t sent an email this morning because of this exact feeling. He pulled out his phone and showed a draft to the person in the seat beside him – the one who had greeted him earlier. Eric thought that this person was his friend, but he wasn’t sure. Anyway, he would have to do.
“Hey, can you take a look? Does this make sense?” The maybe-friend took a quick look and shrugged. “Yup. Really straightforward. It makes sense to me.”
Every time Eric tried to check about the language thing, people told him that there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. They all swore up and down that he was using the same language as everybody else. And yet… Eric distinctly remembered that there was a time when he would speak, and people would really understand what he was telling them. Like – really understand. You know how when you keep a couch in the same spot on a carpet for a long time the carpet develops deep imprints where the couch’s weight presses on it? Well, he remembered a time when his words and people’s minds were like that. He would speak and the words would fit exactly into existing grooves and molds in people’s landscape of ideas. And when he was sad, or mad, or needed something, he could say something really mild and innocuous, but people would know exactly what he meant.
These days people said they understood what he was saying, but he felt like he was a couch that someone had moved to clean the carpet and then stupidly put it back a few inches off from where the imprints in the carpet were. There he was, standing next to where he was obviously meant to be. Like an idiot.
That’s why Eric avoided participating in the discussion that was being held in class this morning. He decided that until he figured out whether he was using the correct language the best thing to do was to say as little as possible. But that didn’t obviate the related issue of understanding what other people said. On the one hand, he understood perfectly. On the other hand, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing an inside joke.
By the end of class Eric felt tired, both of focusing on the lecture and of so much stiff sitting. On his way out of the lecture hall someone Eric hadn’t seen in a couple of weeks appeared out of nowhere and, bumping into him, said “Hey! It’s been a while! How are you? Listen, I have to run. Let’s grab lunch sometime?” He promptly disappeared. Guess he really “had to run.” Eric was instantly filled with confusion and longing born out of loneliness. What should I do? Does he really want to have lunch with me? Should I message him later and ask what day works for him? Eric reasoned that it was just as likely that the kid was merely being polite. They do that all the time in this country. It is an unsecured loan of goodwill. “Want to have lunch” just means “you evoke mild positive emotions in me as I pass you by.” Half the time. The other half they actually want to have lunch. If you can tell the difference you are probably not an international student.
It was time to eat something. The class had been long and Eric had only had coffee for breakfast. In the dining hall he entered the labyrinth of buffet stations like a ship entering a foreign harbor. He swayed a little on the giddy currents. Here it was again – this disorienting feeling that something was just a little bit not right. On the one hand, Eric was very sure that what he was seeing around him was fairly normal dining hall fare. Moreover, he knew that he had tried most of these foods before. On the other hand, out of the scores of items on offer, none felt at all familiar. Not a single food smelled like the cure for hunger, and not a single food had a corresponding entry in the ledger of culinary pleasures stored in his brain. “Maybe these things are not really edible,” – Eric had this thought for only a fraction of a second and then discarded it as utterly ridiculous. ss
Eric had about an hour and a half after lunch before his next class. He had been planning to study, but decided to take a walk. The campus was so beautiful, and for Eric, who had spent most of his life in a place without the red and gold majesty of autumn, the campus still activated the tourist response – that same script that makes people feel that sitting under some random tree is an exciting activity, but only if the tree is in someone else’s country. As he weaved in and out of courtyards and walkways he realized that he was too cold to be able to stay outside for long. He started examining the others around him for signs of discomfort, but people, on average, seemed okay. Eric couldn’t understand it. He had done his research before coming here. His mother even went to the embarrassing lengths of contacting the international student center on his behalf to ask what winter clothes to buy. He had a coat, a hat, a scarf – he had more stuff than most of the other kids. Why couldn’t his body adjust to the temperature? Well –true, Eric was one of the only kids wearing a hat and a scarf, but then he was also one of the only kids still wearing his sandals. In fact, there was only one other person wearing flip flops, and if Eric had looked her way, he would have noticed that she too looked desperately cold. Had Eric looked her way he might have liked her face. Maybe he’d have tried to talk to her and learned that she too was international. Maybe they would have struck a friendship, and then something more if they were really lucky. But Eric was too busy looking at and for locals – people who seemed like they belonged, and he missed her.
Eric’s next class had recently served as backdrop for very unfortunate drama, an entire tragic little scene with a cast of one. About a month ago, Eric and his project partner had wanted to meet with the professor to go over some details for an upcoming presentation and the whole thing went badly. To begin with, Eric’s partner, as the “native” one, was tasked with reaching out to the professor and setting up the meeting. One morning Eric woke up to a message in his inbox signed in both their names and addressed to the professor. It started “Hi Tom, we were wondering if we could meet with you regarding…”
Hi Tom? Who did he think he was writing to? His buddy? His brother? In his mind’s eye Eric could see the hateful email making its way through a web of wires and synapses and descending onto the professor’s screen like a red cape in front of a bull. Eric spent an agonizing hour that morning berating himself harshly for having allowed his idiot of a partner to be responsible for the email and imagining various convoluted scenarios of professorial wrath and vengeance that inevitably ended with him failing the class. About an hour later he received a reply. It was cool and curt, with none of the embellishments of niceness that Eric had grown accustomed to in this country and had come to expect: “Are you able to stay after class this Wednesday?” and signed “Dr. Scott.”
The coolness of the message chilled Eric’s bones. “Of course,” he told himself. “He was never going to write anything critical in an email, but he hates us, that’s clear. He was offended and thinks we are rude and stupid. We are probably going to fail the course!” Eric was filled to the brim with shame and anxiety, and he dreaded the upcoming meeting. s
The only thing he dreaded more than the meeting was the conversation he felt he needed to have with his partner, the Idiot. Did the Idiot realize what he had done? He probably didn’t care. He had rich parents and was comfortably ensconced in safety. For all Eric knew, he didn’t even care about passing the class. Eric thought with a combination of bitter chill and a discomforting kind of pride that, unlike his own parents, the Idiot’s parents were probably soft and cushy like moss. They were probably proud of their Idiot just because he was born to them. Not so Eric. All he got by virtue of being born was a given name (again – not Eric). Everything else with his parents had to be earned.
In the end, Eric didn’t say anything to the Idiot. He just couldn’t muster enough energy to deal with this on top of everything else. The dreaded Wednesday class arrived, and Eric spent the whole hour trying to make himself simultaneously invisible and impossibly ingratiating. He tried to do all this without participating in class and without so much as taking extra breaths – just through the intensity of his gaze and the studiousness of his note-taking, which was starting to resemble a court stenographer’s. The Idiot, who plopped his unpleasant little self right next to Eric and looked cool as a cucumber, turned to Eric midway through class and asked whether Eric was okay.
Eric showed up to the after-class meeting a bumbling mess. He smiled and nodded incessantly, sometimes out of context. He made a point of randomly agreeing with the professor and contrived opportunities to address him as ‘Professor Scott’: “Thank you very much for this suggestion, Professor Scott. This is so valuable, Professor Scott,” and so forth. So busy was he with trying to compensate for the terrible impression he believed they’d made with the email that for the life of him he couldn’t recall the main idea behind their project. When the professor asked him a question he stumbled, sweated, and said something wildly unintelligible. The Idiot threw him an exasperated look and quickly stepped in. Eric was silent for the rest of the meeting while the Idiot and the professor discussed some points that Eric was now not even trying to comprehend. When they left the Idiot turned to him and was about to say something cutting but something in Eric’s face put him off this idea and he said simply, “I’ll type up a summary. We are meeting tomorrow, yeah? Okay, I have something… I have to go. See yah.” And he left.
The project had since been submitted and returned with a decently good grade. Eric’s overall grade in the course was unharmed. This was all water under the bridge now, but Eric remained confused. Was the professor upset about the email? Was the Idiot an idiot? Or was it not such a big deal after all to address a professor by his first name? He was taught that bad things would happen to him if he disrespected those who held power or if he made a bad impression. If the email didn’t make a bad impression (which he still couldn’t believe), then his spectacular performance at that meeting certainly did, but no consequences ever came. Of course, Eric was grateful that things had turned out well, but it also made his world feel even more unpredictable and somehow… wrong.
Painful setbacks notwithstanding, Eric was constantly observing, constantly drawing up knowledge like a thirsty stalk of grass, and he was starting to appreciate and develop a taste for something very special: Professors here, including Dr. Scott, seemed to take themselves much less seriously than he expected. Some of them seemed to openly encourage what Eric initially saw as dissent but was beginning to redefine as frank discourse. One of his professors was a particularly colorful example of. He started the year with a forceful speech:
“This university hired me to be your professor, to have power over your grades. But only you can give me power over your minds, and I do not suggest that you do that. If you disagree with me, I want you to say so. But then you better bring some good arguments, because I will challenge the heck out of you. But if you just smile and nod at me, that’s the same as not coming to my class at all. I already get unconditional positive regard from my dog, so I don’t need it from you.”
At first Eric was not impressed by this speech at all. On the contrary, he thought to himself bitterly that this was the height of pretentiousness. “So basically,” he thought, “since no one is actually going to ever disagree with you, you are implicitly making us concede that our smiling and nodding constitutes real agreement. It’s like fucking us in the head and then making us sign a declaration that we all really enjoy cranial sex. Nice going. At least you can be honest about it and admit that you own our asses for the semester.”
The first time that someone took the professor up on his proclamation of intellectual freedom Eric felt such severe vicarious social anxiety that he almost left the room. When the second student did it, he thought the girl was stupid. The third time it happened Eric thought that everyone in this country was disrespectful and higher ed was going to hell. After the first shocks wore off, though, he started paying attention. What he saw was remarkable. Here and there students picked up their rapiers to spar with their professors and sometimes their professors raised their masks to say ‘touché.’ But what shocked him even more was that sometimes, after a student had been fairly struck down, the professor offered a hand to help the student up. Like you do with equals.
Sometimes Eric seriously considered the possibility that he was dreaming. Why, he even responded to a name that wasn’t his. Wasn’t that the hallmark of a dream? A lot of the time Eric felt like it was a kind of dream that wasn’t exactly bad but was good to wake up from. He felt this when the food was strange, and when he always felt slightly and mysteriously misunderstood, and when it was hard to make friends, and when everyone else seemed to be having sex but he couldn’t. He felt it every time he told someone he was going to “his room”, and then entered his dorm room and felt an involuntary jolt because it didn’t feel like his real room, which was halfway across the world. But these sparring matches, those little triumphs of intellectual freedom – those were the moments when he found himself wanting to dream the dream a bit longer.
Another thing that had Eric hooked was how people seemed to treat their feelings. He thought about this around 7 p.m. as he headed to the dining hall to meet some people for dinner. He was not really close with them, but they were friendly, and a big improvement over eating alone. On his way to meet them he reflected with mixed condescension and envy on the interesting, permissive way in which they seemed to commune with their internal worlds. These local kids talked about their feelings as though they really mattered:
“My third cousin got a divorce. It’s so sad. It reminds me of when my parents got a divorce when I was five. I was really triggered by that.”
“I’m so sorry! Totally understandable. You should ask for an extension on your assignment!”
Eric would nod and smile, and all the while be thinking to himself, “Holy shit, people! Where I’m from you could be getting a divorce yourself for all anyone cared. You could be getting a divorce and your parents could be getting a divorce at the same time and you would still be expected to hand in your work on time. You are a soft bunch of losers!” he thought unkindly.
Oh sure – this particular kid was probably just trying to get out of some homework, and yet… A couple of years ago Eric’s grandmother had suddenly fainted and was taken to the hospital. No one knew what was wrong with her and he was really scared he might lose her. They had always been so close. His teachers knew what had happened but still – when he couldn’t focus that day he was rebuked in front of his entire class. He had a sense that this wouldn’t have happened here. Here his teachers would have let him off the hook. Perhaps there is a place for some compassion after all…
This particular day, though, the conversation turned to post-graduation plans. Someone was saying that she’ll be applying for grad school but had decided that even if she gets in, she’ll defer the admission and spend a year traveling. Incredible! Eric just couldn’t get used to this. Every time he heard someone say something like “I’m gonna switch majors!” or “I’m going on a backpacking trip of Europe!” or “I came out to my parents!” or “I don’t want kids!” or “I think I’m gonna get a tattoo!” he felt like he was watching a film and couldn’t decide if it was utopian or dystopian.
“Are your parents okay with this?” He asked the girl mechanically.
Her face darkened, but not the kind of dark before a tornado. It was the kind of dark when you know you are about to get soaked and your fancy hairstyle might be ruined.
“Yeah, I mean… They aren’t super happy about it. They are trying to talk me out of it. But they said that if I can get a scholarship of something they’ll be more okay with it. They really don’t want me to take out a loan and they are not gonna help me pay for this. So I’m kinda on my own. But if I can make it happen, there isn’t much they can do, so…”
“Yes, of course. That’s so cool, Steff!” said Eric and thought to himself, “Isn’t much they can do, huh? Where I’m from there is plenty they could do. For instance, descend upon you like a tornado and tear you limb from limb!”
A bolt of envy flashed like lightening and blinded Eric to the fact that though Steff’s parents didn’t “descend upon her like a tornado,” they actually did plenty to deter her. Hadn’t Steff just said that they basically told her they will cut her off if she goes through with her plan? What are the odds, then, that she will actually go through with it?
To Eric though, this didn’t matter. There was a current of freedom here that he was getting more and more drunk on the longer he stayed in it. And this was when he felt that if all of this was a dream, maybe he didn’t mind staying here for a bit.
After dinner Eric had some work to do. It was the middle of the week in the middle of the semester coming up on midterms. They all had work to do. So Eric went back to his room and for the next couple of hours thought of nothing except his problem sets. He was medium on the procrastination scale and actually liked many of his classes, so his work usually got done somewhere in the space of time when you can see the last minute from where you stand, but you are not yet in it. Also, it’s a myth that no one sleeps in college. Eric slept most nights and was certainly going to sleep tonight.
Sleeping bodies at night are like boats, quietly rocking on the surf of night noises in the ocean-like darkness. Eric floated on these currents too and his body, warm and vulnerable, would have made someone want to touch it, had someone been sleeping there with him. Eric woke up to a hot, insistent sun and to the tart smell of flowers. Then he became aware of the smell of cooking, his mother’s cooking, from the kitchen. At college morning smells were mild and sweet but here even the morning meals smelled of sauces and spice. He threw aside his light sheet, drew the blinds, and then opened the window. A gust of warm wind ruffled his hair, rustled the curtains, and lifted some papers on his desk. Then he heard his name being called, not ‘Eric,’ but his proper name. His mother was telling him it was time to get up. He generally hated that she did that, but today he was only too happy to get up quickly. He had missed her food so much! Actually, how come he’d missed it so much? It didn’t appear that he ever left home, so he probably ate it last night…
At the breakfast table not-Eric gobbled down his food and listened appreciatively to the warm cadences of his native language floating over the sizzling and hissing sounds of the busy kitchen. He was entranced. “Then there never was a long trip, a campus, or class discussions? There was never strange food, and strange girls and I was never called Eric and never had to wear coats and hats and never got a chance to be equal with my professors? Was this all a dream? And was it a good dream…? And then again – I could be dreaming now. I could be in my dorm room in bed and dreaming of warm weather and of my mother. Let’s say I’m dreaming now – is that a good dream?”
Copyright © 2023 Anna Braverman