Michael Crichton - Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues

“You don’t want to go?” John said, now acting surprised.

“Me? Not want to go to the Piggy Club Picnic? You’ve got to be kidding. I can hardly wait.”

“Garden Party,” John amended. He sighed. “Little late to call her up and refuse, isn’t it?”

That was unnecessary, and as I left the room I slammed the door behind me. Typical John interaction. I was furious and, in a sense, grateful for the pressures of the coming exam. No chance to brood on it. It feels so good when I stop.

Down the hall was Herbie’s room. Herbie was a weird little cat, sort of a cross between Mr. Natural and Dr. Zharkov. He was a senior, and seventeen years old. He’d come from somewhere in West Virginia, where his father worked in the mines and his mother worked in the mine offices; one of those trips. Mother had noticed very early that Herbie was not like the other children and had taken him to a testing center that the government ran for mentally retarded children. The testing people had found that Herbie’s I.Q. could not be accurately measured—and not because he was retarded. They’d sent him to a special high school in New York, and then they’d gotten Harvard interested in him. Herbie hadn’t taken a math course that was listed in the catalog since his first year at Harvard, nor, for that matter, an economics course or a physics course. He was now working up at the Observatory, taking a side degree in astrophysics.

I came in and found him sitting in his bentwood rocker, rocking back and forth. He wore dungarees and a garish print shirt, and he was smoking a joint the size of an expensive cigar.

“Peter,” he said, when he saw me.

“Herbie,” I said, and sat down across from him.

Herbie scratched his head. “Let’s see, now.” He looked across the room at a wall calendar. “Economics, is it?”

I nodded.

“All right,” he said. “We can take an hour.” He held out his hand. I dropped the Baggie into it. He squeezed it, feeling the texture, then held it up to the light; finally tossed it onto his desk. “Sold,” he said. “There’s paper and pencil on the desk. Let’s get started. It’s all very simple,” he said. “The internal dynamics of the European nation-state in the early part of the seventeenth century eventually necessitated the manipulation of the economy to serve the political interests of the state. That concept in turn led—am I going too fast?”

“Just fine,” I said, scribbling as fast as I could. “Just fine.”

I HATE THE MORNINGS BEFORE exams. I always go to breakfast, because I’ve been up all night, and I feel really ragged, and I have coffee and that makes me feel even more ragged. And I read the paper and shoot the shit and try to forget that I have an exam at 9:07 and that I haven’t studied for it.

If you can get with some good breakfast discussion, then you can forget the exam coming. A discussion like whether women with small boobs have better orgasms than women with big boobs.

But there wasn’t any such discussion the morning after I got back from San Francisco. I just sat there with my coffee and notes, and I felt ragged. It was so absurd, the school riff: all that time spent in school, which in the end amounts to the morning of an exam and the hour or two of the exam itself.

Across the dining hall, a few industrious wimps were still studying: jamming down those last few pages of notes, knowing full well that it might make the difference between an A-minus and a B-plus. I thought of the Romans stuffing themselves with food, then sticking their fingers down their throats, vomiting it up and starting to eat again. Of course, if you eat that way, you must be much more interested in the process of eating than you are in the nutritional value of the food you take in. You must also have the stomach for it.

Pretty soon the wimps were dumping their trays, and hustling feverishly out the door, talking to themselves. The time had come. I got up and left with them.

The exam was held in Memorial Hall, a cavernous medieval sort of building, with desks in long rows. The proctors wandered from desk to desk with their hands clasped behind their backs. The best proctors—the most professional ones—remained entirely and haughtily aloof. But the graduate students and section men who were there to answer questions about the exam questions, as well as to be proctors, were pretty bad. A lot of them liked to walk from student to student and check out what was being written.

About halfway through the hour one of them stopped to look over my shoulder. He looked, and he stayed. I kept writing, getting suddenly nervous. He had a nose cold, this proctor, and he sounded like a horse with pneumonia on a cold winter morning. Finally I turned back to look at him.

He was shaking his head as he read the page.

I shrugged.

He shrugged back, but at least he walked on. The bastard had shaken me up; I began having trouble concentrating on the question. Particularly since I hadn’t done any of the reading that was necessary to answer it. I was just sort of going along, putting down words. The answer didn’t mean anything, but then neither did the question.

I began to think of Sukie, and how she had looked when I left her at the airport. I wondered if she made it back all right. It was a drag for a single chick to hitch out to Berkeley at night. And then I wondered if she was meeting somebody afterward. I wondered if she had just wanted a ride to S.F., and that was why she had come in.

Then I started to think about how she had been in bed. It was obvious that she wasn’t learning anything from me, which was completely to be expected, but just then it seemed outrageous, absurd, that she should have been with anyone but me. Or that she ever would be with anyone but me in the future. I could feel irritation building, and I realized that I was jealous. Not even jealous, more…

“Five minutes,” the king proctor said, stepping to the microphone.

I looked back down at my bluebook. I still had another essay to go. I stared at the question, praying for inspiration, and I got it at the last minute.

I HAVE NEVER BEEN JEALOUS. At least, not about women. I have been jealous of objects, of things, and sometimes of traits; I remember especially a friend of mine when I was a kid. He held my unbroken admiration for years, because of his imagination. He effortlessly devised such wonders as the Burning-Bag-of-Shit Trick, conveniently placed on a neighbor’s doorstep—when the neighbor tried to stamp it out, well, that was his problem.

Also the Good Humor Man Stunt, in which one kid would sprawl out on the road, deathly ill, and enlist the Good Humor Man’s help, while another kid went to the back of the truck and climbed into the refrigerated compartment. There he would stay, eating himself sick, for a full block, at which time a similar catastrophic mid-road illness would again cause the truck to stop, and allow the half-frozen and satiated ice-cream fiend to escape giggling and shivering into the sunlight.

And I remember I was jealous of a guy who lived down the street from me one summer who had a cycle before I even had a driver’s license.

But as far as chicks went, I had never really felt anything. Certainly not jealousy. Chicks had been a necessary evil, giggling half-wits who played games until your balls were purple and then forgot their purses in the theater, or had to be in by midnight, or Weren’t That Kind of Girl, or some other crap.

And yet there I was, finished with the exam and by all reasonable expectations hot on the trail home, to blow some dope and collapse into bed, after being up almost forty-eight hours. But that wasn’t happening. Instead I went right back to my room and called her.