Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“Are these the first few things that come to mind, or are you serious?”

“Serious enough.”

“Let's do it, then.”

The drink is less disgusting than one might assume — that, or I'm too stubborn to admit that I've purchased ten dollars of weak emetic. I turn to see Vinati conducting an absentee orchestra through the final movement of Dvorák's “New World Symphony” or some particularly violent Wagner piece, her arms and hair but a series of blurs. It's irrelevant that Ilkay's no longer there. He's now next to me.

We talk for a few moments about his impending trip to Europe, as well as the unique brand of despair that accompanies graduation. We then move to a table and begin to run through anecdotes that have been repeated so many times that they have almost become platitudes. He returns to playing host upon seeing someone else arrive, which leaves me in the presence of several people I don't really know. Vinati and a few of her friends are at another table practicing thrift by enjoying the milk of a desperate cow that clearly isn't going to be purchased tonight.

I would have come with other friends of mine, but the sad truth of the matter is that most of the people with whom I have associated over the past four years have left town, either for Europe or some distant part of this country. Dennis is busy packing. His plane leaves for London tomorrow at dawn. I would have taken him with me last night, but that time had been reserved for his girlfriend, who has so many pejorative cognomens that just about everyone has started calling her by her first name again: Kristina (not Kris, not Tina, and sure as shit not Krissy). The members of the 26 thStreet contingency to whom Ilkay referred are nowhere to be seen. Not that this is too big of a concern. As a wise Russian monk once said (and I am paraphrasing here), If we stop feeling at the very least curiosity for the mysterious others surrounding us, we become indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. Nietzsche would disagree, but, then again, Nietzsche seems to be less a person, and more a corpus of aphorisms that people take or decline like hors d'oeuvres at a soirée —kind of like the Bible, ironically enough.

“You were in Post-colonial poetry class,” a girl with very discernible highlights says. This comes after a moment of awkwardness that should have been filled with introductions. Still, she's pleasant; there is a hue of sincerity in her tone that portends either gullibility or the acceptance of that suburban propriety with all of its underhanded comments and supercilious punctilios. I lean to the latter, as she seems to already have the mannerisms of a forty-year-old housewife from Central Jersey. There are more observations that could be documented, but I'll spare the reader as to not sound too cynical about the practices of tanning, shopping, and totally thinking oneself to be a Carrie.

“Yeah,” I respond slowly. “Angelica, right?”

“Yeah.” She offers no follow up until… “This is Teddy.”

“So what do you do?”

“Live.”

He laughs boisterously. “No, man, like what do you do ?”

“I just graduated. I haven't even had time to seriously look for a job yet. My parents just left on Wednesday.”

“I know how that goes. I just graduated from Northeastern last year,” he says while thumbing his Bosox hat.

“You're from Boston?”

“Yeah. But the money's a lot better down here. I'm in finance,” he says without pausing, blinking, swallowing: as if trapped in a tableau lacking in any ostensible significance.

“That's good,” curiously, slowly. “Do you miss Boston?”

“Of course, man,” he responds, suddenly animate again.

I realize he doesn't have the accent that one typically associates with New England, let alone Boston. He is a veritable paragon of upper-middle-class-East-Coast-suburban-whiteness, that archetype that has come to be regarded as normal in this country, as a sizable portion of television writers share his background. He's outgoing, a little arrogant, bright yet clueless, and essentially harmless. He shaved two times today. He wears a checkered button-down tucked into slacks (yes, slacks); his sleeves have been rolled to the elbows. He sports loafers, has nearly perfect teeth, and probably votes Democrat for reasons that will soon seem irrelevant once he forgets that there's a distinction between the working class and the poor. “When you're in Boston, you feel like you're in a neighborhood. Here, you just get lost in the crowd. Especially where we live.”

“Well, we're glad that you're here in the City,” Angelica swoons. Most of the denizens of the table taste bile. “You should have seen his apartment up there, though,” she says to no one in particular. Her eyes meet mine. “It was absolutely gorgeous.”

“Where did you live?”

“Back Bay,” he responds in a tone that is overly nonchalant. “Do you know the area?”

“A little. Most of my experiences in the area revolve around Davis Square.”

“Why were you up there?”

“I lived there for about a month with my girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend.” The white Victorian had been converted into three units. I arrived and told you that I felt as though I was in Virginia. There was a patrician elegance to the house that you wanted to deride, but you couldn't. So you went the other way; it was your dream house, the only place in which you could see yourself growing old. You wanted to be surrounded by books, by institutions of culture and learning. —Cambridge has always been home to the most important intellectuals in the country. New York has its fair share, and, you're right, there's probably more artists there than here, but just look at what we're surrounded by. And don't go quoting Bulgakov on me. What I'm trying to say is that I'll actually be able to get some work done without being subjected to the insanity of that cesspool you call home. You weren't being argumentative; you were just trying to eliminate the guilt that had hidden itself in one of the boxes in the back of the U-Haul in which you drove up to whatever city Tufts is located in…Is it Medford or Cambridge? We sat on the porch that first night, listening to a newer Mountain Goats album on that little boom-box that you kept saying you were going to “pitch” and drinking bottles of Ipswich that we'd purchased at a convenient store on Mass Ave. and talking about the previous year with gratuitous usage of the phrases “remember the time…” and “I'll never forget when…”, about little things with big implications, about fights that were speciously resolved, about how both Ortega y Gasset and Sartre sneered at the existentialist movement, but are now considered two of the philosophy's most preeminent figures even if it wasn't a philosophy so much as a recognition of the scary side of freedom, a fact which explains why no American has ever been accepted into the movement's pantheon (as Americans, we are always taught that freedom is good in it-self, that [the Hegelian concept of] negative freedom is the only freedom, that the elimination of some freedoms in order to promote greater freedoms is an idea subscribed to by Marx, and not Locke). —Something Ortega said really got to me recently; it was how he addressed the issue of the other. True, it's a common topic for just about anyone writing in the twentieth century, but he sounded a lot like Fromm when he described the break from Eden as the creation of this other. We break from Eden, from nature, and then live in two worlds — the internal and the external. He said we are constantly looking to return, and that the return to a unified world implies the abolition of the other — the distinction between our internal and external lives. But that's terrible, if you think about it. And yet it's kind of the road we're heading on, what with all the advances in digital technology and the Internet and the Bush administration. How fucked up is that? The air was brisk; I put on that over-sized sweatshirt that your parents had purchased when you visited the university in the spring — I still have it (in my closet, my dresser, somewhere) because you are still too bashful (or polite, I still haven't decided) to ask for it back. We even brought out a blanket from your bedroom and cuddled on the bench that sat on the porch right outside your living room window. The streets were dark and populated by occasional headlights and stray drunks. You said it reminded you of Michigan, the lacustrine graveyard to which you believe you will never return. I said it reminded me of the fall.