Adam Levin - Hot Pink

If Susan Falls were to create a successful television advertising campaign for Carla Ribisi’s ass, the only two things she would have to figure out would be (1) how much time x equals for the average viewer, and (2) how to make the campaign compelling enough to keep the viewer considering it for ≥ x .

If Susan Falls could pull that off, then even if the viewer were to start with a bias (e.g., “prefers big asses,” “disdains small asses,” “abjures jacked-up small asses that look bigger than they are”), the bias would, by campaign’s end, be made irrelevant; whether im- or explicitly, the viewer would, once her x was met, reach the same conclusion as Susan:

Any ass worth spending all this time on must be some really good ass.

CHAPTER 130,024

AN ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

The other brilliant aspect of Carla Ribisi’s blue snowpants is the sound they make when Carla enters a packed lecture hall, tardy, as she just has. Except people in college are never called tardy . The tardy go to high school. In college they’re late , and this is the sort of thing — this usage of tardy —that Susan Falls wouldn’t want to betray to Carla Ribisi upon their first actual meeting, but might come in handy later on, when Susan decides it’s time to coyly let Carla know something that she wants the whole world to know.

Susan wants the whole world to know that she is a fifteen-year-old college freshman, but she doesn’t want the world to know that she wants the world to know. She wants the world to see her as the sort of person who would not only make light of such an achievement on her part in conversation, but the sort of person who would really not consider it an achievement. She has a statement prepared in explanation of her being a fifteen-year-old college freshman, and she hopes that the topic will come up so that, one day soon, she can make the statement. This is the statement:

“Ah, well… When you’re legless, no one wants to play with you, and TV gets boring fast, so all you have are books and time.”

CHAPTER 130,025

SHIKKA SHIKKA, A GLIMPSE AT DEATH

Carla Ribisi enters the packed lecture hall, late for Logic I: An Introduction to Propositional Logic. Her snowpants make the snowpants sound. For every person present, the sound is the seed of a tree of uncountable self-perceptions relating to Carla, and, three strides in, Carla sees them all watching her, the professor included. He’s clearing his throat, over and over.

Instead of making her way to her usual desk at the back of the lecture hall, she considerately heads to the nearest open seat, which is in the front row, between a deaf boy — in front of whom crouches an interpreter whose frantic signing distracts all hell out of the ASL-fluent Susan Falls — and Susan Falls, in front of whom is a wheelchair.

The interpreter signs, “Lecture interrupted by noise: S-H-I-K-K-A S-H-I-K-K-A,” and Susan’s mind twirls at the thought of signing sound for a deaf boy; at the thought of a deaf boy reading a sign for a sound; at what must be the sameness, to a deaf boy, of a sign for a sound and the sound the sign stands for. As if a sound were nothing more than the sign that stands for it.

Susan Falls shivers, like in the Nordstrom dressing room, but not hypothetically.

Carla Ribisi, while getting settled, inadvertently knocks loose the brake on Susan Falls’s wheelchair. The wheelchair rolls down the moderately sloping floor of the lecture hall. “Oh God,” whispers Carla Ribisi.

And Susan’s shivering body starts to shake, only, with her mind still twirling, it’s as if it isn’t Susan’s field of vision that’s trembling, but that which is in her field of vision; the shaking of Susan’s body seems to be the shaking of the classroom, and although a part of her knows that it’s her body shaking — a part of her knows from experience that classrooms don’t shake — the shaking of her body, rather than being expressed by the words my body is shaking , seems to be the expression of the words my body is shaking . And no part of her knows otherwise, not from experience. And the thought of this makes her shake harder.

And harder, until the rolling wheelchair strikes the wall beneath the tray of the chalkboard and clatters, and Susan startles out of the twirl. Stops shaking. Ideas can’t get startled, is what she tells herself; they can’t shake. Names don’t shiver, she thinks. The world is not just a word with an l . Everything is fine. The twirl was an outcome of low blood sugar is all.

Look at things, Susan thinks, look at the wheelchair.

The wheelchair, having struck the wall, rolls back a few inches, as if the wall had struck it back, thus describing Newton’s third law of motion — rather, demonstrating Newton’s third law of motion… Or rather demonstrating the effect of Newton’s third law of motion, for the wheelchair doesn’t do the demonstrating, does it? — the motion of the wheelchair does the demonstrating… Newton’s third law of motion, which is the name of a principle described by Newton, explains why the wheelchair describes the motion that it describes after striking the wall. And a shiver comes on.

Better to look at Carla, Susan thinks.

“Oh God,” Carla says. “Oh no.” The shiver wavers, quits. Susan never got to eat her breakfast is all, her Eggs Jiselle, she tells herself, and to quell the last tiny remnant of her panic, she inhales deeply, slows her blood down. What Carla hears is mounting rage.

“Oh God,” says Carla Ribisi once more. “I’m really so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Carla,” says Susan. And all her panic is gone.

“It’s just, God, I mean, it’s just that…”

“Carla?” Susan says.

“I hate today. Anything I do is wrong.” Tears tremble in the scoops of Carla’s eyelashes. One falls, splats against a thumbnail the color of a robin’s egg, is atomized. More follow.

Everyone in the classroom continues to watch Carla Ribisi, even the professor. To defend Carla, Susan Falls glares at anyone who thinks she’s strong enough to stand the eye contact. It is a sacrifice. Susan also wants to watch Carla cry.

“Let’s leave,” Susan says.

“Really?” Carla wipes snot on the arm of the matching blue parka that she hasn’t yet removed. The parka’s shell is a shiny kind of nylon, iridescent, and the snot is clear and perfectly straight, like some three-inch pinstripe. It performs miracles of refraction with the fluorescent light particles that fall through the grids of the ceiling panels. Now Carla leans in close and whispers, “But,” and then she sees the line of snot. “God that’s gross. I’m so gross…” She snorts a giggle.

“But what?” Susan Falls says.

Carla, still whispering: “How will we get out of here?”

“Just pull my chair over and we’ll go.”

“Everyone’ll see.”

“Fuck them,” says Susan Falls. This is the first time, in her entire life, that she has employed an extra-cerebral profanity. Though in fantasy she has often used swear words, she has never spoken one. It feels good, and it occurs to Susan that, as stupid as most people sound when they use profanities, as stupid as she must have sounded just now, the feeling of power that just rushed through her, from inner labia to thyroglossal duct, the trace sensations leftover from just now, just now when she said the word fuck , make sounding stupid more than worthwhile.

“Fuck them, then,” Carla Ribisi agrees, and it is the hottest motherfucking thing Susan has ever heard.

CHAPTER 130,026

TWO BOUNCES IN LOGIC

Carla, eschewing the intricacies of the plan, crouches in front of Susan and, at the sign-language interpreter who is staring at her, makes this sound: “Tch.”