…or, Sense And Insensibility
I went to bed in a funk and woke up Wednesday morning feeling the same. Barley’s departure had been a slap in the face. Not a bad one, but the kind that wakes you up, snaps you out of a daze.
Without meaning to, without realizing it, I’d started imagining a future with her, at least for the short term. She was a good person and she was my friend. If I ever found myself telling the story of the first woman I made love to, I’d be talking about her and not Missy. But being a good person and being human were independent states. I couldn’t make the same assumptions with her that I could with another human. That would be as bad a mistake as doing that with an elf.
She looked more human than Iason and the middlings, but she was as different in her way as they were.
To try to snap myself out of my mood, I tried to coax Violet into coming for breakfast with us. Marlot was good company but I didn’t want to turn into the pair of losers who always ate alone together. Violet was being stubborn about it, though. She had the points in her meal plan. She just refused to use them.
“There are a lot of things on the breakfast menu that aren’t meat,” I told her during an early morning smoke break. “There’s fresh fruit. You could go over there and get an orange or a grapefruit half, basically for free since you’ve already paid for the meal plan. Hell, you could grab some and shove them in your bag for later. I think that’s against the rules, but I see kids come in and just grab an apple or a doughnut and turn around and go.”
“Yeah?” Violet asked. “You eat a lot of oranges over there?”
“No,” I said. “I like orange juice some of the time, but I’m not big on oranges.”
“Yeah,” she said. She wiggled her nose. “That’s what I thought.”
“That’s why it’s the best meal of the day,” I said. “It’s the only one they put out real, whole fresh fruit for, and the only one they have big tubs of scrambled eggs and bacon and sausage patties for, too. Everybody wins.”
“Yeah, you know, I checked it out last Saturday—I mean, the first Saturday—and I had to turn around and walk right out the door,” she said. “It doesn’t smell like an orange grove in there.”
“So, what, you can’t even smell meat without getting sick?” I asked. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“If somebody’s eating a burger or a ham sandwich in the lounge it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “But think about what it feels like when you walk into the cafeteria in the morning. Think about everything that’s coming at you: the sizzle from the griddles back behind the counters, the smell of the bacon and the sausage. That’s why you go. Not because you’re hungry for the food, but because you’re hungry for those sensations. If somebody brought you out a plate of crispy, warm bacon you might eat it and like it, but you wouldn’t be as satisfied because you didn’t get your real fix.”
“Are you saying I like the sound of bacon better than the taste?”
“I’m saying you like the whole package. Tasting without hearing and smelling is like hearing and smelling without tasting. It might nourish the body, but it doesn’t do anything for the mind.”
“I think you’re exaggerating a little,” I said. “But I’m getting the point.”
“Well, maybe it is an exaggeration for you,” she said. “But not for me. Eating is a full sensory experience, and walking into the cafeteria when the air’s full of meat is too much of that experience for me.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Violet would be Violet.
When Marlot and I got to the lunchroom a bit after that, we found a new development. Management had set up a sign outside it outlawing public displays of affection and seat-sharing.
“Sorry, Jamie, but rules is rules,” Marlot said. “I can’t sit on your lap today.”
“Damn the luck.”
“Lot of empty seats today,” she said after we’d gotten our food. The cafeteria looked like a jigsaw puzzle, with lines of deserted tables winding between islands of human and non-human students. Marlot dropped her tray down on one of the tables in No Man’s Land and sat down. She had a big bowl of spumoni and a cup of coffee with hot chocolate mix dumped in it.
“Hey, where’d you get ice cream?” I asked Marlot as I sat down.
“It’s inside the cabinet where they set the desserts out,” she said. “Big drums of it.”
“Are you allowed to get into it?” I asked.
“Nobody stopped me,” she said. “I paid for a meal. It’s the exact same place they keep it during lunch and dinner. Why would it be off-limits now?”
“Don’t know,” I said.
“Anyway, she seems to think it’s okay,” she said, pointing with her spoon over my shoulder. “I guess if anybody wants to bust me for Grand Theft Ice Cream, they’ll have to take her on, too.”
I turned and saw the the Harlowe clique. Mack had a bowl of ice cream. She was sitting in her own seat for once, and everybody was keeping their hands to themselves. It was obvious they were pissed. They seemed to think the rules were discrimination. I would have agreed they were heavy-handed and prudish, but it sounded like they were comparing a rule barring handjobs at the breakfast table to hanging out a No Elves Need Apply sign.
Yeah, fuck you, too, I thought, remembering my grandfather’s stories about trying to get into the carpenter’s guild as recently as a hundred years ago. If this was the worst discrimination the Harlowe kids faced, they were doing pretty good.
I left the ice cream for another time. I just enjoyed my plate of bacon and eggs and potatoes—sight, sound, taste, and feel. A bowl of ice cream for breakfast didn’t appeal to me. Violet was right to a point about eating being an experience, and ice cream did not equal breakfast. But if the mood hit me for some waffles, I could go for a little a la mode on top.
Experiencing bacon did a lot to lift my mood. By the time I was halfway across the pedestrian bridge to West Campus, I realized how much I was looking forward to my first class with Professor Bryony. It was probably a sign of how little excitement I had for the rest of my schedule, but I liked everything about the class in giant doll house on the ass-end of campus. The teacher was interesting and interested in her subject. The material was something I had an aptitude for but I was still learning things. More than any one thing, though, it was the whole experience.
The classroom was dim and dusty and smelled like preservatives. The windows at the back of the room had been papered over, and the paper was now yellow and peeling. The walls of the classroom bore wallpaper that was older than my mother. It was anybody’s guess what color the flowers on it had originally been.
It was leagues better than any of the staid institutional rooms in the big brick buildings on the east side.
“So you made it out of the woods, did you?” Bryony asked me on the smokers’ porch.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Guess you noticed I didn’t come back, huh?”
“I try to keep an eye on my ducklings and make sure none of them get eaten by alligators,” she said. “If you’d been somebody else I might have raised a ruckus.”
“Khee, thanks.”
“Oi, mind your tongue,” she said. “You’re still talking to a professor, you know.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I meant ‘kee’.”
“Anyway, it’s not that I didn’t care so much as I wasn’t worried,” she said. “Being that you’re handy with the wood lore, and you weren’t alone.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Did you hang around, or go further in?”
“Further in,” I said.
“See anything interesting?” she asked.
“Yeah, you might say that,” I said. I might not have been so evasive, but she’d just reminded me I was talking to a professor. The whole trip through the woods was bound up with my personal—i.e., sex—life.
“Did you meet the Green Men?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said.
“Funny buggers, aren’t they?” she said. “The elves say they’ll shamble after you and grab you, but I’ve walked right up them, waved my hands in front of them. The things are completely insensible. Mind, you don’t want to stumble into one. Paralyzing rash is no fun.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. I meant it. I knew I hadn’t imagined the Green Men veering to lumber towards us.
“And mind you don’t go too much further in,” she said. “There are things in the woods more dangerous than Green Men. Wonderful, too, but also terrible. After you see the blood worms strip a deer, you won’t sleep for a week.”
“Iason calls them lightning worms,” I said.
“Oh, does he?” she said. “That’s apt, too. He tell you about them, then?”
“In point of fact, he did not,” I said.
She clicked her tongue.
“You be careful going around with him,” she said. “You have the second highest grade in my lab, you know. I hate to lose a good student.”
I didn’t ask who had the highest grade. She catered to Honey Calloway like she was an empress or something. It was no skin off my back, though. As long as she graded me fairly, I wasn’t going to kick over anybody else’s applecart. Anyway, as far as I was concerned, she’d just told me I was the best student in the class.
The professor made another transparent show of her favor as soon as class started.
“Well, now,” she said, looking around the room. “I had meant for there to be a pop quiz today, but with Miss Honey absent again that hardly seems fair. So I guess I’ll combine it with the next one, and we’ll just be getting on with things.”
“Who’s ‘Miss Honey’?” Louis, my tablemate, asked me for the second time in as many class sessions. “Does she have a TA?”
“No, it’s the gnome girl who sits up front,” I told him again.
“Has she been gone the whole time?”
“No, just this week so far.”
After class, I walked down to the edge of the woods with the professor and she told me about her experiences with the crow tribe. Apparently she spoke their language.
“Well, it’s not so much a language, really,” she said. “I mean, I couldn’t sit down and write out a dictionary. The noises they make are more in the way of being a tone of voice. The words are something else.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“My Gram was the one who got me started,” she said. “She could talk to all sorts of birds, and other things besides. She said the key to understanding an animal is to listen with your heart. I used to watch her trying to get the trick, but I never worked it out. I got crows, and then later bears, but they were an accident.”
“Iason made it sound like nobody’s ever worked out how to talk to bears,” I said.
“Well, that’s elves,” she said. “They hear so keenly they never learn to listen.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
Cross reference TOMU 101 « « ~62~ Alien Geographies ~64~ Goodnight, Sweet Prince » »
