We Are Not Ourselves(140)
He ran past Rockefeller Chapel and onto the quad. The sprint across the length of the campus to Cobb took his breath away, and by the time he arrived he was panting hard. There was a time when this run would have been nothing to him, but when he decided to pursue the life of the mind, he stopped taking care of his body. He considered it a noble choice, except when he examined the evidence that he was falling apart. His muscle mass had melted away considerably. He was long and lanky and now almost certainly too thin. Instead of gaining the traditional fifteen pounds, he had probably lost twenty. He figured he looked like he was taking drugs, though in fact he was scared to try any. It would have been enough that his father had been a drug researcher, but on top of that, in his father’s Alzheimer’s he had an up-close example of the effects of haywire brain chemistry. He didn’t want to do anything to damage his brain. Of course, he understood that sleep deprivation was as ruinous as many drugs. The strongest drug he ever took was caffeine. He drank coffee throughout the day, enough to make him faintly jittery most of the time. He had a thick eraser of fifties-style hair, and his glasses were big, plastic, and chunky and looked like a stage prop. Once October bled into November, the weather provided the model for the persona so many around him cultivated: brisk, astringent, clarifying, with intermittent flashes of manic warmth.
He paused in front of Cobb to catch his breath and gaze at the indefatigable smokers, who stood in the mouth of the big stone C-Bench in any weather, puffing at Galoises and Lucky Strikes, anything unfiltered, to hurry the heat into their lungs. In the winter, with puffs of condensation escaping lips, everyone on campus looked like a smoker.
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In class, he took a seat at the round table, and then he was snapped awake to see the class all looking at him. The professor had called on him to speculate about what motive Raskolnikov might have had for the killing, beyond his stated philosophical one. Connell replied that he wondered whether Raskolnikov might not have been struggling through some kind of Oedipal problem. His father was dead; there was tremendous pressure on Raskolnikov to succeed, to provide a life for his sister and mother. He had his landlady at his back, a surrogate mother figure. Maybe the pawnbroker was herself a surrogate for those unresolved feelings.
The professor, a Russian American with a Mephistophelian goatee, had an amused smile on his face. This had happened before—slumbers of Connell’s punctuated by sudden outbursts of insight. Connell figured either that the professor possessed that elusive quality, the so-called Russian soul, or else that he had been similarly sleep-deprived at one point in his career himself. Something had allowed him to understand Connell’s bizarrely derelict behavior as an expression of authentic scholarship. Certainly it would have been harder on Connell if he didn’t do the reading. But to fall asleep like that in class, in brazen view of the instructor, and spring awake to provide a take that the other students seemed to chew thoughtfully on, even if they wore looks of scorn or pity: this seemed to strike the professor as being a natural mode for the study of Dostoyevsky.
Connell couldn’t help it. He never got enough sleep. He would drift off standing up, sometimes midconversation. If he leaned against a wall too long he would lose his legs and nearly topple over. There was so much to read, and the conversations he found himself in often lasted deep into the night. He watched the night owls go to sleep and pressed on.
Class let out and he went outside for the few minutes between classes to stand in front of the building. He spotted that professor he always saw with his son, a redheaded boy about four or five years old. He watched them walk across campus hand in hand, the professor gesturing around at something, the two of them stopping to watch a squirrel slip down the sloped lid of a garbage can and land in a crash of plastic containers.
He wished he had his own father with him. They could share an apartment off campus. His father could wander the grounds all day and they could meet for dinner. His father could trail him to classes. He would love the state-of-the-art labs, the brilliant students, the sense of higher purpose. His father had never gotten to hang out on a campus like this, though he’d always maintained that all campuses, in spirit, were essentially the same, that the differences between classes of institutions were more in degree than in kind.
After his second class, Connell want back to the dorm and did a little work. Then he went to dinner and rehearsal. He had gotten the part of Orlando in As You Like It, because his experience as a debater had lent him a certain rhetorical polish. The problem was, he didn’t know how to be anybody but himself, and he wasn’t sure what that self was yet, so he studied other people for traits to grab and fashion a personality out of. He liked to think this was what all college kids did, but when he ran into one of those hale, relaxed young men whose character, in the Heraclitean sense, seemed carved out at birth for him, he felt foolish and guilty. It helped that the character he was playing in As You Like It was a little na?ve, because he could be breathless and overwhelmed up there and it would just about make sense.
They had spent a week choreographing the fight scenes, which were the only parts of the play he had any mastery of. He hadn’t exercised in months—was it a full year now?—but he still had a wiry energy, and he executed the flips with an ease that made him embarrassed about the rest of his performance. His father would have enjoyed watching him practice the fight scenes. He loved swashbuckling movies about adventures on the high seas, and World War II flicks with buddies fighting side by side and striding into danger.