Heads of the Colored People(8)
“I’m only going to be here for a few more minutes. It’s fine.” Randolph fumbled through his desk drawer for a bottle of Aleve and his prescription pills, looking from one bottle to the other, as if making a decision about which level of migraine he had. He rattled the pills around and poured one into his hand. He could feel her mouth mocking him, even with her head turned, her little beak scrunching up.
“It’s a real condition, you know,” Randolph started, loudly, “overillumination. I literally get headaches from these lights, all fluorescent lights.”
“Hmm.”
He pointed to his head. “You’ve never had a migraine, I guess.”
“No. It’s okay, turn off the light.”
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Randolph asked his three o’clock class how they would deal with “an inconsiderate roommate who, for instance, made a lot of noise while you were trying to sleep.”
Someone said, “Mind games.”
Another said, “Man, I’d tell him to keep it down. When I gotta study, I don’t have time to play.”
“Just ask for another roommate,” someone else said.
“Like that would work,” several people seemed to say at once.
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On Monday, he got up twenty minutes early to beat Isabela into the office. When she came in, she smiled and said hello as though nothing had changed between them. Randolph made small talk, taking the opportunity to build a bridge, if a bridge is defined as the path to getting one’s own way.
“Would you like me to get you the desk lamp?” he started. “You know, this was my idea, and I feel bad about adding an expense. I can buy the lamp.” That sounded fine, he thought, not too pushy, but hopefully rhetorically manipulative enough to remind her of the gravity of the situation.
“That is fine.” Her mouth went from neutral to something else. They didn’t speak again that day.
? ? ?
The morning Randolph presented her with the lamp, in what he hoped was a cute mosaic pattern, Isabela did not smile. She paused with tight lips and said, “Thank you,” leaving the lamp untouched.
She beat him to the office for the next couple of weeks and turned on all the lights except her desk lamp. Whenever one left, the other adjusted the lighting to his or her preference. Randolph researched overillumination, looking for ways to convince Isabela of her insensitivity. Two of the friends he polled said he was making a big deal out of nothing; she probably just didn’t understand. Two other friends said she was being a jerk, and there was no way she could misunderstand. Jerry, a mutual friend of Reggie’s, said, “This is the kind of petty drama that can only happen with a woman. She’s the aggressor, but watch out now, or she’ll make it all look like your fault.” Reggie said this was about power and that Randolph could only lose, whichever way he played it. If he acted aggressively, he became what “they” always knew he would be, and she won. If he let her have the office, she won. “How do you think I went from Reginald to Reggie?” he said. “You can’t win, brother.” The Richter needles in Randolph’s temples charted small hills.
What else could Randolph do? He’d tried reasoning and compromise. He fantasized about driving Isabela out of the office, delighting in her expression at the sight of a fake rat spinning in her chair or a Spanish-English dictionary on her desk. He’d seen people on reality television rub their testicles on their housemates’ mattresses or pillowcases and brush the inner rim of a toilet with their toothbrushes. The victims never found out until they met for the reunion episodes and watched the footage together. Randolph wasn’t ready to pull his balls out over this, nor did he like the way they could implicate him in a potential misreading of the situation, but he thought about it.
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One late morning while she was still in class, Randolph went over to Isabela’s desk and flattened the bag of trail mix she always kept there, crunching a few of the nuts with his thumb and watching their oil streak the plastic. As quickly as he could, he removed all but a few of the yogurt-covered raisins and put them into his pants pocket. He flicked the desk lamp on and off three times and returned to his desk to eat the raisins before they melted into a mess, the cream and hydrogenated oils thick and sweet against his gums.
When he returned from class, Isabela was out of the office, and a book called Microaggressions had been left on Randolph’s desk. He tossed the book to her side of the office, not caring where it landed. When he pulled his lunch bag out of his desk drawer, he found his sandwich spotted with four abnormally large dimples on each side of the bread, like deep fingerprints. Randolph removed the bread from his sandwich, placed it back into the paper bag, and ate the smoked turkey directly from the plastic.
At his urban middle school in Chicago, a kid was shot for allegedly stealing someone’s lunch. At Wil U, a faculty member was caught going through another one’s desk drawers, and a fistfight broke out in the hallway. The woman won. At Wil U, a boy had been jumped for leaving the library at the wrong time. At Preston, Randolph found that people with money committed these assaults but left fewer traces, the violence psychological. He heard stories of girls saturating tampons with ketchup and sticking them into other girls’ thousand-dollar handbags. They published anonymous glossy newsletters accusing male professors of roving eyes or worse and tucked them into faculty mailboxes. Caracas or not, Isabela didn’t know how Randolph’s dual schooling had prepared him to get ugly. She didn’t know with whom she was fooling.