School starts in a month. It’s your last year of college. Anything could happen. You could drop out. You could die. You could find something you care about immensely. So far school has been quiet; it’s been long hours of solitude. You have come to rest in the uppermost reaches of your body, in your thick skull that sometimes lolls over the tired, unexercised neck. 

Light becomes eclipsed by the trees, then it is a glimmer at the top of the wood stairs. You stop where you are, next to a fir, bend over, your hands braced on your knees. Breathe.
 

You need a candle, but feel inhibited from searching through your professor’s drawers and cupboards. Funny, you had no problem masturbating on his couch. Wonder how this night might be different if your professor were not in Paraguay, rafting. You’ll watch his house for three more weeks, then he’ll be home. Maybe you’ll have coffee together.

You’ll let him make the coffee, resume dominance over his house. Suddenly your presence in his bed, his halls, and his shower will seem obscene and unreal. His smelly terrier will no longer come to you. His actor friend will knock at seven-thirty, let himself in, a newspaper under his arm. Your professor—let’s say his name is Aaron—will make a third cup of coffee. The three of you will sit in silence—the friend in the rocker, Aaron on the couch, you beside the window, looking past this redwood table, past the garden, which you can’t see from the window, downsloping as it is, and over the campus. Beyond campus is a combination of farms on Palouse silt and patches of pine. You’ll wonder where you’ll go this spring and what, exactly, you’re doing here. You’ll consider your suffering, most of which has originated within a three-mile radius, as with car crashes. You’ll make a show about mourning, leaning your head against the cool glass. Maybe the professor will sense this suffering and fall in love.

For now, give up on the fillet. It’s too well done to bother with. Mushrooms are enough for a small woman like you.

You count the pennies on his table as he smokes from a purple bong. He offers you a hit. "No thanks," you say. You can’t stand the thought of putting your lips to the bong of a man who wears tube socks up to his knees along with satin jogging shorts. You notice with disgust his penis hanging out one side of the shorts. His skin is pasty and he has a bad shave. You rub your cigarette out in ketchup in the plate that, three days ago, was overloaded in frozen-fried French fries.

"Do we have to look at that thing?" he says. "It’s like it’s staring at me."

You follow his eyes to the sculpture on the table. "It’s a sculpture."

"A goddamned frightening sculpture. What is this? Some stabbing thing...and candles? Is this your kind of thing?"

"Is what my kind of thing?"

"Forget it," he says, laughing. His breath stinks. He’s loaded. Probably so are you.

You can’t believe you are sleeping with this oaf, much less that you are sadly attracted to him. You have been for ten days. He is better-looking sober; the alcohol brings out his high blood pressure and acne scars. Imagine your attraction has to do with nature, with his bigness, broadness, as if he could pull in a lot of dead animals. But he’s certainly no provider. He’s told you that. He’s said, "I’m one of the bad guys. You shouldn’t be with me. Then again, you’re one of the bad girls, aren’t you? Aren’t you?"

Stare at the metal sculpture, a mask silhouetted by the candle inside it. Think about the flame, about Kennedy’s grave, about your mother. Wonder whether Tube Socks will walk in. It’s after one in the morning—it’s possible he will.

Ask yourself whether it’s worth it. You think about enjoying yourself, but you can’t go on with such pungent breath hanging around, however relentlessly he gropes.

Say, "Hey, hey. A condom. Don’t forget the condom."

Notice he’s wrinkled and splotchy and has stretch marks at the bottom of his back when he gets up to fumble around in his coat pocket. He turns around. The hair on his chest is going gray. "Never can be too careful, can you?" he says. He stumbles to the couch.

More than one thing is wrong. Several things are wrong—the smell, the sound, the touch—like a reverse orgasm. He looks ridiculous in the condom, with the little pale tip of it hanging off the end of his big penis. Roll over, your face to the cigarette-smelling floral-print couch. It is possible to die. Asphyxiation. Hanging. An acquaintance—a lawyer—has said the first decision a philosopher makes is to live or to kill himself. This state you are in, the state of indecision, has become a part of you. No one can convince you that you are sustaining yourself. No one can confirm your death.

"What?" he says. He makes a few nods toward getting your attention. Love, you think, is like sturgeon. Then, "Oh, forget it." He lies beside you for about ten minutes, then gets up to leave. You hear him jumping into his tight pants and zipping up his coat. Wonder whether he’s still got the condom on. "I’ll call you later."

Contempt and love and cabernet and fire and garlic combine to make this a pleasant night.

Twelve empty bottles of wine and one full bottle are lined up on the table, along with a number of stuffed mushrooms and melted candles. Dishes are stacked high at the end of the table. There are a couple of conversations going on. The one to the left of you regards survival post-Christ (the millennium is upon us! oh my). The one on the right regards athletics. The professor is also an athletics counselor. He’s telling stories about black people. Black people are very popular at the moment, what with clothing style, music, TV, he says. Soon the conversations come together and everyone talks of surviving black people. There’s not much to say on this point, this ridiculous point, the conversation is headed in no clear direction. An uncomfortable silence comes over the guests. The pregnant woman—Lorrie—has fallen asleep, or passed out, on the blue carpet in front of the fireplace. Her angora sweater is swept up high, exposing her protruding belly button. You look to her as if to break the silence but grow weary.

The fire crackles and smokes. It is filled with sappy cherry-tree branches.

Nudge the professor’s leg beneath the table; he’s sitting across from you. He glances at you with annoyance.

The phone rings. It’s your mother. She wonders what you’re doing. You’re drunk, she can tell. Don’t deny it. Tell her you’ll call her in the morning. Tell her the check is in the mail.

You feel dazed and separate, but happy. You’ve had good wine, good food, good conversation—before it turned athletic/survivalist, it was about poetry (the lawyer) and astronomy (the radio maker), and the fire and several half-melted candles light up the room and flesh beautifully.

The lawyer nudges your leg beneath the table. Glance at him with annoyance.

Before the professor leaves, give him a poor drawing of yourself with him, beside a river. He kisses you deeply. You are taken by surprise and forget to kiss him back. Say nothing as you watch him walk out the door. He waves behind him without looking back.

Soon the others leave.

"I can’t believe you," says the radio guy, your boyfriend for the last few weeks, as he walks out the door. "You’re just like the rest of them."

Pull a blanket out of the closet and cover Lorrie and her blooming belly.

You wonder whether you should push your cap back. You forgot to look in the mirror to see how you look in cap and gown, how you should have worn the cap. Your tassel is hanging to the wrong side. 

Move it.

Watching the master’s students collect their degrees, you realize that you—a bachelor—have the wrong degree. You thought you’d feel relief. Instead you feel imprecise.

You walk through the remainder of the ceremony like a dead woman, since you’re getting, after all, the wrong degree.

"Just words, just words, just words," you whisper when it comes to you again. It is entirely unfair.

"I guess this is it," you’d said the night before. You’d seen lamplight in his office window and wondered what he might be doing there so late at night. You wondered what you were doing there so late at night. You thought he might be thinking of you. He wasn’t. He was printing off letters of recommendation for student athletes. He said, "Hey, you still got that Dr. Grip pen I loaned you?"

Your professor appears in bizarre archaic robes and ropes after the ceremony. He says nice things about you to your parents. He makes an impression. Mom and Pop are suddenly happy they’ve helped you through college.

A man hits it big on a slot machine. He curses with joy. A few people who are sitting at the slots around him offer congratulations; apparently they’re his friends. "You needed it, man." "If anyone needed it, it’s you." "Happy for you, man."

A waitress with an empty tray stops in front of you, begins to say something, looks behind you, and leaves.

Call your parents from a pay phone.

No one answers.

An airline pilot who has ridden on the same shuttle here that you have asks if you’re all right, if you’d like a cup of coffee or a drink. Over coffee, explain your situation. Your car is parked, you say, an hour and a half away in some nowhere town in a forest. What you meant to be a spontaneous trip has turned out to be a lot of layovers and a stolen wallet, a stolen set of Glasda luggage. You simply have no money or ride to get to your car. Explain also that you were once in love with a river rafter named Paraguay. "That’s hard luck," he says. "Or that’s natural. Depending how you look at it." He offers to pay for a hotel room for you.

You learn later that he means he’d like to invite you to his hotel room.

Wonder how the others are faring. Consider giving them a call. Try information. They have no listing in Moscow, Idaho. Surely the black belt and radio guy have moved away. You have no idea where they might have gone.

You’ve become bored, filled as you are with cabin fever. You waitress for nearly nothing—again—and feel like you’ve been doing nearly everything that in any way connects with sauces, peppers, and soft drinks. You’ve willed yourself to stop drinking, but with no results. Remind yourself you have lost five pounds; considering the fact you’ve gained forty, it seems inconsequential. Other than all that, you’ve simply become more boring and you haven’t heard a good story in weeks.

Fix yourself a banana shake, wonder if you’ll throw it up. Vow to throw the child parties as he or she grows up. Decide you’ll take the child to symphonies, plays, musicals. Consider a name. Dido (dildo), Aeneas (anus), Sparky, Todd, Kirby, Pam (Spam). Nothing sounds good.

You call the lawyer, whose number has surfaced within your head. He greets you with happiness and surprise. Tell him about the baby. He insists he be the godfather. He insists he buy you a crib. Agree. He’d like to see you. Tell him you live several hundred miles away.

"It’s nothing but a little air time," he says.

Ask him about his friend, the professor, and the professor’s actor friend. He says he’s fine, he’s fine, they’re all doing fine. "The important thing," he says, "is your health."

Hold your giant belly self-consciously as you step onto the slushy icy road. Look up the street for a bus doesn’t appear to be coming. Step back into the gutter. Study your new red-and-brown wool gloves.

A man asks you how you are. He is Middle Eastern. From what country, you have no idea. Tell him you’re pregnant. He nods.

The bus is coming. It slops ice and snow onto the curb. It’s coming fast.

Check your watch. Two minutes late.