The Collective (8 page)

“It was all a lark to you. A little walk on the yellow side. You used me.”

“If anything, Eric,” she said, “we used each other.”

I brooded and cursed and cried in my room in Dupre, alone, the entire weekend, and then went down the hallway to Joshua’s room.

I walked in without knocking and sat down on his battered beanbag chair. There was detritus all over the floor: books, clothes, CDs, magazines, squashed cigarette boxes, food wrappers, an old guitar missing several strings. A red bandanna was draped over a lamp, batiks and posters of Sartre and Iggy Pop were tacked to the walls, and a black surfboard, inlaid with the prism design from Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, hung down from the ceiling, held aloft by a fishnet. “Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes was playing on his stereo.

For reasons unknown, Joshua was wearing a green Bavarian alpine hat with a tassel and feather and puffing on a big, curved calabash tobacco pipe. He was hunched over his desk, gluing together an arched, three-foot-long bridge, made wholly of toothpicks.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“These are catenary trusses,” he said. “Check this out.” He propped up the bridge so it spanned his file cabinet and desk, then, to a middle strut, he hooked a rope that was tied to a cinder block. Suspending the heavy, slowly rotating block, the bridge did not give. It did not bend. “You believe that?” Joshua asked, admiring his handiwork. “Fucking toothpicks.”

“You were right about Sourdough,” I told him. “I should have listened to you.”

He nodded. “I’ve missed you, bro.”

It was a school for the bookish and nerdy, for geeks and losers, for kids who liked to study, who actually wanted to learn. During our four years at Mac, we would read Foucault, Hegel, Derrida, Saussure, Gadamer, Lacan, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari—never the full texts, mind you, just xeroxed scraps and smidgens that still we would not understand, but from which we could lap up the lingua franca of pseudo-intellectualism. We’d sling around words like synecdoche and hyperbole, ontology and eschatology, faute de mieux and fin de sičcle. We’d describe things as heuristic, protean, numinous, and ineffable. We’d discuss Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Plato’s cave and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Laffer’s curve and Schrödinger’s cat. We’d embrace poststructuralism and existentialism and epistemology, semiotics and hermeneutics. We’d see everything as an allegory or a metaphor for something else, and ultimately we’d deconstruct everything as divisive or patriarchal or sexist or homophobic or racist or neofascist—a product of heteronormative exclusivity, a metanarrative propagated by the oligarchy. We’d answer almost every question by decrying it as a syllogism, or a trope, or tautological, or phallocentric, or reductive, or hegemonic (undoubtedly our favorite buzzword). We’d come to believe that any text—be it Shakespeare or a comic book or a supermarket circular—had the same intrinsic value, and we’d insist that all truth was relative, that there was no reality without signifiers, that there was no there there, that nothing, in fact, really existed. We’d argue and rant, we’d foment for empowerment and paradigm shifts and interstitial hybridity, we’d make grand, sweeping pronouncements about subjects of which we knew nothing. We would become articulate, well read, sensitive, open-minded, totally insufferable twits. We would graduate as nihilistic, atheistic, anarchistic, moralistic, tree-hugging, bohemian, Marxist snobs. We would love every minute of it.

All of this we did without a trace of irony. Only Joshua, ever the devil’s advocate, would call us out at times (although, on the whole, he tended to be the most pretentious and reactionary of any of us: “Hemingway was a racist.” “Flannery O’Connor was a racist”).

“Look, this is all just intellectual masturbation,” he said once in class. “The fact is, no one here will ever be poor. In ten years, what do you think you’ll be doing? Maybe the best-intentioned of you will be working for a nonprofit, but you’ll be living off your trust funds. More likely everyone will have caved in and become corporate attorneys.”

That spring semester of my freshman year, I took Problems of Philosophy, Metaphysical Diasporas, Faith and Doubt in Nineteenth-century Literature, and Introduction to Creative Writing. Jessica was in the first class, Joshua in all four. Our education began in earnest, and so, too, did our friendship, Joshua and Jessica working assiduously to lift me out of my funk over Didi. (I’d see her now and again on campus, and each encounter would fill me with heartache. I could not imagine then that, after a year, we’d reach a rapprochement of sorts, born mainly out of disinterest, since we’d both be involved with other people, and that eventually, when I left Mac, I’d forget about her almost entirely.)

Jessica got me to start running with her on the treadmills in the Field House. To counteract such a frightening aspiration for health, Joshua got me to start smoking cigarettes. We watched reruns of Magnum, P.I., of which Joshua, peculiarly, was an aficionado, and for each viewing in the lounge, he’d make us wear Hawaiian shirts and drink mai tais. We visited the Walker Art Center. We spent hours browsing in Cheapo Records and Hungry Mind Books, inhaling the musty acid odor. We ate greasy fish fries (made with the ever-present walleye) at the St. Clair Broiler. We listened to live jazz at the AQ. We rolled frames at BLB, the Bryant-Lake Bowl, a combo restaurant-coffeehouse-performance space-bowling alley. We rented snowshoes and clumped up Summit Avenue, past the Victorian mansions, and trekked along the Mississippi. We had long bull sessions about the meaning of life (“Do you see the world as mean or sublime?” Joshua would ask, and he’d shake his head pityingly when we answered sublime).

We spent so much time together, people began referring to us as the three musketeers, the three amigos. “No,” Joshua said, “you know what we should call ourselves? The 3AC. The Asian American Artists Collective.” And thereafter, especially when we were drunk, we’d use the acronym as a rallying cry, a toast to our solidarity: “To the 3AC!”

Mostly what we did, though, was study and read (I entered college with 20/20 vision and left needing contacts). My grades had suffered the first term, and I was determined to do better overall in the spring. Nonetheless, the only course that I truly cared about was Intro to Creative Writing.

In the class, we started by reading selections from a poetry anthology and then taking a stab at writing our own poems. This was, without exception, a ludicrous exercise. None of us were poets. We didn’t understand poetry. We didn’t know what to write about. There were sixteen students in the class, and the majority were not English majors. Intro to Creative Writing was considered a Mickey Mouse course at Mac, and it fulfilled a fine arts requirement.

So we presented weepy elegies for our grandmothers and family dogs, self-pitying monologues about teenage angst, hackneyed pastorals about meadows and fluorescent moons, angry apostrophes to divorced parents, soaring heroic couplets about unrequited love, mawkish paeans to pain and sorrow, and fiery sonnets about loneliness. It was the most wretched stuff. Everything alliterated and rhymed. Most of it was incoherent drivel. There were repeated appearances of tears and rain, usually in combination. But, true to the ethos of Mac, no one in the class laughed or disparaged any of these sorry efforts. We were supportive and kind. We made gentle suggestions. We lauded the intentions.

The poetry part of the class didn’t matter to me. What I was nervous about was the second part of the course, when we would write fiction. For all my ambitions to be a writer, and for all the encouragement I had received in high school, told by more than one teacher that I possessed a creative flair, I had never written an actual short story, just unfinished vignettes or scenes.

We did a few fiction writing exercises, and then we scheduled ourselves for the real thing: a workshop rotation wherein we would make photocopies of our stories and pass them out in advance, then have them critiqued in class after reading a handful of pages aloud.

Joshua, of course, volunteered to go first. After he finished his brief recitation, we sat in silence in the classroom. The story portrayed a ten-year-old boy in Seoul after the Korean War who accompanied his father every day as they pushed a cart to deliver and sell charcoal. It was a quiet story, with not much happening and hardly any dialogue, the only fracas of significance an argument with a racist GI. Yet the language was lyrical and precise, with none of the bombastic flourishes and hyperkinetic rhythms I had expected from Joshua. At one point, the boy recalled a long-ago trip to visit relatives in Inchon: “He remembered looking out over the Yellow Sea, where the water lay undulant in the sun, the waves glinting as they moved toward shore, folding over one another like the ruffling of curtains.” The story had grace and gravitas. There wasn’t, as far as I could discern, a single misstep in it.

The professor, Peter Anderegg, cleared his throat. He wasn’t a real professor, just a visiting instructor, an adjunct. He was fairly young, perhaps twenty-seven, and was in his first year out of graduate school. He had published a few stories in some obscure journals, but not a book. Bashful, diffident, at any other college he would have been run over by the students.

“This is really … extraordinary,” he said. “It’s really quite beautiful. ”

Our initial reaction confirmed, the class began chiming in, ladling out our own effusive praise. Peter had a workshop rule, which was that the author could not speak during the roundtable critique, but I kept sneaking peeks at Joshua, and he was beaming with obvious pride. With his literary references and quips, he had already established himself as the class leader, but now he had elevated himself so he wasn’t just another blowhard. He had authentic talent, and from then on, his authority in the workshop was unassailable.

We walked to the Tap, a neighborhood dive, for burgers and beers, and sat across from each other in one of the big wooden booths. I asked Joshua, “How about giving me that story for Chanter?”—the literary magazine at Mac.

“That little rag?” he said. He swigged his Summit IPA. He had made Jessica and me get passport photos, without revealing why, and then had procured fake IDs for us. Mine was laminated with the name Nick Carraway. His said Seymour Glass, Jessica’s Frida Kahlo. “It’d be kind of a waste, don’t you think? Those guys are idiots.”

I was low man on the totem pole on the journal’s staff, but I was certain I could convince Chanter’s editors—who were known to be snitty, once turning down a story they had solicited from a prominent author who’d read on campus—to take Joshua’s piece. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll guide it through.”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” Joshua said. “I was thinking I’d submit the story to a real magazine.”

“Yeah? Like where?”

“Maybe The Atlantic Monthly.”

“No shit?”

“Or maybe Esquire or Harper’s,” he said. “Fuck it, I might as well go for The New Yorker.”

Such an idea would never have occurred to me. His story was good, but it seemed arrogant—outrageous, really—of Joshua, an unpublished eighteen-year-old, to presume he had a chance at any of those prestigious venues.

As my turn in the workshop approached, my anxiety ratcheted. I kept eking out opening paragraphs of short stories and then tossing them. Finally, I finished a hasty draft, typed it out on a computer in the library, and ran off copies. It was about a couple standing in an alleyway next to the man’s motorcycle, a Suzuki Katana, having an argument. There were vague allusions to illegality: a rigged poker game, a pimp. The woman wore a sequined dress slit on the sides, and there was a recurring image of her blond hair falling aside, exposing the curved nape of her neck, as she reached down to adjust the clasp on her stiletto shoe. It was called “Nighthawks Rendezvous.”

I had rushed the story, I knew. Twelve pages long, it was filled with mangled phrasings and inexplicable tangents and more than a few typos. Writing it, I had had severe doubts that it displayed any merits whatsoever, yet, irrationally, as I read the first four pages out loud in class, I began to think that it wasn’t that bad. As a matter of fact, I thought it might be pretty inventive and original—kind of edgy.

“Comments?” Peter said to the class. “What did you think?”

No one said a word, just like when Joshua had presented his story, and I wondered if the class was similarly awed.

Ben, a political science major, raised his hand. “I’m not sure I understand what’s going on in the story.”

“Yeah, is this real, or, like, the guy’s dream?” Stephanie said.

“I was kind of confused, too,” Tyson said.

“I’m wondering what the author intended,” Elizabeth said. “Was the author intentionally trying to be abstruse?”

This was another one of Peter’s commandments. In order to protect students from feeling they were being attacked, we never addressed the author by name or by saying “you.” We were told to use “the author” exclusively. We weren’t supposed to look at the author, either. We were to pretend that the author was not in the room.

Rules for decorum aside, the discussion began to take a bad turn—the first time in any of our sessions, in fact, that the critiques were unequivocally negative.

“It’s like a really slick music video,” said Geoff, “but I don’t know if it has any more depth to it than that.”

“I don’t think there’s enough of a character arc,” said Cory. “No one changes during the course of the story.”

“We don’t know enough about them,” said Jeremy. “They aren’t developed very much.”

“There’s no conflict that I can define. What’s at stake? Is anything resolved?” asked Drew.

“The prose gets a little grandiose,” said Lara. “It’s reaching for highfalutin but it comes off as ostentatious.”

“The hair and neck thing got to be really tedious,” said Carey.

I waited for Joshua’s verdict. The hair and neck thing—at that moment I realized, with panic, that I had completely ripped the image off, almost word for word, from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de Rendezvous, a novel that had been on Joshua’s recommended books list.