Primordial: An Abstraction

22

I am in class now.

Intro to Film Studies, I think.

Nobody’s listening to the professor. The content of his lecture is too hard, or too boring, or too Old Hat, or too irrelevant, or too verbatim from the textbook.

As always, I am sitting in the back, in the corner, by the window, staring into Oblivion.

A man turns to me and introduces himself as Bill.

Bill isn’t sitting in a seat.

He’s standing near the window, as if banished there.

Has he been standing there the whole time? Or did he get out of his seat during the lecture and sneak beside me?

He’s undernourished.

He’s middle-aged.

He’s wearing a tweed coppola.

He reminds me of Andy Capp. My grandfather used to love that comic strip.

I inform Bill about my grandfather’s deep and reverent penchant for Andy Capp.

Bill is polite enough. I stand up and we shake hands and talk about the weather.

The professor gives us the evil eye.

I return the act of aggression with a look that says GO FUCK YOURSELF OR I’ll KILL YOU!!!

The professor understands. His book on astro-pragmatics was ridiculous. I wrote a scathing article in protest and critique of it just three years ago. The article met with terrific acclaim and more or less tanked his career.

The evil-eye melts into his skull.

Bill and I converse in very confident yet very reserved tones. I learn that he spent some time in Hawaii.

“I’ve spent time there too. Do you like poi?”

He tells me he’s Hawaiian.

“Oh. Do you like the Brothers Cazimero?”

He reminds me that he’s Hawaiian.

“Oh. Have you stayed at the Royal Hawaiian? The pink palace on Waikiki Beach. It’s the oldest hotel on Oahu, right? I used to stop there every year on my way to Kyoto. My kids came along sometimes. They loved it. I can’t remember if my wife accompanied us. You can’t believe the breakfasts they served at the Royal Hawaiian. All fresh fruit. Then, after breakfast, me and the girls would go surfing. There’s a coral reef in the bay, though, like a rhizome of knives, and we couldn’t wipe out; if we wiped out and fell in the water, the reef would tear us to pieces. So nobody wiped out. We became expert surfers instantly. Had the reef not been there, had it been safe to surf, and if falling off of the board would not have entailed certain death, it probably would have taken us weeks, perhaps months to learn how. I may have never learned. There’s something to be said for epistemological prudence.”

Bill says, “I’m not sure if prudence is the right word.”

I say, “No? Well something like that. Anyway you should check out the Royal Hawaiian. I’d live there if I could. I—”

“Do you like pornographic films?” interrupts Bill.

I cock my head. “Do I like what?”

“Pornos. You know.” Bill makes a gesture that, I gauge, represents what a pornographic film involves.

“Do I like pornos?”

Bill narrows his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter if I like them or not. I watch them, if that’s what you mean. I’m alive, aren’t I?”

Bill tells me he’s an independent filmmaker in addition to a student. He tells me he sees something in me, some kind of charisma or energy.

I inform him that I’m perfectly aware of my raw Benjaminian aura.

Bill wonders if I’d like to star in this docu-porno he wants to make about contemporary college life.

I explain that I really only enjoy pornography in private life, whether I’m involved in it or merely standing on the sidelines. Also, his idea isn’t terribly unique.

Ignoring the latter assertion, Bill tries to convince me that public sex, and the dissemination of public sex, is a good thing.

Uninterested in “good things,” I cut him off and underscore how I’m not passing judgment on pornography and have no moral objection to it. “My concerns are purely subjective. They belong to me alone.”

We discuss what specifically constitutes pornography and the dynamics thereof.

“Surely just having sex in public isn’t pornographic,” Bill remarks. “And yet if other people can see what’s going on, then it becomes pornographic, doesn’t it. Pornography is pornography because of the gaze of the other, isn’t it.”

I want to go back to talking about Hawaii and the Brothers Cazimero. Their song “The Pueo, Tara & Me,” about an owl, really stuck with me. Sometimes it makes me cry if I think about it too much. If I listen to it, I’ll definitely cry. But I don’t want to make a stink about our discussion of pornography. Bill clearly wants to talk about it. As is often the case with people I am not inclined to beat, I allow him to take the discursive reigns and acclimatize to the direction, the speed, the tonality of his interlocution, chiming in at key moments with sighs of affirmation, with engaged modulations, and sometimes I respond outright, but no more than a sentence or two at a time, and after awhile I can tell that Bill is really enjoying himself.

At some point, the professor stops lecturing and just stares blankly at us. So do all of the other students.

I turn to the professor. “Do you harbor fantasies of dismemberment? Do any of you?” I look around the room. Most of the other students look away. The students that don’t — I keep my eyes on them, one at a time, until they look away too.

When I turn back to Bill, he’s gone. I never see him again.