Primordial: An Abstraction

53

I have a secret to tell somebody, anybody.

I go off campus to get my sushi.

The sushi that they serve in the cafeteria of the Student Union doesn’t even qualify as sushi. It insults real sushi with its glib artificiality.

So I go to this place in the city.

Very covert.

None of the employees speak a word of English, but I can tell they like me. The inflection of their gazes indicates nothing to the contrary.

There’s a problem.

Every time I eat my dish of sashimi salmon and tuna draped over sticky brown rice, I use more and more wasabi.

Every time.

At this rate, soon there will be only wasabi.

The fish, the rice, even the soy sauce and the garnish of pickled ginger — it will inevitably dwindle to an nth degree of meaning in the face of such Rampancy.

The laws of thermodynamics command it.

Zeno was not the idiot that the Eleans so desperately wanted him to be.

This doesn’t stop me. I’m concerned. But I still need and want my sushi.

One day I go to get my sushi and the place is gone.

Not closed.

Gone.

There’s a building, but it’s not the same building.

There are no doors or windows.

It’s really just a colossal, upended cinderblock. I wonder if anybody’s trapped inside. The city looks different too.

I try to ignore it. All of it.

Depressed, I go back to campus.

I walk around for a couple of days. It gets dark and light and dark and light and the air is cool and warm and cool and warm and it always smells crisp and natural and earthy, like good incense.

At some point I realize the University has fallen apart.

Despite my situation, and despite faculty residences, I recall how the gothic beauty of the architecture used to invoke feelings of the Kantian sublime in my sensorium. How the seas of fog flowed beneath the stately, dark-bricked buildings and halls. How the cathedrals and the gymnasiums and the bibliotheques crouched beneath the heavens like autocratic Nephilim with garden-fresh breath. The elegant steeples. The cobbled turrets and their wayward belfries. Stone bridges ran between the tallest bluffs; they were at once medieval and futuristic. To walk among the architecture was to stand atop the Fell and gaze into the Tarn.

Now the University lies in ruins.

I don’t remember when this happened. I don’t remember hearing any buildings fall down.

My dorm is still intact. So are all of the administrative fortresses and sanctuaries and gazebos.

Everything else is rocks and dust, flotsam and jetsam, savannah and wind.

Professors roost on the debris teaching old books to brained students who lay comatose or dead in the gravel. I pass by one classwreck after another. The professors seem to have new springs in their pedagogical steps. Their eyes are sparkling and I can see their teeth and they’re gesticulating with animation as they read aloud passages from assigned texts and pause to discharge canny hermeneutics that flow over the students like expanding rings of fire and ensure the certain fossilization of their bodies into the bones of the ragged earth.

It’s a good dream. I’m sorry to see it dissolve into reality.