Primordial: An Abstraction

8

It’s the day before classes.

I’ve been sleeping well. My roommates are terrified of me and I insist on absolute silence when I’m in the room, day or night.

The storm sirens go off.

There’s no storm. The President is about to give his welcome speech.

All of the students flow out of the dorms into the grassy hollow that the dorms and the halls and the observatories and the theaters and the athletic and teaching facilities surround like the stalagmites of a medieval crown.

They’ve set up a stage near the chapel. Slowly we congregate around it.

Onstage the Provost and the President of the University wait patiently for everybody to settle down. They’re making smalltalk and then the President says, “God I love coitus. I just love it.”

He doesn’t know the microphone is on.

The Provost informs him about the microphone.

Immediately the President retracts the statement, but casually, as if he still doesn’t know the microphone is on, ensuring everybody that, no matter what, he aspires to be the sort of patriarch and authority figure who lives and dies by the goodness of his Word. To the Provost he adds, “Who doesn’t love coitus?”

Only the merit scholars hear him.

A lot of the students have dropped acid or eaten psychedelic mushrooms and are either petrified with fear or gibbering like chimps.

I’m somewhere between sobriety and drunkenness and I’m listening to a Walkman. Already I have reverted to my natural primitive state.