The face of death confronted her at 11:40am in a windowless lecture hall.
The History of the Modern Middle East met there bi-weekly under the command of a stout Palestinian scholar named Professor Qasim who delivered, with almost gleeful energy, seething invectives against Western exploitation to an Greek-style amphitheater of undergraduates.
There were no films, no music, no plays, not even a piece of art in the textbook. It was a numerical story of greed, corruption and human suffering, capitalism, neoliberalism, bombings, opium trades, untold casualties of endless wars, the erasure of culture, the loss of language, the attempt to reconcile modernity, the deliberate smashing of political autonomy; of hypocrisy, lethargy, and evil.
She sat in the fourth or fifth row, always behind three freinds who wedged themselves at the front. There was a couple and their third friend, all with matching iPads they took meticulous notes with, writing down everything the professor said regardless of it's relevancy, more akin to court stenographers than the critical thinkers liberal arts college promised to procure. She was a student of philosophy, not a major for bureaucratic reasons, and deeply insecure about it.
The professor was asking everyone to look up a specific photo of Franklin Roosevelt and Ibn Saud sitting on the deck of the USS Quincy.
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His wife often came with him. Opportunity, she knew how to take advantage of, not only like the fact that Columbia offered free classes to all seniors in New York but the way their very marriage, was best summarized by her, though on the phone and to her sister, he heard it through the door and knew she knew he could: "Well, Opportunity Knocks." It was, in retrospect, an in-op-or-tune time, at least for the one half that was going off to the jungle for what might be forever, but maybe an op-or-tune time for her exactly for that reason. They were okay asking these kind of questions now. They had the kind of marriage that was only honest, and she had always been remarkably blunt. He loved that about her.
It came in handy, especially nowadays, when she was the only one willing to say "Carl, you look like hell." With her, he could laugh, and say "Today might be your lucky day."
She saw him from across the room. He was looking at nothing at all. His eyes had sunken into two purple holes, cavernous orbs of black with no discernible center. His whole face seemed to be melting towards an abyss, his body seemed to be falling forwards into something as he sat there, catatonic.
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i remember that.
he thought to himself.
i feel myself trying to remember that.
he rethought to himself.
this has been my life. feeling myself feeling things.
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They are laughing about men outside.
"They have to take shrooms because no one has ever asked them to be self-aware. It's like 'Woah... all of us are existing on a plane, but some peoples plane is like, shittier..."
"No literally. And it's like... 'I just discovered empathy. Also, my mom is a beautiful woman'"
They all laugh.
The boyfriend smiles, because he has to. His girlfriend grabs his hand in reassurance, trying to say 'but not you'.
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"I feel like we don't have a world-philosophy system. Something to live by. We don't have..." The idea already started to sour in her mouth. "Would we have committed this kind of atrocity if we had a better philosophy?"
The professor stared at her sort of blank-faced, almost stunned.
"I think...what you're trying to say, is that--"
He walked a few paces from his podium, as if to distance himself from the subject matter.
"--your use of 'we' is interesting. I'm a historian. Can I tell you if Churchill slept easy on his pillow? No. But I can tell you about children who did not sleep at all, because of his actions, because they were dead."
Carl laughed. It came up as a cough accidentally, and startled the girl who was always staring at him. She probably had no idea he saw her staring. It made him think of war, of feeling like prey, of making eye contact with strangers through dense forests. There was something impenetrable about these kids, he felt there when he sat with them. It was more than the slimy, biotic ooze that covered all young people and caught moonlight easily. He remembered that; this presence was alien.
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She couldn't believe her eyes. He was actually decaying. She'd never witnessed something so horrifying in her life. She whipped her head around to see if anyone else seemed aware, or upset. Desperately she looked for recognition in someone's eyes, but they were fixed on the professor or laptop screens, answering emails, surfing the course catalog, more often scrolling instagram.
She felt compelled to thank him, but for what? She wanted to get up and away from the field of faces cut like short grass and reach up like a great tree, and show him she saw him. She desperately wanted to ask "Sir! Are you okay!"
But instead his purple eye holes just stared at her, like great cosmic face eggs, telling a story she knew only enough to know she did not understand.
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