gt; gt;PART ONEgt; gt; gt;1gt; gt;PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A CREATIVE WRITING MAJOR IN THE AUTUMN OF MIKE DUKAKIS, gt;ORgt; FIRST LOVEgt; gt;gt;Often he thought: My life did not begin until I knew her.gt;gt;—Evan S. Connell, gt;Mr. Bridgegt;gt;gt; gt;Bgt;UNNIESgt;gt; gt;gt;Igt;n the early seventies there was an epidemic of Playboy Bunnies hurling themselves out windows of the John Hancock Building. Leo informed him that these bunnies weren’t rabbits. They were women, women with long pointy ears and puffballs over their breasts. Popper was five. He would imagine them falling, all that air speeding past those ears. But these bunnies never landed. Theirs was a free fall that went on and on—and on. And even then he thought he understood why they did it. That if you spent so long so high, so so high, it was only inevitable that you’d need to feel that drop, Hugh Hefner and Chicago itself be damned. If it’s time to fall, let’s fall.gt; gt;Lgt;ETHEgt;gt; gt;gt;Ann Arbor, 1988gt;gt; gt;gt;Tgt;he scene: the basement of the Undergraduate Library at the University of Michigan, the most hideous concrete mistake of a building ever architected by man, i.e., the UGLi.gt; gt;It’s 2 a.m., Tuesday.gt; gt;The UGLi is a raucous place, loud conversation, coffee, beer, music, a little dope in the bathrooms, some isolated studying here and there. Popper’s not studying. He’s in his cubby, half-sleeping, half-reading William Blake. Not for class. Popper likes to carry certain books around and announce before anybody even asks: gt;This book? No, actually this isn’t for class. And it’s not pleasure reading either. There’s no such thing as pleasure reading. It’s all pain, pain—and more paingt;.gt; gt; gt;gt;If you trap the moment before it’s ripe,gt;gt; gt;gt;The tears of repentance you’ll certainly wipe;gt;gt; gt;gt;But if you let the ripe moment gogt;gt; gt;gt;You can never wipe off the tears of woe.gt;gt; gt; gt;She’s a mere four cubbies away. At first he spies only the back of her head, her blond-brown ponytail rising above the plywood like a beacon. He ducks beneath his desk and eyeballs down the row of legs. Her running shoes are off her feet, one socked foot scratches a naked shin.gt; gt;Blake admonishes, nay, threatens—gt; gt; gt;gt;Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.gt;gt; gt; gt;Popper stands up and laps the cluster of cubbies six, seven times, as if pursuing great thoughts. All the while, gt;surreptitiouslygt;, observing her in this basement light, in this noisy purgatorial fluorescence. Each time he passes, he peers a little closer over the rim of her cubby. Never has a square of plywood held so much promise. Details? At present she is eating a Butterfinger. Very unique candy bar. Famous yellow wrapper. Concentrate. Don’t babble. Tell your head to stop babbling. She places her index finger and her middle finger over her mouth when she chews. She is reading intensely. He can almost see her eyes move across the words. God, if I could only read like that. I read two sentences and my brain wanders to Tegucigalpa. Her face, describe her face. Why is it so hard to describe a face? May as well describe a soul!gt; gt;(Question for Creative Writing Professor (adjunct), Tish O’Dowd Ezekiel, author of a good, sad novel called gt;Floatersgt;, which refers to those small black wings that rain down our eyes:gt; gt; gt;gt;POPPER:gt; gt;gt;Professor O’Dowd Ezekiel, why is it so hard? Why are things like trees or cars easier, when we spend much of each day staring into faces?gt;gt;gt; gt;gt;PROFESSOR O’DOWD EZEKIEL:gt; gt;gt;Ah, but do we, Mr. Popper? Do we really ever truly look at each other, see each other? It would seem to me that we spend our days not looking into each other’s facesgt;.)gt;gt; gt; gt;Body easier. Legs easier. Breasts easier. Always. Because men are inherently infantile? Something to do with our relationship to the memory of our mothers? Hers? Only rising hints of sweatshirt. Small undiscovered planets? You know they’re there, but they’re so distant they may as well be conjectures.gt; gt;Retreats to his own chair. Spies low again. She crosses her legs, one way, then another, then uncrosses them. For no recordable reason, Popper thinks of the word gt;lethegt;. He gets up again and approaches the dictionary, the great dictionary that stands alone in the middle of the room, beneath all that buzzing light, like a weird pulpit nobody ever sermons from. Popper flaps the pages of truth and/or metaphor. gt;The stream of oblivion in the lower world, hence, forgetfulnessgt;.gt; gt;Maybe I’m spelling it wrong?gt; gt;Ah, gt;Lithegt;. Supple, bendable, that’s better. Supple, an exciting sort of word. Back again to his cubby headquarters. Use it in a sentence. gt;I hope you don’t mind my saying hello. I find you beautiful but also lithe, not to be confused with lethe, which means something else entirely, having to do with memory, or rather loss of it, yet as it is, I can’t forget you. Are you by any chance a dancer?gt;gt; gt;She gets up to talk to a friend sitting in another cubby. The friend’s face hidden, nothing but a mass of curly hair.gt; gt;“How’s it going?”gt; gt;“I’m so bored of psychology I could go on a shooting spree,” Mass of Curly Hair says.gt; gt;Gripping Blake for courage, Popper makes his move and drops the note on her desk. He notes the title and the author of the facedown book. gt;The Need for Rootsgt;. Simone Weil. Never heard, must look him up.gt; gt;And flees to the bathroom. Popper, hiding in a stall, waits. In the bowl, a forlorn unflushed turd the color of knockwurst. But even in there, he hears her laugh. A blasting, honkish, gooselike sound. The UGLi goes quiet. He’ll learn this. How this girl could laugh entire rooms—banquet halls—into silence.gt; gt;gt;Lindy, seriously, look at this, some doof’s writing notesgt;.gt; gt;Agt;Tgt; Ygt;Ugt; Lgt;IN’Sgt;gt; gt;gt;Wgt;ait, you’re a what?”gt; gt;“It’s a new undergraduate major.”gt; gt;“Weird.”gt; gt;“You?”gt; gt;“Philosophy.”gt; gt;“Philosophy. Interesting. Really. And difficult. Wow, philosophy, wow. I’ve read Kierkegaard. God ordered Abraham to murder his kid and Abraham said, Okay okay, whatever you say, not a problem. He didn’t even try to get out of it. He didn’t run away to Nineveh, which sounds to me like a pretty fun place. That’s faith? I mean, at least Jonah gave defying a totally unreasonable God a shot. And Kierkegaard says Abraham’s a great man? To me, he just sounds like a bad dad. Did I miss something?”gt; gt;She just let his gibberish float there between them without answering. Lunch at a Chinese restaurant on South University. The place was dark, the blinds drawn against the afternoon sun. Above each table a small round bulb; Popper thought, Each table its own sad moon. This isn’t going very well at all. She is from Wisconsin and her name is Katherine but her father had called her Kat since she was six minutes old. Kat Rubin. gt;I’ll never see her againgt;.gt; gt;“Who do you read, then?”gt; gt;“Oh, you know, lately a lotta Ray Carver.”gt; gt;“Who?”gt; gt;“People call him a minimalist, but that’s really a misnomer. Carver just doesn’t use a barrel of words to say something he could say in half a phrase. He’s the poet of modern despair. Drunken, laconic husbands. Lonely, cheating wives. You know, the gritty truths—”gt; gt;“Fuck that. Are you related to Karl Popper?”gt; gt;“Never heard of him.”gt; gt;“How many Poppers could there be?”gt; gt;“I’m not sure there needs to be any more.”gt; gt;“He’s this supposedly important philosopher.” She waved a tuffle of rice squeezed between two chopsticks before his eyes. “It was Karl Popper who brought scientific rigor to the so-called soft sciences. You have something on your chin. Some sauce. Karl Popper said, for example, that astrology was bunk and sociology was even bunkier.” She licked her finger and reached across the table to his chin. She touched his chin with her licked finger. She touched his chin with her—gt; gt;“How did he feel about Scientology?” Popper asked.gt; gt;“Quick,” Kat said. “Name the lovechild of Karl Popper and L. Ron Hubbard.”gt; gt;He shrugged.gt; gt;“Cher?”gt; gt;She honked a brief laugh. “Nice. Not that I’ve ever read Karl Popper. Nobody reads him anymore. I guess he served his purpose. To bring scientific rigor to whatever whatever whatever. Seems kind of obvious to me. Systems need proof. Okay, next.”gt; gt;She pressed her chopsticks to her lower lip and watched him watch her. Popper took this in about his relation. A kinsman rendered irrelevant, these days unknown even to his own family.gt; gt;“And Kierkegaard?”gt; gt;“Oh, Kierkegaard’s just romantic. That’s a different deal altogether. Abraham was prepared to kill Isaac because he loved him gt;andgt; he loved God. And God didn’t make him do the deed because He loved Abraham. In Kierkegaard, everybody loves everybody. I’ll take Kant. If we’re estranged from ourselves, how can we not be estranged from other people, much less love them? Kant says that what we don’t know—or wait, maybe that’s the existentialists—”gt; gt;Popper gripped the side of the table. The entire lunch he hadn’t once used his chopsticks. Sitting there half listening, watching her eat, her fingers brilliantly, acrobatically, tonging those thin little wooden sticks while he shoveled food into his mouth with a common fork like a hayseed. Possible to switch to chopsticks now, this late in the game?gt; gt;He opted to stop eating altogether.gt; gt;“Something wrong?”gt; gt;“No!”gt; gt;She stood up and stretched, fluttering her arms toward the ceiling. “You’re done? I think I’m done.” He watched her go up to the front and pay the bill for both of them. On the sidewalk outside, the sun white and bulbous, she said, “Did you notice nobody working there was Chinese? A Chinese restaurant should have at least one Chinese person—What are you up to now?”gt; gt;gt;What am I up to now?gt;gt; gt;It was the autumn of Mike Dukakis. What could possibly go right? In a month, Popper would cast his first vote in a presidential election. And on the other side of campus, the bells in the tall clock tower ring, the bells ring… gt; gt;Ogt;N THEgt; Rgt;UGgt;gt; gt;gt;Kgt;at refused to live in the dorms. What am I, a lab rat? She smelled of lip gloss and sweat. Amazing, and also deeply disturbing, how fast two near-strangers can go from Chinese food to a wrestlingish tussle on a worn-out rug in an attic room amid the trees. Her walls were practically all window. No furniture, only the bed they weren’t using. Skin that seemed as far away an hour ago as, say, the Yukon Territories is now right here beneath his shocked fingers, his entire body (led by his still blue-jeaned pelvis) in a state of ecstatic flux, now spastically, aimlessly, freakishly thrusting, a twitch, and aw no no, shit, shit, shit—gt; gt;To distract, to buy time, to cover up, to ward off the unwardoffable, he clutches her and he tells this stuff about the Yukon Territories, trying to remain calm, casual. “Isn’t it amazing how a clothed person is another country? For instance, earlier today, to me, you were—your body, I mean—was the Yukon, Canada’s northernmost—”gt; gt;“Are you a little repressed or something?”gt; gt;She reached inside his boxers. His heart banged deep in the well of his ear.gt; gt;“Oh, I get it.” One goose-honk, two goose-honks.gt; gt;“Just give me a little time.”gt; gt;“You know what you need to do?”gt; gt;“Just a little time—”gt; gt;“Grip yourself. You know, when you’re still stiff. You want to cut off the blood flow, like a tourniquet. Plus, you’ll probably enjoy—”gt; gt;“Please stop talking.”gt; gt;“It’s called shunting.”gt; gt;“I’m begging.”gt; gt;“I’m only trying to impart some friendly advice.”gt; gt;“Do you do this with everybody?”gt; gt;“Give this sort of advice?”gt; gt;“This. After a lunch date. Come back to your place and—”gt; gt;“Are you a monumental prick? Metaphorically speaking since as far as I can tell—”gt; gt;Kat rolled over and pushed the hair out of her eyes and began sliding downrug. Describe the attic room with windows on three sides, her on that frayed rug, his ecstasy, his shock, his humiliation, his what? The dappled afternoon light. The tall oaks lurking outside like voyeurs. Her chin edging down his chest. Describe it. Her chin—Why not just say happy? For once? Why not say joy, as derived from the thirteenth-century word originally connoting rejoice?gt; gt;“Cool apartment,” Popper connoted.gt; gt;She tongued his knee. “Don’t talk now.”