Truth on Purpose

 
A gravelly, smoked-out voice speaks iambic, every second syllable stressed in volume.  It’s soporific, and it rests my hazy, stocking-capped head against the chilled window.  My eyelids are stage curtains; nature pulls them down while courtesy tugs them up, so my eyes live in limbo, half-lidded. A lecture on global exchange rates and the cause of the Euro’s strength—I gaze up at the ceiling and pretend it is the sky, begging in a desperate, barely-audible whisper: A lightning bolt.  Please.  The portly, middle-aged woman, the one who always scribbles country music lyrics around her charts and graphs, barks a quick laugh.  The professor frowns but doesn’t glance over.  Portly woman shoots me a chastising frown with mirth in her eyes.  I shrug. She enjoys trying to make fragile conversation with me, always forgetting that fragile things are built to break. That, and I really shouldn’t offend an absent almighty with half-minded prayers for quick and blinding death.

Paying close attention to any economics lecture really is tantamount to slow suicide, so I watch the students scampering about in the newly-arrived snowstorm.  The falling flakes might as well be hailstones, the kids dart about with such haste and ostensible discomfort.  I picture feckless wrens fighting the rain as they wing their way back home to their Spartan birdhouses. After a few minutes, though, the token smartass in Hawaiian shorts struts by, daring all to approach his Olympic plateau of toughness.  Without looking toward him, I ask spectacled, pockmarked gamer kid to my right, Have you ever seen a jackass?  One with his girlfriend’s hairdryer centimeters from his toes, desperately fighting frostbite?  Choking back tears so his girl won’t see him cry?  And all because he either loves shorts so much, or because he’s so damn proud of his calves?  Spectacled, pockmarked gamer kid isn’t used to strange conversation with strangers—he smiles noncommittally and uncomprehending before returning his attention to the featureless hellscape of the lecture.  A lecture like a asymptote.  It is constantly approaching its conclusion, but never, ever fucking reaches it.

I should pay attention, really.  I am failing.  I did well in the first few units, where common sense and the ability to make change can earn you a solid "B" on any Chapter One test.  Now, though, you have to draw graphs, explain various utilities, describe not only principles, but also applications.  I have been read the riot act of my scholastic abilities with each and every "C," "D," and "F" that I have earned since middle school.  My presence in college can be explained away by a penchant for test taking, as a 35 on your ACTs can convince a lot of admissions people that you can change.  I don’t want to change.  I am happy pushing stones, swinging scythes, growing flowers.  But I am so close, now, to a stretched and parched sheepskin insulating my walls against the outside’s unlearnt cold.

The glossy textbook before me boasts a forbidding weight.  I know that I will never open it except to draw small cartoons of hamsters and swordfish.  I wish I could manage more than hamsters and swordfish, so I silently vow to master another animal.  Perhaps a turtle.  A turtle toddling towards a festooned fieldhouse mid-graduation, listening to windbags blow hot air until empty.  A turtle like an economics lecture, one that is half-dead but refuses to die.  A turtle creeping towards its deathbed, unaware until the end that he was actually a sprinting hare. What are you thinking about? portly woman queries quietly.  You look so lost in thought.  Running blindly roughshod over the second sentence, I crisply snap out, Turtles, facing her with an earnest stare and vapid smile.  She laughs.  I think she likes me way more than I like myself, but I forgive her anyway.

I can’t take anymore, so I stand up and duck out of the room.  The professor usually assumes a student is using the bathroom, but I usually walk the building’s fluorescent hallways.  I step out into the storm, hoisting myself on to the concrete ledge that embanks the frozen earth abutting the sidewalk.  Two others sit on the opposite ledge, and I realize we are sitting on the engineering shoulders of the building’s entryway.  The horns are filed away, the pitchfork discarded, the haloes pawned for bar money, so I have no idea who is who.  Cigarettes in fingerless gloves, they suck and puff like they’ll never quit, like they never want to quit.  They chat lazily to each other, their conversation like a dozing cat flat-backed in a window’s winter sun.  It is casual and cathartic, and I listen to the rhythm of their words, ignoring the dancing shadows of their meanings.  Every conversation has a heartbeat, and when I put my ear to theirs, I hear every arrhythmia, every bass drum palpitation, and I can hear it founder until it stops.  Their conversation is dead, and they bear its ghost back inside.

 
I grow tired of the wind chapping my face, so I wait a few seconds and then follow them. I walk into the restroom, and brush the hair out of my face with my hands. Most times, I prefer to hide behind my hair, but I feel especially invulnerable right then. I stare at myself in the mirror for a few brief moments, feeling those brief moments stretch themselves into something else entirely. My square jaw juts urgently forward underneath a beard like a Maine Coon’s undercoat; I often think it searches for my missing chin. Sinuous shaped eyes like the leaves of a crab apple tree envelop glassy green irises. I don’t think about any of that, but instead gently bump my mind down a spiraling, indecipherable, ineffable introspection that contains no thoughts and only brief glints of understandable emotion. This spiral travels neither upward nor downward, but instead in upon itself like a shark eye shell on an unexplored beach. My body spasms as I surface out of my brief meditation, and I exit the bathroom found in thought.

As I make my way back towards the classroom, I check my silenced phone for the time.  5:06.  Shit.  Class has been over for six minutes.  I glance up from my phone to see my sleeping pill of a professor drinking from the water fountain.  A plan hatches, skipping incubation.  I put the phone to my ear.  So is he going to be okay?  Alright.  Well, thanks for bringing me up to speed.  Yeah.  Uh huh.  I pitch my voice loud enough for my professor to hear.  Don’t worry about it.  I see my professor right now.  No, no, don’t worry.  Tell him I hope he gets better soon.  Buy him some flowers for me, and I’ll reimburse you.  Yeah.  I’ll see you soon.  Bye.  By now I’ve neared my professor, who was waiting for me with a concerned eyebrow cocked.  Sorry I left class like that, but I had an important phone call to take.  He responds.  Is everything alright?  I respond.  Yeah, I think so.  Sorry again.  I’ll see you Monday.  I feel bad, but I say it all anyway.  I’ve never told a truth on purpose.