Time Passing Without Us

The stairs have rubber mats laid over them that make it easy to descend in silence if one treads softly. At the bottom, a thick metal door will open relatively soundlessly, but the lock clicking into place always echoes down the dormitory hall regardless of how gingerly it is shut. I walk heel first, laying down the soles of my shoes gradually on the dirty tile, passing every numbered door with nearly surgical care. In the dank grayness of Mary Beach’s first floor, it is vital that I am not heard.
Slowly, with measured breaths, I drag my keys from the front pocket of my asphalt colored jacket. I can see my door’s handle up ahead, almost shimmering in the sparse, sterile washes of light that have managed to crawl in from the fluorescents in the stairwell. This is the farthest I’ve ever gotten. This time, I may have just done it.
There’s only so much I can do to minimize the soft tinkling sound my keys make when they collide as I sort through the ring in muted haste. Then a soft grinding as the key enters my lock. Then, a vociferous whir as the door next to mine is flung open and Chandler Wittel slides into the hall, clad only in blue green boxer briefs, eyes already fixed on me.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from college life, exactly. Poorly written, gimmicky teen movies and failed-journalists-turned-traveling-motivational-speakers had me at the ready for adventures in glorified debauchery perpetrated by hosts of stereotypes wielding benevolent but unapologetic eccentricity. Nobody ever said anything about being charged nearly every evening by a mostly naked, Transformers obsessed product of American homeschooling that, if he caught me, would proceed to hump my leg with gusto. Neighborly? Not hardly.

“Whoa whoa whoa! Chandler stop! Chandler, no. No!”

But he was already barreling towards me, focused in sick determination. This is the part where I always panic and my hands shake too violently to get the door unlocked in time, so I have to try to run to the other end of the hall or duck under him. It never works. Despite being shaped like a pear, he’s surprisingly spry, and he has considerable upper body strength from all of the racquetball he plays. I could always throw a punch to spare myself, but I try my best to be a pacifist, and I also don’t really want to touch him. I shouldn’t even have to put up with this. Yeah, maybe it was a bit much to break up a bagel into fifteen pieces and hide all of them in different parts of his room, and I may have gone a little over the line when I tricked him into downloading naked pictures of Daniel Radcliffe, but nothing I’d done in the first three months of our freshman fall semester could possibly warrant retribution this heinous.
I’d always wondered why people in movies had to scream like they did in times of crisis that weren’t even necessarily surprising. Experiences like this resolved that query. Apparently mortified squealing is just something your body does for you, like sneezing or remembering to breathe. I wish my body could have come up with something more useful to do as Chandler bear hugs me and I am helplessly bludgeoned by his pelvis into the painted cinder block wall with enough force for the sleeve of my jacket to erase everything on the small white board outside my room.
These exchanges always end the same way: I pretend not to be unequivocally violated, talking briefly with him about the classes we share or the latest fake news story he’s read, and then escape into my room to sink into a chair and bask in scarred relief. I often try to console myself by thinking that, should I want to join a fraternity in the future, I’ll likely have an advantage.
Really, these attacks are not instances of sexual assault as much as his newest manifestation of aggravated retaliation. We’ve been going back and forth since day one. I’d steal his cell phone, he’d steal my laptop. He’d make off with my shower caddy, I’d spray shave gel all over him at four in the morning and watch him roll in it, still asleep. I would get on his computer while he was in the bathroom, changing important settings and all of his Facebook information so that everyone could read about his affinity for pedophilia. He would write “Who is the Asian chick you were showering with earlier?” on my dry erase board so that I would invariably be awoken in the middle of the night by the chastising knocks of an RA. Now, somewhere along the line of the myriad personal inconveniences we so loved exacting on each other, Chandler had discovered the effectiveness of genital intimidation.
Forcibly repressing the thought that I was just grinded by a dude, I let myself fall into the wobbly chair at my sickly wooden desk. It seems awfully paradoxical that my family had just spent the price of a new car on me living in what amounted to a baseball dugout full of furniture likely carpentered by a friendly retarded man. The walls of the place are the same cinder block as the hall, painted the muffled color of dirty eggshells. The floor exudes a blank sloppiness that makes me think of wet cement, and drawing the blinds means jettisoning the observance of night and day. The encroaching silence of the surrounding stone waits for me to sit alone like this, to catch me in between bouts of busied scurrying to remind me why I’m here. For me, this life wasn’t so much a choice as it was the dictation of circumstance, of necessity. Marietta did not belong to a lengthy list of hopeful possibilities, surviving to the end by bedazzling me with all its promise. In fact, no such list ever existed. I never got the chance to make it.
In a way, the decision that I would be attending Marietta College was made before I was even born, and in the time it took my grandmother to postulate that problems she didn’t acknowledge were problems she didn’t have. My future was sealed in something that that poor, stubborn old woman crinkled up in the back of her mind and left there, and I’d known it since an evening in the December before my arrival at Marietta when she stopped breathing and my mother came down to the basement to tell me she’d called an ambulance.
Time has a way of passing without us, and the causal pivot points of our lives seem to connect only when our backs are turned. Joellen Fury’s misstep was that she never turned back around to see what her life looked like all strung together, and for that she would pay dearly. She’d always been a bit of a naive recluse, perpetually planted in a recliner in her part of our house, sequestered in a burrow of books and forgotten newspapers, watching Judge Judy, but my mother and I had begun to notice an ever-expanding dullness creeping over her that we both agreed was just her old age as we pushed down a secret anxiety.
She repeated herself more and no longer spoke deliberately, but rather her words billowed faintly from her like thin smoke from a jammed machine. The already obese woman started swelling, started hating everyone she could no longer remember, started falling and remaining cursed to the floor until one of us would rush from work or school to come help her up. Her bullheadedness rivaled her decay. She hadn’t been to the doctor since my uncle was born, no reason to start now. But there was a reason, and it had risen from a sea of willful self neglect that winter night as the sirens wound their way up the hills and my girlfriend squeezed my hand and mom did her best to cry softly.
It was congestive heart failure, an adorably amiable doctor told us at the hospital, and it would have taken her had we not convinced her, for our sake, to come that night. Two valves in her heart had given up, letting fluid collect in her body, causing the swelling and suffocating her from the inside. The fuzzy senility was her brain screaming for oxygen, letting go of her memories and thoughts in its struggle to stay afloat.

“So, what can we do?” my mother pleaded, a week at the hospital and a hundred plus pounds of drained fluid later.

Funny. I had spent my sophomore year of high school having people apologize for my father’s cancer, then my junior year sharing the house with a paranoid schizophrenic stranger, each beginning and ending with my mother or me proffering that very same question. You’d think we’d have learned by now that the answer is always the same.
Our options were to go forward with a surgery she wouldn’t survive, or put her on a strict diet that would involve more pills than food and administer frequent breathing treatments. Even with the medication, the physician told us, she would slowly fade over the next year or so, but it would at least give us more days to remain a family. I liked the word he used: fade. I pictured my grandmother growing infinitesimally more translucent with each day, until at last we came home to nothing. I thought of yelling across a still lake at night, the sound waning as it sailed, losing itself peacefully against the tree line. If only. Knowing her, we’d find her at the bottom of the driveway, spread eagle on the pavement, frozen in the spiteful act of trying to get the mail just to show us all she still could. Or maybe she’d stand on tradition. I could see a familiar Thanksgiving dinner, the three of us sitting down to a meal that mom spent all day on in our poorly lit kitchen. My grandmother would complain about the food and jab my mother with false inadequacies in a confused effort to be part of the dinner conversation, then instead of retreating back to her den mid-forkful to catch Survivor and forget what she said to upset everyone, she would pass quietly while mom sobbed over the stove and I feebly tried to compliment her in between confounded bites of stuffing.
Toggling through these scenarios in my mind, I knew there was no way around it. While everyone else in my senior class had conniptions over getting accepted into choice schools that would get them good jobs, my criteria revolved simply around my being able to make a frantic drive home after a phone call that was certainly coming. If I couldn’t be there, my mom would have to deal with everything alone. That put my choices at either Marietta College or West Virginia University at Parkersburg, a local community college which, while I’m sure at one time it offered a quality education, was now more closely representative of a cheap clinic for people born without the parts of their brains that hold aspirations.
So I filled out all of the paperwork, moved in, went to the activities and played the games enthusiastically designed to get scared teenagers to start talking to each other and make the transition into becoming familiar, scared teenagers. I went to my classes. By all appearances, I was a college student, but in my head I wasn’t really anything.
While my mental space didn’t accompany me to Marietta, it didn’t consciously dwell much on all of the last days at home I was missing, either. I could still laugh, make jokes and dear friends, but when all of the white noise this new segment of my life offered died out, I was trapped again in a mental purgatory, in a cognitive destitution that told me I wasn’t in control and that I shouldn’t ever expect to be.
Still at my desk, my phone begins to vibrate, and my heart jumps as the screen comes to life, but it isn’t the call I’ve been expecting. I lean back in my chair, rubbing my neck to warm my hands, unknowingly pricked by the first crippling pangs of what will become a two-year exhaustion. Down the hall, a door closes. The smacking of bare feet grows steadily more audible, cut off by the deadness of a palm thrust firmly into my door.
Chandler’s mousey voice floats in through the cracks, promising he won’t try anything if I open the door, asking me to come with him to the gas station so he can stock up on more chocolate and energy drinks. I crack a smile in spite of myself, thinking of how later this creepy little ingrate will shuffle up to the girl’s dorm and move from door to door, handing out fun-sized bags of M&M’s and asking them how they are. I think of how, later still, he’ll find a way to trick me into downloading those same damn pictures of Daniel Radcliffe. As I tell him to hold on a second, I don’t think about how we so often let life teach us what it is, what it means for us. While I tie my shoes, I wish it would occur to me that we get too comfortable thinking that things have to be a certain way. Leaving my cell phone behind on the desk, I open the door not knowing that every sick surprise Chandler has in store for me is a friendly reminder of how up for grabs everything is.