Jordy Rosenberg - Confessions of the Fox

Some time agonever mind how long preciselyI slipped off the map of the world. I took the manuscript with me.

It was night when I left. The hallways were dark, but then they were also dark during the day. Many of the fluorescents were burned out or broken, and since the building had been condemned, Facilities Management had declined to fix them. Theyd demolish the whole thing soon enough.

I hadnt been planning to leave, and yet I was becomingnot exactly anxious about the manuscript, but overcome. The manuscript was confounding, its authenticity indeterminate. I had known Id get wrapped up in it.

But I was more than wrapped up. I was lost.

My ex and I once had a game of inventing German compound words for things inexpressible in simple English. Most of this lexicon concerned cuddling, language that was useless to me now. Outer spoon with arm resting on hip. Outer spoon with arms wrapped around inner spoon. Facing spoons: bodies entangled.

There must be a German expression for self-loss-in-a-project, I thought the night I left, pulling up an online dictionary to concoct a Frankenword for my currentand, I feared, eternalcondition. Selbst-Verlust-in-Projekt.

I think it is fair to say that if my ex had diagnosed me I would have been assigned a different Frankenword. Something far less generous. But since we were not speaking, I was free to diagnose myself.

Surely someone has noted that loss (Verlust) and desire (Lust) share a root. Which brings me both further from and closer to my point.

Several months prior to my precipitous departure, as a kind of Welcome Back to School/Fuck You event, the University held a book sale. It seemed that over the summer the Chancellors office had emptied out the seventeenth to twentieth floors of the library for a big renovation. Deans offices and a dining atrium for upper-echelon adminstrators.

The book sale took place out in front of the building, right where new-student tours marched past. The University was proud to display its optimization of the library. Some fraternity had received community service credit for manning the tables. Tank-top-clad guys hulked over the piles of books doing curls and glaring. Surrounding the tables were huge posterboard mock-ups of the dining-atrium-to-be.

Wandering by one afternoon, riffling through the Universitys entire collection of philosophy, linguistics, and postcolonial theory, I spotted it.

A mashed and mildewed pile of papers, easily overlooked. And yet, a rare and perplexing find. The lost Sheppard memoir? The scholars in my field had scoured the records, debunked everything theyd found.

You can just have that, the kid at the table said.

Back in my office, I stared at the hunk of papers exhaling dust on my desk. It mixed with the other particulate matter that sifted down from the ceiling voids and leaked out of the walls. I wheezed a slightly magnified version of my usual office-wheeze and turned the first crumpled page.

The manuscript had not been read in years, or perhaps ever. There was not a single checkout stamp on it. In fact, there was not even a back-cover card to stamp. The manuscript had never been catalogued at all. Someone had clearly just stuffed it into the back of a stack, where it sat, hidden from view, for god knows how long.

Until now.

For months, I worked under the narrow yellow bloom of my ancient desk lamp, transcribing the soft, eroded pages of the manuscript, and hoping in a kind of offhand way that I wouldnt dream at night of either Lust or Verlust (but what were the chances; this was all I dreamed of), while being rained on by the yellow flakes of asbestos or something that drifted through the holes in the ceiling. Occasionally a mouse or rat would make its way down the hallway under flickering half-light, nails clicking on the linoleum.

On the night I left, flipping between pages 252 and 257, a vague suspicion Id had for some time suddenly crystallized. There was something very wrong with the manuscript.

And furthermore, I needed to disappear with it.

I put the papers and my laptop with its transcriptions and notes into my briefcase, dodged the hallway vermin and walked to my car. Not an insignificant journey: I had pulled a very bad number in the parking lottery. I am not ordinarily sentimental about my workplace, but it was an uncommonly beautiful eveningthe last vestiges of fall snagged by the first hard shanks of winter, edges of ice cutting into the blue New England nightand so I didnt mind the walk. I was saying goodbye, after all. I even permitted myself to briefly enjoy the faade of gentility that the campus took on only in the dark. The birds called sharply to each other in the breezes. The great gray-trunked oaks cast shadows on the buckled pavement. Ivy wrapped the black iron lampposts, helixing fifteen feet up to blown-glass lanterns tremoring with orange light. The University had installed these recently in an attempt to give the crumbling Humanities Quad a distinguished Old World feel. It was another of the landscaping improvements they were constantly unleashing in lieu of actually fixing the infrastructure.

But I digress.

You may not know this, but it is possible to hold back a single set of tears for years straight. Many a filmic crescendo concerning masculinity confirms this fact. Quiet shot of car interior. Aging guy. Beard scruff. Hands on wheel. Black night. Cue music.