10. Specter #2
Before the empty-headed creature showed up, I spent most of my days doing the work I was meant to do as a linguistics graduate student.
My specialization was syntax. I investigated the ways words come together in sentences, represented in diagrams that looked like trees.
How their leaves and roots, nouns, verbs, quantifiers, adverbial phrases, swayed and talked to each other, how they bonded to create the structure to hold meaning.
My friends worked on morphology, phonology, computational linguistics, each of us looking for a different window of understanding into a Universal Grammar for language.
Each day was a mixture of awe and excitement about the possibilities of knowledge—the relief of being surrounded by people who shared this hunger, for the first time in our lives—and also a sprinkle of a latent terror.
Terror staring at datasets that refused to fit into a pattern.
Despair looking at the plain black plastic clock on the wall of the graduate lounge, ticking toward 2 a.m. on the eve of a paper deadline.
Thinking that we might not be good enough to be there.
An unspoken but palpable fear that if we didn’t do well, if we fell behind, we would be kicked out of the program (and in my case, also the country).
During the day, I liked sitting by the windows on the old floral couch at the graduate lounge, working quietly alongside other students, or occasionally discussing the repercussions of different linguistic theories, drawing sentence derivations together on the whiteboards.
The large yellow oak coffee table was often covered with notes, tea and coffee mugs, and old plain-covered journals with titles like Natural Language, Language, and Linguistic Inquiry.
At some point in those earlier days, someone drew an alligator on the whiteboard.
I thought nothing of it and erased it to draw sentence tree diagrams comparing the position of object pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and English.
When I came back from class later, someone had erased all the words and drawn a little cartoon alligator.
It wore sunglasses and tapped its big, round belly, satisfied, licking its lips, as if each word on the tree had been an apple it had plucked and eaten.
I laughed and drew a heart and little eaten apples strewn around the board, oblivious to what would come later.
The biggest change when the creature showed up was time.
I already had so little of it, and now I had to spend so many of my nights awake, relating my days, describing the scenery, the stories my mother used to tell me as a kid, what I had for breakfast, feeding it my paper drafts, the brochures I diligently collected from the different clubs and proselytizers on Bruin Walk.
I needed to find more time to sleep. That empty-headed thing liked the papers and flyers, but it loved the talk.
After a while, it no longer had the body of Snow White’s witch.
It was now a man, a whole foot taller than me, wide shoulders and back, rounded with muscle that made it hungrier, the legs of a cyclist. As it grew stronger, it was I who shriveled up with exhaustion.
One day, after a few delirious months, I woke up to Ana shaking my shoulder. I had fallen asleep under my desk. “Let’s go, amiga. Class is in fifteen minutes.” She helped me up.
“Shit!” I stood up all at once and grabbed my toothbrush and toothpaste out of the desk drawer.
“I’m worried about you.” She made sure to pause and look me in the eyes, to register a degree of gravity, then walked with me to the woman’s bathroom.
While I brushed my teeth, she stared at me in the mirror. “Are you on drugs?”
I burst out laughing, toothpaste going everywhere.
And then the laughter turned into crying.
I had not been able to finish my assignment.
I had read the entire dataset to the creature the night before.
It had shown up in the office with a coconut head this time, the two holes for eyes and one for a mouth.
The mouth was not big enough for the papers I had collected, so I had to read everything instead.
By the time it was finished, I could barely keep my eyes open.
One minute I was trying to work and the next Ana was shaking me awake.
“I am not on drugs,” I said, sobbing, toothpaste running down my chin, hand, and wrist.
She hugged me, led my hands to the water, wiped my face. “Talk to me.”
I shook my head. No more talking.
She dabbed my face with a paper towel. “All right, for now, let’s just make it to class, okay? We’ll talk later.”
Ana modeled breathing in and out slowly as we walked to class. Ana and I were the last to arrive, although I managed to go in without crying.
We sat with the other nine students around the cherrywood conference table as the professor continued his spiel about the role of grammatical categories, binary tree structure, and entropy in predicting phrase boundaries.
I tried to follow it, but with little ability to focus.
This was stuff I used to love, but I was so tired.
He called on me for a question on the dataset, presumably related to what he had just talked about. But my head was empty.
“Maybe if…” I said, squinting at a particular area of the dataset projected on the white screen rolled over the blackboard. “If we look at…” I paused, as if trying to put a brilliant but complex insight into words. But there was nothing behind what I was saying. I wanted to vomit.
Zach and Ana exchanged looks. Then she jumped in: “Right! I see what you are looking at, right there on the last two lines.”
“Oh, I see it now,” said Zach.
Ana took over the conversation with something she had surely worked hard to discover and was planning to bring to class discussion today as her own idea, as she should have, rather than pretending I had seen it first. I felt terrible, and also so grateful to her.
My standing was getting pretty dicey in that class.
After they moved on to another topic, she gently squeezed my finger under the table and wrote on the corner of the open page of my notebook: I just want you to be okay.
If only I had told her right after class.
But I didn’t think anyone would have believed me.
I didn’t want people to think I had lost it.
I didn’t want to go on probation, to be kicked out, to lose my visa and be sent home.
I didn’t want to lose the program and LA and her and Zach. I just wanted it to disappear.
That day was the last Thursday of the month, when Ana, Zach, and I usually attended student happy hour at a place just south of campus.
We would split half-off appetizers and do our monthly “we survived another one” toast. I went home early to try for a recovery nap first, only to be shaken awake again, though this time hideous nails dug into my shoulder.
I peeked at it—it was back to wearing the alligator mask—then at my alarm clock on the bedside table and immediately felt like crying.
It was midnight; I had missed happy hour.
I thought of Ana and Zach sitting there waiting for me, my not showing up even after they saved me in class.
It shook my shoulder again. I had never resisted it before, but I was so tired and sad.
“Go away!” I mumbled.
It shook me harder.
“Leave me alone.” I pulled the blanket over my head.
It poked me in the back.
I ignored it.
After a couple more tries, it went quiet. For a few seconds I thought it had gone away. I imagined that all this time, all I had needed to do was ask.
Then it ripped the blanket off me and sent it flying across the room. It screamed at me, a mixture of a high-pitched whistle, boiling kettle, fire alarm, and lion roar.
It was panting, the arms clenched into fists at its side, making me think of an angry gorilla. It was huge now, the body of a tall bodybuilder, and it was furious.
I screamed into a stand, then quieted myself quickly so as not to agitate it more.
“Okay, okay,” I said as calmly as I could while looking for my backpack.
As I searched under the blankets, on the floor, under the bed, I told it about my morning.
About Ana waking me up, about class. I repeated what I remembered from what the professor had said, something about applications to predictive text.
I related what I could from Ana’s response, even without understanding exactly what I was saying.
I was grasping for whatever I could find in my head, repeating the words displayed on the posters and ones I sometimes heard being yelled in heated discussions as I walked by the stand of the closeted conservative student club that stationed itself on Bruin Walk: words like “fiscally conservative,” “handouts,” “bootstrap,” “merit.” I repeated random lines from movies, like Clueless and Back to the Future.
It began to calm down. Slowly it headed to the leather chair.
The backpack was nowhere to be found. In my exhaustion, I might have left it in the graduate lounge.
I kept speaking as I looked for something to feed it.
I had given it everything in the room. All our junk mail, my notes, each of the books I had bought and the ones I had originally brought from home.
I closed my eyes trying to think. It responded with an angry growl.