Lux Et Veritas
Oh yeah, our bodies felt long strong lean (especially Ali’s, everyone could see what she was like, damn), we felt capable of doing what we wanted to do and of having Ideas. Ideas and Ideas, forever.
Freshmen weren’t allowed to start clubs without upperclassmen but so what. Viv, who dyed her hair a different brilliant color on the first day of every month, was already committed mind-body-soul to Graphic Design so she did the posters. On one half, a photograph of the lily pond, a lush little pocket of loveliness (still green, just beginning to be touched by red and gold and purple in late September) tucked behind the Gymnasium, the kind of image that had been featured in the brochure and pulled us magnetically toward this particular liberal arts college. On the other half, an image of the lily pond photoshopped by Pat to look gray and brown and dead, the water dried up and the foliage shriveled, the great oak nothing but a burned-out stump. Pat, perfect apocalyptic genius. We may have been cynical, sure, but that didn’t stand in the way of us sighing with admiration when we saw the posters. DON’T LET THIS… BECOME THIS. Overly simplistic, perhaps, but Noah, the wordsmith among us, poet and orator, had delivered a monologue about the history of slogans—Simplicity is King. The Society of Optimistic Cynics. SOC. (Ali’s idea. A little cheesier than some might have hoped, but Ali was 100% goodwill plus 100% hot so whatever.) Viv bought eight pairs of striped socks.
The poster was our first memo, our miniature manifesto, and our website (thanks, Rob, o Webmaster, you silent prodigy!), where Tran’s facts and figures were laid out with impeccable logic, got a hundred hits the day the posters went up and five hundred the next and eight hundred the next, etc.
A professor in the Ecology Department endorsed it first, then the captain of the rowing team. Things were set in motion. Les (North Dakota farm boy, knowledgeable about machines and female anatomy) could construct apparatuses and wire that shit like an electrician; Joey (exquisitely androgynous, we’d been best friends with her for three days before we knew if she was a her or a him) was disarmingly, mystifyingly attractive and thus could give orders that would be instantly obeyed
even by reticent workmen.
On the night the Idea became Reality, we watched the Gymnasium from the forbidden roof of our dormitory. A private, illegal party, just for us, but we couldn’t get in trouble now. We’d already contributed too much to the life of the campus. And wasn’t that what the brochure had been asking for? Students who’d contribute to the life of the campus? Well damn. Here we were, contributing away, in our three-piece Salvation Army suits and our falling-apart vintage dresses, waving in the air cigars that for some reason wouldn’t stay lit, drinking absinthe (half of us unsure what exactly absinthe was, the other half unsure if black-licorice Jelly Bellies dissolved in cheap vodka dyed green with food coloring counted as absinthe), already terrifically drunk, not envious at all of Team One, the hundred members of which ran up to and entered the front door of the dark, unlit Gymnasium in their futuristic silver leggings (not our idea, those godforsaken leggings). We watched, we waited, we pretended our stomachs weren’t trembling with the dread of failure, remember we’d been dorks not so long ago, we knew how it felt to fail publicly, go stag to prom, cough miserably over your first cigarette behind the high school in some distant, lonesome hometown.
But: suddenly the Gymnasium blazed. It blazed exactly as it was supposed to, all its radiance intact, perchance more radiant than usual, casting electricity out into the November darkness through its cathedral windows (did we neglect to mention: at this particular liberal arts college the Gymnasium was built to look like a cathedral, an old rich bitch of a donor gave some huge sum but specified only for the construction of a Catholic Cathedral on campus, so there you have it, her rolling by in her black limousine to preen and approve and meanwhile an Olympic-size swimming pool filling with water where the altar ought to have been). Anyhow: there it is, our Gymnasium, glowing with a sacred light. You could kick that Gymnasium off the face of the earth and send it out into space and still it would maintain the perfect fluorescence of its hallways, the perfect coolness of its vending machines, as long as the hundred devoted members of Team One kept pounding away on their exercise machines, all their youth and energy and stress and sexual frustration harnessed to keep the Gymnasium alight. Oh the absinthe we drank oh the cigars we kind of smoked.
We agreed to be honorary members of Team Forty-One, the final team, but really we were too busy (didn’t we have better things to do with our vital energy?); newspaper interviews, radio interviews, TV talk shows, not to mention classes, classics, calculus, crushes, the search for sex. For We were Known on campus nowadays. And hadn’t we always felt, each of the eight of us, privately, separately, in our youths, in that long-ago unbelievable time before we knew one another, that we were bound for greatness? Indeed, we took it in stride. We donned the futuristic silver leggings for a photo shoot with a glossy magazine; we strode down the street in a pack of eight, one creature with sixteen metallic legs. Once in a while we fulfilled our obligations in the Gymnasium, for there was a girls’ sauna and a boys’ sauna and clothing was not required; it was strongly suggested that students, after completing their electrical responsibilities, unwind and replenish with a trip to the sauna, which had been inexplicably underused in the preceding decades, so not only had we accomplished everything else we’d accomplished but also the Gymnasium was now an Elysian land inhabited by nymphs and gods. Our joy could not be measured. In our common room the grapefruit rinds piled ever deeper and the problem sets disintegrated into snowy specks; some of the unused condoms became used, and still we didn’t know which of us dared own cologne.