Campus
A. R. Strain
I wake up and I hear bagpipes. That’s how I know Kayla is dead. I’m sitting in a Yves Klein lecture looking at the slides but becoming bored. Then people start leaving. The lecturer looks like an annoyed peacock but the leavers aren’t leaving because they’re bored. The mood outside is grim, like the sun fell. Where is everybody? I don’t know what else to do so leave too and go to my room.
Hearing music isn’t all that unusual for me—it’s not like a song stuck in my head either. These are swatches, or samples, of original music unwritten but legible—but never, before today, bagpipes! Jacob and Andres tell me it’s dream-music. It’s in Tolkien, they say. Kayla’s not even Scottish, she’s Irish I think or maybe Polish. She likes steak aspic, wherever that’s from. I’m always certain the music isn’t a fever dream, or a product of drinking. This time a knowingness loiters and what I know is the bagpipes are a funeral march for my girlfriend.
It rains erratically, more like a rehearsal of rain, and then the light turns a really disturbed quality of blue. All the insignificant and therefore crucial things I’ve learned about Kayla—that her favorite plant is Iris ensata, best in well-drained soil, that she was born during a total lunar eclipse, that she wants to work somewhere like Givenchy and then stun the world by marrying rich—arrive back to me in a meshy package. When we met, our chemistry was dubious. I thought we’d probably say hi or something if we saw each other but never hang out. I was more interested in her friend Agnes, who’s the year between us. Agnes was, still is, bored and opinionated. She’s a seasoned bar-talker, always right at ear-level, always without shouting.
I soon discovered Agnes dated exclusively older men in the city, which sounded really dull. After I told Kayla that I had desired Agnes first, she grinned. I didn’t know girls grinned, so carefree: all the ones I’d known either smiled hauntedly or cried.
There are legions, decades, of philanthropy in my family. My father endows many with hope and many more with homicidal intentions. You’d never catch me in any of our family’s houses, not without a balaclava and a Mac-10 anyway, and I can’t bring Kayla home with me, no matter how pretty she is. Not van Eicken material, I can hear Father saying. Why’d you bring that poor girl here, anyway. What were you thinking?
The truth is Kayla calls me her spiritual director, imploring me to always preserve her in a wheel of lights. Even when she accuses me of deriding her, or calls me a narcissist, I keep doing it—spiritually directing her. I promised I’d do it all the way up until we put her body under glass, like Saint Catherine.
Andres comes in and says everyone is down in the common room. I picture it smoke-filled, dignitaries pacing. Students under drill, wracked by apprehension, are in no scenario I can come up with. We go down there and two hundred boys are standing around the giant television set, waiting for news. Here comes Jacob. Who? he says. What? says Andres. They look very recently put out, like this is only a supreme inconvenience. I know, I say. Has either of you heard from Kayla?
Heard from her in what way? Jacob says.
Does either of you believe in premonitions? I say.
Not much, Andres says.
Yeah, not really, Jacob says. Did you have one? I thought what you had was more like fugues.
A fugue is a fixed number of voices, I say. Idiot, I think, How do bagpipes fit into that.
How long do you think we’ll be stuck in here? Andres says.
I think Kayla was there, I say.
Where? Andres says.
You'd better go check, Jacob says.
Jacob’s dad is an ambassador or something else embarrassing. Diplomacy is a terrible family business and I fully expect Jacob to go into it. Thru the window a long line of police vehicles formalizes a horizon against the threat. Whatever it is, Monument Drive will be sealed off for the near future. I picture FBI helicopters landing on various quads, sanding the dormitories in rotor wash. Before I started buying all her cosmetics, Kayla told me she used a biafine emulsion for dry patches or redness. It’s typically used to treat wounds and abrasions, or full thickness wounds, or to manage skin drafts and donor sites. I expect to see her on TV any second, weeping blood. They would never show the bodies in any kind of condition, I tell myself rudely. One time she asked me, What’s gonna happen to me? Girls do that sometimes, quietly say the helplessness they didn’t learn but mastered anyway.
It occurs to me that staying in place is going to render obsolete any hope I have of checking on her. I can’t stay here, I say. I have to go make sure she’s okay.
Well they’re not letting anyone in or out, Jacob says.
Campus security has a man on the door. Police are visible outside, moving in groups with sort of a knotted tendency, so steadily they appear to sway. The absolute dread subjugating all of us inside must be nothing compared to the ambient agitation outside.
They’re not even letting us use the phone, Andres says.
There’s a single phone on each floor of our dorm, the lines for which are always cryptically long: boys calling their parents, boys calling their dealers, boys calling their bookies, boys calling their girlfriends, boys calling their court-mandated therapists; the lines always make me think of prison, of worked-out guys in the movies shagging or shanking each other depending on the mood. I spy Nathan, one of the proctors, lifting a pitcher of water from a nearby cart. After pouring water into dixie cups he places the cups in rows, wingtip to wingtip, in the turbulence of his shaking hands. The softness of this gesture opposes our jagged chatter and sets me down somewhere near ease, if only for a flash. I imagine Jacob and Andres creating a diversion, allowing me to sneak out a window or past the guard. A little noise, a little scuffle or a leveraged panic attack and the trick would be done. Instead we stay in nervous purgatory for hours as our dorm fades from a reproduction of home into the beam of a curdled star. Nathan and the other proctors circulate reports as they receive them—the campus is secure, the perpetrators are subdued, lives are no longer in danger. Finally we’re freed and I plunge into the now-night air like a swimmer, moving rhythmically across the arching lawns redolent of rain, students crying and praying, students smoking, students putting down the rebellion of their fear with the forces of habit. I see Agnes and know that whatever disaster is waiting, she’ll have all the ingredients. She stands under a pink umbrella. According to her eyeliner she’s cried recently. Oh my God, she says as I approach. Oh my God.
Where’s Kayla you dumb whore, I want to scream. Instead I say, Where’s Kayla?
She’s ok, August. She’s ok.
Where is she?
Home, the apartment. She’s not here.
She’s ok, I think. She’s ok. I’ll run the 2.4 miles there against any remaining blockade without stopping and seize her unharmed and kiss her from clavicle to hipbone and she’ll never guess by my face the level to which I thought I’d lost her. I will take her home to my family and they’ll ask her if she believes in God and she’ll say yes and they’ll fly her into their web of dreams.
A.R. Strain is a writer, bookseller, and curator in Los Angeles. Find him on Substack (christebola.substack.com) and X (@euphorianth).