When the Tigers Broke Free

I find myself rambling in a wasteland. Everything is white. The wind is howling in my ears, my body is being tortured by a blunt pain caused by the freezing temperature. The snow is crunching underneath my feet. Or rather, it is squeaking like an old wooden floor. Perhaps I’m on the North Pole.

This is what I imagined it looked like. I might run into a dog sled! The vision of being rescued provides me with new energy and I start to walk faster. Do they even have dog sleds on the North Pole? I turn around and see a kitten stretching. It is so small that I would swear it must be blown away by the wind. The sky is greenish and turning violet. I’m trying to remember how I got here when, suddenly, something changes. Instead of standing on the hard, frozen soil, I am now lying on something soft. The room is being lit by opaque sunlight and the wind is permeating through my blanket. My roommate is sleeping with his head on his desk and apparently, he hadn’t closed the window. For a while I put my head under the blanket and pretend to be in a tent. On the floor next to my bed, there are several short stories that were supposed to inspire my thesis for the next paper: “Sans Farine,” Kafka’s “Penal Colony,” an article about a German executioner and some kind of futuristic pseudo-story reminiscent of 1984. There is also a collection of Bukowski’s poems that one writer had given to me. I grab the crumpled papers and finish reading the existential story of a man in a velvet armchair.

Someone has glued a Matryoshka doll picture to Brittany’s door. I would like to know why. Every single day, thousands of stories are being created here and not knowing them makes me sad. Someone fixed our elevator overnight. I exchange a couple of words with the lobbyman downstairs. I wanted to read newspapers at breakfast, however, it is too late so I only have a banana and some juice. The weather outside turns out to be warmer than expected. The bus is empty today so I can sit in the front and answer my emails on the phone. The traffic is mild and my journey to the arena takes only about 10 minutes. As always, the bag with my equipment is buried on the bottom of the storage so I have to go through others’ stuff as if it were debris and I were looking for survivors after an earthquake. The skates don’t want to fit my callous feet. I haven’t practiced for a week because of a sickness, but after the rest my game is swifter and my team manages to wins 2:0.

I decide to have lunch in the west campus dining hall. As I am entering, it seems to me that the place smells like home. Not like the home on the other side of the world, but its alternative of my life here. I used to live in west campus my freshman year and I got emotionally very attached to the area and its community. In the back of my mind I can see the same picture in dim colors; the pleasure springing from happy memories is replaced by painful realization that last year’s life is gone. University life amplifies the cause and effect relationship; even the slightest decision defines a set of stories that I can become part of. Every face that is turning away from me and that I will never see again is filling me with desire to go back and alter the moment. But even a man living thousand lives wouldn’t fulfil all the parallel realities. People are entering my life and leaving it. Mark was a real friend. We used to hang out almost every day, he could always make me laugh and he supported me at bad times. After the school year was over, he transferred to some university in Oregon and I never heard from him again. “How’s it going, Mark?” I’m typing in the email, but it only gives me a sensation of a desperate cry and trying to rescue a drowned man from the water. Maybe the past needs to give way to the new opportunities so they can open the gates into a new world. Is the new world going to be any better? I am finishing eating my pasta and getting ready for a lecture.

My calculus professor is Serbian and to this day I have no idea how to pronounce his name since it contains five consonants in a row. The algebra in today’s problems is really ugly and tastes like bad fish. In between lectures I have to stop by in my lab – I had left my glasses there. We are working on a research of neuronal activity in legs of lobsters. Or more precisely, how the activity affects the neuron’s birefringence. When we are done with the lobster, we get to eat it. Sometimes, there are so many lobsters that no one wants them and we fight over who will have to take the lobsters home. After a series of engineering classes and ethical imagination seminar, I head to a little room without windows in the photonics building. It looks like a little cell illuminated by incandescent lights that I hate, but it is also one of very few rooms that allow undisturbed working on a project. I am building a model of a bridge with Ben, Pattrick and Earl. It is already dark outside and I have no idea what the time is. When I go to the rest room, my reflection in the mirror shows widely dilated pupils. I’m feeling dizzy. Can mechanics and long concentration have psychotropic effects?

I’m sitting behind a piano in General Sherman Union. In the summer someone had this wonderful idea to place pianos on our campus. I’m sitting behind this piano and my surroundings is melting and being fogged by darkness. I really want to sleep but I’m having so many good ideas. And I’m putting them in the tones of my fall melancholy. With each pressing of the key I can feel warm vibrations and the resonance of the wooden body. The piano is slightly out of tune but that can’t possibly disturb my harmony. Music is carrying me in my bed on its shoulders. In my bed next to which the same pages are still lying. The pages on which Sanson will again execute the French king, the Condemned will again escape his punishment, Jeff will again sacrifice himself and Franz Schmidt will never avoid the damnation. Also, Bukowski’s poems are still lying there. And I am lying too and my mind is continuously leaving my body. I hope I had closed the window.

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