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DID I MISS ANYTHING?

The Iguana Fight

I was about take roll in English 101, when one of my students burst into class, saying, “Two iguanas are fighting in the parking lot.  It’s amazing!”

This was Specialist T.J. Grier.  He was a nice kid with a big mouth, taking classes between tours in the Middle East.  He was someone who always had something to announce when he entered a room, who planned his arrival to be the last in the door so that everyone would listen, but his sincerity here was impossible to mistake.  He had seen something worth reporting on.

Half the class stood up and pulled out their phones.  It was a Friday afternoon.  I sighed and said, “Bring your notebooks and a pen.  You will be writing about this.”

The very smart students and the very stoned students were confused, but the rest were happy for a change of pace.  I was planning on having them free-write about the upcoming Chinese Moon landing, but this would do.

“Let’s go,” I said.  “Iguana fight.”

I ushered them out of the classroom, across the courtyard, and into the faculty parking lot.  Sure enough, there was a small crowd gathering around two lizards each about a foot and a half in length, hissing and puffing themselves up.  They danced around each other, grappled for a split second, and then released.  One of the lizards tossed the other under a parked car, but it emerged unfazed, and the crowd cheered.

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NO MAN’S LAND

They’d taken Danielle barely breathing, and zipped her into a duffel bag and lugged her down the steps, stopping on the landing to rest, then dropping the bag like it was filled with rocks, not an injured girl. So little air left in her lungs they thought she’d died but she’d been a runner and knew how to pace herself. She could smell the dumpster’s metal sides, the rustiness mixing with the vegetable mulch of rinds and tomato skins and egg shells and sour cottage cheese and Tampax that had been inside another girl’s body. She was somewhere no one wanted to be zipped into a duffel bag, and heaved into a dumpster. They’d drawn her knees up to her chest; they’d done that after she’d blacked out, after he’d pressed down on her neck with his thumbs. What had she done that made him so angry?

The sun heated the dumpster; it felt like the sun truly was beating. Not much oxygen, but there were side panels made of mesh and Danielle could draw bits of air through them. All the garbage must be trying to breathe too. This must be what little Joey had felt. She’d met him at Farm Sanctuary during her internship. Joey, she said aloud. He wouldn’t leave her like Jon had. But that was okay. Once she enrolled in Rutgers, once she sat in her classes there would be people to meet. No reason to look back. She’d fallen in love with Joey, the lamb’s white fleece, spotted black on his legs and around his nose. Joey had been found alongside a highway, limping tiredly with a leg wound, unable to lift his head. A passerby stopped and brought him to Farm Sanctuary where Danielle assisted, with changing his bandages and feeding him from a milk bottle. There was so much light in Joey’s large eyes, and he always seemed to be smiling.

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This final section examines quantum style in a broader sense: how the successful student of QS places herself in the very context of scientific and aesthetic discipline. Here the ideas of apartments, singularities and theories give way to mystery. That we have broken down mystery into its many parts (see Rule 4 in Section 1) does not steal away its power. In fact, it strengthens mystery’s ability to surprise, confuse, and titillate because it has completed the gauntlets of both emotion and intellect.

To approach this topic from a different angle, we may ask just how does one live successfully in adherence with quantum style? A simple question that breeches a most complex answer. We may, in substitute of this general one, ask a set of different, more directed questions: On a tour of a new apartment, how will I know a storage area can fit all my possessions? After a singularity, cement realities seem to generate at random—how can I be expected to stop crying? I seem to be especially vulnerable to keeping messy code, do I exist as a patch of dark matter, yet undiscovered or explainable? What if it is difficult for me to see symmetry in the universe? Is God hiding himself from me as a result? We ask these questions because we feel them. We are urged by them. But the successful student of quantum style is easily a blind explorer. To be blind is to be able to see matter in the darkest places. What a coincidence to have so many blind heroes: Zatoichi, Matt Murdock, Geordi LaForge, Max Carrados. To be blind is to be set free of trivial distraction.

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