“Okay. Stay tough, John. I’ll go stand watch. Can I have some gum?”
“Here. Thanks, Nicky.”
I wandered off, not attracting too many stares from the few students at the study carrels—were they still in session here?—since I was dressed virtually identically, except that they had neat, short haircuts and mine under the scarf was decidedly shaggy; I’d been procrastinating on a haircut for months. If I could keep it up I’d be well on my way to becoming the guitar guy from the video. Some looked at me inscrutably as I passed, their calm, dark eyes following me. Were they... agents? Minions? What was the word Johnny had used? Maybe not. They still looked possessed of all their life forces, their vital juices, not like the man from the airport.
I glugged from a drinking fountain in the hallway, deliciously metallic, like the mineral water Johnny had given me a taste for back home, and cleaned up in their spotless bathroom. Everything had a curious smell to it, hot and dusty, like the dry smell of the sand at Elk Island in the summer, with an edge of toasted bread and seaweed. The smell of a new place, a city detectably at the edge of a desert as well as a sea, detectably different from the smell of Casablanca and Fes. I wondered what home would smell like when I eventually went home, my nose desensitized to familiar things. If I ever went home.
I did a few laps around the library, drinking every time I passed the fountain, then wandered outside, into what initially felt like the inside of an oven, full of pale brick and sidewalks, but was tolerable after a minute thanks to a constant, stiff breeze. Tiny sparrows that looked exactly like the ones at home flickered around my head. Away from the library, the university buildings were scattered amongst a veritable forest, dense trees planted everywhere except the pathways, which were lined in white concrete pots filled with succulents. I had gotten so used to the heat that it actually felt cool in the shade. There were more students here, dispersed amongst the trees or napping in the lawns. Despite the heat, the grass was green and lush. Tuition dollars, I thought without humour. You pay your bucks, you get the receipt with the word Degree across the top, you get the green, thick grass.
Two girls in sundresses, one red, one purple, were dancing to music coming from a small stereo in the grass, giggling and stepping adroitly over their textbooks. I stopped to watch, jealous of their education, their bare feet, the expensive sandals discarded on their bags—even the boombox, remembering my broken one back home. Students were the same everywhere: rich and bright, and not purposefully ignoring but not actually able to see people like me, as if they had some filter for people who were lesser than they were, that they might try to break down over the years of their schooling or they might not.
The big difference between me and Johnny, I thought as I kept walking, not wanting to be branded the campus pervert, wasn’t race, wasn’t money, wasn’t gender, wasn’t looks, wasn’t intelligence. It was that she thought the world was, in general, improvable, and I didn’t. We’d both extrapolated from the people we knew, from personal to global, and just veered away from each other like lines on a graph, never able to come close to touching again. I’d seen enough of people to know that they never changed. And she’d seen enough to think that they did.
But she was wrong, fundamentally wrong. I’d tried to change people, and failed. And I didn’t know anyone who had succeeded, not one single person. Yet she persisted in believing that she could do it—and not one or two, here and there; everybody, everywhere, for all time. That was why the press loved her, that bullheaded optimism that would have looked like actual insanity in anyone else, but who had the patents and the labs to back it up, who had designed valves for the Canadarm as well as wheelchairs, who had drugs for Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis and malaria and sleeping sickness and cancer, who had created both extra-caffeinated coffee beans and vitamin-enhanced rice, who had a giant thing that only transported photons and a tiny thing that only killed potato pests. No strata of society had escaped her vision. She saw a shining future, and I