Fiction: Prosems
Monday, October 12, 2009
It was eight o'clock in the morning when Cooper walked past him, sitting at the base of a fat clay colored column outside the library doors, waiting for them to open.
No one had ever known the library to open on time. All anyone ever knew was that a woman named Kathy would turn the lights on in the foyer and walk up to the doors, and you'd stand on the other side, watching her bony hands rummaging through the pockets of her tech jacket for a giant ring of keys you knew couldn't be that difficult to find.
The first Minnesota snow had fallen the night before. It came without a real warning (other than that one on the weather channel) and it fell late at night while most of the students on campus had been asleep. Cooper would have missed it, but he was rolling on Vivance from 2:30 in the morning until then, writing a paper whose thesis seemed to slip farther and farther away from him the harder he rolled. When he put the little white pill on his tongue in the middle of his empty room, it was snowing then. When he sat himself on the sofa in his living room, it was snowing then too.
No one had ever known if her name was really Kathy either. It just said that on her jacket. Cooper had a jacket that said Kathy on it too. He bought it at a thrift store for a few dollars because he thought it looked good and funny because it had the name of somebody else on it. It was a green puffy thing with white stripes and little snap buttons. It took him a moment to remember that he was wearing it. He wondered if the real Kathy would get upset. But she just opened the doors and let three freezing students scurry inside where they shook the snow from their jackets. Kathy stepped past them and pulled a box of Marlboro's out of her jacket, shoving the keys back inside. Cooper wondered if there was a particular kind of person who smoked those cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked enough in his short life to know. But if there was, he thought, I think Kathy would be the kind of person who would.
Cooper’s breath curled up in the air as he watched Kathy pull a white lighter out of her pocket and hold it for a minute, starring at the snow falling off a tree way off in the center of the lawn. She was a short woman with a boy’s haircut. She must have been about 52, but then, Cooper thought, if she's been smokin' for awhile she could be 30 and I wouldn't think any different of it. Kathy was skinny. Her waist, perhaps, was about the circumference of a frying pan. You wouldn't know that though unless you looked at her legs, which stuck out from her jacket several sizes too big. Yeah, Cooper thought, several.
Kathy wasn't glancing at him, nor was she glancing at Cooper, even though he was still sitting there long after the doors had been opened. The three of them lingered outside the doors in silence. He stood up and disappeared behind the glass doors. Cooper followed him in, but before he walked through he checked his reflection in the glass. His face looked pursed and angry, and he wondered if it was the Vivance or if he was just constipated with schoolwork. The jacket still said Kathy, alright, although the white letters were begging to peel off of it. And through the faint image of his face in the glass he could see the boy taking a sharp right and heading off to the computer lab. Cooper chuckled to himself and laid his bare hand on the door handle. If it was anything but metal it would have been frozen, but metal in Minnesota just gets colder and colder to the point where you can't even touch it anymore. Metal gets so cold in Minnesota you wish it was ice, because ice would be warmer. Holding on to the door handle, Cooper looked at his reflection one more time, only this time he saw Kathy, peering over her shoulder, smoke hanging on her lips, starring at the back of Cooper's head. Cooper shook off a notion that suddenly popped into his head and walked through the doors. By the time he was in the library he had forgotten completely what the notion was.
He worked at the desk in the computer lab, though he usually just read books and didn't know the answer to questions. He was a tall boy, skinny, with a swooping pompadour that looked like a tsunami wave. He had a constant smirk on his face, as if at any moment he might break out into a monstrous grin or a bellowing laugh, bearing his teeth, several of which stuck out at frightening angles. A bright green name tag hung from his neck, strung up by a white cord.The boy's name was Lenox Marcuse.
"Excuse me," Cooper said, laying his frigid hands on the desk. "I'd like to check out a lap top."
Marcuse looked up from the computer screen in front of him, blankly. "What kind?"
"The working kind," Cooper said. Marcuse was silent for a moment before telling Cooper that he had meant what kind meaning Mac or PC. "Oh. Um. Mac, I guess."
Marcuse disappeared underneath the desk and brought up a white computer. Cooper slid him his ID and Marcuse held it under a small, flashing red light which beeped. "All set."
Cooper removed the card from the boy's fingers and saw that he was grinning. "Do you know that woman who works out there?"
"Kathy?"
"Yes that woman."
"I know of her," Marcuse said.
"Where is she from?"
"She's native."
"So I she doesn't care 'bout the cold? Right? Natives don't care about that kind of thing."
Marcuse's grin faded away. "No," he said, as if he had been wronged, as if someone had asked him to do something he did not want to do. "I'm a native," he said. "I care about the cold."
"You do?"
"I'm not some rock. I'm not some unfeeling piece of fat. I care about the cold. I hate the cold. I hate it. I hate how it kills the leaves before they even get a chance to die."
Cooper picked up his laptop and prepared to leave. Before he turned around he told Marcuse, "I meant. Well. I meant. Okay."
