That winter, I was given a retention project focused on transfer students who were registered last semester but weren’t returning for the spring. My new boss, X, asked me to do it. He told me that he’d spoken to the executive dean. X is a good guy. Before he became the assistant dean, he was the chair of philosophy and I didn’t have much interaction with him, but once he got the fancy new title it meant that I was his direct report. The guy who was in that position before was a good guy, too, but he wasn’t detail-oriented. Unfortunately, he often just took the easy route, which he justified by thinking that it was the best way to help students. I don’t like it when people do that because then students suffer.
After only about a month of working with X, he told me that his wife had recently had a stroke. He didn’t say anything else about it. He and I were getting to know each other. I think in an understated way he was telling me that he was going through something and if I could take that into consideration. He didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d say something like that, and I wondered if he meant it that way. It’s something I thought about. I thought about it in the same way that you take a blanket off the couch and put it on the chair because it looks better.
One thing I did for the transfer student retention project was try to figure out why people had left, and a pattern emerged showing that a lot of these students were in financial hardship. A sizable percentage who hadn’t returned had business holds. I told X about this and he said it was good and we’d need to look deeper.
The city was going through one of the worst winters it’d had in a while. The real snow piled up one weekend but it wasn’t melting because of how cold the temperatures were. I mentioned to my wife how bad my commute was and she sort of agreed but she also worked a few days from home so her take on that wasn’t as frustrated. Most sidewalks only had a single plowed line down the middle the width of a snow shovel. Some sidewalks were just piles of dirty snow and ice. The trash seemed like it wasn’t getting picked up because of how little space there was for parking and everything else. The snow and the bitter cold temperatures were like someone you don’t like crashing on your couch. It was all over the news, conjecture about how many homeless people had died.
A friend of mine, an actor who I’d worked with a few times, asked me to read something he’d been working on. I anticipated that it was going to be a short story or a bit of a memoir or something but instead he emailed me an article about consciousness. I read it with interest but told him truthfully that I didn’t really have any idea what he was talking about. I did, however, say that my new boss was a philosophy professor and that I’d send it along. My actor friend was appreciative. He said that he'd written it while he’d been deployed. I knew that he’d been in the Marines but we’d only had one actual conversation about that in the whole time I’d known him. He said that he’d been a heavy machinery operator and that the Marines shopped him around. He told me that he’d been in places that he could only reveal in a tell-all book. I asked if he thought about writing one but he didn’t have an answer.
The more I inquired into the transfer retention project, the more I found that transfer students who weren’t able to return had business holds. A handful had all of their classes planned and approved and it looked like they’d wanted to register but weren’t able to because the hold blocked them. I emailed some of these students asking why they weren’t returning and all I got back was radio silence, but then I received an email from a girl explaining that an incident had taken place and she was homeless. She said she was living sometimes with an aunt but that the aunt was abusive and that she’d woken up outside one morning when it was twelve degrees but felt like two degrees because of the wind and she had a suspicion that her aunt had gotten her drunk and given her drugs and then lured her out of the apartment. I talked to counseling and wellness but their position was mainly that we could provide the girl with links and recommendations for services but that was the limit of the support we could offer. I called 311 and spoke to a few people but their responses echoed what counseling and wellness had said. I wrote back to her with a whole list of resources and questions but I didn’t get a response.
I kept sending information to X about the results I was finding and I made particular note to highlight the financial side. I outlined how we could provide support to future incoming transfer students, and what we could do when they were admitted, but I also included some questions and inquiry into what we were doing for those in financial hardship. This was not the first time I’d voiced concern about whether kids were being given adequate information about the financial burden. I wanted to reach out to the business office but the head of that department was a prick and I knew that he wouldn’t make anything better. He probably could make it worse. At X’s core, he’s a philosophy person. That’s his purpose. That’s what he wants and who he is. Certain people who work in the bursar's, though? Or a select few who work in admissions? A couple of them are closer in their hearts to thieves.
The winds were worse than any winter I could remember. I spent the first half of my life in New England, so I know what winters are, and when I got to the city early on there were a bunch of tough winters, but after Covid there were winters, one after another, that weren’t cold, so I think the city had gotten a little spoiled. Maybe I’d gotten spoiled too. Each semester, it seemed like students were more and more spoiled. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV, and my parents didn’t have cable. Now the freshmen seemed like they’d grown up watching ten hours of content per day across all different devices. Maybe they weren’t spoiled in a certain sense—a lot of them came from tough socio-economic backgrounds—but I think the content had spoiled them all on its own. The winds in the city were tough that winter, though, like hyper-speed devices howling kinetic gobbledygook into our brains. Whenever it snowed, the winds were rampant, thrashing lines of snowfall like chaotic, jumbled, black and white computer code.
X responded back about my actor friend’s consciousness paper. He said that analytic philosophy wasn’t his area but he provided links to resources. There was one in particular that I thought my friend would like, a database with different journals taking submissions. I forwarded this along and my friend responded with thanks and it wasn’t long after that I got an email saying that his paper made it through the initial screening at a journal and would be looked at by the editor-in-chief.
My wife and I had decided to try for a baby and we’d been working at it for seven months but nothing was happening so we set up a bunch of tests. For some reason I knew that the tests were going to come back fine for her but anticipated that the results were not going to be as nice to me, but then again, looking back now, I also had suspicions that something might be wrong with my wife. She has these weird allergies. She’s allergic to apples and pears and she gets really bad period cramps. Maybe it was that sometimes I was certain things were going to come back wrong for me but fine for her, and then other times maybe it was that I thought things were going to go wrong for the both of us.
The way that I had to do my test was bizarre. The clinic I went to had an elderly disposition, and this wasn’t exclusively because of the person who checked me in. The room where I had to do it was from a time gone by, ancient magazines and DVDs, and the chair in the room had that paper on it that’s usually on examination tables. The way that I had to ring a bell afterwards and hand over my sample and the way those people looked at me as I handed it over… it all felt like I was some kind of strange and foreign organism. It made me wonder about the act itself and how animalistic I was. The whole experience, of course, was unflattering and exposing, like I had my pants around my ankles trudging through Central Park. It’s those results that I anticipated, though. I knew before I opened the email that something was wrong because they didn’t send them on time and it took some doing to get them.
I'd say that I live most of my life preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. I think sometimes this means that I live in a sort of constant state of panic. I tell people that, anyway. It’s often how I think. When I saw the email with the results, I had to Google things to confirm what I was looking at.
One day, during this tough winter period, I started reading a book that I’d already read. There are rare books that I finish and know that I want to re-read and this, certainly, was one of them. The book is about a girl who starts going deaf and, really, the story is about external silence instead of her internal world descending into silence. The girl is interested in whether or not her consciousness will become bent and warped in an even deeper way as opposed to a superficial one, but she doesn’t think about this in terms of what’s going on and what will go on in her head, she thinks from the lens of the rest of the world. She thinks about it in terms of the ecosystem surrounding her. She thinks about the world as becoming increasingly more silent instead of thinking that her hearing is descending. The character has an older brother who goes to Iraq after September 11th but he never comes back and she thinks about the silence that he experienced as a total silence but that it had nothing to do with what she was going through. I was re-reading the book when I got the results. I wondered about my own inability to do things and whether they fit in line with being deaf. I thought, too, while reading, about my friend’s consciousness paper. For some reason, I had a strange thought about the book's words. This thought, for some reason, made me wonder about the paper. I had paranoid suspicions that he'd plagiarized it. I don't know why I thought this. It reminded me of someone once telling me that paranoia is more powerful than intellect.
I had a meeting with X about the transfer retention project and I told him more about the student who emailed me, the girl who'd become homeless. X showed genuine concern, he held his chin and scratched his beard, but when he said he’d look into it he didn’t make eye contact. I was sitting in X’s office in a different building two blocks over from my office. I could hear the wind. It was like it was trying to jimmy the window in an attempt to slide inside. It was an intruder. It reminded me of just how cold it was and I wondered if X was thinking about the same thing.
My wife and I first met with a doctor for her but she spoke to us both. We learned about our options and this doctor wanted us to move forward but first I had to meet with a urologist. I did the following week and he did an ultrasound and the things he said afterwards were positive but it all made me sad. The conversation he engaged me in during the ultrasound was to distract me from the inspection. I looked up at the ceiling and saw only the ceiling and the conversation felt like the air was goop. The positive slanting analysis he delivered after the ultrasound reminded me inversely of the email I’d gotten from the transfer student. She was homeless and I wasn’t. She could do things that I couldn’t. I could hear and the girl in the book I was reading was losing her hearing in a gradual, cascading silence ticking off progressively like an apartment heater flicking on. During the ultrasound, the urologist asked about my work and I told him a bit about the administrative side, but I explained that I taught a little bit as well. He asked if I had any book recommendations and I told him I was re-reading something that was largely about a girl going deaf. I got into the weeds of the plot but I realized that he wasn’t actually listening. His prompt was to get me distracted so that he could concentrate. There was silence when I stopped talking and he kept working.
In another meeting with X, I floated the idea that I could contact the transfer student who had emailed me, that I wanted to reach her in a more meaningful way. He said that I shouldn’t. He told me that, really, any of the personal information that we had access to through the school was for registration purposes only and if they were used for any other reason, it was, technically, against the law. I already knew this. Even sending her a message through her personal email instead of the school’s was tricky. I already knew this. He explained that I shouldn’t push anything. I heard what he said but I acted a bit like the urologist. I let X explain his story while I kept to my work, the ideas that I was mulling over in my head.
I called her. She didn’t pick up. I left a message and she called back.
Are you still in the same spot? The same spot that you explained in your email? I asked.
What? she said. I heard noises on her end of the line, and I heard the wind. It was all around us.
Are you still having the kind of financial problems that you outlined in your email?
Yes, she said. And they’ve gotten worse. The bills for school aren’t good. It’s different than what I got told. I’m confused. I thought that the school was going to help me.
I wanted to just rely on my set of default statements categorized in my head as financial aid responses. A few iterations of saying which office to call and who was the best person to speak to.
Do you have a place to stay? I asked.
No.
Where have you been sleeping at night? It’s very cold.
My aunt, she said, but we're not related.
Is that alright?
No.
Is there anything that the school can do? I asked, fidgeting.
I don’t know where to live, she said.
I’m sorry.
Why did you call me?
I wanted to see if you were okay.
I have to go, she said, hanging up.
The appointment for surgery was set up by the urologist. I got a message from my wife at work, a chat in my email, saying that her friend had gotten pregnant and that she was jealous. I told her that I knew what she meant and that I was sorry and then she apologized. The most basic human function felt not just taken away from me, but it was also that it had never been an option. All that paranoia about condoms and all that concern over the years, in all different situations and instances, it had all been, in a way, pointless. They weren’t going to know exactly what was wrong with me until the surgery but what was clear was that I was not capable of doing what my evolutionary function had been categorized as.
At work, when I worked on the retention project, investigating further into why students didn’t return, I included different indicators in Excel, notes and designations about who these students were and why they might’ve not come back. A lot of what I found was financial, and for whole stretches of that project, all I received was silence. A kind of deafening silence that included my inability to feel like an organism capable of what I’d been evolutionarily designed to do. I’d reach out to students in emails, asking why they hadn’t returned, and I’d get nothing back. No replies. It was like they were ghosts.
I called the girl again but she never called back.
I knew that each of these students had debts, and it was difficult knowing that unless they returned to school, the debts would be associated with something they’d attempted and failed at. A lot of people fail out of college, though, I thought, which was separate from my situation, a thing that affects less than one percent of the population.
The end of the book I was re-reading left me feeling strange and unsettled but deeply gratified. Re-reading a book is like seeing someone who you knew a long time ago except very few of the things you remember align with the person now. All of a sudden you start to realize that this person who you’d lost touch with, they never even had a brother, you’d just made that up. They never told you that they loved you, that was someone else. Re-reading a book can often be like getting re-acquainted with someone you once knew but you start realizing in strange and bizarre ways that you never even knew them at all. You start to feel as though the whole structure of things is sideways, bent and incorrect. Independent, diagonal lines that you’d thought were fully-formed orbs. The lovely thing, though, is that all of this doubt and insecurity in recognizing your misremembering becomes delivered separately by the book than it does with a person. The book, if it’s great, leaves behind your own ineptitude and provides you with solace. In this book I re-read that winter, the girl goes completely deaf but she meets someone, falls in love, has a child and the child is born deaf but the woman has no pause. She has no anger. She has no interest in this attribute that’s been withheld from her child. At the end of the book, she’s in her apartment holding her newborn baby, looking down at him. He is wrapped and fresh back from the hospital. She can’t hear anything, but she can hear absolutely everything, as if silence, the word, has become categorically redefined. Silence, to this woman, has nothing to do with sound and only has to do with birth.
There was a morning I had to myself, alone - my wife was in PA at a baby shower—when I saw that it was ten degrees but felt like negative fifteen. The weather app showed that it was the wind and there was an advisory. I wanted to go for a run but the thought of that wind… Even if I was bundled properly—fleece-lined leggings, a hat, gloves, a face covering—it wouldn’t protect me enough to make the run alright. A winter like this in the city makes you nostalgic for somewhere else. You’re walking to the deli pining for a version of where you live that’s currently nowhere. You just need to wait, wait out the season, so that the place you want to be reveals itself in spring after the snow and ice have thawed and melted. At least with winter in this city, no matter how bad it is, you know for certain that with enough time, the season will change and you can be where you desire once again. It’s like saying goodbye to one generation knowing that you’ll be able to hold another new one in your arms. The cold is so ruthless. It kills people who don’t have proper protection, and if it doesn’t kill them then it wounds them.
I knew going into the surgery that there was an option when I woke up where I’d be told that they didn’t find anything, which would open up a whole new adventure of decision making regarding how my wife and I would move forward.
The only conversation I ever had with my actor friend about his time deployed was a sort of standard, predictable one where I asked the types of things a person who’s never been near a war asks. That’s when he told me that the Marines shopped him around and that he’d been to places that he wasn’t supposed to be.
They’d stick us into a tiny plane and say we were doing a drill and then six hours later we were in another country getting briefed.
Were you scared?
Yeah.
How scared were you?
I was scared but then you get used to it.
I remember talking to him feeling like a little kid. I thought of nights when I was sleeping while he was off.
When he was talking about watching people die, he said something unusual about this plane of existence dropping off and some tangential reality appearing. He told me that he’d always heard about the circle of life but when he was over there he realized, I guess, that life and death can’t be described with math. He said that because a circle is a shape—geometry—it can offer something to us, some kind of philosophy on life, but that π doesn’t have anything to do, truly, with life and death. He said that math is tricky because it has a lot of evidence but the only thing that math is good for is to make us feel better.
It's just a language, he said.
I asked what he meant by all of this.
In the same breath he told me a story about going to the hospital right after his little sister gave birth and that there was blood on the floor. When he mentioned his sister’s husband’s reticence about holding the newborn, my friend cleared his throat and straightened his posture. He told me that later on that day, when his sister was back at her apartment, that she held the newborn, his nephew, in a way that stuck with him and it was days later as he contemplated this that he said that he understood more about life and death from that one snapshot than anything he’d learned during war. I asked him why and he told me that it’s because he loved his sister.
Against the wishes of X, I went to the address associated with the girl’s account in the backend of our database. If you’re not supposed to email a student at their personal email address, then you’re certainly not supposed to just show up at their house. The address was an apartment complex in Queens. I waited for someone to let me into the building. I knocked on the door of the apartment, number 5F, and a woman answered. I’ll describe her charitably by saying that she looked and acted and sounded impaired. She was combative, and in the end, belligerent. I told her nicely who I was and added details about my retention project and the outreach I was doing. Once I mentioned the girl’s name, though, Sophie Delores, the woman instantly started crying. Her body heaved. She was acting erratic and tough and scary. She kept repeating that the girl didn’t have anyone and nobody could have done anything, and when she did finally tell me—even though I couldn’t remember if I’d ever met Sophie and wasn’t sure if I knew her face—I could imagine what she looked like lying there.
