The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Twenty-Five: Property Damage

Karen was one year older than me, so I was a junior that first year and she was a senior. By second semester she started to feel the terror one feels when one approaches graduation with no plans. She always talked about grad school, so it’s like she had no idea, but there’s still plenty to worry about even when you’ve got it narrowed down that far—applying and then being accepted or whatnot. She even started thinking that grad school itself was a dumb idea, and that maybe it was just her way of coping with the fear of failure by putting off her entry into the real world, and she thought maybe she should just skip grad school altogether and get on with failing already.

“I don’t think grad school is just a way to put off failure,” I said. “I mean, there are like a million ways to fail in grad school.”

“Thanks.”

“Or even before you get there.”

“Thanks.”

“The only thing you happen to be putting off is living off your own money instead of your parents’. Either way you’re still going to have plenty of different ways to fail.”

“Thanks, you fuckface. That really helps, you fucking dumb ape.”

She did not have much of a sense of humor about any of this.

She got really angry at me a lot that semester because I wasn’t freaking out with her. She thought I should be just as afraid as she was. Not afraid for her, I mean, but afraid for myself.

“Don’t you ever worry about what you’re going to do when you get out of here?” she’d ask. “I mean, you’re what, a fucking English major, right?”

“Yes.”

“So what the fuck are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I’d say. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’re going to get out there and fail? And fall on your face? And embarrass yourself and disappoint everyone who ever believed in you? All those dumb gullible people from Shit-town, CT who sent you off to Boston and said things like ‘make us proud,’ aren’t you afraid of letting them down?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Were you this nervous this time last year?”

“Of course not.”

“Well there you go.”

“That’s not it. That’s not it at all.” I was always missing the point with Karen, if you believed her.

She really started losing it, truly. This wasn’t just your ordinary run-of-the-mill anxiety. She was really losing control. There were mornings where she literally woke me up shaking next to me under the covers. I’d try to drag her out of bed because she had class or she hadn’t eaten in three days, and she would refuse—not even refuse, just cling to the mattress and make this kind of half-moan half-squeal that was kind of like the sound I imagine a mouse makes when you’ve got your foot on it and it’s trapped and you just slowly start crushing it. I had to leave the room when she started in with that noise. The thing to do might’ve been to stay and comfort her or whatever, but I figured, I have class too, and I have to eat (and a lot of the time my excuses were a lot lamer than that, I wanted to play wiffleball or I just needed to get away from her or something), so I’d leave her. And then I’d get back and she’d still be in bed, and you felt the pillow or the comforter or something and it would be just wet and sticky enough so you’d know she’d been crying and tried to stop herself in time to pass it off like nothing had happened. My response would be to wash my sheets, because I imagined her blowing her nose into it all and getting phlegm everywhere. I washed my sheets a whole hell of a lot during that time.

And then other days she’d be fine. Totally normal. You never knew what was going to happen.

“You sure look happy today.” I always went just exactly far enough to imply that she was having a breakdown, but not far enough that she’d break down right there in front of me and we’d have to talk about it. I was a hell of a guy.

“I am good.”

“You get a job or something?”

“I got a plan,” she said. She pulled out a scratch ticket.

“No shit,” I said.

“These tickets have a one-in-three chance in winning. If I buy three, then my chance of winning is 100%.”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow,” I said.

“Then, I take those profits to buy more expensive scratch tickets, with like, one-in-six odds. Buy six of them, make another profit.”

“But if you buy three one-in-three tickets at one dollar a piece, win two dollars with one of them and lose on the other two, then you haven’t made a profit. You just lost one dollar.”

“That’s true,” she said. She pulled out some graph paper that was filled with calculations and sloping lines and things. It was more math than I’d seen in three years of undergraduate education. I almost passed out. “But if I buy 5.322 tickets, then—see? My profit line surpasses my cost line. So if I don’t make a profit on my first three, then I just need to buy 2.322 more and my odds of not making a profit are so small as to be statistically irrelevant.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” I said, miles behind. “I must be missing something.”

“Then,” Karen, pulling the paper away from me, plowing forward, “I get the one-in-sixes—with guaranteed profit after no more than 10.1 tickets—and use that money to buy some lower-odd higher-payoff ticket, until I win enough of those, etc. etc., until I climb the ladder up to Powerball, whereupon I’ve already pocketed some $300 million, and I have more than enough to cover both the straight one-in-142 million odds and the regressed one-in-270 million guaranteed profit, and I win the Powerball jackpot, and I’ve got more than enough money to retire.”

“Why don’t you stop before the Powerball jackpot?” I asked. “Isn’t $300 million good enough?”

She gave me a bored shrug.

She was bullshitting of course. I figured this out kind of late. About when she asked “retire,” is when the gears started turning.

“Look at you squinting at those graphs,” she said. “You’re never going to make it in the real world if you can’t do a little math, Wordsworth.”

“I don’t like Wordsworth.”

“Oh, you don’t, do you?”

“How long did all this take you?” I asked. The graphs and calculations were real, at least.

“I did it in Applying Lacanian Principles to the Psychoanalysis of Learning-Disabled Children.”

“Isn’t that an independent study?”

“Yes it is.”

“All this to entertain me for like twenty seconds?”

“Pph,” she said. “I did it to entertain me. I just decided to let you in on the joke.” I had been flattered, too, for about half a second.

I did honestly worry about her, though. I tried to keep sharp things out of the room—switched to an electric razor. I’d leave scissors on the desk or something and then forget about them and leave, and I’d get back and they’d be gone and I’d freak out and Karen would be down the hall using them to cut the tag off a new pair of jeans or something and I’d just about faint from relief when she walked in OK, and she’d look at me like she didn’t know what was up, but she knew. “What’s with you?” she’d ask in that real guarded way that let me know she did not want to have to face an honest answer.

It was around this time that she joined this ideological magazine called Gesture (if you can give me a real magazine with a name that’s worse than Gesture, I will mail you $50). Their ideology was mostly muddled and incoherent, but let me try to explain it real quick. Their whole premise was that humanity has forever been living under the illusion that Actions had Meanings, and that Meaning was revealed through Action (capitalizing these words was their thing, not mine). But this was wrong, these Gesturists (again, their thing) believed—Action and Meaning are actually two separate entities, unable to be combined. To take Actions with the goal of expressing Meaning was to labor under a false consciousness. “Our task,” Karen wrote in an op-ed that ran (somewhat astonishingly) in our school’s paper the Daily Free Press, “is to remove the residue of false Meaning from pure Action. When one can take Action without the constraint of intended Meaning, only then can he or she truly revel in what he or she is truly capable of.” Karen hadn't founded the group or anything, but she quickly assumed leadership of all these pointy-headed lost souls. This op-ed was to be the most complete and enduring statement of the Gesturist manifesto—their “magazine” never released an issue.

That didn’t stop these clowns from holding hours-long editorial meetings in my fucking room, for some fucking reason. Picture anywhere from 3-12 (!) morons who’ve read too much literary theory without understanding a word of it blathering on about what their “movement” meant. Imagine coming home from class to that.

One might think that it would be easy to get a bunch of self-deluding children to agree on something so utterly vapid, but there was actually a lot of debate, especially about the ideal Gesture. They eventually decided that it would be something like taking some giant paintbrush (oh yes) and smearing paint across a skyscraper.

“But if these gestures are meant to remove meaning from action,” I’d say when I was trying to clear out the room, “isn’t that itself a meaning? Which makes this whole thing self-defeating from the start.”

“But we’re not asserting the meaninglessness,” Karen would reply (she really had the best brain of the bunch by far—I’d always ask her what she was doing wasting her time with those cranks). “We’re just Acting. The gesture is not towards meaninglessness. It is its own end.” It was a neat little logical loop they’d worked out for themselves. I would then point out that for a group whose organizing principles were all based around Action, they sure did a lot of sitting around bullshitting in my room, and they’d all give me dirty looks.

She used to get mad at me, she thought I should be all into this. “Remember that time in the restaurant when you stepped into the shower and walked back out to the table dripping wet?” I nodded. “That was this. That was beautiful—you unmoored yourself from social conventions and so-called rational behavior and just did something for the sake of doing it. Didn’t you feel like you’d had a brush with something deep and meaningful that you can’t reach any other way?”

Well, no, I hadn’t felt that way. And I didn’t really agree with her premise, that this was something I’d want to feel even if I had felt it. She was probably right to call me unmoored, but I’d been like that for a while, and I kind of felt like I wouldn’t mind mooring to something for a change. And I think I had principally done it because I’d hoped Karen would like it.

At this point, I was working in the AV booth at the Tsai Auditorium, which I think was the biggest lecture hall on campus—they held big classes in there, and whenever there was an orientation or conference or something like that, they held it in Tsai. It was the nicest place on campus by a mile and a half—if they’d held the accepted student program in one of the big, empty rooms in the GSU with all that cheap carpet and bleak modernist architecture I’d have probably ended up at like Trinity.

But anyway, I worked the AV booth with another kid named Colin. We worked all these events and big lectures where the professor requested a PowerPoint or something on the projection screen—we also handled all the audio (microphones and speakers and whatnot). I say we—Colin was the only one who knew how to run all this stuff. I just sat there and kept him company, mostly. Our supervisor hired me and told me Colin would teach me the ropes, but on my first day, Colin said he had it under control and I should just sit there and make some money. This was just fine by me.

Colin was a pretty good guy. His girlfriend hung out in the booth a lot, and when Karen heard about this, she started coming around too. Colin’s girlfriend was named Dana, and I kind of fell in love with her. She was very sweet—she’d catch me off-guard, saying something nice. Not even necessarily about me, but just with her general niceness, and it never lost its novelty—that some people just thought nice things all the time, without having to try, as opposed to realizing they should be thinking something nice and trying to come up with something on the spot all the time—this blew me away. And then Colin, I think, was really attracted to Karen. Everything that came out of her mouth was endlessly fascinating to him. If Colin and I were trying to negotiate a swap on some secret wavelength, the girls were having none of it. I tried to be over-nice to Dana to match her genuine niceness, and so I came off to her as affected and dull. And anyone who let Karen know he found her intelligent or interesting, as Colin did, instantly went down in her estimation. She needed someone like me to be bored with and unmoved by her.

Colin and Dana were both Karen’s age, so one day we were all in the booth and they were all talking about what they were going to do after graduation. I knew this was kind of a touchy subject for Karen so I tried to stay out of it.

Colin was going into some tech field I couldn’t hope to understand—he basically told us he was going to be doing exactly what he was doing at Tsai, only he was going to be paid $40,000 a year to do it, instead of $7.60 an hour. Dana was a music major who was probably going to get a teaching degree.

“I don’t know,” Karen said, “that seems like the worst thing you could do with a music degree. Listening to a bunch of idiot kids play their instruments poorly? You should give that job to someone with no musical sense at all, so they don’t know how bad it is.”

“I sort of always had this in mind,” Dana said. “I wanted to teach and I love music, so it was sort of always in the back of my mind.”

“You know, I take it back. That’s actually very noble. Molding young minds, and whatnot. It takes a real champ to put up with all that school shit in the interest of bettering the next generation.”

“Are you making fun of me?” Dana cut in with her nervous little smile. “I can never tell if you’re making fun of me,” almost apologetic.

“I’m not,” Karen said, which is what she always said, whether it was true or not. She loved nothing more than to say something sincere and have everyone think she was making fun of them. It delighted her to no end.

“Why don’t you tell them what you’re going to do after graduation,” I said.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“No, tell them.”

“I’m gonna teach an etiquette class, you prick.”

“She’s gonna RIDE THE RAILS!” I screamed. People inside the auditorium probably heard me. “This weekend we’re going shopping on Newbury Street to look for a nice bindle! Isn’t that right, sweetie?”

“I actually have an interview with Houghton Mifflin on Monday.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” I said.

“I don’t tell you every goddamn thing.”

“What happened to grad school?”

“I only tell you enough to keep you quiet.”

“Hey, that’s awesome,” Colin said. “What division?”

“Yes,” I said, “what division of Houghton Mifflin?”

“And anyway,” she said, ignoring us, “who really cares about what we’re doing after we graduate?”

“It’s in like a month,” I pointed out, because I was a little annoyed now that I’d been showed up.

“Why sit here giving ourselves breakdowns worrying about that when we’re wasting so much time?”

“What should we be doing?” Colin asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said in a way that made it pretty clear she knew exactly what. “How about we meet here tonight and figure something out?”

“Figure what out?”

“At midnight or so.” We were all staring at her, the way you’d stare at some stranger on the subway who just all of a sudden announced he was going to start growing feathers. “Wear dark clothes and bring flashlights and the keys to the auditorium.” We all kind of chuckled.

No one showed up, of course, except for Karen. That would have been insane, and besides, it all sounded like a joke. Even though, really, I knew better. I knew she wasn’t joking. I knew even before she told me, just a few minutes before midnight, that she was headed to the auditorium, and that I should come. I told her no, and she left.

I was just reading or listening to music or something. I had class early the next morning, but it didn’t even occur to me to go to bed before Karen got back. I guess I imagined she was just sitting in the lobby, waiting for one of the three of us to join her, and that eventually, she’d give up and come back. Or no, that’s not accurate. I didn’t think of her at all. I just thought she was gone—didn’t matter where—and she would come back.

I think it was a little after 2:00 when I noticed she hadn’t come back yet and wondered where she was. I put on my shoes and headed out.

I didn’t even go to Tsai first. It hadn’t occurred to me yet. I figured I’d check at her room first, so I walked past the auditorium, all the way down the Student Village where she “lived,” according to BU’s records. The security guard wouldn’t let me in, even when I told him it was an emergency (which I didn’t think it was—I was just trying to get up there), so I just ran past his booth and up the stairs and he didn’t bother following me. I climbed up to the seventh floor and knocked on her door for a while until one of her roommates (who had almost certainly been sleeping) answered. I asked if any of them had seen Karen, and she told me “not in the last three or four months.” I walked away without thanking her.

I snuck past the guard by creating a diversion on one end of the lobby and sneaking out behind him. I shook up a soda can and spiked it like a football, and then I used couches for cover until I got to the front door. I did all this not because I thought he’d stop me, but just because I thought it would be a fun thing to do.

It was a 20 or 30 minute walk back to my place, passing Tsai again. She still wasn’t in my room when I got back, so I sat around for a bit, and then it finally dawned on me to check the auditorium. Maybe Colin had showed up after all. It was then that I noticed she’d taken my work keys.

I set off for Tsai, jogging now. At one point I tripped on a root of one of those big old trees growing in the sidewalk and scraped my knee up pretty bad. The closest two entrances into the CAS building were locked, but the third was open. I leapt up the steps and ran for Tsai, where in the darkness, I saw a flashlight beam bouncing around through the door and around the ceiling. I tripped again down the four or five stairs down into the main CAS lobby, splayed out on the mosaic of the ship or whatever they have in there. It took me a second to catch my bearings.

When you enter Tsai, there’s a little lobby, and a curving wall, and you walk either right or left to get into the auditorium proper. When I limped into the Tsai lobby, I saw the carpet was all ripped up. In some places it had been ripped out of the floor and piled up in the corner; in other places, there were just deep, irregular gashes all the way through; and in others little squares of carpet were neatly cut out and stacked up so you could see the concrete. Oh, they’re doing renovations, I thought, because even though it was about three in the morning on a weeknight, that sure made a whole hell of a lot more sense than what I saw when I turned the corner. It was Karen, clawing and tearing at the carpet up and down the auditorium’s aisles with a box cutter.

She hadn’t noticed me coming in, so I just stood there for a second and figure out what she was doing. She was nearly done—one aisle was already ripped up and she was nearly at the stage, working from the back, in the other. She was just slashing wildly—I don’t know if this had been her technique throughout, but it was making for some messy results. She grabbed a big chunk of carpet by the end and ripped it up, nearly falling over backwards in her enthusiasm. It was this tearing sound, I think, that finally woke me up.

“Karen!” I screamed, so loud I was afraid someone would hear us, even though no one else was around, obviously. She looked at me and inadvertently caught her own face in her flashlight, and it was eerie, her pupils all huge, mouth hanging open, face totally drained of anything resembling human consciousness. She was definitely in another place. What she looked like was a skunk or something you catch in your headlights driving down a country road at night. The difference being the skunk stands there for a second and then runs off into the bushes, whereas Karen just stood there, with the carpet in her hands, for oh maybe six or seven very long seconds, before she started up with the box cutter again.

I cut through the seats and ran up to her. I was afraid to get too close, because she looked like she was out of her mind and in the state she was in I didn’t put it past her to lunge at my neck with her box cutter (frankly, I wouldn’t have put it totally past her in any state). “Take a break for a second and look at what you’re doing!” She ignored me. “Is this your stupid club thing? Is that what you think this is? It isn’t! This is property damage!” Rip rip rip, cut cut cut. “Apples! Apples apples bananas!” Just to see if she was listening at all. No response, so I decided the best thing to do at this point was to just book it.

I ran home and locked the door and got into bed with my clothes and shoes on and everything and just went to sleep. The plan was to stay in bed thinking about what the fuck I had just seen and who I was involved with, because I didn’t think I’d ever be able to calm down enough to fall asleep, but I was out pretty quick. She did wake me up when she came home an hour or so after I did (she had her own set of keys to my place—the door-locking was more symbolic than anything) and sat on the end of the bed for a while, but then I fell asleep again and when I woke up in the morning she was gone.

Colin and I were fired. Not that they suspected us, but they figured one of their student employees must have been involved, so they fired all eight or nine of us. It was no big deal for me, but the job Colin had lined up for after graduation fell through. The next night at dinner (with Karen—she hadn’t gone anywhere for very long, of course), I thought about a hundred ways to bring up what she had done. But I never mentioned it. I never even mentioned why we weren’t hanging out at the Tsai tech booth every day or that I had been fired at all. We just carried on like nothing had happened. Like that job and those people (Colin and Dana) and that weird night—like none of that had ever existed at all. She stared into her salad that night and moved all her greens to one side and all the other colors to the other side and then mixed them all up again and then left without me, without taking a single bite.