Gnosis

The freshman emerges from his first class, and stretches, feeling like a fully–fledged high schooler. That morning the quad outside his building had bubbled with excitement, as new students, dizzy with the ascension from the mud of middle school to a more intellectual, and enlightened atmosphere had spun past each other, clinging loosely in group hugs before sliding away with nervousness and feigned nonchalance. He walked on his toes, having no time to respond to gravity’s call before chance reunions with classmates nearly forgotten over the summer lifted him back up in elation and congratulations. He breathed deeply, imagining that the air rushing into his lungs was filled with a different mixture of gasses than the air off campus, somehow lighter and more energetic.

The buildings on the high school campus towered above him, vaulted hallways and steepled roofs pointing to the sky like prophets.  But the architecture also seemed to float, like it was calling the land itself to rise higher, encouraging the entire campus to lift off from the boorish constraints of planet-bound middle school life.

And as he made his way to his first class, his eyes fixed on a higher plane, he grinned at the thought of the esoteric syncretism of high-school classes, new forms and maps of knowledge overlapping with each other, augmenting every new realization with an invitation to continue. The books and papers would be like a spider-web or a rope bridge, suspended above the physical chaos, and keeping him above the wash of clumsiness and confusion that pollute students in the lower grades.

He hears the pneumatic hinge close the heavy classroom door behind him with a clunk. The air in his chest swells as he looks down the hallway. At its end, a staircase drops down to the first floor, folding back upon itself midway down. The footsteps of those ascending and descending resound, below, moving up through the atrium and down the corridors of the upper story. His next class waits in the third story of a structure that he can barely glimpse through a window at the end of the hallway, rising across the quad where he gathered and celebrated only fifty minutes ago.

But between him and the stairwell roils a mass of other students. They collide with each other constantly, moving like a school of fish, fleshy but buoyed above the floor by the great tumult of their voices, bodies and books. The currents that twist between them rush into invisible cracks and quickly slip the length of the hallway, but the mystery of their passage remains hidden from him, and the musk of so many maturing bodies deadens the air, giving the impression that even the ether has been restricted by this monstrous, pubescent throng.  Even the claps, slaps, and shouts of high school camaraderie sound sodden, muddy, and somatic.

He begins to plot his own journey over the length of the hallway, down the stairs and outside, across the open quad, inside a far building and up two flights of stairs to the circular seminar room on the top of humanities building. He imagines looking out the room’s windows high above the rest of the campus and watching the other students slowly drift over the green like seeds in the wind. But his vision eludes him, and his aspirations disappear as he drops his eyes to the level of the floor and sees the barrage of black and brown dress shoes stomping over one another in the roadblock that the hallway has become.

Perhaps another student, a young girl, has just left a science class at the other end of the hallway, her head full of vectors and velocities. She looks over the teem of bodies swarming over each other in the hallway and drops easily down the stairwell on her way to her next class, unencumbered by the worry of navigating her way through the crowd. She is not encumbered by a heavy canvas bag, but has managed to slip a notebook and a few important books into her purse, and she moves quickly, without any burden, between pulling guards and softball pitchers through the hallway to her next class. But caught on the far end of the hallway, the freshman sees this potential only as a glimpse or phantom before a surge of shoulders blocks his apprehension and deadens his aspiration.

Treating the difficulty as an intellectual challenge, he contemplates all the different methods for traversing the distance that drop into his awareness. He might be able to glide or ride through the mess as immaterial as his own breath, and collect himself on the far side of the hallway.  There must be some trick, some magic or technology, which his mind can untangle and decode.

Settling on the most likely plan, he takes a step to his left in an attempt to slide his wiry torso against the lockers and slip quickly around the edge of the crowd, but doors open and close with frenetic urgency as his classmates yank on padlocks and pop open their lockers searching for the tomes they will bear to history or science classes.  Even a few inches outside the reach of the locker doors, arms and legs move back and forth, barring his passage, and thump against his ribs and shoulder, forcing him back.

He sees a gigantic sophomore pass by, a boulder lumbering slowly downhill.  The heap could only be called an athlete in the loosest sense of the word. Certainly he has neither the wing-footed grace of the cross-country runner nor the spry, puckish agility of a lacrosse midfielder. But perhaps his bulk will punch a hole in the crowd large enough to follow. Perhaps a skinny freshman might slip into his wake, sucked up by the vacuum that must follow before the froth and backwash of insulted cheerleaders and loitering thugs closes the hallway back up. But the draft, if it is ever even there, passes too quickly, and hips drive him back, shutting off the access he hoped for.

Worrying now that he will not make his next class on time, the freshman begins to press himself between whatever cracks he can find between bodies. He ignores the grating of the uniform fabric and greasy stubble as he pushes past his classmates. The smell of students who forgot their deodorant mixes with that of those who sprayed on too much of some exotic and macho blend, forming a choking musk that makes his breath seize in his throat. Limbs tangle and release and the whole body of students sways a bit from left to right and back again, like a ship’s roll. Holding his books tightly but manfully against his hip with one hand, he attempts to break between two shoulders using a swimming motion with his other hand. This earns him one disdainful glare and one angry elbow, but he presses on.  He ducks below the arch of two taller sophomores high-fiving each other, only to be buffeted from behind and drop two of his books. The books are kicked away and then back to him while students shout in surprise or warning to each other, and after scooping up the books which are now bent and creased in unnatural places, he stands and finds his back pressed against a locker.

He cannot make the passage on his own, so he invents another scheme.  Instead of surreptitiously following another student, he will sacrifice his own dignity. He finds another titan and, turning his blade-like body sideways, steps directly in front of him. The two boys then form a kind of prow that can cut through the wash of bodies and sail to the end of the hallway. But in practice the plan is actually more like a poorly conceived stunt, and its failure is bodily and resounding. The larger boy presses forward with no understanding of the plan and thereby dislodges the freshman without even recognizing what has happened, waving him aside with a great wallop that sends him face-first into the door of the room from which he just emerged. His body cracks against the wood and he slides down in a daze to the floor, his head light but dizzy, his limbs leaden and unmoving.

Now slumped and sitting, the freshman looks the length of the hall, past the trunks of legs and torsos that switch back and forth in front of him.  His eyes can just make out the atrium and stairwell at the end of the hall. He tries to think of a way to get to it, but the pain in his head disrupts his focus. The bellow of students pushing and straining pulses in time with his headache. He cannot understand how, but some of the students he left class with are now disappearing downward, having overcome the passageway. Perhaps, he thinks there is some arcane knowledge which might allow him to do this, some equation or poetic phrasing which contains within it the secret to disappearing and reappearing at the end of the hallway: the secret, even, to teleportation itself.

As he slowly stands up and gathers his books again, the freshman feels deep in his stomach a disdain for his own physical volume, which prevents him from winding his way to class.  He abhors the pulsing tide within him, and even the weight of his breath burdens him. He imagines a new formlessness that he might inhabit, diaphanous and cloudlike. He imagines himself broken down into mere molecules, blown apart and then reassembled. He wishes there were a way to step between planes and places and then reemerge. He wants to leave his body behind and disappear.