But this poem was different. It began with the word “I,” which immediately made me skeptical. Everyone who works in publishing (at whatever lowly level) has certain quick and dirty rules by which to judge the likely quality of incoming work before actually reading it. This poem’s first word violated mine. The mailroom is a bad place for poetry, and since I was so far unimpressed, I stuffed it in my backpack with my newspaper and my textbooks and went home.

Sometime early that (or possibly the following) evening I found the
unsigned poem stuck to a lint-covered cough drop at the bottom of my bag.
I threw the cough drop away and tried to read the poem all the way through.
Much of it was abstract, or at least obscure, and I was not at all sure I
had the gist of it. The state of contemporary poetry being what it is,
however, this uncertainty was grimly familiar, and I continued to read. By
the time I reached the third line from the end I decided that the poem was
addressing me personally. This was disorienting, especially since I still
didn’t know what it was saying, so I stopped reading. Cover letters
address me personally; angry responses to rejection slips address me
personally. Poems and submissions usually pretend to more general
interest.

My bedroom is my “office,” and piles of items requiring
attention cover practically all of its surfaces. Some people have “in” and
“out” boxes. Instead of boxes, I have heaps, and instead of “in” or “out” I
have “here” or “someplace” or “huh?” So the poem went in the “huh?”
heap, and I went downstairs to dinner.

Later that (or the next) evening, I found this poem for the third time. It
had fallen off the “huh?” pile and was now mixed in with the
best-untitled agglomeration of dirty socks and underwear on my
floor. I read it determinedly all the way through, and became (although no
more sure of its meaning) completely convinced that it was not a submission
at all, but rather an urgent personal message from someone who believed
that only the formlessness and loose logical requirements of modern poetry
would serve their purposes. Modern poetry has existed for almost 100 years without anyone feeling this sense of utility about it, so I
was pretty impressed, and I read the poem again, with even greater
attention. Unfortunately, if I had had to paraphrase the poem at this
point I would still have been constrained to say it was some variation on
the “I … something … you … you … something” theme. I restored it to its
rightful place on some pile or other and went to sleep.

The very next (or possibly some other) day I found another unsigned poem in
my campus mailbox, written evidently by the same person and printed on an
almost identical half-sheet of paper. It went directly into my backpack
together with some junk mail and a request from His Holiness the Dalai
Lama that I join his effort to kick the Chinese out of Tibet. Certainly
the Chinese have no business in Tibet, but I confess that upon returning
home I immediately turned my attention to the new poem. This one began
with “Imagine,” rather than “I,” so my instinctive
incomprehensible angst-ridden confessional poetry alarm did not go off. I
was now able to definitively paraphrase the poem in the following terms:
“I … something … look at you all the time … something … something.”

I was flattered to realize what the anonymous poet was writing about. More than
flattered, I was astonished and excited and attentive. Flabbergasted and amazed. Dumbfounded, staggered, astounded. I had never been wooed in verse. I had scarcely been wooed at all in recent memory, and what could be more arousing than a brave poet who understood the erotics of concealment, of anonymity? This could be my brilliant poststructuralist lover for the new millennium. This could be the one whose mind would be the shimmer off an article by Geoffery Hartman, whose body would be the vanishing glory of autumn in a mirror. I took this fantasy seriously long enough to act. I wrote a nine-line poem without structure in which I endeavored to be as obscure as possible. I have been a practicing poet for nearly six years, and with that training I succeeded at opacity so far as to be unable even now to recall the meaning I intended in the poem I tacked up on a bulletin board where the mysterious person would be sure to see it.

My correspondent had managed to expose and to remain hidden, a simultaneity
of revelation and privacy that I found fascinating. Isn’t this the essence
of seduction? The bathing suit that covers but does not cover, the “sweet
nothings” that are uttered but do not communicate? And this person
was revealing him- or herself with the most intimate language, all the
while concealing her- or himself behind the curtain of obscurity. I
responded far less cleverly but with a kind of bravado by placing both of
our poems on a public bulletin board where they could be both a real
private (albeit partially anonymous) dialogue and a public work of art. I
have never had sex in the library — an informal requirement for graduation
at my school — but I imagine the rush is similar to what I felt with my torn
pieces of paper and my Scotch tape and my thumbtacks, looking over my
shoulder and rummaging in my bag in order to pretend that I was looking for
a pen to write down the name of the Amnesty International contact person.

Soon the mysterious lover-by-text responded. Nine-line poems were
appearing on the bulletin board, in my mailbox, in my e-mail account. I was
overwhelmed and inundated, and gradually I began to be frightened. It was a
delicious fear at first, but for a moment it became a nightmarish fear and
I wrote a poem of many lines and even less coherence than the rest,
protesting in the strongest language against all that was unfair about my
lopsided ignorance of the situation.

All of my new friend’s poems began with the letter I. I did not know the
reason for this, and had I known I might have been more frightened still.
The story is reaching its end, so I can explain the “I,” the “Imagine,” the “Intrigue,” the “Inferno”: The messages I had been receiving were all acrostics built upon the letters of my name. I felt and still feel foolish for failing to realize that each of these poems I had been reading and occasionally feverishly re-reading for a period of over a week spelled out my name along the left-hand margin, and I can only say in my defense that nothing in my undergraduate major in English literature prepared me for it.

The reaction to my angry poem was subdued. It was clear to me by now that
I was probably not in correspondence with the fantastical goddess-lover-poet of my dreams, but rather some real person whom I probably already knew in some way. This was probably someone who saw me (from what distance I couldn’t know) every day. He or she knew my face, my name, my specific vulnerability to this seduction. My anger was gone, but my sense of exposure increased literally by the hour. So I sent a brief
demand by e-mail (the person had set up an anonymous e-mail account) that we meet.

She replied, acceding to my request and dissolving the mystery with a
poem in the letters of her own name. Because her identity was no longer
secret, our meeting in a remote corner of an empty cafe lacked some of the
high-stakes psychodrama and practically all the eroticism of the preceding
days. The poet was a woman I knew, who had once asked me out to dinner.
She was attractive, smart, but very real, and under the circumstances that
reality could hardly fail to disappoint. She renewed her
invitation, and I again declined. We spoke carefully and quietly about the
episode. We told each other that it had been interesting, and that we
would see each other around.

This game is our latest obsession, our most current technique for
escaping the consequences and the ethical relevance of day-to-day life. We
cross into the world of this game, as we have crossed into the world of so
many others, and we shed the kind, thoughtful, honor-coded,
categorical-imperative-driven and secular-Christian virtue that our
parents, schools and neighbors have worked so hard to inculcate in us. This particular game came from the Web, and it takes place in the
underbelly of the squeaky-clean “Star Trek” universe, a universe of
smugglers, arms dealers and unpredictable idealists. The temporal and
spatial anomalies, the inter-species romances and the chance to save
backwater civilizations that are so much a part of the Enterprise’s
experience are few and far between here. Instead we accumulate
practically unimaginable wealth; we hone our cutthroat bargaining and business
skills; and (as I have described) we blow each other up.

Entertainment like this really has no boundaries. We take a
deliberate step by crossing into it, but once we’ve cast off the restraint
that held us at a distance from its playful space, the way back into the
responsible everyday world is no longer clear. The game seeps into the
time that we pretend to work, and eat, and plan, and socialize. When we
were playing 3-D battle chess I learned to dream about it, anticipating
Stephen’s countermoves and planning openings for the next day. At parties
we would move through living rooms according to the laws governing knights:
two steps forward and one to the right, finding ourselves in who-knew-which
tangle of kids discussing the impeachment, or the new DeLillo book, or
where they were when they heard Jerry died, or — if the kids were younger — Cobain.
When I destroyed the water-smuggling ship, Stephen lost not only the
black-market price of the goods, the depreciated value of his vehicle and
the life of a scrupulously crafted avatar, but also the chance to be taken
seriously when we bicker about who’s a faster driver, about who obeys the
traffic laws a little too exactly.

“Yo, what took you so long, asshole? ‘Boy Meets World’ in 30
seconds.” This is the problem: an everyday afternoon TV schedule that you
had better not be late for. Stephen was not angry, but he can’t pass up a chance to criticize. At first I could think of no defense:

“Why don’t you shut up? Where’s the popcorn?”

“Popcorn? Why don’t you fucking get home in time to make your own?”

Then I remembered the great coup I had won above the surface of
the Desert Planet and I cashed in on it to terrific effect.

“Get home in time? Listen, at least I don’t explode for no obvious
reason two seconds before pulling into the driveway.”

At this point my roommate’s impatience ceased to be a personal
affront and became just one of a long list of pitiable qualities, a
reminder of my strategic superiority. I was no longer threatened by his
competent fashion sense (in contrast to my own) or his bottomless
fund of insults and obscenity. Stephen’s very impulsiveness became a
reassurance that the hyperspace shipping routes were safe for my own
trans-galactic monopoly, that in our squabbles of one-upmanship I would
always have a rejoinder.

But risks and reassurances like these are nothing compared to our
first experiments in joyful mutual destruction, such as when we used to
play Marathon. When we were freshmen, a guy named Ian knew how to download
games from a site in California. He came over to the apartment every
couple of days to help us get set up: first Marion, who he had a crush on,
and then Louisa, her roommate, and then Stephen and Leo and me. The girls
soon lost interest (both in Ian and in the game) but Stephen and Leo and I
became enthralled. As few as one or as many as 10 people could enter a
simulated maze inhabited by homicidal aliens equipped with machine guns and
disintegrator rays. We were at a delicate age, prey to the contingencies
of early college love-affairs and responsible for the first time for the
serious organization and delineation of our own lives: work and play,
friendship and desire, rivalry and hatred. Play was through the school’s
ethernet system, so everyone could sit at a computer in his own room,
ganging up on the aliens.

“I’ve got napalm! Look out, Leo. Oh shit, now you’ve got it all
over yourself.” I made some of the first discoveries in the world of the game Marathon — including the notoriously powerful napalm launcher — but never quite learned to control many of them.

“Yo, what the fuck are you doing. Look, I’m dying.”

When a character had absorbed too many bullets, fragments of
shrapnel or disintegrator hits, the animation on his screen would grow
surreal, suffuse with red and finally go blank. If he wanted to get back
in the game he had to log back on. And the other players had to approve
the log-on if a game was already in progress.

“Yo, let me sign on, dude.” Victim of my clumsiness, Leo was now dead.

“No way, Leo. Look, I’m about to win.” Ian’s competitive streak
was graceless and explicit. After a while we stopped inviting him over.

“Yo, don’t be an asshole,” Leo pleaded.

“Hold on, I’m about to waste these guys. PLOW!”

“Dude, you gotta let me on. You come over my house, use my
roommate’s computer, now you won’t let me in the game.”

“Why are you such a pussy, Leo?”

It didn’t take long for the aliens themselves to become a
distraction in the increasingly serious business of annihilating one
another. Stephen and Leo battled every night, refusing to play in the same
room, bellowing at one another through two sets of open doors. Then they rehashed the previous night’s duel at lunch. By this time Stephen had found
out that Leo’d slept with Jessica who worked at the bookstore, and although
Stephen had no right to be jealous or protective (since she’d shot him down
simply and politely and never spoken to him again), the game was not
exactly all in fun.

“By the way, Leo, I found the atomic land mine again, so tonight I’m
going to make you cry.”

“Dude, shut the fuck up,” replied Leo, bored.

“No, I mean it. I’m gonna booby trap the second level where you’ll
never find it. If you don’t stay the fuck off of the second level you’re
gonna be toast.”

“Just shut up. You’re so full of shit your eyes are turning brown.”

This particular game did not seem to encourage moderate, tasteful
speech. In fact, I’ve never heard such loud, prolonged obscenity outside
of Leo’s telephone calls with his family. In any case, after a while the
calls home were just another game. Instead of napalm he could ask about
his brother’s torturous junior-high love life, about his mother’s tedious
job. After a certain amount of abuse his family members would hang up on
him: kick him out of the game.

But as Jessica who worked in the bookstore disappeared from our
lives again, our interest in Marathon faded. Plus we found some kids from
Villanova who could kill all of us (working as a team) in less than
90 seconds every time we played. I was never much good at the game,
and when we met the ‘Nova kids I had started doing the reading for my
philosophy class again, so there was less time for practice, but Leo
especially was at the top of his form, killing Stephen and me predictably
every time. He had learned how to speed up the aliens, and could take on
as many as six at once. Leo was the “goddamned KING of fucking Marathon,”
the cyber-athlete we all tried to be.

The guys from ‘Nova blew him up with a recoilless rifle in less
than a minute, and he walked out of his room stunned and ashamed. I never
even fired a shot. That was the end of Marathon for us.

The end of the rest of the story is the water-smuggling debacle,
and the present search for a new game. After a while one wins not only a
great victory in a given game, but even bragging rights to the whole
territory of that game. Out of Stephen’s disgusting mouth it is not
unusual to hear, “Yeah, but I’ll make you my little bitch in Battle Chess!”
In some obscure way this is good and proper, but it makes the search for
new games constant and insatiable. For Chanukah I just bought him a
remaindered copy of Myst, and also he found something called Moto-Racer
pre-installed on his new computer. He’s been having some trouble with job
applications and his thesis, and he’s been a little down on himself. Right
now he’s in his room, shouting again and again, “I SUCK AT MOTO-RACER,” and
giggling when Marion tells him to shut up. I worry about this, but I also
suspect that he’s trying to hustle me.

Except not always. Here in the Bad Line we wonder if the Good Line sophomore in the long green dress has Gates-like money in the bank or if she only got her Perkins app. filled out on time, and more important, what she thinks of schlumps with T-shirts, hangovers, and two feet planted solid in the Bad Line.

We in the Bad Line have already talked to the OK-lady. But we didn’t hear OK — more like, “You need to go talk to the ladies against the wall.” The OK-lady doesn’t want to hear about the loans, the application deadline or the fight with Mom and Dad about the bookstore charge account. She doesn’t mention shortfalls, debits, gaps, lacunae, debts, aporia or any of the other words they teach us here in college, because she’s polite and because a kid behind me brought his father with him. Fathers needn’t hear the problems of the ones who aren’t their own. I’m not yet at the Ladies-by-the-Wall, but last year one of them made Sara cry, and asked me things I might not tell a doctor. “You’ll have to provide this information every time there’s a disbursement.” Everybody’s promising to pay in quiet voices. Everybody has a story. Heather’s mother’s looking for a job and finding nothing for a Ph.D. and no experience at 55. Miles knows he sent the money just before his parents moved in early August. Jacob was awake with me still drinking only hours ago. He has no story to tell the Ladies.

No one’s saying much here. Everybody’s looking at their feet. Lauren, who was gorgeous in my Dante class, is red-eyed in the corner waiting for the Man-Behind-the-Wall to check some numbers.

Rumors pass along the Good Line with the chatter. Word is that it’s gonna take an hour to get our ID photos taken, but there’s no commercial photographer or anything, so nothing about smiling for the Beanie Baby, none of that idiotic “Say Potatoes!!” cheer. We in the Bad Line listen glumly. This guy Eric is saying something to a girl about binary cultural structures in Lévi-Straussian theory and gesturing at us.

As the Bad Line approaches the Bad Table, where the Ladies-by-the-Wall sit, there are chairs to rest in for a moment. No one wants to lose his space in line and so we slide from chair to chair, pausing to hunch down and stare at the floor, or at the leaflet on the floor about the chance to rent a small refrigerator. Generations of high school seniors have dreamed about their own small refrigerator, dreamed about the hummus and the cream cheese and the Budweiser that will finally be their own, in their own refrigerator. Very few high school seniors realize that the previous renter will have scrubbed that fabled appliance with aggressively aromatic oven cleaner as the time of reckoning approached and the risk of losing the security deposit because of the spreading fungus became increasingly real. Very few suspect that the promising brown box with three pieces of glued-on magnetic poetry flatly stating “some dogs cruise” will exhale, when opened, the reek of the chem lab and will endow its contents, in the space of hours, with eau de burning-weapons-manufacturing-plant.

But the line has moved, and we kick our backpacks down a seat, and slide our bodies down a seat, and hunch again as the late-registering freshmen arrive with their fathers and mothers in full force at the large door and the tail end of the Good Line. Some of them will sit here yet, we think.

Jacob has grown excited. Desperately trying to throw off his bleary morning face, he launches into an Explanation. This line, he says (he likes the chairs), is not the Bad Line, just the Other Line, and that line over there, the Good Line, is Another Good Line where the other good kids wait. The lines for registering cars or buying groceries, waiting for the parkway tolls or mailing letters overseas are neither good nor bad, he says. So whence this privileging of competently, early, fully, well-paid bills?

There’s nothing to say to a kid like this, and as the men’s lacrosse team passes, shouting that they’ve got a game this afternoon but that they’ll see the green-dress girl tonight, we slide down to the next chairs, edging closer to the table, looking at the floor.

One thing is true. This is the last year, the Last Bad Line. Things could be much worse. I’m pretty sure I only owe them in the hundreds, not the thousands. Thousands-owers are the ones who have to go Behind-the-Wall, and I’ll be thinking of them next year, as I think about them now, but from a greater distance, in the Big Line for a fellowship, a job, a law-school slot, a chance to go to Spain. In the Big Line the chairs don’t fold and the floor is not marble. In the Big Line all the other lines are fine, or even Good. And there are Explanations.

We were freshmen, 17 or 18 years old, living away from
home and parents for the first time in our lives. The building that we
lived in became our identity, the mark that set us apart from the rest of
the school. We went there to read, get high, hang out, have sex, cook
wretched meals of ramen and canned corn. We went there when there was
nothing else to do, nowhere to go, when we wanted to simply be, and yet we
complicated Being. We established slogans: “When you’re not going anywhere,
you’re going to 119.” “There is that which is the source of
motion, and to which all motion returns. The Apartment is the Unmoved
Mover and the destiny of men.”

Perimeter meant land between the Self and Other, Sane and Mad, the
Mind and World. These dichotomies, and thus the schematic possibility of
our drug-mediated adventures, were taught by our professors. We threw our desperate enactment of them in their faces like an accusation of their age,
a testimony to our courage. No one could be strong who didn’t ride along
the edge of madness, testing intellect against the unexplainable. We were
the young Americans pondering infinitude with what we held to be tremendous
energy. Nighttime and daytime were dreamtime, and the kids who went to
class and went to sleep and didn’t go to the Apartment were the weak, the
small, the uninitiated.

One month Becky and Ramien tripped every day; they
kept a journal more and more obsessively, then summoned everyone to witness
an improvised ceremony on the last day. We crouched on the concrete
porch of the apartment building. Ramien laid pieces of wood
scavenged from the corners of the storage area deliberately into a
hexagonal pile. Becky spat thrice: into the woodpile, off of the steps
and at Ramien. He did not wipe the spittle off his dark shoulder but
stared intently at the polygon he’d made. Becky’s eyes were such narrow
slits that no white was visible. She poured something (scotch whiskey, it
was later determined) out of a brown glass bottle onto the heap and dropped
a match on it. The trip journal was produced, and the two explorers read
passages seemingly at random to the rest of us, and to a few “randoms” who
wandered by. Every time one passed the journal to the other they would
cooperate in ripping a page out and letting it drift onto the little flames
by their feet. They read loudly. “MONDAY: DOSED AT 9AM AND WENT TO
BREAKFAST. HAIRY LUNCH-WITCH (EVEN THOUGH BREAKFAST-TIME) TOLD RAMIEN HE
COULDN’T EAT WITHOUT ID CARD. EVERY SINGLE RANDOM THERE TALKING ABOUT
TRENT LOTT FOR SOME REASON. BECKY SWEARS HERE AND NOW SHE WILL NEVER RUN
FOR OFFICE.” Another entry from later in the month was less coherent.
“PATCHWORK TRUCE DECLARED ON TAMMY’S COUCH. MAYBE ELBOWS SIGHTING
(ACTUALLY TWO). CRITICAL INFO: NEG, NEG.” The ceremony continued for over
an hour, but only a few of us watched the whole thing. When it was over
the journal was empty. Becky and Ramien stood with necks bent in S-curves
looking at the sun. They turned inside. I turned on “Simpsons.” Ramien
packed a bowl.
There were casualties. Gregory moved out of the Apartment halfway
through the year, shouting wildly that his grandfather had died for our
sins. Jason lasted a few months into sophomore year, but went into
seclusion, emerging to disrupt parties with barely coherent demands that
the music be changed to Philip Glass, or to play intricate but cruel games of flattery and insult with his girlfriend. Kristin’s
native psychic abilities were keyed up to such a pitch of sensitivity she
went into convulsions when she saw in a dream that Brian, studying abroad,
had been arrested for boisterous drinking in Paris. Members of the
Apartment crowd were sent to jail for drug offenses, placed on disciplinary
leave, spoken of in serious tones by the administration behind closed doors.
But it was also a time of awe, of a great and supernatural beauty
we had scarcely known existed. Lovers learned to speak to one another
without making sounds. We all learned how to hold each other’s hands and face down acid-summoned monsters decorated with kaleidoscopic glamour.

And there were kindnesses, too. We all trembled before the holy power of our own words and ideas, and gradually the power of our kindnesses. Minutes before dawn in early winter I awoke in someone’s living room from the darkness of an alcoholic sleep. Opposite me a girl named Ruth turned in her sleep, pulling her arms into her chest for warmth. Ruth had sex with everyone I knew but me and Gregory by the end of the year, and at this particular time she hadn’t spoken to anyone in over a week. Stephen and Leo were playing chess in silence and watching the last fragments of color drain away from their hallucinations. Stephen moved his rook to Nick’s last file and leaned over Ruth, placing a blanket from the back of his chair on her pale body.