She had a rather awkward nose. But a sensible midsection. Or so the boy thought, tensing his calves against the legs of his chair, leaning back and forth to the rhythms of his thoughts. Thankfully for her, she didn’t give a fuck what he thought. Not many people did. He kept thinking anyway. She sold ‘indecent’ pictures of herself online, though they fetched a decent price. Nobody at the school knew, because she was most popular among teens in the early stages of puberty. The kind who make porn free. The kind who have a statistically significant likelihood of buying the all-natural supplements and cremes, hoping to expand their genitals and clear their skin. Which bodies matter? Oh, the darling buds of May.

The professor was perspiring heavily, with clouds forming on his itchy collar, reading Shakespeare, wondering. Did I pack my daughter’s lunch? His tongue lurched and lolled along consonants and vowels that had become unintelligible to him. One must wonder how the ancient priests passed the time, repeating the same incantations for their sponsors. It all gets boring after a while.

Having skipped the introductory courses, a doe-eyed and precocious freshman, wearing a brown bow-tie the same color as his freckles and his spectacles, listening intently to Shakespeare via Schwartz, saw the seasons ebb and flow, the leaves change color, as if from a distance, as if all at once, and felt that he had finally gotten a handle of things, could appreciate them as he always wished to. The feeling lingered; but, by the fifth sonnet, it eventually left his system with the same lack of haste as a full-bladdered driver reluctant to pull over. A non-plussed junior with bantu knots and jeweled fingers watched the minute hand, asking herself if the major was worth the prerequisites.

A dog sat on the lap of a rail-thin subject of unknown gender because nearly too small to be seen. Institutions have become rather effective at identifying depressive symptoms; they prescribe canine affection and offer uppers when a well-balanced breakfast just doesn’t cut it. We care about mental health here; it takes courage to seek help. You are not alone; unfortunately, our sessions fill up quickly. We are all just bodies, trying our rational best.

Cindy–the spectator, watching the classroom scene through the window as she walks across the library quad–has a rare disease. She can’t really hear people. But they still talk to her, in a way. She hears the thoughts that they’ve never told anyone. Sometimes they’re insightful, other times horrific, but many deserve to be forgotten. She reads, in other words, without books. She reads wobbly kneecaps, crimson earlobes, and the quiver of one German émigré’s voice, wavering over every inserted French word, remembering the young chanteuse encountered—an ever-near lifetime ago—in a sojourn to Paris. Hers is the language that is never spoken.

Cindy is a successful shamanistic meteorologist, reading the clouds of temperament the way an oncologist forecasts the grey blotches of an MRI, a neurologist conducts symphonies in the iridescent notes of a PET. The talent’s a mixed bag. It was an occupational and developmental hindrance at first, but she developed modes of coping over time. By the fourth grade, she had claimed a space along the spectrum; or, rather, her former teachers, colleagues and students assumed that space for her. Her pseudo-disorder served as a defense for her at times strange way of communicating, made others more forgiving and self-critical in her presence. At the university, she taught quantitative methods in psychology. Her courses drew a specific brand of student; most regarded her highly, as a kind of savant. They never told her this, and so she frequently heard it.

As a student in her early years, she learned to write down what she wished to forget; in other words, she learned, as we all do, how to handle those cycles of remembrance and forgetfulness, even if the poles of her cycle were reversed, even if our activity were her dormancy, and our silence her confessions.

She learned love through symptoms, not sermons—through her mother’s firm, hairy knuckles, as they folded her laundry, ironed and pressed her dresses. Her blue eyes and blond curls drew suitors from an early age; but, thanks to her talents, she was able to skip the difficult lesson of learning how to distrust the love most ardently professed. Her romantic life was a tragedy that lasted three acts: her teens, early twenties and nearly, Oh God nearly, thirties. She spent just over a decade trying, yet failing, to find happiness the ol’ fashioned way. Brian’s anxious attachment style made a poor match with Cindy’s condition, as she was never able to express herself quite as explicitly and frequently as he wanted. Britney’s bisexuality was closer to heterosexuality on the Kinsey scale; and, hearing the daydreams of her partner, Cindy often felt second-best. The straw that broke the camel’s back was Adam, who was always faithful, but whose wayward glances finally proved to Cindy that thoughts are more polyamorous than promises.

As she grew older, she developed an ascetic hedonism, always kept herself at a distance. The world existed, for her, under museum glass. Through her binocular lenses, she collected the sensations of others like an ornithologists collects hues and calls, variegated feathers and warbles. A visitor to the lives of others, Cindy sometimes feels that she lives on another planet. Sometimes it’s a better one.

Her theory about intimacy, for which she had made a career of attempted data-evidence, was that we like to own each other’s silences. Her research assistants would sit down with subjects who were in long-term committed monogamous relationships, and fill out forms with the following scripts:

I, [subject name], am a willing participant of Professor Renoir’s study: I am aware that all questions are optional, and that I may choose to leave the study at any time.

How long have you been in a committed relationship with your partner? On a scale of 1-10, how close would you say you are to your partner? How many things would you say you know about your partner that nobody else in the world knows? Is there anyone you think knows more about your partner than you do? Who? Why? How many things do you think your partner knows about you, that nobody else in the world knows? On a scale of 1-10, how close would you say your partner is to you?

Odd-numbered participants were asked about their intimacy with their partner first, even-numbered participants were asked about their partner’s intimacy with them first. The experiment was then repeated, this time with all partners present, and with the questions placed in the second person [plural]. How long have you been in a committed relationship? On a scale of 1-10, how close would you say you are? How many things do you think nobody in the world knows about you?

Cindy’s research assistants, as well as her colleagues and sponsors, assumed that the purpose of the experiment was to draw a correlation between the number of secrets and the rating of intimacy. Indeed, her published research established a supposed Renoir constant, about .1, meaning that perfectly intimate partners, 10/10 on the scale, share approximately 100 secrets. Any secrets beyond that have a negative impact on intimacy: If you knew, I’d have to kill you. What a load of crap. Still, people bought it. Puts food on the table. Some thought of Cindy’s work as representing her supposed disorder, her inability to pick up on social cues: a savant’s impossible attempt to quantify the humanity. Others thought of Cindy as bravely attempting to confront our finitude and superficiality, saw her willingness to reduce the human experience to cold facts and figures as a strength that those without her condition could not possess.

The fact of the matter is that Cindy could not have cared less whether the correlation were statistically significant, whether the numbers were correlated as hypothesized. She enjoyed watching people’s ratings and reactions change, when the partners were placed together, and when they were asked to think of how they were perceived by their partners. She had read enough people’s thoughts to know that it’s much easier to observe than to think of oneself as the observed. A wife who knew the way her husband’s eyebrows arched and clenched after tasting too much salt, the way his sleeping body would incline towards the fireplace just like a flower’s stem strains to find sunlight. A husband who fell asleep watching a freckle on his wife’s back, just below her ribcage, rise and fall. These secret things which people do not know about themselves, but which are cherished by their loved ones.

Perhaps the biggest secret of Cindy’s life, aside from her condition, was that she had stolen this intimacy-secrecy theory. Flipping through an old, dog-eared copy of the DSM, from her glass-walled office (fishbowl architecture was in vogue at the time of the Psych. Dep.’s construction, for its positive effects on accountability), she could see the students gathered in the lobby below. She often went to her office for some morning coffee and voyeurism, but this time her investigations proved more elucidating than she had expected.

She watched the flicker of a screen flash over a distracted first year’s face. He was enamored with a young Latin pop star, but could not speak a lick of Spanish. The singer’s voice, for its incomprehensibility, gained the allure of an exotic birdcall–her indecipherable desire marking the “X” of an unknown treasure. He had found a rare interview, in English, where she discussed her obsession with lesser-known American songwriters, picked up from the farthest aisles of her local record store. Her friends never appreciated the music, and she would only ever listen to it alone. She developed her own canon of troubled troubadour heroes, in the solitary afternoons by her record player.

She wore black leather, weighty opal pendents, sat on a grey couch, and spoke in a slow cadence, with great pauses between clauses–the tentative tippy-toe steps of a burglar, stealing into a second language. Her black eyeliner and raven-haired bob told him the obvious fact: that she was beautiful, even as her taciturn, downward-facing demur demanded that he remind her, as if she needed his compliments, his gaze, to be beautiful.

In the next, suggested video, she wore a laurel of pink petals, and a dress whose shoulder pads bloomed pollinated puffs. The mariachi–the slow, honey-lacquered chords of their oversized guittarónes accompanying her mellifluent contralto–watched her as a patriot might eye a national monument, with one eye adoring, the other scanning for ignorant, impudent tourists who might dare touch the sacred. Her eyes closed as her notes ascended the scale; her arms extended in each direction, swaying to the same breeze as her hips. Despite the delicacy of her dance, it was clear that she had no fear, nor would an ancient redwood tremble at a squirrel’s touch.

Her song held the secret of the seasons, carried by zephyrs to elders’ ears. Her teary-eyed falsetto made the mariachi shudder; the virgin perished in the fire, still sleeping. Her feet stamped their mark into the earth; her arms raised in triumph, yet another winter had been survived, the roosters crowed, the sea burned orange in the spring’s first sunrise. She embraced her shoulders and the words crept from the corner of her mouth; her wry smile knew what could be told only in euphemisms: sweet dewy fruits and the passion of young lovers who meet their first suitors. Her fists clenched in rage; mothers buried their stillborn daughters, fathers their soldier sons.

In his earbuds, reverberating in that innermost privacy of his head, he listened to her susurrations, promises of love almost too soft to be heard, by a lover almost too scared to try, only to realize that she had whispered, just the same, in everyone else’s ears. He felt betrayed. The love of all and none, she glowed like a vernal princess, but he longed to keep her in his dark, wintry chambers.

His family had always loved the beach, but none had the talent for poetry. That was its name: the beach. There were no greater titles, no words for the way hot sand embraced his body with a ravenous hunger, consuming even the spaces between his toes; no one spoke of the way the warm sun seemed to surround him, suspended in the hammock, as the wind ran its fingers through his hair, the chill breeze nibbled his ears; the way heat filled his body, as he woke from an unplanned nap, stretching his skin against the ropes’ resistance. And so–in the silence of stupid tongues–he thought himself unique, did not think of how the sun kissed even his mother’s shoulders. But, in that moment, he realized: beauty is a whore, and we are all too timid to admit that we were her jilted lovers.

Crimson currents crashed under Cindy’s cheeks; she fell in love with the boy. She wanted to pull him tight to her chest, to swallow him up, and keep his innocence safe in her belly forever. She wanted to feel his heartbeat close to hers, wanted to synchronize her hunger with his, wanted to place a hand over his head at any time. As she heard her own, entirely inappropriate advances, the bubble burst; her imagined pregnancy gave way to parturition, and he again left her control, entered into–became the property of–the world.

He had enrolled in introductory courses for both acting and creative writing, inspired by the bard, unsure whether to play the fool or pick up pen. This moment had assured him. At first, he had wanted the godly powers of the author, who could scribble magic spells in letters’ curls, a script which traces every contour of the world: the most jagged thunderbolt, the loftiest smoke, the steepest cliffs. But suddenly he thought better of the performer, who inscribes on his body the spectator’s most carnal desire.

While the worlds of fantasy might be trapped within a writer’s pages, the actor’s flesh becomes canvas for the landscapes of the audience’s fantasy–a face remembered fondly as who one once wanted it to be. What use is a well-placed word, when you might remember youthful love by my dimpled smile, might associate pathos with my own shrinking shoulders? Hands can take so few forms, but my body can twist to knit my musculature–in and out, in and out, like a sewing needle–can loom a greater tapestry of imagination.

Someone came by, and asked what he was doing; startled, he closed the screen, and forgot his train of thought, as if waking from a dream.

The boy left to his class, but Cindy kept her gaze on a now empty chair. The DSM in her hands might as well have been written in cuneiform. A fog had come over her mind, a slow-moving obscurity sitting in her cranium. She walked listless across campus, no longer able to work. After this sharp intensity, a flare in the flesh, the skin turns a skeletal white, burnt, dead, numb. Just a repeating question: what? What’s going on? What was that? What now?

A professor of gender and sexuality studies, Dr. Goodman–who was quite frequently and secretly derided for repeating the phrase “therapeutic touch” ad nauseam, who had been writing for the past several summers a lecture entitled “Haptic Happenings: Spatial Ontologies of the Flesh,” writing it for long enough that the title no longer held any meaning for her–recently, with a clean bill of health, had become a breast cancer survivor. Sur-vivor, living in the beyond. Undead. The ache of her mastectomy had by this point ceased, but its effects were felt daily in the free movement of her locket, which now swayed as she walked, but which once rested flat against her chest, in the hollow where there are now the pale traces of scars.

On Thursdays at 11:45, just before the lunch crowd really started to gather, when the air was still fresh and unfiltered, Goodman sat in a marble seat secluded by the shade of the library. It was where a veteran couple met, after morning classes, for their ritualistic changing of the guard, shifting their newborn from hand to hand. The mother had been a medic. The father an engineer. He had ended another human’s life for the first and only time while studying abroad the only way he could, serving in what many of his professors and colleagues thought privately to themselves was a crusade for oil. I.E.D. is a rather facile and clinical term to describe the unnameable, the very explosion of uncertainty, a loud confusion erupting from this so-called “improvised explosive device.” He had felt nothing after the killing; but, after feeling the soft flesh of life that he had brought into the world, a miasma rose in his corneas, a poisonous cloud covering what should have been the apple of his eye. He had gone to the VA, and his counselor was helping him learn how to grieve so that he could love again.

They fed the baby at this 11:45 juncture, and Dr. Goodman pretended to grade papers as she eyed the breastfeeding mother. She didn’t know their names, though she would occasionally make eye contact and nod. They must have known she was a feminist studies professor, because they didn’t seem to mind, didn’t suspect her of spying. But she was. Spying.

She had breastfed her own children, and was living vicariously the experience of having flesh on her chest. When her body first began changing, she had been disgusted with herself. The bloody, itchy nipples. The anguish of trying and failing to get her baby to latch. The pain of pushing a stick of butter through a popped pimple. But there was something so sweet, so soft, so loving about her baby boy. The tremulous touch of his delicate, wet tongue. Her son was too young to remember that bond between them. She had been afraid, even, to talk to her partner about it. As if there could be anything untoward in her act. Pouring her very life out of her body, sustaining that tiny, insatiable mouth. But what is love without shame? How she missed it now.

She made her way past the grieving Goodman, hastening to her weekly luncheon of four at the faculty dining hall. One guest was the chair of the philosophy department, and had only ever published one book: Communication, Sive: The Permeability of Certain Boundaries. He had written it at a time when the phrase “Spinozist theory of immanence” still held meaning for him, back in the nail-bitten days of his Ph.D., though he often wonders to himself whether more people could be helped if he had learned how the hell computers work. In the afternoons, just after his seminar, when his capacity to answer undergrad questions suffuses his ennui, he tends to think the world would be much worse without men like him to ask and answer the question: “why?” In the evenings, after watching semi-literate schmucks deliver the nightly news, the coin flips again to tails, and his dismal spirits carry him into his solitary bed.

What he has not published, and yet what remains most dear to him, is a short story written over the course of several decades, about a man who enters every room with the question: “What’s going on?” Strangely enough, this simple question proves to be part of a rather wise strategy, as the protagonist becomes the sudden confidante of every passing stranger. The tone in his voice changes slightly in each delivery, holding new meanings for each new listener. Sometimes the interrogative sounds angry, expressing a shared frustration: “What’s going on?” being translated in the listener’s ears, replete with interrobang, as: “just what the hell is going on here, what do they think they’re doing?!”

The question is not altogether different from the trivial slang: “what’s up?” And yet the protagonist of this philosopher’s fiction is amusedly surprised to find that the same question receives such an iridescent variegation in responses–a simple prism, through which every color shines. His personal favorite is a sing-song riff of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?”, a question that seems to succeed only in impressing a generalized compassion and lament upon the recipient, leaving them enough space to fill with all their sorrows. The mere fact that “what’s going on?” is ludicrously successful, despite its apparent vagueness, suggests that there is perhaps no worse catalyst for the truth than a direct question.

Sitting on Cindy’s left, across from the furrow-browed philosopher, is the chair of the psychology department, who is adorned almost always by his signature red overcoat and blissful smile, and who has a pleasant rapport with nearly every other member of the faculty, a feat whose success many attribute to his sagacious progress in his field. The truth of the matter is much simpler. Sir Veau, as one French student was fond of calling him, had the chameleon-like quality of liking whatever anyone else did. It started out as a harmless prank, developed into a troubling addiction, eventually became an effective educational technique as an autodidact in over his head, and finally ended up as his primary methodology for making it through life even-keeled.

Arriving late, but at a rather brisk pace, especially for her silvered age, the Danton to these three musketeers, the chaplain made her merry way to the dining hall. In her dreams, she was a carnival barker selling toothpaste. She never dreamt of anything else. That ineffable, oneiric imagery to which the great Freud et al would like to ascribe cosmic significance was in this case as follows:

In her daily life, the chaplain was never regarded disdainfully as the bearer of bad news, the harbinger of doom and gloom–the typical killjoy. Selling toothpaste as children young and middle-aged made their way past her, each gnashing through buckets of popcorn and balloons of sugar fluff, the chaplain was largely received as a quaint, perhaps antiquated, eccentricity. The barker wore a pinstriped suit with a green bowtie, the color of freshly ground mint, and her overall pleasant demeanor did nothing to dispel her warm reception. Amidst the abundant joys of dental decadence, this lone holdout of oral hygiene helped to put others at ease; at least someone, somewhere, was keeping our teeth in mind, giving us permission to forget the worries of the world, certain as we are that another Atlas might carry them. Perhaps it was a poor locale to distribute enamel polishers (the barker never disclosed her earnings), but her presence did much to amplify the atmosphere. How could we feel tolerant, without a few quirky cohabitants to remind us of our reason?

The chaplain’s best, most delicious secret, the one which had drawn Cindy to her all those years ago, which Cindy had been savoring for the entire duration of her tenure, is not this minty dream; no, that is just a palate cleanser. The best, most delicious secret of our dear chaplain’s life is that she has been, since a rather early age, a practitioner of auto-ascetic asphyxiation. After attending a lecture by Alan Watts as a late teen in the early 70s (the chaplain was always one for fostering ecumenical dialogue across the remaining acolytes of the Eternal-being-bearing-thousandfold-names), where she learned that the term “nirvana” stood for nothing more than a simple exhalation, she chose to deny herself–to the best of her ability–even that simple pleasure. At first, she held her breath through entire sentences, using Professor Watts’s oratory meter to dictate the rhythms of her bellowing lungs. Progressing, then, past paragraphs and almost into pages of transcribed dialogue, the chaplain startled her neighbor with a poorly timed gasp. Despite that brief embarrassment, her experiment in deoxygenation proved so effective as to become addictive; never one for involuntary inhalations, the chaplain spends a good deal of her day intentionally not breathing.

But, as only Cindy knew, the chaplain was no hunger artist, no Pharisaical faster; she did not perform her suffering for the sight of others. Even a trained eye could not see her diaphragm, covered by a billowing sweater, linger in its retracted position. A gestalt psychologist might explain the phenomenon as a relative increase in sensation, caused by its brief abnegation. After closing one’s eyes for a lengthy respite, the awakened sun will send forth its spearing rays much less sparingly. However, the effects of the chaplain’s experiment were not limited only to her eyes; each sensation bloomed to its full fruition. The scent of a distant neighbor’s perfume arose in her nose; coffee coated her tongue like a rather robust lover; the deep grains of the pew met each concentric ring of her fingers in a million invisible embraces.

Upon first feeling this bliss, when every spackle of Professor Watts’s eyes shone brightly above his aquiline nose, she was returned to the hard-backed chair of her religious education. On what had been a rather mundane Monday afternoon, Father Fiorentino delivered a misty-eyed speech about Dante’s elusive and illuminating Paradiso, where, bit by bit, the shackles are lifted from the great poet’s heart, and scenes are revealed before the poet’s eyes whose effulgent beauty would have blinded any mere mortal’s eyes. In that moment (in Fiorentino’s eyes or in Watts’s, she was unsure), she hypothesized that each soul was granted the same bit of clay, the same fraction of that indivisible eternal love, which spread like butter over bread across the course of one’s life. While the widely dispersed average may fall just under the threshold of our radar’s register, the chaplain’s clumped up moments of nirvana–suddenly, finally, breathing again–would reveal in her all that was holy and forgotten. In those moments of release, forgiveness came easy; every sinner became a troubled saint.

Lunch with these strange spirits, these old friends, had begun to restore Cindy’s orientation, reinstated her in her small corner of the universe, such that by the time Cindy returned to the field, sensation returned to her fingertips; her peripheral nervous system had been reactivated, beyond the static clinging to her head. Before her evening lectures in statistics, she liked to watch practice–jerseys dissociated: the numbers organized themselves, getting into lines, intersecting, breaking free, making plays. She went to see a footballer with a foot fetish. To clarify, he had no interest in other people’s feet. He was no toe-seeking demon. If that were the case, he likely could have found a crowd of fellow podiaphiles in no time. No, he liked his own feet. Not how they looked. How they felt. Perhaps one of the few athletes to ever make it to the collegiate level without ever suffering from fungus. To still have all his toes point in parallel directions. He took great care of his toes, cultivated cuticles; pampered with pedicures, his feet were treated better than most Beverly Hills pets. Cleats with padded insoles and baby powder. Drawing his finger across the creases in his feet’s palms, the soft, padded flesh–the cavernous archway from heel to toe–he would feel more in that foot-long journey than many would discover on a cruise along the Amazon. According to some theories, whole lifetimes can be read in one’s palms. This is nothing by comparison: he could suffer whole lifetimes in his feet. And so he did.

But always alone. Not that he had never been intimate before. He had paid his dues. Received the proper stamps on his resume. Accumulated credit, frequent flyer miles. At times, he wished that he were less insecure, could tell someone, could feel someone else’s fingers spread the spaces between his toes. But they were rarely ever seen, and certainly never touched. Normally he was drunk when he thought like this. When sober, and often when hungover, he wondered whether it were not better to keep his feet to himself. A sexual Achilles.

His girlfriend, on the sidelines, was a cheerleader for a Division III football team, who started wearing contacts only in her senior year of high school. Her closest confidante was her late grandmother, recently deceased. She joined the team to gain some independence. She was an uncertified expert in 21st century romance. On big, living-room, and pocket-sized screens. But she was barely passing her course on Medieval poetry. Grandma would take her to the movies, sneaking hard candies and chocolates in her purse. Offered an invite every time, grandpa refused to join, his lips curling at the offer like a child at his first taste of lemon, his hands swatting away the idea as if it were a wingèd pest. Grandma rarely ever made it more than fifteen minutes past the previews, though her snoring would sometimes wake herself up at halftime. With her grandmother asleep beside her, she spent more time watching the couples in the theater–holding hands, whispering, canoodling–than the ones on screen. She liked to imagine romance, but rarely made a concerted effort to see it. Like her grandmother, she was almost always horizontal during sex.

A foul, almost sulphuric sophomore, who camped more than she showered (a habit from the kibbutz), passed by the field, with perhaps more dried mud in her curly mop than was on the average player’s cleats. A quasi-Buddhist communitarian, she had just come from the local co-op farm. It was a meditative experience for her, getting eaten by bugs. Her reborn uncle would call it a holy communion. This is my body, which will be given up for you. The mosquitos drained her sorrows in much the same way that leeches could cure the plague. She was a mystic, humble and insane. She never felt more alive than when her exposed skin exploded in volcanic clusters, erupting with an ineffable and indefatigable desire; never more sinful than when she finally gave in, scratching that divine itch.

Elbow deep in a rosebush, on the opposite side of the field, a vermiculturist crumbled the loamy soil, his home-brewed concoction, between his fingers. He found beauty in what even Shakespeare had cursed as worms’ meat. The university didn’t give their landscapers orders, just spaces to grow in. He named the plants, but the university claimed to own them. He had less power than the shaggy studente who passed him by, though he had made the very ground on which she tread. Alas, poor Yosef. I knew him, José.

For her own part, Cindy was a secret unto herself, kept within her skin until the day she died, when, like ass-eared Midas, she was whispered to the trees: a story to be told in their lofty branches.