Communication Breakdown

She always wore a black and white suit. One of her favorite stunts was to commandeer a study room in the Angel library by telling the students it was reserved for faculty business. Of course, she was no more on the faculty than I was the man in the moon. One of my long time Ann Arbor acquaintances (he had his 15 minutes of fame some years ago when he barricaded himself in his car when it was about to be towed for parking tickets) was a sort of library watchdog, a Cerberus who scrutinized any and all that came through his portals. And while he didn’t have 3 heads, he could tell something was amiss about this psycho Swiss Miss (I think she was Italian). We probably worked there for about a week before his suspicions led him to begin his surveillance in earnest. I guess you could say I was her accomplice in the sense that I played literary Jekyll to her illiterate Hyde.

One of her habits was to sit in the corner like some kind of insane “Rocking Horse Winner” and furiously scribble and highlight the journals she trundled in. Typically, at approximately 10 minute intervals she would interrupt my writing and research to show me some profound passage she had gleaned from the reading, such as, “results show,” or, “these are important findings.” Then she would proudly announce that we needed to get these ideas in her dissertation. When she wasn’t doing this she would argue with me for 10 or 20 minutes, and sometimes longer, about whether “given,” or “consequently,” was a word. Her vocabulary was so limited that I had to patiently, and oftentimes in a thoroughly exasperated manner, that she should put her undivided semantic and syntactic trust in me, but her psychological condition/demeanor was such that this was impossible. After all how could someone with her retentive capacities apply my received wisdom over any length of time?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. At this point I was working on her written exams, which would later provide the framework for her longer thesis.