Nancy & Me

“Unless you enter the tiger’s den you cannot take the cubs.”
-- Japanese Proverb

Chronologically, dear reader, I’ll get back to the written exam period, but since fictions play with these kind of conventions, allow me to randomly discuss the strangeness of Nancy.

As I said, she packed 2 laptops and 2 printers. Why she did this soon became apparent. She treated these somewhat fragile machines like, for lack of an accurate comparison, common gardening tools. While I would be working on one, a Dell I believe, she would roam around the library, or hotel, or wherever we happened to meet, carrying the other laptop as a child would, holding the thing by a corner of the screen, carelessly dangling it against her thigh. The image I’m going for here is an institutional setting. Picture, if you will, a gowned retard shuffling around a mental ward, sucking her thumb and dragging a threadbare blanket.

No wonder she wore a bandolier of flash drives. When she wasn’t accidentally deleting hours of my painstaking work, she was inadvertently stepping on newly purchased flash drives strewn amidst the academic debris she had trundled in and dumped, yes dumped, on the floor. Oftentimes, I would arrive to the sight of her simultaneously pounding on the laptop keyboards of both computers! Why, because she was so A.D.D. that she would literally save 50 or 60 files of the same document, carefully naming them all, and thus ensuring that it would take me sometimes hours to find the most recent version of “her” work. She would give them different names, but her nomenclature was like those Indian Tribal languages they used in WWII to fool the Japs. Sometimes I tried to decipher them phonetically, but even this sort of effort was thwarted by her impenetrable incoherence.

One of her wildest, perhaps, inventions was the fantasy that she had a baby. As we came to know each other, and as the baby took on a role in our weird interactions (In retelling this tale, I sometimes forget that we are both experts in communicative issues related to interpersonal boundary management) scenes from the Mike Nichols film adaptation of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”(1966) became a recurring daydream. Recalling the fantasy child George and Martha conjure up to confuse and hoodwink Honey and Nick, reinforced my doubts about Nancy’s baby (as I recall, it had no name or gender). For years after I last saw her, the “baby” (to be perfectly candid, visualizing Nancy as a part of the procreative act required to produce a child was impossible for me) came to represent a mythical kind of objective correlative for my phantom dissertation.

Did I really write the thing? Only my closest confidantes knew anything about this bizarre story, and this all came second hand, from me. Hilariously, for a time both my ex wife and girlfriend entertained the suspicion that this Nancy might be an illicit liaison that neither one knew about. Yuck! This was until Brigitte snooped around the library sites at BSU.

In truth, Nancy meetings served many purposes, but that’s another story.