BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SPRING 2001

42 :: readers :: 5/07/01

Jakob is sitting in a chair left out in a university hallway. He turned in his grades earlier this morning. He gave out mostly B's, a handful of C's and A's. He ended up flunking a few kids who stopped showing up halfway through the semester. (He knows the F may have negative repercussions for some of those students, and yet he only feels the most microscopic dot of guilt. He's surprised, momentarily, that he doesn't feel more.) After submitting his final paperwork he made a pass by Fletcher's office.

Fletcher sat at his desk, behind several piles of graded work, hastily punching figures into a calculator. —Hey, he said, without looking up.

—Cutting it close, eh? Jakob said.

—Yours are in, I suppose, Fletcher said.

—I just turned 'em in.

—Wait a second, Fletcher said. He looks at the calculator, compares it against a column of figures in his gradebook. —That can't be right.

—I'll get out of your hair, said Jakob.

—No, wait, said Fletcher. He finally looked up. —What are you doing right now?

—I don't know. I was thinking I'd go out and grab some lunch.

—I'll be done with this stuff in, I swear, like, twenty minutes. If you want to stick around I'll head out with you.

—OK, says Jakob.

So he went out into the hallway and grabbed a chair. It's easy for him to kill time; he's got reading material on hand. It's the new issue of Adbusters, a magazine that he'll glance through sometimes in the bookstore but doesn't normally buy. This issue is all about urbanism, though, about strategies for transforming cities, and since he's interested in those sorts of ideas, he wanted to see what they had in mind. The issue arranges interesting quotes, images, and slogans into categories based around the type of space they remark upon. Dead Space: where the city forgets. Shared Space: where control fails. Some of the material in the magazine seems to contradict other material in the magazine, but that's OK. Complexity is born from interference. He's particularly interested in the quotes from this guy (architect?) Toyo Ito. Ito: People today are equipped with an electronic body in which information circulates, and are thus linked to the world through a network of information by means of this other body. Jakob is interested in how people think about networks, about information; he's hoping to spend some of this summer putting together the framework for his novel, which is about those exact topics.

He makes a mental note: Toyo Ito. He thinks here momentarily about this movie Memento that he and Fletcher went to see recently, when they were both burnt out from grading. (They'd called up Freya to see if she wanted to go, but she had to work.) He imagines tattooing remember Toyo Ito across his thigh.

In the office, Fletcher finishes filling out the grade forms. He affixes his signature to the bottom of the forms (done hurriedly, it looks like he's written F , but oh well who cares). He throws his coat over his arm and picks up his hand-me-down briefcase and heads out into the hallway. There's Jakob, hunched over a magazine, reading.

—What are you reading for? Fletcher says. —We're supposed to be on summer vacation. He holds the grade forms high.

Jakob snaps out of the magazine and looks up at Fletcher. —Ah, he says, —the work of the academic is never done. Summer vacation is just a chance for us to catch up on our reading.

—Professional readers, Fletcher says. —Is that what we are?

—That's what we are, says Jakob.

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