souvenir collection, his trove of preposterous electrical appliances, and his
laugh-- a screaming hysterical cackle that would ricochet down the long shiny
cinderbiock corridor whenever something grotesque flashed across the 45-Inch
screen of his Video System or he did something especially humiliating to
Ephraim Klein.
Klein was a subdued, intellectual type. He reacted to his victories with a
contented smirk, and this quietness gave some residents of EO7S East the
impression that Fenrick, a roomie-buster with many a notch on his keychain,
had already cornered the young sage. In fact, Klein beat Fenrick at a rate of
perhaps sixty percent, or whenever he could reduce the conflict to a rational
discussion. He felt that he should be capable of better against a power-punker
Business major, but he was not taking into account the animal shrewdness that
enabled Fenrick to land lucrative oil-company internships to pay for the
modernization of his System.
Inveterate and cynical audio nuts, common at the Big U, would walk into their
room and freeze solid, such was Fenrick's System, its skyscraping rack of
obscure black slabs with no lights, knobs or switches, the 600-watt Black Hole
Hyperspace Energy Nexus Field Amp that sat alone like the Kaaba, the shielded
coaxial cables thrown out across the room to the six speaker stacks that made
it look like an enormous sonic slime mold in spawn. Klein himself knew a few
things about stereos, having a system that could reproduce Bach about as well
as the American Megaversity Chamber Orchestra, and it galled him.
To begin with there was the music. That was bad enough, but Klein had
associated with musical Mau Maus since junior high, and could inure himself
to it in the same way that he kept himself from jumping up and shouting back
at television commercials. It was the Go Big Red Fan that really got to him.
"Okay, okay, let's just accept as a given that your music is worth playing.
Now, even assuming that, why spend six thousand dollars on a perfect system
with no extraneous noises in it, and then, then, cool it with a noisy fan that
couldn't fetch six bucks at a fire sale?" Still, Fenrick would ignore him. "I
mean, you amaze me sometimes. You can't think at all, can you? I mean, you're
not even a sentient being, if you look at it strictly."
When Klein said something like this (I heard the above one night when going
down to the bathroom), Fenrick would look up at him from his Business
textbook, peering over the wall of bright, sto record-store displays he had
erected along the room's centerline; because his glasses had slipped down his
long thin nose, he would wrinkle it, forcing the lenses toward the desired
altitude, involuntarily baring his canine teeth in the process and causing the
stiff spiky hair atop his head to shift around as though inhabited by a band
of panicked rats.
"You don't understand real meaning," he'd say. "You don't have a monopsony
on meaning. I don't get meaning from books. My meaning means what it means
to me." He would say this, or something equally twisted, and watch Klein for
a reaction. After he had done it a few times, though, Klein figured out that
his roomie was merely trying to get him all bent out of shape-- to freak his
