their magnet coils. Sometimes Klein would use Bach's "Passacaglia and Fugue in
C Minor," and at the end of each phrase the bass line would plunge back down
home to that old low C, and Klein's sub-woofers would pick up the temblor of
the 64-foot pipes and magnify it until he could watch the naked speaker cones
thrash away at in the air. This particular note happened to be the natural
resonating frequency of the main hallways, which were cut into 64-foot, 3-inch
halves by the fire doors (Klein and I measured one while drunk), and therefore
the resonant frequency of every other hail in every other wing of all the
towers of the Plex, and so at these moments everything in the world would
vibrate at sixteen cycles per second; beds would tremble, large objects would
float off the edges of tables, and tables and chairs themselves would buzz
around the rooms of their own volition. The occasional wandering bat who might
be in the hall would take off in random flight, his sensors jammed by the
noise, beating his wings against the standing waves in the corridor in an
effort to escape.
The Resident Assistant, or RA, was a reclusive Social Work major who,
intuitively knowing she was never going to get a job, spent her time locked in
her little room testing perfumes and watching MTV under a set of headphones.
She could not possibly help.
That made it my responsibility. I lived on EO7S that year as
faculty-in-residence. I had just obtained my Ph.D. from Ohio State in an
interdisciplinary field called Remote Sensing, and was a brand-shiny-new
associate professor at the Big U.
Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no
megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times
and we had neither Kleins nor Fenricks. Boston University, where I did my
Master's, had pulled through its crisis when I got there; most students had no
time for sonic war, and the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the
dorms. Ohio State was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex
where noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than tweedy
black bachelors. I just did not know what to make of Klein and Fenrick; I did
not handle them well at all. As a matter of fact, most of my time at the Big U
was spent observing and talking, and very little doing, and I may bear some of
the blame.
This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest
why. It is a work of the imagination in that by writing it I hope to purge the
Big U from my system, and with it all my bitterness and contempt. I may have
fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until as close to the
end as anyone could have, and I knew enough of the major actors to learn about
what I didn't witness, and so there is not so much art in this as to make it
irrelevant. What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can happen in
your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the
rest.
--------------------
-- First Semester --
