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--September--
On back-to-school day, Sarah Jane Johnson and Casimir Radon waited, for a
while, in line together. At the time they did not know each other. Sarah had
just found that she had no place to live, and was suffering that tense and
lonely feeling that sets in when you have no place to hide. Casimir was just
discovering that American Megaversity was a terrible place, and was not happy
either.
After they had worked their way down the hail and into the office of the Dean
of the College of Sciences and Humanities, they sat down next to each other on
the scratchy Dayglo orange chairs below the Julian Didius III Memorial Window.
The sunlight strained in greyly over their shoulders, and occasionally they
turned to look at the scene outside.
Below them on one of the Parkway off-ramps a rented truck from Maryland had
tried to pass under a low bridge, its student driver forgetting that he was
in a truck and not his Trans-Am. Upon impact, the steel molding that fastened
the truck's top to its sides had wrapped itself around the frame of a green
highway sign bolted to the bridge. Now the sign, which read:
AMERICAN MEGAVERSITY
VISITOR PARKING
SPORTS EVENTS
EXIT 500 FT
was suspended in the air at the end of a long strip of truck that had been
peeled up and aside.
A small crowd students, apparently finished with all their line-waiting, stood
on the bridge and beside the ramp, throwing Frisbees and debris into the
torn-open back of the truck, where its renters lounged in sofas and recliners
and drank beer, and threw the projectiles back. Sarah thought it was idiotic,
and Casimir couldn't understand it at all.
Out in the hallway, people behind them in the line were being verbally abused
by an old derelict who had penetrated the Plex security system. "The only
degree you kids deserve is the third degree!" he shouted, waving his arms and
staggering in place. He wore a ratty tweed jacket whose elbow patches flapped
like vestigial wings, and he drank in turns from a bottle of Happy's vodka and
a Schlitz tall-boy which he kept holstered in his pockets. He had the full
attention of the students, who were understandably bored, and most of them
laughed and tried to think of provocative remarks.
As the drunk was wading toward them, one asked another how her summer had
