"As long as I live"

I’m taking the final exam in a drawing course. Drawing is a requirement because this is an engineering school. Drawing here means technical drawing. The other students and I are in the lecture hall and the proctor goes on and on in a grating voice. Behind me, an intruder is speaking loudly into a cell phone. “You don’t belong here. Please leave!” he is told, and he does.

The exam is in the form of two large sheets of paper folded like maps. Most of their surfaces are covered with various sorts of information. One of them, as a matter of fact contains a number of highly detailed maps on several scales of a certain city.

Each sheet also has a couple of gridded areas on which we are to draw. There’s a practice grid and a grid for the finished drawing. We must stick rigorously to the grid, putting down a single mark in each grid square. This is difficult for several reasons. First of all, the lecture hall seats have very little desktop space and the sheets of paper are very large when unfolded. Second, we are in a hurry because we have to do a practice drawing first, then copy it neatly onto the second grid. No one has told us how much time we have. Finally, in my case, my hands aren’t steady enough to draw the kind of confident lines desired. It’s stressful.

I begin drawing weak squiggly lines on one sheet of paper but then discover that the drawing that actually counts is the other one, the one with the maps. I begin work on that but become exasperated and impulsively get up and leave without finishing, even if it means failing.

I wander off campus along the streets of a rundown industrial city. It has a timeless quality and the sense of a history that may be as ancient as Athens or Rome or as modern as a New England mill town.

I come across a desolate dead-end street that looks like the roofless interior of a ruined or never-completed building on a monumental scale, made of worn and crumbling red sandstone. I walk toward the dead end and see an iron gate in the corner at the end of the wall on my left.

Going through the gate I find myself back on the campus, which is hilly and rocky here and there. The buildings are like those of an Ivy League school. Crowds of students are milling around and waiting anxiously to see if they passed that accursed, but crucial drawing exam. Some of them wait on line and present their IDs to an official who checks a list like those election workers check when you vote. When my turn comes I present my ID but, though there are a couple of names on the list that are suspiciously similar to mine, my correct name isn’t there.

I enter the philosophy building, then find myself in the museum. I wander from gallery to gallery. It’s dark and many objects on display are monumental in size. Only a couple of other people are there. One of them handles several objects, which I’m sure isn’t permitted. He tries to fit his body along the curves of a statue, not in a particularly erotic way, but as if he and the statue were characters performing in a play.

In another gallery, an ethnographic one, two men in gorilla suits jump up and down as part of the exhibition.

Finally, I find my way to a colonnaded garden, through the center of which a stream is flowing. Between two of the columns a tiny branch of the stream trickles across a broken sandstone floor. This is a deliberate element in the landscaping, a toy stream small enough to jump across without wetting your feet.

I hear clarinet trills beneath a piano introduction. It’s Benny Goodman and Count Basie playing Harold Arlen’s “As long as I live.”