Liberal Arts War

A Story by Ben Stein

Based very closely on a real dream that took place entirely at my school.

I feel my sides begin crawling with sand, rolling down a dune somewhere in a dark desert, for it is not hot. The innards and blood cascade together down much further than they could were they to stay in my body. All I can see is black; whether it’s the inside of my eyelids or the sky, I haven’t the faintest clue. I can only guess what’s really going on, but I’m sick and this is a sensation not unlike the chills one gets when one’s fever is reaching its peak. Sleep is not coming easily, but it seems inevitable; it’s almost as if I have just gotten up. I’m still trying to figure out if I’m awake or not. The shutters are closed and it’s raining, so it may well be night or day; it doesn’t particularly matter. The air is cold and saturated with spitting rain, but I have blankets and can’t seem to get out of bed, so I doubt I’ll bother closing the window or finding out if the “3:36” on my clock means A.M. or P.M. My eyelids feel as if they have small weights tied to them, each approximately the size of a counterweight from a phonograph, two per eyelid. The television show playing on my computer screen grows blurry as the generic white earbuds slip from my ears. I try to get up, but can’t help feeling that I’m sinking further into the world in my sheets where every light source is as dull and grey as the one that is trying to make its way between my blinds.

I played lawn bowling with some students at a college near an observatory. I used the black balls and the girls used white. I thought the girl on the left was my classmate but there’s no way that’s true. My classmate hates me. This girl couldn’t have been more excited to play at my side, and I couldn’t have been more annoyed to play at hers. Well, I guess that’s how it would have been anyway.

Anyway, what appears to have been an RA came into my dorm room and announced, with a clearly disturbed but soberly professional voice, “It’s happening. Just making sure you guys are okay.” Naturally I told her I was sick and asked her what was happening; she replied, with that same quavering, frantic uneasiness that made her pin-straight, dirty blonde hair sway with the breath exiting her mouth with each word. There was no gesture to move it as she let out, “The Spanish Revolution. Well, our version, with Mexico anyway.”

It still makes little sense, now that I’m awake.

There was an observatory. I’m not sure where. The girls with whom I played lawn bowling seemed to have been students, but why would I assume that? Must have been the lanyards, those bright orange things hanging from their back pockets because their front pockets were far too small to carry anything that could have been on the key chains at the end of them. In fact, I could see their ID cards poking out at each of the four corners directly above the cheeks no one asked them to expose.

There were helicopters outside of my window. I’m not sure what sound could have triggered them but they were certainly there. I heard voices calling out from what I can only assume was an extremely loud megaphone, “GET DOWN ON THE GROUND!” Again with the assuming, I assumed that they were the police, here to take care of the Spanish Revolution.

I’m starting to think that maybe that RA didn’t know what The Spanish Revolution really was, and instead had meant to say “Spanish Civil War.” Although, who does know what those really are? I myself have trouble distinguishing between the Civil War and the Revolution. Written by the victors, you know? Surely, the history books can’t be any better at answering our questions. Who won which, and why were both necessary? Anyway, unimportant as that is, the fact remains that the subjects (objects?) of these chopper pilots’ yelling were invisible, but I think I remember what brought them there. I had seen a poster, something having to do with a protest. Some preachy school propaganda to keep face while treating workers like s**t, but I didn’t know it would turn into this. No. This had to be something on more of a national or international level, perhaps a war.

Somehow I’m able to take that in stride, as the war outside of my window is taking shape. I’m glad I’m inside, and that hopefully I’m not involved in the war itself. They usually don’t make college students go to war. Come to think of it, there doesn’t seem to be any fighting going on, just a few planes flying by, a friend of mine smoking on a bench under a palm tree with two attractive girls, and that damned poster I saw earlier today. I straighten out my pajama pants and try to get out of bed.

The gym smelled awful. I’m pretty sure that’s how I got to lawn bowling in the first place. You see, I don’t quite know my way around campus yet. Expecting to arrive in a dorm bathroom after a short walk down the hallway, I instead found myself in the gym basement’s bathroom after a considerably longer walk than I had thought. Not sure how I got there, in an extreme daze, and determined to get out of that room, with its filmy yellow (previously white, I presume) walls, rank stench of urinating corpses, stained porcelain troughs with the 1950s “American Standard” logo stamped on in increasingly transparent black underglaze, I ran past six or seven students, probably athletes, changing in a locker room, who either shoved back at my accidental collisions or ignored me. I made for the first exit I could identify as such, knowing that I would probably never encounter them again outside of a dining hall anyway, and found myself in a parking lot. It was dark, though it had not been when I had begun. Usually it’s easy to gain one’s bearings by climbing up stairs, but the gym building was so repulsive I couldn’t bring myself to touch it again and instead decided to walk south.

From the observatory I walked south again, noticing that I had been heading east for no reason. I walked west a bit and then continued mostly south, expecting to find some familiar scenery. All I found was that damned war again. Apparently there had been a protest and the helicopters were there to round up the protesters and hopefully disperse them nonviolently. I considered this for a moment, quite literally shaking sense into myself. Why on earth would they need helicopters? Oh, well. They were, of course, not really there. You probably couldn’t land a helicopter anywhere on campus, nor could you hover one over it with a clear line of sight to ground level. There are too many trees.

It’s brighter than I thought. I guess I’ll shut my eyes and wait for dark. No reason for the sunlight to aggravate my delirium.