Photodissociation Fragments

Button (the storybook bear with buttons for eyes, not the person) wakes up startled to the sound of banging on his chamber door. Luckily for him, everyone lying in bed is still clothed, albeit now awake and confused.

As the words from the man on the other side of the door fluttered through the air into poor Button's ear, Button was forced to hastily reconstruct the previous night's events the best he could. All the while, his severely intoxicated head persisted in the unnerving task of assembling the steady stream of virulent noise into a coherent message.

In the colloquia of the times, the message was this: "Jon, is my daughter in there?"

Last night the Hindenberg crashed. Nevertheless, Button flew to the door to meet his inquisitor face to face.

If the narrator were a man of substance and aware that being impolite will never become passe, perhaps he would have made the following sardonic remark: "Well hello, Mr. Cook. What can I do for you on this fine Saturday afternoon."

In lieu of that heroic remark came a wide-eyed, open mouthed, "Hi."

"Well you don't look very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed."

"Yeah."

"Jon, do you mind telling me what happened here last night?"

"Well, why don't you ask your daughter? She is right here."

"We are both men. So let's talk man to man."

In my nineteenth year, I received my first lesson in manhood. Men have talks like this. And if you fail to understand, any explanation that I can proffer is useless to you.

"Mr. Cook, your daughter and I drank too much, got really sick, and then passed out."

"Is that all that happened, Jon?"

"Yes."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes."

Satisfied with me, he looked over at his daughter, clutching my comforter and terrified of what was to come. The following exchange forever remains a microcosm of my fatally frail condition and how the fates choose to toy with me in the worst of ways.

"Tonya, come on, you are coming home with me."

"No I'm not."

The sensitivity of my consciousness heightened a thousand fold in that brief amount of time, along with my undying desire to hide underneath a pile of old, winter coats for the remainder of this hunting season. I should have made my level of stress known by making audible the question that raged on the order of a hundred decibels within my head, "What do you mean you are not going home?" After all, I had just met this girl merely two weeks before. I was not ready to become this person -- not here anyway, not in this fraternity house, not in this bastion of male adolescence. No way.

And so, Mr. Cook began walking away but did not leave before making clear to me what I had already inferred. "Make sure she gets home, Jon."

I slumped in the hallway, the one with the atrocious wood panelling, with my head in my hands, wondering how I had allowed my life to veer in this surreal direction. My pledge brothers and friends surrounded me slowly, inquisitive as to the nature of this most recent spectacle; but I had no answers for them, and they had no answers for me either. Things had become Boltzmannian in scope.