Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

least this was tangible. A starting point. A hypothesis. The scientific method demands that we begin with a hypothesis. How else are we to design our experiment?

The river was as immobile as ever, but now it made me angry. This was no time for sitting there, stagnating. Things couldn’t simply stay like this, with Deb gone and no explanation. I usually think alone, but at that moment I needed someone. I needed to know it wasn’t just me. But who? I couldn’t trust Professor Bell. I didn’t really know anyone else in College who had known Deb. The truth was, I didn’t really know anyone else in College at all except Gin from the library, and Deb did not go to the library. Deb wrote all the time, but her writing flowed from her like waterfalls. She didn’t pore over pine tables and sweat into pads of A4, like Gin and I had to.

I thought of Dr. Humberton. He would at least remember who Deb was: she’d been in his lectures. There were only thirty of us, and Deb asked a lot of questions. He had to remember her. And surely he’d have her real name on his records. I knew Humberton had an office in the raised faculty building. There was a decent chance he’d be in it, too—it was the middle of the morning, and a Thursday. I set myself in that direction. My chest was pounding.

The little shit must be having a birthday today too. Hasn’t been here in a while thank Christ. How old is she really? How would I know. I can’t understand time anymore. Maybe I never could.

One birthday, Mr. Jones the geography master makes her want to kill herself because he gets them to colour in maps of Europe with colouring pencils and then he critiques their pencil work. Their colouring-in skills. As if that was the point of anything. It’s insulting because you know she’s not a child, she is thirteen years old. Or now she is sixteen years old and she says she wants a boyfriend and I can just tell she has no idea what the point of him would be. Well the point of anything, my dear little shit, is never what you think it is.

The first birthday was the last birthday. The birthday. The night she showed up, I actually thought she was a shit. It was dark. It felt awful, but it always does, so I just went to the toilet. Then I started bleeding so I went to the hospital. And that was it. The hospital. The white light. The yelling. The end of the line. The end of everything.

And I was meant to love it, this birthday present. Birthday past, birthday future. What a joke. They gave up on that pretty fast though and took the little shit away. Someone else will always do a better job loving things than I would. I have never been able to tune in, not that way. Maybe other people have a kind of sixth sense that I don’t have. Or maybe I just don’t want to. To be honest I can’t tell anymore if it’s on purpose. Does it matter if it’s on purpose?

Chapter Six

“Think of us as beings in four dimensions,” Humberton used to say. “We stretch out in time as well as space. Really, we’re 4-D worms: little tubes tunnelling through time. Only we’re not going anywhere in time. We’re just pinned there. Like specimens in a box.”

I ran across the bridge. I was moving as fast as my body would let me, but as I held the idea of Deb in me, in my memory, I felt her stillness. Like water that should be flowing. It was as if Deb didn’t move anymore, didn’t change. Even so, I told myself, she was suspended in the substance of reality. In the past, not just in my memory. Deb was gone, but she was still real. A bug in amber, not a dragon in a story. I pictured Deb trapped in brown resin, still as death, her pink sweater and blonde hair all turned the colour of Lyle’s Golden Syrup. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the image.

Humberton’s office was on the third floor, but before I could go up I had to go down to the basement toilets. I looked over the graffiti: the usual rubbish, and the rhyme about Shakespeare shitting here, but today I found, newly scrawled in another hand:

Even if that is true, would he honestly choose,

Over Stratford, the Sidgwick Site lecture room loos?

And it seems like a stretch, ’cause at least in my head,

For a guy who shits here, is he not kinda dead?

That’s right, the newcomer had changed the metre from iambic to anapestic. And the original author wasn’t even writing pentameters to start with.

Amateurs.

Business over, I ran all the way up the battered staircase, grey plastic worn bare at the centre where everybody treads, but still like new at both sides. Academic staircases are always battered in the middle. Too many of us going up and down all day. Of course you could walk at the edges, but it’s awkward and people look at you funny. And what would you be trying to prove?

On the stratospheric heights of the third floor, the light was bluer and clearer. I slowed my thoughts and my body, in order to pass at a more respectful pace by the librarian’s desk, through the little faculty library, and on into the open corridor with Humberton’s office and those of a few other lecturers. I approached his door, painted a brilliant white like the surrounding walls, and stared at this blank slate for a moment.

I am sure Dr. Humberton didn’t know then how important he could have been in this story. How important he should have been. I rarely spoke to him. He was the most popular lecturer in the whole philosophy faculty. A gaggle of students