Worlds by Joe Haldeman Read Free Book Online Page B

the free lunch—good old familiar rabbit—it’s hard to say. Find out at the meeting Tuesday night.
    The courses keep slapping me with double-vision déjà vu. First there was
Scarlet Letter
followed by a religion lecture on Puritanism. Then the dialects class was about the myth of survival of Elizabethan English in Appalachian enclaves, and the entertainment class covered folk music of that area—including a slightly dreadful half-hour cube of an old woman torturing a guitar and droning incomprehensibly through her nose—with a fascinating explanation about how Elizabethan English survived, etc. etc. It’s a conspiracy; they set up this whole university to convince me that I’m going mad.
    8 Sept.    Miserable day. Last night I was ready for beef, and joined a group that was going to an improbable place called Sam & Pedro’s Tex-Mex Saloon. It was quaint. The decor and costumes were bogus 19th-century Western, straight out of the classic 20th-century movies. The only beef on the menu that I recognized was chili. It was good; the spices masked the beef flavor and weren’t as hot as the curries I’m used to. Different, though. I started to regret it about 6:00 a.m.
    I divided the morning between bed and toilet, with occasional forays to the phone. The infirmary told me to sit it out, very funny, and come down if it didn’t clear up soon. Drink water. Called Dr. Schaumann and got the assignment for Monday
(Billy Budd
and
Tom Sawyer
, both of which I’ve read). Called the library and got the business and religion lectures piped in to my cube.
    I tried to get the next couple of lectures in those courses, but they were “only available under special circumstances.” Infuriating. They’re afraid you’ll sit down for eighteen hours and take a whole course. Never show up at the auditorium. What’s wrong with that? On New New you pass or fail depending on your final exam or paper, even in most precertificate courses. Why do they treat us like this?
    By afternoon my digestive system evidently decided it had successfully repelled all invaders, but I didn’t feel up to going out with the rest of the floor to celebrate the Friday-ness of it all. I studied for a while, and wrote to John and Daniel. Watched half of an idiotic sex farce on the cube.
    The one nice thing that happened today was that Benny Aarons called. He offered to bring over his seminar notes,wondered if I had plans for dinner. I explained my position, horizontal, and we made a tentative date to have lunch at the zoo tomorrow.
    On paper that looks rather aggressive, but he was actually sort of diffident and shy about it I think I do like him.
    Went down to the music room and did some scales and intervals, then was suddenly starving. Walked to the Vietnamese restaurant and had some rice with
nuoc mam
, as they call their fish sauce, and a couple of glasses of cold rice wine, and wrote this diary entry. Now bed.
    9 Sept.    The zoo was fun but somewhat unsettling. It’s in the Bronx, one of those areas where you only go in the daytime. When Benny showed up to escort me, he was wearing a long knife on his belt; at the zoo, most of the men and some of the women were similarly armed. The zoo was safe enough, Benny explained, but anything could happen in the subway station or on the street. I wasn’t sure what good a knife would do against a waster of a wolf-pack, but it did make me feel a little safer to have even symbolic protection. The subway stop was almost as bad as 195th Street.
    (It’s against the law to go armed, technically, but the law’s only enforced after the fact, unless a policeman thinks you’re up to no good. Benny said he’d never used the knife for anything but woodcarving, and never planned to. But a couple of years ago a robber gave him a bad skull fracture, and he’d carried it ever since, outside Manhattan. He suggested I get one, but I’d feel ridiculous. I’d rather run.)
    There were so many different kinds of animals I