Before my senior year of college at Screechmore, I wasn’t much of an activist. I was not an educated voter. I didn’t even like reading the news. I don’t think I was indifferent to the world so much as I was oversensitive to it. I remembered too much, had too many regrets. If I shouldered external suffering, I’d exceed my own threshold for abuse and go up in a cloud of hopeless vapor. So, I’d failed to adopt a point of view towards most things—tariffs, immigration, left vs. right Twix. “Have you adopted a point of view yet?” people would ask me. The answer was always no. I was too busy thinking about how my life could’ve been different. What if I’d asked Emily Tisdale to prom that year, or joined a fraternity? Everything could have been otherwise; still, knowing my luck, in every possible world I’d probably just end up the same lonely guy.
And then I met Mathilde.
***
It was a snowy Tuesday evening three days before midterms. I was sitting in my favorite library nook, watching the snow sprinkle down on Screechmore Square and studying a book on Edvard Munch. It was a bad habit of mine to completely forget about class registration, so I usually ended up taking the classes nobody wanted to take. That semester my parents were paying money they didn’t have so I could learn about “The History of Pain: From Owwies to Anguish.” It was the last class I needed to graduate, and in three days I’d have an exam covering everything from Classical Pain to Contemporary Discomfort.
At some point, as I flipped between The Scream and Munch’s final, boring-beyond-belief painting, Pretty, Pretty Ponies, I must have dozed off, because the next thing I remember I was in a dream, strolling along the Pont Neuf on a crisp October morning. I bumped shoulders with a tall, thin man in black shades and a black suit and thought, did I bump into him or did he bump into me? Before I could contemplate the difference, the thin man started yelling at me in Russian. Apparently, he was in the KGB. Before I could solicit his badge number, he threw me into a mysterious martial arts grip that made me feel like I was dying by fire a thousand times.
When I jolted to consciousness, Munch’s ponies were covered in drool, and it was 11:14 pm. “This class is ruining my life,” I mumbled, bending down to pick up some papers. And that’s when I saw Mathilde.
Now I don’t want to come across as a hyper-romantic, but when I say I saw Mathilde I’m making an understatement. I did not see Mathilde so much as I encountered Mathilde, encountered her as Shakespeare encountered his Dark Lady, as Keats encountered his Nightingale, and as Gatsby encountered his Daisy. She was love and death, Cleopatra and Helen, the apotheosis of my dreams, and in the half-second glance we shared, she occupied a place in my heart nobody had before or ever will. We were the only two people in the library and it felt like the world. Outside you could hear the snowy wind whistling.
“Are you okay?” she asked. She had a slight French accent, a soft, sensitive voice.
“Uh-yeah, sorry, I was just having a horrible dream about the KGB.”
“I know. You were screaming bloody murder. Everyone was videoing it.”
“You’re kidding me, really?”
She laughed, suppressing a blush. “No. Lucky for you, I was the only one in here, but yeah, incredibly loud shrieking for a library.”
“For a library, most shrieking usually is.”
There was an awkward moment where we kind of just looked at each other. Then Mathilde had something else to say, “I didn’t know people experienced emotions like that anymore. It’s kind of endearing.” She was looking down at her papers, half-pleased with her forthrightness, half-embarrassed. Meanwhile, I was struggling to comprehend my luck at this moment; if my whole life was leading up to this, every bad day suddenly felt worth it.
She told me she was the president of the Screechmore Solidarity Committee; I told her I was taking a class on The History of Anguish. That’s when she leaned forward and, touching my hand, told me my choice to study anguish was both tragic and beautiful. I was having trouble looking her in the eye. I cleared my throat. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
Just then, the overheads flickered off, leaving us in the dark.
“Hey folks, we’re closing up.”
The library security guard, Miles, was peeping into our little walnut-paneled room. He had a wry smirk on his broad face, no doubt stunned to see me talking to a real-life girl. Since freshman year, Miles had gently expelled me from my nook many a Friday night, sometimes accompanying me to the front steps because there was nobody else in the building. He was a cynical comrade of mine—a buddy—and now he was playing it cool.
“Wish y’all could stay here but, y’know, you’ll have to go someplace else.”
Mathilde shrugged. “I live right around the corner in Patsy if you want…Or do you have plans?”
As a senior, I’d basically given up on romance. Trying to get to know someone at this point was like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic—a totally futile effort at staving off the inevitable disaster of graduating without a girlfriend. And yet here I was. Miles gave me a look that said, Go for it.
“No,” I said, “No plans at all.”
***
We walked across the yard and onto Godolphin Street, where the streetlights were solitary and bright, and the snow was high on the street, and there were only a few people out. Mathilde buzzed us in at the black iron gate at Patsy House, and as we walked to the elevator, she swooped an entire stack of The Daily Screechbox off a newspaper stand. I asked her what she was planning to do with those.
“Oh, just throw them away,” she said. “They’re an unserious magazine that lies.”
I was a bit disconcerted by the sudden edge in her voice. I’d seen The Daily Screechbox and thought some of their cartoons were funny. “I haven’t read it,” was all I said.
“Good.”
Mathilde lived in a spacious single that looked out on the statue of Silly Silas Screechmore, the college’s Founder (Mathilde had tried, unsuccessfully, to sledgehammer the statue to bits the previous spring). There were black and white photographs pinned on every wall. I recognized a portrait of Franz Kafka and what looked like diagrams of the major concentration camps. A whole bookshelf was crammed with trophies from prestigious debate tournaments, and a newspaper called the Honolulu Star-Bulletin was on the coffee table. I picked it up and skimmed a page festooned with angry sharpie slashes.
“My Roman Empire,” Mathilde said, grabbing two beers from the fridge.
“What’s going on in Honolulu?” I asked innocently, hoping I hadn’t missed out on news of yet another unspeakable genocide.
For the next hour, I sipped my beer and listened to Mathilde lecture about New Frontiers in Human Dignity. The Honolulu State Penitentiary had been mistreating prisoners for decades—treating them, in the words of NPR, “no better than warthogs in heat.” Every day, while we silver spoon students went to office hours and gorged ourselves on Insomnia Cookies, hundreds of shackled shoplifters and marijuana possessors were forced to painstakingly assemble crate upon crate of hula girl dashboard dolls.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
She looked out the window, her eyes glowing like two embers. “Every day is the ninth circle of hell for these prisoners.”
And on top of all of that, the Screechmore endowment was deeply invested in a private equity firm, Vecna Capital, which was sucking sweet value out of the the prison, like unpasteurized milk from a cow’s teat, according to fund manager and Screechmore ‘07 Michael Carnivalbarker.
As she paced the floor, antsy as a cat trapped in a chimney, I felt a surge of indignation. These Margaritaville prison guards were not only abusing their prisoners— they were abusing Mathilde. Deep in thought, she stared down at the lawn, watching plastered students stagger home past Silly Silas. She scoffed and tried to ignore them, instead imagining herself the president of her own little country, assessing the battlefield and plotting her maneuvers.
“What can I do to help?”
She ruffled her hair then turned to face me. She really was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
“You already are.”
***
The next day I found myself up early with Mathilde and the rest of the Screechmore Solidarity Committee. Studying for History of Anguish would just have to wait, which panicked me a bit (I was already in C+ territory) but it was also exciting to get out of myself and plug into something new. Maybe I’d been aloof in the past, trapped in a solipsistic coma, but I’d become a real activist overnight. I had a purpose and it felt good—that I shared this feeling with a tall, haughty Parisian didn’t hurt either.
In the Science Center atrium, we marched back and forth, wearing blood-flecked leis, protesting the Honolulu State Penitentiary and its abominable practices. I was handed a megaphone (Mathilde had spread the word that I could really scream) and a sign that read, WE ARE ALL HONOLULU.
“Fuck the prison-industrial complex.”
“Divest!”
“Men treated no better than warthogs in heat!”
The other students passed by without giving us any attention. It occurred to me that we were disrupting study season, but who cared? I was in love with an activist now, and if she was proud of me, that’s all that mattered.
Who wasn’t proud of us was Screechmore president Gaten Matarazzo (no relation). Throughout the day’s protest, we received many warnings from Matarazzo’s emissaries. Matilde repeatedly rebuffed them. “If Matarazzo doesn’t want us here, he can tell us himself.”
Eventually, our stubbornness, combined with the shrill, relentless megaphonery, got the cops called on us. The other students in the committee had no problem dropping their signs and disappearing like robbers after a heist, but Mathilde was ready for a fight. A hulking, vest-wearing cop grabbed hold of her arm.
“Hey, stop grabbing her.” I tugged on the cop’s bicep, but the second I touched him, he coshed me on the head with his truncheon. Spots appeared in my eyes and a welt the size of Argentina appeared on my forehead. After that, things got pretty loopy.
My next memory is of lying on Mathilde’s bed. She removed an icepack from my head and said, “hold still.” She then tenderly brushed her lips against mine and whispered in my ear, “Welcome to the team.” I’d never been in love, so I didn’t know what to look for exactly, but I remember feeling a love-like feeling towards Mathilde that night, a feeling that, with time, might just pass as Love, the Real Thing.
In the morning, I woke to find Mathilde poised ominously at her window. I dressed and told her that I probably couldn’t make it to the Committee Breakfast that morning, that I had to make headway on my Anguish studying. She said that was fine, but didn’t turn around.
“Will you be free tonight?” she muttered.
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“Good.”
It was around 11:00pm when I stopped by Mathilde’s dorm. She came down to get me at the black iron gate, dressed all in black. She explained that her friend John Forbes Sackler would be helping with the protest. Before I could ask who the hell John Forbes Sackler was, or if he was related to the Purdue Pharma Sacklers, or why she had said his name with so much enthusiasm, we walked into her dorm room and I came face to face with the guy myself. He was taller than I was, muscle-bound, with thick blonde hair and a black OxyContin puffer jacket.
“What’s up dude,” he said, going for a fist bump.
I accidentally high fived it.
“Not much,” I said weakly. My stomach was starting to hurt.
The two sat me down on the couch to unfurl their genius plan: through a family connection, John had hunted down the symbolic showstopper of our protest: an actual live warthog named El Diablo, stolen from a cartel petting zoo by the Purdue Pharma extraction team. El Diablo was downstairs in the back of a trailer and now we were all going to drive to President Matarazzo’s house and let the thing wreak havoc on his lawn. No better than warthogs in heat. “This is the endgame,” Mathilde said. “Suit up.” She threw me a balaclava.
In the parking garage across the street, we found John Forbes Sackler’s Range Rover. Sure enough, there was a small horse trailer attached to the rear and, indeed, a mad, stamping warthog padlocked within. John and Mathilde sat up front; I was relegated to the backseat. The car skidded out onto the cold, salted road.
As we drove, “Sack” went over the plan again. He would get out first and clear the path, open the gate, and so on. Then, on his command, I was to unlock El Diablo and lead the warthog into the property using the retractable leash. Meanwhile, Mathilde would be at the wheel ready for the getaway. Of course, I didn’t want to be on beast duty, but then again, as it was the toughest job, I had this idea that it’d have the biggest payoff in Mathilde’s heart—that it’d ensconce me, once and for all, in her affectionate European bosom.
Ten minutes later, we were in front of a sprawling colonial affair surrounded by a white picket fence. John got out and went to fiddle with the gate. Then it was my turn to prepare El Diablo. I fiddled with the key, then I fiddled with the latch, then I fiddled with the trailer door which swung upon with a wheeze, and then I was staring at this tusked beast whose snout left little puffs of warm air in the night. Keeping eye contact with the animal, I reached down for the retractable leash. Good boy. I trotted the warthog out and headed towards Sack, but the second the beast saw him, it appeared to have a sudden change of heart and started running the other way. Then, in an absurd turn of events that would’ve left even Rube Goldberg scratching his head, the leash became coiled around my left foot, and before I knew it I was being dragged 50 miles an hour down a street by an evil warthog, screaming. Each time I passed a house, a light would go on. The Range Rover caught up beside me. “Meet us back at the rendezvous point,” cried Mathilde. “And don’t get caught!”
“I’m being road scraped by a goddamn warthog,” I yelled. But then the car was gone.
My foot became loose eventually, and El Diablo ran off into the woods, but as soon as it did, a campus police car turned down the road. This really was the endgame. Now, not only was I a jilted lover, I was going to jail. I felt like breaking down and crying. So then I broke down and cried.
The car pulled up next to me, rolled down its window.
“What in the hell are you doing out here, man?”
Now as I’ve said before there are times in life when something so fortuitous happens you feel you’re not alone in the universe and that something is looking out for you, bringing you to this moment so ripe with happiness that you suddenly forget every day where you felt broken-hearted because that one happy feeling is just so good. It’d felt that way in my life only a handful of times. I felt it when I met Mathilde, and now I felt it again, looking into the cop car and finding not the same bull-faced cop who clonked me with his club, but Miles, broad-faced, smiling Miles, my cynical comrade from the library. I got in his car, told him everything. He dropped me off at my dorm. “I didn’t see you tonight, capisce?”
“Capisce.”
The next morning I walked into my History of Anguish exam still aching from a pretty bad road rash. And I aced it.
by William Herff
