user:m.mendel

  I'm midway through the alphabet now in Conner's office, still cataloguing away. Sometimes he and I have a little discussion while I'm working. It's usually about the class I'm taking. The other day, I told him I was studying Descartes. Conner was all reason and logic, going on and on about Descartes being the father of modern philosophy, the link between mind and body and the beginning of Enlightenment.

  "Sometimes," I venture, "none of it seems to make sense."

  "In what way?" he replies.

  "Well, for instance, 'I think, therefore I am.' I mean, I am what? Is a person who they think they are, or who other people think they are?"

  He gives me a superior look, speaking slowly and deliberately. "Well ... I think we're getting a little off-base here. To make a long story short, the point of it is the nature of certainty. Thought and being are fundamentally the same thing. So now, are we understanding it a little better?"

  "To make a long story short, no." I decide that Conner has no idea about thinking and being when you're not who you think you are—I think, therefore I lie, therefore I'm not? I think, therefore I lie, therefore I am? ... but not really. I think, therefore I am ... oh, forget it. How can I expect him to understand—and I hate his tone.

  "Do you ever search for rare birds?" I suddenly ask.

  "I used to. Then I stopped. Finally realized it didn't make me happy."

  "Why do people obsess about them anyway?"

  "Well, it's a bigger issue. It's rare anything. You get sucked into it. I don't know," he says, removing his parka, rolling up his shirtsleeves, digging into his backpack.

  "Maybe it's something deeper that drives people to keep searching," I reply. "To discover something only they can see. Maybe it makes them feel like Messiah—only I can talk to God or predict when the entire universe will explode into nothingness. Only I can see that telltale shadow of the Virgin Mary's profile on a taco shell. Only I can hear God's voice through the fire. Or maybe it isn't even that heavy. That fleeting glimpse is just so hypnotic, like Medusa's gaze—beautiful but could turn a person to stone."

  Conner has now stopped fussing and is staring at me.

  "You're right," he says. Then he's quiet. "So you see a rare bird. It doesn't unlock the secrets of life—does it? You still wake up the next day with the same shitty relationship, the same existential questions, the same damn leak in the roof. But for these few moments, you're immortal. You've beaten the odds. Reversed the natural order of things."

  He pulls a bottle of martini olives out of his backpack, opens it, and holds it out to me. I pop one in my mouth. He continues in a tone that's almost religious, or maybe a little boozy. At this point, who cares?

  "Frankly," he says, "the best part of bird-watching is just the quiet enjoyment of ordinary moments. The more you look, the more you see."

  "Giving up smoking is like resigning yourself to a perpetual sense of longing with absolutely no release. Your senses ambush you all the time, egging you on when you least expect it. There will be a certain smell, a taste, even a beautiful passage in a book, or even, say, those damn butterflies we saw the other day at the exhibit. God, did I want a cigarette after that. I don't know—you feel so hopeless. Never quite whole."

  "Like love," I say suddenly. "Isn't that what it's like?"

  Conner shakes his head with what seems like disbelief and then smiles at me.

  "Yes, exactly. Like love", he says.

  "It's so odd," he says, in a tone that sounds almost as if he's talking to himself. "You go to a party or whatever, and you spend the whole night zeroing in on the woman in red, the blonde in the corner, the girl with the big laugh, and then, as you're leaving, you see someone out of the corner of your eye, her hair glinting in the light, her long neck tilted slightly as she listens intently to the person next to her. And you know she's the one you should have talked to."