loop, infinite

I went to Barnes & Noble tonight to study and also to buy Don DeLillo’s new book, which is called Point Omega and which I’ve been meaning to pick up for the past month.

DeLillo’s publisher is marketing Point Omega as a novel, but if it is it’s an absurdly short one. There are just one hundred and twenty pages, and the pages are unusually small, with unusually wide margins. The words are all typeset in a pretty huge font.

People say that DeLillo’s books have been getting shorter and shorter since Underworld. They say this like it’s a bad thing. I like short books, though. They work for me. My attention span, after all, has degraded pretty seriously over the past decade.

In 2000 I read terrible genre fantasy, books so fat and so heavy that they would have been lethal weapons if I’d thought to throw them at my enemies, if I had enemies. In 2010 I am unable to read a novel that’s more than three or four hundred pages long.

The only books I can read now are short “works” of “literary fiction.” This is bad because I believe that one day I will find myself cornered in an alley with only a copy of something like Point Omega to protect myself. On that day I will be fucked.

Anyway. Point Omega has a cool cover; it prominently features that famous figure-eight symbol for infinity. I have long been obsessed with that symbol. I can remember how it (and the concept of infinity) were first introduced to me. I was arguing with this guy, in first grade, about what the biggest number was. I told him it was 9,999,999,999. He told me I was wrong, and that the biggest number was infinity.

I asked him what infinity was. He said he would show me. He took out a piece of paper and put his pencil down and drew the figure-eight and kept drawing, his pencil going around and around and around, the figure-eight getting darker and darker and deeper and deeper. Eventually the paper ripped.

“That’s infinity,” he said.

That kid and I went on to have many more cliched schoolchildren arguments, such as what our three wishes would be if a genie were to give us three wishes. He said he wanted money, power and happiness.

I told him that this was incredibly dumb, and that the real right answer was money, power, and three more wishes. I said that’s the loophole: you have to use the third wish to wish for more wishes. He said it so does not work that way. I said it does too. He said does not. I said does too. Oh, to be in first grade again.

The arguments about infinity changed throughout elementary school. I think third grade was when a friend of mine realized that the largest number was not infinity, that it was in reality “infinity plus one.” I said, no way, what about infinity plus two? My friend said, what about infinity plus three? I said, what about infinity times infinity? And so on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera.

In fourth grade someone found out that infinity was actually “not a number,” and thereafter that guy used this knowledge to abort infinity arguments before they even started. I’d say, “So what do you think the largest number is? I think it’s infinity times infinity times infinity times infinity,” and this guy would just look at me and say, with this bizarre faux-mystical wisdom, “Infinity is not a number.” And he’d walk away.

In high school I took trigonometry and the only thing I remember about that class is the phrase “as x approaches infinity.” I have no idea what that phrase means or signifies anymore, but I think about it all the time. As x approaches infinity. It just sounds so fucking profound.

So I took Point Omega to the Starbucks that’s sort of built into Barnes & Noble’s second floor. I put it and my bag down on a table near the window, and went over to the barista and tried to order coffee, and was caught off-guard because I couldn’t remember how to order shit at Starbucks and also because the barista was lithe and lissome and generally very pretty, and there is something about pretty members of the opposite sex that causes my brain to crumple.

“I’ll have,” I said, “a, uh, like, uh, you know, like, like, well, kind of a tall, like, a tall, uh, a latte.”

In my confusion, I mispronounced the word “latte.” I said it with a short “a.”

When I had the coffee, I returned to my table and noticed that the person sitting in front of me was an Indian dude and that he was reading a book. I could, at a glance, recognize this book. It was First Aid for the USMLE Step 1.

I could recognize the book because I have a copy of it. Almost every med student I know has a copy of it.

Right now I’m supposed to be using that book, because I’m supposed to be studying for “the USMLE Step 1.” “USMLE” stands for “United States Medical Licensing Exam,” and “Step 1″ signifies that the test actually has three parts.

I don’t know what parts two and three involve, but I know that part one is meant to test your “basic” “science” “skills.” The test requires you to commit a very large amount of information to memory, and this is where First Aid for the USMLE Step 1 comes in: it is a book that kind of consolidates all the shit you need to know into one thing.

How does it do this? Well, the book is very, very thick: about four Point Omegas thick. The book also just summarizes the hell out of shit. It doesn’t actually explain anything. The book is little more than an incredibly lengthy list of facts, with no explanation of why those facts are what they are. What I’m saying here is that it would be a laughably huge understatement to say that First Aid is a little hard to read.

Several people have told me that studying for Step 1 is “really simple” because “all you have to do is memorize First Aid.”

Part of me wants to wonder what kind of crack these people are smoking, but most of me knows that they are not smoking crack at all. They are just people who are capable of memorizing shit. They can do it pretty easily.

I cannot do that. Maybe it means I’m defective, or maybe it means my mind just doesn’t work that way. Maybe the problem is that I never actually did any work up until now: every single thing tested on Step 1 is something I was taught at some point in the past two years, but I blew all those classes off, never even attempting to learn any of the information long-term. I crammed, because it was easier, and because I didn’t give a fuck.

And a book like First Aid is what I guess you could call a “reviewing tool” as opposed to a “learning tool.” It assumes you already know this stuff.

So I have First Aid, but cannot use it. Instead I’ve been trying to use individual, “subject-based” review books, to get more detail, more context. There are a lot of books available. I guess review books are big business. A list of just some of the titles I own: Rapid Review Pathology; Board Review Series: Physiology; High-Yield Gross Anatomy; Lippincott’s Illustrated Reviews: Biochemistry; Katzung & Trevor’s Pharmacology Examination and Board Review.

And I’m jumping all over the place, not studying any of this in a coordinated way.

I tried to read pathology stuff tonight but kept glancing around. At one point I saw two Indian girls walk into the cafe area, saw them sit down several feet away, and saw one of them pull out what was unmistakably a copy of First Aid.

I have no idea who these girls were, or, for that matter, who the dude in front of me was. It’s possible that they go to the other med school in Kansas City: maybe they’re all from KU, rather than from UMKC.

KU’s med program is, colloquially, referred to as “KU med.” I knew a guy in Springfield, in high school, who wanted to go there. I didn’t like this guy much. Freshman year, spring 2003, we were in the same English I class together. English was the last class of the day, right after lunch.

Since I had no friends, et cetera, I typically ate lunch by myself in about five minutes and then left the cafeteria and sat down in the hallway near the English room, where I’d try to read for the next twenty-five minutes.

I say “try” to read because as I read, more people trickled into the hallway and this guy would invariably show up and just fucking ambush me and start talking, earnestly, about shit I didn’t care about, such as, to take just one example, KU med.

“I really want to go to KU med,” this guy would say. “That’s why I want to take Latin next semester.”

“Uh, what?” I said.

“You know, because, like, the majority of medical terms, they come from Latin, right? So I figured I’d learn Latin to get myself kind of a heads-up.”

Not only was this absurd, it was also wrong. It seems clear that most medical terms come from Greek. Maybe this guy didn’t know there was a difference. Greek, Latin – you know, same thing, right?

I remember we were allowed to do one of our book reports in English on “any book” that we “wanted.” I picked The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, and wrote this kind of scathing thing about how shitty it was (this was around the time it hit me that all the genre fantasy I’d been reading was terrible).

This guy picked Kiss the Girls, by James Patterson. An interesting fact about James Patterson: he is probably the worst fiction writer in the fucking English language. I think I would rather read Dan Fucking Brown than James Patterson. This is saying a lot.

This guy loved the James Patterson book. The book, in fact, converted this guy into a Patterson fan. He told me (many times, and at length) about how he now had this burning desire to read every novel James Patterson had ever written, because Kiss the Girls just really, really impressed him.

The following semester, this exact guy ended up in my English II class, where he kept asking me to help him write some essay about, I don’t even know, fucking Lord of the Flies or some shit. I was getting so tired of this dude. I eventually told him that.

“Seriously,” I said, “just leave me the hell alone, okay? Why do you keep talking to me all the time? We’re not like friends, you know. You do realize this, right?”

The guy said, “I think you could stand to be a little nicer,” and slunk off.

And I thought, man, maybe he was right: maybe I could stand to be a little nicer. Then again, I had to get this guy off my back somehow, right?

A problem with me is that I’ll allow situations like that to kind of fester for a while, because I don’t want to offend anyone. And then I snap. It was probably unfair to the guy. It’s not like he knew I hated him that whole time. Maybe he really did think we were friends. Well, whatever.

I was turned on to Don DeLillo by a friend of mine here; she read White Noise in high school and recommended it to me. I was kind of surprised that DeLillo was on her curriculum, but she went to some kind of fancy private school, so I guess that explains it.

We never read anything terribly interesting at my high school. It was standard-issue, predictable stuff. To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby.

I really liked White Noise. My reaction, after I finished it, was this overwhelming desire to just read the thing again, immediately. I almost never feel that way when I get done reading a book. Usually I just think, well, okay, I got done with that.

White Noise compelled me to seek out and read every other book DeLillo had ever written. It just had that effect on me.

White Noise also made me wish (not for the first or last time) that I’d gone into English or some shit instead of fucking medicine, because then I could be doing something entertaining, like writing a master’s thesis on White Noise and “consumer culture” as “reflected through” the “lens of” something-or-other right now, rather than, for e.g., being in my current position of needing to memorize the fucking contents of First Aid for the USMLE Step 1.

I like DeLillo a lot as a stylist. I know that sounds incredibly pretentious but I can’t think of a less obnoxious way of putting it. I like the guy’s spare, kind of deadpan prose. I wish I could write like that.

DeLillo, from what I understand, still writes on a typewriter. He only writes one paragraph per page. Sometimes he types the same paragraph out over and over again, obsessively. He says he pays a lot of attention to the actual shapes of the words he’s writing. He looks at the form of each letter and considers how they physically fit together.

That kind of deliberation appeals to me. Nabokov did something sort of similar: I’ve read that he wrote his novels on index cards.

After about an hour, that Indian guy put First Aid away and pulled out his laptop. It was a MacBook Pro. Look at that fucking lemming, I thought, using a MacBook Pro. Then I realized, to my absolute fucking chagrin, that I, myself, own and use a MacBook Pro. Why am I such a dick?

I tried to picture myself as a “famous writer,” some forty or fifty years in the future. I’d be this old masterly dude, like Don DeLillo is now. Someone would be interviewing me on the occasion of the release of my fifteenth novel, Loop, Infinite.

The person would ask if I still use a MacBook Pro to write, and I’d say, yeah, I’ve been writing on the same one since 2009. Except, no, that would never happen. You can use a typewriter for forty or fifty years, but not a laptop. Laptops break. Laptops become obsolete.

I felt like this was something almost profound, and found myself wishing I had Don DeLillo’s cell phone number, and wishing that we were friends, because then I could call him and tell him that shit about how laptops break, and he’d probably say some incredibly deep and wise shit about how that’s symbolic of some particular aspect of consumer culture. Unfortunately, I kind of doubt Don DeLillo even owns a cell phone.

I looked back at Indian dude’s MacBook. I could tell, from the way his Dock and Finder looked, that he was still running Tiger. I wondered, for a second, why he had not yet upgraded to Leopard, and then I berated myself for thinking something that fucking nerdy. Who gives a shit what operating system this dude is running?

A little less than a year ago, a girl asked me to upgrade her own MacBook Pro, which was running Tiger, to Leopard. I remember that I agreed. Why did I agree? On one level, I was just trying to be nice.

On another level, the girl was totally pretty, so I almost had no choice but to comply. One of my problems is that if a sufficiently pretty person asks me to do anything, I will do the thing, no matter what the thing is, and no matter who the pretty person is.

This is, I suppose, a big character flaw of mine. It’s the kind of thing that would have led me into big trouble by now if my life were somebody’s work of fiction.

I went to get more coffee, and while at the front, waiting for my coffee, I noticed there were actually coffee mugs on sale, right there at the coffee counter where you order your coffee. You can order coffee and buy a coffee mug at the same time, if you so desire. This was another thing I would have called Don DeLillo about if I had his cell phone number.

The mugs on sale had inspirational messages printed on them. The one closest to me said, “Do what you want and follow your heart. Live the life you’ve dreamed of living!”

I said, “Easy for you to say, mug.” Actually, I did not say this, because there were people around. The pretty barista was right there, and did I want her thinking I was crazy? No. I mean, it’s not like I’m not pretty crazy, because I am, but I didn’t want her thinking that.