Yoda has taught at the university for years, but this afternoon, as he got his coffee from El Don Motor Lodge lobby vending machine, he can’t remember the name of his class or the building he’d taught in for how long? He stands on the sidewalk. Cars zoom by, and the Number 66 bus belches smoke as it travels west on the Mother Road. He looks down at his shirt. Two letters in Anthrax, his daughters’ favorite band, were splashed with bleach, so it just says ANT AX. He looks further down. His khakis are wrinkled. And what is that stain?
He recalls now that he’d been writing a lecture most of the night. He smiles and sighs with relief at this memory of where his head had been. He teaches Bafflement 101 and a graduate-level course that traces the origins of obfuscation. He has found early mystification at the level of the protozoa.
As he wrote his lecture last night, just before dozing off, he thought about what his auntie had told him once. “Your thoughts are more powerful than anything. There is nothing without thought.” Then, she’d read the first chapter of Genesis to prove it to him.
He sighs and smooths his black t-shirt. He waves to a colleague exiting Room 109 of the motor lodge. Yoda brushes black bits of pavement off his pants and walks to a parked car in front of what used to be Arby’s but is now a bakery. A loaf of wheat bread cracked and dusted with flour is eleven dollars. Enigma Bread. But how good would a slice of that fresh bread be with his coffee.
Where had he set his coffee?
He sees his reflection in the car window and smooths his greying hair. Examines the side of his face with a scrap as if he’s fallen or been hit with something.
That’s right, he’d fallen asleep at his desk. It’s just a mark from his head resting on a stack of books. A paper cut, too. Books can be dangerous.
That’s why he’s trying hard to avoid entering the building just up the street. It’s full of books. The place that calls to him like church does for others. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the folded notice of an author talk. He’s drawn by the cover of the book – a sunrise after a long, long night.
He looks across the street at the new library. It’s built where the Caravan East used to be. The Caravan, where he’d spend nights with fellow students and MaryAnne from Pojoaque.
MaryAnn from Pojoaque had the most beautiful smile and black hair, so black it turned blue at midnight. MaryAnne from Pojoaque, whose voice soothed him, lowered his anxiety levels several notches when she’d speak of anything, but mostly when she talked about pie. She loved pie. After a some beers and dances, they would leave the Caravan, walk down to Harriet’s Diner, and have lemon meringue pie, and MaryAnne from Pojoaque would tell him how meringue was made. It required strong arms. Arms that had the endurance to stir and stir and stir. The kind of arms that could churn and churn and churn as if you were running through a desert with no end in sight.
Churn and churn and churn like his stomach now just thinking of books and MaryAnne and nights at the Caravan and bottles of beer sweating on the table and her love of pies and how she’d disappeared from him because she couldn’t understand his need to study so much. To stay out late with his colleagues working on his dissertation, and, of course, his need to teach. To teach students like his auntie taught him about thoughts that can lead out of bafflement. For example, thoughts of yellow pie with meringue.
He thought maybe this could be his last year? Maybe he was ready to retire from all this. He could hitchhike out to Pojoaque and see if MaryAnn is in her kitchen that’s yellow like her favorite pie. With yellow tiled countertops and a yellow Formica table with four chairs. One with a crack in the seat so that when she sits in her cut-off jean shorts, the gap in the vinyl scratches the back of her thigh. So, she fixes it with a piece of silver duct tape that matches the silver legs of the chairs. And, in the center of the table are sunflowers and lilies and just coming out of the oven a pie, the meringue, like foamy edges of a warm sea. MaryAnne from Pojoaque will say, “Come and get a slice, Myetsoh.”
“Myetsoh.” His birth name. The one he almost forgot because his colleagues call him Yoda because he knows things they don’t. Like protozoans split because they just couldn’t live with themselves, and Auntie, God is baffled and made us so.
Just like Myetsho knows, as he crosses the street with cars honking and enters the shiny new building, someone will be talking, in a soothing voice, not about pie, but about pie and how it is the dusty road home.
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