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The Opened Verifold
Few scholars find their way into such circles.
Ira woke in the library reading room to the ringing strike of the university clock tower. He felt his glasses digging into the side of his face, stirred by the vibration of the table, as each successive toll of the bell pounded against the back of his eyes.
One, two, three, four o’clock.
Even after their echoes subsided, his head wouldn’t stop throbbing.
He looked down at his coursework strewn across the table, creased where he’d slept on it. Notes from Professor Harland’s lectures on Alterity Theory. Ira’s scattered pages of half-outlined term paper proposals — mostly false starts that he’d since crossed and caveated into oblivion. He busied himself gathering them up, getting his bearings and sorting everything into its proper order.
Among the notes were two distinct passages he’d cited, surrounded by his own densely-crowded annotations. He last recalled his efforts to reason through their mess of contradictions and mutual contingencies, how he lost his sense of time in this room, staring and thinking as though the quandary had locked him inside his own head, not to be released unless he produced a solution.
It was coming back to him, how his vision had begun to cross and double, until thesis and…
