Beatrice Bat

Part 1.

In the library of CCNY I sat on a couch a space away from a familiar dark skinned girl, hair almost over one of her eyes. I wrote in my note book a few minutes and then noticed she was playing Sudoku. “How do you do that so well?” I asked.
She was startled. “What?” she whispered.
“You’re finishing that Sudoku. I’ve been playing every night this week and I can never finish. Is there some sort of trick?”
“I write the numbers on top,” she said with a very delicate, crispy, whispery voice. “And I cross them out as I get them so I can see clearly what I need.”
“You finished the crossword puzzle too.”
“Yea. I usually do.”
“What’s your name?”
“What?”
“Your name.”
“Beatrice.”
“Hi Beatrice.” She was very short, just over five feet tall. I’d been seeing her around and smiling at her for weeks and she always smiled back. “I’m Pink. What else do you do?”
“What?”
“What else do you do?”
“Um. What do you mean?”
“Besides Sudoku and crossword?”
“I draw. Um, and I make comics.”
“Cool,” I said.
“What are you writing?” she asked.
“I’m planning out the next few hours,” I said.
“I would never do that.”
“No? Hm. What do you make comics about?”
“My comics?”
“Yea.”
“Um. Well they’re just about things that happen.”
“What is it that you like about comics?” I asked.
She looked away from me and said, “I like how the illustrator draws particular parts of the story but decides what to leave out. I like that.”
I stared at her as she stared forward, as if she were protecting herself from further inquiries.
“It was good to meet you Beatrice. I will… see you around.”
She smiled at me. “Bye,” she whispered.

The book fair was set up in our campus, a roped off area of shelves with unwanted, cheap books. I saw Beatrice walking by it. “Beatrice!” I called.
She had a corduroy bag with buttons on the strap at her side and was holding a book with both arms against her chest. “Hi Pink,” she said smiling.
“Have you seen the book fair?” I asked.
“No. Is that where you’re going?”
“Yes. Come with me.”
“Okay.”
She followed me through the shelves. “Hey look,” I said. “The Bhagavad Gita. Cool.” She watched me flip through the pages. “Have you ever seen these pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t they cool?”
“Are you going to buy it?”
“No. I have it already just not with pictures.”
She followed me to another shelf. “Hey, look at this,” I said.
“What?”
“It looks like letters between Jack Kerouac and some lady.”
I bought it for a dollar and walked her to class, picking up the black school paper on the way.
“I read your article,” she said.
“The one about the water crisis?” I asked.
“Oh no. The one about going green.”
“Oh yes. The true way to go green,” I said, “is to protest.”
“A guy in my class,” she said, “told me he went to a protest at Baruch College against the budget cuts to CUNY.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m part of that.”
“Those things aren’t publicized enough though. In Paris they started charging tuition at this school and the whole city shut down because so many people were in the street. I think that was beautiful.”

Beatrice and I walked up the big white steps inside the middle of the Met Museum. “Remember that book?” I asked her.
“Which one?”
“The letters between Kerouac and that woman.”
“From the book fair.”
“Yea. I’ve been reading it.” I felt extremely empty because I had nothing else to say.
She took my hand and led me towards the exhibit. The sign said, “Love and the Renaissance.” There were extremely colorful paintings of semi nude people in natural settings surrounded by angels. There were flowers and sometimes alters. Beatrice let go of my hand and jotted notes in her book.
“I think the main thing,” I said, “was that before this time men would marry women by force you know? It was like a form of property and in the renaissance they wanted to make love the central thing and like always, emphasize chastity.” There was a painting of cupid sneaking behind someone in the shadow, putting his mischievous finger to his lips.
We walked through the knight’s armor. “Look how short people were back then,” she said.
“Yea.”
“I’d like a pendant of my own,” she said.
“What’s a pendant?”
“It’s that logo on their chest. See.”
“What would yours look like?”
“It would be a panda with a spear riding a unicorn over a banner that says ‘Go Team Beatrice.’” She giggled.
I wandered into the Asiatic room by myself. The walls were turquoise and the items were wooden.
“Pink,” called her soft voice from the room before me. I felt as if time had stopped.

She held my hand and we looked at a small statue of a fruit bat. “I was at this psychic Reiki healer recently,” I said. “And she told me that she saw this image of a bat while healing me, and that bats to her symbolize transformation.”
“That sounds correct,” she said. “I have a bat tattooed on my back.”
“Can I see?”
“Mm,” she considered it reluctantly. She lifted the back of her shirt. There was a cartoonish bat.
Outside it began to rain so I opened my umbrella. Half of it was broken and hung down so I held the remaining half over both of us, holding her close. “You’re ridiculous,” she laughed.
“So,” I said.
“You can just hold it over yourself.”
“Why? You’d get wet.”
We stopped at a corner for a red light. She was looking across the street and without second thought I kissed her.

On the train I wrote her a stream-of-consciousness letter, read it once and folded it four ways. When she wrote back she said, “I admit that this is my fifth try at writing this letter. I also admit that you make me extremely nervous. I’m also trying to write in pencil because as you say, it’s more sustainable although I have my skepticism about that.”

She walked with me from bulletin board to bulletin board. I held the thumbtacks and she held the posters. She lifted them up from the bottom as high as she could and I tacked them on top.
“That’s the last poster,” she said.
“Good. It’s been good to poster with you and that’s everything on my list.”
“Thank you Pink.”
I took my little notepad out of my pocket and scratched “Posters” off. “Oh no!” I shouted.
“What?” she asked.
“What time is it?”
She looked at her watch. “It’s 4:50.”
“I have ten minutes to submit my entry for the writing contest.”
“So what do you have to do?”
“Run. Can you come with me?”
“Okay.” We ran to the computer lab. I printed the story while she read the contest rules. “You’re supposed to number the pages,” she said, “and write the name of the award you’re competing for on the front page.”
“Fuck!” I yelled.
Soon we were running, holding hands, up the broken down escalators. I ran into the English department sweating, right up to one of the advisors and handed the manuscript to her.
“You’re ten minutes late Pink Noche,” she said in her Russian accent.
Beatrice came walking in.
“Will you accept it anyway?” I said, heaving.
“Yes,” said the advisor. “But this is the last time.”
Beatrice broke into laughter, leaning on her knees and I smiled, took her hand and walked out of the department.

“Who’s this girl?” asked my mother washing a dish in the sink. I leaned against the counter, legs crossed, hands in my pocket watching her go back and forth from the sink to the other counter, letting the water run.
“Mom, you shouldn’t let the water run,” I said.
“What, I’m doing dishes.”
“She’s from school.”
“What school? Your school?”
“Yes. CCNY. My school. What’s sort of interesting is around the time that I met her I bought this book.”
“Yea?” she said, cleaning a knife.
“There’s a parallel because it’s a compilation of letters between this woman when she was dating Jack Kerouac in 1957. Kerouac was older than her. I’m older than this girl, Beatrice. She lived in Morning Side and this girl, Beatrice lives in Morning Side. This woman and Beatrice went to the same high school.”
My mother transferred to the counter, letting the water run. She said, “So?”
I reached over and turned off the sink.
“What are you doing?” she yelled.
“You’re wasting water.”
“I’m trying to do dishes!”
“I’ll do the dishes.”
“Okay. Do them. Anyway, I don’t get what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Well the other thing is Beatrice is kind of shy like the girl in the book.”
“Well, that’s okay. She does talk doesn’t she?
“Never mind mom.”
“Do you like her?”
“Yea. We’ve been going out now.”

I was typing on a computer in a small office covered in all sorts of maps, posters that said things like, “Take Action” or with images such as wind turbines. There was a knock at the door. I let Beatrice in and shut the door behind her. “So this is where you save the planet?” she said.
“Well so far I’ve only done extremely local and more health-based environmental issues. I’ve only just began to focus Climate Change. I’ve been working extremely incessantly on it.” She sat on the couch. I turned on a lamp and turned the main light off. I turned off the computer screen and sat next to her. Strangely, some R&B music played through the walls.
I gave her the next letter and she said, “Thank you. I really like reading your letters.”
“I like the drawings you put in mine,” I said. “And you say really insightful things.”
“Thank you.” She leaned against me and said, “Pink. I really like you.”
“I like you.”
“Only, you make me extremely nervous. I had this dream of you the other night. You were in some sort of parade. I was squeezing through to see you. It was like you had super powers or something.”
“Hm,” I said. “I don’t think I have any super powers. I can do this funny dance though.”
“And do you remember meeting me?” she asked.
“I remember seeing you walking by and smiling back at me.”
“No. Before that. Do you remember you helped me register to vote?”
“Oh. Oh I registered hundreds of people to vote this year. I even stood on the street in Harlem and registered people, and in the subway.”
“It was at a table outside. I thought you were in your late twenties.”
“Late twenties?”
“Yea. It’s embarrassing. I realized you were a student when I saw you inside and realized you were probably 25 years old. And I was holding a cupcake and you smiled at me and I bumped right into this woman and dropped the cupcake on the floor,” she giggled. “Then in the library when you so randomly talked to me, and I don’t know why you did by the way, I realized that you looked extremely young and that you were probably only 20 years old.”
I laughed. I wondered what the deal was with this girl. Most people thought I looked younger than I was. Most girls seemed to think I was too funky or gay or skinny or too nice. I thought to myself, “This Beatrice is not human.” I didn’t think I was looking for anyone gentle and good. I thought I was looking for someone weird and outgoing. Beatrice fell asleep on me. I watched her breathe for an hour. She was like a flower.

Part 2.

“Wake up,” I said. She lifted her head from me in the darkness of the bus and the night. “We’re here.”
A group of five of us walked into a hotel room where one friend already was. She greeted us enthusiastically in her Russian accent. “The opening ceremony was so great!” she said. “It was spiritual and like we were all one.”
“Too bad we missed it,” my friend Amy said.
Immediately Beatrice and I curled up together on a bed. “They’re tired,” said Amy. “Louie’s going to be here tomorrow. He’ll miss all the workshops but he’ll be here Monday to lobby.”
“That’s good,” said the Russian girl.

Thousands of people our age swarmed every where in the Convention Center, many in green t-shirts. The seven of us met by a large Rosetta Stone-square block with every alphabet carved out and the shadows of the alphabets projected onto us. We all had name tag necklaces on. “So how was everyone’s workshop?” Amy said.
Beatrice said, “Janine and I went to one about global politics and Climate Change. It really helped me understand things.”
“I went to one about food,” I said. “They had to divide it into two workshops it was so popular.”
Beatrice whispered to me, “Pink, I want to go to the last one with you.” It was Sunday and we hadn’t attended any together in the two days. “I was thinking we could go to ‘Art and Activism.’”
“I was thinking the same thing.”

She held my hand on an island in the middle of Times Square. Someone gave her a jar and said, “Be very careful with this. It’s coal sludge. It’s very toxic.” The 100 of us marched one block to a hotel chanting, “Clean Coal’s a Dirty Joke/Watch Your Profits go Up in Smoke.” We circled in front of a hotel where a coal company was having a black tie affair. Beatrice handed flyers to people passing by. One woman shook her head at us in disgust.

As the sun set we walked out of the dispersing rally and I asked her, “Do you want to meet my friend at an exhibit on robot-art?”
On the screen the robot drew all sorts of patterns. “The robot makes its own decisions,” said the narrator. My arm was around Beatrice in the dark theatre. My friend had a mustache like Salvador Dali. I wasn’t paying attention. I was worried that my mind was fizzling out.
The lights came on. My friend said, “What did you guys think?”
“It was really cool,” she said. “When I was a little girl my father made robots and once he worked on a similar project. I really can’t wait to tell him about this. What did you think Pink?”
“So,” I said. “They are robots stimulated by brain tissue?”
“What?” she said.
“I mean. How did they make decisions?”
“You didn’t understand it?” She looked at me horrified.

I walked her home in the night. She was on her phone. “Dad! I saw a movie that reminded me of you.” She held my hand.

I joined her in the cafeteria where she laughed with her dozen friends. I didn’t pay any attention and didn’t understand their inside jokes. She looked at me with girlish eyes and said, “Are you okay? You seem bored.”
“I’m just kind of tired. I have to go finish some work.”
“Okay.”

On the train I read her letter. She said, “I don’t like that you don’t talk to my friends. I have to tell them that you don’t hate them. They’re important to me just like you are important to me. I know you want to meet my parents but I can’t let you meet them until you at least talk to my friends.”

I walked into the school gym which was filled with hundreds of people in white t-shirts that said Relay for Life. It was a cancer fundraiser. I spoke to my friend until Beatrice saw me. She was wearing the white t-shirt and no shoes. She asked, “Are you staying the whole night?”
“No. I just came to give you this letter.”
“Aw, stay the whole night.”
“The trip to the Climate Change Exhibit is ten tomorrow morning,” I said.
“So. We can just get coffee after this and then go from here.” Then she gave me sad puppy eyes.
I sighed. “For you I will stay.”
A woman said to me, “You’re going to walk laps around the gym in those boots?”

I sat down with Beatrice’s friends in their circle of some 15 people. They were playing cards and joking. “Hey,” I said to Beatrice. “I’m going to talk to my friend.”
My friend Wanda was one of the organizers of the event. “Wanda,” I said. “What can I do to help?”
“Do you want to run the popcorn machine?”
“Okay.”

Beatrice came to me where I was reading my astronomy text book at the machine. I loved my astronomy class. “Why won’t you come hang out with my friends?” she said.
“I’m volunteering.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to. I won’t be here all night.”
“I’ll stay here with you,” she said sadly.
“I’m boring Beatrice. Go hang out with your friends.”
She sullenly left.

When I returned to her I took a short story from my bag to show her. “Look,” I said. “Someone in my class wrote this. I want you to read it.”
After ten minutes she said, “Can I show you all the typos you missed?”
“That wasn’t the point!” I yelled and snatched the story from her and went back to Wanda.
As the people dispersed I cleaned up debris around the gym and she said bye to her friends. I struggled to remove a blue balloon from a paperweight because it was her favorite color. When I gave it to her she said, “Aw. Thank you.”

We walked into the dawn. “I’m really cold,” she said.
“Take my jacket.”
“That’s okay,” she said.
“Let’s get coffee.”
“I’m going to go home.”
“Don’t go home. Come to the exhibit.”
“I don’t think we’re getting along very well right now.”
“Yea but you should still come to the exhibit. It’s about Climate Change.”
“I’ll go another time.”
I sighed. “You might as well go this time so you end up going for sure.”
“Bye Pink,” she said and left.

I walked to another part of campus and sat at a picnic table. After a while of quiet a blue balloon appeared. It floated under a ceiling and in between two walls where I watched it float off into the sky.

Amy said into the conference call, “Janine, You’re going to put up flyers tomorrow. Avery and Pink are going to leaflet from twelve to two. Does every one know what they’re doing for the rest of the week?”
“It’s going to rain on Earth Day,” Said Janine.
“It’s suppose to rain on Wednesday, which is the world’s Earth Day. Our Earth Day is Thursday, which should be sunny. Our events are inside on Wednesday and at 2 people are walking out of class to protest the budget cuts. I don’t know about you guys but I’m going to walk out.”
“Me too,” I said.

I wrote a text message asking people to volunteer for CCNY Earth Day and went through my address book clicking on names to send it to. When I got to Beatrice I hesitated. She had been at a couple of our meetings. She helped make flyers. But she hadn’t been helping at all for the past two weeks and we had hardly spoken. I skipped over her name and then I stopped again. “On the other hand,” I thought, “Just because she’s my girlfriend doesn’t mean she isn’t a person. It doesn’t mean I should exclude her from volunteering on Earth Day.” I scrolled back up and clicked on her name, counter-intuitively.

On the world’s Earth Day, I walked out of my astronomy class into the rain. Amongst the 150 people, someone gave me a sign and I stood up on a bench holding it over my head. I spotted Beatrice with her friends. They were standing outside of the rally talking. I got down and approached her.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“I know. Can I come to your building tonight after six?”
“Sure.”
I returned to the bench. I watched her and her friends walk away. “Does she not agree with this?” I wondered. “Why has she never discussed her feelings about this? Does she think I’m some sort of follower? Does she think I’m too political? Is it because her friends don’t care?”

The next day Avery helped me clean up on the sunny day in front of the school when the CCNY Earth Day dispersed. “I can’t believe it’s finally over,” she said.
“It’s never over,” I said. “But we can sleep tomorrow.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Where do you go now?”
“I have to talk to Beatrice. I guess me and her are over too.”
“Oh what happened?”
“Oh um… I don’t know. I’ll tell you later.”

I sat on the bench in front of her building. Her small form emerged into the windy, leaf swirling, late afternoon. I leaned back, exhausted, arms stretched out on the bench. She sat a foot away from me without touching me, her knees together, both hands on her knees, facing forward and looking down. “I think we should just be friends Pink.”
I was quiet. I watched her hair blow in the wind and her sad, almost indifferent face. It was surreal to hear her say that so certainly after such a short period of time. Just two months earlier she still looked at me with stars in her eyes and wrote as if she didn’t deserve me in her letters.
“Why?” I asked, sincerely.
“We’re just too different. We have nothing in common.”
I knew this was compensation for a longer story that she’d rather not say. Obviously, amongst the whole world, or the whole school, we had hardly different sentimentalities. “She just doesn’t think I love her back,” I thought. “I could get on my knees and tell her that she’s being stupid and that would probably work… but I’m pretty tired, and I don’t mind if my life changes right now.” I was amazed that she still wasn’t looking at me. “Don’t think that I don’t love you just because I’ve been so busy lately,” I said. “When the time comes, no one is important to me. People are replaced by the whole of the world.”
She was still quiet.
“But I thought about something today. Because it was Earth Day. I’ve been so frantic lately and especially today. I think to really appreciate nature you have to relax, like the people of pre-modern times who tended the fields all day.”
“They had it hard,” she said. “They worried about basic survival every day.”
“But I think it’s better to live on the edge of death, to be poor and to live benignly amongst nature.”
“People weren’t happy in those times, I assure you,” she said.
“I’m glad we’re having this discussion. I think we were lacking this.”
“I have to go,” she said. She stood up without touching me and walked inside at the same pace that she came out and with the same sullen grace. Somewhat awed, I watched her disappear.

That night I read her dozen or more letters and closed the lid on the little box. I turned off my lamp and the solar powered lamp that she bought me for Beatmas (she was born on Christmas) automatically turned on and illuminated the picture she drew of me and her laying in the grass, hearts floating up into the sun. I walked outside and in a courtyard I was suddenly struck by the sight of bats fluttering in the trees.