Each in Turn
Caitlin was exactly as good a student as she remembered. The reason that she does not remember working is because she spent all of her time in the active pursuit of the knowledge that the degree promised to impart. She received three separate scholarships, all of them meagre in the scope of things, and now only remembers receiving one of them. She had her rent paid by her parents, who were wealthy.
Like Ella, she had mostly antagonistic relationships with her tutors, with one notable exception, which we will get into. These relationships had the flavour of disdain, more than of fear or hatred— Caitlin considered most of her tutors unimaginative and unqualified to teach. She enjoyed attending lectures from professors and especially professionals and specialists from outside the institution, and made a habit of rudely interrogating the actual teaching staff during their studio visits, even belittling them when she was able. She did this with a marked air of exasperation— why are you letting me bully you? I’m an undergraduate student. Show me why I’m wrong. Tell me to shut the fuck up.
The arrogance of youth! She also remembers none of this. Caitlin’s memory is a curious thing— simultaneously hyperfocused and hyper-selective. In her own mind’s eye she was simply a dedicated student, and showed her dedication by taking her work seriously. She got good grades, actually very good grades, and produced a series of essays over the course of her studies that would set up the groundwork for her thinking and her procedures— a strange term, but one that she used in her own mental functioning; her life was built around and supported by these procedures, which were something like routines, and something like mental images that placed her in association with the writers that she admired. As she did this she cycled through young and completely disposable lovers at a voracious pace. Something she does remember very clearly was one of these young lovers, a sensitive, intelligent man, but a coward in her estimation and as such beyond saving, studying art at a worse university, telling her something that stuck with her. He said: you should be careful breaking people’s hearts. Adults do crazy things all the time in relationships, they kill their spouses, they kill themselves. It’s not all so easy.
He said it in an odd way that Caitlin knew immediately meant that he was not talking about himself. He was talking in the abstract, as though, in a moment of young-art-student-lucidity, he had seen her murdered by an angry lover, or perhaps seen her murdering someone else (perhaps for cowardice?), or even seen her killing herself. They had broken up at that point, but it was such a strange barb of a comment that she was briefly upset that she had decided to end things, and actually the two of them would remain friends in a distant sort of way for a couple of years after this, exactly because of this odd flash of insight.
In addition to her various boyfriends, girlfriends, and lovers, she developed an intense mutual attraction with exactly one of the teaching staff on the course, an older woman who was actively despised by the other tutors and professors, and who taught cinema studies, and a class titled ‘Compositional Cruelty’, and another simply titled ‘Demons’, which was concerned with the iconic placement of limbs and other bodily units onto abstract series, and was nearly a class on choreography or script-writing.
She could not remember the tutor’s name, and they never had sex, but she (Caitlin) would take her (the tutor) out to dinner often, and try to get her drunk, because when she was drunk she had wonderful things to say about cruelty and demons, and also because she was a flirt when she was drunk, and fantastically full of true, unrestrained hatred for the university. She was also (and Caitlin liked this much less) full of the same poison for art, and for artists (at least for living artists), and, it was slowly and painfully revealed, for her own failure to penetrate into their sainted ranks when she was younger. So getting her drunk was always a gamble— you might get demon and sex chat, but you might also get the suicidal misery of the unfulfilled creative staring down late-middle-age in almost complete anonymity.
But Caitlin felt strongly that from this woman, uniquely, she could genuinely learn things. She was exposed to unbelievably subtle and complex interrelations of categories that she was certain the other tutors did not actually care to try to understand when they referenced them in the way that they were formally required to. It was in these drunken dinner dates that she realised that, for example, a painting, or a text, was an infinitely and recursively complex text— that each could be penetrated and excavated forever, and that this made them useless as discreet statements of any intent or position, but infinitely open to the inscription of finer and finer essays at the beauty and fragility of description of the world, or of life in the world. She learned that some people are sensitive and some are not, and that the infinity of the painting or the text was simply opened up differently in each case— that sensitivity is a technique, in exactly that same way as coarseness. She learned (and saw, in the same way that you suddenly see faces and monsters and animals in clouds) that she could dedicate her entire life to the excavation of infinite forms, and that this would be a life wasted, because her own infinities were in projects and structures that were strictly bounded. A demon, with its iconographic body, is not like a painting (though one might treat them as thought they were, if one had the inclination and the training), and she felt kinship with demons more than with paintings.
She would place a thing in its relation, and the only infinite volume that she cared to incorporate into that relation was the other (the other person, or herself as other), because of course people are quite enough to deal with without the introduction of infinite paintings and infinite texts.
The sad tutor understood her and tried to steer her back towards paintings and essays; a transgression for which Caitlin neatly punished her by withdrawing interest and attention nearly completely. She began instead to date outside the academy— developed an interest in seeing police officers and specialists in logistics and intelligence. She thought of them as characters in film scripts. She thought of them as her demons, posed and signifying, and placed each in their proper frame, and then took great pleasure in swapping the frames, in changing the positions of the limbs, much to the amusement of her lovers, who thought of her as basically an eccentric (those of them who appreciated art or the idea of art even thought of her as something akin to a holy fool), but also good in bed, attractive (attractive more than beautiful, in her own estimation and also in that of the partners), intelligent, wealthy, or if not exactly herself wealthy, clearly from wealth, derived from its rituals, accustomed to moving through them. She met Beth this way of course, but more on that later.
She got her own start in intelligence during this period. She was having sex with a man who worked in personnel procurement for a security firm (she was wholly unaware then, and never found out, that this man was in love with her), and one day asked him what type of person the firm most needed or most sought out. His answer, which he had to think about for a while, was not exactly what she expected. ‘The ideal situation for us in terms of an analyst or operative,’ he said, ‘is that you can give them a broadly-defined task, and trust that they can identify exactly where, inside that broad scope, they need clarity. Then they can go off and set themselves up in whatever way that they need, without oversight, but they must be able to identify where they require clarity.’
She recognised herself at once, and said so, which made him laugh.
About a year later she applied for an analyst position and was hired on; her first employment since beginning her degree six years prior. She was twenty five years old.
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