*Note: This essay is an excerpt from a longer project about walking the Camino de Santiago.
Spring arrived and I barely noticed. Low sky the color of concrete crumbled into pebbly blue, whipping wind through the hilltop campus. And where was I? Under tube lighting, my desk one of five pushed against the walls of our shared office. As a grad student I get an office, but I share it with four others. We are on the interior, windowless side of the hallway. Our chairs have levers that move the seats up and down, tilt them forward and back. It’s standard-issue office stuff, but we’ve always found it delightful, grownup. On Monday of our last week, for no reason we could tell, the back of Tony’s chair falls off and onto the floor while he conferences with a student. Tony and I laugh like it’s a slapstick routine, too loud, and we crawl around on the carpet looking for the screw while Tony’s student says, “Huh” without moving. Eventually we give up. We stare at the seat back lying upholstery side down, HUM spray-painted onto the plastic. Humanities: the last building on campus to get funding for upgrades. It didn’t matter. We have only four more days to use these chairs and then the University will politely revoke our offices and furnishings, our mailboxes, our personal codes to the copier upstairs. It’s because we’re graduating but it feels curt and impersonal, like a punishment.
As a graduation gift my mom has bought me a plane ticket to Portugal so we can walk 250 miles of the Camino de Santiago, from Porto to Santiago. Gavin has already walked the Camino, solo. He walked a different route that my mom and I are planning, coming from the east rather than the south. On our first date, it was the first thing we had in common: his pilgrimage just past and mine quickly arriving. He produced a scallop shell from his backpack and told me it was the passport of the Camino, both a visa for entry and a symbol of membership. “You’ll see it everywhere you go,” he told me.
Why a shell? Because when Saint James went to Spain and Germany and France and Portugal to spread God to the far ends of the known Earth, he carried the scallop as his only tool; he drank from it, ate from it, smoothed it in his weary palm. Or: when Saint James died his body vanished, but a faithful hermit followed a fallen star east to Galicia’s wide fields and dug red dirt with the shell, uncovering the remains of the Wanderer, in the spot that would become Santiago. Or: after Saint James’ boat capsized on its way across the ocean, he was carried back to Spain, beached in a favorable tide, covered by two thousand scallop shells which had delivered him alive to his spiritual home. The shell’s furrows converge at a single point, as many furrows as there are paths to Santiago, as many paths as there are stories about Saint James.
When we met, Gavin lived alone on a boat that was stored above-ground in dry dock, no neighbors in sight. We had to climb the swim ladder to get to the door. I was powerfully attracted to this introvert in his strange hermitage. It was the first thing we had in contrast: his quiet self-containment, my desire to crash around in the world, making noise and friends.
In the last few weeks the right side of my body has begun a slow process of failure. First I discover a wide, gray bruise on my right thigh. Then a welt on my neck. A ring on my right hand which has given me no trouble for years suddenly blisters under the silver. A splash of pimples across my right cheek. I develop a persistent nasal dripping, and blow my nose so often it erupts in scabs, which I self-consciously pick at so that they grow larger, spread out onto my face. I lean my head back in the mirror: the right nostril is enormous, swollen. Pressure in my face wakes me: behind my eyebrows, under my molars. I sleep with tissue twisted in my nose and the bedside fills up with soggy paper. I take all of this as a clear sign that my left brain has exhausted itself.
On Tuesday I pay $85 to have my master’s thesis bound for shelving in the University library. I pay my money in the print shop surrounded by samples of different embossment styles, suddenly doubting the significance of this achievement. As grad students we don’t sit for finals, but the last week always boils over with deadlines and appointments. I calculate the days’ must-dos in five-minute increments. After the print shop I must get forms notarized in the graduate office across campus. I am hungry. I’m hungry all the time now; I think it is from thinking.
Summer approaches, and while the days are still cool the nights shrink to nearly nothing. The hours of dark are slender, with wide shoulders of transition on either end. I lie awake in deep-black center of it. I drink water from a jar so big I have to sit up in bed and grip it with both hands like a child. Like a child, I want to be held. Gavin presses his bare butt onto my thigh and tilts his face as far from me as possible, which is his way of saying: I love you, but I’m tired.
I have dreams about trying to do things and failing. I try to play drums in a band, but my drums are yogurt containers and someone keeps turning them right-side up so that my drumsticks crack the edges. I run a footrace but I’m carrying a pillow, a king-size pillow with ruffles at the edges, and I toss it into the grass then wake up with a powerful muscle cramp in my right calf. I stitch the stringy night minutes together, three at a time, until they add up to morning.
Our professors encourage us to recover. Shut your laptops! Go for a run! Tenured writers bound out of their windowed offices in workout gear while we ghost the hallways, waiting to be dismissed. I leave on Sunday for Portugal, and my professors are thrilled that I am walking the Camino. Recovery, they insist, is physical.
My roommate Lindsey moves out. For weeks her boxes, baskets, and crates tide towards the back door, then disappear. In her place, Gavin moves in. He carries three armfuls from his boat, and will sell or abandon the rest. His items accrete like barnacles in the corners of the house. I find a small elf doll, Christmas-green, on a shelf behind a vase of dried flowers. His enormous jar of nutritional yeast looms over my spices. He replaces the toothbrush cup.
When my mom arrives she takes Lindsey’s old room downstairs and every day unpacks her suitcase to survey what she has brought for the Camino, what she still needs. She studies maps on the couch, checks the weather on the Portugal coast. “Did you pack a raincoat?” she asks me. “But is it a bulky raincoat?” I tell her yes, then no, though I haven’t actually packed anything at all. “It’s upstairs,” I say. Which, in a sense, is true. Every day she repacks and weighs, measures the dimensions of her gear.
On Wednesday, Gavin and I drive her to REI. My mom wants new shoes, although she bought shoes a long time ago, and has spent the last six months rising before dawn to break them in. Perhaps she broke them in and then all the way out. I don’t mind: my favorite Thai restaurant is next door. On the way, she peppers Gavin with pointed questions about packing. She’s hoping for his advice but he’s bad at giving it. She wants to know if she should bring a small travel towel or a full-size, an inflatable pillow, 3 water bottles or just 2. “Either way is fine,” he replies vaguely, shrugging. It’s probably true, but it’s not the sort of answer she’s looking for. She spends the rest of the ride in silence, flipping through a stack of store receipts, and when we get there Gavin evaporates into the bike corral.
On the shoe wall short wooden shelves protrude with left-foot samples of every make and model they sell, and Mom lifts then replaces each one. She agonizes over these. I circle the sock displays. Silk, wool, seamless, double-layered. The thinnest are most expensive, and I convince myself to join in her spirit of preparedness. My mom and I become twin agonizers. I lift and replace, then pick two of the double-layered pairs and a set of silk liners. They can all rub against each other, all these stacks of fabric, leave my heels and toes intact. One package promises No blisters. Guaranteed! “You hear that, feet?” I say down to the floor. “Someone’s making you a promise.”
On Thursday Mom helps me box up my office. The shelves and drawers fill two cardboard crates, and then there is the lamp, and a string of colored lights. That’s it. My mom points to a desk near the door messy with post-its and framed photos: Tony and his mom, Tony and his girlfriend. The shelf above is crowded with a rainbow of book spines. “That’s Tony’s desk,” I say. “He’s reluctant about graduation.” We make one trip with our boxes out to my truck, and halfway there the lampshade falls onto the ground.
My confidence goes soft at the edges, takes on unstable loads of doubt. I worry that the last two years have qualified me for nothing useful. Nothing useful at all. The story of St. James and the shell is charming, but I’m not sure what good it does. What does it add to the world? The harder I study fiction the slipperier it gets, alchemic and ephemeral and incomparably difficult. I can’t figure out the use of it. Why aren’t I in the engineering building? Why don’t I study vaccines, sustainable fuels, aquaculture? Why build stories when the world needs so many lamps and batteries?
On Friday, I bike uphill to campus for the last time, limp through the grim Humanities halls. Other than my new double-layered socks, I wear exactly what I wore the day before, and perhaps the day before that. “Nice outfit,” says Tony. “Thanks,” I reply. “It’s from my floordrobe.” His laugh is a short and knowing hoot. We are all, each in our own way, walking a long and lonesome path. Sentimental at cleaning out the office. Sneezing as we emerge into sunlight.