Cool hand

It's cold and damp this evening, and stinging droplets - the product of a day full of rain and mist - cling to my cheeks like tears as I walk through campus. Light pours out through archways and alleys and from the cars that hum along Nassau Street, sending fleeting beams up the stone walls and through the gates. And yet I feel strangely solitary. The rain has driven most inside, though it has now ceased, and the hour makes it hard to see any animals through the cloak of darkness. A few distant howls of laughter come echoing through the heavy night, shepherded to my ears by the thick fog that has seeped into the main quads and courtyards as if from an overflowing glass. Each building looks ominous against the night, and the trees seemed dwarfed by the eerie glow and by their own shadows flickering against the walls in the waning moonlight.

This is the Princeton I didn't see on my first visit, or even the second or the third. This is the empty campus that seethes on its own until day breaks. Then it is flooded again with pastels and laughter, when it is no longer desolate and festers no more. For now, though, I walk through yet another arch and hear my footsteps reverberate off the walls and come screaming back into my eardrums, each noise amplified against the silent night.

    I've come to the Wilson School fountain, and I sit and listen to the splash of water against the smooth stone floor. Beneath a starless sky that seems to have swallowed up each glistening star, the fountain bottom sparkles with quarters, nickels and pennies dropped casually by passers-by. I fish dime out of my pocket and toss it in. It hardly makes a sound against the churning of the water, and my wish, too, is drowned out by the sudden blare of car horns, unusual for this time of night.

    I think of my parents now, alone at home and awake, too, watching Paul Newman movies on TCM until they fall asleep. My home is quiet now too, and each creak of the old wood floors is like a cannon blast at Gettysburg. The city around it is not so friendly now, the backyard not so inviting. We are not there to take care of each other, so we've come to fear each scene that is not just the way we dreamed it to be. From a campus barren to a bed empty, my parents and I share a sense of apprehension at this new chapter and wariness at what lies beyond the horizon. My mother gets up to pour herself a glass of water, and the liquid splashes against the bottom of the glass. In her late-night stupor, she lets the cold water fill to the brim and start to flow over onto her wrist, surprising her as her eyes flash back down to the faucet.

I dip my hand into the fountain and bring it cold and glistening before my face. It holds nothing. I can snatch at the night and try to keep it as much as I like, but nothing will stick. I can attempt to bottle this mixture of tranquility and uneasiness and ship it home, but it will not translate. Instead, I find that my experience here will have to be my own entirely, that my stories over the phone will not resonate with the electricity carried by this hazy evening at college. There is nothing of it that I can share with them.

    Back at home, Paul Newman returns to the screen, playing poker and winning, as he always does. He smiles devilishly as he rakes in another pot. "Yeah," he says against the static air in my parents' bedroom, in lines spawned from the clarity in my own mind, "but sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand."