the great danes

It has always been extremely difficult for me to separate reality from my own sordid brand of fiction, and the already precarious distinction has been made even more so by the fact that I find myself living in an environment where it is so easy to succumb to the foreignness of everything that I often lose sight of the fact that not everything is part of some elaborate fantasy constructed for my own personal amusement - there are military strategies to study, babies to sit, Arabic words to memorize.

While I’m more or less fluent in French, I still have to pay attention to fully comprehend when someone is speaking to me.  If I suddenly decide to imagine, let’s say, yesterday’s guest lecturer in my evening class as a comic strip villain whose evil superpower is giving face transplants when you don’t want one, and then think about what his favorite kind of ice cream is for thirty minutes, and then think about him eating ice cream while rollerblading in drag, and then back to him being really good at face transplants - I’m done.  I can effectively go for two hours without having any idea whatsoever of what Very Serious Thing Such as Various Kinds of Real Terrorist Threats was being discussed.  This is a dangerous thing, especially given that all but two of my (graduate-level) classes are in French.  It is also highly entertaining. 

Allow me to explain: I can zone out better than the best of them.  And when I’m tired or cranky I can spend an entire two-hour class session thinking about alternate personas for my classmates, constructing elaborate back stories - sometimes including time travel and involvement in highly sensitive political scandals.  In this respect, going to my school is a gift.  Never in my life have I felt so consistently uncomfortable, which makes me retreat a little more than usual and play the observer because - when you’re made to feel constantly inadequate in this Very Serious, Impossibly Elite Political Science Institution - you have to go out of your way to find ways to make yourself laugh in order to avoid going insane.

There is a group of exchange students from a French military university who are attending Sciences Po this semester, two of whom I see on a semi-regularly basis.  I revel in their presence because they stick out as being more out of place in the environment than I am - they are a singular vision of Arnold Schwarzenegger next to their more effeminate Parisian male counterparts, with their crew cuts and regulation eyeglasses and enormous pectorals that protrude from their striped merino sweaters.  They speak in shortened, straight-to-the point phrases.  They are alarmingly polite.  They show no weakness, display no elements of superfluity.

Compared to them I am the homeless woman in the corner at Starbucks who spreads her own fecal matter on the bathroom walls and throws packets of Splenda at gay couples while cackling and coughing violently.

I call them the Great Danes, and I have made it this semester’s goal to study their speech, their movements, draw portraits of them (see above) instead of paying attention in my economics class.  In my mind their names are Hans and Gerhard (they speak English with a subtle German accent despite the fact that they are French, which I think is the Greatest Thing Ever, which also makes me a little uncomfortable because they are the consummate incarnation of the Aryan male and I am but a Jewess in a foreign land), and they are good at everything.  While I fidget in class and check my phone every ten minutes to see if Martha Stewart wrote a new tweet, they stare at the whiteboard, nodding in absolute comprehension every five minutes, with the phrase ‘MY FAVORITE PASTIME IS SITTING’ scrolling on a marquee across their brains. 

They iron their bedsheets and have protein shakes for breakfast, which they drink from a straw, sitting down.  On Sundays, they clean their apartments using only bleach and a toothbrush and do their laundry while listening to Franz Liszt.  Gerhard is a ginger and he fences (“Ach ya,” he remarks during a phone call home, “Ghrandmother, mine fencing suit is soooo white!”); Hans swims with me on Thursdays and I imagine that one of his favorite things to do as a child was Holding His Breath for a Really Long Time.  He does the butterfly with such mechanical perfection that I always think of those old German marching songs playing in the background, videos of bombs going off in black-and-white reels.  They are such streamlined human beings that I can’t even imagine them having genitals.

I think about them when I’m hung over: like Sunday after waking up still drunk, feeling more Troll than Human, when I rummaged around my kitchen for sustenance and a utensil - only to find beer and Greek yogurt in my fridge, and a plastic fork I hadn’t used from when I got falafel a few days earlier.  I muttered grudgingly, “The Great Danes do not eat yogurt with forks when they are hung over.”  The Great Danes have no use for alarm clocks either, and they see things in grids and can draw impeccably straight lines and they never get lost because they know Physics and I’m convinced that whatever it is, Physics can explain everything.

They can sense when an animal is in distress - or at least Hans can - and taught archery at a Summer Camp For Boys.  They saw two people having sexual intercourse in the woods once and were appalled. 

In real life I’m sure they’re regular guys: they probably let loose once in a while, drink alcoholic beverages, maybe even say something crude to a member of the female sex.  I’m sure they also think I’m really creepy because I stare at them during class and write down everything they say (they must have noticed by now because they have Excellent Observation Skills).

I should probably start paying more attention in class; I might actually learn something useful.  I’m sure the Great Danes have an Above Average Grip on Reality.

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