Night Watch

Clarence accepted the assignment from Campus Security. Thom, his supervisor, patted him on the back and handed him the keys. “You’re the man,” he said.

All Clarence wanted, was a couple of nights’ work on the weekend to help pay for tuition, and extra time to study when he was making the rounds. “Simple enough,” he said, but he couldn’t help but wonder why the other guy had quit. He wondered about all the talk he heard on campus.

“It should be a quiet night,” Thom said, but handed him a card with his number, just in case. “I’m going home to the wife.

Clarence frowned. There was something stirring. He felt it all week, and he hoped the night would free him from his distractions.

There were freshman coeds and men living in Nobis Hall the dormitory. And he was a senior. Some of the young women looked at him as a father.

Nobis Hall, built in 1940, was recently converted to from a woman’s dormitory to coed, where the men occupied one wing and women occupied the other.

Clarence had come from the family’s farm. The campus was all he ever wanted: friendly professors, coeds, but he found the number of students overwhelming, and he often kept to himself.

A sign on the wall said:

It’s not what you take from here

It’s what you leave.

The Honor Society

A portrait hung on the wall, of the founder, Sydney Jones. Clarence felt a chill, as eyes on the portrait flowed his moves. A deep voice said, We have a fine tradition of taking care of our young woman.

There was a buzz from the front door, and a drunk coed stumbled inside. She brushed stands of blonde hair from her eyes and reached for his hand. “I’m Natalie,” she said. She wore a long black T-shirt and black jeans. Her mascara was smudged.

He looked her over for a moment and asked, “Aren’t you in my Botany lecture?”

She giggled. “I don’t think so,” and she disappeared into the elevator. The bell rang seven times as it went to the top floor. He listened, as if he could hear the sound of her closing the door to her room and locking it.

He heard a voice call out, We can be friends.

He sighed and opened a reference book for his course on Social Psychology. He had to turn in a term paper on Monday.

“All the women here say that I look like their older brother,” Clarence said.

He opened his book, The Eyes of Perception, A Group Approach and furiously jotted in his spiral notebook. Inspired. His English Composition instructor had step, getting the idea was the easy part, but completing the paper was always hard. Like life, Clarence thought. He wondered how many students within these walls had let life pass them by.

He frowned when he thought about how his classmates in high school had ostracized him, in spite of his awkward attempts to be a friend. How the word about his misdeeds had spread.

A gust of air whooshed out a vent, and the building stirred. He glanced at his watch. It was one A.M. All I need is a little peace and quiet, he thought, but he felt the building stir. Last weekend was the Sock Hop in the Commons, but there was nothing on the calendar for this week-end.

He blinked and saw a coed running through a meadow, through a stream. He saw the water glisten under the sun as it bubbled over rocks. He heard a woman’s laughter. He heard one-thousand laughs. He shook his head. “Leave me alone,” he shouted and returned to his book.

One third of his grade for Social Psychology rested on this paper. He closed his eyes for a moment to shut out all the distractions, and returned to his book. Perceptions are influenced by your time and place, and the people around you. The words leaped off the page. He took a sip of tepid coffee from a cup.

He stopped when he heard the sound of a girl crying. A man was walking away. His thoughts turned the day he ran into a coed on campus, and she told him the dream. He looked up at the ceiling and cried out. “I’m just supposed to keep an eye on the place.”

He covered his face with his hands, and he was overwhelmed by the dreams of others. He cried out, “I’ve got to finish this paper,” as the lives of others played out in front of his mind’s eye.

Natalie came down, sat on a nearby chair in the lounge and pouted. “I had this dream,” she said.

Clarence sighed and put down his book. “I know. You were running through a meadow.”

She shook her head no.

“You lost your man?”

“Not even close.”

“But why are you telling me?”

“I have no one else to talk to.” She proceeded to tell a tale of a group of soldiers walking through her room as she lay in bed. “What can it mean?” she asked.

He picked up his book. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

He jotted a few more notes, then opened his laptop and proceeded to write. He struggled to get a few sentences and stopped. He screamed. He realized he was bearing the dreams of every woman in the dorm.

Minutes later, Thom, his supervisor walked into the room with his arm wrapped around his wife. She staggered and blew him a kiss. “We were having a drink, and she said she wanted to meet you.”

“I’m trying to finish my paper, and I’m getting all these interruptions. I’m just a watchman, and the coeds are treating me as an older brother or a father. I can’t get any work done. I never signed up for this.”

The supervisor took a deep breath and said, “You have a gift.

The supervisor’s wife blew Clarence a kiss, and he swatted it out of the air.

The supervisor continued, “You see, you have the gift where you are to everyone, just what they need.”

“But I can’t get any work done. I’m bearing all their dreams.” He paused and pointed at the portrait ‘So why did the other guy quit?”

“He wasn’t cut out for it, but you are.” The portrait of the founder smiled. “You were meant to be here, to look out for our fine, young girls.”

Natalie and three other coeds stood in the lounge and waved. Clarence sighed. “How do I get my work done?”

“Tell them you’ll come back for them. Tell them you’ll never leave.”

“I have to get a little work done, but I’ll see you tomorrow night. As they walked to the elevator, he shouted, “Send good vibes.”

The room was filled with warmth and still as he wrote the paper. After an hour, he stopped and looked out the window to see a streetlight shine like a star. “I’ll be darned,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of watching after them, but it’s a matter of leaving the perception that I care.

He told Thom, “That’s okay. I can be anything they want me to be.”

He closed his eyes and saw the face of Natalie, then the faces of the others as they lingered in his mind.