Deconstruction Novel Excerpt 4

The beginning of chapter 4... Here's the previous excerpt. I hope everyone has a blessed Christ day!

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Two big things happened in the fall of 2016 for our little group. One was the election, which is still echoing through history as I record these memories. The second is that Brad got a “call to ministry.” A “call to ministry” means God wanted him to become a pastor.

Brad was clearly a smart guy, at least in a book kind of sense. He was smart enough to wait to the last minute to write a paper and then stay up all night and get an A on it. He seemed horribly unfocused most of the time.

I would typically be in my single room studying in the evening. He would allegedly be studying out in the common space of our suite. Except he wasn’t. He would read a little, then get distracted by some Google search. Then he would go see what was going on in the hall. Sometimes he wouldn’t get back for an hour.

Come ten-thirty he and Matt sometimes would drive off to Huddle House. Allegedly they were going to study there. They’d get a “late key,” since we all had a midnight curfew. But they would have some waffles or a burger and change their plans. “Let’s go back and study at my suite,” Brad might say. (By then I was usually asleep.)

But it wouldn’t happen. By the time they got back, Brad's glucose level was calling him to slumber. Sometimes Matt would stay up, but Brad almost never did. The next day would come and he would start the whole cycle of getting nothing done again.

Meanwhile, Matt’s demon was video games. He often wouldn’t come back and study. He would come back and get involved in Call of Duty or something along those lines. Like Brad, he was somehow smart enough to pull out that paper or test. April and I didn’t know how they managed to get through.

I ran across Brad at 4AM one night by chance in the suite. I had gotten up to use the restroom. “Why do you do this to yourself?” I asked him.

“I know. I know. I always hate myself at about this point,” he said. “It’s really stupid. I never intend to. I just can’t seem to get it done any earlier.”

“How can you even think at this ungodly hour?” I asked.

“Not very well,” he said. “I was really interested in Beowulf three hours ago, but not so much right now.”

He got so far behind his first semester that he tried to pull two all-nighters in a row during finals week. It didn’t go so well. During one of his final classes—a fairly small one in fact—he woke up with the lights out and his face smudged by his desktop, in a puddle of his own drool. Thankfully that class didn't have a final. Apparently the professor and students had very much enjoyed leaving him there after the class time was finished.

He shared at lunch that day that all reality had become one for him at about 5am. He jokingly said he had become a Buddhist monk. He had become one with the Oversoul and he had joined the whole universe in perfect harmony.

Brad was smart, but he probably wasn’t as smart as the college thought he was. They gave him credit for all his first-year courses in math and chemistry on the basis of his AP scores. He took third-semester calculus and second-year chemistry his first semester at college. He was able to make it through the calculus, but the chemistry killed him.

It was a course called inorganic analytical chemistry, with only three students in the class. There were a couple tests but the bulk of the class was a series of ten experiments in which Brad had to figure what mystery substance the professor had given him. The kicker was that these experiments didn’t have to be turned in at any particular time. They just all had to be done before the end of the semester.

This was death for Brad. His skill at procrastination left him with half of the experiments still to go in the final week. He was also supposed to submit to his Old Testament professor how much of the Old Testament he had read that semester. He and Jessica were supposed to read the whole Old Testament. (The rest of us soon realized not to take that professor for Old Testament.)

Jessica more or less lied. Most students did even though it was a Christian college. It was on the honor system. You just said, “Yes. I read it.” A few fudged by telling themselves, “I will finish reading over Christmas,” and then put down 100%.

Not Brad. His conscience wouldn’t let him--at least not to lie that blatantly. The first of his all-nighters was spent desperately trying to read the Old Testament. The odds were against him. He had managed to read maybe half by the time he got back from supper the night before. Then the heaviness of the evening began to settle in. He had two finals the next day to study for as well as a final paper to write for World Literature.

Thankfully, he had read Crime and Punishment in high school. The paper bit the dust by midnight. Not his best work, but it would have to do. He remembered enough from class discussions with his twelfth-grade high school teacher to sound really smart. The teacher actually put the word "Brilliant" in her feedback.

The hours from 12-5am were all reading. He was not a good reader. He had a horrible time focusing. He told me he often read the same sentence over and over and over. Sometimes it went in. Often it didn’t. "I can honestly say, 'I've never read a book I couldn't put down,'" he once told me with a smile.

He would stand and read. He would pace back and forth with book in hand. Sometimes he would read to himself aloud. Every sentence was like a runway to somewhere else.

Eventually, he decided not to worry whether he really didn’t fully comprehend what he was reading. He just moved his eyes across the lines. Maybe he missed a line or two. By the time he diverted to study for biology, he had managed to say he had read 75% of the Old Testament with a slightly shaky conscience...