I enter the classroom by stumbling backward down a long flight of cement stairs. The room is bright and antiseptic. The professor looks sort of like Dipak Pallana and he’s using a three-dimensional holographic device to illustrate his lecture, cf. Return of the Jedi [1983]. Little balls of primary-colored light swoop around each other, threatening to form a model of DNA. This is the new fingerprinting technology, he explains, far more accurate than what we currently use. These laser balls represent the ridges of one’s fingertip, way magnified. The scanners run along these ridges, absorbing data that is both biological and phenomenological.

I talk with him and another student afterward. He gives me a uniform resource locator that is overlong and difficult to remember. The student is wearing a lab coat and has the kind of hair that juts outward at cheek-level. I wear my backpack on both shoulders and my locker is white. I don’t have a combination lock yet.

The dorm room is vast and dark and low-ceilinged and empty — it looks like an office cleared of cubicles and chairs. There are multimedia kiosks that you swat with a wand to transfer information (music, typically).

This is Brady College, in eastern Maine. It’s almost embarrassing how good it feels to be part of an institution again, to have a printable schedule, a yearly plan. To carry my stuff around in a backpack. My new roommate is Kenyan and finds a large silver gun in my duffel bag and I try to knock it out of her hand. I’m happy because this is only my first day and already people know my name and are laughing at my jokes.