Toby, who was always wearing his black turtleneck and blue jeans, was trying to fit himself into the crack the wall. The rest of the theatre department were watching him, though some were thinking of heading home; they had seen this before. This was apart of Toby’s ongoing thesis, “How Stuck is Stuck? A Question for the Mimes.” Currently, he was jamming himself into a large crack in brickwork backstage that they kept covered up by the ugly curtain. Which was this week’s current obsession. Before, it was between the boiler pipes that Toby would wedge himself into. How he found this particular crack was anyone’s guess.
The sight of Toby forcing himself into a crack that he knew was too small for him was a heartwarming train wreck of stupidity. Everyone couldn’t look away, even though the crack was only 6 inches wide. “Where is he going to go?” someone would whisper to her friend, as Toby’s face turned red with strain. His arm was swallowed by the crack and some of his torso was starting to fit, but as much as he pushed, there was literally no where he could go. Still, Toby started to sweat. His feet scuffed and shuffled on the linoleum trying for a better angle. Under his breath, he was muttering words of encouragement. Someone would take a picture of him and his portrait would hang in this very spot. But Toby wouldn’t be around to know, he would move on to other tight spaces in the coming weeks. By the time his thesis is turned in and he becomes Dr. Toby, a shrine appears under the portrait. His legend would grow, the building would inherit his name, and eventually the draft through the crack would be mistaken for his ghost.
Why had the theatre faculty accepted his proposal in the first place? That’s what Dr. Gatorbalm thought as he watched the lad cram himself like a sardine. That’s what he thought each time he came to watch Toby smoosh himself behind a filing cabinet or beneath a bathroom sink. He had to critique what he saw, it was the Dr.’s role as Toby’s adviser. But Gatorbalm found the whole task so baffling that he wasn’t sure if Toby was improving or not. Certainly, a lot of effort was being put forth into the project, Toby had given Gatorbalm a detailed schedule of when and where his next cramming would take place. But the academic merits of his student’s squishing were beyond the scope of the professor’s understanding. He would have to read some books, probably a lot of them. If he got enough of them, he imagined that Toby would want to lay underneath all of them.
Old Gatorbalm, with glasses that resembled plastic knife blades, remembered the hot August afternoon when Toby first proposed his thesis. He wore his turtle neck and jeans despite the heat. Humidity ran rampant in those days and the old drafty theatre building suffered the most. It heated like an oven with all its clay bricks. None of the windows were big enough or close enough to an outlet for an air conditioner. Gatorbalm sat in chair by the fan for the whole day of presentations, sweating every second from 9 to 5. At 4:45, he was ready to leave this sauna of a building and be free of his swimming pool of a shirt, yet there was one proposal left. Toby had been in last year’s intermediate movement class and from the passion and drive that he earned him a 103% in that class, Gatorbalm expected a straightforward proposal that would be ten minutes tops. The presentation took over an hour. Most of the time was spent in repeated explanations of what Toby was hoping to achieve. They went over health concerns, the potential fire hazards, the moral implications. Toby kept explaining that, “morally speaking nobody, not even him, would get lost or stuck, despite any apparent evidence to the contrary.”
First, the faculty refused the proposal, there was no way they could let a student wedge himself into a tight space on purpose. The Head of the Department, Dr. Sandson, had already gotten in trouble with the clown incident. Anything with clowns and mimes had to go through the dean’s office. But Toby reiterated that he wasn’t aiming to be a mime with his thesis, he just thought that mimes should learn a thing or two. While the tired and sweaty professors shared in this thought, Toby had exceeded his time and should come back tomorrow.
But he would implement his thesis in practice before then, as he wedged his back against the classroom door. Then, as if to oppose all rules of mimes, Toby and the theatre faculty argued loudly about how stuck the graduate student was. Toby said he was stuck. Dr. Sandson told him to get the hell out of the way. Toby asked how he could do that if he was stuck. The grin never left his face. He started offering them solutions, but tenured professors look inelegant if they have to climb out windows and nobody brought butter. Finally, he said maybe they should sign his proposal. One swish along the dotted line and Toby was up on his own two feet, thanking each and every professor with a warm handshake. He was out of the building before they even knew what had happened and the next time they saw him, he was trying to cram himself behind the vending machine.
Ethan W. Hayes 