The building echoed with the sound of chairs, people, and trays shuffling about. From time to time there was a rise and ebb to the volume as groups flowed in and out of the building. Wrappers for potato chips and convenience store sandwiches crunched as students passed the time between classes, wishing it were Friday. Tables along the railings of the second and third tiers were all occupied, some accommodating three or more bulky chairs, others seating singletons who silently ate, read, scribbled, or typed. Audible words or phrases rose from assorted groups, linked together to create cryptic, hilarious, or unintelligible sentences.
Spastic, sporadic tapping on laptops, sometimes a distorted message from YouTube, resonated from distant corners of the building. Were they hurriedly finishing essays, homework, a review session minutes before the next class? Were they merely bidding their time, obsessively checking email, Stumbling, Googling, instant messaging, typing a memo to remember an obscure agenda?
Disembodied voices would speak from behind a bookshelf. The voices would be loud, laughing, then soft, mumbling, whispering. Were they speaking to one another? How many were there? After some time I realized many were alone, speaking to someone unknown, a sort of schizophrenia that was commonplace that I had come to expect in such crowded spaces.
Laughter was the loudest noise. Sometimes high shrieks in unison, sometimes an unpleasant hyena cackle pocked the otherwise consistent background noise of the J.C. It was hard to imagine these laughs originating from a good-humored joke; they had an air of sadism, a note of cruelty at the expense of an absent, ignorant party. Then there were the belly laughs, those which were full and booming yet warm. These were the kind of chortles that make you wish you knew what they were laughing about, make you wonder what those people were like.