RMMLA, Part 2: The Gathering

(This one feels sloppier than the first; it's longer, too. I should chop back pieces.)

The change from the bent-backed gamblers around their machines, the forests of improbably dyed hair seemingly torn from 1980's television, to the calm of the conference level is enough to leave me speechless. Tables assembled through the long room are lined carefully with pamphlets and books available for anyone to take free, provided they write a review. The few people wandering around are mostly middle-aged but academically handsome, their large white name tags pinned to their suit jackets or hung around their necks on a line. The rooms adjoining the lobby have whimsical names like Paiute, Hospitality, and Shoshone, but each is filled with padded chairs facing toward the presenters. Each table comes with plastic cups and plastic pitchers filled mostly with ice. On the podium, a gaudy, starry logo reminds me where I am.

A girl who looks no older than me greets my mother and gives her a folder, handing me my own embossed white folder without asking my name and giving me the choice between a blue tote or purple: it's hardly a choice. After I clip the nametag to my favorite red shirt, I notice that even most of the men wear their tags around their necks, careful not to ruin their dress shirts. Ironically, this is the last time I will wear my red shirt; it's fated to be destroyed in the wash just after I return from Reno.

As my mother and I walk past the escalator that brought us to the conference level, we pass a pair of women, and my mother stops and exclaims that they're speaking Hungarian. Backtracking, we greet the women, who smile and say they saw the names on our tags and decided to speak Hungarian loudly to see, employing what seems to be a sure Hungarian summons. I have experienced this effect before, as complete strangers approached my family in foreign countries, greeting us like old friends because we share this little language.

They introduce themselves as Helga and Martika. Martika is a little younger than I am, an undergraduate from UC Berkeley, fair skinned and dark haired. Helga is closer to my mother's age, blonde and striking. They, along with a woman we haven't met yet, will be presenting on the Hungarian panel my mother is the chair for. I stand nearby. It's not just my shyness about attempting a language I speak at most with two people regularly with strangers, but my lack of familiarity with the topics and cultures of both conferencing academia and Hungarian literature. In Reno as well as in Hungary, I am a stranger, watching and understanding but not quite present, a projection of a self I left back in Utah.

We go to dinner soon, a rather bland affair at a dining room that's part high school cafeteria, part Reno bar. The highlight is chicken wings. I keep an eye out for two friends from the University, but I don't see them, and I end up pulling a chair to the end of a small table my mother, the two other Hungarians, and a French lady share. They talk; I mostly eat. When I turn in my voucher for one free drink at the bar and ask for water, I get a bottle of plastic bottle that holds at most one cup. A group of half-drunk academics at the next table talk loudly over the introductory announcement, making sniggering jokes about the tiny woman speaking not being loud enough, not that it matters to them whether they hear or not. From what I overhear, they're not wrong, although I dislike them no less for it; it's the same welcome speech I could hear at any gathering of like-minded people, full of automatic praise for those who helped arrange it. After dinner, my mother and I walk Martika back to her hotel, every bit as bizarre as our own.

I meet my mother and the Hungarians the next day in the conference center lobby. Martika's parents are there as well, having come from California to see her present, and her father tells me stories about the Hungarian language and its influence on the world. They are outrageous, making the thinnest connections between similar words; I wonder if he himself believes a word of it, or if he just wants to see how I'll react. I am polite but noncommital, careful not to be the fool.

My own panel begins at the same time as the Hungarian panel, so I excuse myself and plunge again through the sea of tacky carpeting, the slot machines like flotsam from a wrecked alien ship that these shabby gamblers tinker at like a Baby Boomer cargo cult. I walk past whole fast-food restaurants built into the casino, the familiar sight of a Quiznos momentarily jarring. There is no-one there but a bored clerk; it's too early in the day for the patrons to need refueling.

When I walk in, the rest of the panelists and most of the audience have already taken their places. I am not late, but it feels like it. A middle-aged woman is the chair of this panel. She introduces herself as Patrice and invites me to sit. We would go in the order of the brochure, which means I am first to read. I slip my stapled paper from my bag, glancing over the hasty revisions in pen, and mentally gird my loins for battle. My two friends, fellow grad students from the English department, smil at me, sitting in the back row and half-hidden behind others. The French lady from dinner is here as well.

To my astonishment, Patrice skips me and first introduces the stunning blonde sitting beside me, a PhD student I remember as Isabella (whether or not that was her name), with a soft accent I am unable to place. I feel like a child who has had a new present he isn't yet sure he likes suddenly snatched away. As she reads a paper about the combination of the Western and science fiction genres in Joss Whedon's Firefly, Patrice nudges me and apologizes for going out of order. Nothing to be done about that now but to sit and enjoy the brief reprieve mingled with extended expectation.

I enjoy the Firefly essay, feeling the little furry fanboy inside me purring. Then, in a long blur like a streak of muddy paint across canvas, I read my essay. "William Gibson is awesome. I want to be like William Gibson," I feel I am repeating over and over. The next reader is what I will later, uncharitably, refer to as a 'character,' advertising her Harry Potter parody books and even offering her card and bookmarks before her presentation. She presents, as my honor grudgingly requires me to admit, an altogether solid reading exploring the heroine's journey in fantasy literature. Patrice reads last, a fascinating exploration of a possible inspiration for Superman: a pulp science fiction story about a girl from Mars published a few years before the first Superman story was written.

I fear one question in the question and answer session after the readings, and I think I can see it lurking in one of the corner seats, crouching and clutching a black cloak around itself, ready to leap up and unveil itself as soon as the tension in my neck is enough to snap tendons. I wait for the question to come, putting out my own answers as best I can with half my mind occupied with watching for my shadowy nemesis. I know it was gathering in the back of every mind there, "Do you see your thesis applying to other modern science fiction writers?" And I have my plan: I will jump onto the table, whip off my shirt like Conan, and exclaim with my fist in the air, "I have no idea. No idea whatsoever! Suck on that, academics! Suck on it!"

To my astonishment, the question does not come. As we file out of the room, I think I catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure giving me the thumbs-up on its way out the door. Instead, I have a very pleasant conversation about Firefly, fantasy, and science fiction. When it is over, I bid a hazy-headed farewell to my compatriots and return into the bowels of Harrah's. In my stunned state, the gamblers hardly matter. My mother's panel is over by the time I slide up the escalator out of the soupy morass of casino, but we have a pleasant conversation afterwards, and my mother marks me down as having been in attendance for her total count; a little dishonest, but Hungarian studies are not as popular as science fiction. There were more than a dozen to hear me babble about William Gibson, but less than half that to hear my mother's panel.

Lunch is a fairly excellent salmon I enjoy in the company of my new friends of the Hungarian panel. The highlight isn't the speech, a tepid affair discussing gambling in classic French literature, but the dessert: a creamy mousse in a chocolate egg. If I wasn't so stuffed, I'd steal the desserts set at the unoccupied spaces at the table.

The rest of the conference descends in a mist. I enjoy a panel on medieval romance, although I have read none of them. Something about medievalists, perhaps, makes them excellent storytellers, and I am as eager to hear the next part of each story as I am to hear their interpretation of it. I next endure an 18th Century Literature panel. The best part is a middle-aged man in sneakers and an outrageous Texas accent who has difficulty pronouncing the words in his own paper, a confusing muddle about Jane Eyre and Paradise Lost. I don't think Charlotte Bronte ever imagined snatches of her prose being read in the manner of a Baptist preacher, all gesticulation, pitch rising and falling. I look at my mother, who sits beside me, grinning like a hyena. She says if she looks at me she'll break out laughing. In the question session, someone manages to weasel out that our Texan friend wrote his essay at the suggestion of a friend and doesn't fully grasp the concept himself. He is the most honest person at the conference.

I have dinner with my friends, my mother, and Agnes, the final member of the panel my mother chairs. The next day, my mother's presentation is attended by three people, the panel being composed of three and the chair. Late nights of revision and worry take their toll; I have already fallen asleep several times; once at 18th Century Lit, twice at Shakespeare, and I struggle to remain politely awake. My mother's friend, Denice from the local University, has earrings and enthusiasm in abundance. In her leather jacket, she is perhaps the most comfortable of all of us. She is more used to Reno than I am, but it's more than that; she sees the conference, not the slot machines, not the giant plastic leprechaun. At the end of the panel, we say our goodbyes and start home.

There is something unnatural about the conference, something that the greater weird of Reno mutes but doesn't quite squelch. We are strangers, never seeing each other before or since. At most, we breathe the same air once a year. We all come to read, to bolster our curricula vitae, to justify the letters before and after our names. When it's over, the papers go in the bin and we go back to our schools. It is a gathering as ephemeral as a city built in the desert.

We stop at a Burger King, and I get a Whopper. Although I'm fond of their greasy taste, it is perhaps the worst Whopper I've ever had. Even the meat in Reno tastes fake.