Editor’s Note: This story is a piece of fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. You can read the first part of this story here.

A few days later, we are walking around the hallways of EVGR. “I hate this art,” he tells me, as we are looking at the seemingly abstract pieces of art hanging on the walls. “There are some cool pieces upstairs, actually. I’ll show you.” We take the elevator, and we are standing by an orange poster with brown drawings, titled “Latin American Studies Undergraduate Summer Program.” It says “For the summer of 1969” on it. It was so long ago! There is more writing on it, “Information available at Bolivar House.” “Do you know where that is?” I ask him. “We should go find it.” 

We go to another floor, and we are standing by posters that likely belong to an old theater group on campus. “Daisies on the Cartracks,” I read out loud the title of one. The poster next to it, which also seems to belong to another theater play, is titled “Maxwell Anderson Winterset” and has a date on it, 1948. 

“These people, years ago, worked so hard on this play, and they were so excited to perform it. They put these posters up around the campus more than fifty years ago, and now, those very posters are hanging up here. There is something weird about looking at these posters, right?”

“Yeah, it’s like it wasn’t that long ago, and those students were kind of like us. It makes me realize how fast time is flowing by.”

“There is a strange feeling about them, like we are looking at not-so-distant history, history that feels relevant to us, but is already in the past.”

“Who knows where the people who were once involved in this play are now… Do you think they could have guessed that their posters would end up hanging up on some corner of a student dorm years later?”

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We are passing by the music room on the first floor, and we hear the sounds of a beautiful jazz song through the walls. We stand there for a bit, looking at the people playing the music through the thin window on the door, and we just listen. Earlier, we were being loud, and we hadn’t noticed the music. “It’s so symbolic,” he says. Then he says something like, “You just need to be quiet to hear what is going on around you sometimes.” I feel as though he said something very profound just now, and I tell him, “Wow, that was so deep.” He thinks I’m being ironic, and he makes fun of himself for saying it. 

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We are on the 10th floor of EVGR, at some corner area that reminds me of a staircase. We are listening to Chet Baker and talking about Instagram comments. He makes a comment about how fake people’s Instagram profiles can get. I agree with him. “I think like when people comment on each other’s posts, it’s a way of declaring to others of their friendship. They comment on someone’s post, all those hearts and love-filled messages, but do they really care about each other so deeply? I think it’s a way of showing that you are not alone, like a demonstration that you belong to social circles. ‘Oh look, we are close enough to put random hearts on each others’ posts, I am her friend and she is my friend and I am not alone.’” He agrees with this comment that I make, and I continue thinking about if what I just said is actually reflective of people’s behavior. We are sitting by a large window overlooking the east campus. Hoover Tower is right across from us in the darkness. I have never seen the campus from this angle before, I tell him.

We are walking towards Main Quad at night. “I’m so full of joy!” I scream. It makes him laugh. “JOY OF LIVING and LIVING OF JOY!” I scream again. We are laughing.

We are walking inside the main quad, by the history corner. “I’m going to show you something,” he says. Right in the middle of that part of the quad, when you see the Rodin sculptures when you look to your left, there is a telephone on a wall. “I like looking at this telephone,” he says. “It makes me feel like I’m in a movie, it’s so artistic.” I wish my phone wasn’t dead so I could write down what he just said, I think to myself. “That sounded so poetic,” I say, and ask, “Do you think it still works?” I watch him take the old telephone from where it is and put it to his ear, as I lean my back to the wall across him. I feel like we are characters in a book. I feel like we are in Wong Kar-wai’s “Fallen Angels.” I feel like we are in Luca Guadagnino’s “Bones and All.” I am full of euphoria, laughter and happiness. We are alone in Main Quad on a summer night, and everything, in a sense, belongs to us. 

“Do you know how to climb up to the roofs of Main Quad?” I ask him. I am surprised he doesn’t know. All the artsy people on the campus do. “You are the kind of person to know these things”, I tell him. “We could definitely figure it out; it can’t be that difficult.” 

Then we forget about it, as our conversation flows into breaking into buildings. “We have to go inside the psychology building! It’s my favorite place on the campus,” I tell him. “All the great experiments happened there. Psychology is such a romantic subject.”

We realize that the math corner is not locked, so we go inside. It smells old in there. We go downstairs, and we pass into the psychology building through room 041. I take Art to the corridor where the Stanford Prison Experiment took place. “This is the place,” I tell him, showing him the sign on the hallway titled “Site of the Stanford Prison Experiment 1971.” “This is where Zimbardo did his revolutionary experiment.” He hadn’t been here before. The lab I work at, Culture and Emotion lab, is located in these rooms now. I show him the room with the sink that used to smell horrible inside, but the room is locked, so we can’t go in. 

We go up to the psychology lounge and wander around. We are looking through the glass to the old books on the shelves. I read the name “Bandura” on one of the books. “Have you heard of Bandura’s Bobo doll experiments?” I ask him. He says no.

“He did an experiment that showed that children can learn aggression by observation. He split children into different experimental groups, one group was exposed to aggression being done by an adult toward a Bobo the Clown doll, and the other group was not. Then, the children were taken to a room where they were given toys to play with. The children who were exposed to aggression gave more aggressive responses, portraying similar behavior to what they had observed, compared to the children that weren’t exposed to aggression. So, children imitate the aggression they see around them and learn from it. It sounds quite obvious now, but it wasn’t a widespread idea back then until Bandura. It was actually conducted at Stanford, at the Bing Nursery.”

We continue looking through the shelves. “It’s like a small museum in here,” Art says. Historical pieces used in experiments, items that belonged to professors and their books are all shown here. We stumble across a photograph of the professors in the Department of Psychology, taken in the 1990s. “This is an old picture of the professors,” I point out to him. “Zimbardo is over here. Some of these people still teach here!” I move my finger across the photograph, pointing at the faces of the professors. “Ellen Markman still teaches. Laura Carstensen as well. They look much younger here than how they look now.” 

Looking at this old picture of the department, I get the same feeling of strangeness that I had felt while looking at the old theater posters from 1948 in the upstairs of our dorm. The pictures document history, that is not that far, but still in the past. This is a history that is relevant to us through geography, through belonging to Stanford. These objects remind me that we are soon going to be history too. Perhaps this is why I’m writing this. Before Art’s and my presence get lost in the history of Stanford, we were delightful at that moment on a summer night in Main Quad, and I want that to be remembered, somewhere.