The Executor (2 page)

“It looks like he has a badger on his face,” Yasmina said.

“Half-badger,” I said, vaguely.

I will assume the best of her and say that I don’t think her behavior was calculated to inflict maximum damage. She was self-absorbed, but I knew that about her and loved her all the same. Even when I began to sense us circling the drain, I’d always told myself she’d never be so thoughtless as to put me out without notice. I’d been wrong.

Though I wanted to go out on a zinger, in the end all I could muster was an attempt at irony.

“The life of the mind,” I said, holding up my meager stuff.

“Enjoy it,” she said and closed the door in my face.

 

 

DOWNSTAIRS, DREW was waiting in his car. He put down his Sudoku, popped the trunk, and got out. Then, seeing how little I was carrying, he shut the trunk and opened the back door instead.

We had gone most of the way toward Somerville when he cut the volume on the radio and said, “I hope you know you can stay as long as you like.”

It was then that I knew I needed to get out as quickly as possible.

Lying atop a creaking sofabed—Nietzsche’s one lunatic eye gazing down at me from the windowsill, the snow behind him swarming like a cloud of ideas—I began making a list of avenues to explore: job websites, Craigslist. Briefly, it occurred to me that I ought to get a copy of the classifieds. The idea of finding my destiny in a newspaper seemed quaint—indeed, ridiculous—and despite the abject circumstances, I smiled to myself in the dark. Now I look back and understand that getting ahold of that paper was, if not the first significant decision of my life, at least a necessary step toward all that followed, every one of my catastrophes.

T
he next three weeks found me bounced miserably from one couch to the next. Soon enough I learned that the price of a few nights’ hospitality was that I retell my sob story from the beginning, usually to the woman of the house but sometimes to him, too, the two of them sitting opposite me, brows knit concernedly, holding hands as though to shield themselves from my virulent bachelorhood. Given my druthers, I would have stayed with other bachelors. Aside from Drew, though, I didn’t know any. That’s what happens when you’ve been coupled for two years: you know only other couples. And I couldn’t go back to living with him, not because he wouldn’t let me but because his apartment was an atrocious sty. It was just as unbearable as being forced to explain yet again how Yasmina could have possibly punted me when we’d always seemed so happy.

I needed my own place. That much was obvious. Less obvious was how to go about obtaining it, given that my bank account held a hair over two hundred dollars. I was no closer to finding work, having failed to submit a single application. My standards were high, cripplingly so. Whatever I did, it would have to be at least minimally intellectual, while still leaving plenty of time for my dissertation. Some friends thought I ought to be open to the idea of working at, say, a bookstore: a job with an aura of scholarliness, and unlike the visiting lectureships I spent my time ogling on academic networking sites, one I might conceivably get.

“Or you could tutor,” they said.

I told them I’d rather starve.

At that point I saw no cause for panic. Sooner or later, Yasmina would call, begging me to return. It made no sense to get comfortable elsewhere if I was just going to have to pick up and move back in with her. So I kept ringing up one friend after another, calling in favors, burning through all the goodwill banked over my dozen years in Cambridge. Every morning I’d rise up from whatever junky couch I’d slept on and take my laptop over to the Yard.

Emerson Hall, which houses the philosophy department, has its own dedicated library. It is proof of the extent of my alienation from colleagues and teachers that I avoided the place unless absolutely necessary, preferring to sequester myself in an abandoned corner of the sixth floor at Widener, where I sulked and pretended to write.

It was on one such afternoon that I found myself halfheartedly skimming through the
Crimson,
picked up more for diversion than anything else. The writing always made me smile—bumptious undergraduates proclaiming home-brewed solutions to global problems—until I realized that, five years hence, those same undergraduates would be editing the opinion page for the
New York Times.

Classifieds in Ivy League newspapers cater to the young, the smart, and the desperate. Several ads solicited attractive, non-smoking women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine as egg donors. Infertile couples would pay up to twenty-five thousand dollars plus expenses, a figure that made my head spin. My yearly stipend—back when I had a stipend—had been less than that. All for a single cell. I made a mental note to call a sperm bank and investigate the going rate.

One ad offered custom tote bags for your sorority; another a ten-year-old Volkswagen Jetta in good condition, below Blue Book. A third appeared to promote a self-published book about the history of the universe, for sale through the author’s website. I say “appeared to” because the copy was nigh on unintelligible and the person who’d written it quite plainly delusional. Anyone can advertise in the
Crimson.
All you need are no fewer than fifteen words at sixty-five cents apiece.

So, actually, I could not have advertised in the
Crimson.

The eighth and final ad came in just over the minimum.

Contemporary philosophy’s primary activity is the hard scrutiny of language. I reread the text several times, understanding it and yet not. What kind of conversationalist? Sought by whom? Merely “sought,” in the sense of being necessary, the way a cheap source of alternative energy is “sought”? Can something be sought without there being a seeker? Of course not; that’s not the way the verb works. Presumably the seeker in this case was the person who had placed the ad. As the sentence stood, however, lacking an agent, I felt as though I was reading the description of a state of being, rather than a job offer.

How could an applicant determine his seriousness without knowing what the job entailed? Did “serious” mean that I had to be serious, or that my application had to be capable of being taken seriously by my prospective employer? For instance, I might seriously desire to become a fire-breathing lesbian astronaut, but one could not reasonably describe my chances as serious.

The ad’s tone warned as it invited, one hand outstretched, the other up in defense. Who said anything about solicitors? Perhaps the seeker was concerned about identity theft. In that case, why publish a phone number? Why not an e-mail address or, for the truly old-fashioned, a P.O. box? Something here did not jibe, and I had the feeling that I was staring into the mouth of a scam. These days it’s hard to be too suspicious, paranoia no longer a pathology but a mark of savvy.

Still. It sounded so strange, so enticingly strange.

I could have called from inside the library—there was nobody around—but I have always considered Widener a temple, disturbing its dusty silence a sacrilege. I packed up and left, crossing the Tercentenary Theater in the direction of Canaday Hall, the hideous dormitory known as “The Projects,” where I’d lived as a freshman. Outside the Science Center, the snow was soiled, compacted by hundreds of feet, and I paused to watch a group of students putting the finishing touches on a giant, Daliesque snow-ear. Once indoors, I breathed on my hands, took out my cell phone, and dialed. A recorded voice told me that this account had been deactivated, message one-one-four-seven.

I tried again and got the same voice, and after it happened a third time, I realized that this was actually happening. Yasmina had cut me off. That she footed the entire bill seemed irrelevant just then; she had once again stranded me without a word of warning, and I was livid. I almost threw the phone against the wall. My need for a source of income grown even more pressing, I went downstairs in search of a pay phone.

 

 

SHE SOUNDED ELDERLY. I thought I detected an accent, although I needed to hear more than a single hello.

“Yes, hi, I’m calling about the ad in the
Crimson.”

“Ah. And with whom am I speaking?”

“My name is Joseph Geist.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Geist.”

“Thank you. Same to you, Ms....” I paused to let her introduce herself. She didn’t, so I said, “I’m intrigued. What sort of conversationalist are you after?”

“A catholic one. Small c. Is that how you would describe yourself?”

“I think so. Although for the record, I’m Catholic, big C, as well.”

She laughed gently. “Well, I shan’t hold that against you.”

I’d settled on German, although her inflections were decidedly different from those I’d encountered in Berlin. Perhaps she was from the countryside, or another city.

“I’m no longer practicing, for what it’s worth.”

“Ah, a lapsed Catholic. That I find more to my taste.”

“Glad to oblige.”

“So, Mr. Geist, the lapsed Catholic, you saw my advertisement. You are a Harvard student, I presume?”

To explain my exact status would have taken far too long. I said, mostly truthfully, “Graduate student.”

“Yes? And what do you study?”

“Philosophy.”

There was a tiny pause. “Really. That is very interesting, Mr. Geist. And what kind of a philosopher are you?”

Though tempted to puff myself up, I decided to proceed with caution.

“A catholic one,” I said. “Small c.”

She laughed again. “Perhaps I should ask instead your philosopher of choice.”

I couldn’t possibly anticipate her tastes, so I said what I thought would best provoke and amuse: “Myself, of course.” Except what I actually said was, “
Ich, natürlich.
”

“Oh, come now,” she said.

But I could hear her smiling.

“I shall be pleased to meet you, Mr. Geist. Are you available at three o’clock?”

“Three o’clock—today?”

“Yes, three o’clock today.”

I almost said no. I didn’t want to seem too needy. “That should be fine.”

“Very good. Allow me to give you the address.”

I wrote it down. “Thank you.”

“Danke schön, Herr Geist.
”

Standing there, receiver in hand, it occurred to me that we had not set any terms. I didn’t know how long she wanted to talk or what she wanted to talk about. Nobody had mentioned money, so I didn’t know what, if anything, she intended to pay me. I didn’t even know her name. The whole arrangement was incredibly bizarre, and I wondered if it was a scam after all. She sounded harmless enough, but.

The phone began to chirp. Distractedly, I depressed the hookswitch, fumbled out more change, and called information for the number of the local sperm bank.

I
t may seem immature, not to mention impractical, for a thirty-year-old man to hold his breath and turn blue rather than go out and get a job like everyone else. I had far more at stake than pride, however. For years I had defined myself by my ideals. This had to be the case, because I had published nothing, received little recognition, beat back endless criticism of my choices. Everything I had achieved in more than a decade of study could be, and often was, dismissed as a waste of time. Certainly I hadn’t made any money. So when I laid my head down, when I rose up in the morning, all that I had to sustain me was the knowledge that I had been faithful to a principle: to live by my mind, and my mind alone. What looks like laziness, the tantrum of a postmillennial slacker refusing to make concessions to the real world, was in fact an act of self-preservation. At the risk of sounding maudlin, I will say that it was a struggle for my very soul.

Why this should be so is best understood with a backward glance. The great chain of causality stretches far into the past, and only the cosmologist approaches the truth when he claims to begin at the beginning. For the rest of us—shrieking as we tumble in medias res—an arbitrary starting point will have to do.

 

 

I WAS BORN in a small town between the coasts—flyover country, to those with less-than-perfect tact. The nearest city referred to itself as a suburb of a second, bigger city, making us the demographic equivalent of an asterisk to a footnote. We had two Dairy Queens, three diners, and an International House of Pancakes. Of sturdy German and Irish stock, sixty-five percent of us were registered Republicans. Firearms ownership was the rule, NRA membership common, atheism unheard-of. Our winters smothered; our summers drooped. On sharp October afternoons I would roam the woods behind our house, stomping leaves and startling the white-tails that came to nibble on my mother’s flowerbeds. As a boy I could identify dozens of birds by call or sight, wearing out a copy of
Sibley
by fifth grade. Once I left home, all that knowledge bled away, and the deep sense of loss I felt whenever I went back was one of the reasons I never did.

My mother and father married young, enough so that her parents had to accompany them down to the courthouse for the license. Needless to say, it was a shotgun wedding. My father was nineteen, estranged from his own family, a high-school dropout with little more than a muscle car to his name. My mother hardly knew him, her parents less still, and while I suppose that it’s impossible to place a price on respectability, I will always wonder whether everyone would’ve been better off counting to ten and taking a few deep breaths before doing anything rash. Is marriage so intrinsically valuable that it’s worth sacrificing the happiness of all involved? This was 1970, after all. Single motherhood still carried a stigma, but the world was changing.

Of course, it’s possible—however implausible—that my mother and her family were genuinely enthusiastic about the match. I’ll never know, because I wouldn’t show up for another seven years, and by the time I got old enough to ask questions, all the original intentions had long since vanished, the emotions dried up and blown away.