"Right Between the Eyes"

academic apocalypse: a novelette

This will be the final Wednesday creative writing post of 2022. The feature will return in 2023 with new content for paid subscribers. Don’t worry, no essays will be paywalled: they count as public discourse and therefore want to be free. Fiction and poetry are harder to write, though—they are written with the whole body and soul, not just the mind—and ultimately more significant. They demand recompense. Thanks for reading!

[This is the big one. Better you don’t read it. I never tried to get it published: neither a short story nor a novel, it’s at once too long and too short. And then it would have been too controversial, too eminently cancellable; maybe it still is, even if the political issues have shifted, the ideological fires cooled. I wrote it in 2014. I ripped from a then-viral headline. It reflects the ideological micro-climate of that year very faithfully. If you don’t remember the headline, I won’t remind you; it’s not necessary for the enjoyment of this novelette, and, anyway, we should let the dead rest. Some people I know who did read this found it too satirical, almost mean-spirited, the most apocalyptic thing I’ve ever written about academia, left and right, men and women, like something worked over by an insensitivity reader. Strange to say, I wrote it before I read The Day of the Locust—you’ll see why that’s strange when you get to the climax. It’s full of bad language, including bad racial and gender language, so please be warned now and don’t complain later; I had to use bad language to describe a bad world. Borges makes a cameo. It takes leave of realism at the end. The folk rhyme from which I derive the title, quoted in the first section, is real; an older relative taught it to me when I was three years old. Never having published this, I probably quarried it for later productions, so faithful readers will hear some echoes, particularly in both the name and character of Louise. I have always thought with unreasonable fondness of this minor apocalypse. I probably shouldn’t have written it; you probably shouldn’t read it.]

Right Between the Eyes

Anna Wojtunik was not really my aunt, though that is what I called her when I was a child. One of those family friends so close to the family, and so deprived of any family of her own, that she seemed like a blood relative, she came to be called Aunt Anna. Do relationships like that still exist among people? Nowadays our friends are really all we have outside our tight spouse-and-child circle, and we do not care enough about our extended kin to honor our friends with titles like “uncle” or “cousin.” And a friend to whom family obligations cannot honorifically be extended has no reason not to leave you when a better offer comes in. Nor, indeed, do your genuine family members, not anymore. I myself took a better offer and moved to Los Angeles eight years ago, and, aside from the odd Christmas, I never see my family or my old friends at all. I have my wife and my daughter and my professional associates; I have too much to do to fly across the country for holidays the spiritual bases of which no one can be bothered even to remember any longer. But my grandparents were long dead, and my parents had taken a three-week Alaskan cruise; so, when Aunt Anna died completely alone, I was the one who had to fly home to settle her affairs.

Nobody smokes now, but the plane still had a no-smoking icon over each seat. Aunt Anna smoked: Cools, in long, thin cartons, white and bright bluish-green. When I was a child, I thought boxes that looked like that should contain mint candy. She did not use those cheap plastic lighters, though, the ones that also looked in their bright pastels like toys or confections, as if the whole adult enterprise of smoking were an excuse to re-enter the sugared halls of childhood. Instead, Aunt Anna carried little black and red matchbooks and lit her cigarettes from flaming match-heads. The smell I remember her carrying with her, in her hair and in the folds of her clothes, was less ashy or tarry than sulfurous; she had the scent of a fire. A pious woman, she attended mass not only every Sunday and on the holy days of obligation, but also three times a week. She went early in the mornings, when her matches must have burnt brightly into flame as she walked through the neighborhood to the church, startling drivers like an ignis fatuus. Despite her religious devotions, she avoided any preaching or even religious allusions in conversation, except to gossip about the priests, sad-eyed men in dresses. She was one of those “bad” aunts, always bringing the children treats and teaching them dirty jokes. She was plain-looking—worse than that, to be honest—and had never married. She wore shapeless skirts in browns and grays. She would poke two fingers, a lit cigarette between them, as she talked to you, a smirk on her unadorned lips spreading beneath her huge square glasses as she convinced herself, if not you, of her point. For a large, ungentle, chain-smoking older woman—she was in her fifties when I knew her, a friend to my grandparents—she had a surprisingly high and girlish voice. As the ancient plane shudderingly lifted itself off the cracked tarmac to bring me to Aunt Anna’s graveside, I whispered beneath the engine noise a rhyme she had taught me:

Pretty girl, pretty girl 
Sitting in the sun
Along came a big dog 
And smelled her in the 
Country boy, country boy 
Sitting on a rock
Along came a bumblebee 
And stung him on the 
Cocktails, cocktails
Fifty cents a glass
And if you don’t like them 
You can shove them up your 
Ask me no questions
I’ll tell you no lies
A man got hit
With a bucket of shit
Right between the eyes

---

Aunt Anna’s death—or its context—had become a cause célèbre on the Internet. An article called, with some irony, “The Last Days of a Professor,” circulated widely on social networks among what you will forgive me if I call the lumpenintelligentsia. (I have an advanced degree too, you know, but I decided not to commit economic suicide by remaining in academe.) The article gave out only the barest details and avoided any facts that would forfeit a liberal audience’s sympathies. A woman almost eighty, a scholar, was being paid below-poverty wages to teach French and Italian at a relatively prestigious university; she lived on wages so low that she could not afford to pay the electric bill for her studio apartment and had to grade exams and compositions by candlelight or else in grease-floored, all-night fast food restaurants. At the end of the same spring semester during which she found out that her year-to-year teaching contract would not be renewed in the fall, she must have dozed off while working into the night and was consequently immolated along with her books, all those books crowded into every crevice of the tiny studio, so many books—English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian—that the place must have gone up in a vast split-second rush that sucked all the air out of her city neighborhood. Luckily, the building was safely evacuated, and no one else died. But an adjunct professor had died: not a person, but a social role, and this gave her increasingly disgusted colleagues all over the country a face to paste on the banners announcing their protest.

Out of grimly amused curiosity about this bizarre legacy of Aunt Anna’s, I agreed to meet with two young left-wing online journalists who had taken the train down from Brooklyn to the humble little city of my birth. In their email requesting to speak with me, they had informed me that, two days after the funeral, a lunchtime rally in support not only of Aunt Anna but of adjunct rights more generally would be held on the university campus.

When I walked into the bar for our appointed meeting—I had just come from the funeral and was still in my mourning clothes—I found them complaining about the décor and then complaining about the complaints.

“Total fucking kitsch. Plastic Ionic columns for planters, Japanese screens to partition the dining room, Victorian Gothic wall moldings, French Impressionist paintings. Everything a commodity, torn from its organic context and put on display for the weightless pleasures of the middle class. Christ, this is a fucking nightmare of reification.”

“Fuck, dude, shut up. What’s good about an organic context? An organic context is ladies in the kitchen or dying in childbirth. You white academic Marxist guys are all reactionary as fuck. Face it, you only hate capitalism because it means a man’s home isn’t his castle. You don’t care about people suffering. What do I care about kitsch? Aesthetics is just one more tiny dick-measuring stick. I care about the fucking sweatshop this shit was made in...”

About that time they noticed me standing there, though they did not break their poses: he sat on a stool with his knees apart and his elbows resting on the seat-back so that his large hands hung loose and limp, his back hunched so that his balding dome was thrust forward and caught the light; she sat with tightly-crossed arms and legs crossed likewise, the pointed toe of one boot upraised toward him monitorially, half her pale face shaded by her hair. They introduced themselves as Connor and Madison but did not offer to shake my hand or to move to a table for ease of conversation. So I pulled a stool in front of them and sat; unfortunately, it was shorter than theirs, as if they were trying me.

Connor took out his phone and held it out over his knee to record our talk.

“We can make this brief,” he murmured. “We found out about Anna’s story through some of our union contacts. She had been in touch with reps about possibly unionizing adjuncts at the university around the time of her passing.”

I thought of how little Aunt Anna would have liked the word “passing.” I could envision her, the cigarette bobbing between her pointed fingers, spilling ash on her gray skirt: “Passed? Died. She died, died, for Christ’s sake, she died.”

“Okay,” I said.

“We were hoping to write a longer piece on Anna, to flesh her out a bit. Frankly, we were excited when we heard about her union orientation. It showed a level of class consciousness we thought we might be able to fold into the general theoretical tendency of The Leveler.”

“Okay,” I said.

Madison rolled her eyes and stretched her lower lip out to blow the hair from her forehead. Connor looked nervously at her. Then he turned to me and said hastily, as if hoping I would not hear him, “Do you know anything about Anna’s political tendency?”

“No. She rarely said a political word in my presence.”

“Women are socialized not to,” Madison said casually. Then she swiveled her seat toward the bar to request another drink.

“Who knew that feminism, considered as the theory of female agency, would come to rely so heavily on passive verbal constructions?” Connor muttered, giving me a look that invited commiseration with the lot of all men subjected to powerful and unaccountable women.

“Whatever, bro,” she said over her shoulder. “You just keep talking. You were going to anyway. Let’s just finish this so we can get the fuck out of here and back to civilization.”

Connor lowered his eyes to my shoes and said, “Listen, we’ve heard a couple of disturbing reports about Anna. That she wasn’t necessarily the most popular teacher among all students. The university, I gather, was a stricter college when she started teaching there, before it pursued university status and downplayed the religious angle. I guess she was overwhelmed by the social change. And the thing is, we don’t really want to push this story too hard if something unsavory comes out, so we’re trying to prevent that by finding out what we can now. We would love for Anna to become a symbol of the general injustice involved in casual and contingent labor. But there are, you know, optics involved. We thought the combination of an older woman with social democratic tendencies would be ideal, or, I guess, unthreatening, but if there’s more to it...you know?”

When I did not reply with more than a nod—because I longed to be out of these people’s company—he started fiddling with his phone. Madison tilted her head up to suck a few more drops of gin through the ice cubes in her glass; she comically widened her eyes over the rim at me. Finally, Connor passed me the phone. He had pulled up Aunt Anna’s entry on a website where students could rank and evaluate their instructors.

Not 1952 anymore lady. And its not our fault if we dont want to talk in class. Why should we when youll just make fun of us???

thinks her ancient opinions are the law. “jokes” cruel and unfunny. too many tests—what about essays? what about what we think? don’t get me started on the bitches hair

She has a gross fetish for ancient books that are offensive and disgusting. She doesn’t care about any idea past the middle ages. She says tests are objective, but she obviously takes delight when half the class fails. IF HALF THE CLASS FAILS ITS YOUR FAULT!!!

I learned alot from Mrs. Votunk but she is f’in harsh. I see where these other complaints are coming from but maybe people could spend less time complaining and more time studying. Some of her opinions are totally sexist racist etc. Problematic shit. But she is old old old.

It is DR. and it is WOJTUNIK, and she is more brilliant than you philistines will ever be. These moronic remarks are unsurprising, though: intelligence always offends the stupid.

Oh here we go, the old lady’s vagitarian relations with Fuk-Yu Soo or whatever that stuck-up Ho-rean’s name is, the one who just left the last comment “anonymously.”

That old bitch looks like she smells.

I passed the phone back. “Kids are cruel,” I offered.

“But if she was a reactionary...” Connor said.

“She was my aunt. I told you what I know. I wish you good luck, but I don’t think she would have much cared about becoming the figurehead of a pro-union movement. She was a non-political woman. I have another appointment, so I have to be going now.”

I stood and walked away without shaking their hands. Behind me, Connor called, “I didn’t think she was literally your aunt.”

I paused on the sidewalk in front of the bar to take off my jacket. The third week in May and already the weather had turned hot, after a late winter that had dropped snow well into April. I had grown up with these pestilential changes of season, but I had come to prefer the regularity of L.A., the bright dry sunny mildness day after day. The bar was situated in the student neighborhood. Athletically-built boys were already going shirtless, and girls who had yesterday worn hats and scarves now wore diaphanous sun dresses hung by thin straps. I felt like a stone in a roiling sea of flesh as they drifted past me on their way to and from final exams, my mourning suit incongruous in all that bare winter-pale pink.

Then Madison tapped my shoulder. “Connor has your number, but I need it too, and I don’t want him to know I’m contacting you on my own. I want to send you something, so you can know what Anna was really like as a teacher. For us, it’s not good. But you should have something to remember her by.”

“Why are you doing this? We don’t even know each other.”

“It’s not for you but for her. When I first saw it, it sickened me. I almost sent it around to everyone in our organization to put a stop to this mission to make Anna a martyr. But then I started, I don’t know, feeling drawn to her. Feeling a certain kinship, even though what she was saying horrified me. As a woman, I mean, as a progressive, it was unbearable. But then, to compare her, her authority, her certainty, to somebody like Connor, his passive aggression...”

“Look, I’m not sure you want me involved in your internecine disputes.”

“I’ll be in touch,” she said. “Just give me your number.”

So I did. Then I walked back to my rental car, to keep my rendezvous with Louise Wojtunik, a woman I had not even known to exist before I met her at the funeral.

---

Few people attended the funeral. Aunt Anna had kept in touch with no family members; as far as my parents could remember, she was an only child, and an adoptee as well. She had not agreed with her adopted parents—they had expected her to lead a more conventional kind of life. When she was in high school, she found Latin more appealing than home economics or all the callow young men. In the severity of their judgment on her preference for intellect over duty or even eros, her parents alienated themselves permanently from her already fractious affections, which had no doubt been damaged by her early knowledge that an abandonment had been the first thing to happen to her on the earth. Her friends from the old days—from my grandparents’ raucous whiskey-spiked-coffee canasta nights—had died or gone into homes or moved to Florida or wandered away into the mists of dementia.

Accordingly, the only people beside the priest who stood in the faint light of the mausoleum interior, as coral-orange-pink as a rich woman’s bathroom, were the old professor Alfonso Soledad, with whose studies in Hispanophone poetry from the siglo de oro to the avant-garde Aunt Anna had used to assist; Su-Yun Cho, a young woman who had taken several classes with Aunt Anna, and who had moreover developed some kind of extracurricular relationship—schoolgirl crush?—with her; a woman in sunglasses so big they covered half her face, with a thickly-tangled mass of dark hair threaded with strands of bright silver and a hot-pink fiberglass cast on her right forearm that clashed with her all-black ensemble; and me.

I had spoken to Su-Yun before the service to schedule a brief meeting for the following day over coffee so that I could get a clearer picture of Aunt Anna’s final days. Our discussion had been curt, and the serious undergraduate did not invite any friendliness from me, nor did she seem at all curious about my relationship to her beloved professor. As for the old scholar, he fell into conversation with the priest both before and after the interment; they discussed the Church’s lamentable decline into modernism: “It began with the elimination of the Latin mass,” the young clergyman instructed Professor Soledad, who nodded with an ironical tight-lipped smile that seemed to be suppressing a guffaw.

So, as we walked out of the mausoleum and into the unseasonable heat of spring, I tried to talk to the woman I did not know. Still blinking the sudden sun-brightness out of my eyes, I introduced myself. She turned an imperturbable face on me, its lips twisted slightly in mischief. I looked away, because most of what I saw in her face was myself, mirrored and doubled in the lenses of her dark glasses.

She said, “I’m Louise.”

We shook hands, her cast abrading my palm.

“And how did you know Anna?”

“She’s my mother.”

“I didn’t know Aunt Anna had any kids.”

“Most people don’t,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “You say she was your aunt?” (She was saying ant, like the insect, while I had pronounced it awnt; earlier in my life, I had said it her way, so awnt must have been an affectation I had picked up at college or on the west coast.) “What does that make you? To me, I mean?”

“Nothing,” I said. “She was a friend of the family. I knew her when I was a kid.”

“Back when she had friends,” Louise said, blowing a line of smoke over the headstone horizon. “Oh, I know: your family was the famous Murphys. My mother talked about them so nostalgically, like they were school friends, even though she was middle-aged when she hung around with them. Those years, when she sent me to that fucking school, for all the good it did me.” She laughed, little girlish notes whistling through the smoke-carved troughs in her voice.

I checked my phone, to make sure I would be on time for my meeting with the leftists. Then I said, “There’s so much I’d like to know about Aunt Anna.”

“There are things I’d like to know too. Is there a lawsuit in this, for one?”

I saw my eyes widen in her lenses.

“I don’t mean to shock you. But my mother wasn’t a very warm person. We loved each other in our way, but our way involved a lot of dark humor. It helped us to get over our disagreement about the way life should be.”

“I’m not here to judge...”

“Now that’s the kind of thing we both hated.” She stabbed two fingers at me, the cigarette burning between. “Dishonesty. Of course you’re here to judge. We’re all here to judge. Why else were we given these discerning minds? Go on and judge me, Murphy. I’m judging you.”

But I could not read her judgment behind her dark glasses.

She pulled a business card from her purse and handed it to me. “I need a nap,” she said. “I drove all night to be here after three hours in the E.R., which followed a seven-hour shift at the bar. If you want to talk later—talk or whatever—call the cell number on the card.”

I put the card in my jacket’s inside pocket and then conspicuously flashed my wedding band at her.

She tossed her cigarette butt in the cemetery grass with a “Pfft!” and a broad misbehaved smile, a smile more daring than those usually found on the faces of women—or even men—her age, a smile that is contemptuous of mortgages and medical bills and vows, a smile that would on a adolescent girl mean that she had not yet experienced such things, but that on a woman approaching middle age means, In fifty years, we’ll all be dead. I watched her stalk away across the grass, her steps forceful and awkward, her high heels sinking prematurely into the funereal earth. The priest and Su-Yun Cho watched her as well, with faces of quiet exasperation. On my way to my rental car, I took out her card and read it: Louise Wojtunik: Taste & Beauty Consultant

---

That night, sitting on the edge of her stiff hotel-room bed, I asked her what her seemingly self-given title meant.

“Probably nothing yet. I’m trying to create my own job, as the successful people often advise you to do. I decided that I might as well ask the world for what I want—the most the world can do is say no. So I suppose what I want to be is a person who gets a call and goes to somebody’s house and fixes them up for whatever the occasion requires—a hot date, the boss coming to dinner, meeting your boyfriend’s children for the first time. I’ve got a guy from the bar making me a fancy website. I figure it’s the Internet age—why should you go to the hairdresser, what if you don’t have time to book a caterer? I’m ahead of the curve on this one, Murphy: soon all services will be one on one. It’s an emerging business model.” She smiled so widely upon saying this that her tongue almost hung out. Then she asked, “You buy that? I took a business class, learned some jargon. Anyway, I can’t tend bar forever, not with shit like this happening.”

She held her injured hand out to me, the fingers protruding from the pink cast swollen and purplish up to the black-painted nails. I took the hand in mine, grateful not to have to look her in the face: whatever had happened to her hand had also left her with two black eyes, a bruise-colored domino mask that made my own eyes water when I looked at it. I was too timid to ask if “shit like this” meant that she had been hurt when a crate of liquor fell on her or because some drunk had beaten her. But she sat up with perfect boarding-school posture on the edge of the bed, a bend at the small of her back, legs crossed almost demurely, except that she bobbed her upraised foot so that her hotel-provided pink slipper hung alluringly from her toes. She had just finished showering when I arrived, and her robe was not belted especially tightly. With poise like that, such fearlessness and control, I knew without asking that whoever had hit her in the face had been paid back in kind, hard enough to break bone. Meanwhile, I slouched and slumped in my black suit, beginning to emit a sweaty odor after the unseasonably hot day, my legs gracelessly splayed off the bed, a hole at the heel of one sock. She had given me a square of marijuana chocolate when I arrived, and now everything was starting to dissociate, action from consequence most of all. So I asked her what I wanted to know.

“Tell me how in the hell Aunt Anna had a kid.”

I’d said awwwwnt, drawling it out, and we collapsed on each other in laughter. Then she told me.

---

Anna was thirty-four in 1968. She had moved to the city from small-town Ohio for her degree in French and Italian and had stayed at the university for her master’s; she stopped speaking to her family and maintained a nun-like existence as a bride of learning, a scholar of one candle. She taught language classes at a Catholic women’s college and assisted Professor Soledad at the university with his path-breaking study of Borges, all while she worked toward her Ph. D. with a dissertation in classics on Virgil’s providential poetics. A photograph from this period that Louise later scanned and sent to me showed Aunt Anna at a typewriter in her tiny studio apartment, the machine and the shaky desk it sat on recessed into stacks of books. Aunt Anna, thin and wiry, all bone and tendon, dressed in her plain lay-sister’s uniform, smoked and smiled slyly. Over the typewriter she had sportively mounted a quotation from Nietzsche: “When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexually.”

1968 was the year she met Toffenetti. In fact, his surname had originally been Toffenelli, but he’d had it legally changed to the tougher-sounding Toffenetti; hardness was valued in the circles he moved in. A graduate student of Soledad’s who was drawing out his dissertation to avoid the draft, he was a Communist writing a scholarly panegyric to Dante as the seminal poet of world history’s total organization. Soledad had introduced Toffenetti the Dantean revolutionary to Anna the Virgilian reactionary at a lecture; the two fell immediately into a kind of bantering Beatrice-and-Benedick debate, each accusing the other of fundamental metaphysical and philological error. At least this is how I imagine them: Anna insisting to Toffenetti that a Dante stripped of his spiritual dimension was mutilated and meaningless, Toffenetti assuring Anna in turn that Virgil and Dante continued to hold such power over our imaginations precisely because they wrote about the conflicts and contradictions of the real, the material, the civic, the world of the people.

She found his materialism crude, insensitive to vast realms of human experience and need, while he judged her religiosity irrational, unworthy of her grand intellect. And she, who had inherited her adopted immigrant family’s patriotism, their sense of having been granted a historical reprieve, the rare gift of almost limitless opportunity in this wide-open country where money was miraculously the only measure of value and where anybody not lazy could earn money, found Communism itself distasteful; he, on the other hand, spoke of the lands despoiled, the bounties hoarded, the traditions razed, the languages dying out for lack of anyone to speak them, all so that murderous money could be spun by sweated labor and turned into yet another commodity for the odorless masters of men.

But their philosophical differences could not prevent the strange union of the Catholic woman with the Communist man. Each dressed plainly and inconspicuously, putting no faith in outward appearance. With grim merriment they mocked their era’s naïve sex liberationism, all the bare-breasted and barefoot bacchanals, the long-haired cretins who thought they were gazelles rutting in the mud.

They held modern art, high or low, in contempt, and gently teased the old homosexual Soledad for his interest in the effete Argentine fabulist. The professor had sent them once to pick up the great Borges from the airport and drive him back to the university for a lecture, and they agreed that his vaunted skepticism and over-estimated erudition represented the refined play of an aged blind schoolboy pleasuring himself in public with the toys in his sightless mind. When this decadent age gave way, whether to the renewed authority of the Church or to international socialism, the arts would return to the serious and beautiful representation of typical sublunary natures.

Of her mother’s character, Louise explained, “Living with her was like living in a convent. Sure, she had a dirty mouth—she was worldly in the way of girls who have read a lot of books. But she never did anything bad, and she would never let me do anything bad. Boarding school liberated me—hell, I did all the bad things there. And I guess it freed her too when I went away. That’s when she met your family at church and started enjoying their ‘domestic dissipation,’ which is what she called it, by the way, in her letters to me. But the only bad thing she ever did was Toffenetti.”

Then Louise described Toffenetti to me, as he had been in the sole photo she had seen of him, now lost: a lean big-shouldered man, dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with tufted wires of hair poking over the open neck of his purplish red shirt. He had his strong arms crossed defiantly against his broad chest, his fleshy lips pursed in an expression of curiosity verging on contempt, with a curled hint of a rakish smile at the corner.

“Scholar, soldier, lover,” was Louise’s judgment on his appearance.

So how did those two ideological anti-sensualists end up fucking? Anna rarely spoke of it, so Louise did not know, but she assumed that they took each other’s virginity and were appropriately gentle with one another. He finished his dissertation—Aunt Anna had possessed a bound copy of it, until the fire took her life and everything in it, and Louise had spent her childhood leafing without comprehension through the yellowed, brittle, badly-typed pages of this only relic left by her father, Eternity as History: A Study in Dante’s Dialectics. And after graduating, Toffenetti gallantly took his leave of Anna, supposedly to go to Cuba. Wherever he had gone, he was never seen or heard from again; Anna perhaps romantically imagined that he had died in revolutionary activity, in Angola, maybe, his beautiful body laid out in a some guerrilla’s tent in the posture of the dead Christ.

With rather brutal candor, she used to tell Louise that making love to Toffenetti had been a mistake: not only a sin but also an intellectual error. “We were scholars; we loved learning for its own sake. It was a pleasure to walk with him in the labyrinthine garden of ideas. That was the pleasure we really wanted. That was how we enjoyed each other. When we gave that up to paw at each other, we were being literal, stupid, unimaginative.”

And that was why Aunt Anna had a dirty mouth and taught me naughty rhymes. To her, all of it—the shit, the piss, the assholes, the cocks, and cunts—was so stupid, so crude that it could only be crudely expressed. The whole fucking thing, the whole thing of fucking, was the opposite of intellect, and she treasured intellect alone. She had remained close to Professor Soledad for all those years; she must have wondered from time to time whether he and Borges and all those other queers—Plato, for instance, or Wilde—had been right, while she and Toffenetti had been wrong: artifice met eternity in our visions and inventions, and the disposition of our bodies mattered not at all to God or to history, themselves visions and inventions. And life under the moon? A bucket of shit.

I was on the point of making these stoned speculations aloud to Louise, Louise who had totally eschewed learning as a way to rebel against Anna. I almost told her outright that my marriage was coming to an end, that my daughter barely knew me, that I was sick to death of L.A. and public relations, that I wanted to be back under my city’s gray skies, that I wanted to spend my days in infinite libraries, that I regretted not going for my Ph.D.

Then Louise said, “I guess my mother never wanted me, and I guess I can’t fucking blame her.” How can you answer that? You aren’t meant to. She turned to me and unbelted her robe; her small nipples were dark, like her hair and her eyes, like her father’s eyes. I waved my wedding band in her face. “Pfft.” She unbuttoned my black funeral shirt and peeled it from my wet white torso, a molting insect.

Louise made love violently, smiling. She drew a moaning orgasm out of me and left a hot-pink streak on the hotel room wall when she raked her casted arm across the white paint.

---

I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and brought my phone to check messages. Madison had texted me screenshots of the emails Aunt Anna had sent to Su-Yun Cho; they had been hacked from the university servers by right-wing enemies of The Leveler and would be released widely tomorrow to coincide embarrassingly with the pro-union rally that was to be held on campus in Aunt Anna’s memory. I read the messages again and again, perched naked and shivering on the edge of the tub. I tried to hear their words in Anna’s voice; I imagined her cigarette bobbing before her, the ash drifting down. “I hate her, but I revere her absolute self-possession,” Madison texted me. She also wrote that there was talk that Anna’s death was not the romantic tale of a poor scholar burned up by poverty and passion for learning, but was the more comical and bathetic and classless consequence of smoking in bed. Or, worse than that—but not, for young leftists, any less bathetic—a suicide: the surrender of a woman aging alone, a champion of disgraceful and superannuated ideas whose life’s work had quite rightly come to nothing. Eventually I left the bathroom and sat on the bed, watching Louise murmur in her troubled sleep. I thought to wake her and tell her of these developments; then I thought better of it. I thought I heard Louise say, in the throes of a dream, “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies...”

---

To my inexperienced eyes, the rally did not appear to be an unqualified success. Only about thirty people milled around in front of the administration building, and they looked less like adjunct professors than like workers bussed in by the union, along with calculatedly scruffy members of the campus’s various and no doubt competing socialist organizations. A tiny blond girl waved a vast Palestinian flag. Students lounged on the lawn, the rally not breaking their finals-week concentration, all bleary eyes contracted in frustration over textbooks spread open in the grass. Not wanting to be thought a part of this weary rally, which Aunt Anna would have disliked anyway (“There’s nothing more intelligent than a single cultivated mind, and when you start adding minds together, that’s when you really see stupidity”), I kept my distance as various union representatives took turns at a portable microphone to extol the virtues of collective bargaining. Eventually I turned and found Connor at my side.

“Where’s your other half?” I asked.

“Who cares? Probably sabotaging this rally somehow. Reactionary bitch.” His whipped his eyes left and right. “Don’t tell her I said that.”

Then he calmed down enough to assess the situation. The problem with trying to hold demonstrations on this issue was simple, he explained to me. First, the adjuncts themselves won’t come out, for fear of losing their already precarious jobs; and many of them do not in fact care about their pay or job security since the whole reason they can work at such a poorly remunerated job in the first place is because they are supported by a spouse or some other family money. Second, graduate students would not demonstrate for adjuncts, since they have an interest in keeping the less-prestigious teaching jobs to themselves as well as in perpetuating the tenure system they hope eventually to succeed in; thus, adjunct interests were in conflict with the interests of graduate students considered both as the apprentices they are and the professionals they hope to be. Tenure-track professors could not afford to support the non-tenure-track, lest they jeopardize their own ascendancy, and the tenured would not rally for the non-tenured anymore than the spider would rally for the fly. As for the undergraduates, they could not discriminate among their teacher’s confusingly various roles, largely because they had not yet had any experience of the world outside of school and were in fact just now going into debt to keep their experience inviolate from economic reality for a few more years.

“So,” I asked him after he’d made more or less the above speech, “what is the point of this exercise?”

“The point is to make the union movement look vital and socialism look relevant.”

“But? I mean, aren’t you a socialist?”

“Sure. I want a just world, a just university. But rallies don’t mean shit. This place—” he swept his hand across the campus—“is going to have to burn down to the water table before there’s any chance of justice.” At this, a little smile curled the corner of his sneering lip; if it weren’t for his sarcastic petulance—that and his soft, slack paunch—I might have taken him for another Toffenetti, fit spokesman for Aunt Anna’s memory.

An older man in a salt-of-the-earth uniform of sweatshirt and jeans had the microphone.

“I knew Anna from way back. She always supported the unionization effort. She would always shake her head and say that you needed more than greed to run a decent society, that avaricious men were preying on the naïveté of students and the dedication of teachers. Betraying trust and virtue like that, she said, was a sin. Yes, she was a very religious woman, and I know that doesn’t always appeal to folks these days, especially on my side of the political aisle. But Anna was a lady of the old school, the daughter of an immigrant family, an educated woman from a time before that was a common or welcome thing to be. And her faith taught he that we have an obligation to help the least amongst us, even as greed destroyed and devalued education...”

Then I noticed that Madison stood behind us, her arms folded across her chest, her face exasperated with the speaker’s performance. She seemed overdressed in the unseasonable heat, with a black turtleneck, opaque black leggings, and high black boots, but she did not look at all heated: her face was pale, nearly blue.

“I thought you gave this up as a lost cause,” Connor said. “Skip the rally, write a non- committal article, and don’t apologize for wasting grant money if they don’t accuse you of it. That’s what you said at the hotel.”

“The world should know what this woman believed.”

“Oh, come on. She was an old lady. She grew up in the forties and fifties.”

“And so what? ‘Poor little dear, she just couldn’t help herself’? Isn’t that what it always comes down to for you mush-mouthed male feminists? ‘Fuck me, fuck me, I won’t hurt you, baby, you know I’m a good guy...’ You should hear how a woman talks when doesn’t have some man to mind her, when she doesn’t give a shit what anybody thinks.”

He held up his hand as if to ward off her words: “Whatever. Whatever you feel you need to do, Madison.”

Madison carried a small messenger bag from which she produced a pack of cigarettes and her phone. She lit up and blew smoke casually as she walked toward the front of the rally. She shouted to the old union speaker as she loosely loped toward him: “Hey! Hey! Do you think this is okay? Do you think this is okay?” She held her phone high.

At first he tried to talk over her. Then his face tightened into an indulgent smile, a benign kindergarten-teacher smile, as if apologizing to the audience for this and all unruly girls, a smile just like the one Connor had worn as Madison lit her cigarette. Finally, the union speaker said, “What on earth are you talking about?”

By this time, Madison had closed the distance between herself and him. She elbowed him aside, blowing smoke in his eyes from one corner of her obscurely grinning mouth. He tripped backward over his own feet and skidded, suddenly frail, on the grass. He scrambled up and walked away, as if he had not fallen, the seat of his pants green-streaked.

“Listen,” she commanded huskily into the microphone. Half the students studying on the grass turned their heads toward her, faces creasing with alarm as if a public emergency had been announced over loudspeakers. “We are here to speak for the rights of an adjunct professor whose expertise was greedily used up and then thrown away like garbage. Listen! I’m speaking to the undergraduates now! Do you know that many of your instructors can’t afford to pay their electric bills? That they don’t have health insurance? Do you think this is what the high prices you pay to this university is worth? Your instructors are hired arbitrarily and dismissed arbitrarily. I know, you’re thinking, ‘What does this have to do with me?’ But it has everything to do with your education. It has to do with paying exorbitant tuition rates, rates that go up every year, to be taught by people in desperate circumstances and in poor health. Do you think you are receiving the best instruction from people like Anna Wojtunik, people who need quality healthcare and a dignified retirement rather than a job better done by a younger and better-paid scholar?”

She paused and smoked. Almost all students were looking at her now. She blew smoke over the microphone and lifted her phone again.

“I have here some emails sent by Anna Wojtunik typed on a university computer, sent from her university email address—because Anna Wojtunik did not have a computer of her own. Do you think you should be educated by someone whose pay does not allow them to purchase a simple laptop computer, someone who feels that her age places her beyond technological engagement? If you doubt the poor position the adjunct crisis places you in, please listen to these emails from Anna Wojtunik to a student in her Italian 303 class.”

Madison’s cigarette burned between her fingers, the ash scattering on the air as she thrust out her hands to force the words across the quad. A crowd of students began to form, slouching in heavy backpacks, wearing expressions of feigned indifference on their faces. A gaggle of shirtless boys who had been throwing around a frisbee wandered over, smirking crassly and expectantly, no doubt hoping the emails would prove salacious. A young woman of nineteen or twenty, with cropped hair dyed glossy black but so pale otherwise that she appeared to have no eyebrows or even eyelashes on her snub-nosed and infantine face, edged her way cautiously to the inner ring of the gathering crowd. The union men looked stricken, nauseated. Madison’s voice resonated within the quad; it caromed in echoes off the walls of the campus buildings. She raised her phone to her eyes and began to read Aunt Anna’s hacked emails to Su-Yun Cho.

“‘I don’t have to tell you that it is impossible to teach your classmates. They have all their nice little ideas already, preserved in impregnable sarcasm like lucite. They do not know anything of what happened before they attained what passes with them for consciousness, and if they did know, it would offend their tender and cosseted sensitivities. Who ever heard of neurasthenics without repressed passion? And yet that is what they are. They would be offended to know that warm showers, oral contraceptives, and electricity did not feature in most of human history. They do not understand that most people before the last century saw little opportunity to become literate—an opportunity the students themselves blithely see as a burden—and that those who did read, read by candlelight and had to watch their stores of wax and wick. That those who wanted a picture had to draw one; that those who wanted to hear a song had to play one. It would surely grieve them to know that all those benighted generations before their own, which held ideas they find so shockingly not nice, endured much more strenuous lives than those of a college student in the year 2016, and that those generations therefore had more warrant for their opinions than does the present generation for theirs—the present generation, which renders judgments unsupported by experience. Because it would offend them to know about the past, I teach it to them—the teaching of any curriculum not simply numeric or logical requires the transmission of the past to the present, even though the present now sustains itself in the illusion that it has no past but was invented yesterday. But teaching per se is under a ban. I am not really supposed to teach; I am supposed to arrive in the classroom for a fake transaction in which I give them a few foreign words useful for business travel and assign them letters signifying excellence in return for their conveying to the university via scannable forms that I should be permitted to keep my job. And the university pays me what this activity is worth: nothing.’”

Madison read this with the conviction of an actress, putting the stresses on all the right syllables, Aunt Anna’s rage and contempt insinuating themselves into her body, taking her over.

“Had enough?” she asked with impregnable sarcasm in her own voice. “How about this one: ‘It is no coincidence, as an old Marxist-Leninist friend of mine used to say, that my classes are full of girls and that the girls are full of shit. I don’t mean to offend you—you sound nothing but prim, which I find entirely refreshing—but where I come from, one can express oneself pungently. Yes, these girls: you know them. They never had a problem in their nice little suburban lives, so they have to invent problems, melodramatize the normal insults and anxieties of life into shuddering traumas, such that no traumatized person can be responsible for herself. They certainly can’t take intellectual responsibility, no, that they still expect the boys to take care of, even though there are no boys anymore, because the boys are all locked up masturbating and playing video games in their mother’s houses. I believe that the sex-relation means little to the God-given intellect—I believe we are all equal souls before God—but these girls, who seem to have inherited the liberal arts tout court, are very frightened that they are stupid, so they refuse the intellect and pass off their stupidity as progress. They don’t know any of those bad things that could cause a person to become unhappy or perplexed, which, for my part, is all that I am and all that I know. I look at them, and I think: “Is this what I fought for when I was one of the only women pursuing a Ph.D. in classics? This dumb petulance parading as a politics?”’”

The increasing crowd grew aroused at this email. I’m not sure they followed its logic—I’m not sure I could have followed it by ear alone, without having read it the night before—but they heard “dumb girls” and variations thereof, and they heard themselves insulted. The shirtless boys let out deep-voiced and half-sincere bellows of disparagement; they pumped meaty fists in the air, and then the other students started to join in. A union representative approached Madison, but she shoved him aside violently, lit another cigarette, and swiped another offensive email onto her phone screen. Meanwhile, the undergraduate with dark hair and albino coloring nervously side-stepped through the crowd closer and closer to Madison.

“This one’s the fucking kicker,” Madison said. Then she fell into the rhythms and even the mannerisms of Aunt Anna; the raspy, smoky voice was the same in both women. Eventually she seemed like a truer daughter of Anna Wojtunik than was Louise. “Listen to this,” she said: “‘I hate ignorance, I hate it. I believe in the felix culpa. There is no going back before we fell, before we ate of the tree. Only knowledge now will allow God to bring forth the good from this morass of a world. So for a time, it looks as if to teach the young is only to corrupt them, just as surgery interrupted would appear to be slaughter. To impart knowledge is necessarily to impart knowledge of evil. This is why they all hate us. Hell, I don’t blame them, the dummies. The dumb administrators, the dumb parents, the dumb girls in the schools, the dumb boys at the video game consoles. They see only the corruption, only the menace, in a teacher, so they reduce us as they can—pay us nothing, don’t listen to us, tell us what not to say. Otherwise, we would tell them the unpleasant truth of what this world is, and of what they have to do to save themselves in it. Not from it, you understand: I would not claim to be entirely orthodox, but I am no Gnostic, though even the Gnostics in their heretical passion may be preferable to the bland fervor of today’s children. I don’t really give a shit that they barely pay me enough to afford the old lady’s proverbial diet of cat food. How can I complain? I would be the first to say that what I offer can’t be quantified. But the loyalty, even the love you’ve shown me, Su-Yun, is some kind of recompense...’”

“Whooooaa—lez-be-honest!” whooped one of the frisbee boys. A general change of classes must have taken place, because the end of the quad was now massed with students. They chanted and shrieked, half of them ignorant why they were doing so. I was pressed by the crush into the first circle around Madison. Soon I was close enough to see her ferociously strike a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand.

“I’ll stop there. I will spare the family of this unfortunate woman a recitation of her hideous and medieval views on abortion, which she calls ‘the epitaph of our civilization, the holocaust of innocents,’ or her evidently hypocritical attitudes toward queer desire, on the topic of which she quotes Dante’s comparison of sodomy to usury, in that both devalue human fruition and creativity...”

The crowd now shouted down Madison, whose voice in any case cracked with hoarseness or obscure sorrow. They were not chanting, not converging around a common complaint, but beginning to roar in a general fury, a roil of absolute discontent. Some, not realizing that Anna was dead, called for her firing; others took up a defense of her heterodox views.

Then the pale-skinned black-haired girl stepped from the crowd and stood in front of the microphone. She had approached it nonchalantly, as if not to let herself know what she intended to do. Madison’s eyes fell on the girl, and then she summoned her forward with an almost imperceptible toss of her head. The girl walked up and impersonally pried the microphone from Madison’s frozen hands. Madison for her part looked spent, stunned with exhaustion, like someone coming down from a drug. The girl held the microphone with both hands to her lips and blinked fearfully. The crowd partially settled at the unexpected sight of her. When she finally spoke, she was louder and more forceful than her blanched appearance had led one to expect.

“I was a student in Mrs. Wotan’s Italian class. And I just want to say that she made me feel continually uncomfortable throughout last semester. It was supposed to be a class in Italian, but she made us read these old poems from the Dark Ages that had no respect for women or for people who are queer or non-binary or for people of different faiths or anything. She said they were classics that would help us learn about culture. But we were just there to learn the language, not to be exposed to really disturbing stuff, with no warning or anything. I remember a part of the poem or novel or whatever where it was about Muhammad and he was split down the middle... Anyway, I asked Ms. Woggo why we had to hear about this horrible prejudice, and she said that we ought to learn to understand points of view that are different, and I said, ‘But this Dark Age stuff is against everybody different and makes us all really uncomfortable.’ I mean, I knew people in the class who seriously wanted to throw up when they thought of it, it seriously jeopardized their mental health, the way this lady’s teachings were like all the structural violence and erasure they experienced early in their lives, in their toxic relationships with their families. And she didn’t give us bad grades, because she said she’d get fired if she did, but she graded on a curve so we all got Bs instead of As, and then she told us that we didn’t deserve them and made fun of us because we didn’t even know what it was like when she was a kid and kids all had to learn Latin. Professor Grotto just really couldn’t get with the present. She didn’t use email or have a course website or anything. She really emphasized how everything in the language had a gender, even the ‘a’ and ‘an’ and ‘the’ words, and how we had to make sure we got those right, and we wanted to say, ‘Isn’t that what we should be getting away from?’ but we knew she would never understand. I mean, Dr. Vohunk was really smart, and I guess it was hard to be a woman when she lived, even harder than now, but that’s really no excuse for all the harmfulness she caused, especially to people who didn’t have her opportunities or her intelligence. So all that being said, I guess I wanted to say that if having something like a union for teachers like her will mean that they can be held accountable for their ignorance and the violence they cause, then I think that we as students should maybe think about supporting it...”

She stopped speaking but still held the microphone. Again she blinked. The crowd, now that she was finished, set up another disorganized cry. I heard somebody say “Unions now!” but I also heard somebody else come out with “Feminazi cunt!” Madison, waking from her empty trance, took the black-haired pale-skinned girl’s hands in her own and brought the microphone to her mouth. In a cracked, guttural voice, she screamed, “Adjunct unionization right fucking now!”

This cry goaded the crowd to its final frenzy. Madison and the girl embraced to shelter themselves from its violence. I saw a young woman reach into her bag and pull a carton of yogurt out. She hurled it toward the university administration building, and it crumpled and glopped on the stone steps of the edifice. Then everybody threw everything: candy bars, phone cases, water bottles, and finally even the shoes from their feet. When they had run out of everything else, they opened their bags and hurled their textbooks. The microphone turned the chaos into a screeching, whistling squeal of feedback that battered the quad like a sonic storm.

During the girl’s speech, I had slowly backed as far through the crowd as I could. When the crowd rushed in, as if sucked forward by some implosion, some vacuum at the heart of the university, I turned and hurried away to keep my appointment with Su-Yun Cho. Someone had lit the student newspaper on fire and waved it in an arc before me; the imprint of flame on my retina caused me to stagger through my hasty retreat.

---

All of the independent cafés near the university had gone. No more worker-owned places with unmentionable bathrooms, undrinkable coffee, free jazz rattling the cups, and bookshelves creaking with the weight of anarchist classics and grainy antinomian pamphlets. They had been replaced by chain shops, which occupied the ground floors of the new student apartments, buildings that in all their pastel-industrial blandness looked like shipping crates. In one of the chains—beige walls, pop music, faux-warehouse ceiling—I met her. She was there before I arrived, waiting for me, reading. The stark red, white, and black cover of Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks affronted the café’s neutral atmosphere. She appeared out of place also. The controlled mood of such chains seemed to encourage, in college students anyway, a laxity of attitude. Young men slouched in taupe armchairs, lolling in laptop light, T-shirts riding up their beer bellies, while young women lounged with their feet up, ready for sleepover, in sweatpants and slippers. But Su-Yun Cho wore mourning black: a turtleneck sweater, a skirt that reached to her ankles, black high-heeled boots. Even the butterfly barrettes pinning taut her neat bob were black and metallic, glinting occasionally when they caught the light. The light too sometimes illuminated her huge glasses, screening her eyes from view. I sat down heavily across from her, apologizing for my tardiness. She held up her index finger and patiently swiveled her gaze to the end of the sentence she was reading. Then she snapped the book shut; it lay between us like a conversation piece. She was drinking some fruit tea the color of wine.

“I would not have taken you for a Gramsci reader,” I said.

“Anna recommended it to me. She said there was much to be learned from it about modern forms of order.”

“Yes, she always had an interesting relationship with the Marxist tradition...”

“At its best it respects the objective. She wasn’t the reactionary they’ve painted her as. She was open to hearing everything, reading everything. Being open doesn’t mean that you fail to judge, though, that you lose the ability to make distinctions.”

“Why is judging so important to you?”

“What on earth do you mean, Mr. Murphy?”

“Just that most people don’t care. They get up, go to work, come home, have fun on the weekends. They don’t try to find the pattern, the order, in it.”

“Those people are living out someone else’s vision of order; they just don’t know it. Maybe it’s necessary that most people do so. But I never could. In fact, I find it slightly contemptible. I want to find the true order behind all men’s stupid plans and live only according to that. That was what Anna wanted as well. I have never met anyone else who shared that desire so strongly. So strongly she would sacrifice everything else for it.”

“And if you never find true order? Will you impose an order of your own, like Gramsci’s comrades in Moscow? Or give up in doubt and despair? You know, Anna’s death is not a fully settled matter. Was it really a lit candle? Or the more dreary and familiar case of falling asleep with a lit cigarette in hand? Then again, I’ve heard the word ‘suicide’ whispered, and I’m sure you have too. Old lady, failing health, no money. Not so hard to understand.”

“She would not. I promise you that, Mr. Murphy. The choice is not ours. To take your own life is to steal from God. A prideful, Satanic act.”

“I’m just having trouble trying to reconcile this image of Anna as a severe teacher, a strictly religious thinker, with the woman I knew who smoked and drank and swore and played cards, who loved off-color humor and liked to play the poker machines from time to time. It’s as if I didn’t know her at all.”

“What’s to reconcile? She spoke to me of her worldly years. They were a kind of experiment for her, a period of the self-enforced normative after what she considered her triple failure as lover, mother, and scholar. I think she genuinely loved your family. She did not love the company of other scholars, certainly. She thought that they, even those who agreed with her views, lacked some elemental sense of reality. She liked real people, working people—far more than I do. Intellectuals, she believed, needed a forceful encounter with what could not be thought away.”

“A bucket of shit?”

“Right between the eyes.”

Su-Yun had had her right leg crossed over her left since I’d sat down, but now she crossed the left leg over the right. She sipped her wine-colored tea, her gently smiling lips briefly stained. A silence had fallen over the café, the slovenly students having been absorbed into their studies or else their social lives online. Su-Yun’s long skirt rustled. I spoke quietly into the quietness.

“Did Anna affect any other students the way she affected you?”

“No.”

“Why not? Why you?”

“What do you want me to tell you, Mr. Murphy? Some sob story that will explain me, that will explain Anna, that will reduce the both of us to a couple of words you can memorize and not have to think about again, so you can just say, ‘That’s that,’ and get on with whatever it was you were doing before this intrusion into your settled life of what you can’t understand, this brief glimpse of something beyond the world you’ve made for yourself? What if I told you I was adopted by the usual clueless white Unitarians, nice enough in their idiotic way, invincibly ignorant as only those so convinced of their own righteousness can be, and for that reason infinitely infuriating—infuriating because their very niceness was their weapon against all challengers? And that I, tragic alien adoptee, then left for college and got politics there the way people used to get religion, that I started beating the ethnic drum and carried banners and placards everywhere I went, had banners and placards where my soul used to be? That it eventually came to feel like a set of empty gestures, the ludicrous donning of tribal costume for the purposes of interest-group membership, when my real complaint against my so-called parents had nothing to do with bureaucratized identity politics and everything to do with their refusal to recognize even the very existence of the real and the necessary, their blandly brutal progress through a world they made to fit their fantasy of how it should be? That I met your aunt, or whatever she was to you, and that she showed me not my roots, not my heritage, not my authenticity, but something far more valuable: the tradition my moronically Unitarian parents and this entire brainlessly democratic country had turned their boneless backs on, the tradition of order, metaphysical or social, as apprehended by a Dante or a Gramsci, for which ethnicity was only one symbol and hardly the most potent?”

She paused; I said nothing, though her oversized lenses gave her an appearance of total openness. The chatter in the café picked up. She began to speak again, but I could scarcely hear her, so I leaned closer, across the table, catching now my twinned reflection in her glasses.

“Or suppose that I told you that the last story was an invention? The real story is this. My parents were immigrants, embarrassing F.O.B. evangelical fanatics, all sandals-and-socks and inability to talk to the plumber or the bank clerk, the kind who beat your ass-cheeks raw for a 94% on the exam. And that all through my childhood, I dreamed of some larger world, tried to lose myself in various visions of a land beyond our front door. I cycled through gangsta rap, separatist feminism, slam poetry, drugs and sex, sex and drugs, anything but the dutiful immigrant daughter routine, until your blessed aunt came along in my second year of college and put me on the path to salvation, the royal road to the rose beyond the stars of which all the drug-visions and orgasmic intimations were degraded copies, a way to know my place in a universe vaster than my parents’ unintelligent faith could allow them to apprehend, a universe so vast that it allowed even, albeit only to believers, a strange and unforeseen desire...”

I took a chance and laughed this time; I laughed into her face.

“Do you have another one for me, Ms. Cho? Because that one wasn’t true either. Those were two clichés, one after the other. I live in L.A., the factory where the clichés are made; I know complete bullshit when I hear it. Is this some exercise in the irreducible complexity of truth, some demonstration that I can never know Anna, never share in what you had with her, never have any hope of knowing you?”

“Absolutely not, Mr. Murphy. Now you are the one talking in clichés. The feminine as impenetrable mystery? Still more the inscrutable Oriental feminine? ‘Secrets of the East’? Please. We’re not all that inscrutable, none of us. Your aunt summed you up in a few lines I’ve memorized, you know. ‘Poor bastard,’ she would say, ‘he was the one with the promise, he wanted to be a writer, I could see he had a fire in his eyes that none of the others had. I sometimes felt I had come to this family just for him, come from my world to his to bring him out. He was an ungrounded wire conveying electricity from somewhere. But the imagination has infinite enemies. He married a dummy and moved out to la-la-land to write ad copy. It will disgust him in the end; the imagination can’t be suppressed forever. He will walk out on his own child one day, you mark my words. Christ, he should meet my daughter. She’s no dummy, even if she pretends to be one to get back at me...’ That’s what Aunt Anna wrote about you. She said, ‘Honestly, most men should be breaking rocks and most women should be nursing infants,’ but she exempted you. And you’re sitting in front of me, and I’m wondering why. You seem excessively passive. Have you made love to Louise yet? You seem like someone who doesn’t do anything at all, so as to remain innocent in your own eyes. Like my stupid Unitarian parents. This leads you to prize material success too much because it is the only form of success the world will understand, and you need them to understand, because you have failed in your own eyes. Like my stupid F.O.B. parents. You do nothing but what is required of you, and then you pass off the very slight rewards of docility as your conquest. But your aunt”—she was saying ant—“chose another way. And I followed her. It doesn’t matter which other way so much, whether Catholicism or Communism or ethnicity or lesbianism, so long as the way demands that you both act with all you have got in you and remember that your individual actions scarcely matter except insofar as they express a whole: a whole community, a whole meaning. You must give every inch of yourself away to something grander than you.”

She stood up, as if to go. Looming over me, a tall young woman, she pulled a cigarette from her purse and put it, unlit, between her lips. She leaned down and said in a low voice, almost a whisper, the tip of the cigarette bobbing with her words:

“And you feckless men. You sensitive men. You think anyone cares what you think. You enjoy your lyrical reveries even as your daughters in the universities are tongue-tied and stupid while your sons masturbate to squalid fantasies in basement rooms. Why? Because nothing means anything anymore. And it doesn’t matter what you think, only what you do. That is why all the Catholics and the Communists and the ethnics and the lesbians meet in the night—all the believers in order. We get together to discuss you behind your back, your precious sole selves with your memories and your desires. We who have unbound our tongues and only hold them to keep our secrets, we daughters of Dante or of Bilitis or of Gramsci. If you want to be a writer, Murphy, write this down. Write just what I say and don’t try to explain it. Make them think I wrote it for you. Let your you be taken over; the beginning of order is to hear its call. Let yourself be possessed; let my tongue take root in your mouth, let my saying be your doing, the moving of your lips, an alien voice spooling out of your mouth, the voice of necessity...”

---

I moved back to the city I came from six months after the funeral, in the middle of winter. My ex-wife remained in L.A. with our daughter, whom I miss at the most banal times—when seeing a puppy on the sidewalk or popsicles in the grocery store freezer. We are living on the money from Louise’s so-far successful aesthetic consulting work. She has allowed me nine months to write my first novel, for which this little remembrance may well be a preparation; at the end of nine months I will have no choice but to find a job. We plan on marrying in the spring.