The Executor Part 1

The executor.

by Jesse Kellerman.

To Gavri

The philosopher comes with a.n.a.lysis And proves it had to be like this: The first was so, the second so, And hence the third and fourth was so, And were not the first and second here, Then the third and fourth could never appear.

That is what all the students believe, But they have never learned to weave.

-GOETHE, Faust

Choose, said the Fool.

-The Book of Odd Thoughts, 17:19

1.

I used to own half of Nietzsche's head. It was the only thing I truly considered mine, and on the night Yasmina threw me out, it was the last item I retrieved before going to the door and turning around to offer my concluding thoughts. used to own half of Nietzsche's head. It was the only thing I truly considered mine, and on the night Yasmina threw me out, it was the last item I retrieved before going to the door and turning around to offer my concluding thoughts.

She spoke first.

"I've always hated that."

I said nothing.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I know you love it. But it's really creepy."

I told her I didn't want to argue anymore.

She asked if I would be okay. I told her it didn't matter. She insisted that it did, so I told her yes, I would be fine. This was false. I said it so she wouldn't feel guilty. You cannot live with someone for two years without developing a kind of reflexive sympathy, and I knew that if I didn't rea.s.sure her, she would spend the whole night awake, worrying about me. Not without cause: she was putting me out in the middle of a blizzard. She ought to've felt guilty. But pride forbade me from exploiting that.

"I'll be fine," I said again.

"The more you say it, the less I believe it."

Still, she didn't seem inclined to let me back in, her body blocking the doorway. Behind her was the apartment where we had lived and worked, where we had slept and talked, where we had made love. Observe the bulletin board, pinned with photographs and paper memorabilia, evidence of a shared history. Dinners with friends. Weekends in Salem and Newport. Remember the coffee table, a battered leather trunk unearthed at an estate sale. Adjacent to the front door, a nail juts out of the wall. Sometimes something hangs there, its absence a conspicuous reminder of all that has gone wrong.

I'm not a man easily lost for words, but standing there on the verge of expulsion, I couldn't think of a thing to say. Tears periodically rolled down her expressionless face, as though out of obligation. The contrast between us could not have been greater than at that moment. She was small and dark, bejeweled, glittering, and elegant. And I? Six-foot-three, ruddy, thick-limbed, capable of holding all my possessions-the entire physical evidence of my existence-in two hands without breaking a sweat.

This speaks primarily to how little I owned. Packing had been a depressingly brief process, everything fitting into a medium-sized duffel bag-which I'd had to borrow from Yasmina. Half the bag belonged to my laptop, my books, and six inches' worth of unfinished dissertation. The other half contained my s.h.i.+rts, fraying at the cuffs; my jackets, mangy at the elbows; my wrinkled khakis and jeans. Jammed into the bag's side pocket was one pair of brown loafers, scuffed beyond repair. All told, a thoroughly wretched wardrobe, one that reflected a self-image cultivated over years: rumpled scholar. Clothes belonged to the world of things. I belonged to the world of ideas. Fretting over my appearance would have meant acknowledging the importance of how others perceived me. Back then I found this idea repellent. To some extent I still do. Despite everything, part of me cannot relinquish the notion that I stand outside society, above its judgments.

It is a part of me that grows smaller every day.

Last, there was Nietzsche's head. Half-head. The left half, to be precise. I'd found it in an East Berlin flea market. For the life of me I can't say what I was doing there. (In the flea market, that is. I know what I was doing in Berlin: spending yet another travel grant doing yet more research for yet more of my never-ending dissertation.) I've never been one to make frivolous purchases, and everything one finds in such places is, essentially, frivolous. If memory serves, I was coming from the Staatsbibliothek Staatsbibliothek, headed back to my tiny studio in Prenzlauer Berg, mulling over what I'd read that day. I must have strayed from my usual route, because when I stopped moving I found myself standing in a noisy aisle I could not remember entering, in front of a booth I could not remember approaching, holding an object I could not remember picking up.

Cold and heavy, it was made of cast iron, with a square base that sprouted into a half-bust, a human head split sagittally: one ear, one eye, the left half of a nose. The crudeness of the workmans.h.i.+p testified to clumsy hands wielding inferior tools: the proportions were off, the surfaces uneven, and the eye in particular had an unreal quality to it, set alarmingly far back in its socket, as though staring out from the void, the surrounding flesh seamed and trenched. Somehow, though, this lack of refinement contributed to the overall effect, and anyway, the moustache, even one half, gave it away. Really, who else could it be?

"Sehr l.u.s.tig, ja?"

I looked up at the vendor. He bore a distinct resemblance to Joseph Stalin, which was surreal, because among the Soviet-era kitsch strewn across his table was a teakettle adorned with hammers and sickles and emblazoned with Stalin's own face.

I nodded and turned the object over, revealing a bottom lined with peeling green velvet.

It was a bookend, the vendor said. Its friend-that was the word he used, Freund Freund-was missing. He didn't know where it had come from, although he theorized that it had once belonged to a professor. "Ein Genie "Ein Genie," he said, a genius, a genius, adding that the world would not be the same without him. Coming from someone who appeared to have neither shaved nor showered since perestroika, this seemed a wonderfully intellectual sentiment, and as a philosopher, I was moved to see how Nietzsche's ideas, so often misunderstood, could still inspire the common man. adding that the world would not be the same without him. Coming from someone who appeared to have neither shaved nor showered since perestroika, this seemed a wonderfully intellectual sentiment, and as a philosopher, I was moved to see how Nietzsche's ideas, so often misunderstood, could still inspire the common man.

"E=mc2," he said. "Ja?" "Ja?"

I think I did a good job of hiding my dismay, although at that point I felt it my responsibility to take the bookend into custody. Anyone who mistook Nietzsche for Einstein could not be trusted. I asked the price. He took a second to size me up, weighing my desire against my shoddy sportcoat, before asking for thirty euros. I offered ten, we split the difference, and I left elated, my bag fifteen pounds heavier.

Over the last few years, the bookend had become something of a totem, a reminder of happier times, when I could still get travel grants. By the night Yasmina threw me out, of course, all that had changed. My funding had dried up, with no more forthcoming. My teaching positions had been given away to others in greater need, those who still held promise, those in their third and fourth years of graduate school rather than their eighth and counting. My so-called advisor had not spoken to me in months. Around Emerson Hall I had become, if not persona non grata, then a white elephant.

I therefore cherished the bookend, keeping it atop the stereo cabinet in the living room, where I could see it from my desk in the corner. It offered encouragement. Moreover, it was my sole contribution to the decor. Yasmina had never objected, and to hear her true feelings took me aback. As I stood there, trying to conjure up an appropriately clever parting shot, I cradled it against my chest, protecting it from her.

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

"Half-badger," I said, vaguely.

I will a.s.sume 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 cla.s.sifieds. The idea of finding my destiny in a newspaper seemed quaint-indeed, ridiculous-and despite the abject circ.u.mstances, 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.

2.

The 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 lectures.h.i.+ps 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, Crimson, picked up more for diversion than anything else. The writing always made me smile-b.u.mptious 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 picked up more for diversion than anything else. The writing always made me smile-b.u.mptious 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. New York Times.

Cla.s.sifieds 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. Crimson. All you need are no fewer than fifteen words at sixty-five cents apiece. All you need are no fewer than fifteen words at sixty-five cents apiece.

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

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

CONVERSATIONALIST SOUGHT.

SERIOUS APPLICANTS ONLY.

PLEASE CALL 617-x.x.x-x.x.xX.

BETWEEN SEVEN A.M. AND TWO P.M.

NO SOLICITORS.

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 ident.i.ty theft. In that case, why publish a phone number? Why not an e-mail address or, for the truly old-fas.h.i.+oned, 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 n.o.body 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 h.e.l.lo.

"Yes, hi, I'm calling about the ad in the Crimson." 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt. 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 antic.i.p.ate her tastes, so I said what I thought would best provoke and amuse: "Myself, of course." Except what I actually said was, "Ich, naturlich."

"Oh, come now," she said.

But I could hear her smiling.