Dying Inside

I watch him as he reads. Somehow I expect him to be moving his lips, to be stumbling over the unfamiliar words, but no, his eyes flicker rapidly over the lines. He gnaws his lip. He reads faster and faster, impatiently turning the pages. At length he looks at me and there is death in his eyes.

“This is shit, man,” he says. “I mean, this here is just shit. What kind of con you trying to pull?”

“I guarantee you’ll get a B+. You don’t have to pay me until you get the grade. Anything less than B+ and—”

“No, listen to me. Who talking about grades? I can’t turn this fucking thing in at all. Look, half this thing is jive-talk, the other half it copied straight out of some book. Crazy shit, that’s what. The prof he going to read it, he going to look at me, he going to say, Lumumba, who you think I am? You think I a dummy, Lumumba? You didn’t write this crap, he going to say to me. You don’t believe Word One of this.” Angrily he rises. “Here, I going to read you some of this, man. I show you what you give me.” Leafing through the pages, he scowls, spits, shakes his head. “No. Why the hell should I? You know what you up to here, man? You making fun of me, that’s what. You playing games with the dumb nigger, man.”

“I was trying to make it look plausible that you had written—”

“Crap. You pulling a mindfuck, man. You making up a pile of stinking Jew shit about Europydes and you hoping I get in trouble trying to pass it off as my own stuff.”

“That’s a lie. I did the best possible job for you, and don’t think I didn’t sweat plenty. When you hire another man to write a term paper for you, I think you have to be prepared to expect a certain—”

“How long this take you? Fifteen minutes?”

“Eight hours, maybe ten,” I say. “You know what I think you’re trying to do, Lumumba? You’re pulling reverse racism on me. Jew this and Jew that — if you don’t like Jews so much, why didn’t you get a black to write your paper for you? Why didn’t you write it yourself? I did an honest job for you. I don’t like hearing it put down as stinking Jew shit. And I tell you that if you turn it in, you’ll get a passing grade for sure, you’ll probably get a B+ at the very least.”

“I go

“No. No. Maybe you just don’t see what I was driving at. Let me try to explain it to you. If you’ll give it to me for a minute so I can read you a couple of things — maybe it’ll be clearer if I—” Getting to my feet, I extend a hand toward the paper, but he grins and holds it high above my head. I’d need a ladder to reach it. No use jumping. “Come on, damn it, don’t play games with me! Let me have it!” I snap, and he flicks his wrist and the six sheets of paper soar into the wind and go sailing eastward along College Walk. Dying, I watch them go. I clench my fists; an astonishing burst of rage explodes in me. I want to smash in his mocking face. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I say. “You shouldn’t have just thrown it away.”

“You owe me my five bucks back, man.”

“Hold on, now. I did the work you hired me to do, and—”

“You said you don’t charge if the paper’s no good. Okay, the paper was shit. No charge. Give me the five.”

“You aren’t playing fair, Lumumba. You’re trying to rip me off.”

“Who ripping who off? Who set up that money-back deal anyhow? Me? You. What I go

Is he serious about the refund? I can’t tell. The idea of paying him back disgusts me, and it isn’t just on account of losing the money. I wish I could read him, but I can’t get anything out of him on that level; I’m completely blocked now. I’ll bluff. I say, “What is this, slavery turned upside down? I did the work. I don’t give a damn what kind of crazy irrational reasons you’ve got for rejecting it. I’m going to keep the five. At least the five.”

“Give me the money, man.”

“Go to hell.”

I start to walk away. He grabs me — his arm, fully outspread toward me, must be as long as one of my legs — and hauls me toward him. He starts to shake me. My teeth are rattling. His grin is broader than ever, but his eyes are demonic. I wave my fists at him, but, held at arm’s length, I can’t even touch him. I stare to yell. A crowd is gathering. Suddenly there are three or four other men in varsity jackets surrounding us, all black, all gigantic, though not as big as he is. His teammates. Laughing, whooping, cavorting. I am a toy to them. “Hey, man, he bothering you?” one of them asks. “You need help, Yahya?” yells another. “What’s the mothafuck honkie doing to you, man?” calls a third. They form a ring and Lumumba thrusts me toward the man on his left, who catches me and flings me onward around the circle. I spin; I stumble; I reel; they never let me fall. Around and around and around. An elbow explodes against my lip. I taste blood. Someone slaps me, and my head rockets backward. Fingers jabbing my ribs. I realize that I’m going to get very badly hurt, that in fact these giants are going to beat me up. A voice I barely recognize as my own offers Lumumba his refund, but no one notices. They continue to whirl me from one to the next. Not slapping now, not jabbing, but punching. Where are the campus police? Help! Help! Pigs to the rescue! But no one comes. I can’t catch my breath. I’d like to drop to my knees and huddle against the ground. They’re yelling at me, racial epithets, words I barely comprehend, soul-brother jargon that must have been invented last week; I don’t know what they’re calling me, but I can feel the hatred in every syllable. Help? Help? The world spins wildly. I know now how a basketball would feel, if a basketball could feel. The steady pounding, the blur of unending motion. Please, someone, anyone, help me, stop them. Pain in my chest: a lump of white-hot metal back of my breastbone. I can’t see. I can only feel. Where are my feet? I’m falling at last. Look how fast the steps rush toward me. The cold kiss of the stone bruises my cheek. I may already have lost consciousness; how can I tell? There’s one comfort, at least. I can’t get any further down than this.

TWENTY-TWO.

He was ready to fall in love when he met Kitty, overripe and eager for an emotional entanglement. Perhaps that was the whole trouble; what he felt for her was not so much love as simply satisfaction at the idea of being in love. Or perhaps not. He never understood his feelings for Kitty in any orderly way. They had their romance in the summer of 1963, which he remembers as the last summer of hope and good cheer before the long autumn of entropic chaos and philosophical despair descended on western society. Jack Ke

Selig, who was 28 years old, had just moved from his Brooklyn Heights apartment to a small place in the West Seventies. He was working as a stockbroker then, of all unlikely things. This was Tom Nyquist’s idea. After six years, Nyquist was still his closest and possibly only friend, although the friendship had waned considerably in the last year or two: Nyquist’s almost arrogant self-assurance made Selig increasingly more uncomfortable, and he found it desirable to put some distance, psychological and geographical, between himself and the older man. One day Selig had said wistfully that if he could only manage to get a bundle of money together — say, $25,000 or so — he’d go off to a remote island and spend a couple of years writing a novel, a major statement about alienation in contemporary life, something like that. He had never written anything serious and wasn’t sure he was sincere about wanting to. He was secretly hoping that Nyquist would simply hand him the money — Nyquist could pick up $25,000 in one afternoon’s work, if he felt like it — and say, “Here, chum, go and be creative.” But Nyquist didn’t do things that way. Instead he said that the easiest way for someone without capital to make a lot of money in a hurry was to take a job as a customer’s man with a brokerage firm. The commissions would be decent, enough to live on and something left over, but the real money would come from riding along on all the in-shop maneuvers of the experienced brokers — the short sales, the new-issue purchases, the arbitrage ploys. If you’re dedicated enough, Nyquist told him, you can make just about as much as you like. Selig protested that he knew nothing about Wall Street. “I could teach you everything in three days,” said Nyquist.