n. malicious happiness, from damage and joy.
ex. You could say I should have seen all this coming, but that would be unnecessarily schadenfroh. (And I’ve heard it all before.)
The Schumans are big cremators, but if I buck tradition and get a tombstone, I’d like it to have on it nothing but my name and a line of Kafka’s “A Little Fable,” which is a tiny story about a mouse who gets stuck in a maze. “Alas,” the mouse says, “the world gets smaller every day.” At first she was relieved when she saw walls appear in the distance. “But,” she continues, “these long walls closed in so fast that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.”
Then, a surprise: the story’s most important character—lurking the whole time, unbeknownst to all of us—appears and changes the game entirely, furnishing me with my epitaph:
“You’ve simply got to run the other direction,” said the cat, and ate it.
Rest in peace, me.
I think that last line is meant to be funny, but I fully expect all who visit my interred remains to think it’s stern and somber, and to leave the cemetery with at best a new insight into futility and mortality, and, if I’m lucky, a full-blown existential crisis.
Speaking of graves, and cemeteries, and cities where the dead outnumber the living two to one, I spent my penultimate year of graduate school in Vienna, Austria, crown jewel of Central Europe—Zentralfriedhof corpse pop. 3 million; living pop. 1.7 million. I was there on a Fulbright grant, as a “fellow” at a lovely cultural studies institute where I attended a lot of lectures by Austrians who talked way too quickly, and got unlimited free room-temperature mineral water. My other activities during the year were staring awkwardly into my webcam at Witold back in the U.S., where he had a non-tenure-track job teaching philosophy in St. Louis; riding the tram; shuffling mournfully around perfectly preserved old neighborhoods; getting jacked up on six-euro cups of coffee; being depressed in the birthplace of psychoanalysis; and pecking away at my dissertation on Wittgenstein and Kafka. At the end of the year, I gave a forty-five-minute talk on my research in carefully enunciated German, then braced myself for a Q&A courtesy of the city’s notoriously literate and grumpy populace. It turns out my most perplexing query was from the director of the cultural-studies institute, Herr Boltzmann, who, after I illustrated part of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations with that “Little Fable,” insisted that he’d never heard the story with that last sentence before. “Are you sure it doesn’t just end with ‘you’ve got to change direction’? Are you entirely, entirely sure?”
“I’m pretty sure,” I said.
“I could swear I’ve read that fable a hundred times and there’s no cat in it.”
“You’re like the person whose mom takes Old Yeller out of the VCR before the dog gets shot,” I said, to raucous laughter, either because the audience appreciated that I’d stolen a joke from Friends, or because—in a triumph of assimilation—the audience thought it was a legitimately good bit of Austrian humor, what the Viennese call Schmäh. I’ll never know.
I do, however, know exactly why Herr Boltzmann wanted the “Little Fable” to end before the cat appeared, because then the story would have had a discernible moral. But doesn’t that kind of miss the entire point of Kafka? Kafka is parables without a lesson. “A Little Fable” is kind of the granddaddy of his oeuvre, given that it’s not a parable without a moral so much as a parable whose moral is that there are no real morals to be had in parables.
I cared a lot about all this in 2009, because this sort of the-answers-are-nonanswers stuff was what linked Kafka together with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein liked to demonstrate that instead of answering a so-called question of philosophy, it was more important to prove how wrong that question was in the first place. He didn’t solve problems so much as dissolve them. As far as I was concerned, I’m not going to answer because your question can’t be asked summed up Kafka quite nicely—that, and the use of stunning German prose to insist that language couldn’t express anything important. To me, the connection between the two nominal Austrians who never met each other was the stuff of true scholarly epiphany. And yet, as I rounded the final year of grad school—on another paid fellowship, one that allowed me to live in St. Louis full-time—I was starting to feel like my own journey to the Ph.D. was itself a parable with no answer or moral.
This made me a real hit at Witold’s department parties, where the philosophers treated literary studies as at best an amusing trifle and more often than not a jargon-riddled, pseudointellectual farce. (Philosophy, of course, is nothing like this.) Witold’s colleague Viktoria, for example, was a very enthusiastic and inquisitive Russian who for some reason enjoyed inviting us to dinner.
“Tell me,” she said one glum autumn evening, as St. Louis’s scraggly vegetation began its annual metamorphosis into angry-looking twigs, “what is it you love about Kafka?”
“Give me a second,” I said, and excused myself to the bathroom.
I locked the door behind me and took a breath. This wasn’t a fucking book club. I wasn’t doing this dissertation to talk about what I loved, to feed into that pernicious rhetoric of intellectual vocation—the “calling”—that enables hundreds of thousands of part-time professors in the United States to qualify for fucking food stamps because at most of our universities, the inner rewards of soaring exegesis are now expected to count as pay. My research wasn’t about love. It was about—
—and therein lay the rub. What was it about? There was no question that I had loved Kafka once. I had loved him a lot. I had loved him in place of a living person who broke my heart; I had loved him through college and young adulthood. But now, after half a decade of graduate school, at the age of thirty-three, 250 pages deep in a dissertation (times six drafts), I could think of no reason for what I was doing, other than that in 2005, a German department had offered me $100,000 to be a full-time student.
Back in Oregon for a Christmas visit to my family, I was at the health-food store with my mother and ran into Victor, a family friend I’d known since I was five.
“I heard you’re finishing your dissertation!” he said.
“Yep.” I developed a sudden interest in reverse-osmosis kale water.
“What’s it about?” he asked.
“Oh,” I said, “it’s boring. You don’t want to hear about it.”
Victor shrugged and went back to his perusal of sprouted wheat berries.
As I loaded our groceries into the car, my mother said: “I think you hurt Victor’s feelings. Why do you do that?”
“Honestly,” I said, “I have no fucking idea.”
“Do you really think your own dissertation is boring?”
“That’s a ridiculous question, because dissertations are inherently boring, as you well know.”
“That’s different. Mine really was boring.”
“See?”
“But I didn’t tell everyone it was boring at the time.”
“Well, maybe you were deluded and I’m not.”
Her eyes were in the rearview as she spoke, but I could see her looking thoughtful.
“Do you even want to be an academic?” she said.
“Sure I do,” I said. “I’m good at it. Or, you know, better at it than I was at anything else I tried before.”
“I’m not asking if you’re good at it.”
“All right, how about this? I’m well into my thirties, and have spent the better part of the last decade working harder than I ever have, in training for one specific career at the expense of all others, and I don’t think anyone is going to want to hire a thirty-four-year-old German Ph.D. to be an editorial assistant, and at least I’ve had dental insurance this whole time.”
My mother pulled into our carport and sighed. “You’ll figure it out, Bekibek,” she said. “You always do.”
“Actually, I never do, but somehow I still manage.” This despite having a mother who calls me Bekibek and has done so since 1990.
She was right, though. I had to quit telling everyone my research was boring and terrible, even if doing so was for purely altruistic purposes, to spare them a quarter-hour of bloviation about the rule-following paradox and whether controversial Wittgenstein scholar Saul Kripke ruined it or blew it right open. (If you want to know the answer to that, then I hate to tell you this, but that’s the wrong question.) If I wanted to succeed on the job market, I’d have to start assuming everyone else should find my dissertation as interesting as I did back when I started it.
The academic job market is not the kind of thing you enter for fun, thinking maybe you’ll apply for a job as a professor, because what could it harm? Because it does—and in my case did—a tremendous amount of harm. How? Let me count the ways. First, the job market destroyed my time, time that would have been better spent on my dissertation, or making out with Witold, or submitting my résumé at the Gap. (Not really. I’d never be hired at the Gap, because I was too old.) Applying for a single academic job—and mine was but one application out of two hundred for each position—requires about thirty hours of work up front to compile an eighty-page dossier, customized for each institution, with a meticulous cover letter and an extensive portfolio of teaching and research materials. This was bad enough, but then every place I applied also required I use a specific online portal that demanded, from all two hundred of its applicants, two more hours of irrelevant HR paperwork aimed at people with regular jobs. (“Phone number of current supervisor”? “Years spent in current position”? “Reason for leaving this position”? How about: TA positions and dissertation fellowships are all for a single year each, as per industry standard, you fucking dicks?)
Back when I reluctantly took the GRE, and despite barricading myself in the NYU library for three days with nothing but black coffee and quadratic equations, I scored a 710 on the math portion. This sounds like it was good but was actually very bad. Engineers and physicists take the GRE, too, and so I scored in the thirty-third percentile. (I guess I am bad at math after all. At least for an engineer.) But even my feeble thirty-third-percentile brain knew that a one-out-of-two-hundred shot at the two dozen open tenure-track German positions in the country was what professional statisticians call extremely fucking shitty odds.
And yet, when the rejections came, I could barely see through the hurt of it. It wasn’t just that I didn’t get a job. Sometime during the past five years, my academic self had snuck up on my personal self and eaten her whole. (I suppose it might have had something to do with spending most of my waking hours being an academic, even if I didn’t “love” it or entirely know why.) Being passed over for a professorship was Dylan Gellner my high-school boyfriend dumping me all over again—I’d bared the fruits of the hardest intellectual work I’d ever done before these search committees, essentially shown them my soul, and they’d been unmoved. I’m sure, like Dylan Gellner, they liked me fine—but once again, the whole of my thinking, feeling self had fallen short. Actually it was even worse than getting dumped by Dylan Gellner, because going out with Dylan Gellner didn’t pay for my rent, food, and utilities.
The totalizing sense of existential failure that emanated from the rejections then infected my household, and a pall of uncertainty took root about every aspect of my future. It wasn’t just Where would I be working? (Or, for that matter, Would I be working?) It was: Where would I be living in the next year—or, foreseeably, for the rest of my life? Would it be somewhere Witold could get a job and move? Would he want to? It was simply expected that if I was a serious enough scholar, I would happily sacrifice my relationship. Who needs a love life when you’ve got the Life of the Mind? Academic job applicants are cautioned on a regular basis to remove wedding rings at interviews, not to speak of a spouse (or, if female, children), and to appear married only to the Profession (and yes, they call it “the Profession,” capitalized, in utter seriousness).
People with no experience in academia wonder why their cousins or friends with Ph.D.s are on the brink of nervous collapse, when nowadays it’s hard for everyone to find a job, thank you very much. What they don’t realize—and they have no reason to know this, of course—is that academia expects its aspirants to sacrifice everything for even the slightest, smallest chance at full membership in the club. The rhetoric is painted cheerily—Be flexible and willing to move!—but the reality is pernicious: Give up everything, expect nothing—and you just might get something. Discovering all of this for the first time, while sequestered in a strange town with no day job, made me a truly delightful partner. So much so, in fact, that one day, Witold did what he does best, which is use math to express difficult concepts.
“Your job market woes,” he said, “have sucked ninety-five percent of the fun out of this relationship.”
“I’m surprised you’re leaving the five,” I said. “That’s pretty generous.”
“I know it is.”
But I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t so much as run a comb through my hair without sinking into terror and self-doubt, so frayed were my nerves for the entire year. This was due to the extended nature of the academic hiring cycle, where listings appeared in early fall and weren’t filled until April or May. This meant nine months of prostration, waiting, rejection, and, worst of all, hope both legitimate and false (but mostly false). Plenty of hope, as Kafka allegedly once said. “An infinite amount of hope. Just not for us.” Or, at any rate, not for me. So, what could it harm, indeed.
As I probably should have expected, my first try on the market yielded exactly bupkes. It was as if I’d screamed those eighty-page dossiers into a yawning chasm, a void that wasn’t even kind enough to be the Nietzschean abyss and actively glare back at me. Ludwig Wittgenstein told everyone that the most important part of the Tractatus was the part he didn’t write. Was the most important part of the job market the things the search committees didn’t say? I pondered this as I spat bile onto Facebook and refused to leave (or clean) our grimy one-bedroom in St. Louis, rising from bed only to make chocolate-chip pancakes that began to favor the chocolate chips over the pancake batter so aggressively that in the end I was just drowning molten goo in syrup. I pondered it as, after several months of this excellent use of my time, I pulled what had once been a roomy pair of Katharine Hepburn–style wide trousers over my behind, only to clasp them with protracted effort and create what I believed the youngsters called a “muffin top.”
“I think,” I said to Witold on a soaking-wet February morning, another set of form rejections from Southeastern Evangelical College and Semi-Pro Football Team et al. piled up in the mailbox as I waddled into the living room, “that I might have been eating my feelings a little bit.”
He looked up from grading his two hundredth logic assignment of the weekend and smiled a sly Witold smile, this thing he does when he really wants to say something smart-ass but isn’t sure he should.
“Go on,” I said, lower lip quivering. “Just say it.”
“You know what’s really good exercise?” he said.
“CrossFit?” I sniffled.
“Cleaning the bathroom.”
“Why don’t you clean the bathroom, then?”
“I do clean the bathroom—but I also work forty hours a week, and pay eighty percent of the rent, and I thought that perhaps, with you on fellowship and home all day, you might, you know, notice your surroundings a little bit.”
“I’ll have you know,” I said, “that the job market is a full-time job.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “but the pay is fucking terrible. And the benefits seem chiefly to be a bottomless vortex of misery.”
I scowled at him and made a big show of throwing all the half-empty shampoo bottles across the bedroom while I limply smeared some Simple Green around the bathtub.
When I read “Before the Law,” all I wanted to do was jump into the page and tell the man from the country to just go back home. What do you need the Law for, really? I would say. The Doorkeeper is an asshole, and he’s just the most minor of the assholes—he said so himself—so what do you think is going to happen to you, even if you get in there? You won’t have won anything. You’ll just be surrounded by assholes, just like in Spaceballs. Don’t listen to him with his “maybe later” and “try again.” He was created to tell you “maybe later” disingenuously! Go home!
A reasonable person would, in a similar vein, have spent that one year on the job market, taken one look around, gone Jesus H. Christ, this is ridiculous, and beaten feet out of there. But I had other plans. Other excellent, fun plans. You would think, at the very least, if I hadn’t gleaned the appropriate lessons from “Before the Law,” I’d at least have paid attention to an even more important part at the end of The Trial, when the Priest explains to Josef K. the real moral of that very parable: that the Court’s case against K. isn’t actually personal. “The Court wants nothing from you,” the Priest says—doors created for the sole purposes of slamming in faces notwithstanding. “It takes you when you come and lets you out when you leave.” And that’s all. Of all his unknown crimes, K.’s worst was the egocentricity of assuming he was being persecuted.
I knew this intimately from my work, and I of all people should have let art bleed into life. And yet, I couldn’t help but assume that an academic search committee happening to choose another applicant, for reasons that ultimately had nothing to do with me (or my 198 best friends), was a swift personal judgment upon my inherent unworthiness as a scholar. Or, worse, somehow these search committees knew I’d been a nineteen-year-old lazy-ass, and no amount of sincere intellectual labor in my thirties could compensate. Making the job market personal in this way wasn’t just egocentric, though—it was also easier than the reality, which was that being selected for a particular academic position required an alchemic combination of “correct” qualities that was largely out of my control: a perfectly in-need specialization (one that stepped on no toes, but was familiar enough to everyone not to be dismissed as vogueish gibberish); a CV that struck the exact correct balance between teaching and research (different, of course, for every institution); and, most importantly, some sort of transcendental intangible that made one person the right “fit” and another the wrong one.
The reality was that my CV was probably near-identical to everyone else’s: a handful of publications in the “right journals”; a dissertation under contract to become a book; an impressive-sounding list of conference presentations in far-flung locations; a stack of glowing teaching reviews and another stack of glowing letters of reference. What made me “not good enough” (and someone else good enough) largely came down to factors I’d never be able to identify, much less control. Academia wasn’t weeding me out personally for my past or current sins, real or imagined. The job market wasn’t out to get me. It wanted nothing from me. It took me when I arrived—and it would let me leave when I left.
Except I wouldn’t leave. Sometimes, after all, you want the impossible precisely because it’s impossible. Also it was just so much less terrifying to decide that it was all my fault for being lazy fifteen years ago—or any number of other character shortcomings, academic and otherwise. All I had to do, I decided, was be better. Publish more. Work harder. Be even more willing to move anywhere, and do anything. I decided to attempt the job market for three more years. Every single person I knew in academia who held a position I respected told me in no uncertain terms that this was exactly the right thing to do—if not, perhaps, too few years. (Many suggested five. Some suggested ten. A few suggested “as long as it takes.”)
“It’s hard out there, no doubt,” they said. “But there are always jobs for good people.” Yes, an infinite amount of jobs. (Well, twenty-four jobs.) But not for me.
Keep trying.
Come back.
Maybe later.
In the meantime, I was both lucky and unlucky to land some stopgap academic employment, a day job to pay the bills while I continued on the market. I was lucky, because the difference between unemployed and employed is of course vast. I was unlucky because the job was as an adjunct, the academic equivalent of the Land-Surveyor in Kafka’s Castle, a sort of shifty mercenary who’s summoned to the ivory tower but not really let inside, who effectively both belongs to the Castle and doesn’t.
Adjuncts are real professors in that they have teaching responsibilities that are, in most cases, more or less identical to those of their full-time, tenure-track or tenured counterparts. (To students, they’re exactly the same, save for the fact that they always show up in the course listing as “staff.”) But they’re also not real professors, in that they aren’t listed in a department roster, don’t have offices (or if they do, they share with multiple other adjuncts), often don’t have use of the copier or the library, don’t have building keys, aren’t invited to faculty meetings, and are generally regarded by their full-time colleagues somewhere between invisible and gonorrhea incarnate. Adjuncts teach on a course-by-course, semester-by-semester basis for as little as seventeen hundred dollars per class (per three-and-a-half-month semester), and can be fired at any time for any reason. They are academia’s dirtiest little secret—not because they keep quiet (they don’t; many form unions and agitate); it’s more that for some reason, students and their parents don’t seem to care that they’re paying $250,000 to be taught by someone who has to eat at the soup kitchen.
The adjunct job I was offered at the small honors college associated with Witold’s university was a few sections of the introductory freshman literature course, which contained no German texts, but for which I had trained as a TA back in Irvine, when I taught a section of the humanities core sequence. That had been a welcome diversion from my normal duties, of teaching German 101 to half-snoozing freshmen who used Google Translate for most of their assignments, which is not as intellectually fulfilling as you might think. But the literature courses I taught, both in Irvine and then as an adjunct in St. Louis, were different. Demystifying texts with students—difficult ones that they never would have chosen for themselves, that they approached with trepidation or sometimes hostility—was, it turned out, even more enjoyable than demystifying them alone in my room.
After every semester, I would rip into my student evaluations like they were a plate of the chocolate-chip pancakes I now rarely allowed myself.
It was a surprisingly enjoyable class to go to.
If I could take any class at college over again, I’d pick this one.
One of the most interesting classes I’ve taken, and one I will never forget.
Dr. Schuman is pretty much the smartest person I’ve ever met ever.
Dr. Schuman is the best teacher I have ever had, not just here, but in my life.
The good news was that I clearly and at long last had found the place I belonged. The bad news was: What if nobody would let me do this for a living wage, ever? If I stopped teaching college, I’d feel destroyed—but if I kept adjuncting, I’d be destroyed. So that is why I couldn’t just leave. That is why I couldn’t just tell the Doorkeeper to go fuck himself, and get Botox so I could be hired at the Gap. That is why, after another market cycle again yielded no tenure-track offers, I kept waiting outside that door for two more years—even though it damn near killed me.
I don’t mean this existentially. I almost died courtesy of an appropriately Kafkan disease. But let’s backtrack a second: What if the Doorkeeper allowed the man from the country in to the Law for exactly two years, with the promise that almost everyone who has been allowed to do this got full and permanent access afterward? That’s what happened to me. I applied for—and won—a postdoctoral fellowship from a high-profile granting institution, one that was for “promising scholars” who were in danger of Leaving the Field, a fate worse than death.
“Many of our fellows have had their positions converted into tenure-track jobs,” explained the program’s director during a terrifying orientation webinar (largely terrifying because of the word webinar). “Just work hard and make yourself indispensable.” Sounded feasible enough.
I was placed at a massive research university in Ohio, in a department whose chair sold me on four impending retirements (nudge nudge, wink wink), and “collegiality” (academic shorthand for “we actively pretend not to hate each other”). This is it, I thought. I was going to go to Ohio alone, take advantage of my solitude and turn that dissertation into a book, crank out articles, overprepare for class, and suck up to my collegial new colleagues with such believable sincerity (believable because they, being so collegial, would be nice people I’d enjoy pleasing) that they’d have no choice but to look at each other and go: Why even bother with a stupid national search to replace these retirements, when Rebecca is right here being indispensable?
When I arrived, the department manager pointed to the unopened box of books and teaching materials I’d had mailed to myself and told me I might as well take it home. “We thought about petitioning the Dean of Space for an office for you—but for such a short time, will it really be worth it?”
All I could think to say in answer was: “You have someone called a Dean of Space?”
After I held office hours with unimpressed students in the department storage room for several weeks, one of my new colleagues took pity upon me: since he had two offices, he’d allow me to use one of them—so long as I didn’t make him clean it out. That had been a true moment of collegiality, yes—one that almost made up for the start-of-semester party, when the department’s most eminent professor came up to me and said: “Amy! It’s nice to meet you. It must be so nice to be almost finished with your dissertation.”
“It’s nice to meet you too,” I said. “My name is, uh, actually Rebecca, and I am happy to report that I finished my dissertation two years ago.”
She looked at me like she wanted to spit poison. I was reminded of the scene in The Trial where Josef K. has his first interrogation, and the magistrate says, “So, you’re a house painter!” This isn’t true, and K. tries to set the record straight—but that actually just ends up making him look worse in the eyes of the ever-shifting Court.
“Rebecca is our new faculty fellow!” said the chair, in a good-faith effort to rescue me. “Remember? She’s going to be here for the next year.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But I’m actually going to be here for two.”
“Oh, but you’ll find a job before then,” she said. “Surely, you will.”
I had hoped to find a job there—I’d already been investigating a spousal hire for Witold, since this was finally a big institution with money (or at any rate a very rich football team). I had been led to believe a job there wasn’t out of the question. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps this whole thing was going to turn out differently than I thought. If only some force in Wittgenstein’s ineffable realm of the transcendent would give me a signal as to what to do next. If only.
Seven months later, I got pneumonia.
It started out like a bad cold. Witold was visiting for the weekend, and on Friday night I declared, midway through an episode of Homeland (which was currently “our show”), that I would be taking to bed. Witold harrumphed around my cavernous living room—the apartment was too big for one person, furnished in matching red and black décor via one frantic trip to an IKEA a hundred miles away, loneliness radiating from every particleboard surface—unsure exactly why he drove the four hundred miles if I was just going to slink off alone. When he finally slipped in beside me, he recoiled.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No,” he said, “you’re burning up.”
I couldn’t eat. I could barely sit. I would sweat through my clothes every hour, overcome by shaking chills. On Sunday afternoon, Witold had to leave, due in the classroom the next morning at nine.
“Go, go. I’m fine. It’s probably a flu.”
“Are you sure?”
What was he going to do? Take FMLA so he could keep me company while I did the world’s most cursory course prep and gnawed halfheartedly on frozen waffles?
“Can’t you get a friend to cover your classes for you?” he asked.
“My colleagues are German. It takes like seven years to become someone’s actual friend. You know that. I’ll be fine. Go home.”
I waved him out the door, but I wasn’t actually sure I’d be all right. In fact, I was pretty sure that with Witold gone, I could die in my apartment and nobody would notice for days. So I took his advice and composed what I thought was a fairly brave (and desperate) e-mail to my colleagues, quickly reminding them of my name and rank, and asking if anyone might be able to pop into my class the next day, just to hand out a group activity (“Worksheet attached!”) and then leave again.
Those who didn’t ignore me sent back apologies: There was a bigwig visiting that week, a finalist for the “Eminent Scholar” position. Everyone was too busy showing him the racquetball courts and attending his mini-seminar on Nietzschean semiotics. What did I expect? They didn’t know me. I can’t imagine I would have done a thing different in their places. And so, I forced down two more Tylenol, dragged jeans over my legs and a semirespectable shirt over my head, and wrapped a cashmere scarf around my neck a half-dozen times, before walking—grandpas everywhere, take note—a half-mile, in the sleet, with a 103-degree fever, to go teach my fucking class.
As the week progressed, my condition deteriorated past the point that my last flu had started to improve. My dad called up with the radical suggestion that I seek the counsel of a medical doctor.
“I don’t have a doctor,” I explained. “I just moved here.”
“Then just go to one of those rent-a-docs at Walgreens,” he begged.
“Those are such a rip-off!” I said, before dissolving into coughs.
“I will spot you whatever it costs,” he said. “Just go.”
Twenty minutes and a delirious bus ride later, I shuffled into a Minute Clinic looking every bit the pill-scheming druggie: skin that had progressed from waxy to hanging off my craggy visage; eyes that had disappeared into the sunken purple caverns that surrounded them; hair that had touched neither suds nor comb in a week; breath that could have caused a conflagration had I exhaled too forcefully in the nail-care aisle.
“I think,” I said to the nonplussed nurse-practitioner, “I have the flu.”
“You think you have the flu?” she said. “The flu,” she said with a resigned exhale, “is a high fever that lasts for—”
“I’ve had a temperature of a hundred and three for eight days,” I said.
“Oh dear,” she said. “You need to go to the emergency room.”
At the hospital, I was spirited into a cozy cot with clean sheets, in my very own partitioned-off room with its own TV and everything. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air kept me company while I waited for test results. Once they plied me with enough Tylenol and Motrin to get my fever down, I even kind of enjoyed the break. I had been too out of it to bring my laptop with me, and so now, for the first time since I’d arrived in Ohio, I couldn’t feel guilty about the few hours per day I didn’t spend working on my godforsaken book or answering student e-mails about whether or not I could “just bump up” their grades from an A-minus to an A. Nurses flanked me with warmed blankets, soup, hot water, more Tylenol, and care. Yes, I know they were being paid to care, but after a week alone in my apartment shivering into my soaked pillow, I didn’t give a shit.
The doctor attending me was also named Rebecca, and looked about twelve. That’s the thing about academia; because you’re thirty-five and still applying to entry-level positions, you forget that most thirty-five-year-olds are already established in their careers. Forget middle management; they’re partners in their law firms and medical practices. They’re upper management or even executives. So you get administered to by medical residents of perfectly average medical-resident age, but suddenly they’re all Doogie Howser. Anyway, teen wonder medical-doctor Rebecca surmised that since I’d flunked—or perhaps passed—the flu test (whichever it was, I didn’t have the flu), I probably just had “some other virus” that apparently couldn’t be pinpointed, and was about to be sent home.
“But I guess we’ll do a chest X-ray, just to cover our bases.”
“I always appreciate some perfunctory radiation,” I said, before falling into a brief fever dream about doing the Carlton dance in front of my Intro to German Prose class. The next thing I knew, medical-doctor Rebecca was nudging me awake, telling me I had pneumonia.
“Holy shit!” I said. “The walking kind?”
“Nope,” she said, “the regular kind. I guess that chest X-ray wasn’t a bad idea.”
Pneumonia. An actual Lungenkrankheit, a “lung disease,” not unlike the sort that killed Franz Kafka. The kind of illness that, if left untreated—if, for example, its sufferer is a reclusive German professor in a new town with no primary care provider—kills people even today. I sent out an unsolicited but searing follow-up e-mail to my colleagues, explaining that I would have to cancel class for a few days—“given the pneumonia,” I said, lest they have not read the first two sentences, most of which were comprised of the word pneumonia, nor the subject line, which was “PNEUMONIA.”
After I got better, I went onto Etsy, where you can purchase jewelry in the shape of literally anything, and found a necklace in the shape of lungs. I wore it to remind me, not of the pneumonia per se, but of the helplessness that went with it. And of the fact that out of my seventeen colleagues, one taught at the same time as I did, one was pregnant and couldn’t come within thirty feet of me, and the other fifteen did not know me well enough to think I was anything other than a melodramatic hypochondriac.
Was contracting a 1920 disease—the result, according to my teen doctor, of stress—sign enough for me to find something else to do with my life? It was not. Here’s why: What if, instead of just being told maybe later, the man from the country had actually and legitimately gotten a little bit closer to the Law every time he tried to get past the Doorkeeper? Like, to use a random example, let’s say the first time, he was ignored completely; the second time he was granted a preliminary interview of sorts for admittance to a low-level Law anteroom; the third time he got an even better interview—for full access to the Law—and the fourth time, he even got a follow-up invitation to come and spend two days hanging out with all of the Doorkeepers as a sort of final audition. In this case, it would seem like the man from the country was making progress and shouldn’t give up, no?
The year after my first attempt’s gaping void, I got a single non-tenure-track interview (for a position that was later canceled); the year after that, I was at last granted an uncomfortable seat at the foot of a hotel bed at the Modern Language Association conference (an interview I blew by “having a personality,” as one of them put it). Finally, the year after that, my personality and I somehow made it past the interview stage to the coveted position of finalist at another university in Ohio not far from where I already worked. That meant I was invited on a campus visit, which is a two-day gauntlet of more interviews, teaching demonstrations, and “casual” meals where every gesture would secretly communicate to the search committee the innermost nuances of the quality of my mind and my likelihood to remain in rural Ohio forever.
The visit was an unmitigated disaster, largely because I bombed my teaching demo. It wasn’t just the worst German class I’d ever taught; I was pretty sure it was the worst class of any sort that anyone had ever taught. To be fair, I never stood a chance: it was nine on a Friday morning at a school known for its fraternity culture, on a day that was both in the single digits temperature-wise and on which the students had an essay due. You couldn’t have come up with a better formula for calamity if you tried: day everyone wants to skip + reason they have to be there anyway. But, to be fair to them, I did whatever the opposite of rising to the occasion is: their resistance threw me off so terribly that I flubbed every exercise, and ended the class near tears.
In hindsight, I now know that teaching demonstrations in foreign-language classrooms are an impossible minefield. The students are timid about speaking in front of strangers; they’ve got their own stresses and commitments (and poorly timed essay assignments and frat parties) without a visibly terrified, overenthusiastic, suit-wearing rando plunking name plates down in front of them. I should have come in with five games aimed at total beginners that would have immediately made them feel smart and relaxed, and just played the whole time—of course, then I wouldn’t have gotten to demonstrate my precious pedagogy, and I still wouldn’t have gotten the damn job. One option was the mousetrap and the other was the cat. I just wanted to go home, sink into my wobbly red IKEA couch I put together myself, and wait for the slow embrace of death.
But first, I had four more interviews and what’s creatively called a “job talk,” a brief lecture about research that’s supposed to be the final tribunal, where the candidate is lobbed a bunch of withering criticism and, if she vanquishes her opponents properly, is then deemed worthy to join their ranks. Mine was called THE CASE FOR A LOGICAL MODERNISM: the Tractatus, Kafka’s ‘The Judgment,’ and the Ineffable. (Mildly Clever Thing; three-part list; made-up word, check check check.) I gave it to a tiny smattering of the faculty, most of whom spent it texting. Afterward, nobody lobbed me any scathing This isn’t a question so much as a comment questions, which a normal person might take as a good sign, but which a seasoned academic knows to mean that nobody is taking you seriously. Jesus, word about my Chernobyl of teaching demos must have gotten around fast. After that, even though at that point nobody was even pretending I was still under serious consideration, I still had one last dinner, where allegedly I could just be myself, which my mentors were clear to warn me meant be nothing like yourself.
Sometime on the glacial walk between my on-campus hotel and the restaurant—where, since I had no need to impress these people further, I decided to see how much free food I could get and ordered an appetizer, main course, and dessert—it dawned on me that I didn’t want this. I wanted to be offered the job, yes. I wanted to be good enough to get a tenure-track job, and more than that I wanted everyone else to know that I was good enough, too. But I didn’t want this job. I didn’t want to move to rural Ohio alone in the agonizing hope that someday Witold would get laid off and have no choice but to come move in with me and be an adjunct, the exact reverse of what I’d done two years before. I didn’t want to wade through knee-deep snow on a Friday morning just to be glared at by twenty future Mitt Romneys of America who still reeked of booze and called me our Frau, with an unrolled American r. I didn’t want to spend every waking second I wasn’t prepping for class churning out meticulous thirty-page articles that, best-case scenario, would appear three years later in some journal with a circulation of 125.
In other words, dinner went great.
“What would you tell one of your students if he asked you to recommend good Ph.D. programs in German?” asked my never-to-be-future-colleague Boris, as I ripped into my bread pudding with chocolate sauce.
“Honestly? I would say: Under no circumstances should you do this.”
Two weeks later, I got a kindly worded e-mail from the department chair letting me know they’d made a hire, a woman who already worked there as a well-liked visiting professor (visiting from nowhere; it’s a euphemistic title for “adjunct with health insurance”). In academic parlance, she was an “inside candidate.” That explained everything: the finalist from a short drive away who wouldn’t need airfare; the awkward teaching slot, as I wouldn’t have been allowed to take over the insider’s class or even be on campus at the same time she was; the lack of attendance at my talk. There was never any mousetrap. There was never any wrong direction to run. There was only the cat.
Yes, I had spent the past four years getting incrementally closer to the goal of becoming a German professor. Sure, I liked being a German professor fine (with my own students, who didn’t hate me). I was also pretty good at it, despite the two days I’d just spent proving that I was bad at it. But I was now a thirty-six-year-old apprentice who would be expected to keep apprenticing for as long as it took. How did I get here? Who the hell was I? Where was the person who’d spent her nights playing on the indoor swing hanging from the ceiling of her Kreuzberg loft? The person whose Friday nights were not spent writing her book’s seven hundredth footnote until one in the morning—not because she was behind in her work, but because she could think of nothing else to do with herself? The person whose relationship had a fun-percentage higher than five? Who, for that matter, had any human contact whatsoever, outside of her nineteen-year-old students and emergency-room personnel? I know “A Little Fable” doesn’t really have a moral, but I still think the cat was onto something. Yes, of course I was just going to die in the end—we all are—but somewhere between declaring a German major in college and pulling on my ill-fitting Banana Republic suit for that campus visit, I had gone severely off track. And the walls were closing in.
Or were they? Because here’s the thing. That cat, carnivorous four-legged embodiment of Schadenfreude that she was, also had another good point. It wasn’t just that I’d made bad choices, which everybody does. It was that I was looking at the maze all wrong. Understanding something and misunderstanding the same thing can happen at the same time. The mouse insists that the walls closed in on her until there was no room left. But what happens, really, when those walls close all the way in? They disappear.
And guess what else, cat? Every German compound word is easily distilled back into the words that made it, and Schadenfreude is no different. If your life is somehow, either through your own ignominious choices or bad luck, subject to malicious happiness, either from others or yourself, you still have a choice. You can choose the Schaden, the misfortune, the pewter lungs around the neck. Or you can say fuck it, and go for the Freude—decide, after all of that, in spite of (perhaps because of) everything, on joy.
Which did I choose? The answer is simple. And just on the other side of this door.