n. epilogue, from after and word.
All right. I’m not Franz Kafka, and I’m now to the point in my life where I know that’s a good thing. I’m not going to leave this like he did The Castle, at an unceremonious dropping-off midsentence. I’m going say that everything turned out fine in the end.
Around the time of my doomed campus visit, I got back in touch with a long-lost acquaintance from New York, who was a senior editor at an online magazine with a very large readership (now, it seemed, it was writing for print that didn’t count). He suggested I expand some of my bile-shooting Facebook posts about the job market into fifteen hundred words, which he would both publish on the Internet and exchange for actual money. What resulted was an article that implored readers who thought it might be fun to get a Ph.D. in literature to, well, maybe not do that, on account of it would ruin their lives. To my shock, the article racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and in the space of two days I went from wishing that any academic anywhere knew my name to wishing that more of them didn’t. Still, though, it was for the best: with those fifteen hundred words, I had at long last silenced everyone who had spent all those years insisting I keep trying.
In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke describes a nineteenth-century practice to ensure that you didn’t bury someone alive. Namely, if you were pretty sure someone was dead but not 100 percent sure, you stuck a needle through his heart. That way, if he had still been alive (but barely so, and not fooling anybody), he wasn’t anymore. I had known my academic career was dead for some time, and I was sick of everyone I knew insisting I keep trying to perform CPR on a corpse.
“I assure you I am not going back on the job market ever again,” I would say.
“Don’t put that on your Facebook!” they’d say. “A search committee might see it.”
“I’m not ever going back on the job market,” I’d say. “I don’t give a fuck what any search committee thinks about my Facebook.”
“Shh!” they’d say. “Rebecca! What would a search committee think if they heard you say that?”
I put a stop to that shit at last by creating an indelible paper trail of unhireability—in academia, and possibly everywhere else.
But with that article, I’d also committed my last (to date) act of Kafkan perspective shift. I went from professional failure—as in, failure at my profession—to professional failure, as in failure as a profession. Antipathy and loserdom were my new business, and business was terrible, which meant it was great. And indeed, a few months after my questionable debut, the magazine brought me on as a columnist. It was now my job to detail my failures and academia’s vicissitudes—and, when it was newsworthy, I could write about Germany, Austria, and even Franz Kafka.
My new career as a professional train wreck also meant I could dwell in wreckage wherever I wanted—preferably somewhere very cheap, as Internet magazine writing is enjoyable but not lucrative. As it happened, Witold was in year six of his one-year job in St. Louis. He’d won Non-Tenure-Track Faculty of the Year; he’d been made director of undergraduate studies—basically, barring a cataclysm, his job would be lived out in one-year increments in perpetuity. (That, by the way, is what we call “the new tenure.”) Before I moved to Ohio, he’d even bought a two-bedroom condo in a lovely neighborhood, in cash, for approximately the price I paid for my top-of-the-line Discman in 1996. No mortgage for him equaled no rent for me—not to mention, perhaps, the return of cohabitation, which might tick the fun percentage of a certain relationship up into the double digits.
“This place,” he said in the spring of 2013, as I grappled with being newly “academic-famous” (that is, not at all famous), and we lugged what remained of my personal effects out of the beat-up 2000 Saturn on the back end of our very last stultifying four-hundred-mile journey down I-70 from Ohio, “is exactly the right size for a young family.”
“Wow,” I said. “Are you proposing?”
“No!” he said.
“We’ve only been together seven years. Wouldn’t want to do anything rash.”
“Are you serious?” he said. “I thought you weren’t the marrying sort.”
I shrugged.
“And I quote: ‘I have no interest in participating in a patriarchal ownership ritual, thank you very much.’”
“Well, it’s not like I’d take your name.”
“‘I am nobody’s help-meet!’”
“All I’m saying is that I could really use some health insurance.”
On the heels of that grand romantic gesture, Witold and I were married at City Hall in a ninety-second ceremony. He did not shave for the august occasion. By our first anniversary, and shortly before my thirty-eighth birthday, that health insurance had already come in quite handy, given that I was three months pregnant. (Six months after that, it came in handier still, when the Schuman progeny had to be wrested from my uncooperative torso by brute surgical force.)
Our daughter was born in St. Louis on what would have been my grandfather’s one hundredth birthday. We gave her a weird Polish name. When she is old enough to withstand an international flight (or, more accurately, when she is old enough for me to withstand bringing her on an international flight), we will take her to Germany, and Austria, and Prague. I will point out the window of the train as the landscape rolls by—craggy mountains and defunct nuclear power plants; painfully bucolic villages and electric-green rolling hills; buildings that look older than God and that will make her think about believing in Him. I will show her Kafka’s grave (but probably not the mental-institution-turned-hotel where I nearly conceived her twenty-years-older sibling with a guy I didn’t even like). I will remind her that the ground floor is “Floor Zero” and the first floor is the second floor. I will extol the virtues of room-temperature mineral water. I will show her how to skin cooked potatoes with a knife and fork, and how to weigh her produce at the supermarket before checkout, so as not to get yelled at. When we invariably still do get yelled at, I will explain to her that it’s not personal; she’s not really in trouble; that’s just how Germans express their love. That will be both true and a lie at the same time, and someday, I will explain to her that understanding something and misunderstanding the same thing are not mutually exclusive. Someday, I will tell her all about it, but only when she’s much older. And only after the first time she’s waited outside a door that was created for the sole purpose of slamming in her face.