In the Middle of Somewhere (23 page)

“Sorry,” I say as I accidentally brush up against her shoulder while I get myself situated.

“No problem,” she says, and smiles at me.

When the first panelist gets up, she immediately begins to ramble on about how panels are designed to stifle thoughts and make ideas digestible and prepackaged; that’s why they’re called panels, like the containing squares in a comic book.

“Is that Maggie Shill?” I ask the woman next to me. I’ve never seen her speak, but the other panelists are a man and a woman who looks Latina.

“Oh yeah,” the woman says, sounding embarrassed.

I’m shocked. This rambling mess is Maggie Shill.

“As I completed my paper,” Professor Shill is saying, “I realized that it wouldn’t do the world any good—no good at all.”

“Oh Jesus,” the woman next to me mutters.

“What’s the deal?” I ask. “Her work is so good?”

The woman scrunches down in her seat like she’s trying to avoid being seen.

“She’s totally losing it,” she says. She glances at me out of the corner of her eye. “She’s my dissertation director, and—” She looks left and right to make sure no one’s listening. “—she told me that she was too busy to write her paper so she was just going to wing it. I don’t have any idea what she’s doing, but I’m supposed to have drinks with her after this. Maybe I’ll be struck by lightning instead.”

Up at the podium, Professor Shill is still talking, her tone manic, her gestures wild. She’s talking about interdisciplinarity and the role of the humanities, but saying nothing about the topic her paper was supposed to be about. Finally, she starts talking about how being a mentor is all she ever wanted and how her graduate students make it all worth it. The woman next to me slides down farther.

“Oh my god, this is not good,” she says.

“So, she has no paper?” I confirm.

“Nope,” the woman says. “It’s so fucked-up. I was on the same flight as her coming here and when we got in last night she went to the hotel bar to meet some friends and got wasted. I saw her staggering around the lobby at, like, midnight, flirting with some business-looking guy. Then before the panel she grabbed me and told me to come to her talk and we’d have drinks to celebrate after. What was I supposed to say?”

Professor Shill is now denouncing the conference itself, claiming that she had the idea for the conference theme years ago and no one listened to her, but now no one will acknowledge her role. She sounds nuts.

“Dude, she’s lost it,” I say. Man, talk about disillusioned. I can’t believe this is the same Maggie Shill whose work I’ve read all these years.

“Oh, she never had it,” the woman says. “All she does is work and she, like, doesn’t care if you have a life. She basically lives at school and does nothing but read and write. She’s a machine. But she’s off her goddamned rocker.”

Maggie Shill reaches over to the panelist at the end of the table and picks up his paper. She tears it in half down the middle and drops it on the floor.

“In the end, it’s just words on the page,” she says, staring out at us, eyes blank. “Just words on the page that vanish into the air.” Then she walks out of the conference room.

“Kill me,” the woman next to me groans.

I
DECIDE
to get one drink at the hotel bar before I go back to my room and indulge in watching some shitty TV and zoning out.

“Daniel, hey.”

I look up to see Andre, a cute grad student I’ve known for a few years. He started at Penn a year or two after I did and then transferred to University of Michigan when his dissertation advisor took a job there.

“Hey, Andre, good to see you.” He gives me a hug and sits on the stool next to mine. “I should have known you’d be here—U of M’s really close, right?”

“Yeah, Ann Arbor’s only about a half hour from here. You’re in Michigan too, now, right?”

“Yeah, up north of Traverse City. Crazy.”

“Ooh, already saying Up North. Very Michigan of you.”

“Sorry?”

“You know, Up North?” At my vacant expression, Andre says, “Up North is the northern lower peninsula, like where you live. Of course, everyone in Michigan will make a different argument about where exactly you can draw the line that indicates where Up North begins. It can get very heated.”

I smile and shake my head.

“Fucking Michigan,” I say.

“How’s the conference treating you?” Andre asks.

“Dude, I just saw someone totally go off the deep end,” I say, and tell him about Professor Shill.

“Oh wow,” he says. “Well, that’s what being a workaholic with no personal life will get you. You invest that much in paper and ink that can’t give anything back to you and you end up losing your shit by forty.”

Shit, when he puts it like that it sounds so depressing.

“Speaking of which,” Andre says, his hand brushing my thigh, “are you here alone?”

“I am.”

“You wanna…?”

Andre and I slept together at the last two conferences where we saw each other. He’s sweet and really cute, with dark skin and long eyelashes and an adorable way of squeezing his eyes really tightly closed when he comes.

I shake my head. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Andre grins. “Whoa, did Dr. Mulligan actually meet someone?”

“Never mind that,” I say. “Thanks, though. It was good to see you.” I kiss him on the cheek and leave cash on the bar. He winks at me and finishes my drink.

B
ACK
IN
my room, I sink onto one of the beds without even taking my shoes off. I want to go to bed, but I had the nightmare again last night, so I turn the TV on and start flipping channels.

It’s always the same. I’m walking to the subway from the bar after I get off work. It’s dark and I can see the orange light of the subway entrance a block in front of me. Then, in that way dreams have of making fears concrete, the space doubles, then doubles again, until with every step I’m getting farther away from the subway, like I’m on one of those moving sidewalks at the airport and it’s pulling me backward. Then the street narrows into an alleyway and every step I take is like walking through tar, every movement exaggerated.

I see their shadows before I see them, even though there’s no light. They’re cast long on the walls of the alley and the sound of their laughter echoes down to me. I turn around to go back the way I came, but it’s a dead end—a crumbling brick wall that goes up and up until it disappears into the night sky.

When I turn around they’re right there, two of them in front of me and one to my right. They’re bigger than me, bigger than real people. I come up to their stomachs. They start saying things, silly dream things and scary dream things and things they really said.

The first punch splits my cheek to the bone, then a shove knocks the wind out of me when my back hits the brick wall, snapping my head back with a wet clunk. My vision goes double, but dream double, so now there are six of them, a sick tessellation of swinging fists and kicking legs and pain. I fall into one of them with a punch to the gut and he steps back in disgust, letting me fall to the alley floor. Only, now, instead of the filthy concrete, used condoms, needles, and fast food wrappers, the floor is made of Pennsylvania schist, the rock sparkling with flecks of mica. All I can think is that it’s beautiful, like a spill of dark glitter. Then they’re gone.

I breathe out, my ribs protesting sharply. My body, too weak with relief to move, slumps to the schist. A hot tear runs down my cheek, burning as salt slicks a bloody scrape, and I start to sob. Through tears, I see something moving on the wall. At first I’m grossed out, thinking it’s a roach or a rat, but it’s too big and blocky. Then it falls. It’s a brick. Then another slides out of the wall and crashes to the ground next to me. I try to push myself up to run, but the alley shifts and what was the brick wall is now the ceiling, its bricks falling down on me as the wall crumbles apart. I get to my knees and more bricks rain down. One hits my shoulder and I hear bone crunch. I slump back down as more fall, the alley collapsing around me.

The bricks hit every part of my body except my head, busting my bones to dust, pinning my limbs to the ground like the frog I dissected in high school biology. Then brick hits brick, burying me, leaving only my head untouched. Then, finally, they cover my head, my face, and I’m in darkness, feeling each excruciating shock as more fall. I’m alone in the dark as my air runs out. Then I hear a voice, far away and echoey. I try to call out but can’t, and the voice recedes. How long I’m stuck there depends. It’s just darkness and pain as my breath runs out. Then I wake up gasping, my body tensed against the pain.

I know. It’s just a dream and I’m a grown man. But it leaves me shaky every time because though the bricks collapsing didn’t really happen, of course—Ginger jokes that I’ve listened to
The Wall
too many times—the rest of it did.

W
HEN
I
started grad school I had no idea what to expect. I hadn’t taken the college classes the rest of my cohort had, or read the books. I’d never heard of the literary theorists they mentioned and when one friendly girl with a shiny blonde braid asked if I was a deconstructionist, I told her I worked demolition in the summers if she needed something deconstructed. She laughed with me, bumping me companionably on the shoulder, except that I wasn’t laughing because I had no idea what the joke was. Then she blushed. I thought I’d said something offensive and opened my mouth to apologize, but she looked offended and walked away, muttering something about anti-intellectual posturing.

I didn’t speak in class because it quickly became clear that I had no idea what anyone was talking about. I read the books and the journal articles. Sometimes I read them twice. I knew I understood them because I noticed in class when someone misrepresented an idea or got a minor plot point wrong. The part I was missing, I realized little by little, wasn’t the brains or the memory—or even the creativity. It was the language of academia with which my classmates seemed to come preloaded. They had gone to Ivy League schools and large research universities. They named the professors they’d taken classes with in college and the others nodded, as if they were talking about rock stars.

At first I didn’t admit that I’d gone to community college for my first two years’ worth of credits, working two jobs to pay for them over the course of four years. That it was only on the strength of one of my professors’ recommendation that I was able to transfer to Temple for one final year. That I’m pretty sure the only reason I got into Penn for grad school to begin with is because I was a first generation college student who’d made good. Not that admitting anything was much of an issue because I didn’t have any in-depth conversations with anyone. I could never go to their parties because I was always working. I often couldn’t go to department lectures and guest panels for the same reason.

Finally, in May, I had a meeting with Marisol Jett, the chair of the department, to discuss how the year had gone, one of the requirements of my first-year scholarship. I’d had a class with Marisol that semester, but I didn’t know her well. She intimidated me. At first I told her everything was wonderful, I appreciated the opportunity, I was thankful for the assistance—all the crap I’d learned to say to the people who bankrolled things I could never afford otherwise over the years.

But she snorted and smiled and called bullshit. She was straight with me—told me I had to start attending lectures and going to departmental functions, had to start speaking in class and getting involved. When I tried to explain how behind I felt—trying to find a way to express it that didn’t make it seem like they shouldn’t have taken a chance on me—she told me that she’d read my written work and that I had no reason not to be speaking in class. And she wouldn’t hear any more about it. In fact, she seemed to have a pretty good idea what was going on with me in general. Without my needing to say anything, she told me that if a job was interfering with my attending functions, then I needed to reconsider my schedule or think about a loan. She told me that my fellow classmates would benefit from my perspectives just as I had learned from theirs. And she told me something that shaped everything that happened after.

She told that I might think of my background and my unfamiliarity with academic discourses as weaknesses, but that I should, instead, think of them as the greatest tools I had to do innovative, personal, and meaningful work. She told me to trust my perspective, and it was the greatest gift she could have given me. That summer, I worked sixty-hour weeks when I could get them, doing demo at construction sites and working every night at the bar, saving up against the coming academic year when my fellowship would mean that I had to teach classes at Penn to get tuition remission and a stipend, and wouldn’t be able to work as much.

My second year was better. Much better. I started speaking more in class and made a few friends. I didn’t see them much, since I was still working nights at the bar, but I felt more comfortable there. My third year, I finished course work and began studying for my Masters exams, which meant deciding what I would specialize in and what kind of project I wanted to undertake for my dissertation, which would get me my PhD. I was swamped all the time, trying to read everything that might help me with my work.

Then, that spring, I met Richard. He wasn’t the kind of person I’d ever been around before, and, while I can see it for what it was now, at the time it felt like a compliment that he was interested in me. He asked me questions about my research and seemed interested in some of the theorists I was writing about. He always said, “Thank god you have the good sense to write about something real instead of all that fiction.” It was a compliment to me but a dig at studying English in the first place. And, as Ginger later pointed out, it wasn’t really a compliment to me.

The thing about Richard was that he didn’t take any effort. He was never uncertain or insecure. He never asked me where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do. He’d say something like, “Italian okay?” And when I said sure, he’d say, “I know you’re going to love this place,” but never asked me later if he was right. He made it clear, after that first embarrassing date, that he’d pay when we went out. It made me really uncomfortable, but he also made it clear that if I didn’t go where he wanted to go, he’d go without me. And he was never rude about it. On the contrary, he was always exceedingly gracious, explaining things logically and making it seem like it was strange that I cared, since money was no big deal. Of course it isn’t, if you have it.