Dying Inside

Here is my client, the bulky halfback, Paul F. Bruno. His face is swollen and purple, and he is unsmiling, as though Saturday’s heroics have cost him some teeth. I flip the rubber band down, extract The Novels of Kafka, and offer the paper to him. “Six pages,” I say. He has given me a ten-dollar advance. “You owe me another eleven bucks. Do you want to read it first?”

“How good is it?”

“You won’t be sorry.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” He manages a painful, close-mouthed grin. Pulling forth his thick wallet, he crosses my palm with greenbacks. I slip quickly into his mind, just for the hell of it now that my power is working again, a fast psychic rip-off, and pick up the surface levels: loose teeth at the football game, a sweet compensatory blow-job at the frat house Saturday night, vague plans for getting laid after next Saturday’s game, etc., etc. Concerning the present transaction I detect guilt, embarrassment, even some annoyance with me for having helped him. Oh, well: the gratitude of the goy. I pocket his money. He favors me with a curt nod and tucks The Novels of Kafka under his immense forearm. Hastily, in shame, he goes hustling down the steps and off in the direction of Hamilton Hall. I watch his broad retreating back. A sudden gust of malevolent wind, rising off the Hudson, comes knifing eastward and cuts me bone-deep.

Bruno has paused at the sundial, where a slender black student close to seven feet tall has intercepted him. A basketball player, obviously. The black wears a blue varsity jacket, green sneakers, and tight tubular yellow slacks. His legs alone seem five feet long. He and Bruno talk for a moment. Bruno points toward me. The black nods. I am about to gain a new client, I realize. Bruno vanishes and the black trots springlegged across the walk, up the steps. He is very dark, almost purple-skinned, yet his features have a Caucasian sharpness, fierce cheekbones, proud aquiline nose, thin frosty lips. He is formidably handsome, some kind of walking statuary, some sort of idol. Perhaps his genes are not Negroid at all: an Ethiopian, maybe, some tribesman of the Nile bulrushes? Yet he wears his midnight mass of kinky hair in a vast aggressive Afro halo a foot in diameter or more, fastidiously trimmed. I would not have been surprised by scarified cheeks, a bone through the nostrils. As he nears me, my mind, barely slit-wide, picks up peripheral generalized emanations of his personality. Everything is predictable, even stereotyped: I expect him to be touchy, cocky, defensive, hostile, and what comes to me is a bouillabaisse of ferocious racial pride, overwhelming physical self-satisfaction, explosive mistrust of others — especially whites. All right. Familiar patterns.

His elongated shadow falls suddenly upon me as the sun momentarily pierces the clouds. He sways bouncily on the balls of his feet. “Your name Selig?” he asks. I nod. “Yahya Lumumba,” he says.

“Pardon me?”

“Yahya Lumumba.” His eyes, glossy white against glossy purple, blaze with fury. From the impatience of his tone I realize that he is telling me his name, or at least the name he prefers to use. His tone indicates also that he assumes it’s a name everyone on this campus will recognize. Well, what would I know of college basketball stars? He could throw the ball through the hoop fifty times a game and I’d still not have heard of him. He says, “I hear you do term papers, man.”

“That’s right.”

“You got a good recommend from my pal Bruno there. How much you charge?”

“$3.50 a page. Typed, double-spaced.”

He considers it. He shows many teeth and says, “What kind of fucking rip-off is that?”

“It’s how I earn my living, Mr. Lumumba.” I hate myself for that toadying, cowardly mister. “That’s about $20 for an average-length paper. A decent job takes a fair amount of time, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” An elaborate shrug. “Okay, I’m not hassling you, man. I got need for your work. You know anything about Europydes?”

“Euripides?”

“That’s what I said.” He’s baiting me, coming on with exaggerated black mannerisms, talking watermelon-nigger at me with his Europydes. “That Greek cat who wrote plays.”

“I know who you mean. What sort of paper do you need, Mr. Lumumba?”

He pulls a scrap of a notebook sheet from a breast pocket and makes a great show of consulting it. “The prof he want us to compare the ‘Electra’ theme in Europydes, Sophocles, and Eesk — Aysk—”

“Aeschylus?”

“Him, yeah. Five to ten pages. It due by November 10. Can you swing it?”