Dying Inside

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” An unexpected concession: “Maybe there is something sick about my relationship with him.” Her flinty self-assurance vanishes abruptly. That’s the wonderful thing about her: you get a different Judith every two minutes. Now, softening, thawing, she sounds uncertain of herself. In a moment she’ll turn her concern outward, away from her own troubles, toward me. “Will you come to dinner next week? We very much do want to get together with you.”

“I’ll try.”

“I’m worried about you, Duv.” Yes, here it comes. “You looked so strung out on Saturday night.”

“It’s been a pretty rough time for me. But I’ll manage.” I don’t feel like talking about myself. I don’t want her pity, because after I get hers, I’ll start giving myself mine. “Listen, I’ll call you soon, okay?”

“Are you still in so much pain, Duv?”

“I’m adapting. I’m accepting the whole thing. I mean, I’ll be okay. Keep in touch, Jude. My best to Karl.” And Claude, I add, as I put down the receiver.

* * *

Wednesday morning. Downtown to deliver my latest batch of masterpieces. It’s colder even than yesterday, the air clearer, the sun brighter, more remote. How dry the world seems. The humidity is minus sixteen percent, I think. The sort of weather in which I used to function with overwhelming clarity of perception. But I was picking up hardly anything at all on the subway ride down to Columbia, just muzzy little blurts and squeaks, nothing coherent. I can no longer be certain of having the power on any given day, apparently, and this is one of the days off. Unpredictable. That’s what you are, you who live in my head: unpredictable. Thrashing about randomly in your death-throes. I go to the usual place and await my clients. They come, they get from me what they have come for, they cross my palm with greenbacks. David Selig, benefactor of undergraduate mankind. I see Yahya Lumumba like a black sequoia making his way across from Butler Library. Why am I trembling? It’s the chill in the air, isn’t it, the hint of winter, the death of the year. As the basketball star approaches he waves, nods, grins; everyone knows him, everyone calls out to him. I feel a sense of participation in his glory. When the season starts maybe I’ll go watch him play.

“You got the paper, man?”

“Right here.” I deal it off the stack. “Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Six pages. That’s $21, minus the five you already gave me is $16 you owe me.”

“Wait, man.” He sits down beside me on the steps. “I got to read this fucker first, right? How I know you did a righteous job if I don’t read it?”

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 gonna get flunked, is what.”