Dying Inside

“What were you getting paid for these things?”

“Three or four bucks a typed page.”

Cushing shakes his head. “You were good, I’ll give you credit for that. There must be eight or ten guys working your racket here, but you’re easily the best.”

“Thank you.”

“But you had one dissatisfied customer, at least. We asked Lumumba why he beat you up. He said he hired you to write a term paper for him and you did a lousy job, you ripped him off, and then you wouldn’t refund his money. All right, we’re dealing with him in our own way, but we have to deal with you, too. We’ve been trying to find you for a long time, Dave.”

“Have you?”

“We’ve circulated xeroxes of your work through a dozen departments the last couple of semesters, warning people to be on the lookout for your typewriter and your style. There wasn’t a great deal of cooperation. A lot of faculty members didn’t seem to care whether the term papers they received were phony or not. But we cared, Dave. We cared very much.” Cushing leans forward. His eyes, terribly earnest, seek Selig’s. Selig looks away. He cannot abide the searching warmth of those eyes. “We started closing in a few weeks ago,” Cushing continues. “We rounded up a couple of your clients and threatened them with expulsion. They gave us your name, but they didn’t know where you lived, and we had no way of finding you. So we waited. We knew you’d show up again to deliver and solicit. Then we got this report of a disturbance on the steps of Low, basketball players beating somebody up, and we found you with a pile of undelivered papers clutched in your arm, and that was it. You’re out of business, Dave.”

“I should ask for a lawyer,” Selig says. “I shouldn’t admit anything more to you. I should have denied everything when you showed me those papers.”

“No need to be so technical about your rights.”

“I’ll need to be when you take me to court, Ted.”

“No,” Cushing says. “We aren’t going to prosecute, not unless we catch you ghosting more papers. We have no interest in putting you in jail, and in any case I’m not sure that what you’ve done is a criminal offense. What we really want to do is help you. You’re sick, Dave. For a man of your intelligence, of your potential, to have fallen so low, to have ended up faking term papers for college kids — that’s sad, Dave, that’s awfully sad. We’ve discussed your case here, Dean Bellini and Dean Tompkins and I, and we’ve come up with a rehabilitation plan for you. We can find you work on campus, as a research assistant, maybe. There are always doctoral candidates who need assistants, and we have a small fund we could dip into to provide a salary for you, nothing much, but at least as much as you were making on these papers. And we’d admit you to the psychological counseling service here. It wasn’t set up for alumni, but I don’t see why we need to be inflexible about it, Dave. For myself I have to say that I find it embarrassing that a man of the Class of ’56 is in the kind of trouble you’re in, and if only out of a spirit of loyalty to our class I want to do everything possible to help you put yourself back together and begin to fulfill the promise that you showed when—”

Cushing rambles on, restating and embellishing his themes, offering pity without censure, promising aid to his suffering classmate. Selig, listening inattentively, discovers that Cushing’s mind is beginning to open to him. The wall that earlier had separated their consciousnesses, a product perhaps of Selig’s fear and fatigue, has started to dissolve, and Selig is able now to perceive a general image of Cushing’s mind, which is energetic, strong, capable, but also conventional and limited, a stolid Republican mind, a prosaic Ivy League mind. Foremost in it is not his concern for Selig but rather his complacent satisfaction with himself: the brightest glow emanates from Cushing’s awareness of his happy station in life, ornamented by a suburban split-level, a strapping blonde wife, three handsome children, a shaggy dog, a shining new Lincoln Continental. Pushing a bit deeper, Selig sees that Cushing’s show of concern for him is fraudulent. Behind the earnest eyes and the sincere, heartfelt, sympathetic smile lies fierce contempt. Cushing despises him. Cushing thinks he is corrupt, useless, worthless, a disgrace to mankind in general and the Columbia College Class of ’56 in particular. Cushing finds him physically as well as morally repugnant, seeing him as unwashed and unclean, possibly syphilitic. Cushing suspects him of being homosexual. Cushing has for him the scorn of the Rotarian for the junkie. It is impossible for Cushing to understand why anyone who has had the benefit of a Columbia education would let himself slide into the degradations Selig has accepted. Selig shrinks from Cushing’s disgust. Am I so despicable, he wonders, am I such trash?