With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer

by J. R. Hamantaschen

  “Skillman Street and 46th Street, Sunnyside,” he told the driver. Kevin’s place. Alex had never actually been inside it – that’s Kevin for you – but he knew where it was. He took a couple of minutes to catch his breath and looked outside the cab, just to see if there was anything out of the ordinary. Any minute he predicted a swinging pendulum-like shape dive-bombing through this poor man’s side window, burrowing its frenetic face into him, tears and rips and spurts, car accident, disfigurement, looking up at that impossible face, waiting for death or something worse. He focused on the overwhelming heat in the car, as if to burn the vision out of his mind, and texted Kevin an advance warning. He thought better of that and called, also.

  Kevin answered, by his tone blithely unaware of the text.

  Alex told him he needed to come up, it was an emergency.

  “Dude, what?”

  “Just put some pants on and let me up. It’s important, please, I’m literally begging you.”

  “If Caroline kicked you out of the house, that’s not an emergency.”

  “Dude, fuck you. It’s not that. By the way, that would constitute an emergency, anyway. But it’s not that.” He could easily get lost in the palliative of bonhomie.

  Kevin gave an exaggerated sigh and gave him the address and apartment number.

  “Be there in about 5 minutes. Turn off the internet porn and buzz me in.”

  The driver gave a knowing, jovial look at ‘internet porn’ and gave a hearty smirk-and-snort.

  He paid the fee – in cash, it felt smart to do that, no record, he thought but didn’t want to admit. (Use the Blue Card! He thought instinctively of Caroline’s voice whenever he used cash: Sorry, Honeypot. Next time.)

  He buzzed up to Kevin’s apartment. There was far more street life in Sunnyside. It was a popular, near-Midtown neighborhood in Western Queens, a lot of new development, popular bars, the foodie-approved, appropriately-named restaurants Quaint and Salt and Fat just nearby. He felt safer here. An iota of tension dissipated from his gut. He didn’t like Kevin’s lag time in responding to the buzzer, but Kevin eventually buzzed him up a couple moments shy of straight inattentiveness. But after he opened both sequential doors to the building and was heading up in the elevator to the fourth floor, he didn’t care and was nothing other than supremely grateful.

  He called Caroline again, and again it went straight to voicemail.

  Kevin propped the door open for him, face registering his usual impatience.

  “You’re lucky my roommate is out of town.”

  “Roommate, shit. I didn’t even think of that.”

  “What, you think you were moving in now?”

  That makes sense, the apartment was recently updated and rehabbed: Kevin would have to be forking over most of his salary if he lived here by his lonesome.

  “Fuck man.”

  “So, what’s the deal?” Kevin walked over to his couch. There was a paused DVD-screen on his impressive television. Throne of Blood, read the title, the cheap title at odds with the austere black-and-white visuals.

  Alex pointed to the screen. “Throne of Blood? Sounds too low-brow for you.”

  “Dude, Kurosawa, man. I’ve never seen it. ‘8.2’ rating on IMDB. I’m almost done with it, that’s how good a friend I am. I paused this for you.”

  “Hold on.” He walked into Kevin’s bathroom and closed the door.

  “Great now you’re shit-“ he heard until the closed door muffled Kevin’s protests.

  He peed and flushed. He always wanted to see the inside of the notoriously fussy-Kevin’s bathroom: what bathroom could be pristine enough for Kevin?

  “So that was your emergency?”

  “So,” Alex began. “Don’t you see that I’m basically limping? I was attacked at my apartment, and I was attacked because I was looking into the Washington Heights abortion clinic and Gloria Hernandez. They were paying her, and other people, to have abortions at their facility. I’m not sure why, I’m not sure what they do with … them, but I’m positive I’m right. I think some of the mysterious deaths – those Christian leaders having heart attacks, I think they are somehow related. I think they, they are running this operation, killing off their enemies, I don’t know exactly why.”

  “You were fucking attacked? Are you serious? In your apartment?”

  Alex had been operating under a delusion. A delusion of safety. As if Kevin’s questioning was a doomed clarion call, a smelling salt, the honeyed sanctum of Kevin’s apartment drained of color, drained of security.

  He said nothing.

  “Dude, you were seriously attacked? In your apartment? Where’s Caroline? Call the police man!”

  “I … can’t.”

  “You can’t? You say they are killing people? Seriously? Why are you bringing this shit to me, man?”

  He tried to explain how he wasn’t sure exactly who it was who attacked him.

  “I can’t go back home, I can’t go back to the office, I need somewhere to lay low, I’ll get out of here … as soon as I can, I just thought you… you would understand.”

  “Dude, if what you are saying is even remotely true, you need to call the cops immediately.”

  He covered his face, in tears. “They’ll never believe me. I have no proof. It … gets weirder. It gets worse.” So he tried to explain, tip-toeing around the truth. He was attacked by some kind of freak, he explained, lying, as crazy as it sounded it was much more grounded in any understood semblance of reality than the truth. “Just let me wait here until I get in touch with Caroline, then we will leave, we will get out of here. I didn’t mean to get you involved in this. Just … this is far deeper and far worse than I could have ever imagined.”

  “I told you to chill with that sleuthing shit.”

  “And the worst thing is I don’t even care. Morally, I never really cared too much. So what, Gloria and her abortions. Who fucking cares? I made myself care. I should have just minded my business, like everyone else. No one really cares. I just wanted something to do. I wanted to feel like I was doing something, well, like I was doing something productive. I’m so stupid.

  “They tried to kill me, Kevin. They tried to kill me. For real. I’m not fucking around. They tried to kill me. What have I done? I put Caroline in danger. I need to take her away from this.”

  “Dude, it will be okay.” Kevin walked to the countertop, feeling utterly alone and directionless as he filled a cup with water.

  “Why won’t she pick up her fucking phone?” Alex texted her again and called; again, just the voicemail. She should be out of her exercise class now, maybe she was on the train and wasn’t getting service, no, that was unlikely, she was probably just being absentminded, her phone all the way at the bottom of her purse, not even realizing it wasn’t on ….

  “And what about me, man? What the fuck am I supposed to do? What if they trailed you here?”

  “No … no one trailed me, I’m positive,” Alex spoke as if he were an authority on the matter, as if he had anything to offer except blustery conviction, hope and assuagement.

  “I need to think for a second.” Kevin put his water on the table — he never offered me any, Alex thought to himself, hopefully just a product of typical Kevin selfishness and nothing more, he could hardly tolerate the idea of a growing distance between them, this is a lot to put on him, stay calm, he’s doing you a huge favor — and Kevin turned on a noise machine in his bedroom, then turned on the faucet in the bathroom and closed the door.

  “Let me know if you need anything,” Alex called from the main room, which sounded immediately weird, but he felt he should say something assuring. He should have walked right into a biting Kevin retort, but it never came.

  Alex texted Caroline again and stared at his phone, waiting for a call, a text, anything to make it spring to life with news. He needed to make sure that Kevin had Caroline
’s number, in case his phone died.

  Several minutes passed. The DVD menu lapsed to a black still-screen due to inactivity. The faucet and noise machine continued without interruption.

  Several more minutes passed.

  “Yo Kevin,” Alex sidled up to the bathroom. “Yo, Kevin.” Yo, listen to him, he didn’t speak like that with anyone except Kevin, and he spoke like absolutely nothing was wrong, like they were going to crack wise on Kaye or some of the hippie-dippies they worked with.

  “Yo, Kevin,” and now he rapped hard on the bathroom door.

  No answer. He tested the knob and it was locked. He turned the knob as hard as he could, wanting nothing more than to have Kevin yell at him and kick the door closed. He forced the door open as far as he could and it wouldn’t completely give, but it was enough to see crumpled legs and a shape draped over the tub. He continued to force the door open, shaking the lock, for nothing, for no reason except it was something he did, until the door definitely lodged shut, an unacknowledged finality to it.

  He backed away from the bathroom door slowly.

  The bathroom door opened.

  He turned to run for the front door and saw a shape run through his legs — the closest understanding he had was imagining a dog running through his legs, but no — and its parts curled and spread out before him, extending at least a solid foot above him, a sculpted vicious flower of precision, raisin eyes that looked feeble and weak (go for the eyes).

  Alex backed up slowly, palms up.

  “Listen to me, I know you can understand me. You work with … people. You work with people, there has to be a way you can understand me.”

  He kept his hands up, thumbs locked together as if making a fan. He rotated his hands back-and-forth, as if cradling a pot of water, doing anything he could to communicate complete and utter supplication.

  “I can help you. I work in social services. I have access. I … I can help you. Tell Mr. Rampole, Mr. Overton, the man with the ear “— he pulled an imaginary distended ear — “anyone, whoever you work with, I can work with you. I can help you. I can protect you. I don’t care about whatever they’ve been doing.”

  The creature tracked his movement; for every step Alex took backwards, it took an equal step forward. But it hadn’t killed him yet.

  “Just please, don’t hurt Caroline. Just leave her alone. Tell your bosses, I’ll do anything, I’ll do anything you want, anything you say, just please don’t hurt her.”

  He said his piece and tucked his chin into his chest and closed his eyes.

  “Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything. Just don’t hurt her.”

  It made no intelligible sound. But it didn’t rush him, either. He refused to open his eyes and let himself anticipate the moment of his death, but from what he could tell, it wasn’t moving.

  “Please,” he said.

  He kept his eyes closed, pleading in vain, for the death that never came. Instead, it spoke to him of people to meet, fealties and expectations to be kept; and instead of the release of death he instead was left with the growing unease in understanding he had only himself to blame for this new imposition.

  Big with the Past, Pregnant with the Future

  The legal tabloid Above the Law was going to have a field day with this story. Can you imagine it? The Admissions Office of Yale Law School — the most prestigious law school in America — through some incalculable mishap accidentally mass emailed the entire law school the admissions materials of every recently admitted first-year law student whose last name started with “M” through “Z.”

  Michael learned about this mishap via three text messages, all arriving in quick succession, from three different first-year classmates.

  The last names of these three friends? Flaum, Heckenlivy, and Kahl.

  Michael’s last name? Washington.

  Shit.

  Flaum, Heckenlivy and Kahl were his friends, but like all Yale first-year law students (“1Ls”) — and, really, like all law students at top law schools — they’d been immersed in a hyper-competitive culture where the most minute advantage, no matter how lacking in real world significance, was internalized as the basis for their self-worth. Why, of course, these worldly and sophisticated students knew that, in real terms, scoring, say, two points higher on the LSAT than a competitor was reflective of nothing but luck or a particularly good testing day, and held no significance whatsoever outside the conveyor belt of legal academia. Of course that’s how they’d react if the issue was ever brought up.

  But, of course, the issue didn’t come up, because the system was so thoroughly internalized by all of its participants. So, of course, if a Yale 1L met up with a friend who went to a respectable school outside the Top 14, but yet was still a school blessed with all the rarified trappings of privilege — say, a George Washington University or Vanderbilt University — then, why of course, they could both agree that the whole system’s obsession with GPA and LSAT scores was terribly silly. Both students could recount the sordid reasons for this sorry state of affairs, how LSAT scores and GPA were the two most important metrics governing school rank, according to U.S. News and World Reports, so top law schools prioritized these two markers beyond reason in order to keep their ratings high. Both friends could laugh about the whole ratings schema and how it had nothing to do with the quality of instruction, as each first year student in every law school read the same inapplicable horseshit taught to them by the same highly-credentialed idiots who never practiced law in their lives, whose method of instruction was the same outmoded Socratic Method.

  See, those two hypothetical friends could agree on a lot. But here’s the rub: the friend at George Washington University would be bringing this up defensively, to feel as smart and accomplished and deserving as his Yale friend. And the Yale friend would nod to all this and agree, but never lose sight of this important distinction: at the end of the conversation, he’d still be at Yale, with all the accoutrements and advantages that distinction entailed.

  And, of course, The Yalee was better and more deserving. Because here he was, at Yale.

  This was the culture Michael and his classmates were part of. They all went to Yale; they were all on the same exalted pedestal. But when you’ve been marinating in a culture that prioritizes pointless distinctions that serve only to make the distinction-holder feel superior, the release of these admissions materials, this veritable mother lode, the alpha-and-omega resource collating all such pointless distinctions … could any creature immersed in this system really be faulted for taking advantage of this opportunity to spy on the merits of their friends? Who wouldn’t take advantage of this ideal one-way mirror? All the big questions could be answered! Who had been admitted with a lower GPA or LSAT score? Who had concocted the most overcompensating treacle of an admissions essay? Which scion of plutocrats had presented him or herself as Mother Fucking Theresa? In short, there was no doubt in his mind that his good buddies Jason Flaum, Brian Heckenlivy, and Cindy Kahl were poring over his admissions materials and sizing him up.

  He’d been about halfway between the campus and his apartment when he received the texts (which had all arrived within two minutes of each other). It was only November of their first semester, and school had only been in session for about two months. Ahh, Yale Law School: so confident was Yale Law School about its pedigree that they didn’t even have grades for their entire first year. (Yale Law School, ladies and gentleman! The hard part is getting in!). He was surprised their transcripts weren’t fucking gold-plated.

  Still, despite the seeming camaraderie and good-tidings this system was intended to generate — and the change in priorities among his classmates; Jesus Christ, they couldn’t even compete over grades! — as are moths to a flame, so are law students to envy and resentment. Law students coasted on a steady stream of mean-spiritedness; blocking the channel only caused it to spray out forcefully in different directio
ns.

  And one such noted purveyor of this resentment and mean-spiritedness was Keith Mullins.

  Michael, as innocuous and modest as he tried to present himself, was recently made one of Keith’s prime targets. For Keith had dubbed Michael as part of team Triple A: the Affirmative Action Admits.

  Do you know how politically correct Yale is? Here was a school that withdrew a moot court problem involving a hypothetical heterosexual father and a hypothetical lesbian mother for fear that students having to argue in favor of the father could be “psychically damaged” from the experience. Here was a school where students boycotted a professor who refused to use the word “Chicano.” For Keith to express any opinion that could arguably be interpreted to be disrespectful to the institution of affirmation action was, to put it mildly, extremely ballsy and bordering academic suicide.

  The tension between Keith and Michael — and really, the tension between Keith and everyone at Yale — escalated dramatically about two weeks ago, when Keith sent everyone on the 1L email list an article from City Journal about affirmative action. This article discussed the mismatch problem, or the allegation that black and Hispanic students admitted to competitive colleges with substandard test scores were far more likely to fail out, drop out, or choose less challenging majors. The article only briefly mentioned law schools, but argued in passing that black and Hispanic students admitted to competitive law schools with substandard GPAs and LSAT scores were far more likely to fail out, drop out, graduate into the lowest quartile, or fail to pass the bar altogether. The author also argued that legal academia’s obsession with bolstering the admissions rates of blacks and Hispanics to appease U.S. News and World Reports prioritized race over more pertinent classifications, such as economic class. As a result, the article argued, the black and Hispanic students admitted at top law schools tended to be economically privileged and academically deficient: the worst of both possible worlds.