by Russel Smith
Arnie called his name from twenty feet away. Kiint turned bug-eyed, exhausted, head hanging forward off his neck. He gave Arnie a good stare before nodding that, yes, he wanted the food.
He took it and said only, “Don’t tell them you did this.” He waggled the burger.
“It’s cool.” Arnie unfolded the chair he’d dragged over and Kiint sat down with a gasp.
“Don’t tell them we talked at all.”
“Not to worry.”
He wolfed his burger after first checking its contents. He smelled of extreme sweat, fish, and wetsuit rubber. As he chewed he quickly surveyed the damage he’d done, and what he had yet to do.
He seemed to remember Arnie standing there.
“Bacon. You have to leave.” Kiint looked at him philosophically. “It goes bad for you if they know you didn’t try to stop me.” He nodded with a new thought. “And they think we’re friends.” He stood and thrust the plate at back to him, salad untouched. “Thank you, but.”
Arnie hesitated taking it. When he did, he said, “Hey, I can help.”
Kiint turned away, put the palm up again. “Don’t joke about it.”
“Who says I’m joking?” Arnie said, regretting it because it sounded whiny. And he had just understood what Kiint had said. They think we’re friends. Kiint ignored him again, trudging off toward the ramps wagging his finger in the air, remembering something.
In the bunkhouse Arnie pulled someone’s blanket over his legs and sat down to a solitary dinner, while starting Ken Kesey’s Demon Box, apparently an unfinished novel plus other stuff he didn’t publish before he died. The blanket smelled harshly of somebody’s deodorant. The book wasn’t that good and Arnie was bored by it. Fiction. And it was getting dark to read. He tried a flashlight for exactly five seconds before he threw Demon Box in one direction and the flashlight in the other, making a fantastic wobbling strobe in the room before it crashed through the window and fell out into the dark.
And then down from the ramps the clang of a hammer, the sound of which still made Arnie’s heart race. He wondered where it was he should go, and if a city, what city it might be, and now Kiint’s hammer sounded comical, a puny tink tink tink in the face of a world of steel and cement and big government. Arnie started to laugh, bouncing in his seat, mouth full of burger, ready to help take it on.
Never Prosper
Liz Harmer
One day, when Paul was practicing at one of the seven grand pianos in their winter home, the Palais Wittgenstein, he leaped up and shouted at his brother Ludwig in the room next door, “I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door.”
—from Anthony Gottlieb’s “A Nervous Splendor”
Of course there was no end to the cheaters. Evie prepared for the meeting by looking over the essay, which was so poorly cut-and-pasted that it contained several different font styles and sizes, and then the final sentence just ran off a cliff, no period, no final payoff to the opening promise: After all it is clear that Wittgenstein believed. She had now read the paper more times than it deserved, though it did have a strange beauty. We have so far said nothing whatever: a direct quote from the text itself but unattributed as such. Still, it was incredibly to the point.
She knew the name but not the face of the student who had produced such a mess. She had interacted with Steven Vandersteen only via email, emails that were also syntactically odd and sometimes even offensive in their illiteracy. Be there at 3, he had written, and despite the strange command of its phrasing, its keenness to keep her in this office chair, waiting, she knew that he really meant that he would be there at 3. She was sure she had never seen him. She knew the names of the twenty-seven who bothered to attend class regularly, and she knew the faces of those who never showed but sometimes came to her office hours as though their smiling manoeuvrings would earn them the grade they wanted. Steven Vandersteen, whose name had a performative quality as though invented for the sake of sound, belonged to a third category.
Teaching was a useless activity. Like torture as an interrogation technique it did not produce the effect it was meant to. Torture never delivered the truth, and teaching never delivered knowledge, regardless of methodology. Evie’s disillusionment was nearly complete. I am receiving a salary, she told herself. I have an office and prestige. Meanwhile the students received the grades they needed, learning nothing. Only those already inclined to understand something did. She swivelled in the chair she’d picked out in the office furniture catalogue in a swell of optimism in August, and looked out at the few bobbing palm leaves along the parking lot. She hated palm trees now more than ever.
Cheating did not give her hives, but she was required to investigate and perhaps to punish those who plagiarized or stole. As someone who had never cheated—who had not even taken a shortcut or skimmed a book!—Evie had the illogical intuition that the principles of order in the universe would justly punish such people with or without her intervention.
It was ten after three. Steven Vandersteen was late. She left all the windows on her monitor open, each of her papers an attempt to untwist an elaborate knot, like a cop in those detective shows pinning up photos and strings to connect them on a board. Instead of working, though, she logged in to Facebook, where she saw that Natasha had just posted a few photos of herself in Queen’s Park, and near Robarts Library, and in front of the Humanities building. Toronto with its trees flaming into colour and the olive green scarf Natasha wore loosely over her sweater were autumnal, and homesickness pricked Evie. She clicked like on the photos—they weren’t selfies but there was no word on her companion—and then messaged Natasha: Since when are you in TO? Natasha seemed to be logged in but did not respond.
Natasha was the only one Evie could talk to about Tom. Evie had known him now for twelve years, since the Philosophy of Language class they’d both taken. He’d criticized her after the first session for nodding too much. “Your nodding does nothing to humanize you,” he’d said outside the building in a drizzle, with a cigarette pinned to his mouth. His squint had a James Dean quality, but Evie thought she was immune to this, never having cared for James Dean. She blushed. Her nodding during class was a private movement cruelly exposed. To seem unperturbed she bummed a cigarette and smoked with him in the rain.
Later she discovered that she was exactly his type: straight blond hair, the body of a high-school athlete. He liked to make women blush; the other philosophy majors knew him well. The professor in that class, an eccentric whose glasses would often fly off his face by the force of his gesticulations, adored Tom. Tom got the only easy As in the class, drinking all night and then tossing off essays a few hours before class began in the dim lamplight of his dorm room desk, on a typewriter that he used instead of the computer labs like everybody else. Tom and that professor—Dr. de France—had a Wittgenstein/Russell dynamic. Bertrand Russell had once said of Wittgenstein admiringly that he was “destitute of the false politeness that interferes with truth.”
For all her perky nodding, Evie really had to work in that class. Her notes included the sentences of encoded formal logic that Dr. de France scribbled on the chalkboard, muttering that the students wouldn’t understand these but really they ought to be able to, and she sat there writing until her wrist hurt, hating de France and Tom both. Her ambition was as big as theirs was, but her naivety disguised her. That she liked Gottlieb Frege for asking the question they were all thinking: What is a number anyway? That she liked the verve of a philosopher called Quine who said that if we see a person pointing at a rabbit and saying “gavagai,” we don’t know if “gavagai” means “rabbit” or “undetached rabbit part” or “timeslice of a rabbit,” and to assume that their language disclosed the same conceptual scheme would be shameful, despite the silliness of the example. By then, she had become utterly conscious of her every movement in the class (Tom sat two rows over and one back,
and she felt the heat of his looking at her on the back of her neck), and soon afterwards she was sleepless in his bunk listening to the anachronistic type-tapping of his genius through the night, the dings and rolling, the chatter of keys a soundtrack so particular to their romance that whenever she heard it she rushed with feeling for him, like a person accused of nodding stupidly.
Her only contact with him was now on Facebook or over text. Men believed themselves to be unsentimental, but they were the worst of all. Sometimes he would text her, just: the present king of France is bald. It was a reference to this class, where they’d met and first read these essays by Russell to do with truth-claims and sentences that seem to have no meaning. He would text it only if they hadn’t talked in a while, and it meant: I miss you, don’t forget about me.
So she and Natasha talked too much about him. Natasha had appeared in grad school the way a fairy does in a tale. Evie had followed Tom to U of T, and he’d acted surprised that she’d gotten in on the same level of scholarship that he had. His disdain was almost as good as being treated roughly in bed.
Natasha was dark eyed and sleek with makeup, black hair long and shiny with care, and Evie was sure that Tom would sleep with her. Natasha’s look of arrogant self-certainty and the intelligence in her eyes were, to him, nearly an invitation. The seminar they all took seemed to be just an occasion for the two of them to engage in foreplay while Evie watched. Blowjobs came up as illustrations of Hegelian dynamics more than once. Evie prepared herself for it, expected to find them in his bed, or to find one of Natasha’s scarves hanging over a piece of his furniture. It wasn’t as though Evie and Tom were together; it wasn’t as though she hadn’t found out he was sleeping with another woman before. But for about a year, her heart would race every time she had her hand on a doorknob for fear of what lay behind it.
“I don’t like women who try so hard,” Tom told Evie when she brought up Natasha, early on.
Years later, Natasha said, “I don’t know why you like him. He’s not likeable.”
“It’s not that I like him. It’s force. Animal attraction.”
“You want to be pushed around, but you should find a better man than Tom to do it,” Natasha said. Grad school didn’t turn Natasha’s looks; not only did she not go ragged but her nails were still done. Evie became wan and cowed, blond hair limp, going brittle like an old book.
Natasha was now living in Germany on a fellowship. They were geographically triangulated, one on either side of Tom and Toronto. Evie relished any contact with him, which, at this point, tended to be criticisms of her Facebook posts. He was a man who had come of age in the nineties and still thought like Kurt Cobain, or like Ethan Hawke’s character in Reality Bites—that one’s every action must be perfectly consistent if one is to have dignity. He still believed in the concept of selling out. Smiling at a customer at the Gap or at the Dean who might give you a job when you do not feel like smiling is thus a form of lying. It was a maddening but deeply attractive quality, though now that he was on Facebook he was disappointingly knowable. He always liked her pictures, always criticized her for complimenting someone else, and could be counted on to message her whenever she complained about Southern California. These were Tom bait—she posted such updates when she craved an argument with him.
I’m not obligated to find this place beautiful, she told him. It’s a desert.
You have everything you ever wanted, he wrote. It’s ridiculous for you to complain.
I don’t have everything. And I’m entitled to my feelings.
You need someone, he wrote. You’re no good on your own.
The gall of this man! But she knew that he only meant that he was lonely, that he was no good on his own, that he needed someone.
“Maybe he wants to live in the desert with you,” Natasha said later, during their phone-call debriefs. “Or it’s just Tom being Tom. Some men enjoy knowing that women are talking about them, calling them asshole.”
(Tom had once called Natasha a “femme fatale.”)
“I think he’s just immature. But he won’t be gorgeous forever.”
“He has a man-bun,” Natasha said. “And he knows exactly what he’s doing.”
3:18. Steven Vandersteen had not yet shown. Natasha had not replied to Evie’s message but had replied to various fawning comments to her photos, all variations of “what a babe,” with the obligatory “aw, you guys are sweet” in response. They all pretended that this wasn’t the game, this vanity, that the photos’ sole purpose wasn’t to attract envy and admiration.
Evie should know. She had not become threatening but more attractive to men since winning the position. Men turned around her like spokes around a hub. She had started wearing daring shades of lipstick—reds and neon pinks—and to admire herself in reflective surfaces when she passed them. She could not distinguish the feeling of attraction from the feeling of being attractive, her desire from her vanity. The better things seemed to get the worse they were: this was the hard truth.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s prosperity was a curse. Three of his brothers committed suicide, while the fourth, a pianist, lost a hand. Ludwig threw himself into the battles of World War I, spent his life plagued by the puzzles of philosophy and by his fortune, which he kept trying to give away, an incurable virus of wealth. The Nazis came and the Wittgensteins fled. Between the wars, Ludwig abandoned the work that made him famous and moved north to teach schoolchildren. As a young man, his aptitudes had been mechanical and he had worked on hot-air balloons as an engineer. The schoolchildren tromped behind him in the woods while he told them the names for things. He was an expert whistler.
He worked as a medic during World War II and tried to avoid his fans. By then, a circle of believers had formed in Vienna around his philosophy, and he had earned the raving admiration of Bertrand Russell. Ludwig hit the schoolchildren with a ruler.
“About which one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent,” he wrote in the trenches of World War I. All purists wish that a word was a clean window, a direct line. All purists like stillness and singularity. In the preface to his final work he expresses his frustration at his results being “variously misunderstood, more or less mangled or watered down.” This “stung my vanity,” he wrote. As for his vanity, he “had difficulty quieting it.”
At least she liked her office. The palm trees were not so bad from afar, the vista a postcard cliché, though she had since learned from her landlord that they were full of rats. “They live in the palms, honey,” he’d said after she saw a dishearteningly large brown rodent on her balcony. “The palms are filled with ’em.” Now she could see that their plaits of woven bark must be easy for a rodent to climb. And of course everyone talked about the smog. The dirty air—who knew on the particulate level what it really was?—blotted out, some days, all proof of mountains. Or created cotton candy skies at sunset.
Everyone back where it still snowed and rained in reasonable intervals believed she had won a jackpot, and now she needed to figure out how best to manage the envy of others. But Southern California was just like everywhere; people hated their lives here as they did everywhere else. She had opinions about the sky. Grey weather had not been the cause of her gloom, but had carried it like vapour. Gloom had a pressure system, too, and the blue sky was a taunt, cheerful as a sixties housewife. She longed for a downpour.
The glamour of philosophy, its sheen and its thrill, would soon dull for these students. It happened to everyone, except for madmen, maybe: the first dose of philosophy, which seems to question everything you thought you knew, is actually heady with illusions. A year or two of undergrad, three if you were lucky, and then you hit peak illusion, believing as you did that these thoughts mattered, that you were doing something both deep and important. But the end result was predetermined. What you thought was freedom landed you in an air-conditioned office somewhere, no better than a clerk. Type, type, tap. A person struggled t
o get up a mountain and, well, you know the rest. You can tire of a view.
She now had to manage the students’ illusions. Wittgenstein thrilled them because of his renegade personality. He was a Jesus figure, toppling tables. So she told them his biography, she laughed over gavagai, she said, “What, we may ask, is a number?” and she did not tell them when they came to her office for advice about switching their major to philosophy that you only ended up becoming a desk-jockey if you were one of the lucky ones. She would not say to them, Look, you are headed to loneliness. If you even get a job, you will have to move far away from everyone you love.
Tom had once told her that he adored her strangeness, but she thought he only found her strange because he was prejudiced against blond women. But, then, being a genius often makes a person an asshole, and she pointed this out in lectures when she wanted a laugh. During his tenure as an abusive schoolteacher, Ludwig wrote in a letter to Russell, “I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness.”
3:23. She refreshed the feed. Nothing from Natasha, but a new photo from Tom. Tom Abstract (he had of course invented a bullshit name)—with Natasha Balay. It was a picture of the two of them fairly close up—definitely he was holding the phone that took the picture—in Queen’s Park, surrounded by trees gone gold, dropping leaves in a glitter. Their faces were nearly touching. “Philosophers in Autumn,” he’d titled it. She cringed at the attempt to be ironic that read as gravely sincere. They think that they’re philosophers, she thought. It was like calling yourself a poet when you’d never published a thing. But after her cringe came another set of facial expressions, which she did not see in the reflection of her screen, because she was so focused on the photo. The likes were pouring in. Someone had commented: look how cute you are together.