The Executor

by Jesse Kellerman

  As the one to introduce me to Nietzsche, he readily appreciated the irony when I began to lose my faith. Still, he continued to treat me with respect. If anything, my atheism became a new and fruitful topic for discussion, because he wanted so badly to win me back. And though he never succeeded, he was proud of me for not having run from the confrontation. All he asked was that I continue to push myself. Philosophy, Plato has Socrates tell us, begins in wonder, and at that age I had much to wonder about, in contrast to my parents, for whom life had drawn the curtains.

  PRACTICALLY THE ONLY THING capable of rousing my mother from her torpor was the battle over what happened on the night Chris died. It took years for the case to be closed, although it was never truly resolved.

  The facts were these. After leaving the house, Chris drove to a gas station, where he was denied cigarettes after failing to produce proper ID. He then asked for the bathroom key, informing the clerk upon reemergence that there was something wrong with the toilet. It is possible—although speculative—that while the clerk left the register to investigate, Chris reached over the counter and swiped a pack; by the time police got around to asking for the CCTV video, it had been taped over.

  Sometime after eleven, he turned onto Riverfront, which runs east before curving north and becoming the Crawhorn Bridge. A patrolman parked at the corner of Riverfront and Delcorte reported seeing the truck go by; he noticed because the driver’s window was open, one arm hanging out, never mind the cold.

  Near the entrance to the bridge, along the right side of the road, the guardrail was partially down, having been mangled the day before by a snowplow. According to the county, orange hazard cones marked the spot where the asphalt dropped away toward the water. No cones were ever found, however, not on-site or in the river, so either the wind had carried them a considerable distance or, as seems more likely, careless workmen had neglected to put them out.

  Police later determined that Chris took the curve at upwards of sixty miles per hour, far too fast to make that turn on ice. The pickup slid clean off the road and tumbled down the embankment, flipping once before landing on its side in the partially frozen water. It took a while for the cab to become fully submerged, and, if conscious, he should have had more than enough time to crank open the window and climb out. But when they pulled everything up, they found him still wearing his seatbelt.

  Initially, the coroner ruled Chris’s death an accidental drowning. Four months later, this was revised to drowning resulting from a motor vehicle accident, with a probable indication of suicide. The general consensus was that the change came down from the county supervisor, who had taken heat in the local paper for his neglect of the guardrail and his failure to put out cones. Prior to that point, my parents hadn’t considered taking legal action, even turning away an attorney who had approached them offering representation. Now, however, my mother was outraged. She went on the warpath, motivated less by greed than by a need to refute the county’s unflattering judgment of my brother. Chris’s behavior had been erratic, but that didn’t make him suicidal. He was an inexperienced driver, and he might not have realized that he was going too fast. If he hadn’t gotten out of the truck, that was because he was unconscious; one needed only to look at the bruises on his forehead where it had smashed against the steering wheel. If he’d intended to kill himself, why go to such elaborate lengths? We had guns in the basement. Moreover, the guardrail had come down less than thirty-six hours before the accident. How could he have known to drive there, of all places? It didn’t add up. In another of her rare bold strokes, my mother called up the attorney and filed suit for wrongful death and negligence, thus beginning a six-year process that would eat up what scant reserves of spirit she had left.

  Back then I sided with her, more out of loyalty than anything else. In years since, however, as I have devoted my attention to considering the ways in which people choose, I’ve grown leery of easy explanations. It’s possible that Christopher both did and did not intend to drive off the bridge. I will never know. These days, more than ever, I understand that nothing is more inscrutable than the human heart, and that no act, great or small, righteous or wicked, can be so named by one who stands outside the actor’s mind.

  5

  Here is what Harvard looked like to the eighteen-year-old me: it looked like a giant redbrick treadmill. What I remember most of my first few semesters is a vague sense of panic, my big-fish-small-pond confidence crumbling as I sprint to catch up. Nobody from my hometown had ever gone to Harvard; indeed, reactions to my big news ranged from bafflement (as in, Harvard University?) to skepticism (they let you in?) to downright hostility (too big for yer britches?). And the gaps in my education were daunting. I came from a public school where my biology teacher, a born-again Christian, could refuse to teach us the theory of evolution, choosing instead to spend twice as much time on molecular biology. (On the plus side, I knew the Krebs cycle cold.) Compared to my new classmates, many of whom had gone to prep schools that offered classes on topics like post-structuralism and Jungian theory, I felt like an imposter. Just learning the lingo required an enormous outlay of mental energy. I became hyperaware of my accent, and although the odd girl seemed to find my colloquialisms cute, I nevertheless always felt self-conscious opening my mouth in section. No longer the smartest boy in the class, I was forced to revamp my self-image: hick-turned-autodidact.

  Now I realize that a lot of this had to do with my own insecurities. It also had to do with the friends I chose, who like me were would-be intellectuals. There were plenty of non-snobs at Harvard. It’s just that I shied away from them, and in doing so I made my lot considerably tougher than it needed to be.

  Still, I loved it. For the first time I felt at home, surrounded by young people for whom a huge future was not only imaginable but expected. True story: my roommate spent an entire semester building a tiny, working MRI machine, which he then used to scan our hamster. I loved it. I loved the fact that the campus was older than the country in which it was located. I loved the traditions, loved the corny stories they trotted out on the campus tour. I collected Harvard: haunting its museums, investigating its architecture. I made pilgrimages to as many of its seventysomething libraries as I could. (The holdings in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Tuscany would have to wait. I did, however, get to the New England Primate Research Center, an odyssey involving a borrowed station wagon and a missed exit on the pike.) I attended every formal, took every famous course by every famous professor, went to every Master’s Tea. I soaked it all up, and when I spoke to my old high-school friends, pretended to sympathize with their minor-league yearnings, I knew at last that I was free.

  MOST PEOPLE, should they ever chance to spare a thought for philosophers, picture a bunch of white-haired men in smoking jackets, or perhaps togas, pulling on pipes and expounding the meaning of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. In all the best departments in this country—places like Harvard, Princeton, or NYU—philosophy bears much more similarity to mathematics. This style, which predominates at English-speaking universities, is called Anglo-American or analytic philosophy, and it places heavy emphasis on formal logic and argumentative clarity. Once you’ve read papers with as many symbols as words, it comes as no surprise that most of the great analytic philosophers have had backgrounds in math or hard science: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Tarski, Quine, Carnap, Putnam.

  Nowhere in that list are Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault. There’s a reason for that: at Harvard, we don’t read them. Other departments do—comparative literature, women’s studies. But citing one of those names during a philosophy class is the fastest way to get yourself laughed out of the room. They belong to contemporary philosophy’s other major school, the Continentals, less a coherent group than a wild and woolly bunch of thinkers who refuse to play by the rules.

  For many Continentals, the mechanics of an argument are secondary to its outcome. These writers tend to describe the world as they, as in
dividuals, see it, and as a result they often (appear to?) eschew logic in favor of rhetoric, asserting as self-evident all sorts of ideas that an analytic philosopher would question. When, for example, Sartre posits that the essence of our humanity is freedom, he takes for granted that freedom exists. Not so fast, says the analytic philosopher. We’re free? Prove it. Only then can we talk about whether freedom is important. To which Sartre replies: I don’t have time for your petty bullmerde.

  The animus on each side is considerable. I remember my sophomore tutorial leader outlining for us the rules of his favorite game: “First I name a philosopher. Then you name a worse philosopher. We each take turns, naming worse and worse philosophers, until someone says Jacques Derrida. That person loses.”

  I am sure that equally snide games take place in universities all across France.

  In sum, Continental philosophers think that analytic philosophy misses the forest for the trees, and analytic philosophers think that Continental philosophers are unintelligible, egomaniacal morons.

  Father Fred and I had read a lot of Kierkegaard and early Christian theology, as well as some existentialist fiction, works by Camus, Kafka, Dostoyevsky—which is to say, I’d mostly studied the morons, and was thus underprepared for what I faced at Harvard, so grossly that I briefly considered abandoning the concentration for something more user-friendly, English or government. But I persevered, spurred on by the notion that I couldn’t, and just as I taught myself not to drop my r’s or elongate my vowels, with practice I learned the system, coming to appreciate the crystalline beauty of the analytic style and winning several departmental prizes for my writing.

  I had a dirty little secret, though: all the while I’d been nursing a nasty addiction to existentialism. I couldn’t get away from it, especially Nietzsche, whose ideas gripped me in a way I could not easily explain. People will always argue about what he really meant, but what stood out for me was his insistence that we are radically alone—and therefore bear ultimate responsibility for creating ourselves. His concept of the Übermensch, so often vilified as amoral, made perfect sense to me. I had done precisely that: I had overcome, rising up out of an unread cesspool, breaking myself down, reforming myself in a mold of my own making. As senior year rolled around, and I found my professors encouraging me to pursue a Ph.D., I could not help but believe that Fate had big plans for me. Or, more accurately, that I had big plans for Fate.

  Thus it was that I enrolled in graduate school intending to write my dissertation on the one topic that meant most to me: free will. And damned if I wouldn’t nail that puppy to the floor, melding existentialist fervor with analytical precision, forging a new mode of expression that would not only reshape a three-thousand-year-old debate but clear a new path for philosophy going into the twenty-first century. Applause, please.

  Such grandiosity was misplaced. To begin with, I’m not smart enough, although it has taken me years to come to grips with that. (If I even have.) More important, I was out of sync with the times. The bitter facts of contemporary American academia are thus: one writes not to change the shape of the world but to get one’s degree; one gets a degree in order to get a job; one gets a job because one must live. If one is very talented and very lucky, one catches the attention of Oxford University Press; one sells three hundred copies, all to other philosophers, and toasts oneself with a bottle of mediocre merlot.

  I was naïve—not to mention arrogant—to expect an exemption. Yet all the great thinkers have that presumptuous streak, a sense of the universe waiting on them. I also had a notion that scaling back my goals would be an insult to the memory of my brother, who had, directly or indirectly, set my course.

  My first graduate advisor was Sam Melitsky, a lion of the department best known for his work in the exquisitely misnamed field of ordinary language philosophy. As an undergraduate I had read several of his books, coming to admire his tortured, wordy prose. His author photo showed a craggily handsome man with a stiff thatch of dark gray hair and a prizefighter’s nose, one that suggested he had gone to battle for his ideas. It was a photo more than four decades out of date when we first sat down to discuss my project. By then the rugged maverick had been replaced by a kindly, doddering fellow with gaudy sprays of ear hair. I counted my blessings, though: more than tolerating my pretensions, he encouraged them. I suppose that I misstepped in trusting a man of eighty-four. He had nothing to lose by backing me. In the unlikely event that I did turn out to be a genius, he would be vindicated in his old age. If I failed, he’d be dead too soon to give a damn.

  In the end it didn’t come down to that. Not exactly. What happened, rather, was this: two days after I handed in my first draft of my first chapter—a discursive, bloated thing more than one hundred seventy pages long—he had a stroke that left him unable to read or speak. The nasty but entirely predictable joke around the department had my shoddy editing as the culprit. In short order, Melitsky’s daughters came to Cambridge and fetched him back to New York City, leaving me devastated and forlorn, even more so when I learned that the only person available to replace him was one Linda Neiman, logician par excellence and a legendary hard case. She loathed Sam, and me by extension. At our first meeting she shredded me, rattling off a long list of demands that would have to be met before we could have any hope of working together, starting with the requirement that I pick a new topic.

  “I think I can make it work,” I stammered.

  “You can’t,” she said, and began the abuse anew.

  Three years passed in a deadlock. The more Linda denigrated my ideas, the more I overvalued them, and vice versa. She seemed to take my long-windedness and ceaseless requests for feedback as a personal attack—a fair interpretation, actually, as I was resisting her in the only way I knew how, with words, adding sentence after sentence after sentence in the hope that by piling on enough text I could get her to submit. This was a terrible strategy. She had power; I had none; the onus was on me to adapt, and my refusal to do so served only to confirm her low opinion of me. I was coddled, I was entitled, I needed a good spanking and then some. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I’ll say that her attitude toward me was corrective, at least in the beginning. Soon enough, though, it became punitive, and then plainly sadistic. She ignored my e-mails, restricted my teaching, blocked my grants, and poisoned my reputation. When I referred to her as my “so-called advisor,” I wasn’t being cheeky; the phrase was hers. “As your so-called advisor ...” she liked to begin, before drilling me yet another new one.

  Several times I tried to replace her. I’d have the switch lined up, only to find the offer retracted at the last minute. The consistency with which this happened led me to believe that it was Linda herself who wanted me close at hand. Perhaps she wanted to make me an object lesson, a specimen in a jar she could take down and wave at other obstreperous students as a scare tactic.

  And still I wrote. The highest praise you can give an analytic philosopher is that his work is perspicuous. By that measure even I could see what trouble I was in. I kept changing directions, reconsidering, restructuring. Every time I made a major revision, I saved the document as a new file, numbering these drafts successively. At one point I had forty-two versions of the introduction alone. I would cut a paragraph but refuse to let it go, moving it instead to a clippings file that eventually grew to twice the size of the manuscript—itself nothing to sneeze at. As the poem goes, a little learning is a dangerous thing. And ambition is a perverse master, lashing hardest those who bow down.

  Aware that I was in way over my head, I nevertheless couldn’t stop, having staked so much of my self-worth on my success. Melitsky had once written, “In large part, excellence consists of the willingness to stomach monotony.” I printed that out in letters four inches high and taped it to the wall of my carrel. When I felt discouraged, I looked at those words and thought of good old Sam. All around me, my peers were toeing the line, staking out some picayune corner of the field for themselves. I scorned them, telling myself
that what I was doing was not pointless but brave, clinging to the existentialist idea that one must learn not to fear solitude but to embrace it. They wanted job security. I had the courage to venture forth into the unknown. Each additional page acted like so much swaddling, helping to shield me from the chill fact that I was getting nowhere. When Linda asked how the book was coming, I told her that Hegel didn’t finish The Phenomenology of Mind until he was thirty-six. By that measure I still had eight years.

  She replied that—speaking as my so-called advisor—if I wanted to read Hegel, she would gladly write me a letter of recommendation for the University of Texas.

  It all came to a head one rainy day toward the end of my sixth year, when I went to Widener to do some writing and found my carrel cleaned out.

  I looked back at the elevator. Had I gotten off on the wrong floor? No: there was the blue mark on the wall where I’d dropped a Sharpie. There was the deep scar that ran the length of the desktop; I had wasted hours, days, if you added them all up, tracing it with my fingertips. There was the chair in which I’d eaten, read, written, slept. This was my carrel—my home—and yet everything that identified it as mine—the Melitsky quote—all the books—not to mention the work that had gone into collecting those books—months spent poring over the catalog, cross-referencing, mining bibliographies—the tape flags and marginalia—everything—was gone.

  For a moment I stood paralyzed. Then I rushed forward, as though to stanch the bleeding. There was nothing left to keep in. The sole remaining trace of me was a list of call numbers in my handwriting. I crumpled it into a ball, hurled it down the aisle, and stormed over to Emerson to confront my so-called advisor.