The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  And what is that, pray tell? Naomi thought. She had to stop herself from saying it out loud, because it had now occurred to her that if she kept quiet and called absolutely no attention to herself, she might actually get them to talk to her, or at least in her presence. Months of open doors and appointments that weren’t kept, “Days of Campus Discourse”—what a joke that had been—and pleading emails, asking, in so many ways, something that had begun as What can I help you, my much-respected and admired Webster students, to accomplish? decompressed into What’s going on here? and finally collapsed beneath the weight of Will somebody fucking talk to me, please? Keeping quiet was not the same as uttering a falsehood—not at all! She wasn’t hiding; she was absolutely, utterly, honestly present and ready to be accounted for. That the Webster students surrounding her had failed to recognize her from the cover of their Webster Welcome packets or her frequent photographs in the campus papers or any of her innumerable and conscientious outreaches to them (convocation, presidential office hours, teas, seminars, midnight ghost story readings at the freshman bonfire, for goodness’ sake!), then that could not be considered her fault. Naomi had extended herself; they had withdrawn. And now she was here, and they didn’t realize. Well, tough.

  Her right leg already was howling, but she grabbed it to shut it up because the room was quiet, because Omar was speaking. He spoke like the spirit-orator girl in that Henry James novel: still and small—a still, small voice in a crush of listeners. For a moment she merely heard the musical notes of it, and not the words at all. He had such an interesting face, Naomi noted: sharp features, very black hair that came down over his forehead and stopped where it landed. His eyes were large and extremely dark and he was narrow and undersized: stunted was the word she thought of again. Well, of course: stunted. With that childhood, that deprivation, how could it be otherwise? And did they know? These American kids, with their fluoridated water and vaccine schedule, what the life of two-year-old Omar and eight-year-old Omar and fourteen-year-old Omar had been? How, as they’d drilled for their travel soccer teams, he and his friends must have kicked a battered, pockmarked sphere around some battered, pockmarked lot. How, as they’d conferred with their tutors and typed notes into their laptops, he and his schoolmates had hoped Israeli bombs would not fall on their school, such as it was. And where were those friends and schoolmates now? Dead under exploded buildings? Dead in delusional “martyrdom”? Dead of preventable illnesses or ordinary poverty? She had no idea, but she highly doubted that even one of them was standing in a once-grand Colonial Revival on the campus of a lauded American university, holding the children of immense privilege and wealth in the palm of his slender hand.

  But listen to the words, she remembered. Naomi dug a fist into her calf, which only spread the pain around.

  “I understand that, in normal times, we are defined by our differences, and differences are fine and beautiful things. But these are not normal times. What happened here, tonight, or whenever it happened, should not be normal at any time, or anywhere in the world. We may not be able to fix all the problems in the world—”

  “Why not?” said a woman to Naomi’s right.

  Omar sighed, deeply, contemplatively. “I can’t tell you how much I respect that…optimism,” he said, speaking directly to whomever had spoken, a person he, presumably, could see more clearly than Naomi. “I can’t help but feel that the magnitude of unfairness, injustice in the world, is too much even for the commitment and intention in this room. But I grew up in a very different place from this room. And this ability you have, as Americans, to see a good future, I never met anyone who could do that, until I came to this country. I don’t know how to explain it to you except to talk about my life and my family, and that is hard for me to do.”

  A ripple of anticipation passed through the room. Naomi was not the only one, she saw, who had been waiting for some window into this contained, eloquent boy.

  “My father wasn’t educated. He was a car mechanic. But he was intelligent. He could have been a physician or an engineer. My mother was a nurse, but she could have been a physician, too. And my brother…” Omar choked a little, but rallied. “He was the cleverest one in our family.”

  Omar closed his eyes and swayed a little. Naomi could hear the broken breathing of the woman beside her.

  “Wait,” said a voice behind her—male, low but soft—“what happened to his family?”

  And quick as a cat, the woman beside Naomi twisted back to glare at him, and hissed: “Don’t you know?”

  He went red, almost comically. He was a big kid and very pale, with already receding brown hair.

  He shook his head. “I…no, I’m sorry.”

  “All dead,” Naomi’s neighbor said, as if that were the kid’s fault. “You remember that little boy and his father, who were caught in crossfire in Gaza? The father tried to protect him, but they were both murdered by the Israelis. There were thousands of pictures on the web. It went viral. Don’t you remember?”

  “I think so,” he whispered. Naomi, who did not need to think that she remembered, who knew that she remembered, who had never forgotten that little boy, terrified in his father’s arms as they huddled against a building, praying for it to be over, was already numb. What did it mean?

  “Wait, that was him?” said the kid.

  “Of course not,” said the woman, harshly, but not without a certain satisfaction. “I just told you, that little boy died. And the father. They were Omar’s brother and father.”

  Holy shit, said the poor guy, but maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was Naomi who said that, or maybe she didn’t, but she was thinking it. It was on a loop in her head, at screaming volume: holy shit, holy shit. How was she supposed to have known that? Did Francine know? Had it been in the essay? No, no, it hadn’t; Naomi was forcing herself to remember the essay. She had read the essay, the same essay Francine would have read. But, maybe, somewhere else in the application? Something Admissions would have had access to? Like…an official report of some kind? A letter from the refugee agency or one of the foster parents?

  Then Naomi thought: Does Hannah know this?

  Of course Hannah did. Of course she did. No wonder she’d regarded her mother with such superior disapproval that day in her room, reaching up into the closet for that extra sleeping bag. For Omar. Sweet, sad Omar would not have had a sleeping bag of his own, of course. Omar would not have done much sleeping out in Yukon temperatures, not in the Gaza Strip. And besides, she supposed, Omar would not have owned much of anything. What had he brought with him to Webster from Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin, Bureij? She imagined him climbing up onto a Greyhound bus in some dust bowl town with just a backpack, and shaking someone’s hand, solemnly, goodbye. Alone in the world, and yet bound for glory. Or at least, for this. It all felt utterly inevitable now.

  A Palestinian boy, with a backpack, climbing onto a bus. It made her shudder, first with fear, then with guilt for the fear.

  “Oh wow,” said the poor boy behind her. “That sucks.”

  And with a look of glorious disdain, the woman beside Naomi wrenched herself around again and assumed her mask of pained solidarity as she waited for Omar to resume.

  “I want you to know that I’m not envious when you tell me about your childhoods, and your families. I love to hear about your parents and the houses and neighborhoods you grew up in. My feeling has never been ‘Why did you get to have that, and I did not?’ Of course, I wish I’d had it. The safety alone, you can’t imagine what it would have meant to me and my brother and really everyone we knew. Just that relief of thinking, ‘Yes, I can walk to school’—the school will be there. ‘Yes, I can play outside. My house—no one is going to blow it up. I can have good health and a good education and I can choose what to do when I’m a man.’ I should have had that not because I was such a special and unique boy but because every child should have that, everywhere. And we don’t. And we won’t, not anytime soon. But I also believe that if every person begins in thei
r own place and makes it his or her business to remove violence and harm and injustice, then one day we are going to look around and see that there are no more problems in the world to fix.” He stopped. He looked at them. After a moment, he shook his head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk about this. I hate to talk about this.”

  “It’s all right!” someone said, from up front, apparently at his feet.

  “Oh, I know.” He smiled wearily. “Only…I want to go forward in my life, not back. There is nothing good that comes from going back. But in my home, my family’s home, there was always only back, because we never talked about the future, only our grievance. The American mind is almost, nearly, the opposite way—no past at all, just the now and what we look ahead to: our careers and goals in life. Maybe because you are such a young country and my country is so ancient.”

  Naomi, like, she supposed, many others in the room, found herself considering this point for the very first time.

  “The short way to tell this story is to say that my family died and I came to America by myself. But there is another chapter in between that I am very ashamed of. Some of you, if you have lost a parent, you will understand what I am going to say. You have felt what I felt—the need to replace that person is so powerful. And you understand: My mother and father, they were as human and as imperfect as I am. And I think, you know, it’s because I never got to have that experience of disappointment with my mother and father, there wasn’t time, that I have had the weakness of letting certain people come into my life and take that role of a parent.” He shook his head, and the dark locks moved over his eyes. Naomi now was trying to remember something from that application essay—some detail that might illuminate this dark, decidedly dark, allusion. Did he mean the American, working for the NGO in the schools, who’d pointed him in the direction of emigration to America? Was there some accusation here that hadn’t been in the essay? What exactly was he saying? She nearly raised her hand to ask, but in the next instant she no longer needed to ask. Because Omar, who wanted so badly to go forward in his life, was being borne back ceaselessly into the past again. He trembled, fought with himself, and broke anew.

  “You might be sitting at your breakfast table, or in a Starbucks somewhere, reading the newspaper or looking at the news on your phone, and there is a story,” he gasped, “about someone walking into a market or a restaurant and setting off a bomb. And you might think: Why would anyone do this? And I am glad this is such a mystery to you, because to a healthy mind, yes, it has to be a mystery why a person, especially a young person, would even consider doing such a thing. But in my world, this was an entirely ordinary event, and to a person like me, who wanted more than anything to have back the family that was taken, I would have done far more to feel that I was still in a family. And I will tell you that the day came when I was ready to do this, and even more, for people I’d persuaded myself were my family, my new family.”

  He seemed to have run out of breath. He stood, feet slightly apart, head hung. Naomi could see Chava, suddenly, moving toward him. She was undeterred by the bodies in the way, by the impossibility of making room for her long legs and long arms as she picked her way. She took the room she needed. She went to him and reached up to him atop his chair and encircled his small waist in her arms.

  “I am so…” Omar resumed, one hand on Chava’s shoulder, “so amazed at what I would have done. What I fully intended to do. I am humbled by it. I am appalled.” He nodded, apparently to himself. “I would have been a murderer of children. I would have been a murderer of mothers and grandmothers. I would have been a self-murderer. I hate the person I nearly was. And after that I ran away from those people, and I found someone else I thought I could trust, and this time I chose wisely.”

  The American, Naomi thought. The NGO, yes? Wait, did that mean they were back in the story now? Was this the original story, or an addition to the original story, or some parallel story, meant to coexist, enhancing what was already known? Omar, the suddenly orphaned. Omar, the lost scholar. Omar, the wandering Palestinian. Omar, the nearly suicide bomber? No wonder he’d left that part out of his Webster application; it was hard to imagine Francine, or any other admissions officer, letting that particular extracurricular activity go. She’d heard of child soldiers finding again, after years of violent acts, the rafts of their own humanity. She’d heard of it, but how could it be true? If this was true, and if she was interpreting it correctly, Omar Khayal been ready to reduce babies to pulp in a crowd. He’d been ready to show children the scattered limbs of their parents. He’d been ready to be made use of, for someone else’s brutal notion of justice.

  “So yes, I am ashamed of myself. But I am also ashamed of Webster,” said Omar, and now he had located some inner flint. The penitent on a chair, self-shaming before his comrades, had shifted into a disappointed teacher. “When Chava brought me downstairs this afternoon, I was very angry, and very shocked. Now, I find that I am still angry, but no longer shocked. And why is that?”

  There was silence. If they knew, they didn’t want to say.

  The woman beside her drew the back of her hand across her face, and Naomi saw that it was wet. She had been weeping, silently, for how long? The woman on the other side of her was weeping, too. Was everybody weeping? Was she weeping, herself? She touched the back of her hand to her cheek. She was not weeping. Why not? Naomi thought. She knew enough of Omar’s story to know how awful a story it was. Why wasn’t she moved by this, by him?

  “When I came here two years ago, I was so amazed. I saw the beauty of this place. I felt safety. I felt the willingness of my fellow students to be connected to me. I felt forgiveness, though I told no one about myself or what I’d done, what I needed to be forgiven for. Every day there was something that shocked me, astounded me—a safe room, as much food as I needed. If I was sick I just walked over to the health center and they took care of me. I could study what I wanted. If I needed clothes someone gave them to me. If I needed books they were handed to me, usually to keep. The only fighting was with words, and when it was over we all just went home and no one hurt anyone else. How can you understand what that felt like to someone who grew up as I did? I used to imagine—”

  But he stopped himself. He seemed to be considering something, very carefully. “I know it will sound crazy, but I used to imagine I could bring my family here to live with me in my dorm room on Eagle Road.”

  There was a reaction: brief, uncomfortable mirth. The Eagle Road dorms were notoriously unlovely. And small.

  “I had this daydream that the four of us were living in my room, going to the dining hall for our meals. And going to classes. So in my private paradise, which is what Webster was to me, all four of us are here. And much of that paradise was because of Professor Gall. Professor Gall is a great scholar and a great teacher and a great spirit. And does Webster College recognize his effort and his value?”

  Naomi saw that many heads were shaking, gravely, bitterly. Either Nick Gall had been deeply influential to many of his students, a large contingent of whom happened to be in this very room at this very moment, or Omar’s passion had already affected them deeply. His cause, now, was theirs, or had become the thin pointed end of their shared cornucopia of yearnings and complaints. A better Webster, she understood, was to begin with righting the perceived wrong done to one professor. But where would it end?

  “When I arrived here a year and a half ago,” Omar said, and his voice had taken on a dreaminess, as if he had slipped into a fugue, “I knew no one. I knew nothing. When people asked me what school I’d gone to I said—Webster. I didn’t know you were supposed to bring your before with you to a place like this. I thought everyone was supposed to start over, like I was doing. And then it began to get cold and I didn’t do very well in the cold. I wasn’t prepared for my classes. I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing. And I didn’t know how to ask for help.”

  Well, so much for our safety net, thought Naomi sourly. All that Welcome Week
counseling, the special receptions for foreign students and homeschooled students. So much for the big brothers and big sisters assigned to freshmen, with their ice-cream socials in the new students’ dormitory common rooms and their great big college-catered picnic down at the boathouse. So much for the RAs, four to a floor in the freshman dorms, and their late-night pizza parties, also underwritten by the college. And the writing resource centers and the tutoring network, both devised to make at-risk freshmen feel supported and inspired. And the academic advisors who met with every single student at least twice a year, but at least every other month for the freshmen. Good to know the checks and balances were working nicely. Good to know all of that effort and care had been worth it.

  “Professor Gall saw me struggling. He singled me out. He asked me: What’s wrong? He wanted to know who I was and what had brought me to Webster. He encouraged me to connect with the material in his course, to see myself not as a person at the mercy of war and politics and ethnic or religious discrimination but as a human being connected to other human beings. He made me realize that I had choices, I did not have to be controlled or penalized or discriminated against. I did not have to be somebody else’s instrument of violence. He made me a part of his family. And this man,” he said, eyeing the crowd with a sternness Naomi had not seen from him before, “this man, this teacher, and scholar, this inspiration to students like me, but who just happened to also be a black man—was denied tenure.”

  The room seethed. Naomi, looking around at them, as best she could, felt the darkness of real anger. They weren’t merely echoing back the powerful emotions coming from the boy on the chair; they were involved, individually. They were enraged. For the very first time, she felt real fear—from them, and for them. Then, from outside the room, and the house itself, away down the street, came the first low drone of a siren. Finally: the police. But right away, she thought: not yet.