The Shadow Scholar

by Dave Tomar

  As we sorted through this, the customer sent another message, which Melissa forwarded my way.

  Have not gotten my penn state revision

  Can you resend the link I gavey ou for the supplement and the essay?

  Now it should bear noting that I was hammered at this point, when I composed the following message in an attempt to recount the series of events that had led us to this impasse:

  Melissa,

  I have to tell you, I am intensely confused over the dealings with this customer. I am prepared to make an edit to the PSU essay for $15 as stated, though the customer still has not responded with additional information. I decided to charge for this edit due both to the fact that the revisions differ from the initial assignment instructions and that the customer has been so difficult to communicate with. Either way, the information that i have been given constitutes a completely restructured essay that is entirely different than the first one requested.

  After reviewing the customer’s error regarding the Brown essay, I would say that the same is necessary. In order to conduct a revision, I will need to ask for an additional $35.

  Just between the two of us, this customer is very difficult to deal with. I don’t mind doing all the work but this person doesn’t seem to know what he’s asking for until it has already been completed incorrectly.

  Give me the go-ahead at these rates above, and I will have all of these editorial changes ready by tomorrow morning. Let me know. Thanks.

  Dave

  Dave,

  He really is difficult, I totally agree. I have had to tell him to stop swearing at me several times (and frankly, I swear all the time, but NOT online to people with whom I am conducting business. I mean, really).

  Anyway—please do the PSU revisions for $15 and the Brown

  revisions for $35.

  Thanks!!!

  Melissa

  Melissa,

  I’ll take care of these revisions by morning.

  Maybe I’ll throw some obscenities into the revisions. He may

  like them better that way.

  Dave

  Dave,

  Well, if you do, let me know and I will send you a list of his favorites. ;-)

  Melissa

  When Tom W. finished his set, he came down and had a round with us, then we hopped a train for his Queens apartment. On the train, my “conscience” kicked in. My conscience lives in my stomach and is particularly sensitive to the evils of alcohol.

  I sat in a sweaty pallor on the train, with my head dipping crane-like between my knees, closing my eyes to fight off the stroboscopic motion of the car windows, then swiftly opening them to fight off the vertiginous brain-eclipse spins.

  We had boarded a full train, but people shuffled off at every station. With each pulsing stop, my head became more jumbled and my innards more stewed.

  I did my best to wait until the car was mostly empty.

  Harmon looked at me and asked, “Dude, you gonna make it?”

  Nope. Couldn’t even shake my head to tell him. I jumped up, went to the far end of the car, where the handicapped benches were, and painted the empty space with stomach chowder.

  The train was pulling to a stop as I finished up.

  I returned to my friends.

  Tom said, “Um… let’s… move to another car.” As we walked through the door, the one poor bastard left in the car was holding his nose and grimacing in disgust.

  I mumbled a meek apology at him, which (so far as I can remember) he did not accept. A few stops later, we were at Tom’s house. I had a big glass of water and sat down to write about why I thought that I would make a perfect addition to the student body at PSU and why I felt that my premedical major would best be pursued at the storied Ivy League institution of Brown University.

  With my eyes squinted, with my brain rotating slowly one way, then forcing itself back to center like an oversized microwave casserole, with my back pressed firmly up against the wall to keep me from falling off the floor, I punched out my revisions, then collapsed in a drunken heap over my laptop. I never heard from the customer again, so I guess he was happy.

  But me, I was a disaster.

  I was a bum.

  I was an empty husk.

  I was a guy who had vomited somewhere in New York’s public transit matrix. And I knew I wasn’t the first. I was, more likely, now part of some grand Gotham tradition that dated to the earliest days of drunken, debauched, and vomitous trolley-dodging. But still, it didn’t feel right. Somebody had to clean that up.

  I went back home and thought about how this asshole whose admissions essays I had just written was about to go to a big bright university while I sat in my dark little office with its exhaust-frosted windows and its stolen now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t, high-speed-my-ass wireless Internet. Working from home is great a lot of the time. I don’t envy the world its cubicles and Dilbert comics and traffic snarls and lunches at Applebee’s. But a normal human being could really lose some marbles working in isolation. I never painted a face on a volleyball with my own blood, but I definitely had the occasional conversation with Oscar Peterson or Sam Cooke or whichever other dead man happened to be coming through my stereo.

  “What’s that, Sam?”

  “Shake!”

  “But Sam… somebody could be watching.”

  “Shake!”

  “Sam. I really shouldn’t.”

  “Shake!”

  “Well, jeez. There’s no need to yell.”

  “Shake!”

  “All right, all right. I’m doing it. I’m shaking.”

  Now that Ethan was working outside the house and Bree wasn’t dropping by to visit me, I was cracking up.

  And I was burning out… again.

  But again, I was making loot. A pretty decent amount, really, and for the first time.

  To be clear, this was not the kind of money that made my college education seem financially justified. But it was enough that I no longer felt absolutely certain that I’d have to sell a kidney to stay under a roof into the foreseeable future.

  But in order to do something better than just stay afloat, I had to put in an amount of work that simply isn’t healthy. And I did this without end, without retreat, and without discretion. At times, my exhaustion teetered and toppled over into illness, my insomnia into somnambulant half consciousness, my ingenuity into automation. I pushed my body until the veins in my wrists palpitated visibly, until the lump on my neck bulged like a softball, until my lower back kinked like a tangled Slinky. I missed deadlines, I bargained for extensions, I promised to get my act together. Then I scarfed up more assignments, bigger, longer, more boring than ever, and did everything in my power to turn them into the money that would pay back my repeatedly defaulted student loans, that would keep the electricity on, that would get me questionable Mexican food for dinner.

  But I was toast. My brain wanted to work, but my body was filled with bitter, rubbery resentment. It sagged and knotted and wished that my brain would just die and leave it alone. Eventually, my body would utterly refuse to go on and I would sleep. But every time I slept, I did it in guilt, with a deadline hanging over my head, an assignment passing its due time, frantic customer e-mails silently pelting my in-box while I cuddled with apnea and perspiration. And I’d wake up in mid-gallop, quaking with arrhythmia, confirming two more new assignments before my first cup of coffee was done brewing.

  I was in a bad state. In what was becoming an annual tradition, I crashed. And in this year and all the years thereafter, when I crashed, I crashed hard, with fatigue and snotty colds and influenza and a seasonal hay fever death rattle.

  I knew it was coming when I got fired one morning.

  I don’t make any excuses for this stuff. I have always overbooked myself. I take on as much work as one human being possibly can. I don’t schedule carefully. I don’t look to see if I already have twenty pages due on a given date before taking on another fifteen-page paper. I just figure, we’ll cross that
bridge when we get to it. And cross it we do, half asleep at the wheel, a dozen weigh stations and twenty-five county lines till we can drop off the last load for the night.

  In my time, I have missed many a deadline. I would have four, five, six, maybe seven deadlines a day during peak season, and I didn’t take the weekends off. I would’ve planned ahead, but ultimately I found it much more palatable simply to think about what was on tap for the next day. Had I tallied all of my deadlines for a month and counted the number of pages I had to write, I might’ve thrown myself from a tall building.

  It served my psyche far better simply to take each day as its own distinct challenge. But of course it all blended together, so much so that on any given night, I might finish writing a five-page paper about the early history of the quadruple bypass and then immediately forget what it was about. When I prepared to upload the file for the customer, I would find myself racking my cloudy brain. Was he expecting a paper about setting personal goals for his future as a social worker, or one about McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists? Whatever, let’s give him this one about Martin Luther. He’s probably not going to read it anyway.

  And into this blurring spin cycle were always thrown I-forgot-to-add-the-fabric-softener-type moments: revision requests, requests for additional pages, last-minute rush assignments with rates simply too good to pass up. The schedule ahead always got thicker, the completion of my work in accordance with the dense cluster of deadlines ahead always seemingly less plausible.

  And I had zero patience for the customers. I was curt, rude, and dismissive in e-mail correspondence. And eventually, I just started ignoring them altogether.

  If a customer really annoyed me with impetuousness, with bratty rudeness, with brazen hostility, or even just with too many e-mails, I became as quiet as a tombstone.

  I would just stop responding to e-mails. I’d complete the paper and submit it, but it would come with a cold shoulder. No polite customer service repartee and no apologies. When a client burned over the smoldering embers of panic, I fanned them with my silence.

  It became a real hassle for Melissa, who was good-natured but had limits to how much crap she would take. It was her job to take orders, interact directly with customers, and function as a liaison to a team of writers. She was also responsible for mediating any conflicts between a writer and a client, determining whether a refund should be issued to a customer, and, eventually, firing me.

  This time around, my termination came with a fantastic letter of condemnation. My employer said that at one time I had been an excellent writer, perhaps even “the best in the business.” But over the course of my employment, the quality of my work had declined significantly. I was turning in assignments later, receiving more revision requests, and generally failing to adhere to the high standards that the company maintained, indeed, the high standards that I had set for myself.

  In my defense, the nature of the work itself is positively draining. After a couple of years solid, it can be difficult to stay on your game. Or maybe more accurately, I couldn’t manage my time well enough to stay on it. I had an obsessive-compulsive instinct. It told me that I always needed to have my next dozen or so paychecks lined up. Even in my sleep, the clock was ticking. I never punched out. The fear that there was no bottom, that everything could drop out from beneath me and I’d have nothing to stop my fall—that kept me in deadlines. And it pushed me to take on more than I could realistically handle in the time allotted. It was never for lack of trying. I would just pile it on. It was the only way to go from making some money to making more money. It was all a matter of volume. I had to find ways to cheat the number of hours in a day. So I did. I tricked the day into being twenty-four hours long.

  I could always fool it for a while. But eventually, the day would catch up to me. It would strip me of my false credentials and cast me into sickness. I was almost relieved when I finally got fired. I had been with this company for a couple of years, but this had been coming for months now.

  After no shortage of warnings that I had better straighten up and fly right, they told me that they regretted that it had come to this, but felt that it was probably for the best. They observed that I had burned out. I agreed with them. I asked for another chance. They declined and said that I probably needed a fresh start elsewhere.

  They were right. I don’t take a lot of vacations. And even when I do, I usually carry my laptop with me. If I didn’t get fired once in a while, I’d never take any time off. I still had work with a few of the smaller, crappier, and less trustworthy companies, but nothing I could live on, really.

  During this stretch of underemployment, I was struck by the disconcerting idea that perhaps it was time to look for a “real job.” And so I went on a few “real job” interviews. I interviewed for work as a copywriter for a nonprofit agency. I interviewed with a company that made juvenile reading-education software.

  Ethan even scored me an interview with his Fortune 500 company. They were looking for another proposal writer. So I donned my cousin Marty’s secondhand suit and took a cab to the shiny glass towers downtown. I looked like a grifter wearing something he had won in a game of three-card monte.

  I was more than qualified to do any of the jobs for which I interviewed. But I suspect that they could see through my feigned enthusiasm, through my threadbare suit, through my charade of acquiescence. I didn’t feel fit for this part of the world. Most of these people were actually impressed by my résumé, but none so much as the next paper-writing company down the line. I returned to the Coastal Carolina website that I had visited some years prior to procure the job I was now hoping to replace.

  And, without formally identifying myself as a prior employee, I reached out to the same company that had fired me and, subsequently, Ethan just a few years back. They hired me back instantly. Either they never knew it was me, or they figured that even with my various faults, I was an asset to them. I completed a two-page test paper on constitutional law and I was back in the saddle. To this day, I have no idea if they remembered me from the first time around or not.

  Fortunately, nobody checks references in this business. Chances are, if you approach a custom-paper-writing company and tell them you want to spend your days and nights writing academic essays for something between ten and twenty dollars a page, you have the ability to do the job. Nobody who couldn’t churn out pages by instinct would volunteer for this kind of personal hell. If you couldn’t do it, you wouldn’t even try.

  And even if you did fake your way into the job, it wouldn’t be long before your limitations revealed themselves. It’s not like working in a corporation or going to school. There’s nothing to hide behind. Either the work gets done or it doesn’t.

  I had one month off. A week after I returned to work, my schedule was as densely packed as ever. I had lost time to make up for. And I was feeling confident. I knew I had just been fired, but I felt like an NFL coach. This kind of thing just had to happen every couple of years. It was a necessary way of purging my fatigue, of gaining a new outlook, of starting out fresh.

  And I needed that. And I needed a couple of interviews, too, just to look around at the kinds of places in which I might have found myself in an alternate dimension, to see the file cabinets and secretarial desks and people bustling around or hovering over one another and snorting about what had happened on Dancing with the Stars and Real Housewives of Wilmington, Delaware last night. That kind of stuff made me grateful that I at least had a choice.

  And gratitude can be a tremendous motivator. This time, I was all in. No more screwing around.

  A four-page paper on Transportation Security Administration regulations? Check.

  A ten-pager on Turkey’s fight for independence? Sure.

  A seven-page report on The Bridges of Madison County? Hmmmmm. Shit. I really didn’t want to know what that book was about. Oh well. Click.

  Isaac Newton, Jesus Christ, J. M. Coetzee. Darwin’s theory of evolution, Erikson’s theory of stages,
Piaget’s theory of genetic epistemology. Moses, Mohammed, Ming, and Marx. Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Kant, and Wundt. The British, the Ottoman, the Holy Roman, and the Mughal. The Crimean, the Trojan, the Peloponnesian, and the Hundred Years’. Cold wars, Star Wars, drug wars, terror wars. Nurse leadership, business leadership, military leadership. Group dynamics, independent learning styles, and the knowledge economy. Corporate ethics, corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility. Scorsese, DeMille, Godard, and Coppola. Mozart, Dylan, Lennon, and Armstrong. Policy, legislation, constitution, scripture.

  It got to where nobody would play Trivial Pursuit with me anymore.

  11

  Tunneling Out

  If I were on a desert island, this is about the point at which the scene would fade out, a number of years would lapse, and I would have gone from the Silly Putty–bodied city slicker who couldn’t catch a tankful of fish with a grenade to a loincloth-wearing, tan-hided savage who could start a fire by refracting the sun off his eyeball.

  Did I crave isolation, or was I simply allowing it to control me? Why was I compelled to write endlessly, to create constantly, but with no real compulsion to be seen, no drive to broadcast my work and stand beside it? It was no longer cool to be a hermit writer. The private martyrdoms of Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Cobain seem almost quaint as we watch Charlie Sheen’s slow, tweeting death.

  Today, if you are tortured, lonely, and imprisoned by your own psychic inner turmoil, you’re supposed to complain about it in your Facebook status and eHarmony profile so that other people can know that you’re lonely and drape you in their virtual sympathies.

  And if you’re super-lonely and you have some disposable income and you can make neither head nor tail of the modern dating scene, you might even consider employing a compositional expert to help you express this deep sense of loneliness.

  The following instructions came with an assignment ordered by one such super-lonely soul:

  i want write a short message through an online dating site if you could give six short message i think of… not sounding as a plead or a nag. in the hopes of him to respond and ask me out.