by Daniel Klein
So late one morning he wrapped his supply of Buenos Aires Red in tinfoil and hid it from himself in an urn in Asim’s bedroom. He typed up a charming letter of personal introduction to the address listed at the bottom of the black box, then folded in a half-dozen Xeroxed copies of his best columns, including his most celebrated New York Magazine piece about the zeitgeist connection between Dungeons and Dragons and Hershey Kiss Lip Gloss. A few days later he received a two-line note from a Mrs. Felicia Hastings of Louden, Vermont, requesting his presence at the Harvard Club of New York for an interview in two weeks.
Mrs. H. met Digby in the club’s foyer, led him to the club’s dining room and, although Digby would have preferred a double scotch straight up, ordered coffees for both of them. She looked him over silently for several minutes. He was wearing the tan linen suit Fanny had selected for him for a National Magazine Awards dinner several years back and he looked, he thought, award-winning. Mrs. Hastings, on the other hand, was wearing a severe, navy blue skirt suit edged in inky black piping, giving her the aspect of a chiaroscuro etching. She withdrew a copy of Cogito from her handbag and handed it across the table to Digby.
It had the same heft and trim size as Reader’s Digests of yore, also the same bible-like typeface on the cover listing the articles inside. The lead piece was titled, “The Ethics of Ambiguity”; next came, “The Metaphysical Conception of Analyticity”; then the most mind-numbing of the lot, “Zombies and Consciousness.”
Despite his recent study marathon, Digby could no more guess what these articles might be about than he could supply the Latin name for the fern hanging from the wall behind Mrs. Hastings’ head. His first instinct was to excuse himself for a trip to the men’s room, toward which he would casually saunter before tear-assing out the club’s front door. He held that option in check for the moment.
“What’s your first impression?” Mrs. Hastings asked in a rather studied nonchalant tone.
“Boring,” Digby replied, not only matching her tone, but trumping it with a raised eyebrow. He would have liked to have been able to say that this impression of hauteur was part of his interview strategy, but it was the portraits of those grim, former Harvard presidents on the club’s darksome, oak-paneled walls that inspired it. Digby is extremely impressionable.
“What would you rather see on the cover?”
“A picture,” Digby said. “Possibly of a beautiful woman, say, reading Sartre in a Paris café.”
“In a short skirt, no doubt.”
“Mr. Sartre?”
“You disappoint me, Mr. Maxwell,” Mrs. Hastings responded. “We are looking for a relevant philosophy magazine, not a tawdry one.”
“I guess the question is, relevant to whom?” Digby said. This is what is known in the trade as treading water.
“I read your piece about Dungeons and Dragons,” Mrs. Hastings went on. “I don’t have the vaguest idea of what it was about.”
“Dungeons is a game millions of people play. A role-playing game. At the heart of it is the unpredictability of events. The game probably says more about randomness than Aristotle could have imagined.”
This, of course, was Digby’s famous right brain blabbing, albeit a right brain recently schooled by Philosophy for Dummies. Clearly the time was nigh for him to execute his men’s room trick.
But hold the phone! Was that a twinkle Digby detected in the old girl’s eyes?
“Bonner—Mr. Hastings—once said that if Aristotle were alive today he would be hooked up on the Internet,” she said, exposing a row of surprisingly young-looking teeth with a half-smile.
“He would probably have his own blog. ‘Some Particulars About Universals dot com,’ ” Digby said in a blink. His right brain is a wondrous thing.
Mrs. Hastings’ smile expanded. “We are offering seventy-five thousand a year with a comfortable apartment included,” she said.
Was that it? Was she actually offering Digby the job before their coffees had even arrived?
It should be noted that had Digby been even a fraction less desperate, he would have smelled something fish-like in Mrs. Hastings’ instantaneous offer. But desperate is as Digby does.
“Yup,” was all he could manage to reply.
“Can you begin in two weeks?”
He could.
And that is when his panic commenced in earnest.
Digby dug around in Asim’s urn the moment he got back to his apartment.
CHAPTER 3
“Okay, picture this fellow Joe sitting in front of his TV late on a Tuesday evening. His wife has already gone to bed. The Knicks game is over and he switches off the set. He feels uneasy, too uneasy to go up to bed just yet, even though he has to start getting ready for work in only six hours. He asks himself what the hell it is that he’s uneasy about. He’s got a reasonably good job. He has a house, a wife, a kid, a dog. But something’s not right with Joe. Then he hears himself mumbling, ‘The point of it all is . . . The point of it all is . . .’ ”
Digby stops talking here and tries to make eye contact with his staff. Only one is willing to reciprocate, Madeleine, who appears to be stirred by his opening sally, although it may be his seeming cluelessness that stirs her. The other three, June MacLane, Elliot Goldenfield, and the Russian logician whose name, Digby believes, begins with an ‘R,’ make eye contact with the floor.
The floor is impressive. It is made of dark, broad board hemlock and is covered, for the most part, by a faded, crimson-and-amber Soumak rug. The seats upon which the staff has parked themselves for this, their first meeting with Digby, are a pair of plushy, tufted Victorian settees. Digby sits behind a long oak desk in a swivel chair, also oak, that is fitted with a leather pillow. The velvet-draped, floor-to-ceiling window on his right looks out onto a great sward of budding wildflowers and then onto a grand lawn that, in the far distance, merges with the central quad of Louden College. Collectively, the five of them look like a washed-out turn-of-the-century painting of themselves.
“So,” Digby continues. “What can we tell Joe that will give him a handle on things?”
“Things?” Goldenfield chimes back. “What sort of things?”
“Exactly,” Digby says. “What sort of things?”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” Goldenfield simpers.
Elliot Goldenfield is a lanky fellow, covered from cuff to collar in brown corduroy, his thick black hair slicked straight back in a style befitting this nineteenth-century executive suite.
Digby’s guess is that Goldenfield enjoys a private fantasy about his ancestry, one that reaches back to the court of St. James. He reminds Digby of a young man named Jack Collier who lived across the hall in his Swarthmore dormitory. Collier was also tall, angular, and imposing. President of the Equestrian Club and treasurer of the Fencing Club, Jack was given to wearing paisley bow ties and a black cashmere topcoat. He cut a fine figure, so to speak, and the other Swarthmore students, mostly nerds and smartasses, regarded him with awe and sniggers.
Then one day when Collier’s roommate, Mickey Bernstein, was picking up the mail, he noticed a letter addressed to their room to one Jack Cohen. It was from the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization in Cleveland, Jack Collier’s hometown. It took Mickey about fifteen minutes on the Net to verify that Collier and Cohen were one and the same. But Swarthmore students being clever little bastards, none of them confronted Jack with this discovery; no, their tack was to tag along behind him on the way to the dining hall quipping, “Man, look at that pine tree. What beautiful pine colliers!” and “Anybody up for an ice cream collier after dinner?” Terribly cruel, but funny too, in a collegiate assholey sort of way. Digby was alone among his friends in feeling that Jack was perfectly entitled to assume any identity that got him through the day. Even then Digby believed that all identities were arbitrary at best, so why the fuss? It was one of the few choices a person had.
“Well, Elliot, I bet this Joe person is anxious,” Madeleine offers, then adds, “You know, angst.”
“He has psychology problem,” says the Russian, still not looking up from the rug. “But philosophical not.”
“Kierkegaard wrote about anxiety,” Madeleine says brightly.
“So he is psychologist!” snaps the Russian.
“Maybe your Joe has an identity problem,” says Ms. MacLane. These are the first even remotely sociable words out of her mouth since Digby met her at Mrs. Hastings’ home the previous evening. It takes him only a moment to figure out what has brought her into the conversation—the possibility that Joe has a gender identity problem.
“That’s true,” Digby says tentatively. “Joe doesn’t know who he is. Or possibly what he is.”
“That would not make him particularly unusual in the postmodern world,” replies Ms. MacLane.
Instead of listening closely to her words, Digby finds himself studying the area above MacLane’s upper lip. He detects a few wiry hairs that he suspects have been tenderly cultivated there. They lend a certain Groucho Marxist aspect to her countenance. Back in Manhattan, Digby had acquaintances and friends on every point of the LGBT spectrum and, especially as a man with what his ex-wife termed, ‘a transpersonal condition,’ he did not find their orientations in the least disorienting. But MacLane’s childlike and petulant earnestness regarding her L-ness strikes him as provincial. Perhaps that is because she is stranded here in the provinces.
“So, who or what do you suppose this Joe person is?” Digby finally says.
“It obviously depends on who defines him,” says MacLane.
“For starters, let’s say Joe, himself,” Digby replies.
“Well, since you obviously have a more intimate relationship with this fellow than anyone else here, I suggest you tell us how Joe defines himself,” Goldenfield says dryly.
Without a moment’s thought, Digby says, “Joe defines himself as a guy who just had his first glimpse of his mortality.”
Digby regrets his blurt immediately. To begin with, his identification with this Joe Everyman is way too blatant, not to mention needy, and at this point can only further undermine his already tenuous hold on leadership. But more worrisome is the fact that, inadvertently, he is spouting words that are perilously close to philosophy talk. That is not what Felicia Hastings brought him a hundred and fifty miles due north to spout. She brought him here to burrow from the outside in.
“We already did an issue that focused on mortality,” Madeleine says helpfully. “June, 1991. Heidegger, Camus. And some Aristotle too, of course. Bonner’s favorite.”
Thank God for that, Digby thinks. He has had enough thoughts about his mortality to last him a lifetime. Now where the hell was he going with this? Last night, stretched out on an absolutely divine divan in his three-room apartment one flight up from Cogito’s offices in what is known as Hastings Towers, he had channeled his Joe straight out of Family Feud; and inside Joe’s existential diaper bag was some nasty dread, the kind that stinks up everybody’s existential diaper bag whether or not they have an advanced degree in philosophy. At the time, the Joe ‘what’s-the-point-of-it-all?’ scenario had struck Digby as brilliant, a delicate balance between the concerns of the man in the street and the man in the Acropolis. But now Digby has a sinking feeling that is, he believes, unrelated to his recurring tingles of mortality; it has more to do with hanging on to his new divan while he is still on this side of the Great Divide. He reaches back to his New York Magazine headset. He improvises.
“Joe wants to go to heaven,” he blurts out. “He’s wondering what it’s like and what his odds are of getting in.”
The Russian snorts. Goldenfield rolls his eyes, well, heavenward.
“Eighty-two percent of Americans believe in heaven,” Digby continues. As of yore, tossing off made-up statistics gives him strength; it lubricates his way to pure bullshit. “They want to know what’s cooking up there. Who’s invited. What they’re serving. Living accommodations.”
“I hope you are not serious, Mr. Maxwell,” June MacLane says.
“Please call me Digby,” Digby replies pleasantly. “And yes, I am serious. Our next issue will be devoted in its entirety to the idea of heaven.”
Without a moment’s reflection, Digby has made this decision and made it public. In truth, he didn’t even see it coming. It was inspired.
“Fairy story,” the Russian says.
Greatness! Just the reaction Digby was hoping for. He feels he is on the right track at last. He suddenly remembers the Russian’s name.
“That is true, Rostislav,” Digby says. “But then again, so is the subject of good and evil, is it not so?”
When talking to foreigners, Digby often finds himself unconsciously mimicking their jumbled syntax. In any event, and certainly without realizing it, Digby has shut the Russian up by citing a fundamental dictum of logical positivism, namely that the whole enterprise of moral philosophy is about as rationally based as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”—or heaven, for that matter. Out of the corner of his eye, Digby observes that Madeleine offers Rostislav a consoling smile, not that he believes the Russian needs or has ever needed one.
“There is a line,” Goldenfield begins, looking at Digby with a mix of incredulity and pity. “A line that separates subjects worthy of serious thought and subjects that are, in a word, trivial. I do not believe that Bonner Hastings ever intended us to cross that line.”
“It’s hard to know what Bonner thinks at this point. Anyone know a good medium?” Digby says jauntily. He is convinced that he has found the perfect voice for his new vocation, never mind that it is also a voice that may convince his employees that he is several categories short of an imperative. He quickly goes on. “Sometimes treating a trivial subject thoughtfully produces fascinating results. In any event, eighty-two percent of would-be heaven dwellers do not consider it trivial in the least.”
Digby is getting his first whiff of insurrection. It has a foul, gassy smell. Nobody says a word.
“Let’s give it a try,” Digby says, trying to inflect a few pleading tones into his voice. “Float the idea with our smartest contributors. Get some feedback. And try to think of some non-academics who might have something interesting to say on the subject—poets, priests—.” He stops himself before adding, ‘rock stars,’ but he does say, “Does anybody here read Rolling Stone?”
Surprisingly, Madeleine raises her hand. Hope springs.
“Let’s reconvene in a couple of days,” Digby says and his staff rises and vacates in a platonic minute.
Digby spends the next three hours pouring over two boxes of past editions of Cogito, a reassuringly soporific experience. He tries to imagine who exactly reads this stuff beside the loved ones of the articles’ authors. Other philosophy types, to be sure, but just how many of them can there be? At Swarthmore, there were no more than half a dozen tenured philosophy professors on staff, and two of those, he recalls, only read philosophers who wrote in Greek or Latin. Of course, niche publications are the new wave, running on the steam of niche products; and indeed, the back cover and last three pages of Cogito contain ads for new books from university presses with titles like Inference from Signs, Rationalism, Platonism, and God, and Deflationism and Paradox, but this only raises the question of who the hell is reading these books? Digby makes a note to ask Madeleine exactly what Cogito’s circulation amounts to and what ads cost, two questions that he saw no need to ask before he accepted the job. That was undoubtedly a wise decision.
At one o’clock, Digby decides to whip upstairs for lunch. Unfortunately, this necessitates walking through the offices of Goldenfield and MacLane, so he carries along a copy of Cogito and keeps it pre
ssed close to his nose for the trip. He makes himself a cup of instant ramen soup that someone had stocked in his larder, slurps it down, and then stretches out on his featherbed for a postprandial snooze.
It is pitch black outside when Digby awakes. For a moment, he is sure he is back on Asim’s couch, sleeping off a particularly stressful episode of the Jerry Springer Show. Instinctively, he reaches for the roach under what would be Asim’s couch and in the process rolls off his bed. This awakens him completely. When he realizes where and when he is, he experiences a small trill of hysteria: he has slept through one half of his first day on the job. He attempts to calm himself by saying “But I am the boss” a few times out loud. This gets him on his feet and, moments later, down the stairs and out onto Brigham Street, Louden’s main drag. He is the only person afoot.
By golly, the air is uncommonly fresh up here in the foothills of the Green Mountains. Fragrant too—newly mown grass, dewberries, and crocuses combining in an invigorating April perfume. That and the clear, star-spangled sky make him feel uncommonly fresh himself, a feeling he barely recognizes. For the first time in a very long while, he deeply inhales nothing but clean air.
Brigham Street bows around the south end of the campus where rambling, white clapboard New England homes give way to college shops, restaurants, cafés, and bars. The only one of these with a neon sign is called Louden Clear—a promising signage—so he crosses the street and enters. The place reeks with convivial chatter, but in his present perfumed mood Digby thinks he can tolerate it. He makes for the bar.
