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by Sameer Pandya

  * * *

  I opened my office door, and Dan, my lanky officemate and fellow detritus of academic life, was already there. We taught on different days and were assigned the same office, which had two metal desks and two large bookshelves. Dan had made it a point to leave his shelf completely empty, a poetic nod to the impermanence of his job. On mine, I had placed stacks and stacks of unclaimed, graded blue-book exams that students had failed to pick up after their course had ended. There must have been two thousand little books filled with scribbled pen and pencil. No one wanted to see what they did wrong anymore. Several months before, Dan had written on the back of a business card, “Pass/No Pass,” Raj Bhatt, Mixed Media, 2016, and taped it to the shelf. Site-specific art.

  Dan was tall and skinny. He always seemed uncomfortable when seated; his knees never could find their proper resting place.

  “Hey, bubba,” he said. He was in his boxers, an old white T-shirt, and brand-new tube socks, eating dry raisin bran out of the box and reading the New York Times online. He offered me the cereal. “Breakfast?”

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I whispered. “What if I had been someone else?”

  “Who else bothers to get here this early?”

  I noticed a toiletry kit on his desk. “You didn’t.”

  Dan shrugged his bony shoulders. “The floor isn’t very comfortable. I somehow thought it would be.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I need a break.”

  “A break? You have a sweet, mellow daughter who likes to read books. You don’t need breaks. This job is your fucking break.”

  “What’s up with the language? A little hostile this morning.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Don’t judge me,” Dan continued.

  “I’m not judging you. I’m just telling you to go home.”

  “I can’t. Julie said she isn’t going to speak to me for one full week.”

  “She actually said that?”

  “Yes. Starting yesterday. She made it very clear. She drew a circle around the date for reengagement on the family calendar.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Why do you assume it was me?”

  I just looked at him. I suppose we were all a little predictable.

  He shrugged. “I’m not telling you.”

  “You can be in the house together but not speak,” I said. “It’s easy. My parents built a marriage out of it.”

  “It’s uncomfortable.”

  “But peaceful.”

  I could see that Dan wanted to talk more, but I turned to my computer. I was embarrassed that it actually made me a little bit happy to know that, at the moment, his life was in more of a shambles than mine.

  While my computer powered up, I went into the department kitchen and made myself a cup of instant Starbucks coffee, a useful beverage for the long day ahead. I knew I’d need at least two more cups to get me through my classes.

  For the next hour, I busied myself with prep by going through my PowerPoint slides, adding one here, removing one there. I knew these lectures by heart. It wouldn’t have made a difference if I’d shown up to campus five minutes before class. But getting here early made me feel that I was working hard.

  “You expecting a call?” Dan asked.

  “Why?”

  “You keep checking your phone.”

  “Don’t judge me,” I said, pushing the phone away.

  “Did you read this story about Jews in India?”

  I ignored him.

  He reached out again. “Jews in India?”

  “Yes, Dan. Jews in India. Maybe you should convert and move. I’m sure Julie won’t even notice you’re gone.”

  “You think your mom wants to convert with me?”

  I stuck out my middle finger as I continued to work.

  When I was done with my class prep, I Googled Bill Brown and the name of our local hospital. His profile came up, which listed his bio, specialty, and education, along with his phone number and email address. I wrote down the email on a scrap of paper. What exactly would I write to him? What would I put in the subject line?

  A video had also popped up in the search results: “Stanford’s Brown: Long rally and then THIS.” I clicked on it. It was an old video of Bill in college, very poor quality, but I could see him, in tennis whites, playing a match against a guy from USC. Bill serves and they rally, hitting the seams off the ball. Bill has an all-around game, gliding back and forth on the baseline. He almost seems bored waiting for the ball to arrive, so casual until he hits it back with full force. He has a beautiful one-handed backhand. He gets down low and explodes forward as he hits the ball. The two rally and then rally some more—the ball flies back and forth at least fifty times. I’m getting tired of watching. I’m tired for them. Then finally, Bill rushes the net, and his opponent hits the most beautiful lob, the shape of the Gateway Arch. There, I think. This is the “THIS.” Bill swings around, runs toward the baseline, and with his back to his opponent, hits the ball through his legs and down the line. His opponent lunges for the ball, and misses. The camera closes in on Bill’s face: the same easy smile he had when I met him the night before.

  I laughed aloud at the perfection of it all. Whenever I’ve tried that move, I end up smacking my shin with the racquet.

  Dan turned to me. “Something more interesting than Jews in India?”

  “Nothing is more interesting than Jews in India,” I said.

  My phone buzzed. I assumed it was Eva, but it was Suzanne. I suddenly felt nervous. It was too early for her to be calling. I didn’t want to pick up. But if I silenced it, she would know I was screening her. And so I let it ring.

  “Pick that thing up,” Dan said. “I’ll do it if you won’t. Who are you avoiding?”

  “I’ll tell you later. You’ll get a kick out of it.”

  I waited to see if she left a voicemail. She didn’t.

  As I was leaving, I said, “You know they have showers in the gym.”

  “Gyms are for rats,” Dan said.

  I liked Dan. His humor was sharp, but didn’t hurt. We survived the absurdity of our work together. But he also had a slackerly indifference to the world and his job that I didn’t want the department to think I shared. If the budget ax fell and they could only keep one of us, I was sure it would be him. He fit the role of the disinterested scholar much better than I did.

  I walked out of the office and headed to my 9 a.m. lecture. Because the campus was essentially a beautiful oceanside resort, it attracted students who felt comfortable blurring the line between beachwear and schoolwear, so I had made it my practice to keep my head down when I was outside. On the way to class, I went through the small lot where I had parked. A sporty Audi had just pulled into a spot, and I knew whose car it was.

  Josh Morton was roughly my age. And that’s where the similarity ended. He was the newly christened Bay Alarm Chair in Insecurity Studies, a burgeoning field studying humanity’s fundamental insecurity—political, social, and emotional. And Josh was its leading light. His star had ascended thanks to complete dumb luck. He had taken a trip to Sweden with a girlfriend and come across trygghet, a governing principle of Swedish social life. The gist of trygghet is that you can’t be secure and happy if your life is full of the markers of insecurity—fear, anxiety, uncertainty. Josh took that idea and ran with it.

  Seemingly everyone had read and loved his book The Poetics and Politics of Insecurity. In it, he had interviewed people from across the American social spectrum—a prison guard in Tennessee, a twenty-four-year-old tech billionaire in San Francisco, an aging model in Beverly Hills, the black mayor of a predominantly white town, and on and on—and concluded that the country was moving into an age of insecurity, regardless of class, race, or any other difference. The book opened with this line: “If the brilliant Danish philosopher Søren Kier­kegaard were alive today, how would he assess the fear and trembling occurring all around us? What would he post on Twitter? Would h
e have an Instagram account?” It had won nearly every academic prize possible, and become the sort of book that nonacademics liked having on their coffee tables, something that happened to about one academic book in a thousand. I’d heard a rumor that Josh had just gotten a big contract with a mainstream publisher to translate some of his ideas for a more popular audience.

  I had to admire him for the sheer brilliance of using insecurity to earn him a lifetime of major security. And yet, of course, I hated the fucker. It wasn’t just that he held up a mirror to me and my life; he was admiring himself in a completely different, gold-plated mirror. I tried not to think too much about it, because when I did, getting from my place of insecurity to his place of heightened security seemed as daunting as scaling Everest.

  I saw Josh now, and I know he saw me, but he pretended not to. This happened on campus a lot. I was a lecturer; he had lifetime employment. He looked right through me. My insecurity was of no concern to him.

  As I walked to class, my phone buzzed again. Eva often called to check in after dropping off the kids. I saw her name, but I also noticed that, as had been happening more and more of late, my phone had taken a while to register a voicemail, and Suzanne had indeed left a message. Eva’s call kept buzzing. I thought about picking it up, but I didn’t want to feel agitated before the lecture. Just as the phone stopped ringing, a text came in. “I know you’re not teaching yet. Pick up. WTF? I just saw Leslie.”

  “Will call after class is done,” I texted back rapidly. “Don’t listen to Leslie. She understands nothing.”

  I could see the blinking dots, a ghostly trace of what I presumed was Eva’s anger at my evasion, but I switched out of the messages and checked the list of saved voicemails. Most people left me quick, to-the-point messages. Ten seconds max, if they left one at all. In and out. I had saved a few from my last birthday, which were a little longer, topping out at thirty seconds. Suzanne’s message was three minutes long—a clear violation of the social contract. What did she possibly need three minutes for that couldn’t wait until we actually talked? Was she reading aloud some bylaw that justified kicking me off the committee? I stood in front of the door to the lecture hall, debating whether to listen to it before the class. I decided not to, but as I walked in, now imagining what the message said, I indeed felt agitated. I took a deep breath and tried to calm my head.

  My first class of the day was a large lecture I’d been teaching for years: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. It was the same class I’d taught when I first started teaching. But lately, the ideas that I’d been regurgitating over and over again, quarter after quarter, were getting stale. In class, I did my best to pretend they still excited me, aiming for those golden student evaluations: passionate, enthusiastic, really cares for us. My salary increases were dependent on a handful of adjectives.

  But even as the others grew crusty, the one idea that I still remained genuinely passionate about was dirt. More precisely, Mary Douglas on dirt. I had lectured on it the previous week. When I first read her Purity and Danger in graduate school, I’d gravitated toward its treatment of pollution and taboo among Jews and Hindus. I finally had an explanation for my grandmother’s habit of taking baths whenever she returned from being outside. In her mind, her interactions with people lower on the caste hierarchy were not at all different from the actual dirt at her feet: sources of pollution that needed to be cleansed immediately. Her kitchen was a space of strict vegetarianism. She even kept her grandchildren, who spent their days playing outside, at arm’s length. Something is deemed dirty, Douglas argues, when it messes with the social order of things. “Dirt is essentially disorder.” For a while, I’d written that phrase out in large letters on a piece of paper, and for all the years I spent writing my dissertation, I had it pinned at sight level by my desk. That Mary, she’d nailed it. Particularly when we first joined the TC, I often felt acutely the dirt on my shoulders. I was always worried that I wasn’t wearing the right kind of tennis outfit or that my car was too old, too unwashed, that I was talking to a member about something that should have been assumed and left unsaid. After my comment to Bill, there wasn’t a shower hot enough to wash the dirt away.

  And it wasn’t just at the TC that I felt dirty. Dan could get away with sitting in the office in his boxers. If he got caught, my colleagues would think it was a charming moment out of a Kingsley Amis novel. But if I did that, it would confirm something they already believed about my not being quite right for the department; I knew from experience. I didn’t want that to happen again.

  It was the third week of class. The heavy attendance of the first week was over, but with the midterm in two weeks there were plenty of students in the room. I got up to the front of the class, prepared my notes, turned on my PowerPoint presentation, and for a second surveyed the lecture hall. There were roughly 150 students scattered there, most of them with their faces illuminated by a laptop or phone. I recognized a lot of them by now, but I’d forget them soon after the term ended. Before me was a study in sociological types: the young women, some outwardly confident and others not, who got most of the best grades in class; the bros, who would come up to me at the end of the term, pat me on my shoulder, and say, “Nice job,” just as their fathers had done for years with their gardeners, construction workers, lawyers, and doctors; the shy young men, who may have felt alienated in the sunny social world outside of class, but were finding their footing with the course material and gathering the courage to come chat with me; the handful of students who sat in the same seat lecture after lecture, which I knew meant that they came early every day to get their spot. I always paid close attention to the smattering of Indian-American men in my classes, who, almost without fail, would visit me in office hours, carefully ask about the trajectory of my life, and look in wonder when they realized that the narratives their parents had already written for their futures were not the only ones available. I knew that they would slum with me for a term or two before they graduated and settled into a life at Deloitte. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that Deloitte was probably the safer bet.

  “If you’re all done shopping online, maybe I can get started,” I said, with a bite in my voice left over from the tension of Suzanne’s excessively long voicemail, sitting on my phone.

  The lecture was on the history of Indian men who had come to America starting in the late nineteenth century and sold religion and spirituality to the masses: Vivekananda, Krishnamurti, Deepak Chopra. There were plenty of days when I taught things with false confidence, but I knew this material on Indians in the American imagination intimately. I started by talking about the arrival of yoga in the United States in the early twentieth century. “There’s a long history that gets us to the moment we’re in now, when you all happily pay hundreds of dollars for your yoga pants,” I said, trying not to look up at the students, many of whom I suspected did, indeed, spend hundreds of dollars on yoga pants.

  I turned to the various holy men who talked about India and religion, spending extra time on Gandhi, who didn’t fit perfectly within this tradition, but was someone I assumed most of them knew. I showed them photos of Allen Ginsberg dropping out in Varanasi and the Beatles going through their Maharishi phase. What did all this have to do with anthropology? Nothing directly. Which is why the bone diggers in the department didn’t like people like me. We gleefully ran away from the pretention that anthropology was a science. I talked about these men to underscore the larger point I was presenting in the class about the traditional methodology of anthropology: going out in the world, making claims about “natives.” It was as much about the anthropologist as it was about the natives, a point I had made more forcefully lately. America’s obsession with these holy men, and their yoga and Hinduism and spirituality, was about our own obsessions, our own sense of loss and emptiness. We can examine our love of yoga, in other words, to learn about the kinds of things we find important—self-care, balance, and peacefulness—qualities that are absent in other parts of our collec
tive cultural lives.

  The more I taught, the more I learned that students needed me to be clear about the exact point I was trying to make so that they could repeat it on an exam. And so I ended the lecture with a simple slide that read: “Americans have been so obsessed with these gurus not only because they fulfill our Orientalist desires, but also because they offer an alternative to the culture and religiosity of Christianity. They offer a counter­point to the emptiness of Christianity and Western life.” I had used the slide before in other lectures, tucked away among others. I had never featured it so prominently, and for a passing moment, I questioned the wisdom of being so explicit about my point.

  Most of the students were typing into their laptops. Some had their phones out, taking pictures of the slide behind me. There had been so many changes in the classroom since I was in their seats, but this one felt the most unnerving. Every time I changed slides, maybe half the class raised their phones and took a picture. I didn’t like seeing myself in photographs, and now there were pictures of me, standing in front of my ideas, stored in phones all across the campus.

  I was done. And exhausted. I glanced around the lecture hall.

  To the left of the lectern sat a young man who had attended every lecture since the beginning of the term. He always walked in and out of class alone. The few times I had asked the class to discuss an idea with the student seated next to them, he’d sat there by himself, writing in his meticulous notebook—he was always close enough to me that I could see his pages of handwritten notes. He listened intently to what I said, wrote everything down, but never spoke to anyone. Looking at him now, I saw that he was fiddling with his phone; when he saw me watching him, he shoved it in his pocket. I had taught enough, and engaged with enough students, to pick out the loners from the crowd. As loners go, he seemed pretty middle of the pack, but with excellent penmanship.