I lowered myself off the bed and tried walking to the door normally. Wincing, clenching my fists, sucking air through my teeth, I took ten careful, excruciating steps. By the time I reached the door I had to lean against it while I recovered my breath.
I tested my ankle obsessively the rest of that night, and in between bouts read a few more pages of “Bartleby,” which we were to discuss in tomorrow’s Melville class. I didn’t finish the story until I was midway through icing my foot in the training room’s cold pool the next morning, and when I hobbled across West Campus afterward I realized I’d retained virtually nothing of what I’d read.
Reshawn, though, must have read the story five times, and he was rereading it yet again when I entered the seminar room. Professor Grayson arrived a few minutes after me, and while Reshawn hadn’t bothered to acknowledge my arrival, he now lowered his book to nod to Grayson, with Grayson warmly nodding back. I resented their relationship, resented that Reshawn was allowed to have a secret sharer while I had nobody, nothing.
I only tuned in to the lecture about halfway through class. Quoting the line “Every copyist is bound to help examine his copy,” Grayson was saying:
—In “Bartleby,” and indeed in much of Melville, there’s an overpowering professional determinism. If you are known as a cobbler, then the world expects your whole existence to center on cobbling. If you are a woodworker, you work wood and only wood. But the battle is lose-lose. If you commit yourself wholeheartedly to your profession and do as the world demands? Like Captain Ahab, you’ll be destroyed. And if you dare assert that you possess meaning outside your named function, like Bartleby? Let’s look at the text again.
Grayson read:
“Turkey,” said I, “what do you think of this? Am I not right?”
“With submission, sir,” said Turkey, in his blandest tone, “I think that you are.”
“Nippers,” said I, “what do you think of it?’
“I think I should kick him out of the office.”
“Ginger Nut,” said I, willing to enlist the smallest suffrage in my behalf, “what do you think of it?”
“I think, sir, he’s a little luny,” replied Ginger Nut, with a grin.
“You hear what they say,” said I, turning towards the screen, “come forth and do your duty.”
Grayson looked up from the text.
—Bartleby steps out of the stream and is called insane. Yes,
Silas?
Silas was a black sophomore. Pudgy with cornrowed hair capped by puka shells, he wore thick-rimmed glasses and, for so big a body, had an unexpectedly adenoidal way of speaking. Reshawn and I had become friendly with him last year when he lived in Stager Hall, and he lived even closer to us this year in Mennee, two doors down.
—I feel like Bartleby’s getting romanticized, he said now. Nobody’s forcing him to take this job. He gets paid to render a service, and he should render it. How else is the world going to function if people don’t do what they’re paid to?
—So you agree he should he be called a “luny,” Grayson said.
—I mean, insanity’s when you keep doing the same thing and expect a different result, right?
—But who says he’s expecting a different result? Reshawn interjected.
Silas turned in his seat to look at him.
—Fine, Silas said. But maybe the opposite’s true. Maybe if you keep doing the same thing and expect the same result, that’s also crazy.
—He’s protesting, Reshawn said.
Silas was skeptical.
—Protests want some kind of change to happen. And the way to accomplish that is for people to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. Not just saying “I would prefer not to” and staring at a brick wall.
—But what about who Bartleby was before this job? Reshawn said. Who’s to say he hadn’t been protesting like that for years? Maybe this story just catches him when he’s realized there’s no point anymore.
For how despairing his argument was, Reshawn looked happy and vigorous, as he always did in class. I resented this, too.
Demoted and wounded, humiliated and scorned, I was supposed to submit, to acquiesce, to accept the ostracism and retreat like a leper to his cave. To agree, like I said, that Gwen and Miles were irreconcilable. But there was no Gwen, I told myself as I limped to the Hay that afternoon, there wasn’t even really a Miles. There was just me, and if I showed these people that that me wasn’t going anywhere, then slowly, surely, I could get past this crisis and heal in every possible way.
I changed into mesh shorts and a sweat-absorbing T-shirt in the locker room, ignoring players who said my ass cheeks looked a little chapped. I went to the cold pool, and when the other walking woundeds who’d been soaking their feet finished their rehab prematurely so they didn’t have to share my water, I just sat at the edge, dipping my foot into the pool and feeling thousands of salubrious pinpricks. In meetings I was deaf to the provocations, the snickers, the snubs. On the walk down to the practice fields I hobbled alone to stay out of earshot.
Walking woundeds were expected to contribute to practice, and today I served as Coach Hightower’s gimpy secretary while the linebackers moved through their periods—holding Hightower’s binder, feeding him footballs, righting tackling dummies, arranging cones. I continued to take solace in Coach Hightower’s fury at Barron’s dirty hit, and today my coach made sure to thank me for my help, telling me to “stay close” during Team period. He clearly still didn’t know what the players were calling me. The same coach-player delay that had led him to learn belatedly about me throwing Chase to the floor at Stefan Knows was now applying to Gwen. He would hear it eventually, but if I climbed out of this hole before then, if I made myself irreplaceable, he would be much less inclined to believe the name.
I screamed encouragements to my
