The Way Out

emotional tests. The people who worked with timed-charge explosives were always quiet, rather schizoid types, with the mindset of compulsive gamblers and the fingers of a pianist. “I met a sergeant,” he told me, “who could arm and disarm a blast grenade with his eyes closed. He used to take bets on the nights of ceasefire between one conflict and the next. They’d blindfold him and he’d sneak outside the guard post to the edge of the jungle and then win their bets when he made it back alive. If it exploded, he used to joke, it wouldn’t harm anyone. He came back as though nothing had happened but feeling very fired up, eager to get in a fight or repeat the game. By contrast, in order to write a text like this one you’d need a peaceful and obsessive intelligence, similar to our own. I, because I was walking around thinking about the Elizabethan rhythms of Melville’s prose, stepped on the bomb that blew off my leg.” They were two different modes of psychological concentration, two species of humanity. It’s impossible to write and also set bombs, just as it’s impossible to be a good boxer and a chess master. We looked out at the night in the garden like two old drinking buddies who’ve been with the same woman. “I don’t think they’ll find anything,” he said. “Poor thing. You knew her as I knew her; she was sincere and had integrity. The best ones always die.” So she must have told him we were seeing each other and sleeping together? Had she taken that peg-legged patán into her confidence? These questions distracted me, and I was slow to hear the questions that the bastard was muttering with his customary euphoria.

What were my plans? Was I going to stay with them (“with us”) for another year? I had an offer from Berkeley, I told him, and I might possibly go to California for a while. Well, you should have consulted with us. At the department, they’d been thinking I wanted to stay when they started the slow preparations for the search to fill Ida’s position. Ida. As her name was uttered, something like a secret current of rivalry and confidence came up between us. Both of us knew what it was like to be with her in an impersonal hotel room. I swiftly cut short that mutual understanding. I told him I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I would keep them informed as to my plans.

I went over to the corner where Rachel and Mike were talking with two young colleagues from Film Studies. They were discussing Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. In the film, according to them, there appeared the figure of the extreme rebel, the nihilist in love with a prostitute, capable of acting without regard for any social preconceptions. Dostoevsky’s whore had transformed into Jodie Foster’s bad girl. I walked away as they switched to talking about The Deer Hunter and Robert De Niro’s ability to portray psychopathic characters. And Nicholson? “I imagine Recycler with Jack Nicholson’s face,” said Mike.

I made a few circuits around the room, talking aimlessly with acquaintances, and after a while D’Amato asked for silence. He was going to say a few words to send off the academic year as it came to a close. He spoke of the sad loss we had suffered. The department had created the Ida Brown Prize for the best thesis project every year. There was applause. “We’re living through difficult times in our country,” he said. “We know what terrorism is, and it remains a paradox that now, when email is burying the old forms of correspondence, it is letter bombs that are ravaging our universities. Epistolary forms define culture; they’re present in the Bible and in the philosophical tradition and in political and cultural history. The Persian letters, open letters, Roman epistles, Letter to His Father, anonymous letters, love letters. Will our forms of expression disappear, destroyed by violence?” He paused. “These latest tragic events have made me think,” said Don, “about the undeliverable letters from the dead that led Bartleby to insanity and desperation. We too, with our archaic knowledge, are readers of the writings and letters of the dead.” Then, as though delivering a requiem (and we all thought of different people whom it could be dedicated to), he recalled the ending of Melville’s story: “Bartleby,” he said, “had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington,” and in closing he read a paragraph from the story.

“Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?… For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, molders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more.” And in a tone of great emotion, the intense D’Amato concluded his discourse with the litany of Bartleby’s narrator: “Pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.” He was a bit deranged, D’Amato, and would recite passages from Melville in any situation (in that respect he was like any of us gathered there, a sad group of readers who went on thinking about the enchanting quality of literary texts).

That night, when I finally left the party and walked across the garden of Palmer House toward the street, the place where Ida Brown’s accident had occurred, I saw John III, leaning in the exit doorway, standing there as if waiting for me, very dapper, almost in costume as an Ivy League alumnus, with a white linen suit and a bow tie and the excessive self-confidence that he’d shown all the way through the course. He greeted me with a friendly gesture to show that our relationship was no longer that of professor-student but rather that of colleagues, and before I could