Schadenfreude, a Love Story Read online

“Allegedly, yes.”

  I cleared my throat. “Yeah,” I said. “Just because it didn’t work out for Ross Perot doesn’t make us beholden to the two-party system! Now who’s with us?”

  “Forget that,” said my friend Tamia, who worked with me on the newspaper and was one of the very few black students in extremely white South Eugene High. “I don’t want to pay fifty-two percent of my money in taxes.”

  “But we’d get so much stuff for it, Mia!” I said. “Much more than we could buy with our own paychecks. Better roads, better schools—what are there, forty kids in this class? I mean—”

  “Save it for the debate, Schuman,” said Rasmussen.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, fine, you two pains in my neck win. Do your socialism. Just get to work.”

  Jacob defected immediately—far better chances for smart-assery in a rogue party—as did Violet, Alyssa, and Lisa (there was no socialism section in our textbook and no Internet yet, which meant an assignment with no reading).

  “So,” said Dylan Gellner, as we yanked a set of desks free from the false binary of the left-right continuum. “I assume you want to be president, Rebecca?”

  “Are you shitting me?” I asked. “I can’t take that kind of pressure. Jacob should do it. He’s got charisma.”

  “Fine,” said Dylan Gellner. “You be vice president. I’ll run the campaign. Just don’t fuck it up, like you fucked up your essay on Heart of Darkness.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “How do you know about my essay on Heart of Darkness? You’re not in AP Lit sixth period.”

  “Yeah, but Bumstead put it on the overhead in third, too.”

  “Those are anonymous!” I said.

  “I recognized your voice.”

  Mr. Bumstead had actually put my essay on the overhead as a good example, but I had other things to worry about, namely: What did Dylan Gellner mean he recognized my voice?

  Dylan Gellner shrugged. “I read a couple of your newspaper columns.”

  I had recently sent an unsolicited set of clippings from the high-school paper to the features editor of the local daily, auditioning myself to be their “first-ever voice of a local high-schooler, talking about our issues from our perspective!” They’d bought the spiel, largely because they realized they could get away with paying a child fifteen dollars per submission—and as a result, my chubby little visage was briefly on the side of newspaper boxes, and I made the morning announcements, and so for like a week, before everyone realized that (a) high-school kids don’t read the paper and (b) ripping off Dave Barry does not “current issues from a high-schooler’s unique perspective!” make, I was high-school famous.

  “Your Valentine’s Day piece was pretty good,” said Dylan Gellner, as I realized I’d been staring at him while my mind adjusted to the fact that I was on his radar. “But mostly because you made a ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ reference.”

  “I what?”

  “‘Heart-Shaped Box.’ The song. Nirvana.”

  “I don’t know it.” I made a mental note to pick up In Utero, which I had been boycotting because Nirvana had (a) completely sold out, and (b) had the nerve to cancel a show for which I had tickets the year before.

  “Ahem,” said Jacob, who, like everyone else at the table, was still present and at least somewhat interested in our socialist revolution. “Do we or do we not need to come up with a plan to beat the Democrats? They’ve already got a speech drafted out, and it calls us ‘moochers’ and ‘looters.’”

  We went back to our campaign, which, largely due to our successful derailment of the original assignment, won in a landslide. And, more important, Dylan Gellner and I now possessed a tacit understanding that we would work together during all future civics projects, the next of which would bring about two watershed events: Dylan Gellner would come to my house, and Franz Kafka would enter my life.

  All right, technically, Kafka would reenter my life. My first exposure to the German language’s most famous writer had been during the fall of sophomore year in 1991: on a pitch-black rainy Sunday afternoon, I’d slid The Metamorphosis off my parents’ bookshelf and read it in one sitting. My initial reaction to the first few moments of Kafka’s most famous story was shocked disbelief that Gregor Samsa, hapless star (hard to call someone a protagonist when he mostly just sits there being disgusting), worries primarily that he’ll be late for work. He has an exoskeleton and a bunch of terrifying little legs, but all he can think is, “What an exhausting career I’ve chosen!” Why was Gregor going on about his stupid job, I wondered, when the only appropriate reaction in this particular moment would be this and this exclusively: HOLY SHIT, I’M A GIANT FUCKING BUG? My own jobs at the time were commandeering children’s birthday parties at the gymnastics academy and being in the tenth grade—and, had I woken up with even the slightest fantastical disfigurement (really one substantial pimple would have done it) I would have forgotten immediately about school, work, everything. I’m hideous! I would have said. I give up!

  I just kept waiting for Gregor to break down in horror—so I kept on reading, but to my frustration, such an emotional release never happens, not once in the entire story. Another thing that had perturbed me was that it takes Kafka about fourteen pages to get Gregor to reveal his new body to his family and boss. I’d found myself simultaneously infuriated and spellbound at the methodical, unemotional pace of this narration, its wackadoodle subject matter almost an afterthought, the horror with which the family reacts to Gregor’s appearance when he finally does get his door open and steps out into the living room rendered with the emotional fervor of a shopping list.

  I read helplessly as Gregor Samsa’s condition deteriorated, and watched just as helplessly as his family gave up on him, and, finally, I held my breath as he let himself die. Die! How was this possible? The story was narrated from Gregor’s perspective, for Christ’s sake—he wasn’t supposed to die. But I’d never met Kafka before, and I didn’t realize that authors are allowed to be completely inconsistent in their perspective. Yes, that little book frustrated the shit out of me, but I couldn’t get it out of my head for weeks. I had also assumed it was the only thing of import Kafka ever wrote, and promptly moved on to other interests, such as wondering exactly which of my cutoff jeans looked best layered over just which of my pairs of long underwear. This dearth of intellectual curiosity occurred despite the minor fact that at least four of Kafka’s other books were sitting on my parents’ bookshelf right next to The Metamorphosis—one of which would two years later catch Dylan Gellner’s eye during an AP Civics study party, extra light on the studying.

  We’d moved on from derailing assignments about Our Democracy to derailing an assignment that purported to explicate Our Judicial System: a mock trial, in which once again Dylan Gellner was the intellectual ringleader and charismatic Jacob our star witness. However, our fake case—a breaking-and-entering—had a dizzying array of other, mostly irrelevant witnesses, and the only way to make sense of it was to call in a ringer, one Professor Dr. David Schuman, Ph.D., J.D., despite his marked lack of litigation experience. Several of my classmates came over to the house—including, of course, Dylan Gellner; I mean, he was the group leader, so he had to. It’s not like I invented the study session just to get him in my house, because that would be ridiculous and desperate. But there he was: forest-green polo shirt that somehow made his eyes look blacker. Hair as thick as ever, that smelled of Earl Grey tea. (So maybe I hugged Dylan Gellner hello, all right? I mean, he was my friend. Travis wasn’t in AP Civics, so, like, there was no reason for him to be there.)

  Dylan Gellner gravitated immediately to my parents’ stuffed floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and nodded after noticing the healthy representation of what he informed me were his two favorite authors: Hermann Hesse (of whom I had never heard) and Kafka.

  “This,” he said casually, taking out a yellowing hardcover of The Trial, “is my favorite book.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I know Kafka. I really liked The Metamorphosis.�
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  “Pfft,” said Dylan Gellner. “Beginner Kafka.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “This is my other favorite author,” he said, pulling off a copy of Steppenwolf. “Hermann Hesse.” He pronounced it Hess, without the last e, despite being in AP German. “So what’s your favorite book?”

  If I was going to impress Dylan Gellner with my love of the literary, I was going to have to think of a favorite book that was not on the AP Literature syllabus (my standard answer before had always been The Metamorphosis). I settled on the one I was currently reading, The Cider House Rules, having always been a particular fan of how sexually instructive John Irving was, and also approving heartily of the book’s prochoice message. An odd trade, yes, but Dylan Gellner agreed: I’d read “real” Kafka; he’d read Irving.

  “We can compare notes,” he said.

  Dylan Gellner burned through The Cider House Rules, unimpressed, in a day; I chipped away at The Trial for two weeks. I was gripped at first—I mean, Josef K., a man taken from his bed and arrested, seemingly for no reason! By two guys who are definitely not cops! And then sent to work for the day, like nothing was really amiss! And then he gets summoned to his first hearing, and instead of being in a proper courtroom, it’s in this squalid tenement building full of detritus and grime and way too many residents! And then, when he finally finds the courtroom (by accident), they’ve been expecting him, and the place is packed to the rafters—literally, guys are stuffed into this tiny balcony and have brought cushions to place between their heads and the ceiling—and in the anteroom the “law books” are actually full of amateur porn, and shit just keeps getting weirder.

  The problem was that between the interrogation-in-a-filthy-flophouse scene and the climax—where K. gets summoned to a cathedral and a priest tells him his case is doomed—there are some pretty interminable chapters about a lawyer who won’t allow himself to be fired and a painter who specializes in heavy-handed symbolism. (The painter has depicted the Goddesses of Justice, Victory, and the Hunt as one being. Yes, I get it, we all get it, the poor schmuck never had a chance.)

  Now, if you know to read Kafka as a bone-dry humorist, those chapters are actually the best part of the book, but if you don’t yet, because you are a seventeen-year-old whose primary interests are writing knockoff Dave Barry columns and watching Reality Bites, it is possible they might come across as a little bit boring. But this is something you might not be particularly eager to tell Dylan Gellner.

  “So,” said Dylan Gellner as he slid into a seat across from me in the library during our free period. “Did you finish The Trial yet? It’s taking you forever.”

  “It’s a hard book! The Lawyer-Manufacturer-Whatever chapter was … well, a little boring.”

  “I didn’t think it was boring. I thought it was gripping the whole way through.”

  “Well, I liked the ‘before the Law’ thing,” I said, referring to the cathedral scene (and thus telling the actual truth).

  What I didn’t know at the time was that “Before the Law” is also a stand-alone story, a parable really, a form for which Kafka is famous. Technically, it’s a parable that has no answer or moral, for which Kafka is most famous of all. All I knew at the time was that the story seemed profoundly unfair. A man shows up from “the country” to get access to some mysterious Law. But “before the Law stands a Doorkeeper”—specifically, a scraggly-bearded, mean-ass jerk, who just keeps telling the man he can’t go through. But the worst part is that it’s not like the Doorkeeper says, You can’t go through ever; go home. No; he just keeps saying, “It’s possible, but not now.” For years. Until the guy dies.

  “I especially liked this part,” I said to Dylan Gellner, and then I read aloud:

  Given that the door to the law stands open, as always, and the doorkeeper stands beside it, the man bends over a bit to see through it, to the inside. As the doorkeeper notices this he laughs, and says: “If it tempts you so much, go ahead and try to get in, despite my prohibition. Know this, though: I’m powerful. And I’m only the lowest of the doorkeepers. But from room to room stand doorkeepers, each more powerful than the last. Just one glimpse of the third and I can’t even handle it myself.”

  “That’s a very good part,” agreed Dylan Gellner.

  “But then the man from the country just keeps waiting there, like, bribing the Doorkeeper with all of his shit, just waiting year after year, even though it’s completely obvious that he’s never going to get in. I mean, like, why doesn’t he just go home?”

  “Well,” said Dylan Gellner, “sometimes people want the impossible precisely because it’s impossible.” He cocked his head a little to the right and held eye contact.

  “Yeah, well, it’s pretty rough when the man from the country is about to die and he asks the Doorkeeper, ‘Why hasn’t anyone else come and tried to get in here?’ and the Doorkeeper is like: ‘THIS DOOR WAS JUST FOR YOU. NOW I’M GOING TO SHUT IT.’”

  “Yep,” said Dylan Gellner.

  I’d only skimmed the pages between the Doorkeeper parable and the end, when the two random guys come grab K. (Note: these are not the random guys that arrested him; that would make too much sense; those guys do, however, show up toward the middle of the book, in a supply closet at K.’s bank, getting whipped by a court-appointed flogger.) The guys drag K. into the requisite dark alley and knife him in the gut, and his last words are “Like a dog!” But those aren’t Kafka’s last words in the story—these are: “as if the shame of it would outlive him.” That part I definitely got. That part I remembered.

  But what I’d skipped over—possibly the most important part of the whole book, a part that not even Dylan Gellner saw fit to explicate—was the part where the Priest and K. spend like fourteen pages arguing over what “Before the Law” is really about, like a couple of goatee-sporting poseurs in a graduate seminar. K. thinks the Doorkeeper lied to the man by giving him hope that he could maybe be let in, that he deceived the man by creating a door just for him and then not letting him through it; the Priest insists that the door was created for the sole purpose of keeping that particular man out (and for telling him “maybe” for all those years, which was definitely a dick move). And then the Priest says: “Understanding something and misunderstanding the same thing are not mutually exclusive.”

  I wish I’d comprehended that line that first time through The Trial. It might have led to some better life choices. But on that day in the library, my reverence for “Before the Law” was exhausted and all I could offer was deflection.

  “Hey, did you like Reality Bites?” I asked, given that it was the fully unironic blueprint for my envisioned postcollegiate existence. (Except in my version, Winona Ryder pushes her goddamned hair out of her face and sucks it up at her job so she doesn’t get fired, because even at seventeen I was a hopeless square.)

  “It was all right.”

  “I liked when Ben Stiller was like, ‘I’m a nonpracticing Jew,’ and Winona was like, ‘Well I’m a nonpracticing virgin.’ And I was like—wow, I’m both of those things!” (Did you catch that, Dylan Gellner? I’ve had sex.)

  “So? So am I,” said Dylan Gellner, which as far as I was concerned was about as close to a direct proposition as a socially maladapted eighteen-year-old genius could muster. Once I realized that somebody else had had sex with Dylan Gellner—no doubt the worldly older nerd, Margaret O’Grady—his 1450 translated directly in my mind, as SAT scores so often do, into virility.

  Dylan Gellner had now officially progressed from disembodied formidable mind to actual human body that I might or might not have wanted smashed up against mine. And so we joined the generations of epic literary romances that preceded us, and began exchanging stories we wrote and critiquing them via that cherished school of literary theory known as “passing notes between classes.” I soon learned that Franz Kafka romanced numerous women through letters—and, later still, when I read his guarded missives to Felice Bauer and his substantially more passionate correspondence wi
th Milena Jesenská, I realized why. Every word of Kafka’s correspondence oozes two things simultaneously: the confession that the recipient alone was now in direct connection with an impossibly pensive, enigmatic soul with unplumbable depths; and, of course, longing. Shit-tons of longing.

  After two or three notes from Dylan Gellner—in which, for example, he revealed that he was “essentially born when [he] read [Hermann Hesse’s] Steppenwolf,” or he contemplated the thin divide between insanity and genius, the latter best exemplified in culture by both Mrs. Dalloway’s Septimus and Pinky from the cartoon Pinky and the Brain—it seemed I was, to my delight and not insubstantial arousal, the chosen recipient of Dylan Gellner’s rare-to-impossible decision to open up his unplumbable depths. After about a week of this, and bearing the nearly impossible weight of sexual tension, I found myself simultaneously infatuated with Dylan Gellner and Franz Kafka—Kafka the person, I mean, the guy who wrote thousands of pages of deep, pained, lonely diaries and love letters, not merely the author of The Metamorphosis. I should also probably mention that I found Franz Kafka a somewhat arresting-looking young man, in possession of a shock of thick, wavy black hair and two massive dark eyes that shone like ebony marbles. There was, as Wittgenstein might say, a slight family resemblance. All right, fine, Dylan Gellner was the spitting goddamned image of a young Kafka, and he had to have known it (I assume part of getting a 1450 on the SAT involves being observant).

  Kafka wrote in one of his many letters that “a book should be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” And Dylan Gellner, simply by taking an intellectual interest in me and treating me like an equal—someone worth debating, and challenging, and pushing past her heretofore very comfortable limits—had already axed my frozen sea to bits. Now I was primed to return the favor. But time, it seemed, was running out. “Life is astoundingly short,” cautioned Kafka in his parable “The Next Village” (which Dylan Gellner quoted in a note passed off between classes). “Now in my memory everything is so pushed together that I cannot imagine why a man would want to take a journey to the next village, without the fear that—aside from accidents—the span of a normal, healthy life is far from adequate for such a ride.” Despite my lackluster verbal skills, I was making an A in AP Lit at this point, so I was pretty sure I understood the subtext here.