Hardscrabble Road(23)

At least Delmore hadn’t said anything this morning about hegemonic discourse. Not even once. Jig thought he ought to be thankful for small favors. He made his way down the hall toward his office, the mass of students trailing behind him like germs behind a man with pneumonia. None of them wanted to approach him for fear he’d shout at them. If they did approach him, he would shout at them. He got to his office, unlocked the door—there was something; when he’d first come to Penn, in the 1960s, nobody ever locked their doors, or thought they had to—and got his bottle of Percoset out of the top drawer of the filing cabinet. He remembered when that cabinet held files. Now it held Percoset, Darvocet, Darvon, and Demerol, plus a lot of sports equipment he never used.

Delmore was standing in the doorway, hesitating. Unlike the others, he wouldn’t go away unless he was sent away. Jig had had one of those nights with the dreams, and he knew it would be impossible to explain them to Delmore. He didn’t know if he could ever explain them to anyone. That old fear that he wasn’t really human, that the aliens had put him down here on his own for some reason he would never be able to guess, and then disappeared, murdered by a mob of terrified townspeople. That old conviction that people didn’t actually hear him when he spoke. Words came out of his mouth, and he heard them, but to other people they were just breaths of air, without significance. He couldn’t remember how old he had been when he first realized that it really was him, not them. He was really the one who was so different from everybody else that he was unrecognizable as human.

Headache or not, he wanted a cup of coffee. After the worst of those nights, he never felt like eating, and that was on top of the fact that he rarely felt like eating anyway. He needed a cup of Fair Trade coffee and something not too impossible in the way of breakfast food, like toast.

Delmore Krantz cleared his throat. Jig gave one last desperate foray into speculating about what it was that Delmore wanted from him, and turned around.

“I feel like hell,” he said. “I’m going to go over to the Green Food place and get some coffee and whatever.”

“I’ll come with you to the Green Food place,” Delmore said. “I support the Green Food place. We need more progressive options for eating out in Philadelphia.”

Jig thought they needed more decent steak houses for eating out in Philadelphia, but he wasn’t ready to go three rounds with Delmore over food and capitalist hegemonic discourse, so he let it go. He grabbed his pea coat from the coatrack he’d set up in a corner and shrugged it on. Come to think of it, maybe it was the last girl who had set up the coatrack in the corner. He couldn’t even remember who the last girl was. He did remember his ex-wife, and his children, in spite of the fact that that had all been long ago, but the girls just came and went. Sometimes, Jig suspected they were using him as a handy alternative to that Nobel Prize sperm bank.

There, Jig thought. Somebody in this nation must want smart people. There was the Nobel Prize sperm bank.

“Dr. Tyler?”

“Sorry. I was thinking about the Nobel Prize sperm bank.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Nobel Prize sperm bank. You know. Some guy out in California had a sperm bank where the contributions were limited to Nobel Prize winners and people with IQs above—”

“—The Repository for Germinal Choice,” Delmore said. “It closed in 1999.”

“Lack of interest?”

“I think there was a public outcry against designer children,” Delmore said. “But you can see that it’s going to happen again. It has to. This is the direction capitalism is going in, has always been going in, except now without the restraints of religion or the liberal regulatory state there are no boundaries. Designer children. Intelligence is just one of a list of desirable traits parents will be able to choose for their children. Height, for instance. There will be no more short children in the American upper class.”

“Do you really think the, what did you call it, Repository, that it served the American upper class?”

“It wasn’t cheap.”

“How many times do I have to tell you that class isn’t chiefly about money,” Jig said, but he said it without rancor, because his headache was receding. It was the lack of sleep, that’s what it was. He still didn’t sleep nearly as much as most people. Five hours was about the limit, before he felt groggy and tired the entire day. Still, he wasn’t a graduate student anymore. He had to have at least three uninterrupted hours. If he didn’t get them, he got mornings like this one.

He went over to his desk and looked at the answering machine blinking away at him. There was something else that had changed. In the old days, secretaries had taken messages in the department office, written them down on small square white sheets of paper, and then brought them in and put them under the paperweight on the desk. He didn’t know if he missed that or not.