“Are you sure?”

What was he going to do? Take FMLA so he could keep me company while I did the world’s most cursory course prep and gnawed halfheartedly on frozen waffles?

“Can’t you get a friend to cover your classes for you?” he asked.

“My colleagues are German. It takes like seven years to become someone’s actual friend. You know that. I’ll be fine. Go home.”

I waved him out the door, but I wasn’t actually sure I’d be all right. In fact, I was pretty sure that with Witold gone, I could die in my apartment and nobody would notice for days. So I took his advice and composed what I thought was a fairly brave (and desperate) e-mail to my colleagues, quickly reminding them of my name and rank, and asking if anyone might be able to pop into my class the next day, just to hand out a group activity (“Worksheet attached!”) and then leave again.

Those who didn’t ignore me sent back apologies: There was a bigwig visiting that week, a finalist for the “Eminent Scholar” position. Everyone was too busy showing him the racquetball courts and attending his mini-seminar on Nietzschean semiotics. What did I expect? They didn’t know me. I can’t imagine I would have done a thing different in their places. And so, I forced down two more Tylenol, dragged jeans over my legs and a semirespectable shirt over my head, and wrapped a cashmere scarf around my neck a half-dozen times, before walking—grandpas everywhere, take note—a half-mile, in the sleet, with a 103-degree fever, to go teach my fucking class.

As the week progressed, my condition deteriorated past the point that my last flu had started to improve. My dad called up with the radical suggestion that I seek the counsel of a medical doctor.

“I don’t have a doctor,” I explained. “I just moved here.”

“Then just go to one of those rent-a-docs at Walgreens,” he begged.

“Those are such a rip-off!” I said, before dissolving into coughs.

“I will spot you whatever it costs,” he said. “Just go.”

Twenty minutes and a delirious bus ride later, I shuffled into a Minute Clinic looking every bit the pill-scheming druggie: skin that had progressed from waxy to hanging off my craggy visage; eyes that had disappeared into the sunken purple caverns that surrounded them; hair that had touched neither suds nor comb in a week; breath that could have caused a conflagration had I exhaled too forcefully in the nail-care aisle.

“I think,” I said to the nonplussed nurse-practitioner, “I have the flu.”

“You think you have the flu?” she said. “The flu,” she said with a resigned exhale, “is a high fever that lasts for—”

“I’ve had a temperature of a hundred and three for eight days,” I said.

“Oh dear,” she said. “You need to go to the emergency room.”

At the hospital, I was spirited into a cozy cot with clean sheets, in my very own partitioned-off room with its own TV and everything. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air kept me company while I waited for test results. Once they plied me with enough Tylenol and Motrin to get my fever down, I even kind of enjoyed the break. I had been too out of it to bring my laptop with me, and so now, for the first time since I’d arrived in Ohio, I couldn’t feel guilty about the few hours per day I didn’t spend working on my godforsaken book or answering student e-mails about whether or not I could “just bump up” their grades from an A-minus to an A. Nurses flanked me with warmed blankets, soup, hot water, more Tylenol, and care. Yes, I know they were being paid to care, but after a week alone in my apartment shivering into my soaked pillow, I didn’t give a shit.

The doctor attending me was also named Rebecca, and looked about twelve. That’s the thing about academia; because you’re thirty-five and still applying to entry-level positions, you forget that most thirty-five-year-olds are already established in their careers. Forget middle management; they’re partners in their law firms and medical practices. They’re upper management or even executives. So you get administered to by medical residents of perfectly average medical-resident age, but suddenly they’re all Doogie Howser. Anyway, teen wonder medical-doctor Rebecca surmised that since I’d flunked—or perhaps passed—the flu test (whichever it was, I didn’t have the flu), I probably just had “some other virus” that apparently couldn’t be pinpointed, and was about to be sent home.

“But I guess we’ll do a chest X-ray, just to cover our bases.”

“I always appreciate some perfunctory radiation,” I said, before falling into a brief fever dream about doing the Carlton dance in front of my Intro to German Prose class. The next thing I knew, medical-doctor Rebecca was nudging me awake, telling me I had pneumonia.

“Holy shit!” I said. “The walking kind?”

“Nope,” she said, “the regular kind. I guess that chest X-ray wasn’t a bad idea.”

Pneumonia. An actual Lungenkrankheit, a “lung disease,” not unlike the sort that killed Franz Kafka. The kind of illness that, if left untreated—if, for example, its sufferer is a reclusive German professor in a new town with no primary care provider—kills people even today. I sent out an unsolicited but searing follow-up e-mail to my colleagues, explaining that I would have to cancel class for a few days—“given the pneumonia,” I said, lest they have not read the first two sentences, most of which were comprised of the word pneumonia, nor the subject line, which was “PNEUMONIA.”

After I got better, I went onto Etsy, where you can purchase jewelry in the shape of literally anything, and found a necklace in the shape of lungs. I wore it to remind me, not of the pneumonia per se, but of the helplessness that went with it. And of the fact that out of my seventeen colleagues, one taught at the same time as I did, one was pregnant and couldn’t come within thirty feet of me, and the other fifteen did not know me well enough to think I was anything other than a melodramatic hypochondriac.

Was contracting a 1920 disease—the result, according to my teen doctor, of stress—sign enough for me to find something else to do with my life? It was not. Here’s why: What if, instead of just being told maybe later, the man from the country had actually and legitimately gotten a little bit closer to the Law every time he tried to get past the Doorkeeper? Like, to use a random example, let’s say the first time, he was ignored completely; the second time he was granted a preliminary interview of sorts for admittance to a low-level Law anteroom; the third time he got an even better interview—for full access to the Law—and the fourth time, he even got a follow-up invitation to come and spend two days hanging out with all of the Doorkeepers as a sort of final audition. In this case, it would seem like the man from the country was making progress and shouldn’t give up, no?

The year after my first attempt’s gaping void, I got a single non-tenure-track interview (for a position that was later canceled); the year after that, I was at last granted an uncomfortable seat at the foot of a hotel bed at the Modern Language Association conference (an interview I blew by “having a personality,” as one of them put it). Finally, the year after that, my personality and I somehow made it past the interview stage to the coveted position of finalist at another university in Ohio not far from where I already worked. That meant I was invited on a campus visit, which is a two-day gauntlet of more interviews, teaching demonstrations, and “casual” meals where every gesture would secretly communicate to the search committee the innermost nuances of the quality of my mind and my likelihood to remain in rural Ohio forever.

The visit was an unmitigated disaster, largely because I bombed my teaching demo. It wasn’t just the worst German class I’d ever taught; I was pretty sure it was the worst class of any sort that anyone had ever taught. To be fair, I never stood a chance: it was nine on a Friday morning at a school known for its fraternity culture, on a day that was both in the single digits temperature-wise and on which the students had an essay due. You couldn’t have come up with a better formula for calamity if you tried: day everyone wants to skip + reason they have to be there anyway. But, to be fair to them, I did whatever the opposite of rising to the occasion is: their resistance threw me off so terribly that I flubbed every exercise, and ended the class near tears.

In hindsight, I now know that teaching demonstrations in foreign-language classrooms are an impossible minefield. The students are timid about speaking in front of strangers; they’ve got their own stresses and commitments (and poorly timed essay assignments and frat parties) without a visibly terrified, overenthusiastic, suit-wearing rando plunking name plates down in front of them. I should have come in with five games aimed at total beginners that would have immediately made them feel smart and relaxed, and just played the whole time—of course, then I wouldn’t have gotten to demonstrate my precious pedagogy, and I still wouldn’t have gotten the damn job. One option was the mousetrap and the other was the cat. I just wanted to go home, sink into my wobbly red IKEA couch I put together myself, and wait for the slow embrace of death.

But first, I had four more interviews and what’s creatively called a “job talk,” a brief lecture about research that’s supposed to be the final tribunal, where the candidate is lobbed a bunch of withering criticism and, if she vanquishes her opponents properly, is then deemed worthy to join their ranks. Mine was called THE CASE FOR A LOGICAL MODERNISM: the Tractatus, Kafka’s ‘The Judgment,’ and the Ineffable. (Mildly Clever Thing; three-part list; made-up word, check check check.) I gave it to a tiny smattering of the faculty, most of whom spent it texting. Afterward, nobody lobbed me any scathing This isn’t a question so much as a comment questions, which a normal person might take as a good sign, but which a seasoned academic knows to mean that nobody is taking you seriously. Jesus, word about my Chernobyl of teaching demos must have gotten around fast. After that, even though at that point nobody was even pretending I was still under serious consideration, I still had one last dinner, where allegedly I could just be myself, which my mentors were clear to warn me meant be nothing like yourself.

Sometime on the glacial walk between my on-campus hotel and the restaurant—where, since I had no need to impress these people further, I decided to see how much free food I could get and ordered an appetizer, main course, and dessert—it dawned on me that I didn’t want this. I wanted to be offered the job, yes. I wanted to be good enough to get a tenure-track job, and more than that I wanted everyone else to know that I was good enough, too. But I didn’t want this job. I didn’t want to move to rural Ohio alone in the agonizing hope that someday Witold would get laid off and have no choice but to come move in with me and be an adjunct, the exact reverse of what I’d done two years before. I didn’t want to wade through knee-deep snow on a Friday morning just to be glared at by twenty future Mitt Romneys of America who still reeked of booze and called me our Frau, with an unrolled American r. I didn’t want to spend every waking second I wasn’t prepping for class churning out meticulous thirty-page articles that, best-case scenario, would appear three years later in some journal with a circulation of 125.

In other words, dinner went great.

“What would you tell one of your students if he asked you to recommend good Ph.D. programs in German?” asked my never-to-be-future-colleague Boris, as I ripped into my bread pudding with chocolate sauce.

“Honestly? I would say: Under no circumstances should you do this.”

Two weeks later, I got a kindly worded e-mail from the department chair letting me know they’d made a hire, a woman who already worked there as a well-liked visiting professor (visiting from nowhere; it’s a euphemistic title for “adjunct with health insurance”). In academic parlance, she was an “inside candidate.” That explained everything: the finalist from a short drive away who wouldn’t need airfare; the awkward teaching slot, as I wouldn’t have been allowed to take over the insider’s class or even be on campus at the same time she was; the lack of attendance at my talk. There was never any mousetrap. There was never any wrong direction to run. There was only the cat.

Yes, I had spent the past four years getting incrementally closer to the goal of becoming a German professor. Sure, I liked being a German professor fine (with my own students, who didn’t hate me). I was also pretty good at it, despite the two days I’d just spent proving that I was bad at it. But I was now a thirty-six-year-old apprentice who would be expected to keep apprenticing for as long as it took. How did I get here? Who the hell was I? Where was the person who’d spent her nights playing on the indoor swing hanging from the ceiling of her Kreuzberg loft? The person whose Friday nights were not spent writing her book’s seven hundredth footnote until one in the morning—not because she was behind in her work, but because she could think of nothing else to do with herself? The person whose relationship had a fun-percentage higher than five? Who, for that matter, had any human contact whatsoever, outside of her nineteen-year-old students and emergency-room personnel? I know “A Little Fable” doesn’t really have a moral, but I still think the cat was onto something. Yes, of course I was just going to die in the end—we all are—but somewhere between declaring a German major in college and pulling on my ill-fitting Banana Republic suit for that campus visit, I had gone severely off track. And the walls were closing in.

Or were they? Because here’s the thing. That cat, carnivorous four-legged embodiment of Schadenfreude that she was, also had another good point. It wasn’t just that I’d made bad choices, which everybody does. It was that I was looking at the maze all wrong. Understanding something and misunderstanding the same thing can happen at the same time. The mouse insists that the walls closed in on her until there was no room left. But what happens, really, when those walls close all the way in? They disappear.

And guess what else, cat? Every German compound word is easily distilled back into the words that made it, and Schadenfreude is no different. If your life is somehow, either through your own ignominious choices or bad luck, subject to malicious happiness, either from others or yourself, you still have a choice. You can choose the Schaden, the misfortune, the pewter lungs around the neck. Or you can say fuck it, and go for the Freude—decide, after all of that, in spite of (perhaps because of) everything, on joy.

Which did I choose? The answer is simple. And just on the other side of this door.

Nachwort

n. epilogue, from after and word.

All right. I’m not Franz Kafka, and I’m now to the point in my life where I know that’s a good thing. I’m not going to leave this like he did The Castle, at an unceremonious dropping-off midsentence. I’m going say that everything turned out fine in the end.

Around the time of my doomed campus visit, I got back in touch with a long-lost acquaintance from New York, who was a senior editor at an online magazine with a very large readership (now, it seemed, it was writing for print that didn’t count). He suggested I expand some of my bile-shooting Facebook posts about the job market into fifteen hundred words, which he would both publish on the Internet and exchange for actual money. What resulted was an article that implored readers who thought it might be fun to get a Ph.D. in literature to, well, maybe not do that, on account of it would ruin their lives. To my shock, the article racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and in the space of two days I went from wishing that any academic anywhere knew my name to wishing that more of them didn’t. Still, though, it was for the best: with those fifteen hundred words, I had at long last silenced everyone who had spent all those years insisting I keep trying.

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke describes a nineteenth-century practice to ensure that you didn’t bury someone alive. Namely, if you were pretty sure someone was dead but not 100 percent sure, you stuck a needle through his heart. That way, if he had still been alive (but barely so, and not fooling anybody), he wasn’t anymore. I had known my academic career was dead for some time, and I was sick of everyone I knew insisting I keep trying to perform CPR on a corpse.

“I assure you I am not going back on the job market ever again,” I would say.

“Don’t put that on your Facebook!” they’d say. “A search committee might see it.”

“I’m not ever going back on the job market,” I’d say. “I don’t give a fuck what any search committee thinks about my Facebook.”

“Shh!” they’d say. “Rebecca! What would a search committee think if they heard you say that?”

I put a stop to that shit at last by creating an indelible paper trail of unhireability—in academia, and possibly everywhere else.

But with that article, I’d also committed my last (to date) act of Kafkan perspective shift. I went from professional failure—as in, failure at my profession—to professional failure, as in failure as a profession. Antipathy and loserdom were my new business, and business was terrible, which meant it was great. And indeed, a few months after my questionable debut, the magazine brought me on as a columnist. It was now my job to detail my failures and academia’s vicissitudes—and, when it was newsworthy, I could write about Germany, Austria, and even Franz Kafka.