“Anyway,” he said, “you’re probably right. I should stop spending so much time at the beach and spend more time at home. You know, typing.” He smiled at my bound wrists. I smiled back at his shoulder, snuck only a fleeting glance at my food. “Well,” he said, “my department is having a colloquium, so I should go. Enjoy your muffin.” I hadn’t asked his name, and he hadn’t asked mine.
“Hey,” I said at a party later that night when I ran into Jeff, a philosophy student in the Kant seminar who happened to enjoy the love that dare not speak its name, by which I mean he was going out with someone in the German department, and thus, unlike the rest of his classmates, he had to acknowledge my existence. “Who’s that guy with the greasy hair and the arm sling in your department?” I demanded.
“Oh, you mean VEE-told?” he asked.
“Vee-what?”
“W-I-T-O-L-D. Some European thing. What about him?”
“No reason,” I said nonsensically and a little too fast. “I mean, nothing.”
Jeff went back to his gin and tonic.
“Wait,” I said. “What’s his deal?”
“I don’t really know,” he answered. “He’s not in my department. He’s in that Logic and Philosophy of Science program, where they hate Hegel and insist that all ‘philosophy’ is really math or something. They’re weird. Witold is, like, a sixth year or something.”
Sequestered once again in my hermetic study chamber before bed, I performed the kind of perfunctory cyber-stalk available to the masses in 2006: I looked him up on his department website—his picture was devastating—and then cross-referenced that with Friendster. According to his department profile, Witold Romanoff was an NYU alum as well—and on Friendster he listed his hometown as New York City. Ach, we already had so much in common and he didn’t even know it. He was listed as “single,” and his favorite TV show was The Simpsons. (As long as he meant the pre-2000 Simpsons, this was excellent.) His “research interests” were a bunch of gobbledygook that made my eyes glaze over. (Also acceptable; all graduate students’ “research interests” are gibberish.) One of his Friendster “testimonials” proclaimed: “Witold is more into simplicity than anyone I’ve ever known. He’d have to try to be less put-upon than he is, which would defeat the purpose.” Uh-oh. Did that mean he prized simplicity in others? I was asking for no reason.
No, seriously, I was asking for no reason. The week after the Muffin Conversation, Witold apparently came to his senses and determined that sitting through two hours of Jack Osbourne and Indiana Jones butchering the Transcendental Dialectic was not, actually, fun, and he stopped auditing the Kant seminar. We crossed paths on campus every week or so, as our routes to and from class intersected between UCI’s different retrofuturistic edifices, but that was cause for little more than a flicker of recognition and a nod (from me, I mean; I am very cool. I managed not to yell out HELLO HOT LOGICIAN WITH WEIRD NAME, I AM ALSO FROM NEW YORK, WELL NOT REALLY BUT I USED TO LIVE THERE, SO, YOU KNOW—WAIT, WHERE ARE YOU GOING? So I pretty much deserve a trophy). Eventually, my seminar papers eclipsed all other pursuits; the one about Heidegger and Heinrich von Kleist was just called “—,” after the “substantive Nothing” that allows the “unheard-of event” of sexual assault to take place in The Marquise of O, so it was obviously very important. I forgot all about the hot logician with the weird name.
One day shortly after the start of the spring quarter of my first year in Irvine—thirteen months after the Schillerian-genius actor had broken up with me; not that I was counting—I was in the midst of a severely undermotivated elliptical-trainer workout at the student gym, and I caught sight of Witold talking to some girl. No fair! I thought. Didn’t the hot logician with the weird name understand that I was mulling him over still? And so, since he was conveniently standing somewhere in the general vicinity of the cubby where I had stashed my student ID and keys, I swerved on over to say hello under that completely feasible pretense. He paused, taking in my ratty workout pants. (They were from one of those ill-begotten early-aughts velour tracksuits that everyone wore out to legitimate establishments because they cost two hundred dollars. Mine were knockoffs.) His eyes then swept my excellent New Kids on the Block shirt (vintage 1988, worn in pretend-irony but actual fandom), and alighted upon my visage, which he appeared not to recognize. After ten eternities, he finally said hey. Victory! Once at my cubby, I realized I had nothing to do there—I was actually planning on returning to the elliptical to make my workout a full eighteen minutes—so I pretended to futz with my stuff and then bolted for the drinking fountain.
Once I returned to the machine, however, I noticed that Witold had extricated himself from conversation with the other girl—my nemesis!—and was walking in my general direction. Toward me? Maybe. Possibly not, as behind me stood all of the gym’s other equipment, and it is entirely probable that he was there to exercise and not to search, day after day and with a longing beyond human words, for the mythical Girl Who Reads Kant in German, whose name he didn’t know and whose tender overworked carpal tunnels he had mocked so roundly. But I already looked like an overeager jackass, so I figured I might as well try for a conversation that involved neither injuries nor breakfast goods. I made eye contact and ripped out an earbud as he passed me by—but just one, you know, keeping it mysterious.
“How’s it going?”
He looked surprised. “Not bad,” he answered. “Taking any more philosophy courses this quarter?”
Excellent. He did remember me. Because I am unforgettable. Obviously. “Well, in my Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment course in the German department, we’re reading a lot of Johann Georg Hamann,” I offered, referring to a little-known Kant antagonist who disputed the very idea of “pure reason” with the extremely cogent assertion that language must precede thought, because all language is metaphorical approximation of the language of the angels. “Does that count?”
He managed a small smile. I returned to watching the seconds count backward on my elliptical machine. But he hadn’t left yet.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you know Eli Bergman?”
Of course I did; Eli was the German linguistics professor in my department, which was small enough that you could count all faculty and grad students on two hands.
“I took an undergraduate class from him last quarter,” said Witold. “You know, for—”
“—let me guess, fun? I have to say, you have a somewhat bizarre concept of fun.”
“I was going to say, to improve my German, which I need for my research.”
That made a little more sense. All of the philosophers Witold researched, he explained, wrote in German.
“What, Heidegger?”
He smiled. “More like Frege.” I would soon learn that exactly no analytic philosophers read Heidegger—not even for alleged fun—and that simply by not floating out of the nearest window on a miniature dirigible powered by his own smugness, Witold was proving to be among the nicest philosophers in the world. Meanwhile, the guy he was talking about, Gottlob Frege (I discovered via Dr. Wikipedia half an hour later), was the founder of first-order symbolic logic, otherwise known as the math class everyone in college takes when they don’t want to take math (except it pretty much is math; burn). I had never heard that name in my life—as far as I knew it could be spelled Freyga, and he could have been Estonian or something, and just written in German for kicks. But, now having two entire quarters of graduate school behind me, I behaved accordingly, which is to say I nodded sagely.
“Anyway,” Witold said, “in Eli’s class we read Der Verschollene.”
I was impressed—most Anglophones used the English name for Kafka’s least-known novel, Amerika. “I really liked it,” he said. “Every sentence was like its own adventure.”
That might have been the most exactly correct thing I’d ever heard, and from a fucking amateur, no less. And then, Witold opened his mouth and these words came out of it: “Do you like Kafka?” Did this person seriously just ask this question? So overwhelmed was I with the different options of expressing how much I did, indeed, like Kafka that my brain coagulated into a dollop of goo, of the sort the frat guy on the elliptical next to me had slathered liberally into his hair. So I did what I always do when I’m overwhelmed, which is make the worst choice possible. (This is why, if I make the error of entering a New York City bodega hungry, I will always, always exit with a bag of Bugles.)
I hopped down off the elliptical machine, which, let’s face it, was little more than an unwieldy prop covered in undergrad germs, and with no prelude whatsoever, I lifted up the back of my NKOTB shirt far enough for him to see that two-inch-high K. I’d had inked on the small of my back when I was living in Williamsburg in 1999, nihilistic and jubilant to be free of a bad relationship.
“I,” I said, “have a tattoo.” Witold cleared his throat.
“Well, I’m, uh, interested in reading more by Kafka in German,” he said. “Do you have anything to recommend?”
“I would be honored to make you an itemized list,” I said, approximately seventy-five times faster than I had heretofore been exercising. “Annotated, of course. I’ll try not to make it too long. I’ll just put the best stuff on there. I promise. Just the best stuff. A list!”
“Sure,” he said. “Oh,” he added, as I returned to my nominal evening of exercise, “what’s your name?”
Two excruciatingly paced days later, I got his e-mail address off the Logic and Philosophy of Science website and thanked the thousand spires of Prague that academics are so easy to stalk. I began composing the first volley of a full-court e-mail charm offensive—and they said the years I spent studying Kafka’s letters to Milena and Felice were wasted—but then I realized two things. One: If I wrote in German, that would be both more charming and excellent pretense for corresponding all quarter, because Witold wanted to work on his German, right? I’d be a free tutor and all he’d have to do was pay attention to me. Two: I still hadn’t asked his name, so he was going to realize I’d looked him up. All the more reason to write in German; I made sure the sentence wherein I admitted to having asked Jeff his name was extremely convoluted and possibly above his level (or, at any rate, enough of “its own little adventure” that he’d enjoy reading it so much that he’d have to give me a chance). After much agonizing, I explained to him, I would like to recommend the following Kafka works, with the following annotations:
The Trial, his best-known work, although a bit more difficult than Der Verschollene and it drags a bit in the middle; also, DID YOU KNOW that the order of its chapters is an editorial reconstruction, because Kafka never finished it and skipped all over the place in his notebook?
“In the Penal Colony,” short story of about thirty-five pages about a torture machine; extremely violent and bloody, several possible allegorical parallels to the industrial revolution. (P.S.: DO NOT pay attention to ANYONE who compares this story to the HOLOCAUST because it was written in 1915! They do NOT know what they’re talking about!)
“A Hunger Artist,” short story about a guy who starves himself for sport but nobody comes to see him anymore. Very sad.
“A Country Doctor,” I bet you can guess what it’s about. Gross scene depicting an open wound full of worms. Common assignment in upper-level German courses for undergraduates.
“The Bucket Rider,” possible critique of capitalism. Two pages long.
“The Judgment,” about a guy and his dad and their pretty bad relationship; odd sex joke at the end.
