“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.”
“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.
