“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 with 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.
Only problem was, there were two primary obstacles in the way of everlasting love with Dylan Gellner. The first was Travis, you know, my boyfriend, who had become as interested in smoking weed as he had become uninterested in talking about books. (I guess once you’ve gotten into MIT, you have no worthy intellectual challenges left; I wouldn’t know.) One night, the two of us had been lolling on my Stanford-bound friend Samantha’s couch. I began expounding upon my latest assignment for AP Lit, The Birth of Tragedy, the first Nietzsche I’d ever read and now officially the most interesting and important book in the universe. I’d gotten about two minutes into a breathless (and, likely, incorrect) exegesis of the Apollonian realm before Travis cut me off: “I really,” he exhaled, “don’t want to talk about school right now.”
I excused myself to go stare at my pupils in the bathroom, and wished that Dylan Gellner was there at this no-parents-home Christmas-break pot party, instead of reading Hegel by himself in his bedroom, or hurtling down mountains preppily with his ski buddies, or whatever Dylan Gellner did in his recreational time. Dylan Gellner would have some things to say about the Apollonian realm. Dylan Gellner would understand what a tremendous insult it was to describe talking about Nietzsche as talking about school.
So, back at school, I started inviting Dylan Gellner to hang out with my friends. And that is how Travis and I found ourselves giving Dylan Gellner a ride home one evening before dinner (I’d offered on Travis’s behalf; I didn’t have my own car).
“Do you guys want to come in and hang out for a bit?” asked Dylan Gellner.
“Uh,” said Travis, at the same time I said, “Definitely.”
We nodded hello to the elder Gellners, a tenured economics professor at the university and an artist, before traipsing down the stairs to Dylan Gellner’s basement-level room—which somehow still had enough windows to catch the final extinguishing of the early-spring Oregon light, a feature of many vertiginous Eugene houses built onto the sides of steep hills, where the street entrance is actually the top floor.
“What are these?” I asked, reaching to pick up some suspicious-looking obelisks that stood in formation under a Homer Simpson poster.
“Those are polished rocks,” he said, snatching one away from me, “and some of them are fragile.”
“All right, then what are these?”
“These are my Eastern philosophy books. This is the I Ching, and it comes with a bunch of bamboo sticks, and you do a meditation ritual with it.”
“Wow,” I said. “That sounds fascinating. Can I try?”
“No.”
Travis sat on Dylan Gellner’s twin bed and stared out the window. He had, at this point in our epic eight-month relationship, both run out of interesting things to say to me and lost interest in the things I had to say to him (which, in his defense, were mostly about either Nietzsche or my college applications), but like any seventeen-year-old high-school boy he still recognized and honored that green-eyed demon. As we left Dylan Gellner’s house, I remarked with a forced casual tone, “Boy, Dylan’s weird.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” shrugged Travis—not because of Dylan Gellner’s lack-of-weirdness (because he was weird), but because he no longer wanted to talk about Dylan Gellner at all.
But I’d already made up my mind. That night, I composed a fervent epistle full of Blues Traveler lyrics and drug references, and the next day at school, I pulled Travis aside during lunch and asked him to take a walk with me so that we could talk. He tried not to look too excited.
“I think,” I said, as I handed him the note, “that we should break up.”
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to for weeks, but after you didn’t get into Brown Early Decision I figured you were too fragile to handle it.”
“Oh, I can handle it.”
We hugged and broke the news to our mutual friends, and then to our parents, who were all markedly more upset than we were. “I really liked Travis,” said Sharon to Travis’s mom, Phyllis, when they had a serendipitous run-in at Sundance, the health-food store down the street. “I miss Rebecca,” said Phyllis, a middle-school sex education teacher who was a little bit too supportive about the circumstances surrounding her son’s entry into manhood. (“I know you and Rebecca are planning to have sex while I’m out of town, so here is a variety pack of condoms. Don’t use my bed!”) I, meanwhile, had played up my heartbreak as high as the scale could possibly go, for the sole purpose of engineering Dylan Gellner as tear-stained confidant, an excuse for numerous earnest hand-pats and drawn-out hugs where I could again breathe in the intoxicating tea-scent of his hair and clothes.
There was only one problem left: Lisa, she of the pillowy lips and bedroom eyes, the Jolene to my Dolly Parton, except I didn’t have any boobs. For she had broken up with Travis’s friend Horacio, a Portuguese immigrant who was the undisputed Jim Morrison of South Eugene High. As a result, Lisa carried about her an aura of desirability I could never even begin to affect. Plus, she was much prettier than me, if I didn’t mention. So not only was the school’s most famous romance kaput, one of its certified finest girls was now a free agent.
And she’d been there the whole time: through the entire AP Civics Socialist Coup; every day in the library during free period—crossing and uncrossing those godforsaken gams—during all the literary “discussions” that always devolved into bullshitting about when Mr. Rasmussen was actually going to crack. She’d been there, right next to me, and she was into Dylan Gellner, too. I, despite being (according to me) Dylan Gellner’s long-lost intellectual soul mate, was way outgunned. There was no time to even pretend to be sad about Travis anymore. “The Next Village”! Life is astoundingly short! Go!
I made my move, need it even be said, in a note—the epistolary masterpiece of my short life, composed in the library while I was wearing my new certified-best outfit: black crushed-velvet leggings and a massive olive-green T-shirt printed with an ankh, with the neck cut out.
“I have intense feelings for you,” I confessed, “more intense than I have ever had for anyone, least of all Travis, whose relationship with me was unofficially over long before we broke up.” I knew Lisa liked him, I continued—but did she really like who he really was, or did she simply appreciate his attention, after losing Horacio’s? Did she read his stories? Was she willing to enter into a place, as per Steppenwolf (which I had now of course read, highlighted, and annotated), meant “for madmen only”? I was. Before I could think better of it, I unloaded my confession unto Dylan Gellner’s unsuspecting mitts, and then sat through a tortured session of AP Lit and half a tortured free period, in which I read the same incomprehensible page of Lucky Jim over and over again and wondered why it was supposed to be funny.
