Hardscrabble Road Read online

  Delmore Krantz had opened the office door and switched on the lights and stepped back a little to let Jig pass first. It was the kind of thing graduate students did when they were in awe of their professors and had no hope in hell of ever equaling them. Delmore was the kind of graduate student Jig attracted these days, in droves. There was a time when students came to him for the science. That time was gone. It was odd the way things worked out. Two Nobel prizes, one in mathematics, one in chemistry: that was science. Forty-two years of teaching in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania: that was science. Only the books that had landed him on the New York Times bestseller lists every couple of years for the last two decades or so were not science, and they were…they were…

  With the light on in the office, it was obvious that he’d left his desk in a mess. He hadn’t used to do that. He had this odd feeling, standing in the middle of the empty room, that he had turned into that character in The Nightmare Before Christmas. He was tall. He was thin. He was cadaverous. Delmore was Central Casting’s idea of a sidekick. If he were any shorter or fatter, he’d be a mushroom.

  “You left the tape machine playing,” Delmore said, sounding worried. Delmore always sounded worried, except when he sounded put-upon, which was anytime anybody anywhere mentioned Israel. Delmore resented the fact that other Jewish students on campus expected him to defend Israel. He also resented the fact that non-Jewish students on campus expected him to criticize it. Jig thought he could see Delmore’s future as clearly as he could see anything at all. There would be a job in a fifth-rate department somewhere in the Midwest, a wife with a career as a dentist, a child named Zara or Joe Hill, and forty-two million letters to the editor of the local paper, upholding Socialism and the High Art Tradition in the face of Midwestern anti-intellectual cant.

  The voice on the tape machine was Drew Harrigan’s. It would be, because that was what Jig had been listening to when he’d left to go to the department meeting. He hated department meetings. In the end they all came down to the same long whining complaint about parking.

  “This man,” Drew Harrigan was saying, “this fool, who thinks he’s smarter than everybody else in the universe because they gave him a couple of Nobel prizes, who thinks he knows everything there is to know because he can move a few molecules around, who thinks you—I mean seriously, where do guys like this get off? What difference is there between what he’s doing and flat-out treason? We’re at war. We’re in a big war. We—”

  Jig reached up to the top shelf of the bookcase and turned the recorder off. How many hours of Drew Harrigan’s voice had he taped?

  “It doesn’t matter,” Delmore said loyally. “Nobody pays attention to Drew Harrigan. He’s a fascist attack dog.”

  “He’s the most popular radio talk show host in the country.”

  “Well, okay,” Delmore said. “Those people pay attention to him. But nobody pays any attention to those people. Nobody here pays attention to them. This is a private university.”

  Jig couldn’t help himself. Sometimes he couldn’t. Stupidity fascinated him. “I thought you didn’t approve of the fact that this was a private university,” he said. “I thought you said that Ivy League universities like this one were bastions of capitalist reaction and ought to be abolished.”

  “Yes, I did,” Delmore said, looking confused, but only for a moment. “But you have to work with reality. You have to play the game in real time. The fascists have control of the White House. They’ve got control of the state governments. You’d have a harder time right now in a public university.”

  “Does it ever bother you that so many people vote for the, um, fascists?”

  “They don’t,” Delmore said. “Nearly half the people don’t vote at all. They’re discouraged. They think their voices don’t count.”

  “And if you could get them to vote, they’d elect progressive politicians who would put an end to corporate hegemony, expand the welfare state, withdraw American troops from around the world, and institute social justice?”

  “They’d demand that politicians do those things.”

  Jig dropped into the chair behind his desk. “You’re delusional,” he said. “The great American public is a mob of anti-intellectual celebrity worshipers. If they all started to vote at once, they’d install a monarchy in ten seconds flat. They’d probably give it to the Rockefellers. And do you know why?”

  “No,” Delmore said, looking stiff.

  “Because the Rockefellers are just as stupid as they are. So are the Vanderbilts. So are the Cabots and the Lodges and the Goulds. That’s one thing I learned in prep school. There are two kinds of people at places like Taft— poor kids with brains, and rich kids who can’t think their way out of paper bags.”

  “Bill Gates,” Delmore said tentatively.

  “If Bill Gates had had any talent, he would have stayed at Harvard and gone into physics. I’m going to have to do something about this. I’m going to have to do it soon.”

  Delmore cleared his throat and sat down in the only other chair in the room besides the one Jig himself was sitting in. Jig liked students to stand when they came to see him. Lately, Jig preferred not to have students come to see him. Delmore’s bulk didn’t quite fit between the chair’s arms. It oozed out the open spaces at the sides.

  “The thing I think you have to worry about,” he said carefully, “isn’t the university, but the Department of Justice. The Patriot Act. They could be coming for you that way. They could charge you with anything they wanted to, and you couldn’t really fight back. They could arrest you and not tell anybody where you were, or let you see a lawyer.”

  “Do you really think they could do that?” Jig said. “I’m not exactly Joe Six-pack off the street. You don’t think that would be huge news?”

  “Well, um, yes, maybe, but the news organizations are in the hands of repressive capitalism. They support the administration and its efforts to criminalize dissent. In the context of reactionary hegemonic discourse—”

  “I’ve told you, Delmore, no hegemonic discourse.”

  “It’s the best available language to describe—”

  ”—It’s not the best available language for anything. It’s window dressing meant to make banal ideas sound profound. The country is run by a horde of capitalist shits. Given the chance to get away with it, they behave as what they are. No hegemonic discourse required.”

  “But they own the language. They make it impossible for us even to think of dissenting, because they control—”

  “Have they made it impossible for you to even think of dissenting?” “I was thinking of ordinary people. People who haven’t been trained to deconstruct…to deconstruct…”

  “What?”

  “Reactionary hegemonic discourse,” Delmore said.

  Jig sighed. “You’d depress me less if I thought you knew what it meant,” he said, “but that’s impossible, because nobody really knows what it means anymore. How any of you expect to have any effect at all on the general public is beyond me. You go into a bar in South Philly and start talking about reactionary hegemonic discourse, and you’ll be lucky to get out to the street alive, assuming they pay any attention to you at all.”

  “But that’s just it,” Delmore said, sliding to the edge of his chair. “They’ve been brainwashed. They’ve been dumbed down by advertising and infotainment. They’re addicted to media schlock. If we can pull them out of that, if we can break the spell and show them—”

  “What? That NASCAR is for stupid people and they’ve really wanted to be listening to the London Philharmonic instead of Garth Brooks all along?”

  “The high art tradition is a culture trap,” Delmore said. “It exists to make ordinary people feel bad about themselves. The first step progressives have to take if they’re going to advance the cause of social justice is to validate the cultural instincts of working people.”

  “Right. Give the Nobel in literature to J. K. Rowling.”

  “M
agic is a culture trap, too,” Delmore said. “It—”

  But Jig had turned away. He had had to turn away. He was about to burst out laughing. He looked out the window onto the small, cramped quad that looked as uninviting as the brutal weather that enveloped it. He was sixty-two years old. His best days of scientific work were behind him. Science was a young man’s medium. Mathematicians were washed up by the time they were forty. Physicists rarely lasted past fifty. He was at that part of his life when he was supposed to do something else, and he was being stymied by a man who ran to fat and stale ideas like a racehorse running to a finish line. The only difference was that the racehorse would at least be beautiful, and Drew Harrigan was not.

  “The thing is,” Jig said, not turning around, “we’ve got a window of opportunity. He’s going to be in rehab how much longer? A month, forty days, something like that. So for another month or forty days, there are no more hour-long screeds on radio about how I’m selling out the American government and the American people, how I’m Benedict Arnold—except he never says Benedict Arnold, did you notice that? He either doesn’t know the reference or he doesn’t think his listeners will. How I’m a traitor and a Communist.”

  “You are a Communist,” Delmore said. “All decent people are Communists at heart.”

  “He means a member of the Communist Party, which I most certainly am not. I don’t join parties. I haven’t even joined the Greens. The question is how to shut him up. It would be a very good thing for me if he’d go to jail.”

  “I don’t believe he will go to jail,” Delmore said. “He’s too useful to the special interests that run this country. That run this world. He keeps the masses content and focused in the wrong direction.”

  “At the moment, he’s keeping the masses focused on me,” Jig said. “Or maybe not at the moment. Up until the moment before this one. And when he comes out of rehab, you know what he’s going to do. He’s going to blame all this on a plot by Communists and liberals and left-wing nuts. Which he seems to think are all the same thing.”

  “He’s going to push it all off onto that handyman of his, Sherman Markey.”

  “He’s trying very hard.”

  “You know he will. They’ll put Markey in jail for being a dealer and let Harrigan off with probation or something. He’ll never go to jail.”

  “Didn’t I hear that Markey was suing him?”

  “Through the Justice Project, yeah. They do good work, but they’re a little too middle-of-the-road. I think progressive organizations hurt themselves when they temper their message to appeal to what they think is the mainstream, because I don’t think the mainstream is really the mainstream. People aren’t going to take you seriously if you don’t stick to your principles.”

  The quad looked dead and empty. Jig was tired of looking at it. He turned back and saw that Delmore was now more off his chair than on it. Sometimes he didn’t understand why people like Delmore went on living. He understood Joe Six-pack. Joe Six-pack liked what he liked and was satisfied with it. Delmore was half one thing and half another, intelligent but not quite intelligent enough, erudite but not quite erudite enough, cultivated but not quite cultivated enough. No wonder he went in for “progressive” politics. It was the only place on campus where he wouldn’t expose himself as a mistake on the part of the committee on admissions.

  This was not someplace he wanted to go.

  He picked up a few of the things on his desk: a graphing calculator; a snow globe with a miniature plastic replica of the Cathedral of Notre Dame inside it; a copy of his book, Selling Suicide. It wasn’t that Drew Harrigan was calling him a traitor that was the problem. It was the other things he was saying, the things about contacts with Al Qaeda, about aiding and abetting Islamicist cells on campus and in the city, about money laundered and money sent. It was a laundry list of things that could easily become criminal charges under the right circumstances. They were well on their way to the right circumstances. Jig Tyler wasn’t Delmore Krantz. He could see the writing on the wall and the look in the eye of the dean, who remembered McCarthy but had his own skin to save first.

  It was cold out there and it was going to get colder. If the news these days proved anything, it was that it was easy as hell for an innocent man to die in the electric chair.

  “Lethal injection,” Jig said, realizing only afterwards that he’d spoken out loud.

  Delmore looked confused. “What?”

  “Lethal injection. They use lethal injection these days to execute people, not the electric chair, not most places.”

  “You expect them to try to execute you?”

  “No,” Jig said, sighing. “I was just thinking about innocent people being punished for crimes they hadn’t committed. That it happened all the time. That we know that because of the work done on the death penalty at this very university, in case you hadn’t heard.”

  “The Death Penalty Project does very important work in the fight against global capitalism and domestic repression.”

  Jig sighed again. “Sherman Markey is being defended by the Justice Project, though, isn’t he? They’re bringing in Kate Daniel?”

  “Kate Daniel is a heroine in the struggle against reactionary—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  Delmore looked away.

  “Listen, tomorrow morning, let’s get Ms. Daniel on the line and have a talk, why don’t we? That might help, strategically. Don’t you think?”

  Delmore nodded. He was staring at the floor. He was staring at the bottom of the bookcases. He was staring anywhere in the room but at Jig himself, which was how all their conversations ended these days. Jig couldn’t help himself. He really couldn’t. There were people who hated blacks and people who hated Jews and people who hated broccoli, but Jig Tyler hated stupidity. He hated it with the same passion with which Martin Luther had hated the Catholic Church and Mary Tudor had hated all Protestants. He hated it with a fine white fire that was so pure and so intense, it made the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinians look like a high school football rivalry. He hated it to the point where he sometimes thought that that hatred was all that was really left of him, the Jig Tyler who had shown up on the campus of the Taft School in 1956, thin and raw and intense, able to read the math textbook in forty minutes and understand it all, able to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in two days and understand it all, a searchlight on a campus full of dimmer bulbs, a legend in a week. He was still a legend. He just no longer knew what he was legendary for.

  “We’ll call Kate Daniel in the morning,” he said, suddenly wanting nothing more than to get Delmore Krantz out of that room and out of his sight. “We’ll see what she can do.”

  Delmore still wasn’t looking at him, but he knew a dismissal when he heard it. He mumbled something and made his way out, a thin flush of red creeping up his fat neck like vomit coming up a gullet at the end of a long night of drinking. Delmore was beginning to resent him, Jig knew that.

  No matter how worshipful they were in the beginning, they all resented him in the end.

  3

  Kate Daniel was as cold as she’d ever been, cold enough so that she thought she could shatter her teeth by tapping them with a straw. The heater in the car wasn’t working right, or something. She didn’t want to think it was so cold that the heater in the car wasn’t up to the occasion. She kept getting bulletins on the oldies’ station she’d been listening to since she crossed the Pennsylvania border. She’d have listened to NPR if she could have, but she couldn’t find it no matter how many times she punched the scan button, and she was afraid it would put her to sleep. She was not, really, the right sort of person to be a liberal. She was not, really, convinced that it was possible for the temperature to get down to minus eleven degrees. The old joke about global warming kept running through her head. She fervently wished she had never quit smoking.

  Up at the far end of the street, a man in a long overcoat was waiting, leaning forward slightly to see if her car was the one
he was looking for. That would be Mr. Whoever, from the Philadelphia Coalition for the Homeless, Kate thought. He’d look the car over and either approve of it (in which case she would hate him) or take it as a sign that she was one of those people who took every possible opportunity to burnish her credentials for revolutionary sainthood. The truth of it was that she truly hated buying cars. She wasn’t good at it. She never walked off the lot without feeling she’d been cheated. She spent the next six weeks unable to think about anything but the car negotiations and how she had failed them. It wasn’t worth it. The ’84 Grand Prix was a good car. This one only had 250,000 miles on it.

  The man in the overcoat was nodding vigorously. Kate was close enough now to notice that he was very young. He waved her to the left and she saw that there was a small driveway going to the back of the buildings. In the dark, she couldn’t tell if it was as strewn with debris as the rest of the street. This was the kind of neighborhood where Coalitions for the Homeless hung out. It was supposed to be half-full of vacant lots and half-full of drug garbage. She hated the word “coalition.” She hated it more than she hated the word “committee.” She was already sick of this year’s presidential race, and she didn’t care who won.