the void, the surrounding flesh seamed and trenched. Somehow, though, this lack of refinement contributed to the overall effect, and anyway, the moustache, even one half, gave it away. Really, who else could it be?
“Sehr lustig, ja?”
I looked up at the vendor. He bore a distinct resemblance to Joseph Stalin, which was surreal, because among the Soviet-era kitsch strewn across his table was a teakettle adorned with hammers and sickles and emblazoned with Stalin’s own face.
I nodded and turned the object over, revealing a bottom lined with peeling green velvet.
It was a bookend, the vendor said. Its friend—that was the word he used, Freund—was missing. He didn’t know where it had come from, although he theorized that it had once belonged to a professor. “Ein Genie,” he said, a genius, adding that the world would not be the same without him. Coming from someone who appeared to have neither shaved nor showered since perestroika, this seemed a wonderfully intellectual sentiment, and as a philosopher, I was moved to see how Nietzsche’s ideas, so often misunderstood, could still inspire the common man.
“E=mc2,” he said. “Ja?”
I think I did a good job of hiding my dismay, although at that point I felt it my responsibility to take the bookend into custody. Anyone who mistook Nietzsche for Einstein could not be trusted. I asked the price. He took a second to size me up, weighing my desire against my shoddy sportcoat, before asking for thirty euros. I offered ten, we split the difference, and I left elated, my bag fifteen pounds heavier.
Over the last few years, the bookend had become something of a totem, a reminder of happier times, when I could still get travel grants. By the night Yasmina threw me out, of course, all that had changed. My funding had dried up, with no more forthcoming. My teaching positions had been given away to others in greater need, those who still held promise, those in their third and fourth years of graduate school rather than their eighth and counting. My so-called advisor had not spoken to me in months. Around Emerson Hall I had become, if not persona non grata, then a white elephant.
I therefore cherished the bookend, keeping it atop the stereo cabinet in the living room, where I could see it from my desk in the corner. It offered encouragement. Moreover, it was my sole contribution to the decor. Yasmina had never objected, and to hear her true feelings took me aback. As I stood there, trying to conjure up an appropriately clever parting shot, I cradled it against my chest, protecting it from her.
“It looks like he has a badger on his face,” Yasmina said.
“Half-badger,” I said, vaguely.
I will assume the best of her and say that I don’t think her behavior was calculated to inflict maximum damage. She was self-absorbed, but I knew that about her and loved her all the same. Even when I began to sense us circling the drain, I’d always told myself she’d never be so thoughtless as to put me out without notice. I’d been wrong.
Though I wanted to go out on a zinger, in the end all I could muster was an attempt at irony.
“The life of the mind,” I said, holding up my meager stuff.
“Enjoy it,” she said and closed the door in my face.
DOWNSTAIRS, DREW was waiting in his car. He put down his Sudoku, popped the trunk, and got out. Then, seeing how little I was carrying, he shut the trunk and opened the back door instead.
We had gone most of the way toward Somerville when he cut the volume on the radio and said, “I hope you know you can stay as long as you like.”
It was then that I knew I needed to get out as quickly as possible.
Lying atop a creaking sofabed—Nietzsche’s one lunatic eye gazing down at me from the windowsill, the snow behind him swarming like a cloud of ideas—I began making a list of avenues to explore: job websites, Craigslist. Briefly, it occurred to me that I ought to get a copy of the classifieds. The idea of finding my destiny in a newspaper seemed quaint—indeed, ridiculous—and despite the abject circumstances, I smiled to myself in the dark. Now I look back and understand that getting ahold of that paper was, if not the first significant decision of my life, at least a necessary step toward all that followed, every one of my catastrophes.
2
The next three weeks found me bounced miserably from