The Executor Jesse Kellerman

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The next three weeks found me bounced miserably from one couch to the next. Soon enough I learned that the price of a few nights’ hospitality was that I retell my sob story from the beginning, usually to the woman of the house but sometimes to him, too, the two of them sitting opposite me, brows knit concernedly, holding hands as though to shield themselves from my virulent bachelorhood. Given my druthers, I would have stayed with other bachelors. Aside from Drew, though, I didn’t know any. That’s what happens when you’ve been coupled for two years: you know only other couples. And I couldn’t go back to living with him, not because he wouldn’t let me but because his apartment was an atrocious sty. It was just as unbearable as being forced to explain yet again how Yasmina could have possibly punted me when we’d always seemed so happy.

I needed my own place. That much was obvious. Less obvious was how to go about obtaining it, given that my bank account held a hair over two hundred dollars. I was no closer to finding work, having failed to submit a single application. My standards were high, cripplingly so. Whatever I did, it would have to be at least minimally intellectual, while still leaving plenty of time for my dissertation. Some friends thought I ought to be open to the idea of working at, say, a bookstore: a job with an aura of scholarliness, and unlike the visiting lectureships I spent my time ogling on academic networking sites, one I might conceivably get.

“Or you could tutor,” they said.

I told them I’d rather starve.

At that point I saw no cause for panic. Sooner or later, Yasmina would call, begging me to return. It made no sense to get comfortable elsewhere if I was just going to have to pick up and move back in with her. So I kept ringing up one friend after another, calling in favors, burning through all the goodwill banked over my dozen years in Cambridge. Every morning I’d rise up from whatever junky couch I’d slept on and take my laptop over to the Yard.

Emerson Hall, which houses the philosophy department, has its own dedicated library. It is proof of the extent of my alienation from colleagues and teachers that I avoided the place unless absolutely necessary, preferring to sequester myself in an abandoned corner of the sixth floor at Widener, where I sulked and pretended to write.

It was on one such afternoon that I found myself halfheartedly skimming through the Crimson, picked up more for diversion than anything else. The writing always made me smile—bumptious undergraduates proclaiming home-brewed solutions to global problems—until I realized that, five years hence, those same undergraduates would be editing the opinion page for the New York Times.

Classifieds in Ivy League newspapers cater to the young, the smart, and the desperate. Several ads solicited attractive, non-smoking women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine as egg donors. Infertile couples would pay up to twenty-five thousand dollars plus expenses, a figure that made my head spin. My yearly stipend—back when I had a stipend—had been less than that. All for a single cell. I made a mental note to call a sperm bank and investigate the going rate.

One ad offered custom tote bags for your sorority; another a ten-year-old Volkswagen Jetta in good condition, below Blue Book. A third appeared to promote a self-published book about the history of the universe, for sale through the author’s website. I say “appeared to” because the copy was nigh on unintelligible and the person who’d written it quite plainly delusional. Anyone can advertise in the Crimson. All you need are no fewer than fifteen words at sixty-five cents apiece.

So, actually, I could not have advertised in the Crimson.

The eighth and final ad came in just over the minimum.

CONVERSATIONALIST SOUGHT.
SERIOUS APPLICANTS ONLY.
PLEASE CALL 617-XXX-XXXX
BETWEEN SEVEN A.M. AND TWO P.M.
NO SOLICITORS.

Contemporary philosophy’s primary activity is the hard scrutiny of language. I reread the text several times, understanding it and yet not. What kind of conversationalist? Sought by whom? Merely “sought,” in the sense of being necessary, the way a cheap source of alternative energy is “sought”? Can something be sought without there being a seeker? Of course not; that’s not the way the verb works. Presumably the seeker in this case was the person who had placed the ad. As the sentence stood, however, lacking an agent, I felt as though I was reading the description of a state of being, rather than a job offer.

How could an applicant determine his seriousness without knowing what the job entailed? Did “serious” mean that I had to be serious, or that my application had to be capable of being taken seriously by my prospective employer? For instance, I might seriously desire to become a fire-breathing lesbian astronaut, but one could not reasonably describe my chances as serious.

The ad’s tone warned as it invited, one hand outstretched, the other up in defense. Who said anything about solicitors? Perhaps the seeker was concerned about identity theft. In that case, why publish a phone number? Why not an e-mail address or, for the truly old-fashioned, a P.O. box? Something here did not jibe, and I had the feeling that I was staring into the mouth of a scam. These days it’s hard to be too suspicious, paranoia no longer a pathology but a mark of savvy.

Still. It sounded so strange, so enticingly strange.

I could have called from inside the library—there was nobody around—but I have always considered Widener a temple, disturbing its dusty silence a sacrilege. I packed up and left, crossing the Tercentenary Theater in the direction of Canaday Hall, the hideous dormitory known as “The Projects,” where I’d lived as a freshman. Outside the Science Center, the snow was soiled, compacted by hundreds of feet, and I paused to watch a group of students putting the finishing touches on a giant, Daliesque snow-ear. Once indoors, I breathed on my hands, took out my cell phone, and dialed. A recorded voice told me that this account had been deactivated, message one-one-four-seven.

I tried again and got the same voice, and after it happened a third time, I realized that this was actually happening. Yasmina had cut me off. That she footed the entire bill seemed irrelevant just then; she had once again stranded me without a word of warning, and I was livid. I almost threw the phone against the wall. My need for a source of income grown even more pressing, I went downstairs in search of a pay phone.

SHE SOUNDED ELDERLY. I thought I detected an accent, although I needed to hear more than a single hello.

“Yes, hi, I’m calling about the ad in the Crimson.”

“Ah. And with whom am I speaking?”

“My name is Joseph Geist.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Geist.”

“Thank you. Same to you, Ms....” I paused to let her introduce herself. She didn’t, so I said, “I’m intrigued. What sort of conversationalist are you after?”

“A catholic one. Small c. Is that how you would describe yourself?”

“I think so. Although for the record, I’m Catholic, big C, as well.”

She laughed gently. “Well, I shan’t hold that against you.”

I’d settled on German, although her inflections were decidedly different from those I’d encountered in Berlin. Perhaps she was from the countryside, or another city.

“I’m no longer practicing, for what it’s worth.”

“Ah, a lapsed Catholic. That I find more to my taste.”

“Glad to oblige.”

“So, Mr. Geist, the lapsed Catholic, you saw my advertisement. You are a Harvard student, I presume?”

To explain my exact status would have taken far too long. I said, mostly truthfully, “Graduate student.”

“Yes? And what do you study?”

“Philosophy.”

There was a tiny pause. “Really. That is very interesting, Mr. Geist. And what kind of a philosopher are you?”

Though tempted to puff myself up, I decided to proceed with caution.

“A catholic one,” I said. “Small c.”

She laughed again. “Perhaps I should ask instead your philosopher of choice.”

I couldn’t possibly anticipate her tastes, so I said what I thought would best provoke and amuse: “Myself, of course.” Except what I actually said was, “Ich, natürlich.”

“Oh, come now,” she said.

But I could hear her smiling.

“I shall be pleased to meet you, Mr. Geist. Are you available at three o’clock?”

“Three o’clock—today?”

“Yes, three o’clock today.”

I almost said no. I didn’t want to seem too needy. “That should be fine.”

“Very good. Allow me to give you the address.”

I wrote it down. “Thank you.”

“Danke schön, Herr Geist. ”

Standing there, receiver in hand, it occurred to me that we had not set any terms. I didn’t know how long she wanted to talk or what she wanted to talk about. Nobody had mentioned money, so I didn’t know what, if anything, she intended to pay me. I didn’t even know her name. The whole arrangement was incredibly bizarre, and I wondered if it was a scam after all. She sounded harmless enough, but.

The phone began to chirp. Distractedly, I depressed the hookswitch, fumbled out more change, and called information for the number of the local sperm bank.

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