Chapter 32
Nina found Professor Villanueva’s lecture on hedonism to be something of a letdown.
Prior to bumping into him in the outside world, she had believed him to be an enigmatic intellectual who did not belong to a class of people capable of gas or furtive masturbation.
Now she understood him to be a human being, which was disappointing on many levels.
She realized that he, like her, was fallible and very likely making things up as he went.
Philosophy was not an exact science. He could interpret things as he wished, possibly incorrectly.
And yet, somehow, it was his job to interpret her opinions in a way that would be forever reflected on her transcripts.
It might very well determine the difference between a top twenty law school and virtual impoverishment.
Nina shook herself. No, it did not mean that.
“I constantly feel I’m in danger of doomscrolling over a very real cliff,” Jas said while Nina was lounging in her new four-person bedroom—a large, spacious room at the back of the house called the Icebox, due to its hyper-enthusiastic air-conditioning.
There were two sets of bunk beds lining one wall, then four dressers placed against the leftover wall space, with a walk-in closet that all four of them shared.
It was aesthetically juvenile, like being a child at sleepaway camp, but simultaneously it was freeing.
The four inhabitants mostly occupied the center of the room, on the floor, where they casually threw around topics such as what to wear to the evening’s social events (the closet was really socialist in nature) and who they’d kill if given the chance.
“You know that you control the phone, right,” Nina reminded her sister exhaustedly. “You can turn it off anytime you want.”
“I just feel very un-grounded,” Jas said, before asking tangentially, “You didn’t fuck Arya, did you?”
“No. Seriously? Of course not. And you’re not grounded, Jas, you never have been.”
“Right, right, I should be more like you. Good Nina, calm Nina, such an easy baby—”
“Don’t bring Mom into this. I mean it as a good thing.
You’re not grounded because you think about everyone constantly all the time.
You somehow manage to hold in your head all of your friends in addition to every atrocity you come across on social media.
I’m not sure it’s even possible to be considered sane under those conditions. ”
“Just because I hold them in my head doesn’t mean anything is coming back out of me,” said Jas. “It’s very unproductive to care this much and do nothing about it.”
Nina threw up her hands. “But what can you even do?”
“That’s it exactly, isn’t it? I can’t do anything because I can petition my representatives who are all paid by billionaires and they don’t care and I can rant at everyone around me who also doesn’t care and I can donate money to organizations who try to convince the people who don’t care to care but then really just skim off the top.
And at night, do you know what I think about? ”
“How much your head hurts?”
“How I’d probably just shut up about all of it if I could marry Arya.
” Jas sighed heavily. “It’s very disappointing to discover I’m just an ordinary person who wants stupid things.
When I’m done thinking about Arya, I usually think about how unfair it is that I was born with plenty of food and clean water and access to electricity and all the time in the world to lust over a man who thinks I’m his cousin. ”
“Hi, Jas,” called Dalil, who had just come in from her morning statistics lecture.
“Hi, Dalil,” Jas had replied morosely. “Anyway, I’ll stop bothering you, Nina, I know you have an actual life to get around to.”
“Jasleen,” said Nina. “I really think you need to delete Twitter.”
“It’s not even called that anymore, Nina.
And believe it or not, that’s also something I worry about.
I mean, a lot of journalists found jobs that way.
How am I supposed to be part of a disappearing industry?
I was too busy seeking intellectual purity to go around blowing rich dudes who could give me jobs, like you. ”
“No offense taken,” said Nina.
“Will you hire me, Nina? When I’m unemployable and homeless?”
“You won’t be homeless, Jas. You have me, and I’m very high achieving.”
“See?” moaned Jas. “My life is so easy and yet everything hurts.”
“Have you considered just … going out and having a little treat?” said Nina. “I don’t think your existential suffering is doing anything specific for the Sudan.”
Which brought her back to the philosophy lecture, and the distinct sense as she watched Professor Villanueva that he’d lost a significant bit of shine.
It seemed unfair, really, the certainty with which he made declarative statements, the exercises he posed as if humanity were hypothetical—something they simply were, ineffably, rather than something they did or chose.
Was it because he methodically set aside the parts of the world that were untenable?
Maybe that was the problem, that a certain percentage of the truth was meant to remain unexamined.
Maybe Jas had opened herself up to too much information and now she was short-circuiting.
Maybe when you looked an entire problem in the face you had to give up a bit of your ability to function.
There was a peak, Nina thought, or a quota.
At some point there was a ceiling on the darkness with which you could empathize, beyond which you had to compromise for the power of omniscience.
The more you could see, the less you could care.
Nina hated to continue learning from a man who’d already revealed himself to be nothing more than a man, but wasn’t he teaching her something critical now?
That the only way to do any good at all was to focus on only a very, very small sliver of what could be controlled, and not wonder why some people were given power and agency and authority over others.
Because those people would claim something about bootstraps anyway, which might not even be false in an overarching, universal, objective way.
Was there really a metric for who deserved to be fed and who deserved to be eaten?
What qualified Nina to be part of the hunt?
“You really think you’re the only young female student he’s willing to exploit?
” Fawn had said to Nina the other day, lying together on the floor of the Icebox after Fawn had wandered by under the pretense of seeing how the new residents were settling in.
Or maybe that’s what Fawn had actually been there to do, except Nina was alone, so they got each other off in the socialist closet with one hand over the other’s mouth.
“Trust me,” Fawn said from the postcoital haze, “you wouldn’t be his first or his last.”
“It just seems like there must be someone more deserving of slaughter,” Nina commented. “Like a white man, at least.”
Fawn flicked this away as she would a fly. “Ritualistically speaking, you don’t want some shitty, shriveled organ,” she said. “There’s some parity here in terms of the quality of exchange.”
“So it’s a wellness thing now?”
Fawn gave Nina a hard look. “Who are you, Tessa?”
“No, I just mean—” Nina didn’t understand the question. “I just meant, like, are you serious about this?” Nina attempted again. “Like, when you say ‘the ritual,’ are you talking about magic, or…?”
In her head she became aware of something pressing in on her thoughts from the inside.
She already understood the world consisted of untenable choices.
In many ways she had been primed for this by Jas, and by Jas’s understanding of the world as an unwinnable place that cannibalized itself inherently.
The women who voted for men who stripped the rights of women.
The rich who sacrificed the poor to perpetuate the myth that the rich alone could earn their wealth.
Jas had recently ranted to Nina that prior to the Reagan administration, the wealthy had paid substantial taxes, such that it could not be argued that the suggestion of a wealth tax now was in any way unprecedented.
Those same taxes had previously funded many of the social programs that no longer existed, many of which had ironically been cut by Democrats.
Not ironically. Hypocritically. Hypocrisy, that was the word, and it was also the world.
Nina understood that she could live with all of these truths existing at once, the knowledge of what was right and what was necessary, and what was technically unnecessary but would still be done because it led to something that had to mean something, because otherwise what were any of us doing toiling away under capitalism, striving emptily for the intangibles of purpose and meaning while half the world clawed for the basic right to be alive, and starve?
The thing was, really, that when you broke it down like that, down into the little crumbs, really staring into the face of the problem and looking at it from all angles, it wasn’t possible or ethical to be happy, and yet it was also completely unethical to be miserable, given the circumstances of her life.
Okay, so Nina would be discriminated against for various reasons, she could be powerful or she could be beautiful but she could not really be both, she would always be exploited and yet to succeed she must always exploit someone else, and it was true that her success would always come at the cost of someone else’s but, also, that was true for everyone, and therefore choosing not to be successful was a waste of resources that also meant Jas would almost certainly turn up homeless, and giving up or simply choosing not to accept the power Nina was offered was also, in some way, untenable.