Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside

“I’ll walk,” Selig says.

They go out of the hospital together, up Amsterdam Avenue to the 115th Street campus gate, and into Van Am Quad. The security man stays close beside him, saying nothing. Shortly Selig finds himself waiting outside the office of the Dean of Columbia College. The security man waits with him, arms folded placidly, wrapped in a cocoon of boredom. Selig begins to feel almost as though he is under some sort of arrest. Why is that? An odd thought. What does he have to fear from the dean? He probes the security man’s dull mind but can find nothing in it but drifting, wispy masses of fog. He wonders who the dean is, these days. He remembers the deans of his own college era well enough: Lawrence Chamberlain, with the bow ties and the warm smile, was Dean of the College, and Dean McKnight, Nicholas McD. McKnight, a fraternity enthusiast (Sigma Chi?) with a formal, distinctly nineteenth-century manner, was Dean of Students. But that was twenty years ago. Chamberlain and McKnight must have had several successors by now, but he knows nothing about them; he has never been one for reading alumni newsletters.

A voice from within says, “Dean Cushing will see him now.”

“Go on in,” the security man says.

Cushing? A fine deanly name. Who is he? Selig limps in, awkward from his injuries, bothered by his sore knee. Facing him behind a glistening uncluttered desk sits a wide-shouldered, smooth-cheeked, youthful-looking man, junior-executive model, wearing a conservative dark suit. Selig’s first thought is of the mutations worked by the passage of time: he had always looked upon deans as lofty symbols of authority, necessarily elderly or at least of middle years, but here is the Dean of the College and he seems to be a man of Selig’s own age. Then he realizes that this dean is not merely an anonymous contemporary of his but actually a classmate, Ted Cushing ’56, a campus figure of some repute back then, class president and football star and A-level scholar, whom Selig had known at least in a passing way. It always surprises Selig to be reminded that he is no longer young, that he has lived into a time when his generation has control of the mechanisms of power. “Ted?” he blurts. “Are you dean now, Ted? Christ, I wouldn’t have guessed that. When—”

“Sit down, Dave,” Cushing says, politely but with no great show of friendliness. “Did you get badly hurt?”

“The hospital says nothing’s broken. I feel half ruined, though.” As he eases into a chair he indicates the bloodstains on his clothing, the bruises on his face. Talking is an effort; his jaws creak at their hinges. “Hey, Ted, it’s been a long time! Must be twenty years since I last saw you. Did you remember my name, or did they identify me from my wallet?”

“We’ve arranged to pay the hospital costs,” Cushing says, not seeming to hear Selig’s words. “If there are any further medical expenses, we’ll take care of those too. You can have that in writing if you’d like.”

“The verbal commitment is fine. And in case you’re worrying that I’ll press charges, or sue the University, well, I wouldn’t do anything like that. Boys will be boys, they let their feelings run away with themselves a little bit, but—”

“We weren’t greatly concerned about your pressing charges, Dave,” Cushing says quietly. “The real question is whether we’re going to press charges against you.”

“Me? For what? For getting mauled by your basketball players? For damaging their expensive hands with my face?” He essays a painful grin. Cushing’s face remains grave. There is a little moment of silence. Selig struggles to interpret Cushing’s joke. Finding no rationale for it, he decides to venture a probe. But he runs into a wall. He is suddenly too timid to push, fearful that he will be unable to break through. “I don’t understand what you mean,” he says finally. “Press charges for what?”

“For these, Dave.” For the first time Selig notices the stack of typewritten pages on the dean’s desk. Cushing nudges them forward. “Do you recognize them? Here: take a look.”

Selig leafs unhappily through them. They are term papers, all of them of his manufacture. Odysseus as a Symbol of Society. The Novels of Kafka. Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. Resignation and Acceptance in the Philosophy of Montaigne. Virgil as Dante’s Mentor. Some of them bear marks: A—, B+, A—, A and marginal comments, mainly favorable. Some are untouched except by smudges and smears; these are the ones he had been about to deliver when he was set upon by Lumumba. With immense care he tidies the stack, aligning the edges of the sheets precisely, and pushes them back toward Cushing. “All right,” he says. “You’ve got me.”

“Did you write those?”

“Yes.”

“For a fee?”

“Yes.”

“That’s sad, Dave. That’s awfully sad.”

“I needed to earn a living. They don’t give scholarships to alumni.”

“What were you getting paid for these things?”

“Three or four bucks a typed page.”

Cushing shakes his head. “You were good, I’ll give you credit for that. There must be eight or ten guys working your racket here, but you’re easily the best.”

“Thank you.”

“But you had one dissatisfied customer, at least. We asked Lumumba why he beat you up. He said he hired you to write a term paper for him and you did a lousy job, you ripped him off, and then you wouldn’t refund his money. All right, we’re dealing with him in our own way, but we have to deal with you, too. We’ve been trying to find you for a long time, Dave.”

“Have you?”

“We’ve circulated xeroxes of your work through a dozen departments the last couple of semesters, warning people to be on the lookout for your typewriter and your style. There wasn’t a great deal of cooperation. A lot of faculty members didn’t seem to care whether the term papers they received were phony or not. But we cared, Dave. We cared very much.” Cushing leans forward. His eyes, terribly earnest, seek Selig’s. Selig looks away. He cannot abide the searching warmth of those eyes. “We started closing in a few weeks ago,” Cushing continues. “We rounded up a couple of your clients and threatened them with expulsion. They gave us your name, but they didn’t know where you lived, and we had no way of finding you. So we waited. We knew you’d show up again to deliver and solicit. Then we got this report of a disturbance on the steps of Low, basketball players beating somebody up, and we found you with a pile of undelivered papers clutched in your arm, and that was it. You’re out of business, Dave.”

“I should ask for a lawyer,” Selig says. “I shouldn’t admit anything more to you. I should have denied everything when you showed me those papers.”

“No need to be so technical about your rights.”

“I’ll need to be when you take me to court, Ted.”

“No,” Cushing says. “We aren’t going to prosecute, not unless we catch you ghosting more papers. We have no interest in putting you in jail, and in any case I’m not sure that what you’ve done is a criminal offense. What we really want to do is help you. You’re sick, Dave. For a man of your intelligence, of your potential, to have fallen so low, to have ended up faking term papers for college kids—that’s sad, Dave, that’s awfully sad. We’ve discussed your case here, Dean Bellini and Dean Tompkins and I, and we’ve come up with a rehabilitation plan for you. We can find you work on campus, as a research assistant, maybe. There are always doctoral candidates who need assistants, and we have a small fund we could dip into to provide a salary for you, nothing much, but at least as much as you were making on these papers. And we’d admit you to the psychological counseling service here. It wasn’t set up for alumni, but I don’t see why we need to be inflexible about it, Dave. For myself I have to say that I find it embarrassing that a man of the Class of ’56 is in the kind of trouble you’re in, and if only out of a spirit of loyalty to our class I want to do everything possible to help you put yourself back together and begin to fulfill the promise that you showed when—”