They were really very nice about it — which made it worse, you know — writing her to say how, while it wasn’t a great fit for them right now, they were very grateful for the chance to consider it, and had every hope her timely study of Polish cinema between the wars would find a lucky publisher extremely soon. (Were they taking the piss out of her? With the “timely”? The “extremely”? Nearly seven years on U.S. soil, still their sarcasm eluded her.) She had spent the springtime in a panic. Holed up in her quarters, guzzling cognac before noon. She would speak aloud to Papa, who was dead.
“So what?” she heard him say to her. “So what they took your clout. They left you your life. Your freedom. Rejected? Denied? Try starved. Try tortured!”
True, they’d had it rougher then . . . breadlines in the frigid dawn. The brutal gloom of Warsaw winters. Yet lately from the comforts of her rental home on Elm Street (Oak Street? — she had not been out in some days’ time), Magda envied the old countrymen what they’d been up against. The clarity of their struggle. She had heard the stories of his colleagues — their courage and defiance. Dissident scholars, silenced and surveilled. Their manuscripts smuggled to the West inside of flour sacks. Cut off from the presses, how they’d stopped at nothing to be heard. Perhaps she should self-publish her book on the Kindle store on Amazon.
She considered this now, scrolling. How bad would it be really? The covers were cheerful, and charmingly homemade. They had swirly fonts. On one volume, A DILF For Christmas, an extremely hunky man stood naked, holding a Santa hat over his genitals.
Oh Christ. It was hopeless. These hours alone, these tortured theses — another stillbirth of the mind. Yes, Papa, she was free. A flâneuse in New Haven. Free to roam the crime-choked streets. Free to take the bus to Marshalls each time her car broke down. Free to eat in one sitting a twelve-inch meatball sandwich, then to suffer palpitations, frightening seizures in her lower throat, then be charged two hundred dollars to wait four hours at the walk-in clinic where they gave her an antacid tablet and told her to “go easy on it.” Free to be a middling, no, a failing academic, entombed in her recondite works and meaningless achievements.
Dreadful quiet in the street. It was 9 a.m., already beastly hot. The last Friday in May. The urge to self-destruct was strong today.
You could feel the campus emptying of life out there, the students packing up their things and leaving for the summer. For the future. At last weekend’s commencement she had worked hard not to weep. The mortarboards flung skyward, bright college years, old Yale, goodbye! The graduates proceeding, robed, in dappled sunlight, so young and blessed. Her contract would not be renewed.
It was official. She would leave these grounds without a ripple, forgotten by them all. The youthful technocrats who’d sat through her film survey (the rumored easy A) only to tick the box of their humanities requirements. Fraternity brothers texting, fidgeting through screenings (in rare 35mm) of Battleship Potemkin. Reprimanded, how they’d smirked at her, bemused no doubt by her sincerity, her Slavic styles, her neckerchiefs. Pitying her turgid speech, how benign her field of expertise, how puny the concerns of art against the brute forces of commerce. The girls were no less lazy really, only slyer, more litigious, one young lady this past spring citing frequent cramps as grounds enough to miss a whole semester’s worth of class, and at no cost whatsoever to her grade. (Magda had known better than to quibble with her, one Chloe so-and-so, a Hollywood lawyer’s hypochondriac daughter.) With her colleagues she’d fared worst of all. Careerist types. On the go and on the make, with their podcasts and their panels. No time for Polish cinema between the wars. In the dining halls, at the department luncheons, they assembled in their cliques, politicking, pitching, schmoozing, striving, shaking hands. All so public-facing in their interests, so mad for relevance, they might have been running not for tenure but for Congress. The life of the mind? It was the life of the mouth. A department meeting this past April had gone badly. Not her finest hour . . .
At a young professor in Film Studies who’d proposed to introduce a new course (“Wakanda in Perspective”) she had bristled, then was swiftly schooled — it was not her place at all to disagree. Granted she’d not seen the film nor films in question, a matter of too-long lines at the multiplex plus her having zero interest in the superheroes-franchise genre. Such omissions, one colleague cut in, reeked of elitism (elitism at Yale — a shocking crime), and this from an alumna of Bryn Mawr College, white, a child of well-connected Boston-area ophthalmologists, who had gone so far as to imply she was a bigot. Magda’d tried hard to explain herself, growing very flushed, very nervous to be put on the spot, instantly regretting having drunk before the meeting (a small carafe with lunch that day, of house red from the pizza parlor, hardly what you’d call a spree, but a bad call nonetheless), slipping back by turns into her native tongue as she told them, no, she was no bigot (“Nie jestem fanatyczką! Skądże!”), far from it, in fact. Her concern was that the film scholar community, having toiled so long to legitimize themselves among the classical humanists, should be seized at such a crucial hour by a misguided and fatal populism. A critical juncture was close at hand (nearly in tears now), the dawn of a nightmarish new era for the arts — the treasures of world cinema scrapped for parts, mined for widgets, in their stead a disembodied flow of content recombining, self-spawning, devoid of theme or human authorship, devoid of intencji, nie martwili się? Kto stanąłby w obronie Bergmana? Kto w obronie Hitchcocka? A Kurosawy? Nikt? Dlaczego nikt? And so forth, in that vein, for a few minutes, before (this part she could not remember) fainting cleanly from her chair.
. . . A few had reached out afterwards to share their wishes for her health. She ought to take some time, they said, rest up. Which sounded nice. On whose dime? These Americans, with their therapeutic blather. It was one hand on your shoulder, another coming for your lunch.
She lit a cigarette, a roll-your-own, reclining on the old Salvation Army couch.
She was badly busted up. Out of favor with the fates. What she was selling, nowadays, folks were hardly lining up to buy. Soon the money would run out, her visa lapse. There was talk she might require a surgery, a hysterectomy. (“Sooner would probably be better than later,” said the doctor. Very ominous.)
She knew that she should stop this wallowing, and get to work again immediately. Homesick, soulsick, we must build a new home on the page. There’d been a time, not all that long ago, no film theorist alive could touch her — like a world-class pianist at her Lenovo keyboard, storming out concertos in a trembling, phosphorescent fury. But that was half the problem. She had lived too much in words, in visions. Not even her own visions. Art, which once enlarged her, in the end had made her smaller. Very small . . . teeny-weeny. Such a maladjusted little speck of a woman, she might disappear into thin air one of these days.
She would catch a train. Head down to the city. It was not a bad idea at all. As far as cities went it had some bad associations for her, but she felt a strong attraction to it now. Seeking human voltage, you could do no better than New York. A place to spin out unmolested, and in style, where nobody would bat an eye at a woman at loose ends, day-drunk on a park bench, or conferring with her many dead in the glass of empty storefronts. Some rich friends of her late aunt’s had a pied-à-terre near Lincoln Center, rarely used. She could raid their wine cellar, don their kimonos, blast their opera records. Take in a show. Yes, it was a marvelous idea. A lost weekend. She did not strictly intend to survive it.
In the New Haven station was a carnival air, people headed to the beach, to ballgames. Monday was a public holiday, a day of remembrance for fallen servicemen, though the summer crowds betrayed no hint of solemnity.
She had packed in a hurry. It was just as well to leave it all — her sublease would be up the first of June. The care of her beloved cat she entrusted to her next-door neighbor, Trent the supersenior, who graciously agreed. He was a very nice young man, Trent, about the only Yale student who’d ever given her the time of day — a once-promising quarterback for the varsity football team, waylaid in his junior year by a devastating injury (magic mushrooms, fourth-floor window, visions of flight) and now badly behind on his credits, and minimally productive in his daily life (as per an official mailpiece, intercepted by her by mistake, he was twenty-five years old). Something in this thwarted Hercules had touched her. In his big brown eyes, a tragic knowledge, an animal tristesse, as of a prized racehorse too soon put out to pasture. She’d left simple, easy-to-follow instructions for the care and feeding of the little cat. No doubt he’d be in good and gentle hands.
She arrived to her car early — air-conditioned, clean — and had her pick of seats. Though the bar compartment, sadly, was a thing of history on the Metro-North Railroad, the new custom for those in need was to purchase a beverage at the station’s newsstand and conceal it with a brown paper bag. She had chosen for today’s journey a Lime-A-Rita, a festive malt drink. She would start the weekend with a bang.
She lay back as the train pulled out. She was free and on the move. A great relief not to hassle with parking, and to steer clear of the meddling of the highway patrol.
As a result of a fender-bender in North Haven last October, en route from picking pumpkins for her mantel (the day had started wholesomely enough), she’d been ordered to attend classes on drunk driving awareness and even two sessions of the Fairfield Presbyterian Alcoholics Anonymous. Christ — a sorry, slobby bunch. Housewives and construction workers, parroting amongst themselves their wisdom gleaned from bumper stickers, embroidered pillows, and Eckhart Tolle. To their stories of tough childhoods, charmless adulthoods she’d listened patiently, Faulknerian in their detail and variety. They had put on quite a show. Weeping, hugging, praying, hands all joined together in an ecstasy of helplessness. It was a bit over the top really.
Needless to say, she could scarcely relate. Hers had been a happy and auspicious early life, Communism notwithstanding. Her parents had adored her, with good reason — an only child, born late to them, violet-eyed and ringleted, reading chapter books at three. In her twenties, at the film school in Łódź, she’d been something of a star pupil, the darling protégé of several faculty. (With Mr. Andrzej Wajda she had even had relations, on and off. Grooming, you might call it, nowadays, in the undergraduate parlance. Far from a trauma — she’d loved every goddamned minute of it.)
So no, she had no use for them. They could keep their slogans and their sanctimony. She was not some Fairfield County wino. The problem wasn’t childhood. It was personhood, per se. It was just that life and consciousness were broadly overrated, reality a melancholy, awkward business, squeaky at the wheels, and screaming out for generous lubrication, don’t you think. There was not that much to say about it, and nothing to confess. The facts could not be helped. Her devotion was incurable.
Picking up some steam now. She cracked open a second. Ah . . . delightful sound. They were hurtling past the smokestacks and decrepit industry of Bridgeport, her thoughts starting to scud in the familiar, lovely way. In the poorer suburbs, houses packed together, flags hanging from painted porches. A football field, a Catholic cemetery. The Green’s Farms public library, which in fact she’d been to, once. She loved a scuzzy small-town reading room, and often sought them out along her travels. These would be the Alamo of the literate democracy. Far from the gloss of the ivory tower, but vital in their rumpled way. The foul-smelling loveseats and broken water fountains. The poor and indigent and elderly accessing the internet, sometimes having a short nap. The histories of Rome and Carthage, their loan cards half a century yellowed. Borrowed down the ages by humble, unsung knowledge-seekers, and stained with soup and scum and ashes, each holding in its timeworn margins — it seemed to her — a secret chronicle, a suggestion of the dream lives of yesteryear’s Americans. Shit. She recognized someone.
A former student, coming from the washroom.
She hid behind her cat-eyes and her new issue of Sight and Sound. She would rather not be forced into some kind of interaction.
“Mind if I sit here?” he said.
She would brook no judgement for her Lime-A-Rita. Then again, what did it matter. She must already be a punchline on the campus, if that eminent. He could tell his little friends he’d seen her blotto on a train. A bit of morbid gossip, the last glimpse of the pedagogue before her doom. She’d be sealed in schoolboy legend, like Ichabod Crane.
“Yes, no. Of course,” she said. “I don’t mind. Be my guest. Please.”
He sat down across from her. She couldn’t place him, really. Cut from the same cloth as half the others. Polo shirt and chino shorts, no style about him whatsoever. Temperate in his appetites, generic in his tastes, nary an off-kilter thought in his neat little crew-cut head, she bet. Bound soon for the think tanks, the corporate law firms, in Washington or Cupertino. Whatever bland new world he and his kind would be inheriting, she wouldn’t be around to see it. You could count her out. Leave her to the freaks and screw-ups, the syphilitic ghouls, the losers, Luddites and malingerers. If any such people remained in Manhattan, she would find them and salute them.
Of course, for the time being, it would not stand to be rude to the boy. Now that they were here, there was no sense in ignoring him. The need for conversation hung thickly in the air. She was not so far gone that she failed to pick up on the social niceties and pressures. Soon . . .
“Well, then, what brings you to the city today?” she said. “Weekend plans? Seeing friends?” Many of her colleagues had found meaning in this sort of thing.
“Yeah, seeing some friends. For the weekend.”
“You certainly pack light. Hats off to you.”
“Oh. Yeah, haha,” he said.
“And this summer?”
“An internship, in D.C. At a political consulting firm?”
“Impressive. Very nice.”
“Thanks! Thank you. Well — no, it is. It’s great.”
A bracing tête-à-tête this was shaping up to be.
He shifted in his seat, ill at ease, his limbs ungainly. Bit of an odd bird, on closer look. A painful tentativeness to him, as if compelled to ask permission for so much as drawing breath. He had a way of squeezing his eyes shut every ten to fifteen seconds that was very unbecoming. You found yourself almost bracing for it, as for a car alarm outside your window in the night.
They continued in their small talk for a while. Extremely dull. The city yes, the High Line, blah blah blah. They were churning them out by the millions, just like this, more each year, high-IQ emotional dullards who, once the robots overtook their know-how, would be truly lost and rudderless. Strangers to themselves, without any hope of succor, no recourse to the human tapestry. Forsake the liberal arts, and the young would pay a hefty price.
Before long she was very sleepy. Loopy even — those tall boys packed a punch. She should ask him out to dinner for the hell of it. Sonya and Miłosz had season tickets to the Met. She could show this milk-fed bore a thing or two of art, of madness, of mania, abjection, the avant-garde, addiction. Put some hair on the boy’s chest. He was really not bad-looking, in an Anthony Perkins sort of way, and by all accounts of age. Oh, Magda, Magdalena — stop.
There’s some life in you yet, isn’t there, old girl.
Rough hands prodded her. A pug-faced man was talking. She saw herself reflected in the vinyl of his cap.
“Ma’am. Ma’am. Train’s in, ma’am. It’s time to go now.”
Everyone was gone. A mossy, dead taste in her mouth, like the loam of graves. There was drool all over her silk scarf.
Well, this was embarrassing. Rather rude of the young man not to try and wake her, nor say goodbye. She had dreamt their interaction, possibly. Hallucinated it. This was the grisly, late-stage stuff. They’d talked about it in the meetings. Macabre, ecstatic visions in the detox wing at Fairfield Memorial, startling in their lifelikeness. A fitting coda for her, in a way, that life and cinema should finally be one.
But he’d left something behind, on the seat, a credit card. She picked it up.
Now she remembered. This was the McColl boy. A student from the residential college where she’d been visiting assistant dean one year, back in the day. Her stock was higher then.
He had had some kind of breakdown, his despair chalked up to long Covid, the better to explain it to his proud, bewildered parents. A medication was prescribed; this accounted for the strange tic, the involuntary movements. He had lost a lot of weight. He’d apparently been well enough to return to campus, though whatever follow-up was meant to happen, it had been on someone else’s watch. Granted she’d not thought to ask, or thought of him at all. She’d been very, very busy with her book.
Well. What could you do. Some failed to thrive. To be young was not an unmixed blessing. Some fell quite badly through the cracks. It was bound to happen, really. Small-town salutatorians, big fish at their suburban high schools, but only guppies in the major leagues. And their peers such a sharp-elbowed lot, so swaggering and glib and natural.
Once in a blue moon the very worst would come to pass. A brief flurry of bromides in the school paper about mental health awareness. But otherwise their suffering was unaccountable, invisible. An abstraction and a puzzlement to those left over. A black, black box.
Plans with friends eh.
She had a bad feeling about him. He had something really stupid planned. He carried nothing with him. No weekend bag. No device that she could tell. Of course, she could be wrong about it. Completely off the mark. But if she wasn’t —
She moved against the platform’s crowds, the train-bound travelers pushing on, the smell of sweat, exhaust, heat, metal, popcorn, feces and cologne — the stifling Hades of the great, disgusting city. Nearly rush hour on the Friday of a holiday weekend, the unofficial start of summer, and everyone was hell-bent on their plans. So sure and stubborn in themselves. Their heels dug in, unswerving in their loyalty to life. She did not resent them for this. It was how it ought to be.
It was 2:57 p.m., five minutes past their train’s arrival time. By now, he could be anywhere. For all she knew he’d gotten off at Harlem. Fordham, even. Closer to the bridge. She would never find him.
And if she did? What would she say? She was a poor ambassador for life. She had no great pitch prepared. Would she tell him he had such potential? She, too, had had potential. It was not enough to live on. Half the time, you were worse off for it. A bruising notion, one’s own promise. The special contribution. The song that you were born to sing — you must find it. You must sing it. If you don’t? Then woe to you, child. Around this void, a million lives had been contorted. Bent completely out of shape. To hell with being special. They had had enough of that, the both of them.
She came into the main concourse, the awe-inspiring vault. Laughing at herself, to be getting so worked up. She hadn’t walked this fast in years, except once, to the tobacconist’s at closing time. There he was just past the information desk, a hundred feet away from her, moving towards the northern exit in his rangy, graceless way.
Where was he going, and why so fast?
“Trevor!” she called after him, running now, smiling ridiculously. What an idiot she was. “Trevor!” People turned their heads. “Hello! You forgot something!” He stopped and turned.
It was decided. She would run him down. She would stick to him like glue. Breathe down his neck until he proved her wrong. She would take him back to the apartment, feed him — cheesesteaks, sundaes, whatever he desired. This wasting away wouldn’t do at all. He was still a growing boy. They would ride it out together. Do whatever stupid, boring thing. Rowboats in the park. The Coney Island Steeplechase. But she wouldn’t let him be alone. She’d be mother, father, friend, and maid. She would bar the windows, hide the knives, and if he had to use the bathroom, they would find a way to work around it. It was not up for discussion.
Her weekend plans were fucked, of course.
Cally Fiedorek is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction. Her debut novel, Atta Boy, was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a Vulture Book Highlight of 2024. She lives in her native NYC with her husband and three kids.
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Loved this. Nearly deleted the email, but got started and couldn't stop till I'd finished. Fun story.
Absolutely loved this voice.