The Student
by Benjamin Pfeiffer
No one will help you, he said to me, and I knew he was right. He was the kind of competent mediocrity you could trust. He had written two books, both of them bad but published. I hadn’t read them. That night, we were sitting in a hipster bar, drinking whiskey and talking about what it meant to be a writer. We were alone.
“I don’t think about it,” I said, meaning the life he’d described, and I meant it. “Publication is extracurricular.”
He’d made his career by looking like an author. He had that appearance. He had the gray hair, but he looked youngish and fun, and he wore clunky, black-framed plastic glasses. As the rain began to fall in cold unslanted lines he was saying publishers didn’t want writers like us. The only remaining place for us, he said, is teaching in an MFA like this one. You can’t make money otherwise. You’re not going to become a bestseller. They want minorities. They don’t care that you grew up white trash on the prairie, he said. You’re not the right kind of oppressed. They want diversity. He didn’t use a slur but you could tell he wanted to. He was afraid of me, but why I couldn’t say, and I don’t think he could say either, because he wasn’t talented enough. He might’ve held some fear of my promise as a writer or he might’ve feared his inability to control me. We moved out of the rain but stayed outside under the sodium-vapor lights.
I said nothing. Already I had published several times at a literary journal in San Francisco where they valued inclusive humanity as part of literature. No shortcuts. Everyone was a human being and not a collection of descriptors. That included me. For the first time in my life, my empathy wasn’t an emotional disability, but something people valued. They related to my story. Or to the stories my imagination invented, the ones that came from my experience, my observations, my research. I worked very hard in those days; in fact, I’ve worked hard since I can remember, at everything I’ve done. The mediocrity had never worked hard on anything. He knew returning all people to a state of humanity at an institutional level meant his life would become more difficult. He couldn’t coast on his author-like looks; those days were evaporating, and although he championed writers of color online, and pretended to respect writers who were women, he resented having to compete with them. He was a teacher in name only.
“Why did you ask me here?” I said. “Do you need something?”
He explained that he needed to publish something, you had to publish every five or ten years, or they’d get suspicious of you and resentful of your place at the university, and that he’d arranged to put out an anthology through the university press, but that he needed big names to anchor it. He knew I had some tenuous connections—before I’d come to study with him, I’d studied at other residencies with famous novelists, and I knew people through my work at the literary journal. If you connect me with them, he said, I’ll publish one of your stories, too. That was the offer. A quid pro quo. I watched him. His eyes were washed out gray from the water and the lights and the whiskey. Anyone who glanced at us would see an older, more experienced author mentoring one of his students. Unless they looked closer. They’d see his fingers drumming the beer-sticky tabletop. Or they’d see my discomfort, the way I despised him.
“Exposure is good for a writer your age,” the mediocrity said. “Gets the pump primed.”
I wanted to vanish; I wanted to melt into the dark and the rain. Talking to this professor, I felt like I was lashed to the mast of a sinking ship, and I understood his fear might mean something else, that he was afraid of being alone. He knew what he was on some level. What he represented. He wanted to assure himself that we were alike. He was speaking to a person he thought of as a younger self, trying to rationalize his own choices and biases, the things that had brought him to this moment, and at the same time he wanted something, he wanted to further his career. He thought our conversation represented something like the unbroken chain of events stretching one out of the other in that Anton Chekhov story. He was trying to touch one end and make the other move. But this wasn’t a short story—this was my life, the goal I had set for myself, to become a writer. We were nothing alike.
I said none of the writers I knew wrote short stories. He’d have to look elsewhere.
I resented him for trying to use me to perform therapy on himself, and for assuming we had anything in common; I was grateful, too, and at the same time disgusted, because I understood that, if things had gone differently, I could have ended up like him, weaponizing my identity, believing my lies, using what talent I had to manipulate others. I stood up and said I had to go. He looked disappointed but didn’t try to stop me.
I walked from the bar up to Massachusetts Street and from there to the bridge overlooking the river. Rain kept falling but I’ve always liked the rain. I wore a baseball cap, a waterproof jacket, and sneakers I’d worn since college. But I was wet and stopped for a minute under the awning of an old hotel restaurant, The Harbinger, where abolitionists had once fought a battle against slavers a few years before the American Civil War. This was a frontier town in the middle of the country. Part of the Free State. Men and women and children had stood together here against slavery—Native Americans, Czech and German immigrants, Irish clergy and Black preachers, white Americans from New England, everyone who had a conscience. A Calvinist preacher had sent them Sharps rifles in boxes stamped BIBLES. Confederate sympathizers had burned the town. Killed dozens. Not that I was anything like them. I’m not. These are just stories. Everything is a story once it’s lived—history is a story, and the teller is important. You can’t look at them uncritically despite the pain it might cause you. I was thinking about how people are so proud of it, though. How other people had fought this battle and died to advance the cause of humanity for all people. How today we’re so eager to claim their victory as our own when there is still so much violence left unanswered by blood.
I smoked a cigarette and enjoyed the rain. Tomorrow, I decided, I’d write another story.
Born in 1984, Benjamin Pfeiffer is a writer with work in The Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kansas City Star, and The Rumpus, where he is an editor emeritus. He lives with his wife and daughter in Kansas City. You can find him online at benpaulpfeiffer.com.
