The philosophy student in Harlem wanted to talk about whether all suffering is alike. “Let’s say you get bullied in high school, and I get raped by a trusted teacher. For both of us, it’s the worst suffering we’ve ever experienced, and we both learn from it, want vengeance, develop neuroses, et cetera. Then we meet, and I tell you my pain and you tell me yours. Am I wrong to think yours is trivial? Can we even sensibly compare?” With her, you picked a side just to end the argument. “I think yes. Different in scale, but similar in kind.” She nodded, had expected that thoughtless position, explained why I was wrong, then let me undress her. Of course, it is always easier to lose an argument. Later, very late, I woke up starving. Her floor was littered with books, clothes, a hair straightener I’d never seen her use. I stood naked in her dark kitchen and made myself four eggs, wincing as they cracked on the pan. I was prepared, if she woke, to defend myself on the grounds that eggs were the only food in her apartment and that she had worn my boxers to bed. One thing I liked about her was that she respected logic. The rows of blue lockers were just the most tangible way that the law school was like high school. But it’s not just that the place was like high school; it’s that it made me like I had been in high school. Suddenly I was aware of social status again, and sometimes I cared about it. Same with resumé lines. Ninety percent of the work felt merely obligatory. I was both lazy and ambitious, confident and fraudulent. I missed the time when it had been good enough in life to be precocious. People told me I was in love with a classmate, let’s call her Mary. When he was drunk, Brendan would corner me and whisper that he was rooting for us to work out. It was too well known that I tried to date Mary once. We were still friends and I was protective of her, harboring the paranoid certainty that everyone else adored her the way I did. She was charismatic and mean, but always apologetic about it; not chaste,
FICTION | 13