I breathe out, my ribs protesting sharply. My body, too weak with relief to move, slumps to the schist. A hot tear runs down my cheek, burning as salt slicks a bloody scrape, and I start to sob. Through tears, I see something moving on the wall. At first I’m grossed out, thinking it’s a roach or a rat, but it’s too big and blocky. Then it falls. It’s a brick. Then another slides out of the wall and crashes to the ground next to me. I try to push myself up to run, but the alley shifts and what was the brick wall is now the ceiling, its bricks falling down on me as the wall crumbles apart. I get to my knees and more bricks rain down. One hits my shoulder and I hear bone crunch. I slump back down as more fall, the alley collapsing around me.
The bricks hit every part of my body except my head, busting my bones to dust, pinning my limbs to the ground like the frog I dissected in high school biology. Then brick hits brick, burying me, leaving only my head untouched. Then, finally, they cover my head, my face, and I’m in darkness, feeling each excruciating shock as more fall. I’m alone in the dark as my air runs out. Then I hear a voice, far away and echoey. I try to call out but can’t, and the voice recedes. How long I’m stuck there depends. It’s just darkness and pain as my breath runs out. Then I wake up gasping, my body tensed against the pain.
I know. It’s just a dream and I’m a grown man. But it leaves me shaky every time because though the bricks collapsing didn’t really happen, of course—Ginger jokes that I’ve listened to The Wall too many times—the rest of it did.
WHEN I started grad school I had no idea what to expect. I hadn’t taken the college classes the rest of my cohort had, or read the books. I’d never heard of the literary theorists they mentioned and when one friendly girl with a shiny blonde braid asked if I was a deconstructionist, I told her I worked demolition in the summers if she needed something deconstructed. She laughed with me, bumping me companionably on the shoulder, except that I wasn’t laughing because I had no idea what the joke was. Then she blushed. I thought I’d said something offensive and opened my mouth to apologize, but she looked offended and walked away, muttering something about anti-intellectual posturing.
I didn’t speak in class because it quickly became clear that I had no idea what anyone was talking about. I read the books and the journal articles. Sometimes I read them twice. I knew I understood them because I noticed in class when someone misrepresented an idea or got a minor plot point wrong. The part I was missing, I realized little by little, wasn’t the brains or the memory—or even the creativity. It was the language of academia with which my classmates seemed to come preloaded. They had gone to Ivy League schools and large research universities. They named the professors they’d taken classes with in college and the others nodded, as if they were talking about rock stars.
At first I didn’t admit that I’d gone to community college for my first two years’ worth of credits, working two jobs to pay for them over the course of four years. That it was only on the strength of one of my professors’ recommendation that I was able to transfer to Temple for one final year. That I’m pretty sure the only reason I got into Penn for grad school to begin with is because I was a first generation college student who’d made good. Not that admitting anything was much of an issue because I didn’t have any in-depth conversations with anyone. I could never go to their parties because I was always working. I often couldn’t go to department lectures and guest panels for the same reason.
Finally, in May, I had a meeting with Marisol Jett, the chair of the department, to discuss how the year had gone, one of the requirements of my first-year scholarship. I’d had a class with Marisol that semester, but I didn’t know her well. She intimidated me. At first I told her everything was wonderful, I appreciated the opportunity, I was thankful for the assistance—all the crap I’d learned to say to the people who bankrolled things I could never afford otherwise over the years.
But she snorted and smiled and called bullshit. She was straight with me—told me I had to start attending lectures and going to departmental functions, had to start speaking in class and getting involved. When I tried to explain how behind I felt—trying to find a way to express it that didn’t make it seem like they shouldn’t have taken a chance on me—she told me that she’d read my written work and that I had no reason not to be speaking in class. And she wouldn’t hear any more about it. In fact, she seemed to have a pretty good idea what was going on with me in general. Without my needing to say anything, she told me that if a job was interfering with my attending functions, then I needed to reconsider my schedule or think about a loan. She told me that my fellow classmates would benefit from my perspectives just as I had learned from theirs. And she told me something that shaped everything that happened after.