The spokesman of his generation said with authority, “It’s about two warring groups of chiropodists. One group does it the natural way, looking for fungus and corns, and the other—”

  The nymphet interrupted, “What about the bunion?”

  The rock promoter said, “Society is the bunion. The bunion is us. That’s what I heard.”

  The hooker with a heart of gold added, “The chiropodists are just the prologue. The rest of the book is a social history, according to the New Yorker.”

  And the don’t swing that way said, “Oh.”

  J. liked the class. While he had to admit that the man didn’t look that good some mornings and tended to repeat anecdotes, often changing the ending depending on what was in the news that week, the class was held at 1 P.M. in a building close to the dining hall, and thus spectacularly convenient. That April J. enlisted in the takeover of the Dean’s Office to protest the lack of funds for the Afro-Am Department. It was an annual event, as much a token of spring as the cadre of fertilizer sprayers who roamed the Quad grass in plastic masks. The students filed a permit to take over the Dean’s Office, and the Dean took a few days off to go fishing until the university sent the customary “let’s open talks” letter to the students inside, who were pretty sick of each other after three days of sundry privation. Three or five days, depending on whether the takeover fell on a weekend. Fired up by Nkumreh’s tales of revolution, the front lines, the failed prison breakouts, that year’s sit-in was well attended and J. was sure he’d get laid. Beneath the Dean’s desk, or behind a filing cabinet filled with musky and aphrodisiac transcripts, surely he’d get laid, perhaps by one of the freshman girls who brought in soggy McDonald’s every couple of hours. All he got were back pains from sleeping in the hallway; the precious square feet of carpet space had already been claimed by the dashiki-clad upperclassmen, who had taken over the Dean’s Office the year before and prioritized. He was glad when he got to sleep in his bunk bed again, and drifted to slumber with the ease of the righteous.

  The prodigal son said, “I read how the second person voice hasn’t been used this effectively since the mid-eighties.”

  The Jew for Jesus uttered, “I thought it was nonfiction.”

  The postfeminist countered, “It’s a nonfiction novel.”

  And the twelve-stepper said, “Oh.”

  In the first class after the takeover of the Dean’s Office, they expected Nkumreh to praise their protest. To welcome them as comrades in the struggle. But he did not mention it. He talked about his maroon days in Cuba, and the Marxists he broke bread with, he discussed Pan-African consciousness and unity across borders. He began to miss a lecture here and there, and the head of Afro-Am Department, a German who had written books about Nietzsche and the natal alienation of the slave, filled in for him. Technically, Nkumreh had office hours, but when J. tried to go to them the man’s office was always dark, the receptionist no help. After lectures, Nkumreh picked up his satchel and scurried away and after a time the students learned that it was impossible to snag his attention despite their famous parents.

  The sex columnist pronounced, “In a weird way it’s a reinterpretation of Hamlet.”

  The analyst said, “And Joycean in its use of language.”

  The analysand said, “It’s a masterpiece.”

  The triskaidekaphobic added five and eight without unease. The substituting big black guy when really meaning to say nigger related a tale about a misunderstanding at an ATM. A man crouched on all fours and barked like a dog when the drugs hit.

  The man of the hour, Godfrey Frank, was popular on talk shows, he left his deep tread in popular magazines and sent the junketeers scurrying for cover. It Came from Academia: Frank shambled through the media like a creature from a science fiction film, a monster whose mutant gigantism he could doubtless locate in nuclear-age anxiety, cold war terror. He could write about anything it seemed, from baseball to hip-hop to weapons manufacturers, hold forth on historicized interpretations of ladies underwear while sprinkling in obscure double entendres for the Medievalists in the cheap seats. Articles written by the man (or cooed into microcassette and then later transcribed by a succession of Women’s Studies majors who all shared a prominent body part adored by the cultural studies demiurge) sometimes appeared a few pages distant from articles about the man, profiles that included photographs of Frank perched pensive on Le Corbusier furniture, legs crossed, eyes fixed simultaneously on the high and the low. He quoted French theorists who liked to inflate helpless nouns with rhetorical gases until they burst into italics, and did some inflating of his own. The nouns were never the same after that. A Chiropodist in Pangea was said to be his breakout book, his release from the university press ghetto. That was the word in publishing circles. It was getting raves everywhere.

  A cover girl dared to eat a peach and another vomited in the little girls’ room. The groupies and the hangers-on equipped with strategic filofaxes giggled among themselves for a moment before trolling for the famous.

  No, the junketeers were not fond of Godfrey Frank. He was an outsider who had connived his way into their world of free events as if he were a celebrity. But he was not: he was an academic. Despite their hatred of him, the junketeers came here tonight because it was the best party going in Schadenfreude City, and they wheeled and dipped, ripping sinew from this carcass lately thrown up on their feeding grounds: top shelf, fat olive, chicken saté. Uptown at the Waldorf, the great-great-granddaughter of a wealthy nineteenth-century industrialist who still had plenty of money after the trust-busters robbed him of his empire announced her new charity, but there was no open bar, according to the word around town, and the junketeers stayed away. Downtown in a gallery, a painter who specialized in the whimsical desecration of corporate logos in order to make a point about consumer society and to extend the brittle dominion of irony held a party for his latest show, but his publicity firm had a reputation for thin white wine and supermarket cheese, and the junketeers stayed away. They came here.

  The priapic stroked themselves to swift release under the tables and wiped themselves with cocktail napkins. The trust fund babies invited the rough trade back to the apartment papa bought for them, got more than they reckoned for and bled on catalog sheets before falling asleep with a smile.

  A publicist he recognized from stress-born nightmares and events like this grabbed his hand. Short moussed spines erupted from her scalp to repel predators and a ring of metal in her left nostril helped the behaviorists track her movements through glittery habitat. He couldn’t hear what she said for the music and he couldn’t remember her name for the inebriation associated with her every appearance in his life. She smiled, withdrew a promotional CD from her expensive and artificially distressed messenger bag and deposited it in his hand. It was warm and moist. Then she scampered off to spread the rest of her spoor around her territory, until her bag was completely evacuated.

  The recently liposucked found their palms falling farther than usual to pat new and improved thighs and at this sensation their eyes widened in astonishment, which was taken for animated interest by the food critic, who continued to describe Chef Jean-Phillipe’s cassoulet. Those who longed for the days of the Algonquin round table could think of nothing witty to say because they were not witty people.

  J. made his way through densities. He stepped on the high-heeled hoof of a woman whose face was a fright mask that did not change as he caused her injury. He accidentally and without realizing dislodged a gimlet from a man’s hand, but the man did not protest because he was afraid of black people and in a subfloor of his consciousness thought perhaps he deserved it because he had made a killing that day while others shambled through the metropolis without cappuccino machines, sans arugula, pestoless. J. joined a human tributary that had eroded a course between canyons of the standing still, he trusted that the waif in front of him would not dawdle or stop. He gave himself to the current, the sure freckles on the back of the waif in front of him and the jostling idiot behind him who nibbled at the back of his shoes. J. put his hands in the air and looked at them as they grasped at the cardboard mobiles, the glossy vodka bottles blossoming on invisible wire, he looked as he spread his fingers wide in the air. No one noticed, and he did not expect them to. The diva shrieked through the sound system, addling the neighbors once again, and the waif took him to the altar, fellow traveler, fellow pilgrim, guided by the same instinct now hectoring J. They stood before the open bar.

  The hip-hop artist in heavy rotation on the video music channel lost his clip-on gold tooth in the hummus. The man with no name accidentally revealed it after his third martini: Melvin. The rock star who just got clean fell off the wagon, or on the spike as the case may be.

  At the bar J. beached on a khaki shoal that turned out to be Dave Brown. Dave Brown had both his elbows bracketed into the bar to keep himself steady. The old-timer’s arm moved in a slim arc, like a robot on a production line; when he wanted to sip his drink, it pivoted on the knob of his elbow. This technique kept the shakes at bay. The junketeers nodded at each other, sopping but safe for a moment from the vengeful tides behind them. Dave Brown introduced J. to a woman on his left, a woman whose eyes shimmered beneath scythe eyebrows. Dave Brown tendered her name and credentials, she was an editor at woman’s magazine, and J. had heard her name damned from this man’s lips at an event two days ago, an event much like this. She smiled as Dave Brown offered J.’s credentials, the slim capillaries in her pink nostrils dilating as if she were taking this information into her very bloodstream, and then she turned around to talk to another darling.

  “Can you believe this?” Dave Brown asked. The junketeer’s head panned across the room. “All this for him. Criminy I have to get my act together.” His arm arced over to his drink. “You see anyone else out there?”

  J. said, “I think I saw One Eye and Jimmy the Turk on the other side of the room.”

  “The rest’ll be here soon,” Dave Brown decided. “Not much else going on tonight.” He looked down at J.’s palm. “What do you think of the song?” he asked.

  J. tried to make out the song coming from the speakers, but the ponderous beat effaced it whenever he identified a note or two. “Don’t know, what is it?” he asked.

  “Not that song—that,” Dave Brown said, pointing at the CD. J. still had it in his hand and he held it up to the purple light emanating from behind the bottles in the bar. The name of the song was “Awestruck Post-Struct Superstar,” and the performing artist was billed as Godfrey Frank with Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions.

  “What’s this?”

  “That’s the CD that comes with every copy of the book. He’s singing now.” Dave Brown shook his head. “I really have to get my act together.”

  It occurred to J. that Dave Brown had been around, he had forded shifting and treacherous trends, a hobo of pop, and had seen many things. J. asked his comrade if he’d heard about Nkumreh’s death. Dave Brown plucked the lemon twist out of his martini and sucked it, gnawed it. He said he used to party with him in Bob Rafelson’s house in the early seventies. The Panthers, he said, always had the best coke. Then something shifted on the far end of the room eventually but inevitably triggering a local effect: a sudden eddy that whisked Dave Brown to another corner, to a mellow grotto where there were couches and the media mercenary could rest for a few minutes and drink in peace. J. was left alone at the bar holding the CD. He leaned over and tried to get the bartender’s attention.

  The social climbers clambered unimpeded. The walking wounded realized that time heals all wounds after spying a new object of obsession. The spoken word artist skipped his inner beat and everything he said came out wrong, lyrical and classically cadenced.

  J. had seen them perform once, some time ago at record release party: Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions, a pop group in moribund drag. A few years before, bands from their hometown had made it big by fomenting a new sound that critics and record company executives believed would save rock and roll from the gloomy tyranny of European drone and inner-city armageddon. The bands from that hometown were an angry bunch who had converted their pain into a dread palatable for mainstream radio, a zippy melancholy, and Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions played the game by secreting their sweet pop in thrashing and deadly arrangements. A wah-wah pedal helped exceedingly. A record company signed them on the basis of their place of origin and their willingness to adapt to the new flavor of pop. But things did not go as planned. After two years, the children tired of the new sound. Even the parents were no longer afraid and found themselves humming minor chords while driving to work, signing contracts, closing the deal. The bands of the new sound broke up, or went into rehab, or put out records that were perceived to have betrayed their early promise. Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions, the epigonic poseurs, found themselves in a difficult position when the big record label dropped them after an even newer sound appeared on the scene, antidote to and savior from, according to the arbiters of taste, the last new sound.

  The just last week stomach stapled felt something give. The fond of comparing every civic discomfort to the days of Nazi Germany complained about alternate side of the street parking. The hypocritical said they would never do such a thing.

  Until the band was saved by Godfrey Frank. In a long and heavily footnoted article in a popular music magazine, Godfrey Frank smeared away the muck to reveal the bubblegum underneath. He situated them in a lineage of the Dionysian going back centuries, he located their Thanatotic flourishes as a necessary guise in the final days of a self-conscious century, he outed them as a canny pop band just in time for the demise of the new sound and rescued them from the bargain bins. Critics, insecure about their lack of academic grounding and ignorance of music history before the dusty advent of the blues, reversed themselves; radio station programmers placed the band’s next single in strategic slots. Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions befriended Frank and hired him as a consultant on their new video. And this was the final miracle. He went after the adults without pretense. The video’s conceit dispatched the formerly shabby rockers into the re-created sets of a television show popular when the older demographic was young, and the sight of Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions attired in the bright and lively gear of the television characters they had loved in their youth tickled them, on repeated viewings warmed them inexplicably, reminding them perhaps of easier times, loosening the intractable fear that seized them every minute of the day. Fire Drill and the Orderly Fashions, skinning knees in sitcom mischief to a merry tune, comforted them, more than hedge funds and acupuncture, and made them whole.

  J. read on the CD, This song is a special limited edition companion single available only with the purchase of A Chiropodist in Pangea by Godfrey Frank.

  The so happy they could bust a gut did so, and the content with their lot in life grew more comfortable with their self-definition. The op-ed columnist had no op on Ed, the rent boy with a line for every occasion, but particularly ones like this, particularly for women like her.

  J. had spent the afternoon filing a piece for a consumer electronics magazine. The manufacturer of a digital video playback device had sent him a model of the machine, gratis, and the film companies mailed him free copies of movies formatted for the device. But something was amiss. It was a gloomy occasion. This particular gadget had debuted at the same time as another with identical capabilities, and even though this evil sibling was more expensive and less efficient, the public had chosen, had spoken, had decided that this other device was the one they wanted for digital playback of their favorite classic films and recent box office smashes. The device J. was assigned to write about had already been discontinued, and the film companies were no longer going to produce disks for the machine. But all concerned had a backlog of product they wanted to get rid of, they gave incentives to retail salesmen, the men on the floor, to move the stuff off the shelves and to lie to the hopefully uninformed, who wanted and needed a new digital playback device and might invest in the hapless superannuated boxes. The vested companies advertised heavily in the consumer electronic magazine. J. had an article to write.

  The biracial who adopted a superficial militancy to overcompensate for light skin discussed the perfidy of ice people with the gangster rapper ashamed of a placid upbringing in a middle-class suburb. The queasy at the sight of blood and the weak of stomach found new fortitude.

  It was a tale of doomed technology and ruined hopes, an old oft-told story. Star-crossed since the implementation of its marketing scheme lo those many months before, the device never had a chance. Years from now white dudes with goatees who had never been loved in high school and so channeled their sexuality into the fringe and obscure would rescue the device from a dusty nook in a hip trash store and revive the machine, deify it in the name of kitsch. Name a zine after it. But the travails of this future pop sect did J. no good. He had a job to do and described resolution, picture quality, packaging. He used the word pixel. It was unrecognized by the spellchecker of his word processing program. His profession usually called for him to justify to the people out there the indispensability of this or that artifact to their lifestyles. Now he was trying to praise an object that would not exist in a few months to those who had already voted with their electronics store credit cards against its usefulness. The device did not increase their self-esteem, it did not percolate joy in their blank hearts, it did not gather and glue the potsherds of their fragile psyches. He wrote the piece about the dead machine, faxed it in to a number that answered shrilly, and then he read about the dead man in the newspaper he purchased at the corner bodega.