Nevergreen (A Novel)
Part I: Welcome to the Asylum, Ch. 1
In 2021 I published a novel about campus cancel culture, called “Nevergreen,” which happily did quite well. What I didn’t appreciate was just how prophetic it would turn out to be. It was no accident that it made generous use of inspiration from great books such as “Lord of the Flies” and “1984,” as today’s campuses resemble some synthesis of those rather than esteemed houses of learning. It also nailed it with respect to the deleterious impact on the Jews, nearly homicidal hatred toward whom has been on rather full display on too many campuses since October 7. Here’s the opening chapter to the novel, which is mostly set on a fictional campus called “Nevergreen”—the former home, not accidentally either, of a lunatic asylum. Full information, loads of endorsements, and order (it’s not expensive!) at https://andrewpessin.com/nevergreen/. (Note, too, my new novel “Bright College Years” will be out by the end of this month — check it out here.)
PART I: Welcome To The Asylum
1
He saw her from ten rows away, as she was coming down the aisle. The heavy bubble-themed sweater, the warm smile cast indiscriminately at the other passengers as she bobbed along. He dropped his eyes, anxiously glanced at the empty seat next to him, braced himself for the inevitable. “Good morning, friend!” the woman exuberated as she slipped her carry-on overhead and her carrion into the seat beside him.
Oh, good one, he thought; remember to tell Debra.
But now what to do? It was a long flight. The opening salvo could transition into an hours-long interchange. He was sure she was a wonderful person but that didn’t mean he should want to hear her story. He was sure he was himself not a bad person and he had no need to tell his story, he reminded himself. His fingers tightened on the book in his hand. This tome by Eco that Debra had given him, laden with obscure Italian history and all that gloomy antisemitism. Just the thing to briefly glance up from, perhaps nod, he reminded himself, then instantly return to. Maybe flash the cover as a reminder to maintain the appropriate social buffer zone.
“Oh I loved that book! He is a master!” the woman exclaimed with her smile, and then went on to offer what he had to admit were pretty good insights about the thing. She had settled in and, he noticed, did not remove anything to read or do as the plane took off. “So what do you do, J.?” she asked before he even realized she had somehow extracted his name—he preferred to go simply by his first initial—from him.
What did he do … Amazing how she cut right to the quick. But then again, as Debra had recently pointed out, it seemed like everything lately was the quick for him. “Look,” she said, reading the definition online, “‘the quick’ is any area of living flesh that is highly sensitive to pain or touch. That’s like the perfect metaphor for you. I say ‘good morning’ to you and you wince.”
“I can’t help it if I am ‘highly sensitive’ to lies and misrepresentation.”
“What?”
“‘Good’ morning.”
Debra sort of smiled, but then looked more closely at him. “And why are you wincing now?”
“Also highly sensitive,” he conceded, “to the truth.”
The truth was, of course, that there was nothing wrong with being a physician, and a reasonably successful one—even if he was losing faith in the contemporary practice of medicine, was painfully aware that every patient ended up deceased no matter how he treated them, and even more painfully aware that he had already crossed the hump of his own life and was very much on the descent. Yes, something was surely off lately, more than just lately. His gentle demeanor had developed rougher edges; his great capacity for compassion was declining; his once legendary sense of humor was becoming, how did Debra put it, more mythical. He was officially forbidden from engaging in what-iffery by his wife. And yet—
What did he do? The truth was, he didn’t know what he was doing.
With these thoughts in mind he returned to Brenda O’Brien (for she had shared her name), and made another effort to assert his misanthropy. “I’m a philosopher,” he stated matter-of-factly, wondering how someone so sensitive to misrepresentation had gotten so comfortable with the lying.
Not fully comfortable exactly, still not yet, saying this. It seemed pompous to call yourself a philosopher. And if there was one thing he wasn’t, it was pompous, although he did wonder whether it was pompous to deny one’s own pomposity. But anyway, he reminded himself, the pomposity was good since the whole point was to repel, to solicit the glazed eyes and disinterested “oh,” the turning away so that he could return (in this case) to the Eco novel—which despite (or perhaps because of) the heavy history and gloomy antisemitism was in fact rather compelling.
But not this time.
“A philosopher!” his new friend Brenda exclaimed, her eyes twinkling.
He groaned silently, realizing it was probably too late to go to Debra’s plan B and pretend he was deaf. Plan C, start speaking in tongues, maybe? Speaking in tongues, what an interesting expression, he thought. Glossolalia was the—
“So tell me,” Brenda had continued, oblivious to the anxious expression on his face, “what are some of your sayings?”
His sayings?
“I’m sorry?” he said, wondering if that qualified.
“Ha!” she laughed. “One of our philosophy professors had someone ask him that on a plane recently. Isn’t that delightful? But then I thought, why not? I am always looking for pithy ways of putting things, short, sharp insights. We are actually quite fond of slogans, you know. A word in time saves nine, and all that. And so I meet a philosopher, and I ask, what are some of your sayings. You never know, right?”
You never do know, he thought.
He who had in fact been reading some philosophy recently and over the years, with his already ancient interest in art history, in gargoyles, in tenebrism. With his dabbles into the history of medicine, a history which really was a long series of philosophical errors from olden times up until the very conference he was en route to attend. With his near obsession in recent years with the artistic representation of corpses, executions, dissections. He who between practicing medicine and reading everything by Eco and co-managing the three overgrown monsters who were their teenaged children had scribbled some three hundred pages about Rembrandt’s famous The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, and still hadn’t gotten much beyond the cadaver’s unflayed right hand. He who had even written a novel himself a hundred years back, already then trying to fill the void threatening, like a black hole, to suck up everything around it. It had simply never occurred to him that actual philosophers, who wrote all those articles and spoke at all those conferences and taught all those students, who apparently had something to say, should therefore have, you know, sayings.
And shouldn’t he—pretending to be one such philosopher?
In his head J. started running through some possibilities. “Never listen to a philosopher!” came immediately to mind. No; too annoyingly clever. “Follow your heart.” Too cloyingly cliché. “Every choice presents two options, the one we choose, and the one we instantly regret not having chosen.” Too—close to home. Some profundity? “God exists or not, and either way the implications are staggering.” Too damn profound. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”—perfect, if only someone (he thought Wittgenstein) hadn’t already said it. Tear down the wall: Pink Floyd and Ronald Reagan. I have a dream. All you need is love. Happiness is a warm puppy. All taken! What if, he asked himself, in a final desperate shot, the Hokey-Pokey is what it’s all about?
He had nothing.
He found himself experiencing a new sensation: he was actually speechless.
Unfortunately Brenda did not suffer from that problem. “That is so fascinating,” she said enthusiastically, breaking into the cocoa-tinged cardboard sticks the airline passed for chocolate. “You studied gargoyles in college? I love them. And I have never heard of ‘fugitive sheets.’ What was that word—eco-, ecor—?”
“‘Ecorché,’” J. said again quietly.
“And you have written an entire book about that single painting? It sounds so gruesome, and so fascinating. How lucky am I, to get such an interesting seatmate! I have many questions for you, Doctor. And the timing. It’s perfect. Uncanny, really. You know, I am having another one of my simply crazy ideas …”
Maybe Brenda O’Brien was not so dreadful after all, J. found himself thinking some time later. She was awfully enthusiastic, true, but in this case her enthusiasm was about him. And maybe he could do with a little enthusiasm about himself. The attempts at misanthropy required just so much effort, what with his continual backsliding into, what, philanthropy was not quite the word, but still, he supposed. And his long hours studying Dr. Tulp, staring at the man, staring at the strange off-center gazes of the pointy-bearded associates, wondering just who or what were they all looking at, or for, as if they were aware of someone, or something, a witness, a point, a purpose. There was no masking the fact that he felt tired, lately, so deeply tired, of his job, of his surly monsters, maybe even Debra with her ever-penetrating eyes directed at him—
By the end of the flight he found himself giving this woman in the heavy bubble-themed sweater a longer look—a little awkward, trapped in their seats with their faces only maybe two feet apart—and also found himself if not, well, enthusiastic, then at least entertained by, and entertaining, her proposition.
[To read more, please visit https://andrewpessin.com/nevergreen/]