The Night In Question by Tobias Wolff Read Free Book Online Page B

they were looking at him. Finally he decided to give a straight lecture. He talked about Melville’s exposure of the contradictions in human law, which claims to serve justice while it strengthens the hand of the property owner, even when that property is human. This was one of Wiley’s pet subjects, the commodification of humanity. As he warmed to it he forgot the condition of his face and assumed his habitual patrol in front of the class, head bent, hands in his pockets, one eye cocked in a squint. He related this story to the last one they’d read, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” quoting with derisory, operatic exaggeration the well-intentioned narrator who cannot understand the truculence of a human being whom he has tried to turn into a Xerox machine. And this was not the voice of some reactionary fascist beast, Wiley said, jingling his keys and change as he paced the room. This was the voice of modern man—modern, enlightened, liberal man.
    He had worked himself into that pitch of indignation where everything seemed clear to him, evil and good and all the sly imitations of good that lay in wait for the unwary pilgrim. At such moments he forgot himself entirely. He became Scott Fitzgerald denouncing the foul dust that floated in Gatsby’s wake, Jonathan Swift ridiculing bourgeois complacency by suggesting a crime so obscene it took yourbreath away, yet less obscene than the crimes ordinary people tolerated without a second thought.
    And what happened to Bartleby, Wiley said, was only a hint of things to come. “Look at the multinationals!” he said. And then, not for the first time, he described the evolution of business-school theory to its logical conclusion, high-tech factories in the middle of foreign jungles where, behind razor-wire fences guarded by soldiers and dogs, tribesmen who had never seen a flush toilet were made to assemble fax machines and laptop computers. A million Bartlebys, a billion Bartlebys!
    Wiley didn’t have the documentation on these jungle factories; it was something someone had told him, but it made sense and was right in tune with the spirit of late-twentieth-century capitalism. It sounded true enough to make him furious whenever he talked about it. He finished his lecture with only a few minutes to go before the bell. He felt very professional. It was no mean feat, getting your ass kicked at two in the morning and giving a dynamite lecture at nine. He asked his students if they had any questions. None of them did, at first. Wiley heard whispers. Then a girl raised her hand, shyly, almost as if she hoped he wouldn’t notice. When Wiley called on her she looked at the boy across the aisle, Robbins, and said, “What color were they?”
    Wiley did not understand the question. She looked over at Robbins again. Robbins said, “They were black, right?”
    “Who?”
    “The guys that jumped you.”
    Wiley had always liked this boy and expected him to learn something in here, to think better thoughts than his FBI-agent father who griped to the principal about Wiley’s reading list. Wiley leaned against the blackboard. “I don’t know,” he said.
    “Yeah, right,” Robbins said.
    “I really don’t think so,” Wiley said. This sounded improbably vague even to him, so he added, “It was dark. I couldn’t see them.”
    Robbins gave a great shout of laughter. Some of the other students laughed too; then one of them hit a wild note that sent everyone into a kind of fit. “Quiet!” Wiley said, but they kept laughing. They were beyond his reach; all he could do was stand there and wait for them to stop. Wiley had three black students in this class, two girls and a boy. They stared at their books in exactly the same way, as if by agreement, though they were sitting in different parts of the room. At the beginning of the year they’d always sat together, but now they drifted from desk to desk like everyone else. They seemed to feel at home in his class. And that was what he wanted, for