The Phenomenal Identity of Self-Immolation

 Leda Levine had a crush. One of those horrible crushes that literally, physically crushes your soul. Sometimes her heart hurt so bad that she’d have to stop whatever she was doing and just stand still, arms wrapped protective around her shoulders until the pain stopped. 

The crush was on her sociology professor.

Which was not her normal sort of thing, not at all. She was a smart-person, an ideas-person. Not a person who needed to find sexual titillation in what was a perfectly fascinating academic course. While her friends were out partying, hooking up, she was at the library every night finishing her reading—Marx, Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Edward Said—because what she wanted was to know everything. Desire, for her, was about information. She couldn’t ingest it fast enough, and meanwhile there was more and more of it being generated every day.

Normally. But these were not normal times. The new, horrible president had just been elected and things were all fucked up. Everything was crazy, and everyone was upset.

The students in her classes showed up drunk, sobbed in the hallways, wore black clothing and newly-purchased Black Lives Matter pins, marched through the library shouting No Justice, No Peace!  

Leda’s roommate Hadar stayed in bed for days, subsisting on Cheetos and hot toddies made from whiskey and bottled lemon juice and English breakfast tea.

Whenever Leda asked, “Are you okay?” Hadar would answer: “I just can’t believe everyone is so racist.”

“I know,” is what Leda said.

She remembered how Hadar used to freak out about Leda being Jewish. Every time it came up: when Leda lit her own menorah at Chanukah, mentioned her bat mitzvah, read a few words in Hebrew.

How can you be Jewish and Chinese?

Leda would remind her: Chinese is a nationality. Jewish is a religion.

I’ve never met any Jewish people who were Chinese, Hadar would say. Or, as if it were the same thing: No one at my synagogue was Chinese.

In California where Leda grew up, there were tons of people who were Jewish and Chinese.

Hadar was from upstate New York. Sometimes instead of saying Leda was Jewish, she would say, Your father is Jewish.

Which was true. Leda’s father, Professor Richard Levine, was Jewish.

But he was way less Jewish than Leda’s mother, Susannah Huang Rothstein, who was, it was true, Chinese—Taiwanese, to be specific, though she had lived in California since the age of five—but who had converted when she married Leda’s father. Leda’s Chinese mother was the one who had arranged the holidays in the Levine household, said the prayers over the menorah, prepared the Seder plate on Passover, pulled the Haggadot from the top shelf of the linen closet, who insisted on reading every tedious passage before anyone could eat.

Now she was married to a different Jewish guy. Leda’s stepfather, Chip Rothstein.

Leda’s father had a girlfriend, Sandra Chen, who was Chinese but not Jewish. 

At college, Leda’s friends were mostly white. Mostly everyone there was white. After the election, none of them could believe how racist everyone was. They would turn to Leda and say things like, White people really suck, don’t we?

She never knew what she was supposed to say back to them.

Leda didn’t feel like drinking or protesting or hashing it out in conversation. What she felt was a dark empty hole in her chest. If she inhaled too hard, her breath caught and she tasted blood.  Something primordial sickly wound, a knee scraped bloody, the smell of vomit in an elementary school hallway. Her father packing a suitcase, her mother screaming curses at him.

That feeling when you remembered that safety didn’t really exist.

Six days after the election, her sociology professor, Rajendra Mukherjee, turned to the class and said: People of color need to rise up in solidarity to defeat white supremacy.

The class was Sociology 132. Theories of Multiculturalism, a requirement for her political science major. She loved the reading—no textbook, just a huge packet of articles by people like Edward Said and Audre Lorde—and it was her only class with more non-white students than white ones. Which made her feel a little nervous, like she wasn’t sure whether she could be as smart as she wanted to be about theories of multiculturalism, to be of value to this multicultural room. There was an essay coming up, and Leda wanted to ace it.

Leda sat in front, in all her classes. So as Professor Mukherjee’s gaze circled the room, she didn’t know whether he was looking at the white students—daring them to challenge him—or the Black, Latin and Asian students—daring them to rise up.

She didn’t know, when he said people of color, whether that meant someone like her. Someone who’d never been followed through a store on suspicion of shoplifting, even when she had actually been shoplifting. Someone who’d grown up in a suburb known for its outstanding public schools. Someone who’d taken six years of private cello lessons as a child, who currently had a ten thousand dollar cello in the corner of her dorm room. Someone who’d been called Chinese all her life, even though she was born in California. Someone whose father was a white guy from Brooklyn.

She flinched when Professor Mukherjee’s eyes reached hers, scared to discover: was she invited to the uprising?

Yes, his eyes said. Welcome.

Then they locked in.

She felt it, a click, a falling into place.

They were the only two people in the room. His eyes holding hers, pinning her in place. Big, dark eyes in smooth brown skin, knowing wrinkles just along the edges. His face human in a way it hadn’t been before, intimate like a portrait. A smile of recognition. Of comradery. A slight, inquisitive squint.

In her mind, a flash: the two of them, Leda and Professor Mukherjee, at a well-designed urban-hipster playground, pushing two smiling, squealing children on the swing set.

Which was odd. Such an odd vision that it jolted her out of the spell.

She’d never had a fantasy about kids, not ever. She was ninety percent sure she didn’t want kids.

She blinked, startled. Professor Mukherjee was on with his lecture. She turned her head one way and the other, expecting to see people staring at her like something weird had just happened. But no, everyone around her was the same as normal, flipping through their notebooks, playing with their phones.

After that, it was like there was a spell on her, like she’d gotten stuck. No matter where her body was, her mind, or some large section of it, was still in the classroom under the assessing gaze of Professor Mukherjee. In the dining hall eating cereal in her pajamas, in the hall lounge as she reviewed for her poli sci test. Squirming on the ugly dorm armchair, the restlessness painful in her muscles. People of color, she could hear him saying, and rise up, and solidarity. She saw his eyes, the anger and intelligence in them, the way they softened when they fell on her.

That playground scene. Leda and Professor Mukherjee and their two beautiful toasty-brown babies.

She tried to read the week’s assigned articles from the packet, her normal Sunday morning study session in the library. The article on the table in front of her was about colonialism, the cultural imperialism exercised by the colonizer over the colonized. How the colonized—they were called the subaltern meaning they were below others in the society—were robbed of their own narratives. She got that much, but not much else. It was all semiotics and the failings of deconstructionism and then so, so many words she didn’t understand. Also there was a large section of the essay where women in India set themselves on fire.

Usually she loved this kind of thing. A long, barely comprehensible piece of critical theory, a small piece of a secret world, and she would be welcomed in, if only she could decode it.

The phenomenal identity of self-immolation, she read. A long shared table in a silent library, the serious students up early and laser focused on their work. She blinked, tried again. Self-immolation if performed in certain places rather than in a certain state of enlightenment.

All she could decode was that this text had come from Professor Mukherjee, and that this made it special. 

What was he doing this weekend, she wondered? Was he working right now, reading this same article as he prepared for tomorrow’s class? Was he, like her father the English professor, in his office writing six hours per day, every day, no exceptions for weekends or holidays or even family vacations?

Maybe he was out at a protest. Expressing his solidarity with other people of color. 

She remembered how he had said it, people of color, how he had looked right at her.

She imagined him here, watching her try to read the article. How he would be disappointed in her, her lack of focus. She looked back at the article, but it was a sea of words: caste provenance and sanctioned suicide and anteriority transformed into stasis.

She texted her best friend Maddie, even though it was three hours earlier in California and Maddie was definitely still asleep.

I think I’m in love with my sociology professor. 

Which made her feel better, to tell somebody, at the same time it made her feel like the most horrible, ridiculous person on earth.

By the time Maddie texted back, Leda was taking a lunch break at the vegan fast food restaurant near campus. Still trying to read the article, but not really, more staring out the window. Out on the sidewalk, students were marching by with signs, chanting about fascism and banging on drums. Leda wondered if she should just give up studying and join them.

That’s when her phone buzzed. Is he married?

She put her veggie burger down. Ew, I don’t know, she texted back. She had said she might be in love with him. She didn’t say she wanted to, like, date him or anything.

He was her professor.

Still, she looked him up on her phone. Yeah, he was married. To a very attractive Indian woman, put-together with good makeup. Only a couple pictures on his page, nothing about kids, so she clicked on the wife. A good handful of pictures there, public photos that Leda could stare at for minutes at a time, several times a day without anyone knowing. The wife at a restaurant with friends. Professor Mukherjee giving a talk. The two of them all dressed up in a Bandhgala and Sari, cheek to cheek at someone’s wedding. He was beaming, a huge joyous smile like nothing Leda had seen from him during class. The wife serene, her gaze fixed on something out of view. 

Leda was getting grease all over her phone screen, but she didn’t bother wiping it off. She scrolled through all the wife’s photos looking for evidence of reproduction.

If Professor Mukherjee didn’t have kids, then Leda wasn’t a bad person for fantasizing about his wife, say, leaving him for her massage therapist. Right?

Nope, there they were: the kids. Two of them, lovely plump toddlers, close in age. A series of family portraits, taken at a park, everyone dressed in shades of white and beige.

And something familiar. A swing set. The two children laughing as Professor Mukherjee pushed, sun low on the horizon behind them.

Something tugged hard in her chest when she saw it. It was just how she’d imagined him with his children. Exactly like that image that had popped into her head, in opposition to every ounce of logical reasoning she possessed, of she and Professor Mukherjee raising their babies together. 

Leda stared at that photo all week.

For minutes at a time, all day long, as though it were a puzzle she could solve. Peered at it under her desk during lectures, gazed at it in the dark just before she fell asleep each night. Professor Mukherjee’s children. Perfect, just as she had imagined them, the whole scene so perfect. Something she’d never wanted any part of, not the tiniest bit. Now, suddenly, every nerve in her body ached from the want.

How did this happen to me, she wrote in her journal. When did I become normal?

She stared at the picture until the wanting made her feel sick with self-disgust. Then she looked at pictures of the wife. She hated the wife, this strikingly poised woman that she would probably admire in normal life, hated her with a primal aggression even more disturbing than the lust for her husband.

In class, Leda couldn’t do anything but stare at him like she’d stared at the photo, mesmerized by his performance. He would pace back and forth, waving his arms in big, sweeping gestures to indicate the size of the ideas: structural inequality, de-facto segregation, transitional justice. She tried to take notes, but they were just a string of phrases that didn’t make sense together, meaningless snippets that sounded pretty coming from his mouth.

She studied every facial expression, every movement. What was it that made him so special? Why, when she was supposed to be listening to his words, could she only see the delicate angle of his jawline where it met his neck, the expressiveness of his hands, the way his bulky hamstrings challenged the fit of his suit pants?

She started to get nervous before class, couldn’t eat anything all morning. She’d show up shaky and wrecked, tired from whatever was in the news, the president’s sneering, contemptuous voice on the radio. Hadar was listening to NPR nonstop, like she was trying to catch up on all the caring about politics she hadn’t done for the previous nineteen years of her life.

Leda kept waiting for Professor Mukherjee to tell the class what to do. She was ready for her marching orders, ready to rise up in solidarity with her fellow people of color. But aside from the occasional snarky political comment, all did was lecture about post-colonialism like it was any other class, while she tried, as best as she could, to listen.

Her essay came back with a note: See me in office hours.

She knew why. It was a horrible essay. The worst essay she had ever written. She had tried to connect the idea of the subaltern to the presidential election. The people who voted for the president, Leda had argued, thought of themselves as subaltern because they were working class, or uneducated, or white in a society that was beginning to question the views of white people. In their minds, they were the oppressed minority, fighting for representation.

It had seemed like a good idea, but her paper didn’t make any sense. It wandered in confused loops, sometimes arguing that the poor, uneducated white people really were oppressed, or at least losing power as they believed themselves to be, and sometimes that they were not oppressed at all, that everything in their country was designed specifically around their needs, desires and comforts. She had stayed up all night trying to make some sense of this contradiction, but it was too deep in the roots of the paper. If she took out one piece, the whole thing would fall apart. The quotes she had chosen kept proving the opposite of what she wanted them to, so she found different ones, swapped out half the quotes without changing the analysis afterwards, switched back to the original quotes. She slapped on a title and a shaky conclusion at the end, printed it out five minutes before it was due in class.

The thought of explaining herself, her shoddy work, in Professor Mukherjee’s office made her want to throw up.

Her paper was already on the desk when she arrived, as though he knew she would be coming to this particular office hour, on this particular day, even though there were no appointments and she could have chosen any of his five weekly hours. Maybe he had seen her lurking in the hallway. She had been out there for at least five minutes, taking deep breaths through her nose, steadying her stomach with calm, relaxing mantras: this will not kill you.

He smiled, a little tense. She took a seat on the empty chair in front of his desk, tried to find a good spot on the floor for her backpack so it would lean on the chair legs and not fall over and spill all her crap everywhere. It was like being on trial, except the judge was also some kind of celebrity you had always dreamed of meeting in person. Or the judge was some kind of magician who had the power to destroy your heart. It was maybe the most simultaneously exciting and horrifying thing she had ever felt. 

He got up and closed the door behind her.

Her stomach sunk. This was going to be very, very bad. She decided to blame it on the election.

“Your essay,” he said, sitting back down. His desk was neat, just one tidy stack of papers off to the side. She scanned the room for pictures of his family, found them on the bookshelf behind him, two framed photographs. Both pictures she had seen, studied for hours: he and his wife at the wedding. He and his kids at the playground. 

“I know,” she said.

“I was intrigued by your argument.” Still smiling, a little tense. She could see the shadow of stubble on his chin. “I was hoping you could tell me more about it.”

“You were?” She wondered if this was a trap. Maybe he thought she had plagiarized it. But then, it was clearly too horrible to be plagiarized. “It was just, the election had me really stressed out.”

His smile relaxed a little, some of the tension falling away. “I’ve been stressed about it, too,” he said. An honest smile, like he was relieved about something. His eyes, as she tried to read them, so dark and intense, something sad, something confessional. His eyes holding her gaze, and then:

A playground, a swing set, Leda and Professor Mukherjee pushing two chubby babies in the fading light of a late afternoon.

She blinked. Blinked again, trying to break out of it. Rubbed her hand over her eyes, over her face, until it was mostly gone.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked.

He didn’t wait for her answer. A bottle came out of a desk drawer, two small glasses. He was pouring golden liquid.

“I’ve been extremely stressed,” he said. “About the election. Like as in, it’s taking a toll on my work. On my life.” 

She studied him, as he pushed a glass in her direction, pulled his chair a little closer. His face, the composed jawline she had studied so many times, wasn’t so composed now. Up close, his cheeks were fleshy, his neck becoming a little loose as he approached middle-age. It was that look of adult men, that meaty, filled-out look that was both attractive and scary.

“Does it make you feel alone?” Professor Mukherjee asked. “Being so stressed all the time?”

The babies were there again. In her mind so strong, it was like he was forcing them into her brain. No longer sweet and peaceful, but menacing. Babies in the harsh glare of the setting sun, babies set as a trap to lure her in.

She stood up, grabbed her backpack, and ran out the door.

When Leda told her counselor she needed to drop Sociology 132, he frowned.

“So late in the term,” he said. “There would need to be a serious reason.”

She hadn’t been back to Professor Mukherjee’s class for three weeks. For the first week, she hadn’t gone to any classes at all. Each day she had left the dorm room in the morning, intending a day of lectures and homework. Instead, she found herself wandering around town, aimless. Sitting in coffee shops, watching other students studying, scrolling through news sites on her phone but never clicking on the stories. Peeking into bookstores, scanning the shelves for something useful, something that would explain.

Nothing was going to explain. The grown-ups were dead; Leda was going to have to be her own grown-up now.

 “Some kind of extenuating circumstance?” Her counselor half-smiled at her, encouraging, wispy blond hairs floating amicably over his bald spot. She wondered if he was trying to get her to confess something or to make something up.

“It was the election,” she said. “I’ve just been a little too stressed out.”

He nodded, sighed, pursed his lips like they were fellow-mourners at a funeral.

“I completely understand. Yes.” Hand on the computer mouse, clicking buttons in her file. Voice lowered now, a co-conspirator in the resistance. “I think we all feel that way.”