Read Online The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller - Free Book Online Page A

habitat is to let them forget you’re there.
    If you were ever a fruit fly on the science department wall during one of our staff meetings, you’d hear an in-depth discussion of SimCity High, the online multiplayer video game where social cliques maneuver for power like feuding countries and Queen Bees can be dethroned and put on trial for rogue activity. We never talk pedagogy. But the English teachers are obsessed with all brands of academic quackery.
    â€œYou clearly haven’t read
Blake’s Apocalypse
!” a gruff voice spat as I removed the foil from my tuna. This was Mark Haloran, seventy-four years old and arthritic. A person could easily date this group of pseudo-scholars by their hair (gray), their foreheads (veiny), and their attitudes (self-righteous). At least two were PhDs who’d slunk back to these minor leagues after they failed to receive tenure.
    â€œI can’t take any more Harold Bloom today,” said Diana Trop, English department head. “Listen, I have invented a new procedure to help students with textual analysis. It’s called the Motif Number System. You give your class a list of motifs, say from
Catcher in the Rye,
numbered in order of importance. Innocence is one, experience two, herd mentality three, et cetera. And every time a motif appears in the book, the class writes the corresponding number in the margin. You repeat for each book. So in the
Odyssey,
Odysseus’s guile is ranked one, the guest/host relationship two, and—”
    â€œI was never very good with numbers,” Haloran muttered.
    I wasn’t at all sure about the Motif Number System. Undoubtedly there’d be some kid attempting to turn it into real math.
Mr. Kaplan! I just proved that the square root of Odysseus’s guile is equal to Holden Caulfield’s hat. I totally deserve extra credit!
    The fact is, English class was always abhorrent to me. I’ve never forgiven my high school Epic Literature and Film seminar for destroying my love of
Star Wars.
I still can’t watch those movies without thinking about the myth of the hero, the etymology of Yoda’s name (the Sanskrit for warrior is
yoddha
), and, worst of all, how Obi-Wan Kenobi is a stand-in for Jesus. Have you ever noticed the ubiquity of Jesus in literature discussions? Think about it. A character is compassionate? He’s like Jesus. He’s got long hair? Jesus. He builds something out of wood? Definitely Jesus.
    My brother loved excavating texts, and at times he seemed to want to physically merge with the pages and ink. I once caught him with his nose shoved into a copy of
War and Peace.
I accused him of jerking off to it, but Justin wasn’t amused. Books deserved to be honored and cherished, he said. I replied that a book was inanimate and thus deserved nothing. But if he persisted in believing a lot of spiritual hoopla, at least he should consider the importance of the book in question. In the grand scheme of things, Tolstoy wasn’t exactly the Talmud.
    Looking back, I realize that this brief exchange over book sniffing encapsulated our entire relationship. Physically, Justin may have been larger and stronger than me, but emotionally, he was a weakling. He was obsessed with ideas—and, worse, with ideals. He not only believed in true love and pined after lost causes, but he let us all know exactly what he was feeling. Still, as much as I hated him for his vulnerability, I loved him for that vulnerability, too. He was my brother—my twin. What else could I feel for him but a combination of hatred and love?
    Our friend Hazel once told me that these emotions were the antipodes of our existence. She loved to recite this Catullus poem:
I hate and I love. Why does this happen to me? I don’t have a clue,
but
it hurts like hell.
Justin was my twin. When he hurt, I hurt. And he hurt all the time. His instability threatened my carefully calibrated emotional equilibrium. I had to fix him for