The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet—and this was ironic—there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.

“Man, do I hate language,” Ham said. “If I had it my way, we would all just grunt.” “If we all did that, the grunting would become a language.” “Not the way I would do it.” “Really,” I said. In reply he made some kind of noise.

I wondered if Ivan was asleep. It was terrible to think that he was in this city, possibly very nearby, but I couldn’t see him or talk to him because he didn’t love me. I couldn’t be with him for one minute, not even for the weird leftover hours that nobody else wanted, like from one to three a.m. on a Wednesday. There it sat on the desk, a few feet over my head, reflecting a streetlamp: the Parisian telephone, one of millions, on which Ivan would not call me.

White fluff resembling milkweed fell from the trees, silently and in great quantities. It hadn’t been there last time. I had never seen anything like it before. The whiteness kept falling and falling, like in a sentence from linguistics or the philosophy of language. I thought about the winter—how I used to run into Ivan sometimes walking through the snow-covered quad, a satchel strap crossing the front of his black puffy jacket. I remembered how we’d had so much time ahead of us.