For his first two years at Stanford, Matej had a roommate, Daniel, whom he rapidly reduced to a state of near paralytic dependence that persisted long after they stopped living together. Daniel and Matej had been assigned to each other by the housing services, on the basis of their shared two-pack-a-day smoking habit. Daniel, a mathematician, was overweight, although not grotesquely so, and would have been a pleasant and entertaining person were it not for a kind of deep, inexplicable pathetic quality that he seemed to be at great pains to convey to others, even to the point of aggressiveness. He had a knack for attracting people even more forlorn than he, who then became his demons. One of them, a homeless guy called Bobby, eventually moved into Daniel’s apartment and refused to leave; you could always find him lurking on the balcony, making insulting remarks. Daniel, meanwhile, became increasingly unable to make even the smallest decisions without first pouring out his heart to Matej, who patiently listened and then explained at great length the impossibility of his actually advising Daniel one way or another, because he, Matej, was powerless to cure Daniel’s ontological sickness.
To my bemusement, after having met me only a few times with Matej, Daniel began addressing me long e-mails full of the most detailed and depressing confessions, many of them health-related. “I think I have never had sex with a woman,” he wrote once. “Also, I haven’t done laundry in almost a month and all my underwear is dirty.” After debating for a long time how and whether to reply, I counseled him to go out and buy more underwear. Daniel wrote a full single-spaced page to thank me for this brilliant advice. He began telling me dreams he’d had about me. In these dreams I inevitably appeared as a benevolent figure, floating several feet off the ground.
Among my friends, only Luba was unaffected by Matej. “It’s true there was some addictive quality about him,” she said later. “I felt it, too. I remember sitting on that bench outside the library. He would start talking, and you would be unable to get up and leave. But afterward, hours had gone by, and what had he really said? It was all empty.”
Was it really all empty? All of it? I still don’t know. Sometimes I think it was, other times I think it wasn’t. At any rate, the rest of us spent much of our time in much the way Luba described, reading until late at night in the library, periodically reconvening outside to drink coffee and smoke Matej’s cigarettes. The library became the psychic center of our lives. We all dreamed about it—intense, elaborate dreams. Keren, for example, dreamed that I had filmed a “protest documentary” about the early Friday closing hours, the restriction of graduate-student loan privileges, and the overcrowding of dissertation study carrels; this mordant social critique, which I had apparently shot digitally in collaboration with Keren’s high-school classmate Anat (“in reality, now a belly dancer in Tel Aviv”), had been screened in the library basement, where it actually fomented a violent revolution and resulted in the severe beating of one of the library guards.
In retrospect, the beating of the library guard probably derived from the story of Miguel, the genial three-hundred-pound guard who sat at the front desk, checking IDs and bags. Miguel stood out from among the other library workers, who fit a more or less Dostoevskian mold: a tiny old woman whose organism seemed designed to combine maximum disgruntledness with minimum body mass; a giant white-bearded Santa Claus look-alike who spent all his breaks sitting outside under an olive tree, playing a balalaika. But Matej said that Miguel had confessed to him, late one night when the library was almost empty, that he had an incurable cancer, and would be dead in four months.
This story, which restored Miguel to the Dostoevskian milieu of his workplace, nevertheless accorded with neither his robust physique nor his jovial demeanor. “If he really had cancer, why would he still be checking bags at the library?” someone asked.
“What do you expect him to do, spend his last hundred and eighty days in Disneyland?” Matej demanded.
But four months passed, six months, a year. Miguel was still checking bags, still smiling and saying “Take care, guys,” like some obscure warning.
It turned out that Matej and I were both usually up past four in the morning, and I got in the habit of occasionally going back to his place after the library closed at midnight. Daniel would be in the bathtub, solving math problems; sometimes he would fall asleep, and we would hear him snoring. We sat in the living room, where Matej put away five or six bottles of beer and became more forthcoming about his past.
One night, to my incredulity, he told me that he had been celibate for the past seven years. Seven years ago, he explained, he had experienced a period of total, shattering lucidity, and fell in love with a girl who was obsessed with a Slovenian disc jockey. He had pursued the girl desperately, determined to tear her away from the DJ, regardless of whether he had to annihilate himself in the process. He got the girl, for a time, but they drove each other mad, quite literally. She ran away to Ljubljana. He followed her. She rushed to the top floor of her hotel and tried to throw herself from a window. Realizing he was on the verge of destroying both her and himself, Matej fled to Venice, holed himself up in a pension, and decided to read every book Nietzsche had ever written. In his state of lucidity, he not only understood immediately everything Nietzsche was trying to say, but also effortlessly identified where Nietzsche had made his mistakes. Matej began to write a philosophical work addressing the mistakes made by Nietzsche, but became distracted by a message being spelled to him by the keys hanging behind the desk of the pension. He spent three more weeks in Venice, obsessed by those keys, before he ran out of money and returned to Zagreb, where he was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He refused to take lithium. He said his brain was trying to convey a message to him, an important message about how he was living his life, and he had to figure it out on his own.
A few nights after this confession, when we had both drunk more than usual, Matej and I ended up in bed together. The next morning, I had never seen anyone in so black a mood, almost visibly black. It was as if I had stolen his soul.
People were usually surprised to learn that chain-smoking, hard-drinking Matej came from a seriously Catholic family. He was the eldest of eight brothers and sisters spaced out over fifteen years.
“Man, that is one long history of your dad banging your mom!” yelled one of the weird characters who followed Matej everywhere—a Portuguese mathematician who I think had a mild form of Tourette’s.
“I’m glad to hear you have an accurate grasp of the mechanism,” Matej replied.
The most unexpected feature of Matej’s family background was his great-uncle Pavao, who was not only a cardinal but had been archbishop of Zagreb for more than twenty years. We only half believed in the existence of Matej’s ecclesiastical great-uncle—until the day he died and The New York Times ran an obituary remembering Pavao, aka “the Rock of Croatia,” for rebuilding the Croatian Church after communism and preaching tolerance during the Balkan wars.
In his capacity as a leftist Catholic intellectual, Matej had already read Girard in college, and at Stanford he persuaded us all to take a class on French social thought taught by a Girardian with a joint appointment at the École Polytechnique. And when Girard himself came out of retirement to teach a literature class on mimetic theory, we all signed up.
We were all fascinated by Girard’s theory, but it also irritated us. Matej said our resistance only testified to the strength of our romantic individualist delusions, and to the truth of mimetic theory. His Girardianism became the sign and symbol of his inaccessibility, the thing we all resented about him: the way he always came late and left early, inhabited a near-empty apartment, insisted on dining every day at exactly six fifteen at his depressing eating club. Such behavior was consistent with a Girardian mediator, with an iron-willed narcissist who “universalizes, industrializes asceticism for the sake of desire”; by acting in this way, Matej was thereby supporting his side in the ongoing argument, proving that we were all the slaves of our own egotistical desires.