Credentials, Corpses, and the Room Where Nobody Sits

The bar was one of those places near a law school that hasn’t changed its interior since 1987 — brass fixtures, cracked burgundy leather, framed diplomas on the walls from regulars who’d died or gone into estate planning, which amounted to the same thing. It smelled of lemon cleaner and something older, something the lemon cleaner had been hired to cover up. A television above the register was showing a cable news panel where four people were agreeing with each other very loudly.

Saunders was already there when I arrived, sitting in a booth near the back, turning a coaster over and over in his hands. He had a beer he hadn’t touched. He looked like someone waiting for a dentist appointment — not scared, exactly, but braced.

“I ordered you nothing,” he said. “I didn’t want to presume.”

Egan arrived a few minutes later, unwinding a scarf, her coat still zipped. She slid in across from Saunders and looked at the television for three full seconds, then looked away. She ordered a glass of white wine that arrived looking like it had been poured from a box, which it probably had.

“So,” I said. “Six law school graduates. Same class, fifteen years later. One dead.”

“Right,” Saunders said. “The dead one. Can we start there? Because I think the dead one is the whole story, and I think we’ll spend ninety minutes avoiding that fact.”

“The dead one is not the whole story,” Egan said. “The dead one is the organizing absence. Which is different.”

“Is it?”

“The dead person pulls everyone else into a kind of orbit — they become the gravity well — but if you write the story about the dead person, it’s a tragedy, singular, and what you actually want is something that doesn’t have a center. Something where the center is the gap.”

Saunders nodded, but his face said he wasn’t conceding. “Okay. I hear that structurally. The Goon Squad thing, right? Interconnected panels, no single protagonist, time jumping around, everyone gets their turn in the light and their turn in the background. But here’s what I keep coming back to. There’s a guy — or a woman — who killed themselves at thirty-two with three hundred forty thousand dollars in student debt. That’s not a structural absence. That’s a body. And if we treat it only as an organizing principle, we’re doing the same thing the system did. Making it abstract.”

I felt the silence that follows a point well landed.

“He’s right,” I said, immediately regretting the rushed alliance.

Egan sipped her wine. “He’s half right. And the half where he’s wrong is important. Look — I spent years thinking about what time does to people’s stories. The same starting conditions produce completely different outcomes, and you can’t always trace the divergence to a single moment. Sometimes you can. Usually you can’t. What I’m saying is that if you write this as ‘here are five survivors processing one death,’ you’ve made it a grief story. And grief stories have a shape — they move toward acceptance, or they don’t, and either way the architecture is a circle around the lost person.”

“I don’t want a grief story,” I said.

“Neither do I,” Saunders said. “I want the story where you’re reading about the senator’s chief of staff and you forget about the dead one for five pages, and then something small — a detail, a phrase — drops you back into it, and you feel sick. Not grief-sick. Complicity-sick.”

“That’s closer,” Egan said. “But I’d say the dead person should appear only in fragments. Other people’s memories. Maybe a document. An email draft.”

“An unsent email,” Saunders said. “That’s the cruelest genre of writing. The thing you composed and never hit send on. Do you know what happens to those? They just sit in your drafts folder. Your executors find them. Some intern at the email company’s server farm is technically hosting your last unsaid thing forever.”

“That detail about the server farm is too George,” Egan said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re already performing the empathy-spiral. The move where you zoom out from the human pain to the absurd systemic container and then back in, and the oscillation is the feeling. I love that move. It’s what you do. But for this story, I think we need to be colder than that in places.”

Saunders set his coaster down. “Colder.”

“Not cold. But — precise. Clinical. Some of these characters would not process this death with empathy. Some of them would process it with irritation, or with the specific kind of fear that manifests as contempt. The partner-track associate who’s been passed over three times — she hears about the suicide and her first feeling is: Good, one less competitor. And then immediately after that: horror at her own thought. And then: the dawning sense that the horror is also a performance. That the competitive instinct was the true thing.”

I was scribbling notes. “That’s the Jennifer Egan move,” I said. “The cool observation of something awful that’s somehow more devastating than the warm empathy.”

“They’re the same thing with different temperatures,” Saunders said, and I could tell this was something he actually believed.

“They’re not,” Egan said.

This is where the conversation got interesting — or got stuck, depending on your tolerance for aesthetic arguments between two people who are both right.

Saunders’s position, as I understood it: the story’s power would come from inhabiting each character so fully that the reader felt what it was like to be promised everything and given a fraction of it. The law school as a machine that takes in twenty-three-year-olds with specific kinds of intelligence and ambition and churns out people who have been credentialed beyond their opportunities. The feeling of that — not the sociology.

Egan’s position: the story’s power would come from the structure itself. From the juxtaposition. A chapter about the chief of staff at a fundraiser, the next chapter about the legal aid lawyer deciding whether she can afford to replace her car’s timing belt. No commentary. No warm narration telling you how to feel. The gap between the chapters is where the meaning lives.

“You’re both describing the same story,” I said, trying to be useful.

“We are absolutely not,” they said simultaneously, which at least got them both to laugh.

“Let me try this,” I said. “What if the voice shifts between characters? Not in a gimmicky way — not a different font or a different tense for each one. But the texture of the prose changes depending on who we’re with. The chief of staff thinks in policy language, in leverage and positioning. The legal aid lawyer thinks in case numbers and bus schedules. The podcaster thinks in audience metrics and grievance.”

“The podcaster,” Egan said, leaning forward slightly for the first time. “Tell me about the podcaster.”

“She’s the dangerous one,” I said. “Brilliant. Articulate. Genuinely wronged — not performing grievance but built by it. She went to the same school, probably graduated near the top, and somewhere along the way the career she was promised didn’t materialize, or materialized and turned out to be a coffin. So she pivoted. Two million followers. She talks about the system the way someone talks about a family that disowned them — with fluency, because she was inside it.”

Saunders was nodding. “She’s a counter-elite. That’s the Turchin thing, right? When there are more people trained for elite positions than there are elite positions, the surplus becomes the opposition. But it’s not just opposition. They bring the same skills, the same networks, the same language. They know exactly where the system is weak because they were trained to run it.”

“She scares me,” I said. “Because she’s right about most of it.”

“She has to be right about most of it,” Egan said. “That’s the only way she’s dangerous. If she were a crank, she’d be easy to dismiss. She’s dangerous because her analysis is largely correct and her conclusions are — where do her conclusions go?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“Good,” Saunders said. “Don’t decide yet. Let her be smarter than the story for a while.”

“The teacher,” Egan said. “I keep thinking about the one who left law to teach high school. What grade?”

“Eleventh,” I said, without knowing why.

“Eleventh grade,” Egan repeated. “American Literature. So she’s teaching Gatsby to sixteen-year-olds, and she has to explain the green light, and she knows — she knows — that she is the object lesson. She’s the person who reached for the green light and decided to stop reaching. Except she doesn’t frame it that way to herself. She frames it as a choice. An ethical choice, even. She left law because law was morally repugnant, she tells herself. Which is probably thirty percent true.”

“Sixty,” Saunders said.

“Let’s say forty-five. The rest is that she wasn’t very good at law. Or she was good at law school and bad at law, which is a different and more common problem. And she knows this. She knows the narrative she tells at dinner parties — ‘I wanted to do something meaningful’ — is a cleaned-up version of a messier truth, and she’s spent fifteen years polishing it.”

I thought about the mid-level associate, the one passed over for partner three times. “What about the associate? She stayed.”

“She stayed,” Saunders said. “And staying is its own violence. Do you know what it feels like to be in an institution that has judged you insufficient but hasn’t bothered to fire you? You become the institutional equivalent of that bar stool no one sits on because one leg is shorter than the others. You’re not broken enough to remove. You’re too broken to use.”

“That metaphor is —” Egan started.

“Too much?”

“Perfect, actually. But you’d need to earn it. You’d need three pages of this woman’s daily life — the conference calls she’s on but never leads, the way she signs her emails, the December bonus that’s always lower than her peers’ — before you can compare her to a broken bar stool. Otherwise it’s a simile doing the work that should be done by accumulation.”

There was a long pause. The television had moved on to weather. Someone at the bar was arguing about basketball, their voice carrying the warm, uncomplicated passion of someone whose stakes were exactly what they seemed to be.

“The dead one,” Saunders said again. “I keep coming back.”

“Me too,” Egan said.

“Three hundred forty thousand dollars in debt. At thirty-two. That’s — I want to get this right — that’s not a number that accumulates through carelessness. That’s a number that accumulates through compliance. You did everything right. You went to the right school. You borrowed what they told you to borrow. You trusted the system’s accounting of your future value. And the system was wrong, or the system was lying, and the difference between those two things doesn’t matter when you’re thirty-two and the number is that number.”

“The email draft,” Egan said quietly.

“The email draft.”

“Who’s it addressed to?”

“Everyone,” I said. “And no one. It’s addressed to — it starts as a specific email to one of the other five. Maybe the chief of staff. The one who made it. And then it becomes something else. It becomes this strange, formal document. Like a brief. Like she’s making a case.”

“She?”

“I think the dead one is a woman,” I said. “I think her name should be — actually, I don’t know her name yet.”

“Don’t name her yet,” Saunders said. “Let the others name her. Let her appear only in the space they make for her.”

Egan was looking at the window. The street outside was doing the thing streets do near law schools at eleven p.m. — emptying of purpose, becoming just pavement.

“There’s a version of this story,” she said, “where the structure does the thing I want and the voice does the thing George wants. Where the juxtaposition is cold and precise — a fundraiser, a timing belt, a podcast recording, a parent-teacher conference — and within each section the prose is as warm and inhabited as George’s best work. The temperature shifts happen between sections, not within them.”

“And the dead one’s section?” I asked.

“Is the email. Just the email. No scene. No memory. Just this unsent document, sitting between two living people’s chapters, and the reader has to decide what to do with it.”

Saunders finished his beer, finally. He’d been holding it for forty minutes. “I want to push back on one thing. The chief of staff. The one who made it. I don’t want him to be okay.”

“He shouldn’t be,” Egan said.

“No, I mean — the temptation is to write him as the winner. The guy who made partner at life. Senator’s chief of staff, that’s power, that’s arrival. But what if he’s the most trapped of all of them? What if the chief of staff position is its own kind of credentialed coffin? He can never leave. He can never say what he thinks. He’s not using his elite education — his elite education is using him. He’s the product, not the consumer.”

“And the podcaster,” I said, “she knows that about him. She sees it clearly. Because she used to want what he has, and now she can see what having it costs.”

“So they’re the same person in different timelines,” Egan said.

“That’s the Goon Squad move,” I said. “Same starting conditions. Wildly different outcomes. But maybe not as different as they look from the outside.”

Nobody said anything for a while. I could hear the basketball argument at the bar reaching its natural conclusion, which was not a resolution but a mutual exhaustion dressed up as agreement.

“I think we need to be careful,” Saunders said, “not to make this story about how elite suffering is just as valid as real suffering. Because it isn’t. These people had advantages. They had options that most people never get. And some of them squandered those options, and some of them were squandered by the system, and the story needs to hold both of those truths without flattening either one.”

“That’s the hardest thing,” I said.

“Yeah. It’s the thing that’ll determine whether this story is honest or just clever.”

Egan pulled her coat tighter, though the bar wasn’t cold. “I think the story knows that already. I think the structure — six people, one dead, non-chronological — the structure inherently refuses to rank their suffering. It just places them next to each other. And the reader does the ranking. And the reader is wrong, whatever they decide. And knowing they’re wrong is the point.”

I wanted to say something about how that was exactly right, but Saunders was already putting on his jacket, and the moment had the quality of a conversation that was over whether or not anyone declared it over. The bartender was wiping down the counter with a rag that had seen better centuries. On the television, a weatherman was pointing at a cold front moving across the Midwest with the enthusiasm of someone who believed weather was the last honest institution.

“One more thing,” Saunders said, standing. “The teacher. The one teaching Gatsby. When she gets to the part about the green light — about the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us — she should cry. Not because of Fitzgerald. Because she realizes she’s been explaining her own life to a room of teenagers who are about to make all the same mistakes.”

“And the teenagers?” Egan said.

“They think she’s just really into the book.”

Egan smiled. It was the first time all evening. “That’s the story.”

“Part of it,” Saunders said. “Just part.”