He knew French and German. He knew the periodic table. He knew—as much as he didn’t care to—large parts of the Bible almost by memory. He knew how to help birth a calf and rewire a lamp and unclog a drain and the most efficient way to harvest a walnut tree and which mushrooms were poisonous and which were not and how to bale hay and how to test a watermelon, an apple, a squash, a muskmelon for freshness by thunking it in the right spot. (And then he knew things he wished he didn’t, things he hoped never to have to use again, things that, when he thought of them or dreamed of them at night, made him curl into himself with hatred and shame.)

And yet it often seemed he knew nothing of any real value or use, not really. The languages and the math, fine. But daily he was reminded of how much he didn’t know. He had never heard of the sitcoms whose episodes were constantly referenced. He had never been to a movie. He had never gone on vacation. He had never been to summer camp. He had never had pizza or popsicles or macaroni and cheese (and he had certainly never had—as both Malcolm and JB had—foie gras or sushi or marrow). He had never owned a computer or a phone, he had rarely been allowed to go online. He had never owned anything, he realized, not really: the books he had that he was so proud of, the shirts that he repaired again and again, they were nothing, they were trash, the pride he took in them was more shameful than not owning anything at all. The classroom was the safest place, and the only place he felt fully confident: everywhere else was an unceasing avalanche of marvels, each more baffling than the next, each another reminder of his bottomless ignorance. He found himself keeping mental lists of new things he had heard and encountered. But he could never ask anyone for the answers. To do so would be an admission of extreme otherness, which would invite further questions and would leave him exposed, and which would inevitably lead to conversations he definitely was not prepared to have. He felt, often, not so much foreign—for even the foreign students (even Odval, from a village outside Ulaanbaatar) seemed to understand these references—as from another time altogether: his childhood might well have been spent in the nineteenth century, not the twenty-first, for all he had apparently missed, and for how obscure and merely decorative what he did know seemed to be. How was it that apparently all of his peers, whether they were born in Lagos or Los Angeles, had had more or less the same experience, with the same cultural landmarks? Surely there was someone who knew as little as he did? And if not, how was he ever to catch up?

In the evenings, when a group of them lay splayed in someone’s room (a candle burning, a joint burning as well), the conversation often turned to his classmates’ childhoods, which they had barely left but about which they were curiously nostalgic and certainly obsessed. They recounted what seemed like every detail of them, though he was never sure if the goal was to compare with one another their similarities or to boast of their differences, because they seemed to take equal pleasure in both. They spoke of curfews, and rebellions, and punishments (a few people’s parents had hit them, and they related these stories with something close to pride, which he also found curious) and pets and siblings, and what they had worn that had driven their parents crazy, and what groups they had hung out with in high school and to whom they had lost their virginity, and where, and how, and cars they had crashed and bones they had broken, and sports they had played and bands they had started. They spoke of disastrous family vacations and strange, colorful relatives and odd next-door neighbors and teachers, both beloved and loathed. He enjoyed these divulgences more than he expected—these were real teenagers who’d had the sorts of real, plain lives he had always wondered about—and he found it both relaxing and educational to sit there late at night and listen to them. His silence was both a necessity and a protection, and had the added benefit of making him appear more mysterious and more interesting than he knew he was. “What about you, Jude?” a few people had asked him, early in the term, and he knew enough by then—he was a fast learner—to simply shrug and say, with a smile, “It’s too boring to get into.” He was astonished but relieved by how easily they accepted that, and grateful too for their self-absorption. None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.

And yet his silence did not go unnoticed by everyone, and it was his silence that had inspired his nickname. This was the year Malcolm discovered postmodernism, and JB had made such a fuss about how late Malcolm was to that particular ideology that he hadn’t admitted that he hadn’t heard of it either.

“You can’t just decide you’re post-black, Malcolm,” JB had said. “And also: you have to have actually been black to begin with in order to move beyond blackness.”

“You’re such a dick, JB,” Malcolm had said.

“Or,” JB had continued, “you have to be so genuinely uncategorizable that the normal terms of identity don’t even apply to you.” JB had turned toward him, then, and he had felt himself freeze with a momentary terror. “Like Judy here: we never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.” He smiled at him, presumably to show he was at least partly joking. “The post-man. Jude the Postman.”

“The Postman,” Malcolm had repeated: he was never above grabbing on to someone else’s discomfort as a way of deflecting attention from his own. And although the name didn’t stick—when Willem had returned to the room and heard it, he had only rolled his eyes in response, which seemed to remove some of its thrill for JB—he was reminded that as much as he had convinced himself he was fitting in, as much as he worked to conceal the spiky odd parts of himself, he was fooling no one. They knew he was strange, and now his foolishness extended to his having convinced himself that he had convinced them that he wasn’t. Still, he kept attending the late-night groups, kept joining his classmates in their rooms: he was pulled to them, even though he now knew he was putting himself in jeopardy by attending them.

Sometimes during these sessions (he had begun to think of them this way, as intensive tutorials in which he could correct his own cultural paucities) he would catch Willem watching him with an indecipherable expression on his face, and would wonder how much Willem might have guessed about him. Sometimes he had to stop himself from saying something to him. Maybe he was wrong, he sometimes thought. Maybe it would be nice to confess to someone that most of the time he could barely relate to what was being discussed, that he couldn’t participate in everyone else’s shared language of childhood pratfalls and frustrations. But then he would stop himself, for admitting ignorance of that language would mean having to explain the one he did speak.

Although if he were to tell anyone, he knew it would be Willem. He admired all three of his roommates, but Willem was the one he trusted. At the home, he had quickly learned there were three types of boys: The first type might cause the fight (this was JB). The second type wouldn’t join in, but wouldn’t run to get help, either (this was Malcolm). And the third type would actually try to help you out (this was the rarest type, and this was obviously Willem). Maybe it was the same with girls as well, but he hadn’t spent enough time around girls to know this for sure.

And increasingly he was certain Willem knew something. (Knows what? he’d argue with himself, in saner moments. You’re just looking for a reason to tell him, and then what will he think of you? Be smart. Say nothing. Have some self-control.) But this was of course illogical. He knew even before he got to college that his childhood had been atypical—you had only to read a few books to come to that conclusion—but it wasn’t until recently that he had realized how atypical it truly was. Its very strangeness both insulated and isolated him: it was near inconceivable that anyone would guess at its shape and specificities, which meant that if they did, it was because he had dropped clues like cow turds, great ugly unmissable pleas for attention.