Chapter 3

Someone was knocking at the office door, just as Gavin was about to play the most epic internet Scrabble word ever:

Žižek!!!

On a triple-word score, aw snap!  And sure, one of the Z’s was really a blank tile, but the other one was worth ten points, and the K was worth five, and all told it had to be worth at least fifty.  Žižek was perhaps the only philosopher with a Z (besides Nietzsche, which had too many letters).  Gavin had been gunning for this word ever since Sinder chose the theme for this game: Lacanian psychoanalysis.  He always picked something mega-specific like that: The Frankfurt School, sociolinguistics, 1960s French philosophy. 

When it was Gavin’s turn to choose, he preferred  more general themes—comic books, music, hockey—something you could get a little creative with.   For the theme of time, he had allowed Sinder to get away with money.  But if Gavin played something like Habermas for the topic of postmodernism, Sinder would get all butt-sore: “Habermas was opposed to postmodernism!”  Yes, duh—he was a famous opponent of postmodernism.  If that didn’t fit the theme, then maybe Gavin didn’t understand what a theme was.  It’s not like he had used Cicero or teeth or something.

The office, shared by all the English graduate student instructors, was ugly and undecorated, crammed tight with coffee-stained desks and giant industrial bookcases housing nothing except a few stray copies of the school literary anthology and some old journals nobody wanted.  But this semester he had gotten smart and scheduled his office hour at 5pm on Tuesday, so at least no one else was around, affording him some privacy and unchallenged access to the office’s lone computer.

The door to the office had a giant window in it, which Gavin had been told was for his own protection. No one was allowed to hang a curtain or a poster over it, lest he make himself vulnerable to harassment allegations.  Or herself.  But honestly, himself.  Out of fairness, though, women weren’t allowed to cover it either.

Knocking on the window, timidly like she was afraid to break her fist on the glass, was one of the nerds from English 1A.  That somber girl, the one who had scribbled in her notebook all through class.  As soon as Gavin looked up at her, she tried the door handle, but it was locked.  He switched the computer screen from Scrabble to The Chronicle of Higher Education and opened the door.

“Did you have a question about something?”

Bits of snow were melting trails down her combat boots, her long black skirt, her hair, which was also long but not in a good way, making little puddles on the carpet in the hall.  She had a gray backpack slung over one shoulder and a giant black pea coat over the other.  She looked like she had come to seek shelter in the office.

“A question?”  Her mouth, which was kind of frowny to begin with, turned down at the corners. “No, not really.  I just wanted to talk about some things you said in class.”  

“During the first week of the semester,” Gavin said.  “I believe this is unprecedented.”

She glanced at the computer screen.  “I’m sorry.  I can come back another time if you’re busy.”

See, that’s what his evaluator was talking about. Discouraging.   Gavin and his friends were always complaining about passive, complacent students, and now he was embarrassing this girl for wanting to discuss ideas from the class.  Granted, class had only met once and there was absolutely nothing to discuss yet, but he wasn’t going to get hung up about that.  The university was paying him seventeen dollars to sit in this office being available for an hour, and be available he would!

He slid a stained chair over from one of the empty desks, grinning like a concierge. “No, come in, sit.” 

She propped herself on the chair’s edge, her bag and coat piled high on her lap.  Her back was very straight and she looked ready to make a quick escape.

“Comfortable?  Need some water or anything?”  She shook her head, which was good because he didn’t know where to get her any, other than offering it from his own aluminum bottle, which he had just filled from the strange humming water fountain down the hall.  

“So, what’s on your mind?”

She waited a moment, eyeing him nervously as though to make sure his question was sincere. Spit it out, he wanted to say, but she would probably take it the wrong way.

 “I was thinking,” she said, finally, in a low, gravelly voice.  She cleared her throat, which made her sound louder but not less gravelly. “I was thinking about that question you asked at the beginning of class yesterday. About what’s neither a subject or an object.”

“You were?”  When Gavin told them to think about it, he didn’t expect them to take it literally, to actually think about it.  It was a rhetorical expression meaning I’ve run out of time so we’ll talk about this next class. Everyone knew that.  He supposed there wasn’t any harm in them coming up with their own ideas, as long as they weren’t too disappointed when they turned out to be wrong.

“I think the answer—is it thoughts?”

“Thoughts.”

“Well, I was thinking,” she said, pulling a long tangly strand of brown hair from the front to the back of her head.  “Thoughts are the only things that can make you go beyond your reality.  Like if you don’t like where you are, you can think about someplace else, and in a way it’s like you’re there.  Or if you are hungry but you’re not supposed to eat anything, you can think of the taste of food, and for your brain, that might be the same thing as actually tasting it.  So thinking is a way to create objects that only exist in your brain—the subject.”

“Why aren’t you supposed to eat anything?”

Her frown, which had almost disappeared, crept back across her face.  Yeah, wrong question, he knew, but he was more curious about it than the rest of what she was saying.  

“For whatever reason, like you’re allergic or on a hunger strike or getting ready for a wrestling tournament. Or maybe you’re fasting because it’s Ramadan or you’re a monk.  Food was just an example.  You could imagine you’re rafting down the Amazon, and if your mind thinks you’re there, isn’t it the same as being there?  Or if you’re a woman, you could think that you were a man, or that you were a unicorn or that you didn’t have a body at all.”

Gavin was getting the feeling, the sneaking creepy feeling, that something was wrong with this girl.  It occurred to him that she wasn’t in his office to discuss the class at all.  She was there to fulfill some kind of…personal agenda.

“Um,” he said carefully. “Did you think of all this just since yesterday?”

She shook her head.  “I guess,” she said, her voice shy.  “I guess I’ve always been interested in expanding my mind. It just seems so limiting to be stuck in a body. You know?”

Aha, Gavin thought!  She was a crackpot!  He had located it just now, some craziness in the dark center of her eye, a current of hunger running through the words expanding my mind.  Whatever she was hungry for, she wouldn’t get it from him.  His advisor had warned him, tons of times:

Never get involved with needy undergraduates. They will distract you from your research and suck all your energy.

She leaned towards him, over the mountain of bag and coat on her lap, her eyes wide and hopeful.  “Do you ever feel like that?”

“No,” Gavin said, firmly.  “I think we’ve gotten pretty far off the topic of the course.”

Her backpack banged onto the floor as she jumped up from the chair.

“I’m sorry,” she said, grabbing her coat and hoisting the backpack over her shoulder. 

“Don’t be sorry.”  Just don’t let it happen again.  “It’s just that I have a lot of work to do.”  He motioned towards the computer.  “It was nice chatting with you—”  Her hand was on the doorknob.  “Your name?”

“Rona Gomez,” she said, without turning to face him.  She was halfway out the door, an angry whirl of tangly hair and black clothing.

“Okay, Rona Gomez.  I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”   

The door closed.  

He clicked back to his Scrabble game, but he couldn’t focus. It was that neediness, still prodding at him, making him unsettled. A bad sign for the first week. Not a problem, he told himself.  It was disconcerting, okay, but easy to handle if approached properly.  He would just have to maintain a wall of logic and professionalism to keep her out.  And at all costs, he shouldn’t worry about it. When you wasted valuable time worrying about the needy student, the needy student won.

So. Žižek.  He dragged the letters from the bottom of the screen up to the board.  Z, I, blank, E…

Wait.  Where was the E?  He looked at his remaining tiles: I, R, L.  Fuck.

 “Seriously?” he said to the screen.  And again.  “Seriously?”

What had happened was obvious. He had gotten so excited about the Z and the blank tile that he had imagined an E that he didn’t have. Nothing unusual, just part of the game.  Still, he couldn’t help but imagine that the dark storm that had visited his office had blown his perfect word away.

“Fuck you,” he said, but what was her name?  Oh yeah. “Rona Gomez.  Fuck you.”

<Chapter 2
Chapter 4>