Chapter 27

Attention ladies and gentleman. 

Gavin closed his eyes, took deep breaths through his nose, tried to get his shit together.

Welcome to Garden City, Kansas, where the local time is eleven forty seven a.m.

Liam Stump. Twentieth Century literature.  (Whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean).  Focus!

Please remain in your seats until the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt sign.

He had boarded a plane at seven in the morning, one point five hours to his connector in Dallas, two hours wandering around the airport looking for an appetizing breakfast, finally settled on a Bloody Mary and a bowl of pretzels, another hour to Kansas.  All that time his mind had been flying, too, fast and high as a 747.  Not with thoughts of the job he was applying for, the interviews today and tomorrow, the talk he would be presenting for the second time in a month. 

No, he was thinking about his English 1A class and feeling fucking crappy. Rona Gomez was bothering him of course, but also, weirdly, DeJuan Miller.  Gavin knew his first and last name now, because he had received the email notification from Admissions and Records on Thursday: DeJuan Miller has withdrawn from your class.  

This was the most ridiculously massive failure of a semester ever.  World’s Worst Instructor Fucks one Student, Epically Fucks Over Another.   The movie was stuck on repeat: DeJuan’s eyes lighting up, crinkling into a smile. A real live football player who loved Liam Stump. My mind and my body are fighting all the time.  I thought it was pretty funny someone would write a whole book about that.  Glowing with the joy of self-recognition, the thrill of seeing an idea expressed, an idea you never realized was an idea, an idea that nevertheless you understood instantly and completely.  The love of literature.  It was something Gavin used to feel when he was in college, reading some experimental novel that blasted open his whole way of thinking about what a novel was. Or something really old like Moby Dick that sounded like the most boring thing ever but turned out to be so futuristic and weird that he’d stay up reading it all night, turn down his roommates’ invitation to a party, still be up, reading, when they stumbled in drunk at four in the morning. 

That feeling had set him on a life path as an English major, an English graduate student, a scholar devoted to the study of great books.  And now here he was, deboarding a 747 in Kansas, about to give a talk about aborted fetuses and the textual embodiment of the abject. 

What the fuck happened?

Walking down that shaky tunnel that connected the plane to the airport, he searched his memories forwards and backwards.  Through the tiny small-town terminal, so empty and grimy, carpet all stained like in his office, down to the luggage gate where he would pick up his suit bag and meet his ride.  Five years of teaching English 1A.  It had been exciting and stressful and kind of scary when he started. But sometime between then and now he had put the class on autopilot, and now he wasn’t sure where it had driven off to.

“Gavin.”   

Someone tapped him on the shoulder.  It was Lee Silber, a dark-haired guy, urban skinny with hunched posture and a bit of a gut.  He was the head of the hiring committee.  From the assertive way he extended his hand, Gavin braced for one of those something-to-prove manly handshakes, but no, his hand was soft like a floppy wash rag.

They drove fifty miles across the prairie in a yellow Mini Cooper with New York plates. Everything was flat, flat, flat.  Flatter than Indiana, which Gavin wouldn’t have thought was possible.  But Indiana always had some kind of monster factory or power plant looming near the horizon to break up the skyline.  All western Kansas seemed to have was fields and cows and pickup trucks.

“We’re meeting the department for lunch at the Barbecue Pit,” Lee said.  “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

Gavin shook his head.

“So, yeah, that’s good,” Lee said.  “They don’t really have vegetarian food out here.”

They passed fields, cows.  Rickety trucks with rusted paint.  Shiny new trucks, puffed up like roided-out body builders.  Barns.  One field of white sheep with black heads.  More cows.  The sky was surreal blue, with big puffy clouds that hung too low, like you could bang your head on them if you stood up straight.  They didn’t talk, mostly.  Gavin was glad.  What could you talk about when you were in the middle of so much enormous emptiness and the direction of your entire life was about to be decided?

“There’s a barbed-wire museum about half an hour that way, in LaCrosse.”  Lee pointed out Gavin’s window.  “A whole museum about barbed wire.”

Gavin stared at the field and tried to imagine a building back there somewhere, a town.  There was no way. Some kind of crop, corn probably, was poking through the ground, not high enough to block the view of land that stretched back and back until it reached the sky.  It looked like you could drive for days and never see anything but these same fields with these same corn sprouts.

They passed a particularly crowded pen of cows, a field of sprouting plants that didn’t look like corn, turned right, and they were at the Barbecue Hut.

“We’re here?” Gavin had kind of figured they would come into a town as they got close to the university.  This was just a low, barn-looking building surrounded by a parking lot and a field.

“Yup, this is it.  Fancy, Kansas, home of the Aggies.”

The inside was decorated like a backyard, with picnic benches and planters full of plastic grass.  It wasn't full but there were some families having lunch, kids running around and lots of yelling.  Gavin scanned the room for a big group of English professors, but it turned out it was just the other two members of the hiring committee. They were Paula Bray, a plump middle-aged lady with beauty pageant hair, and Jomo Abasi, from Kenya, who was probably the tallest, darkest guy Gavin had ever met in real life.  

The waitress came by in a checkered dress and apron that made Gavin think of the Wizard of Oz, though maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe that was just how people dressed in Kansas. There wasn’t a lot of choice on the laminated menu: hot links, chicken, tri-tip, pulled pork.  No salads, but they did have corn on the cob with butter and deep-fried mushrooms.  Lee and Paula both ordered the hot link so Gavin got that, too.  Jomo ordered chicken.

“And a diet Sprite," Paula said. "Gavin, do you want a soda or anything?” 

A Coke sounded awesome, actually, but he’d read something online about etiquette at job interview luncheons.  Water or coffee only.  Sugary drinks made you look undisciplined.  Of course it also said you should never order anything heavy or messy, but that probably wasn’t possible at the Barbecue Hut. 

In about three minutes the food was out, all of it swimming in oily red sauce, even the chicken. The hotlinks were forearm-sized and encased in giant fluffy buns.  Gavin stared at his for a while, trying to figure out some kind of dignified way to eat it.  Paula just picked hers up in two hands and wrapped her frosted pink lips around it, so Gavin did the same.  It was some work to get a bite out of it, but once he did it tasted really good, great in fact, like the salt and fat were restoring vital nourishment to his organs and cells.  

“How many people are in the department?” He gulped plain water from a waxed cup and wished it was fizzy and sweet.

“Just us,” Paula said. “I’m Middle English and Renaissance.  Jomo’s Seventeenth to Nineteenth, and you’d be the Modernist.  Lee teaches classical lit and runs the writing center.”

She was dabbing her mouth with a paper napkin like every fifteen seconds.  Lee had taken his hot link out of its roll and was cutting it up with plastic utensils, awkward, but more dignified than getting your face covered with barbecue sauce.  Jomo wasn’t really eating his chicken, just pushing the sauce around with his fork.

“There aren’t any English majors,” Paula said.  “Mostly Agribusiness, Animal Science, Dairy.  It’s really a great school.  And you’ll love the town.  It’s quiet and extremely safe.”  She took a swig of soda and wiped her mouth again.  Luckily they had a napkin dispenser right on the table.  “Do you have children?”

“You don’t have to answer that,” Lee said through a mouthful of sausage.

“No,” Gavin said.

“Of course, you’re so young.  But when you’re ready, Shady Ranch Elementary down the road is a really good school.  Both my kids went there.  ”

Lee was shaking his head, looking at Jomo.

“Paula has been at the university for many years,” Jomo said.  He had a deep voice and one of those clipped African accents that sounded kind of British.

She nodded.  “Seventeen.”

“And she has seen a lot of people come and go.  So her interest in the longevity of our hire is understandable. But—” He gestured with his fork, complete with a bite-sized piece of chicken. “That cannot be part of the hiring decision  We will hire solely on the merit of the candidate.” 

“Well of course.” Paula frowned, and her forehead turned the same color as her carefully rouged cheeks. “I mean, of course we’d love someone who would stay around for the rest of their career, but that doesn't mean.”  She stopped, thought, turned her shadowed eyes up towards her big hair. “I hope that’s not how I came across.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Gavin said.

“Yes, actually it was,” Jomo said, putting the chicken-laden fork down on his greasy plate, next to the otherwise untouched chicken breast. “Mr. Cheng-Johnson is too polite to say it.”

Gavin popped the last bite of hotlink into his mouth.  It didn’t taste good anymore, just oily and spongy. He moved it away from his tongue and worked his jaw—chew, chew—grinding it up until he could swallow it. 

<Chapter 26

Chapter 28>

Chapter 26

Act II, Scene II

Thomas McGrew III and IV have each moved further down the slide  Thomas McGrew III is now several feet from the stage-left proscenium, sitting on a small wooden stool, a wooden cane resting over his knees.  Thomas McGrew IV stands near center-stage, naked, hairless, staring down the slide.  His scalp is smeared with dried blood.

TMG III:  Maybe some cake. (He holds up a small, pink cake).  Such a pretty little cake. 

He places the small, pink cake in tiny pastry box.  He is in some pain as he rises to standing, leaning heavily on the cane.  Then he kneels down, and uses both hands to push the pastry box up the slide.  Thomas McGrew IV does not look down when it hits his foot.  He continues staring past Thomas McGrew III, down the slide.  Thomas McGrew III catches the cake as it slides back down.

TMG III (Still kneeling: opening the box to smell): I bet it’s tasty.  Mmm, strawberries. No?  Don’t want to try it?

No response. Thomas McGrew III  rummages under the stool and pulls out a wind-up toy.

TMG III: Oh now look, a train. 

Still crouching, he holds one hand out, runs the train over it, back and forth.

TMG III: Nothing like the roar of a train to bring some cheer to a dull dark day.  Ker-chug, ker-chug, it goes.

He sends the train rolling upwards on its little wheels.  It only makes it halfway towards Thomas McGrew IV before it loses momentum and rolls back down to Thomas McGrew III.

TMGIII: Ah, you see. This train needs a bit more steam.

He sends it up again, with more force.  It flies past Thomas McGrew IV, disappearing behind the stage-right proscenium. 

TMGIV: Catch it, son!  Catch it on its way down!  Wee bitty little train.  You have to turn around to catch it!

After a moment, it reappears, sliding downwards from stage right.  Thomas McGrew IV faces away from it, towards stage left.

TMGIII: Here it comes!  The train!  Turn and catch…

Thomas McGrew IV takes no notice of the train as it rolls past him. Thomas McGrew III does not look at it either.  Still crouching, he looks up the slide at Thomas McGrew IV, as the train slides by. After a moment it disappears stage left.

Thomas McGrew III uses his cane to pull himself to standing.  He leans on the cane and startes at his naked, blood-stained son for several minutes.  As he stares, the hope on his face slowly crumbles into abject horror.

* * *

Gavin was sitting at the office computer, clicking between his personal email, his New Buffalo email, and some random blog about how to raise chickens in your yard.  He was pretty sure no one was going to show up for today’s office hour.  They only came the day before an essay was due, and then they all came and made a giant line down the hall.

He didn’t remember exactly how he got to the chicken blog, but he had started out looking up some Irish farming terminology from No No Not Now. One link, another link, and the next thing you know, chicken rearing.  Which had nothing to do with Stump but was evidently all the rage in Brooklyn and Austin, Texas.  He didn’t have a yard, currently, not even a balcony, so it probably wasn’t too relevant for him, but he couldn’t get himself to close the window and get back to work.

Two and a half days since he woke up in Rona’s dorm room, and already everything was completely weird. Mostly Rona.  Rona was being completely normal, which was totally weird. In class yesterday, despite the sleep deprivation and the black eye, she was annoyingly on-task.

Still drawing the trees in her notebook, but she was back to answering questions, speaking up when they did small-group work, finding exactly the right passages from Time Slide to illustrate Kristeva’s ideas about abjection.

It was just like she had said: If we just did it, it would be over with and I could focus better.  Did that mean it was over with?  Because man, was she focused.  She was as focused and involved as she had been during the fist weeks of the term. It was Gavin whose concentration had turned to complete shit.

“I think the most abject thing is the pauses,” she had said during discussion. “It’s like the characters kind of fall apart in there, like they stop existing. You know, it’s like how Kristeva says, um.” Thumbing through her coursepack, all creased and annotated. “Here it is: ‘Consciousness has not assumed its rights and transformed into signifiers those fluid demarcations of yet unstable territories where an ‘I’ that is taking shape is cease-lessly straying.’  It’s like Thomas McGrew three and four have fallen into this space where they don’t have an identity for a while.”  

They had never talked about this idea; she had come up with it all on her own. Just a passing thought in some class she was taking, to be forgotten in a few weeks or hours.  An idea that just happened to be the major premise of Gavin’s MLA talk on abjection in Time Slide, one of the most important arguments in his dissertation.  So yeah, she had recreated his life’s work, created and abandoned, over the course of a one-hour-fifteen-minute comp class.  Whatever, fine, no big deal.

Newspaper will not make suitable bedding as it is not very absorbent.  Pine shavings will keep

your coop dry and comfortable.

Mmm, a bed of pine shavings.  That sounded nice.  The clean, woody scent, how it would tickle your nose and make you want to sneeze. The cooing of birds, tiny white feathers floating in the air.  Eggs frying in a pan, giant orange farm-fresh yolks, white edges bubbling and curling up brown. 

The grumbling in his stomach was loud enough to hear. He looked at the clock.  Four forty. Only twenty minutes more, and then he could stop at the Drunken Buffalo for some wings and a beer on his way home.

If you want to purchase eggs rather than newly hatched chicks, you’ll need an incubator.

Maybe next year, wherever he ended up, he’d have a backyard.  Then he could have a little garden, grow his own tomatoes and zucchinis and stuff.  And strawberries. Chickens wouldn’t even be out of the question, or maybe honey bees would be interesting. 

He could be like one of those people who spends a year raising all their own food. Not like he knew how to cook, but he could learn. That would be a good way to use his time in a new place.  He’d be writing a book of course, for his tenure process, but you couldn’t write all day long. And he remembered from his first year at New Buffalo: when you move to a new town where you didn’t know anybody, you have a lot of time on your hands.

All that cooking and gardening sounded kind of exhausting, though.  Maybe he just needed a hobby.  He typed in the search bar on the top of the computer screen: How do I learn to play an instrument?

Someone was knocking on the door.  Gavin looked up at the little door-window, pretty much expecting another instructor looking to borrow a stapler or something.  But no, it was the black guy from English 1A. De…um…Jose?  No, Juan.  DeJuan.  He was out there fiddling with the locked door handle, like everyone always did. 

Gavin let him in and pulled a chair out from one of the empty desks without computers. DeJuan’s walked over to it, a slow, uneven shuffle.  He was wearing shorts, which it was still a little cold for, but they were long, past his knees.  He didn’t have a backpack or anything.

“What’s up?” Gavin asked.

“Not too much.” 

DeJuan stared down one yellow basketball shoe, turning his foot back and forth at slow right angles. Gavin wondered if maybe he had misunderstood the purpose of office hours and just come to hang out.  That had happened before a few times: lonely students who just wanted to sit in his office for company.  Usually it annoyed him.  Didn’t they think he had anything better to do than shoot the shit with some eighteen-year-old?

He wasn’t annoyed now, though.  Maybe even glad to have a project.  DeJuan!  Stop falling through the cracks! I’m here to save you!

Today, he would do that thing he wasn’t supposed to do: get involved with his undergrads. Fuck, he was already involved.  Involved dick-deep, elbow-deep, over his head.  When you’re drowning already, a couple extra inches don’t make things any worse.  

“You seem kind of down.”

DeJuan didn’t say anything, just kept staring at his feet, or maybe just past them at that brown stain on the red-brown carpet. He started massaging his right leg really hard with the heal of his hand.

After probably thirty seconds of floor-staring and leg-massaging, he spoke, kind of a mumble.

“Your class is all right.”

So that was a start. Gavin waited for the but.  DeJuan was turning his foot again.  No but.

“Thank you,” Gavin said.

Some intense staring at the leg.  Massage, massage.  The giant muscles in DeJuan’s shoulder were rippling and bulging under his sleeve.  Then he looked up at Gavin, investigating, like he was making sure it was okay to talk.

“I’m quitting school.”

Oh, no.  Bad.  Sure, DeJuan’s attendance was pretty spotty, but he had turned in all his papers, and they weren’t awful.  He had at least a solid C in the class.

“You don’t need to drop.  You’re passing the class.”

“I guess I miss Philly.” He bent his leg a little, stretched it straight, bent it again. “You know how it is.”

“Philly?”  Gavin didn’t know how Philadelphia was at all, except maybe from movies.

“Nah, missing home.  Like I’m saying, at least you got those Chinese kids.  I got no one here.”

Those Chinese kids?  Was that what this was about?  He kind of wanted to argue. Those students aren’t like my instant best friends just because they’re Asian.  But he wasn’t here to debate the nature of racial identity.  He was here to be supportive and helpful.

“You don’t need to be the same, you know, ethnicity, to make a connection.  You might have a lot in common with somebody just based on your interests.  Like, don’t you have friends on the football team?”

“Yeah, but since I messed up my knee I can’t play.” He propped his hand on his leg, his cheek in his hand, like he was getting tired of holding his head upright. “I mean I still go to practice and stuff, and sit.”

Well, that explained the limping, anyway.

“You shouldn’t leave school,” Gavin tried.  It was kind of an experiment.  Past Gavin would just let the guy drop.  Not my job to keep every flaky student enrolled, and one less student meant one less final essay to grade.  But the new, involved Gavin was going to interfere.  Or at least not let the guy go without a few words of encouragement.

“You’re doing some good work in the class.  You should stay.”

DeJuan looked up, his face still resting heavy in his hand, and gave Gavin a sorry smile.

“Nah, I’m going.  My counselor already set it up for me to drop all my classes.  I got a bus ticket for tomorrow. I just kinda wanted to tell you, you know.  I really liked those books we read.”

Gavin didn’t laugh out loud, but he wanted to.

Nobody likes those books.  Besides Rona Gomez, who was a complete weirdo, no student had ever indicated any fondness for the works of Liam Stump.  You’re not in college to read things you like, Gavin always said. There’s a place to read books you enjoy and it’s called the library.

“The Divine Sharpness one especially.”  DeJuan looked a little perkier, his face finally out of his hand.  “You know, that whole part about the mind and the body fighting?”  

He waited, so Gavin nodded.  Yeah, I believe I’m familiar with that part.

“It’s really like that.”  DeJuan was sitting up straight now, not slouching or playing with his leg. “I mean it’s like, my mind and my body are fighting all the time. It’s like all they wanna do is fight.  I’m like, you guys gotta get this thing worked out!  Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny somebody wrote a whole book about that.”

He was smiling, lights in his eyes. And he was right.  It was funny to write a play about a body fighting with a mind.  It was totally funny.  Gavin smiled, too.

“Hey.”  DeJuan pointed at the computer.  “You getting chickens?”

Crap. He had forgotten to change the computer screen.  Embarrassing.  Although, really, there was no reason to be embarrassed.  It’s not like there was anything wrong with learning about something, even something that had nothing to do with Irish Modernist theater.

“I don’t know.  Maybe.”

“My grandma got chickens.  She down in Georgia. She got a whole little farm down there.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Yeah, it is.”  He stood up, went over to the door.  “Anyway, see ya.  Or I guess I won’t, so.  Bye.”

He stood, which looked kind of difficult with the knee problem, and walked crookedly to the door. 

“Okay, yeah, bye,” Gavin said, watching the broad back disappearing into the hall. Everything was so weird today, like he wasn’t really awake.  It was probably just the lack of sleep over the weekend.  He wasn’t eighteen years old, not like some people, and he couldn’t just shake off a rough weekend

Wait! Fuck.  What are you doing?  He had just let DeJuan walk out the door?  “Bye”?  What the fuck was his problem? Run after him! Try harder!

Gavin stood up from his chair.  DeJuan wouldn’t have reached the stairs yet, not walking all messed up like that.  How weird would it be to follow him, beg him one last time not to give up on school?  Would that be good teacher-involvement or was it more like stalking?

Gavin’s phone rang on the desk.  West Kansas Agricultural University.

Fuck. He sat back down and stared at it, shaking and ringing.  Right before he knew it would go to voicemail, he tapped the screen to answer.

“Hello?”

“Is this Gavin Cheng-Johnson?” the voice said.  A man, young-sounding, kind of New-Yorky. “Sorry for the late notice.  We’ve had some candidates withdraw their applications.  We’d like you to come for a campus visit—I know it’s soon—Monday.” 

Gavin stared out at the empty hallway.  He heard some noises, voices from another office, the door to the stairwell slamming closed.

“Sure.” He ran the cursor across the chicken-rearing page, looking for something to click on.  “Yeah, sure.  Monday's fine.” 

<Chapter 25

Chapter 27>