Chapter 12

When Gavin pulled up, Rona Gomez was sitting on the steps of the Alvah Curtis Roebuck Residence Hall.  It was the largest dorm, a no-nonsense industrial tower, gray to match the dirty snow and cold winter sky surrounding it.  Students shuffled in and out like Eskimos, heads lowered against the pelting sleet, hoods raised, hands buried in pockets.  Rona was wearing a giant dark stripy scarf wrapped about fifty times around her neck and face.

Gavin’s stomach lurched when he saw her.   She’s there.  He had half-expected her not to be, like this whole drive-to-Bloomington with Rona thing was actually the bizarre hallucination that it seemed like.

But no, Rona on the steps, reading The Divine Sharpness in fact.  She looked up, shoved the book into her backpack—clumsy with her gloves on—and hopped into the passenger seat of Gavin's Honda Accord.  It was old, but some kind of grandma had owned it before him so it was in good shape.

“Should I just get on 231?” He had already started driving, a slow creep down the icy road. In this state, all highways led to Indianapolis.  If you wanted to go anywhere else, like Bloomington for example, home of Indiana University's main campus and the academic heart of the state, you could take back roads through the countryside and be damn grateful about it.

“Yeah.”  Rona took off her gloves, then unwound her giant scarf, which took about a minute, and put them both into the backpack at her feet.  “I’ll give you directions to the place when we get close.”

Gavin looked over at her, quickly since he didn’t want to crash into the SUV he was tailgating.  She was wearing jeans today, rolled up over her combat boots, a plain gray sweatshirt.  No makeup and her skin was a little spotty.  Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a messy bun kind of thing.  

She was looking straight ahead, patient, like there was no way she was going to start the conversation. Of course that was his job.  She was the deferential student, he the wise sensei.  As such, he should ask her about something about the class, so they could have a meaningful conversation about her studies.

“How are you liking The Divine Sharpness?” 

“It’s interesting.”  She sounded polite, like she was trying to give the right answer.

“What’s interesting about it?”

“The way the characters represent the mind and the body.  And the debate they have.  I haven’t read a lot of plays that are so philosophical.”

They had reached the edge of town—in New Buffalo, that never took long.  Gavin turned onto the state road.  It didn’t seem too bad; not a lot of traffic, and the snow wasn’t sticking to the ground.  Still, the road felt slippery and it was hard to see with so much gray everywhere.

“Cool,” he said.  “So what was that DMT thing all about?”

“What?” 

Jesus, what the fuck is your problem?  Why did he keep blurting out stuff like that?  It had been happening way too much lately, with Sinder, now with Rona.  Probably stress.  That, or he was losing the ability to control his actions.  Either way, he’d better reign it in before Santa Clarita.

“Sinder said you guys did DMT.”  He tried to sound really casual, like, whatever, we all do some DMT now and again, no big deal. 

“He’s your roommate?” She pulled her scarf out of the backpack and wrapped it around her shoulders a few times.

“Yeah,” Gavin said.  “Do you want me to turn the heat up?”

“I’m okay.”  She put her gloves on.  “You know, I really like Bo.”

“From The Divine Sharpness?” 

“I mean, I think I’m probably more like Mi. But I admire Bo.”

“Well, we’re each like both of them,” he said, wise and teacherly.  “Body and mind.”  

Actually, that was bullshit, and he winced just hearing himself say it. Hadn’t he just cast Rona as mind, not body, in class the other day?  And hadn’t he himself, when he was Rona’s age and aspiring to live the life of the mind, always felt such strong identification with, maybe even admiration (though he wouldn’t have used that word) for Mi?

“But yeah, I can relate,” he said.  “Sometimes it’s tiring being in your mind.  I could see how you might want to get more in touch with your body.” 

Fuck.  That was creepy. He glanced over at Rona.  From what he could see in his peripheral vision, she didn’t look upset or anything, just normal, kind of distant and frowny, like she was thinking hard about something you just wouldn't get.

“You know, the thing about Mi is,” she said.  “I don’t get why Stump doesn’t do more with him.  The mind has so many capabilities. It can do almost anything.”

“I think he was trying to represent minds in general,” Gavin said.  “You know, the normal mind.”

“I guess my mind’s not exactly normal.  It’s okay,” she added, as Gavin started to apologize (he didn’t think he had called her abnormal, but just in case).  “Creative people don’t want to have normal minds.  I mean, like, you don’t want your mind to be normal.  Otherwise you wouldn’t be a professor.”

“Graduate student,” he said.  “But yeah.”

They rode in silence for a while, staring at nothing worth mentioning, just the flat, gray Indiana landscape, the sparsely falling snow. 

Ask her something.  But what?  They had already talked about The Divine Sharpness. Maybe something about abjection, but he needed to do it in a way that didn’t sound like a quiz. 

“Sinder told me,” Rona said, “that he was stressed out about his exams.  I thought the DMT might help him take his mind off them.” 

Or we could talk about that. At least she brought it up herself this time.

“He could also take a bath or watch a movie. Of course, those might seem kind of pedestrian to you.”

“No, they’re okay,” she said.  “Actually I bet the sensory deprivation will be better for stress than all of those.”

“Good, I need it.” Gavin said.  “I’m supposed to give a talk on Friday and I haven’t written it yet.”

“Is it about The Divine Sharpness?”

“It could be.”  They were driving through Spenser now, where US Route 231 met Indiana State Road 46.  You couldn’t switch roads without this detour through town, an oasis of fast food and muffler shops amid miles and miles of empty flat fields.  “But I was thinking maybe another play.  Maybe this one called No No Not Now.”

“I didn’t read that one yet.”

“You weren’t supposed to. We’re not reading it until the end of the term.”

They were stuck at a red light, in a town that they weren’t even supposed to be in, except that it happened to lie between the other towns he was traveling to and from. He looked over at Rona.  Her notebook was in her lap, the same one she scribbled in all through class.  She had written the driving directions on an empty page. It was sweet, Gavin thought, so old-fashioned: most of his students would be using the navigation programs on their phones. Actually that’s what he would be doing, if he were directing.

“I’ll probably read it sooner,” she said. “I read Time Slide last weekend.”

Gavin wanted to be annoyed at her reading ahead again, but wow—Time Slide?  How could he fault a student who couldn’t stop herself from reading his favorite play a month early? 

“Did you like it?”

“It was interesting. What’s No No Not Now about?”

“Huh, let’s see.” 

The vicissitudes of the human heart? 

Two people hanging from the ceiling? 

No, this wasn’t a dinner party. Today there was time to kill.  And this was his student, so he didn’t have to worry about boring her with too much Liam Stump talk. “It’s about a husband and wife who don’t get along.  They’re hanging in the air, in the middle of the stage, from ropes tied around their wrists.   Each one keeps trying to get closer to the other—physically, I mean, like they try to swing themselves around, as a representation of trying to get closer emotionally. But every time, say, the wife tries to move towards the husband, he veers off in some random other direction.”

“That sounds hard to stage.” 

“Right,” he said, like he knew what he was talking about.  He’d seen a couple productions of it, and yeah, they had looked pretty complicated.  He had no idea how they did it, but he guessed anyway. “You need a punch of crazy tracks and pulleys and stuff.”

“Why can’t the couple come together?”

“There are a lot of reasons. No overriding, central problem.” 

This conversation was getting a lot better.   He was finally starting to feel comfortable, like this was a normal student-teacher interaction, that this car, hurtling through the sleet at fifty miles an hour, was nothing more than a mobile classroom.

“Just a lot of little things,” he said.  “I guess partly it’s the typical theme of men and women being fundamentally different.  For example, he’s really demanding about the house being perfectly clean.  And the two of them haven’t been able to have children.  And there are some other things that aren’t exactly said outright but are strongly implied, like the man has this flirtation, maybe an affair, with the wife’s sister. And the wife had a baby out of wedlock that she gave up for adoption, because this is mid-century Ireland and there’s no way you can have an abortion.”

“You still can’t in Ireland.”

“Right.”  Did he know that? Probably. “So of course, the man is kind of bitter about the whole adoption thing.”

“Wait.” Rona had been looking out the windshield, as far as he could see, for the entire drive, but now she turned to face him.  Without even turning his head, he could feel her accusing gaze on the side of his face. “Why would he be bitter?”

“Because she had another guy’s baby and not his.”  Wasn’t that obvious?  “And out of wedlock, so I suppose he thinks she’s kind of a slut. That’s not a fair viewpoint, obviously.  Anyway, this is all a minor point in the play.”

“It’s a huge point.  You don’t just have a baby and give it away like it’s no big deal.”

“Fair enough.”  Geez, we don’t need to get in some kind of big feminist debate about it. “Maybe that’s something you can explore in your essay about the play, when we get there.”

“Yeah, maybe.”  She didn’t sound too upset.  She must be one of those people who just likes arguing.  “What are you going to say about it in your talk?”

They passed a road sign: Bloomington 10 miles.  The snow was getting thicker, falling in fluffy white lumps. Gavin hoped there wouldn’t be some kind of unannounced blizzard.  They seemed to have one like every other week. 

“Probably something about abjection.  There’s this really abject thing that happens at the end of the play.  The husband and wife’s wrists are all shredded up and dripping blood everywhere, because they’ve been moving around so much.  Finally the woman’s wrists become so frayed that they snap off, and she falls to the floor.  She crawls around and finds her severed hands, and she’s trying to reattach them.  That’s how the play ends, with her sitting on the ground, one of her hands between her knees, and she’s trying to reconnect it to her wrist.  And her husband is just floating up there above her, watching silently.  I’m not sure exactly what it means yet, but something in there is definitely abject.”

“The baby,” Rona said.  “The baby was abjected.” 

Forget the fucking baby!  

She was really over-reading this baby thing.  It was like, a tiny point in the play.  Basically a single line from the wife: I gave my heart away when I was a girl of seventeen.  Don’t tell me it was my decision. Don’t. I was forced.  And sometime later her husband says: Oh, it was your decision, it was, and a blight brought on your family.

 “Do you mean,” Gavin asked, trying to figure out her reasoning, “because it was ejected from the woman’s life in order to create a societally acceptable narrative?”

“Yeah. Plus isn’t that what the severed hand represents?  Her lost child, out there in the world somewhere, growing up without her?”

“No,” Gavin said.  “Well, maybe.  Normally it’s read as a symbol of her irreparably broken marriage.”

“Oh, normally.” 

Was she making fun of him?  She said it in a neutral way, just repeating, no judgment.  But that had to be sarcastic, right? He wanted to look over and see if she was rolling her eyes or anything, but the snow was pretty thick and he needed to get over.  They were coming into Bloomington.

“It’s the first exit,” she said. 

<Chapter 11
Chapter 13>

Chapter 11

Gavin spent a couple days thinking about how to cancel his non-date with Rona.  Of course the obvious thing would be to catch her after class on Wednesday, but wow, awkward.  The other option would be to contact her through the school’s registration website.  Even more awkward. Attention: you have a new message from your instructor.  He’s standing you up. 

He searched online for sensory deprivation and Bloomington and found the website for the place they’d be going.  Indiana Isolated, it was called.  Great.  Evidently, the process entailed being suspended for one hour in a light-proof, sound-proof tank of highly salinated, body-temperature water.  And why would he want to do that?  He clicked on the link called benefits. Floating in the tank, it turned out, would improve digestion and cell reproduction, facilitate relaxation, and enhance inspiration and creativity.  

He definitely needed to cancel.

On Tuesday night, Santa Clarita College called.  Gavin was sitting in the living room, watching some show about drag queens and listening to Sinder and his philosophy friend Dan argue about free will. Pretty much a normal evening at their apartment.

The first time he heard Sinder and Dan have the free will debate, he thought  one of them would be like, People can make their own decisions! And the other one would be like, No, everything was decided in advance!  Lots of heavy pronouncements about fate and destiny and God.

Actually, the free-will argument was all about physics. Dan, who was this blond, Midwestern football-player type of guy, believed that every single action in the universe could be predicted, not by God, but by a supergenius who was really, really good at physics. This supergenius knew the movement of planets and stuff, and whether two cars would crash into each other.  But he also knew single thing you were going to think and say and do, based on how the particles and electricity moved in your brain.

Dan believed, at least he said he believed, that all decisions were an illusion.  Our actions were choreographed moves in a cosmic dance that had been set in motion when the universe began.  That was the argument against free will.

Sinder took the pro-free-will side in the debate.  That’s because he studied ethics. Ethicists had to believe that humans controlled their own actions; otherwise it would be a giant waste of time for them to go around telling everybody how to act.  Sure, he said, physics can predict lots of things, but not everything, not our thoughts and behaviors.  

“Okay, so I’m thinking of a number,” he said to Dan.  “You seriously believe that a scientist a million years ago could have predicted I would exist in this exact time and place, let alone what fucking number is in my mind? That’s just juvenile.”

After that they started throwing around a bunch of words like entropy and quantum mechanics and Heisenberg uncertainty principle.  Gavin figured he understood  about forty percent of the conversation, just enough to work with in case they asked him to weigh in.  It all sounded impressive, sure.  But Gavin had once gone a couple dates with an actual rocket scientist, and she said that philosophers might have memorized a bunch of big words, but they didn’t know jack shit about physics.

Then Gavin’s phone began buzzing and flashing: Santa Clarita College. Just the words on the screen gave him that roller-coaster feeling in his stomach, like he was about to go over the drop. He hated phone calls like this, delivering news, maybe bad news. Let's see. It was 8:28, which meant 5:28 California time, which meant that someone had stayed late to call him.  They would contact the top candidates first, right?  And leave the losers like him to the bitter end.

He carried the vibrating phone into his room and sat down on the edge of the bed.  He felt safer there, surrounded by orderly things. His books were alphabetized, his album posters were framed, his closet lacked a door but his shirts hung neatly in it. In this room, the news would make sense, whatever it turned out to be.

“Is this Gavin Johnson?”  Gavin didn’t even bother reminding her of the Cheng.  It wouldn’t matter if this was going to be the last time he ever spoke to these people.   

“We’d like to fly you out for a campus visit next week,” the voice said.  “Thursday and Friday.  Excuse me.”  She was yawning.  “You will be interviewed by the college president and the dean of Letters and Sciences. Please prepare a fifty-minute public lecture on your recent scholarly work.”

Gavin sat on his bed and stared at the phone for a few minutes after the call was over.  Well, now at least he had a really good reason for cancelling with Rona.  With his flyback next week, there was no way he could spend half a day in Bloomington, lying around in saltwater in the dark. No, he was going to spend all weekend getting ready.  He would wake up early each day, go online to find standard questions for flyback interviews, practice answering them, review the key points of his dissertation, study up on the conventional arguments about Stump that he was arguing against, reread Kristeva’s book, write his lecture, prepare for the obvious arguments that would be launched at him in response, review all his Freud and Marx and Jameson and Foucault because you know some uppity grad student would ask about them just to show off.

He started pulling books down from his shelf, making stacks for postmodernism, psychoanalysis, political theory.  One more of Stump’s plays and books about them, though Gavin could basically recite these in his sleep already. The most recent printed copy of his dissertation draft, housed in one of those oversized three-ring binders in his desk drawer.  A stack of important articles he had printed off the MLA database.

He sat back down on the bed and looked at the piles on his floor, breathing hard.  His flight was in eight days—he counted eleven, twelve, thirteen theory books plus six of Stump’s plays—that was a little more than two a day.  And then there was the lecture.  It should probably be on The Divine Sharpness, since that was the one everyone knew, but after Marjorie’s reaction, he was scared to talk about it.  He couldn’t do abjection in Time Slide—that’s what his MLA talk had been about.  Maybe No, No, Not Now?  It was better known than Time Slide but less than Divine Sharpness. He could reread all three of them tomorrow before class.  Right now, he should check the MLA database to see if there were any new articles he had missed on Stump.

His head hit the pillow and he stared at the bumps on his ceiling, more like cottage cheese than popcorn.  The top of his closet door pivoted from the right to the left side of his vision, smooth like a steering wheel.  Yeah, the room was spinning.  It was okay—it just meant he was stressed out.  He took some deep breaths in through his nose, out through his mouth, like they had told him to in that yoga class he took in college.  The closet door was moving more slowly now, a lazy circle instead of an urgent one.

Ah, fuck it.  He was going to go lie in the saltwater.

Sinder and Dan were still arguing in the living room. The drag queen show had switched to a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the drag queen show.

“I’ve got a flyback to Santa Clarita.”  Gavin pointed at his phone like that explained everything.

Dan held up his hand for a high-five.  Gavin managed to return it pretty well, using this trick one of his students had taught him where you looked at the guy’s wrist instead of his palm.

“Well-played, man.” Dan really had been in a fraternity, so when he said stuff like that, he wasn't being ironic.

“Well played?” Sinder didn't move, just stayed slumped on the couch with his arms crossed over his narrow chest. “Dude, you don’t even think he did anything.  It was all fated from the beginning of the universe.”

“You think he did something,” Dan said.  “Why don’t you fucking congratulate him?”

“Yeah, congratulations for what you did.” Sinder nodded like he had just won the argument.  Next to him on the couch in a pile of books about stuff like vegetarianism and whether you should give away all your money to the poor.  Dan was sitting in a pile of books, too, but since he wasn’t Gavin’s best friend, Gavin didn’t know what Dan’s books were about.

“Thanks,” Gavin said. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be studying for your exams?” 

“We are.” Sinder held up a book to prove it: Decisions with Consequences. “You can borrow it when I'm done. ”

<Chapter 10
Chapter 12>

Chapter 10

“The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder.” —Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

* * *

Today was the first day of the unit on The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God.  Guaranteed, it would be the most boring two weeks of the semester, but Gavin had to teach it.  Can’t teach a class on Stump without The Divine Sharpness, now could you? That would be weird, and the one thing we can’t tolerate at a world-class university is weirdness. So fine, The Divine Sharpness, here you go.  

Gavin was usually early to class, but on this day he showed up two minutes late on purpose.  Rona Gomez would be there, and he didn’t want to stand around staring at her while they waited for class to start.  He wasn’t going to be able to go through with his plan to get her kicked out of the class, not after he told Sinder that he was trying to date her.  Anyway, if you were trying to control somebody’s actions—like say, prevent her from giving drugs to your roommate—having the power to mess up her GPA could be useful.  

There she was, the moment he entered the room, already curled over her desk, scribbling in her notebook with her hooked left hand.  Her coursepack was spread across her lap, and her copy of The Divine Sharpness was propped open under the notebook. 

Everyone else was in their regular places in the semicircle, except for the one Asian guy who talked.  He had, oddly enough, relocated from the Asian to the nerd quadrant, right next to Rona.  Kayla was sitting on Braden’s lap, doing something to his hair, but she had the dignity to move back to her own seat when Gavin came in. 

Gavin turned his back on all of them and wrote the word ABJECTION in big blue letters across the top of the dry erase board.  

He could hear the Asian kid whispering to Rona. “What happened to your face?” They always thought Gavin couldn’t hear them if he wasn’t looking at them.

“Skydiving,” she whispered.

“For today’s class,”  Gavin spun on his heel like a teacher in a movie, “you read Act One of The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God.”

It was less than a month into the semester and already the students looked tired and pasty under the flickering yellow lights.  Typical spring semester—always a death march. At least four of them were texting.  It said in his syllabus that he’d take their phones away, but so far he’d never mustered the energy to go through with it.

“At any rate, I’m going to work on the assumption that you read it. Put your phones away or I’ll confiscate them.”  That was as close as he ever got.  “So where in Act One do we see Kristeva’s notion of abjection?”  He pointed at the word on the whiteboard, because some students were visual learners. 

Rona’s hand shot up. 

“Anyone else?” He knew it wasn’t nice to say, but really, it’s not like he could let her answer every question just because she was first.

The Asian kid next to her lifted his arm. 

“You,” Gavin said, pointing, because he couldn’t remember the guy’s name.  There were three guys and one girl with Chinese names, and Gavin couldn’t remember any of them.  His Chinese sucked.

“The blood?” 

“Right,” Gavin said.  “What about the blood?”

He stared at the back of his book, as though he could find the answer there. “Well, like, when it starts spurting everywhere.”

Sure, when blood spurted everywhere.  That only happened, like, every other scene. “So explain why it’s abjection.”

“I’m not sure.  It just reminded me of that essay.”

Rona had put her hand down when her new neighbor began to speak, but now she raised it again.  She avoided Gavin’s gaze, like, Don’t mind me, no rush, I’ll just be sitting over here with my hand in the air, hope it’s not a bother.

“Let’s take a closer look at the first time the heart bleeds.  It’s on page…” He flipped through his own copy.  It had more marked passages than unmarked ones, but it wasn’t hard for him to find the part he was looking for, since he basically had the whole thing memorized.  In his youth, he had been obsessed with this play, even written an undergraduate honors thesis on it back at Berkeley.  Now he was over it, like that CD you listened to all day long on repeat until one day you broke it in half and threw it in the garbage.

“Page twenty-seven,” he said.   “I need someone to read the part of Bo.”

Rona stretched her hand even higher.  Jesus. Not you!  Fine, if she wanted to read, it was fine, but she was all wrong for Bo. Don’t you know?  You’re the Mind, not the Body. Where was that black kid?  The football player. Gavin scanned the room—huh. No black kid. 

“Why don’t you play Mi,” he said to Rona.

“I’ll be Mi,” said a voice from the other side of the semicircle.  Gavin turned to look—Braden.  Braden was definitely not the Mind.

“Rona’s Mi. You can be Bo,” Gavin said.  “Starting with ‘It’s your fault.’ Please read the dialogue and stage directions.”

Braden hesitated like he wasn’t sure what that meant, so Rona jumped in reading Bo’s line, in defiance of Gavin’s casting directions. 

“It’s your fault we’re trapped here.”  Her scratchy voice shook a little, sounding tinny and ungrounded, nothing like how Bo should sound.  It shouldn’t really matter—this wasn’t theater class or anything.  But the point of them reading aloud was to help the rest of the class envision the scene, so now this whole thing was going to be a giant waste of time.  Two students had their phones back out already, and a few more were gazing longingly towards their bags.

“Um.” Braden squinted down at his book, until Kayla pointed a manicured finger halfway down the page.  “Oh, okay.  ‘Blaming it on me isn’t helping anything.  I could just as easily blame it on you, you know.’”

“I didn’t do anything!” Rona read. 

“What about all this? This all—”

Gavin interrupted him: “Please read Mi’s stage directions, too.” Braden scrunched up his forehead and stared really hard at the page.  “That’s the part in parentheses,” Gavin said.

“What about all this?” Braden repeated.  “(He gestures towards the bloody walls of the heart surrounding them).  This all belongs to you.”

“No, not me!” Rona sounded better as Bo now, pretty good, actually, like she meant it.  Braden’s Brandon friend dropped his phone into his backpack, and a few of the Asian kids looked up from their books. “I heard it belongs to you.  I never believed it, though.” 

“Why not?” Braden read.

“Because YOU don’t even exist.”  Her scratchy voice kind of echoed, like one of those Shakespearean actors with Sir before his name. 

All through class, Gavin had been trying to not look at her, but now he was too curious to resist.  Anyway, basically everyone else in the room was looking at her, too.  She looked normal—well, Rona-Gomez normal, introverted in black and gray, hair half covering her face.  It was only her voice that had suddenly assumed the kind of grandeur that a film critic might say elevates the human spirit.

“That’s funny,” Braden read, frail in comparison. “From my perspective, you’re the one who doesn’t exist. At least, I can’t find any conclusive evidence that you do.”  He stumbled over perspective and conclusive and raced through all the other words, infinitely too un-bookish to ever be a convincing Mi.

“I’m right here!” Rona boomed. “Look, you can see me. You can feel me. (Bo punches himself hard in the stomach, yells “Ouch,” then falls to the floor. When he stands again, the knees of his white overalls are lightly stained with red).” 

God, even her stage directions were riveting.  The students were all staring into the empty middle of the semicircle like Bo was there, knocking himself onto the bloody floor with the force of his own blow.  They tittered with uneasy laughter—because it was funny that he punches himself, but sickening, abject, to envision the bloody floor and walls that surround him.  Rona was nailing it.

The thought popped into Gavin’s mind: I could listen to Rona Gomez all day.  He shook his head—actually shook it, back and forth—dude, what?  Geez, get it together. 

Braden’s voice was trembling a little, like maybe Rona’s Oscar-worthy performance was giving him stage fright.  Kayla rubbed his elbow, but he kind of shook her off.  “But that could all be an illusion.  I need proof.”

“Here’s your proof,” Rona said.  “(He takes a swing at Mi, but his fist goes right through him as though he were made of air.)”

“And right there is the heart of the problem, I suppose,” Braden read.  “Under these circumstances, it’s so hard for me to have faith that anything exists.  I mean, all of this (he gestures again at the walls of the heart).   How can I know I didn’t invent the entire thing?” 

These were actually some of Gavin’s favorite lines in the play.  He felt a surge of that painful kind of pleasure, remembering what Mi’s solipsism had meant to him as an undergraduate.  How it was like Liam Stump knew Gavin’s own mind, that he had named the character “Mi”—me—as a personal communiqué directed only at Gavin, a small private joke between the young student and his author-mentor, a quarter-century after his death.

What he wanted then, for a desperate moment, was for Rona Gomez to read the line that Braden had just ruined. For her to read it right, so he could hear the words booming through the poorly-lit room the same way they had once lit up the dark, lost corners of his adolescent soul.

Instead, it was Braden, reading Mi’s stage directions.  “He takes one finger and pokes it hard into the wall of the heart.  It sticks.  When he pulls it out, blood begins spraying into the chamber where Bo and Mi are standing.”

The class gasped, as though the blood were filling up their classroom instead of some imaginary heart. Braden was starting to sound more confident now, milking the word spraying for its full effect, a klutz elevated to gracefulness by his skilled dance partner.  The sickly Asian girl pulled her tiny hands up to cover her face.

“What are you doing?” Rona read. “(He runs over to the hole, covers it with both hands. Blood begins to spurt through his fingers.)”

“I didn’t think I could actually have an effect on it,” Braden read. His voice was curious, removed, a proper Mi at last.

“Bo takes off his jacket and shoves it into the hole. It works for a minute.  Then the jacket flies out in front of a geyser of blood.”  Rona paused, and then, with perfect, terrified despair:  “We need to stop the bleeding!”

“Just let it go,” Braden read.  “We’re not going to be able to stop it.  Anyway, it will be interesting to see what happens.”

“You’re useless,” Rona growled, chilling as Marjorie Mendelssohn. “If you do exist, you might as well not.”

“Okay, stop, stop,” Gavin said. He’d gotten a little hypnotized, and if he didn’t cut it off now, they’d end up reading the whole play.

The class burst into applause, like New Buffalo had just won the Fiesta Bowl or something.  Even the Asian girl was clapping.  Braden’s Brandon friend high-fived him and called his performance sick or tight or one of those Brandon compliments. Kayla’s makeup looked runny like she had been moved to tears, though maybe she was just in a fight with Braden.

After class, Rona tried to escape, plowing towards the door with her head lowered and her hood raised. Gavin stepped in front of her.  The other students were rushing by, anxious to leave as always.  But as they passed her, they all turned to look.  Some smiled shyly, a few said, “Nice job,” Braden clapped her on the back.  Gavin couldn’t even say anything until they were all gone.

His plan had been to catch her after class, to give her the what are your intentions towards my friend speech, maybe even the don’t you ever give my friend drugs again you little tramp speech if he was feeling assertive.  He couldn’t start there, though, not after her performance.  Anyway, maybe it was better to have something nice to open with.  It was like grading, when you would tell a student she had good paragraph unity or whatever so she wouldn’t feel so bad about how the rest of her paper sucked.

Standing in front of him in the now-empty classroom, she looked scared, and Gavin was glad for the opener.

“Good job reading today.”

Something like a smile began to spread across her face, blossoming into a word. “Thanks.”  Yeah, definitely a smile.  He’d never seen her face do that before.  It was shy, a secret smile that was more in her eyes than her mouth.  He didn’t want to be charmed—by Rona Gomez for Christ’s sake—but he couldn’t stop himself from feeling special for being the cause of it.

So this was what Sinder sees in her.  Gavin had thought she was a one-of-a-kind freak, but now he was beginning to match her to a prototype, a category of girl he’d known in college.  It was those girls who wore men’s cardigans and used to cut themselves before they learned to write poetry.  She was—what’s the word for that?  Intense.  Intense could be a lot of craziness and drama, but could also be exciting.  And who could blame Sinder for wanting a little exciting during those dark, lonely days before his exams?  Just when it was the worst possible idea.  Oh, she was worse trouble than Gavin had imagined.

“Are you an actress or something?” he asked, stalling.  There was no way he could talk to her about Sinder while she was still smiling like that.

“No.  Not really.  I used to be on the speech team in high school.”

“You must have been good at it.”

She shook her head. “I was terrible.  I always get nervous and my voice shakes, like it did today.”

“Well, you sounded great.”

Damn!  This wasn’t working at all.  Her smile was getting bigger, a real smile.  She was downright fucking beaming.  Gavin couldn’t remember ever having made a woman, any woman, look this happy.  It sort of felt…how would he describe it?  Good.

It was possible that he would have to have to switch up his strategy for dealing with this whole Rona Gomez thing.  Maybe she wasn’t so bad—maybe she was okay, even.  Maybe they needed to be friends, or at least friendly.  He knew it sounded crazy, like he was allowing himself to be sucked in and all that.  But maybe Frick had been wrong about how to deal with needy undgrads. He had been putting so much energy into managing her, trying to suppress her enthusiasm, when maybe all she needed was a little attention.

“Do you want to have coffee sometime?” he asked.

“Coffee?” Her smile didn’t fade all the way, but she looked confused, like she’d never heard of coffee before.

“Or tea, or whatever.  Just to talk about Stump.”  Shit, gotta be careful to add that.  He didn’t want her to think this was some kind of date.  A)That would be sexual harassment, and B) actually he didn’t care about sexual harassment, it just was definitely not a date.  

“Have you ever done sensory deprivation?” Rona asked.

“Sensory deprivation?”

“I’ve never done it, either.  Pick me up in front of Roebuck Hall at two on Saturday. They have a place in Bloomington.”

“In Bloomington?” He knew he sounded like an idiot repeating things back to her, but he wasn’t sure he was understanding her correctly. Bloomington was an hour away if the traffic wasn’t bad, and with all this snow it would probably be a mess.

Rona’s eyes were wide, excited.  There was only a tinge of purple left under them.  “It’ll connect really well to the stuff we’ve been reading about abjection.” She turned towards the door,  her posture bowed to the left by the weight of her stuffed backpack.  “Bring a bathing suit.  And then, if you want some coffee, we can get it after.”

Gavin watched the door close behind her.  “Fuck,” he said.  But it wasn’t fuck you, just, you know, fuck, so that had to be some kind of progress, he supposed. 

<Chapter 9
Chapter 11>