Chapter 1

When the girl returned to the office to retrieve her backpack, her professor wasn’t wearing any pants.  His pale naked thighs pressed into the nubby blue cushion of the desk chair, his manhood filling his hand like a swollen joystick.  On the computer screen in front of him, a naked woman bounced, bounced, bounced.

“What are you doing in here?” the professor yelled at his student.  He frowned and furrowed his brow to show his anger.

“I’m s-s-sorry,” she stuttered.  She was a mousy girl, with un-dyed hair and owl glasses, a polite gray sweater buttoned tight over her chest.  She took a few steps into the office and leaned against the door to close it. “I forgot my backpack.”  She pointed at it, lying open on the floor.  The title of one book was visible: Human Anatomy.

The professor gave the girl a funny, scrutinizing look—a double-take—creating the impression that he might have looked at her many times, perhaps twice a week for half a semester, but had never truly seen her before. Then he looked at the screen, where the lady was now on her hands and knees, rocking, rocking, rocking.

Then he looked back at the girl.  Then back at the screen.  His member was still thick with excitement, encased protectively in his right hand.

“It’s you!” he exclaimed.  “What are you doing in something like…like…” He pointed at the screen with his unoccupied left hand.

The girl shrugged, causing her breasts to shift unnaturally under her sweater.

“If the dean finds out, you’ll be expelled,” he said.

The girl’s mouth stretched wide, wider, wider, into a painted pink “o” of distress. 

“Please don’t tell,” she said.  “My father will kill me.” 

She grabbed the bottom of her sweater and pulled it up over her head.  Underneath, she was wearing a pale pink bustier that covered her hips and waist.  It didn’t cover her breasts, which, though naked, seemed to be cantilevered by an invisible brassiere. She kneeled in front of the professor and removed his hand from his bulging sexuality, replacing it with her own. Her fingernails were short and painted the color of cotton candy.

“Well.”  He leaned back in his desk chair and closed his eyes. “Maybe we can just keep this between ourselves.”

***

“The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.  If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me carelessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded, and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”  —Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

***

“Welcome to English 1A, the university’s introductory composition course blah blah blah. This course is a requirement for all students who have not passed the advanced placement exam with a score of four or higher.  So yeah, that would be you guys.  Let’s see…more than four absences is grounds for being dropped, as per university policy etcetera etcetera.”

Gavin Cheng-Johnson looked up from the syllabus and surveyed the twenty students in front of him.  Their chairs were arranged in the customary composition semicircle, each with its own stapled blue copy of the syllabus on its tiny fold-out desk.  Nothing too interesting here: six or seven Brandons in crisp new baseball caps, a bouncy batch of Ashleys in boob shirts.  A few prissy-looking Asians, some nerdy kids with pimples and bad hair, one black guy.   First days were always like this.  He entered the room filled with the excitement of newness, of the possibility that something interesting might happen, but of course there was never anything new.  It was all always the same thing, the same students, nothing special and nothing inspiring.

“Every section of English 1A has a theme,” he read.  Here came the important part.  He looked over the top of the syllabus to make sure everyone was paying attention.  “Our section will engage in a structural and post-structural analysis of the works of playwright Liam Stump.”

He looked up hopefully, the final shred of hope, scanning for one face that lit up in recognition, even pleasure.  Nothing.  

“Has anyone ever read anything by Liam Stump?” It was a meaningless exercise, a bit of rhetoric, a formality.  He faced a wall of blankness, boredom, perhaps a thin streak of controlled terror. 

Who lets these people into college?

 I’m serious.

“Well,” he said, clearing his throat as he lowered his expectations. “Has anyone ever heard of Liam Stump?”

One of the Brandons raised his hand, not all the way up, but high enough to expose a tuft of frizzy armpit hair.  His shirt said “Pure Protein Explosion” and the sleeves were ripped off.

“Okay, you.  What’s your name?”

The Brandon looked from side to side.  “Me?   It’s Braden.”

Figures.  Braden the Brandon.  Gavin had had Brandons named Brandon and Ashleys named Ashley plenty of times, but he couldn’t recall another Brandon named Braden.  Braden? Was that even a real name?

“Do you remember what you heard about him?” Gavin coaxed like a kindergarten teacher.

“I think they did one of his plays at my high school.” He chewed hard on his gum for a few seconds, his mouth ajar.  “It had a name like…”

Gavin waited for whatever this was going to be.  He’d bet his Mellon fellowship that it wouldn’t be one of Stump’s.  It would have to be a pretty freaking weird high school.

“It was like something about birds or flying…I don’t know.  Maybe that wasn’t it.”

“I guess not,” Gavin said.

“Divine…”

Aha!  Gavin raised his eyebrows and waited to see how much more Braden could pull from the murk of his Brandon brain.

“The Divine…somethingness…” Gavin could see the wad of Smurf-blue gum sticking to his front bottom molars as he chewed.

 “The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God,” Gavin cut in.  Sorry, but geez, dude, that was getting painful. 

“Yeah,” said Braden.

“Do you remember anything about it?”

“I didn’t see it.  My buddy’s girlfriend was in it so he saw it.”

“That’s the wrong play.” Gavin was working on not being discouraging—that word had appeared several times in his most recent teaching evaluation—so he stopped himself mid-eye-roll and pretended to be investigating something on the ceiling.  But really, how quickly that dream was crushed, it was ridiculous.  “There aren’t any women in The Divine Sharpness.”

But now Braden’s brain had shifted into high gear, or whatever the Brandon equivalent was, maybe some kind of extra-high gear with really low output like they’d use in one of those small trucks with giant tires.  “He said the whole thing was inside a bloody red heart.  And the heart was beating the whole time, and it was, like, dripping blood all over the place.”

“Okay, yeah,” said Gavin. “That’s it.”  It had to be, right?  Maybe they had switched the gender of the characters.  Technically there’s no reason Bo and Mi had to be played by men, except they just always were.  They probably couldn’t find any guys.  High school theater was more of a girl thing.

 “So.” Gavin smiled at the really smooth segue he was about to make.  “We will be reading The Divine Sharpness, and it is indeed set inside a giant, beating heart.  What theme do you think could be embodied by that setting?”

One of the Ashleys raised her hand, which caused the tops of her boobs to bounce around.  It wasn’t Gavin’s fault for looking.  He had been informed of the university’s sexual harassment policy and everything, but seriously, where was he supposed to look? They were hanging out of her shirt for Christ’s sake.

“Is it love?”

She had one of those panda bear faces with the big, dark eyes.  If he said something discouraging now, he would ruin that sweet inquisitive expression she was making with her mouth, so he asked her name instead.

“Kayla,” she said, like she had expected this question and was used to answering it often.  Gavin found her on the roster and marked an A for Ashley.  

“Well, Kayla, it could be love, but can we abstract that a bit? Can anyone think of a larger epistemological issue represented by the heart?”

He looked over at the nerdy kids, the only ones who had a shot at this.   They were looking down at their notebooks.  One girl was taking frantic notes, her left hand curled into a claw around her pencil. Maybe they needed a hint.

“Something about how the heart functions as a symbol?  A symbol of our emotions, like love, as Kayla said.”  A shy smile from her, more than ample payment for all these gymnastics to work her idea in.

“But it’s also a physical part of our bodies.  Does that bring anything to mind?  Anything about how the brain and the body exist in tension with one another, anything about the dichotomy of subject and object?  Well, actually, I guess that’s what I was looking for.  The dichotomy of subject and object.  The subject referring to what we call ego, consciousness, that which makes judgments and initiates actions.  The object referring to what is passive, receptive, lacking sentience.  Humans, of course, are both subjects and objects, in that we both act and are acted upon.  But we like to think of ourselves as subjects, not objects.”

Wow, he had really lost them now.  Even Kayla had stopped smiling.  She was staring deep into the front pocket of her book bag, doing something with her phone. 

“The subject/object dichotomy will be one of the major themes for our class.  We’ll be using it as a lens through which to analyze plays like The Divine Sharpness, No No Not Now, and my personal favorite, Time Slide.  But what’s really intriguing about this dichotomy—”    

The drama of his pause was not entirely artificial. What he was about to reveal was the central premise of his dissertation; here was the argument he would be staking his career upon.  He felt the chill of nervousness spread through his upper chest, as though he were about to divulge this most sacred part of his identity to a hiring committee at the Modern Language Association convention instead of a room full of undergraduates whose opinions didn’t count for shit, thank god.  He scanned the room—no eye contact.  

“What’s intriguing are the times when this dichotomy falls apart, when the boundaries between subject and object dissolve. The times when we encounter things that are not part of ourselves, but not separate from us, either.”

"Professor." One of the Asian students raised his hand.  

"I'm not a professor.  I'm a graduate student instructor. Please feel free to call me Gavin." 

“Gavin, you left out an ‘s’ in the word ‘assignment’ on page three.”  He pointed at the blue syllabus.

Gavin ignored him. “Give it some thought before next class: what is neither a subject nor an object?  It might not sound very interesting to you. But I think if you stick around and do the reading, we’ll all be in for a very interesting semester.” 

Chapter 2>