Chapter 9

There was a girl sleeping on Gavin’s couch.

It was Saturday morning, early.  Sinder had gone out last night and Gavin had stayed up too late watching backyard wrestling on YouTube, which was a weird thing to watch but he just kept following the links and next thing you know it was two in the morning, and he could never manage to sleep past eight, even on weekends, which sucked when you weren’t even thirty yet and trying to have a fucking life.  Now all he wanted was some coffee and a bagel and there was some fucking girl asleep in the living room.

He would have to go back in his room and lie there staring at the ceiling and listening to his stomach growl until she woke up, because he was nothing if not polite.

He squinted down at the girl. She was mostly covered with one of those Wal-Mart stadium blankets that Sinder kept in the living room (skinny guys get cold really easily).  He hadn’t put his contacts in yet, but he could swear—the dark hair stuck to her cheek like a spider web, the deep purple welts under her eyes—okay, yeah, he was sure.

It was Rona Gomez, passed out on his couch like some kind of poorly groomed sorority girl.

Gavin screamed.  Well, maybe not a scream, at least not a girly one. More of a manly scream, like Muah! To be fair, it seemed likely that any teacher would scream if he found his mentally unstable student asleep in his living room at eight in the morning, but since it had never happened to anyone else in the history of the universe, there was no way to be sure.

Still, it wasn’t the slickest of moves, mainly because it woke up Rona.  Her body sent a slow shift through the pattern on the blanket, which was African or something, as she rolled from her side onto her back.  She brushed a zombie hand across her face, wiping her hair from her cheek.  Her eyes peeled open, closed again, blinked a couple of times, fixed themselves right on Gavin.  Then she screamed, too. But a real scream, one of those spine-numbing horror screams that girls did when you startled them in the library or they wanted you to stop tickling them.

“Don’t scream,” Gavin said. 

She was on her feet before he even finished saying it, a tornado of limbs and hair and blanket.  Gavin started to close his eyes so he wouldn’t see her in whatever she was sleeping in—he imagined black underwear, gawky expanses of white skin.  But no, actually she was fully dressed.  Black hoodie, some t-shirt for a band he’d never heard of, battered combat boots. A miniskirt: torn black denim.

She stood, looked at Gavin, scrunched her face.  The swelling had gone down since Monday, but the shadows under her eyes were deeper in color, like some serious eighties makeup. 

“I didn’t know—” Her voice was even raspier than usual, which made sense considering she had just been asleep and then screaming.  She grabbed her backpack and coat from the dining chair, balancing both of them over her left arm.  “It’s cool, I’m going.”  She opened the front door with her right hand, shuffled her awkward load of possessions through, and closed it behind her, silently, so that he knew she had stopped mid-flight to ease it shut.

Gavin picked the blanket up off the floor, folded it twice, and lay it over the arm of the couch.  He sat down and considered the meaning of what had just happened.  Rona Gomez.  In his living room.  Sleeping right here. Gavin’s butt was currently being warmed by heat that had originated in Rona’s body.

He stood up and moved to the chair.

Wasn’t there something you were supposed to do when you found your student asleep in your living room? He thought back to his sexual harassment training, but that was back in his first year of teaching and he couldn’t remember.  Call the police?  The dean?

Sinder came into the living room wearing boxer shorts and a giant fuzzy bathrobe. 

“Sorry about that.” He sat on the couch, hands behind head, untroubled by the lingering heat from Rona’s body. His bathrobe gaped open, showing off the sunken dent where the two halves of his ribcage met. “I would have warned you she was here, but I got home super late.”

Warn me? About Rona Gomez sleeping in the living room? Gavin hadn’t even told Sinder about Rona.  He didn’t want to complain, like Randy Ledbetter said. But this had gotten out of hand now, and it was time for Gavin to come clean.

“That’s Rona Gomez,” Gavin and Sinder said at the same time. It was pretty normal for them to say things at the same time, actually, but this one was weird.

“How did you know that?” they said at the same time.

“She’s in my class.”  Only Gavin said that.  Sinder wasn’t teaching this semester; he was on fellowship because of his exams.

“Oh, seriously?” Sinder grabbed the folded blanket and spread it across his lap.  Gavin couldn’t see the long, dark hairs that must be caught in it, not without his contacts, but he knew they were there. “That explains why she kept talking about Julia Kristeva.  I just met her at a party last night. She’s super cool.”

“She is?”

“Yeah.” Sinder looked surprised, like, Obviously crazy-ass Rona Gomez is super cool, everyone knows that. “Did you know her parents are like total Cuban Republicans from Florida?”

“They’re Cuban?” It somehow hadn’t occurred to Gavin that Rona was Latina. Kind of like how he didn’t think of himself as Chinese, usually, even though his father definitely was.

“Yeah, Gomez, Cuban.” Sinder pulled his knees up under the blanket and wrapped his arms around them.  I should go turn the heat up, Gavin thought, but he didn’t. 

“And she hated Miami so much that she finished high school at sixteen and ran away to New York to be in a band.  It was like, one of those kind of gothy Celtic bands with like a cello or something.  She played me some on her ipod, it was pretty good.” 

“Huh,” Gavin said.  “Do you want coffee?”

Sinder shook his head.

“I’m going to make some,” Gavin said. The kitchen adjoined the living room—well, basically they were the same room, except one had carpet and one had linoleum.  Gavin’s hands shook a little as he pulled the beans out of the freezer.  But the smell rising from the grinder made him feel almost better.   Pouring the water, listening to the bubbling noises: this was all going to make sense in a minute.

“So.” Gavin leaned against the kitchen counter.  Sinder was lying down now, his head where Rona’s feet had been, burritoed up in the blanket and robe.  “What did she say about Kristeva?”

“You know, the regular stuff about the abject.  Our belief in a coherent self is an illusion, blah blah blah. Basically she was trying to get me to take DMT.”

“DMT?” Was that the thing people used for date-rape?  Gavin could never keep all those initials straight.

“It’s a psychedelic drug.”

“I know what DMT is,” Gavin said. “What does it have to do with Kristeva?”  

“Oh, I don’t know.”  Sinder yawned. “It was along the lines of: The only way we can become aware of all that stuff our psyche is abjecting is to take drugs that break down our egos. Something like that.”

Gavin could smell the coffee.  They had one of those pots that let you pour while it was still brewing, so you never had to wait more than a minute.  He held his face over the steaming liquid in his cup—too good to drink, yet, he just wanted to breathe it in.  He carried the cup back to the kitchen table, which was technically in the living room if you went by the linoleum/carpet definition. 

“So what did you say?”

“I said okay.”

“Okay?  What do you mean okay?”

“I said I’d try the DMT.”

Gavin took a sip of his coffee, more like a gulp, which was stupid because it was still steaming hot and it burned his mouth.

“Yeah?  And then?”

“Then I tried it. Smoked it.”

“Oh.  Okay.”  He sucked cool air across the burned parts of his mouth, avoiding saying the next thing he was thinking, but really, someone had to say it and Gavin was the only one here. 

“Aren’t your exams in like two weeks?”

“It’s not a big deal,” Sinder said, his eyes closed now.  “It only lasts ten minutes.”

Gavin closed his own eyes and imagined Sinder and Rona Gomez, sharing a pipe on someone’s couch in a basement somewhere, with maybe like a lava lamp in the corner.  Slumping back, eyes veiny and red and crazy-looking.

Something about the whole thing really pissed Gavin off. It could have been those glazed eyes, symbolizing Rona’s progression from trying to ruin his class to trying to get his roommate kicked out of grad school.  Or maybe it was the image of them side-by-side on a couch, bodies slack, thighs touching, which symbolized—well, Gavin wasn’t sure what it symbolized, or maybe he just didn’t like thinking about it. 

He opened his eyes, and Sinder was asleep. His eyelashes, which were long like a girl’s, folded down over his cheek like a beautiful butterfly wing or whatever.

“Dude, wake up.”  Gavin got up and poked Sinder on the shoulder a couple of times, but it didn’t work.  He went back to the linoleum, poured a second cup of coffee, and poked Sinder again, this time harder and in the ribs, until he sat up and took the cup in both hands.

“I’m awake,” Sinder said.  He opened his eyes really wide to prove it.  They looked pretty normal, other than being open so wide. “Did you ask me something?”

“Did anything happen?” 

Wait, what? That’s not what he was planning to say.  He was supposed to say, Sinder, I think it would be a good idea if you stopped trying new drugs between now and when you take your exams.  But it was Rona giving him the drugs, right?  So that’s probably why he asked.

“With Rona?”  Sinder sloshed down some coffee.  Hot stuff didn’t burn his mouth; because he was Indian, he said.  “Nah, dude.  Just the party was near here and I didn’t want her to have to walk back to the dorms in the dark. I told her she could crash on the couch.”

Such ethics, Gavin thought, but like, sarcastically.  It was kind of an inside joke, since ethics was Sinder’s field of specialization.  It doesn’t mean we’re, you know, ethical all the time, Sinder had said.  Probably the opposite.

“Why?” Sinder's voice was casual, but his eyebrows looked worried.  “You into her?”

Gavin took a careful sip of his own coffee and made a decision.

“Well, you know that hot girl in my class was telling you about?”

Sinder shook his head, like he didn’t remember, but of course he did.  “The Ashley?  I thought you said she was an Ashley.”

It was a stretch—Rona was the opposite of an Ashley, a Zoë or something—but it was the best lie he could come up with to stop whatever the fuck was going on here, and it needed to be stopped.

 “Yeah, I thought she was at first.  She was wearing a different outfit.”

“Oh, right,” Sinder said, nodding like that totally made sense.  “Too bad, dude, I was kind of into her.  No, it’s cool.”  He used his hand to wave away Gavin’s apology—like, pssh, what’s a little lost pussy between friends— and Gavin almost felt bad for messing up his chances with Rona.  But then Sinder did this kind of funny stare at his waving hand, like it was really interesting or something, and Gavin was glad he had lied. 

“This is good coffee.”  Sinder gulped down the rest and put the empty cup on the floor. He stood up and wrapped the blanket over his giant robe. “I need to go back to bed.” 

“But wait!” The first rule of healthy roommate relations was never go to bed angry, so they were gonna have to talk about something else.  “What was it like?”

Sinder closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, bolstered by twelve inches of puffy fabric.

“Well, first it was like a thousand amoebas were bouncing around my face,” he said.  “Then Rona was lying on this beanbag thing, and I think she was chanting.  She was chanting something in a blend of three Romance languages and it sounded like some kind of Satanic flute jazz. And her eyes were glowing this intense violet color.  They looked so, so purple.”

“She has two black eyes,” Gavin said.  “She walked into a wall.”

Sinder nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Did you see the parts of yourself that you had abjected?”

“Maybe.” He pulled the blanket tighter around himself.  He needs sleep, Gavin remembered.  “They’re not parts of me, though. They’re parts of everything.  I don’t mean to sound like a cliché, but we’re all part of the same giant thing.”

He looked so sweet, swaddled against the wall in a beam of early morning sunlight, that Gavin began to feel like an asshole again.  But then he remembered: I’m doing this for him.  No need for remorse.  Gavin was going to save Sinder from himself, more important, save him from Rona fucking Gomez. 

<Chapter 8
Chapter 10>

Chapter 8

Act I, Scene III

Lights come up on Thomas McGrew IV, in his undershirt, holding his long sleeved shirt out in front of him.  Thomas McGrew III sits watching him. He is drinking a cup of tea.

TMGIII (Looking up the slide at TMGIV): What are you going to do?

Thomas McGrew IV scowls at the shirt, then sits down to tie one sleeve around his wrist.  This is a complicated procedure that entails pinching the body of the shirt between his knees. Then he stands and holds his arm in the air to judge how far the shirt hangs down. He scowls: it’s not long enough.  He pulls off his belt.

TMGIII: That won’t work.

Thomas McGrew IV loops a loose end of the shirt through the belt buckle and holds his arm up again.  The shirt and belt, tied together, hang down to his feet.

TMGIII (Holds up a tea pot): Have some tea.  It’ll calm your nerves.

Thomas McGrew IV takes off his pants.

TMGIII: Come on now.

In only his underwear, Thomas McGrew IV sits again to tie the pants to the belt.  When he stands and lifts his arm again, his clothing forms a long, floppy rope about twice as long as his body.  He nods.

TMGIV: Watch.

He tosses the end of his clothing-rope into the air.  The end of his pants leg hits a higher spot on the slide.  It rests there for a moment, then slides down slowly, at a creeping pace, until it has returned to him.

TMGIII: There’s nothing to attach it to.

TMGIV (Angry, embarrassed): Well, that’s extremely helpful. Don’t you think I know that?

TMGIII: Drink some tea and try to relax a bit.

TMGIV (Stomps his foot on the slide, sending vibrations up and down): I AM RELAXED.

TMGIII: Put your clothes on and have some tea.

* * *

Whenever Gavin needed to talk to Marjorie Mendelssohn—two dactyls, she joked—she wanted to meet at Café Firenze, not her office.  It was the artsier of the two undergraduate coffee shops on Main Street.  Students here wore thick knitted scarves and serious dark sweaters.   The ones in New Buffalo sweatshirts and baseball caps went to College Grounds, two doors over. 

She was always ten minutes late, but since she was one of Gavin’s dissertation advisors, he needed to show up on time and wait for her.  At least it was a nice place to sit.  Today they had a fire going and the air smelled like gingerbread lattes. He sipped his black coffee and pretended to read the photocopied article on the table in front of him.  But mostly he was watching Sinder’s advisor, Randy Ledbetter, across the room.  Jolly and white-bearded, he sat surrounded by philosophy undergrads at his regular table in the corner, holding forth like Socrates.

“I guess that depends on how you define Utilitarian,” he chortled, and all the undergrads burst out in peals of sardonic snickering.   One baby-faced freshman on the outskirts, earnest and nerdy, almost choked on her Italian soda.  

Marjorie Mendelssohn seated herself across from him (Gavin checked the clock, yes, ten past). She was tall with good posture and short, angry hair.  He had assumed she was a lesbian for years, but it turned out she was just one of those dykey-looking middle-aged feminists.  Seriously, she was married to a man and they had kids and everything.   

“I had a chance to skim this,” she said, laying an unstapled copy of his revised chapter on the table.  At his dissertation defense back in October, she had fumed: How can you have a chapter on abjection in Stump without any discussion of The Divine Sharpness?  Easy.  Because everyone wrote about abjection in The Divine Sharpness.  Grover Maloney alone had written about it in no fewer than four articles and two book chapters. It seems to be working out perfectly well for him, Marjorie had said.

Now he had revised it for her, as promised, had sent it to her over a week ago, they had set up this meeting to discuss it, and she had had a chance to skim it?  That was a bad sign.  That, and the fact that she hadn’t taken off her gloves or thick wool coat.  This wasn’t going to be a good meeting.  

“So, I have to tell you.” Marjorie pulled her extremely straight back up straighter, leaning her head out of striking distance.  “I still don’t buy your use of abjection here.”

Gavin looked past her at Randy Ledbetter, scratching his chin as he listened to the serious, dark-haired girl next to him.  Maybe I should grow a beard.

Marjorie flipped three pages into a sloppy pile before finding one that was scrawled over in purple pen.

“You say here that the study of abjection ‘has too often been directed towards abject substances—blood, vomit, feces—rather than to the correlative fears and anxieties they represent.’”

“Right,” Gavin said. “That’s the whole point of the chapter.”

She frowned and flipped a few more pages, looking for purple ink. 

“The play’s true sense of abjection,” she read, using one of those scare-quote voices, “is evoked by the strained relations between Bo (the body) and Mi (the mind), each initially unwilling to acknowledge the other’s existence, then increasingly desperate to subsume him.  Only by dominating his counterpart can Bo or Mi resolve the anxiety of duality and achieve a stable, comforting monism.  And yet for the spectator, as for Bo and Mi themselves, the resolution of their palpable tension can only bring further horror and a deepened sense of abjection, as we recognize our own sublimated desires to obliterate those parts of ourselves that defy orderly categorization. Indeed, what could be more grotesque than a body attempting to devour a mind, or a mind to devour a body?”

She lowered the paper and stared at him, her unplucked eyebrows furrowed, pleading, like having to read his chapter was causing her physical pain.

“You don’t see the problem,” she said.

Gavin shook his head.  Why don’t you just fucking tell me.

She slapped the pages down on the table and spread her leather-clad hands across them.  The surface of Gavin’s coffee shook from the impact.  It was the only drink on the table. Marjorie hadn’t ordered anything.

“Why,” she asked, her mouth twisted in a kind of triumphant sneer, “are you so afraid to write about bodies?”

No, no, no. This was all wrong.  Didn’t she understand?  I did this for you. He hadn’t even wanted to write about The Divine Sharpness.  This part of the chapter was a gift, the revision he had written for no purpose at all except to please her.  

 “I am writing about bodies.”  He tried to sound normal, unaffected, like her rhetorical question hadn’t chilled his blood to an iciness even the roaring fire couldn’t penetrate. Just a question. “I’m writing about mind/body dualism and the fundamental instability of the—”

“Actual bodies!  Has it even occurred to you that you are writing about a play whose final scene depicts two protagonists using their teeth and fingernails to tear a giant, bloody heart into shreds of raw meat?”

Gavin studied the fury in her eyes, cold like murder, and realized: she hates me.  How had he never noticed it before, during the past two years that they had worked together?  He thought she was bitchy, for sure, prone to lash out.  But none of that was anything personal.

“And what you want to discuss is the conflict between the mind and the body?” She rolled her eyes, like this was the stupidest thing anyone had ever wanted to discuss, and not, you know, one of the most enduring conundrums in the history of human thought. “How are you going to write about the abject without writing about the stuff of abjection?  It's cowardly, and it seems to be missing the point.”

You’re missing the point! The point of what all that physical stuff represents: the void, the fear of death, the human condition!

Gavin looked over at Randy Ledbetter’s corner, hoping to make eye contact, to send a telepathic plea for help.  Most of the undergrads had left, but Randy was still talking to the last of them, two skinny guys clutching books on symbolic logic. 

“You perform the most convoluted rhetorical acrobatics, all to avoid discussing the specificity of actual people’s physical bodies. Your fear of the body, especially your squeamishness about blood, strikes me as deeply misogynistic.”  

She was lifting her bag over her shoulder now, about to stand up and leave, nothing more to say to him. 

“So, then…” Gavin said.

“Listen.”  She didn’t put her bag down, but at least she stayed seated.  “I’m going to approve your dissertation.  Clearly you’ve worked very hard on it, and Frick seems to buy your argument.  God knows there are probably all kinds of jobs waiting for people like you.”

“Thanks.”  His voice was barely a whisper.  He had to force it.

Then, as though she had given him some kind of socially acceptable goodbye, she was gone, leaving Gavin’s rejected chapter on the table.  He picked it up, shook the papers into a neat stack,  and shoved it under the article he was reading.

“Bad meeting?”

It was Randy Ledbetter, bundled in a ski parka and sheepskin hat.  He had appeared across the table in the seat Marjorie had just vacated, smiling and rosy-cheeked.  They had never really met, never been formally introduced at any rate.  But at this moment, Gavin kind of wanted to climb into his lap and curl up in his puffy jacket.

“She hates my dissertation.”

“You know,” Randy said, pulling on his gloves. “When I studied with John Rawls at Harvard, he told me the secret to surviving as an academic.  Never complain.  Things are only going badly if you think they are. This stuff is all a game, isn’t it, and you can win it with your mind.”

“Okay,” Gavin said. “I guess it’s going all right then.”

Randy winked a wise, wrinkly eye at him. “That’s the spirit.” He stood, lifted his gloved hand and gave Gavin a manly clap on the shoulder before he turned and left. 

<Chapter 7
Chapter 9>