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>