Chapter 19

“We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity.  Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.”  —Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

* * *

“I have some good news and some bad news.”  

It was a bright, sunny day, the kind of warm day in early March that gave you false hope that Spring was just around the corner.  Technically on the calendar it was, but that didn’t mean an end to the snow or anything. There was pretty much always a decent blizzard in April just to remind you that this was the Midwest, in case you were getting any dumb ideas about staying here permanently.

“The good news is, I have your essays graded.”

Sun was streaming through the dirty window, lighting streams of dust in the air. The Brandons and Ashleys had their spring-overreaction clothes on, shorts and miniskirts, because forty-degree weather was the perfect opportunity to show some skin. Everyone else was dressed the same as last week, except maybe a regular ski jacket instead of the extra-warm padded one. 

“The bad news is, I’m not going to hand them back until the end of class.”

There were some aw noises from a few of the more grade-obsessed students (they were trying to get into law school or whatever).  Gavin always handed back essays at the end, though, so he could bolt right after.  He didn’t want to hang around in the same room with students who had just gotten their grades, much less try to teach them anything.

 “But I before I hand them back, I wanted to tell you about the main problem I saw. If you remember, the assignment was to write about abjection in The Divine Sharpness.  What I noticed is that many of you did not present an original argument.”

Many was the understatement of the year.  Everyone but Rona Gomez.  Every single other essay had exactly the same main point: “The blood in The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God is an example of abjection.”  It’s not like it was such an awesome main point, either.  A bunch of quotes about dripping blood and the heart getting torn apart, a passage from Kristeva, nothing that hadn’t been said ten times during class.  He had given them all C’s or B minuses, depending on the clarity of their sentences and paragraph structure.   Rona’s essay got a B.

                                                                                                      

“When you become graduate students or go out into your careers, you’ll be expected to come up with your own ideas.  You won’t be able to get away with taking someone else’s argument and presenting it as your own.  So today, we’re going to do some small group work on developing original analyses of the plays we read.”

There was a groan from around the room, an “I hate groups” from one of the Brandons.  Two quiet Asian girls scooted their desks closer to each other to make it clear that they could not bear to be split up.

 “I’d like you to get into groups of three and brainstorm a list of ways the concept of abjection appears in the first act of Time Slide. You should find examples from the text to support your ideas. You have ten minutes. Get started.”

Blank faces.

“Groups of three,” he said.  “You have nine and a half minutes.”

Yeah, right. It took like seven minutes just to form the groups.  He had to make one of the Brandons—poor guy—go sit with the two silent Asian girls.  Kayla asked if she and the four other Ashleys could work in a group of five. She had stopped sitting with Braden a couple weeks ago and the two of them didn’t seem to be speaking.  Too bad Gavin wasn’t interested in her anymore.  The whole Rona thing was enough drama for one class, and anyway Kayla had kind of lost her sparkle.  Her shirt today was see-through, not in a good way, and her thick pancake makeup looked orange in the sideways light from the window.

“No,” he said, “Groups of three.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes.  Gavin made two of her friends go sit with one of the Asian guys.  None of them looked super happy about it.

Okay, groups set.  All threes, except one weird group of two nerds, one Brandon, and the black guy, fine.  Rona was working with that Asian guy who kept sitting next to her, like maybe he had a crush, and this one nerd girl who always wore shirts with vampires on them.  Rona’s copy of Time Slide was open on her desk, but on top of it she was drawing a giant maple leaf in her notebook with colored pencils. 

“Five more minutes,” Gavin said.  Most of the students were staring silently at their books.  A few were huddled together, whispering. Braden’s group of Brandons were talking about something, but it didn’t sound like abjection or Time Slide.  He heard the words fucking tramp-stamp and boner killer.  

“Okay, which group wants to go first?  Where did you see the idea of abjection in Time Slide?”

Silence, of course.  Gavin looked over at Rona’s group.  She was still drawing in her notebook. 

Finally Braden raised his hand.  He was wearing camouflage shorts that showed off his fuzzy blond legs, a hooded sweatshirt and hiking boots.  “Well, this doesn’t really answer your question.  But in our group, we just talked about how we don’t really get this play.”

That must be a real boner killer. 

“Okay.”  Gavin tried really hard not to make a face, but one of the Ashleys started giggling, so maybe he did, or maybe she was just telepathic. “Can you explain what you mean by don’t get it?”

“Yeah, well, like—is  the whole thing like this?  Just two guys sitting on a slide?”

Gavin hated when they were cute like this.  Instead of answering your question, I'm going to blame the text for my lack of ideas. Just do the fucking assignment.  

“Maybe we should hear what some other groups discussed about abjection.  That might lead us into the larger point of the play, which seems to be what you’re having trouble with.”

On the other side of the room, the black guy was raising his hand.  Wow, black guy.  He’d barely been in class all semester, much less said anything.  Gavin still couldn’t remember his name so he just pointed at him.

“This play, I think it’s about feeling stuck,” he said.   “Like how they’re stuck on the slide.”

“Okay, interesting.”  Not the way people usually discussed the play—it was about the passage of time, not about being in a cage or something—but at least he was actually thinking.  “Can you explain a little more?  Why are they stuck?”  

“It’s like.” He grabbed a fist of his own short, curly hair and pulled on it while he thought. When he let it go, his eyes were bright with an idea. “Sometimes life just makes you stuck somewhere.  Like it’s your time to be somewhere so you have to be there, but you’d rather get out but you can’t.  I think that’s what the play is about.”

Gavin had never seen this guy—DeJon?—so excited.  He gestured with his hands as he explained, looked around to see if the other students were following him.

“Interesting interpretation,” Gavin said.  “Can you explain how it relates to abjection?”

The guy looked down at his book.  He stared at the cover like the answer would come from the blurb on the back.

“I don’t know.”  The light was gone.  Gavin had blown out the candle.

Fuck. That’s not what he meant to do. He was just trying to get the guy to explain a little more, not make him all sad like that.

“It’s okay.” Gavin’s voice felt gentle, the kind of voice you use to talk to your girlfriend or someone who was sick.  He tried to catch the kid’s gaze, to let him know that his thoughts were welcome, that Gavin was happy to hear about them. But he was staring at his desk, his lips twisted, like the world had let him down but he hadn’t expected anything different. 

“DeJuan.” 

Yes, that was his name. It had just popped into Gavin’s head, right when it mattered. “What you said about the play—it was really good.” 

DeJuan didn't look up. 

Gavin hated handing back the essays.  He probably hated it more than anything else about being a teacher.  He read each student’s name, they came up one by one, he handed them the essay and tried not to make a lot of eye contact.  Some of the students shoved the essays in their bags without even looking at them.  Some compared grades with their friends, competing, Aw man, he liked yours better?  A few sat quietly at their desks, studying the comments, then looking up at him all mournful before they left.  The worst was when somebody threw the essay in the garbage on the way out, but no one did that today.

“If you have questions about your grade, you can email me,” he announced to the backs of the students streaming out the door.  “Or come see me in my office hour, which is listed on the front of your syllabus.”

Rona sat drawing through the whole process.  When he called her name, she came up, made sure to look him right in the eye as he handed her essay over, and then returned to her colored pencils.  She was still sitting there after everyone left, filling in some deep reds on the maple leaf. 

“Sorry, I’ll be done in a second.”  She pulled out a golden pencil, held it in the light and studied the color. “I just want to finish this.”

It’s kind of distracting.  This would be the perfect time to tell her, quiet, no other students around.  No more drawing in class.

He sat down next to her and leaned over to see.  The drawing was actually pretty cool-looking, a collage of overlapping trunks and leaves, bright with color, words dancing around them like they were more art than language.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s this tree thing.”  She didn’t look up, just kept drawing faster, like she was trying to finish before he could tell her to stop.  “I’m doing a storyboard.  It’s like an outline.”   

“It’s really nice, but—”

“Do you want to go to fight night?”

“Fight night,” Gavin said.

“Saturday night at Phi Mu Delta.  It’s a frat party but they have like boxing and wrestling in the back yard.”

Gavin wasn’t getting this.  Okay, Rona was into weird stuff, he knew.  But this was weird in a whole different direction.

 “You want to watch fraternity guys fight each other?”

She looked up from her drawing and pushed her hair out of her face.  She kind of searched him with her eyes, like maybe he was as puzzling to her as she was to him.

“I think it would be interesting,” she said.  Like duh, who wouldn’t want to go to fight night?

“I might need to do some work that evening.”  That was a lie.  He never worked on Saturday night.  He just didn’t know if he was ready to watch a bunch of drunk undergraduates beat each other up. Or maybe he just wasn’t ready to be seen at a fraternity with Rona.

“Me, too,” Rona said.  “Let’s work after.  And I want to hear how your talk went.”

“No, I can’t work with other people around.”

She was lining up her pencils in their flat case, wrapping a rubber band around it.

“So just come to the fight night for a while.  We can leave early and you can go do work.”

Okay, fine.  Fine. It was time he fucking accepted it: he had no capacity to turn down anything from Rona Gomez.   She knew how to do some spell or something, who knows, but he sucked at telling her no. There was no point pretending it was any different.  Isolation tanks, blow jobs, being friends, frat parties.  Whatever she suggested, he was going to cave.  Might as well do it sooner and save everyone some time. 

“Sure, okay.  Fight night, Saturday,” he said. 

<Chapter 18
Chapter 20> 

Chapter 18

Gavin was lying on the couch grading a stack of essays on The Divine Sharpness. Usually he alphabetized them but of course he had to put Rona’s on top of the pile.  This would be his first time grading the paper of someone who had touched his dick, albeit only through his pants.  It kind of made the grading more exciting than usual.

Too bad the essay was a total mess. 

“When Bo and Mi destroy the heart that they both live in and that symbolizes both the mind and the body most people see it as an act of abjection that is necessary to bring together the mind’s wanting of order with the body’s messiness as though basically abjection is a way to make the body and the mind match up.” 

Confusing, he wrote in the margin.

Okay, maybe she had some kind of point, if you re-read it over and over until you figured out where the commas were supposed to go. At that rate, it was going to take him three hours to read this five-page paper.

He wasn’t totally surprised that the essay failed to meet the basic standards of organization and sentence structure he had handed out with the directions for the first essay.  For the past week, since Gavin got back from California, she had been a total space-case.  She didn’t speak up in class anymore.  She was still hunched over her notebook all the time, but instead of scribbling notes in her messy left-handed scrawl, she was drawing little cartoons about trees. 

“This is complicated because the thing that gets abjected is the chaos and what is created in the act of abjection is order so ‘abjection’ represents both order and chaos at the same time.  Most people have read the end of the play as the triumph of order over chaos, but I believe it is the other way around. By tearing the heart apart, the mind and the body are rejecting not the chaos of the heart but the rigid structure it has provided as their home and the thing that symbolizes both of them.”

This was making his brain hurt. Focus!  He read the sentence again.  Okay, he still didn’t understand what she was trying to say, but it sounded sort of interesting.  He wrote interesting in the margin.  

He stretched his arms over his head and rearranged the stack of essays on his lap.  Don’t fall asleep.  Probably a bad idea to grade lying down, but sitting up and reading at the same time was too much work.  Ever since he got back from California, his mind had kind of melted into to Velveeta.  It was possible that Rona’s essay made perfect sense and he was just too swamp-brained to understand it.  Possible, but not probable. 

Sinder rolled into the living room on his desk chair and parked next to Gavin’s head.  

“Dude, you’re going to love this one.”  He put his laptop on Gavin’s stomach, on top of the stack of essays. 

Now that Sinder’s exams were over, he still looked exhausted but in a new way.  Instead of pale and drawn, his skin was puffy with deep brown rings under his eyes.  He wasn’t going to get the results of his exams for a couple weeks, and Gavin wouldn’t hear anything about the Santa Clarita job for “up to a month, so we can finish campus visits with the other candidates.”  (Other candidates, plural?  How many people were in the running for this job?)  All week at the apartment, it had been a marathon of microwaved snack foods and reality television.

“I’m supposed to be grading,” Gavin said.

“How many have you finished?”

“Like maybe half of one.”  

“You need a break.” Sinder’s voice had a smirk in it like he was holding back some extremely delightful piece of information.  “It’s a PDT.”

That stood for Please Don’t Tell, which was far and away Gavin’s favorite subgenre of student-teacher porn.  He had even enjoyed lesbian PDT a couple of times; that’s how good PDT was.

“Fine,” Gavin said.  “Play it.”

Sinder reached over Gavin’s chest to start the video. A girl in a plaid skirt and white blouse was tiptoeing across a dark room.  Suddenly the lights came up.

“Tatiana! Are you sneaking out after hours?” It was a large, square-jawed man in a blue v-necked sweater.  For straight porn, he was pretty attractive.  Actually he kind of looked like Talbot De Kessel from Santa Clarita, but with short hair.

“No, Mr. Blade.” The girl had shiny dark hair, and her skin was the kind of warm brown that made Gavin think of coconut oil.  She was maybe Hispanic, no, um, Latina?  Or she could just be a really tan white girl. 

“Don’t lie to me.”  Mr. Blade crossed his arms over his chest, Superman-style.   “You were going out to see your boyfriend.”

She walked right up in front of him, arched her back and widened her big, brown eyes.  “Please don’t tell on me.  I’ll get kicked out of school.” 

Okay, Gavin knew this was all fake, but wow.  He never could have resisted that face she was making. The big eyes, the tiny torso straining against thin white cloth.  He wouldn’t even have the heart to make her suck his dick or whatever.  He’d just be like, Forget about it, go. Be back before dawn. 

Mr. Blade, however, was unmoved.  He was probably more accustomed than Gavin to hot schoolgirls throwing themselves at him.

“No.”  He shook his head. “I’m going to have to tell the principal.”

“But Mr. Blade!  Isn’t there anything I can do?” She looked around wildly, signifying fear.  But her lips were stuck in a half-smirk like this whole thing was kind of funny. “Mr. Blade, please.  I would do anything.”

Mr. Blade rubbed his hand over his big square chin.

“All right, Tatiana,” he said.  “Show me your tits.”

She made a little show of protesting. Oh Mr. Blade, I couldn’t do that, you’re my teacher, blah blah. But Mr. Blade held firm: Show me your tits or I’ll have to report you.  This is a very serious violation of the rules.  If you don’t have a punishment, how will you learn right from wrong? 

“You have to hand it to the guy,” Sinder said. “It’s a foolproof argument.”

After approximately fifty seconds of arguing about it (from 4:27 to around 5:22), she finally cracked.

“Okay, I’ll do it.” 

She unbuttoned her shirt, which only had like three buttons so it didn’t take very long, and spread it open to reveal plump breasts swelling out over a tiny waist.  She was wearing a deep red bra with pink bows on it that made her chest look like an extremely awesome birthday present.

“All the way,” Mr. Blade said.

The birthday-present bra opened in the front, apparently.  Of course it did.  Those bras didn’t even exist in real life, did they? Just in porn and masturbation fantasies.  She reached into the valley between her boobs, taking her time like it was a serious expedition to get all the way in there.  Then she pulled one side open, exposing her right breast, which puffed out from her torso like some kind of insanely delicious caramel pastry.

“And the other side,” Mr. Blade said, motioning with his hand. 

Yeah, that side was pretty much perfect, too.  Gavin squinted at the screen. Were they fake?  Maybe, but if they were, it wasn’t super obvious.  At least she didn’t look like someone had shoved two baseballs up under her skin or anything.  He was gonna go ahead and consider them real.  

She pulled everything wide open, the sides of the unbuttoned shirt and unhooked bra, to make sure the perfect boobs got their well-deserved camera time.  “Is that good?” 

It was fucking awesome. 

“It’s pretty good.” Mr. Blade frowned.  “Now I’m going to have to ask you to suck my cock.”

Sinder poked Gavin in the arm. “Check out Mr. Blade.  That dude is merciless!”

“Uh huh,” Gavin said.  He wanted Sinder to shut up so he could hear Tatiana protesting. But I’m a nice girl, Mr. Blade! I’ve never even done that to my boyfriend! 

Fuck, wait. Was he—yes, he was.  Over on the other half of Gavin’s body, behind the laptop screen propped up on his stomach—fuck.  He was getting a pretty serious hard-on.  

Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

Okay, this was not supposed to happen.  He didn’t even like the student-teacher pornos.  Aside from the lesbian ones, which were straight up depressing, most of them were just way too silly to really get into.  If the actors sounded stupid—if the “Calculus teacher” kept talking about addition and subtraction or if the “precocious student” kept mispronouncing the name of her favorite author—that basically ruined it for him, even if the girl had undeniably awesome boobs and dick-sucking skills. 

And sure, there were a few of the movies he enjoyed.  He had gone into the database a handful of times—maybe twenty or thirty—to find a particularly memorable one when he had some time alone in the apartment.  But it wasn’t like he ever got actively, you know, aroused while he was watching them with Sinder.  What are you, fourteen?  

He tried to slip his hand down behind the laptop in a way that didn’t look super weird or obvious.  Okay, good.  Then he did some kind of really complicated maneuver that involved ruffling the stack of essays into a kind of tent, slipping his hand under it, and coaxing his poor hapless dick up under the waistband of his sweats.  There, a little better.  Maybe? At the very least, all that exertion was pretty unarousing.  Maybe things were going to settle down. 

Oh god, they’re fucking now.  When did that start?  He had only tuned out for like thirty seconds. She was still wearing tiny plaid skirt, the open shirt, and of course white-knee socks.  Talbot-looking-dude was naked.  Without that nerdy sweater, his giant chest seemed to be sculpted out of action-figure plastic. She was sitting on top of him, which was good because he would probably crush her if it were the other way around. She had one leg up in that awkward porn position so that you could see her smooth lady-parts, which looked like a pretty brown flower, getting stuffed full of his ginormous man-part, which looked like a skin-colored police baton.  Her face was tilted backwards.  The camera zoomed in to show her eyes scrunched shut, her full lips opened in a kind of pleasure-sneer. 

Damn, it was happening again. It had to be the girl.  She wasn’t a good actress or anything.  But something about her seemed, sort of like, interesting. Maybe it was the mysteriousness of her big, dark eyes, that sarcastic smirk when her dialogue was too corny.  Or maybe it was just watching her get fucked by the objective correlative for the abstract notion of masculinity.

“That’s enough,” Gavin said.  He could feel sweat drenching his t-shirt where his back pressed into the couch. 

“You’re not into it?  Look at her fucking tits.”  Sinder’s fingers poked Gavin’s shoulder. Gavin kind of wanted to punch him but he couldn’t sit up.  “I thought for sure you’d be into it.”

“It’s okay. It’s just a lot of—”  Gulp. Oh man, could he even say it?  “Um, you know.”

“What?”

“Like.”  Gavin gestured at the screen.  The girl was bent over a desk now.  “Fucking.”

“Well, it’s porn. Look, only four minutes left.  You’ve gotta check out the end.”

Fine.  He could do this.  Four minutes.  Think of something not sexy. 

Bo.  Mi.  Bo and Mi up to their knees in blood, smeared with it.  Bo and Mi tearing that beating heart to scraps of meat with their hands and teeth. 

By tearing the heart apart, the mind and the body are rejecting not the chaos of the heart but the rigid structure it has provided. 

Rona Gomez.

Blow jobs. 

This is not working. 

“Aw, yeah!” Sinder slapped Gavin on the chest.  Mr. Blade was ejaculating.  Okay, it was pretty impressive.  Usually guys in porn seemed to sort of dribble, like their water-pressure was messed up.  Not Mr. Blade.  He spurted in a magnificent stream that arced liked a leaping salmon onto the sweaty bosom of his mate.  The whole thing was like art almost. 

Phew. The screen froze and it was all over.  Gavin felt like he was going to pass out.  Actually he felt like he had already passed out and was about to pass out more, into some uncharted low level of consciousness that might possibly be death.  He was pretty sure his dick wasn’t hard anymore, but it was hard to feel anything below his armpits. Mostly he was all numb and kind of tingly.  

“I’m sorry, but that girl was smokin’,” Sinder said.  “Did you see her tits?  I don’t know how you could watch that without popping a woody.”

Gavin didn’t know what to say to that, so he just lay there and stared at the ceiling.  It was kind of weird having Sinder sitting just over his head like a doctor or a shrink.

“Dude, is that wrong to say?  That girl gives me a total boner.  Fuck, it might be the guy, I dunno.  Man, I’m going to miss you.”   

Now Gavin did sit up, moving the computer and papers to the side of the couch.  His erection was gone for sure, definitely.

“Sorry!  Didn’t mean to freak you out. I just meant.” Sinder rolled his chair back so they had a little space between them.  Much better.  Now Gavin could look at him without feeling like they were about to kiss or something.  “It’s gonna suck when you leave.”

He looked extra-skinny in his baggy pajamas (he hadn’t bothered getting dressed all week). And his generic rolling office chair made the living room look extra ugly.  The wall behind him was stained yellowish from years without fresh paint.  Maybe we should put up a poster or something, Gavin thought.  But there wasn’t much point.  He would probably be gone in four months and there was no knowing whether Sinder would keep the apartment or move on to another one.

“You’ll be leaving too, in a couple of years.”  It was all part of the great Graduate Student Cycle of Life, the universe’s plan for them. Gavin’s older friends had all moved away.  And yeah, it had been pretty sad to watch them go off to Kentucky and Maine and Eastern Oregon and wherever, one by one, knowing he might never see them again, maybe at a conference or something.  Now it was his turn, and then it would be Sinder’s.

“Yeah.”  Sinder turned his rolly chair around in a circle, stopping when he could see the window. “That’s true. We all have to leave.”

“Well, we can’t stay here,” Gavin said.

<Chapter 17
Chapter 19>