Chapter 7

Monday’s class was fucked up.  Seriously, without question, it was the most fucked up class Gavin had ever taught.

To start, Kayla spent the first fifteen minutes leaning over Braden’s tiny desk drawing adorable cartoon rabbits on her own coursepack, which they were sharing.  Gavin had a primo view from where he stood by the board, giving his opening mini-lecture on Kristeva’s relationship to structuralist and psychoanalytic theory.  He wanted to tell her to cut it out, but he couldn’t decide if, objectively speaking, she was doing anything wrong.  Just last class he had instructed them to share coursepacks, and wasn’t that all they were doing?  Of course the sight of her shoving her cleavage all up in his sunburned face (Who gets a sunburn in January?) was completely distasteful.  But that was an aesthetic judgment, and everyone knew what you got when you mixed the aesthetic with the law: Fascism.

“Kayla.”  Thirty seconds more and he was going to chuck his dry-erase marker at Braden’s stupid fuzzy head. “Could you please read the passage that starts, ‘A wound with blood’?”

She looked up, startled, with one of those where am I expressions like she had just stepped off a time machine into a strange new world.

“Page three,” Gavin said.  “Second paragraph.”

“Oh, okay. Hold on.”  She took a long time flipping  through the coursepack, which was supposed to be open to page three already.  But at least she put it on her own desk, thereby pointing her boobs back in an acceptable direction.

“‘A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay—’” She looked up at Gavin.  “Is this the right part?”

“That’s it.”

Her skeptical expression meant that she hadn’t read the essay; otherwise she’d know the whole thing was like this.  Looking around, he saw a lot of wrinkled noses, furrowed brows, confused whispering.  The room was dim in the gray light of winter, and the students’ faces blurred into the industrial tan of the furniture and walls.  The ancient fluorescent light that flickered overhead was a symbol for Gavin’s heart, faint, discouraged, barely able to find the motivation to keep going. Here he was, in charge of these young people—their de-facto boss for this one point two five hours—and he was pretty sure none of them had done the reading.

The one person who had done it, of course, would be Rona Gomez, but she wasn’t there.  That was fucked up thing number two.  It was possible that she had dropped, which would be okay, probably good.  But it was more possible that, at this very moment, she was undergoing major surgery for whatever it was that gets broken after you exit a building through a third-story window.  And that would be not be okay at all. It would be really, really bad and all Gavin’s fault and also quite possibly a crime.

“‘Okay.  The sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay,” Kayla sped up, like she was trying to get it over with, “does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit—’”

“She crazy,” the black guy said.  He was sitting next to one of the Asian girls who never talked.  She turned and stared at him, silent and blank-faced. Agitated giggles began to travel around the room in uneasy waves. 

“All right, settle down.” Gavin raised his voice above the whispers and laughs. “Let’s try and focus.” 

Most of them pulled it together.  The Asian girl stopped gawking at DeWhatever his name was and stared back down at her coursepack.  Two of the Brandons were muttering back and forth and elbowing each other lightly in the ribs.  Other than that, everyone was quiet.  Kayla even managed to keep reading, though her voice was a little shaky like she was trying not to laugh or cry or something.  

“‘These body fluids, this defilement, this shit,” she repeated, “are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border.’”

“Thank you,” Gavin said.  “So.  Class.”  (That’s what he called his students when he was pissed off at them.) “What is Kristeva saying about bodily fluids and feces?”

Braden raised his hand.  Today his shirt had sleeves, so that was an improvement.  But it was tight, some kind of cotton-synthetic blend that clung to his modest pectoral muscles, a few buttons on the front open to reveal a ruddy bit of chest.  It was probably his good shirt.  This must be what Brandons wore on dates. 

“She thinks they’re gross, right?”

“Everyone thinks they’re gross,” Gavin said.  “Why does that matter?  Why do we think they’re gross?”

“They make her feel like she’s gonna hurl.” He had reclaimed Kayla’s coursepack and was flipping through it.  “This whole story is about things that make her want to hurl.  See, here it is, on page two: ‘When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire.’” 

“I thought you haven’t bought the coursepack yet,” Gavin said.

“I read Kayla’s copy last night.”

The fluorescent light glowed bright for a moment, with an agitated buzzing sound, before it went out.

“I was kind of into that part.”  Braden said. “About the milk.”

Kayla’s copy, last night. They were just words when the reached Gavin’s ears. But by the time they got to his brain they were a syllogism awaiting completion. And by the time he completed it they had reached his gut and were throwing flying ninja kicks at his intestines.

“Okay.” Gavin could get over it.  Pain in his stomach, no big deal. “Why?”

 “The way she describes it.”  Braden looked down at the page and dug his fingers into his hair nest.  The light had turned on again, just over his head, so that Gavin could see oily little flakes of dandruff getting knocked loose.  “It’s really realistic.  It’s like when you’re wasted—I mean, you know, intoxicated—and you get that taste in your mouth.”

Gavin imagined Kayla’s manicure entwined in that hair.  It was one of those horrible images, like some atrocity on the cover of U.S. News and World Report that makes you want to shoot yourself.

“Great,” he said, trying to move on, but Braden kept talking.

“When you get that taste, it’s like what she says, like you get all sweaty and your heart beats really fast and you just start to feel the hurl coming up.”

The Asian girl raised her hand.  “Professor Cheng-Johnson?”

“Gavin.”

“Professor Gavin.”  Her voice was crackly and her skin was kind of green.  “Can I please go to the restroom?”   She pointed down at the coursepack.  “Makes me feel sick.”

Gavin nodded, and the girl ran out of the room, almost crashing into Rona Gomez, who was standing in the doorway with her boots and her giant black coat and her ratty backpack and two black eyes.

Fuck.

“Come in,” Gavin said.  “Have a seat.”

There were a couple empty ones off to the side.  She put her backpack down carefully, like she was trying not to be disruptive, which was kind of impossible since every single person in the room was staring at her.  She looked like a raccoon, her eyes ringed in black, rummaging through her backpack like it was a garbage can.

“Okay,” Gavin said.  “So why is Kristeva talking about—”  What had Braden called it? “Hurling. What does it have to do with abjection?” 

Blank stares.  Gavin locked eyes with Braden, who was chewing on a hangnail.  Finally, predictably,  the black-sweatshirted arm appeared in Gavin’s peripheral vision.

“Rona.”

“Throwing up is like the perfect representation of abjection.  It’s casting something out from your body.”  She sounded like she had a head cold, and the bridge of her nose was all swollen. “And then you feel better, like everything will be okay if you can just get rid of this unwanted thing.  That’s what abjection is, getting rid of something you think is wrong or sickly so you can have a sense of wholeness and healthiness.”

Yeah, that’s nice.  So what the fuck happened to your face? That would be the logical thing to say. But instead, he said, “Good explanation.”

“But also,” she said, “abject things make you feel like you’re going to throw up.  Like how we feel around shit or blood or dead bodies…”

“Right,” said Gavin.  “Very good.” 

The Asian girl had just returned to her desk, all pale and sweaty.  Please don’t barf, please don’t barf , he commanded. The only thing that could make this day more fucked up would be a hot pile of regurgitated Chinese food.  

“Why don’t we stop there for today,” he said.  Class was supposed to be over in seven minutes, but he couldn’t see any point in dragging it out.  

The students didn’t seem to mind leaving early. The Asian girl was packed and out the door before Gavin had even finished reminding them to please read the article if you haven’t already.  Kayla and Braden walked out together, stumbling and bumping into each other in what Gavin figured was an exhausted post-coital reverie.

He stood by the door, waiting for them all to get out, so he could talk to Rona Gomez. She stayed in her chair, her backpack on her lap, only coming over to him after the last student—the black kid, limping like maybe he hurt his foot or something—was gone.

“Sorry I was late.”  She pushed back the straggles of hair, like she always did, but this time her face underneath was a lumpy monster mask. “ I had a concussion.”

“The window?” Gavin asked.

She shook her head firmly, then stuck out one arm to steady herself against the door frame.

“The wall,” she said.

The thought of Rona Gomez stepping out of a window had seemed far-fetched enough; he had never even considered that she might try the wall.  He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it: Rona splattered against a wall, her black coat and hair flattened around her like the wings of a smashed insect.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It didn’t work.”

“Okay,” Gavin said. “I won’t worry.”

Which was total bullshit, because of course he was going to worry.  He was going to do nothing but worry until she was out of his class.  

She needs to drop, he told himself, as he made his way across the snowy quad to the Drunken Buffalo to drown his pedagogical sorrows in Scotch.  His jaw was clenched and his hands shook, not just from the cold. Frick had been right: needy undergraduates would suck all your energy, if you let them.  But Gavin wouldn’t let her.  He was ready to fight. He would go to the English department, the dean of student services, the head of campus security, whatever it took. 

Not today, though.  It was late afternoon, which meant the weak winter sun was already disappearing behind the dead-flat horizon, and he really needed that Scotch.  But soon—tomorrow, or definitely by next week—he would get Rona Gomez out of his class. 

<Chapter 6
Chapter 8>

Interlude: The Next Big Thing

You might have noticed that this isn’t a chapter.  Sorry!  Chapter 7 will be coming very soon.  But first I must break for this brief programming note: I am so honored to have been tagged by the brilliant Sophie Hardach as THE NEXT BIG THING!!! Sophie is the author of The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages, which is about the hippest book about Kurdish refugees you will ever read.  It is really sad, funny, surprising, and cleverly structured. In fact, don’t even bother reading my answers to the questions below; just go buy her book right now.  Then go read it.

Finished?  It was awesome, right?

Okay, welcome back.  Now comes the part where we NEXT BIG THING types answer the following questions:

What is the working title for your book?

The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God. I swear, it came to me in a dream.  Weirdest thing ever.

Where did the idea come from for your book?

The book is inspired by the four years I spent as an undergraduate English major and the six years I spent as an English Ph.D. student.  I loved studying English, but I often noticed discrepancies between the things English scholars said they believed and what they seemed to believe in practice.  That’s what this book is about, sort of.   That and the fear of death.   

What genre does your book fall under?

The last book I wrote didn’t have a clear enough genre, for marketing purposes: it was somewhere between literary fiction and “chick lit.” That’s why I’ve made sure my new novel falls squarely into the category of “metafictional academic satire porn.”  This time there will be no ambiguity!  

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Self-serving literary scholar gets called out by savant undergrad.

Or for a multi-sentence version: Gavin Cheng-Johnson, soon-to-be English Ph.D., is searching for a job as an English professor while he finishes his dissertation on the experimental playwright Liam Stump.  He wants to devote minimal effort to teaching his undergraduate composition course, but his student Rona Gomez wants much more than that.  She hangs on every esoteric idea carelessly tossed around Gavin’s classroom.  Hoping to become Gavin’s protégée, she pursues a relationship that will lead both of them to places they never expected or wanted to go.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Oh, no, I don’t know any actors!  I hate movies and TV.  But I think Margaret Cho would be a good Gavin Cheng-Johnson.  And then maybe Aubrey Plaza could be Rona Gomez.  I’ve never seen her act or speak, but I just read an interview with her in Bust Magazine and she seemed pretty cool and also kind of crazy.  Jeremy Irons could play Liam Stump.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Don’t know.  Wish I did!

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I’ve only been writing it for two months, but I am keeping a good pace.  I hope to be done with a draft by around June, though it’s hard to gauge these things sometimes.  The first draft of my last novel took three years, but it was about 500 pages long. I want this one to be much shorter.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Well, of course “compare” is a heavy and kind of scary word.  I was heavily influenced by the novels White Noise and End Zone by Don Delillo.  End Zone is the most brilliant novel, amazing, all about highly philosophical football players at a remote college in Texas during the cold war.  I was also inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which is a novel about a poet and his editor, but it’s written as a preface and annotations to a lengthy poem.  Through the preface, poem, and annotations, we learn about the relationship between the editor and poet. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

All my friends with Ph.D.s who have moved to the ends of the earth to pursue their avocation.  I’m talking Ohio, South Carolina, upstate New York.  Who knows if anyone will ever see them again. I pour this novel out for you, my homies. 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

It has a lot of texts-within-the-text.  These are mostly 1) excerpts from one of Liam Stump’s plays, 2) quotes from critical theorist Julia Kristeva, and 3) scenes from pornographic movies. 

Oh, and I'm writing it serially.  So if you'd like to read it, you can start here.

Phew, that was a lot of thinking about this novel!  I’m exhausted.  Luckily, now for the most fun part: tagging my victims…

I mean, introducing THE NEXT BIG THINGS: 

Michelle Gonzales, besides being my professional and literary life-partner, is the author of the memoir Pretty Bold for a Mexican Girl: Growing up Chicana in a Hick Town, a touching and brutally honest tribute to the small town she left behind. Her love of dystopian fiction borders on psychotic, and she's currently writing her own uniquely Californian/Chicana contribution to this genre. 

Anita Felicelli blew my mind by studying art, literature, and rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley before obtaining a law degree and becoming a published poet and novelist. I just finished her poetic and moving novel, Sparks off You, and can't wait to read her next one. 

Diane Rinella is such a brilliant baker, cake decorator, insane antique house restorer and Rocky Horror cast member that it only stands to reason that she is a brilliantly twisted writer as well.  She is currently working on a series of romance novels about a love so transgressive that it offends about half the people she summarizes the plot to.  Nice work! (I'm totally jealous.)

Chapter 6

Gavin was sitting on Sinder’s futon, watching a lady dressed like a nun use a giant wooden paddle to spank a lady dressed as a schoolgirl.

“I fucking love knee socks,” Sinder said.

He adjusted the laptop on his desk so that it faced a little more towards him, a little less towards Gavin.  It was perched on top of a giant book, six inches thick.  Gavin couldn’t see the title.

 “This makes…” Sinder slid his finger over the screen on his phone.  They documented their porn collection on a spreadsheet, kept online for easy access, though Gavin had never gotten it to work on his own phone.  “A hundred and sixty seven for BDSM—Light. Twenty-six for Christian Imagery. And, let’s see…three fifty two for everybody’s favorite category…” Wait for it, wait for it, oh the suspense. “Lesbian.”
 

Actually, it was Gavin’s least favorite category.  Okay, he hated it.  He would rather sit through a three-hour MLA panel on the Fifteenth Century printing press than watch two woman bring each other to orgasm. What could make a man feel more hopeless, more unnecessary?  There was nothing lonelier in the world. And yet look at Sinder—the guy couldn’t get enough of it.  He was grinning, his mouth a little open, a factory worker enthralled by the assembly-line robot who would make him redundant.

“That’s a lot of lesbians.” Gavin tried not to sound glum.  He wanted to keep Sinder’s spirits up before his exams, and anyway, it wasn’t exactly manly to admit that watching two women have sex kind of made you want to drink Drano.

“I know!  Seven hundred and four!” Sinder was bouncing lightly in his desk chair, his fingers gripping  hard on the armrests.  Gavin remembered reading somewhere that skinny people fidgeted more.  Gavin was on the chubby side, it was true—his last girlfriend had called him Buddha-esque a few weeks before they broke up—but at least he could freaking sit still. 

“Probably a few more,” he said. “I think some of them were threesomes.”

The nun took her robe off, and surprise, she had been hiding a giant pair of fake boobs under there the whole time. She pushed the schoolgirl onto the desk, spread her knees roughly apart, and said, “Young lady, you’ve been very, very bad.”

When she opened the desk drawer and pulled out the Jesus dildo, Gavin started to pick at a scab on his hand.  He had cut himself washing dishes a few days ago, and it was starting to itch. Oh, Sister Margaret, stop, said the schoolgirl, but you could tell she didn’t mean it.  It’s sooo big.  He caught his fingernail under the rough edge of the scab and tugged upward.  Slowly, carefully.  Oh Sister! Oh yes! No sudden movements.  Yes! Yes!  He dragged his fingernail hard towards the attached end of the scab.  It loosened and then skidded on a slick patch of fresh blood.  Fuck me, Sister, yes, fuck me!  He finger-painted crimson circles around his palm.

“What are you looking at?” Sinder paused the video. “You’re missing the best part.”

Gavin held up his bloody hand. “I cut myself.”

Sinder threw a box of band-aids at him.  It smacked against his palm and dropped onto the bed.

“Ouch.”

“You’ll thank me in a minute.”  Sinder angled the laptop screen back towards Gavin and pressed play.

There it was, close-up on the schoolgirl, her lips stretched around the base of her Lord on the cross, eyes peering longingly upwards through clumps of darkened eyelash, saliva dripping onto the little curls of the nun’s pubes—this must be have been made in Europe or something—that were poking past the harness straps.  Sinder was watching him watch, skinny brown hands clasped under his chin, excited for his reaction. 

Gavin widened his eyes like he was really watching, watching hard.  Then he made up his own movie in his head.  In it, a future version of himself was giving the keynote speech at the MLA convention. 

Your understanding of Stump’s less-studied works is so inspiring, the cute grad-student volunteer purred as she escorted him from the stage.  Do you want to go swimming?

I didn’t bring a bathing suit, Gavin said.

Me, neither.  She winked and slipped a pool key into his hand.  Meet me at eleven.

“Fine,” Sinder said, stopping the video.  “Doesn’t look like you’re into it.”  Gavin had already forgotten to pretend he was watching.  He was absentmindedly trying to stick a band-aid to his blood-smeared hand. 

“I’m into it.  Totally into it.” He looked up at his roommate. What was that face you were supposed to make to show you were heartily enjoying lesbian porn? 

“Don’t patronize me.”  Sinder clicked the laptop shut.  Now Gavin could see the title of the book below it: The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.  Guess that explained why it was so thick; a philosopher couldn’t tell you what a word like “epistemology” meant without a seventy-page treatise.

“You can’t focus.  It’s that Ashley in your class, right?”

Gavin had forgotten that Sinder knew about her.  He flopped backwards, banging his head against the dense futon mattress. Sinder liked his bed uncomfortable; Keeps me from oversleeping, he always said.

“She’s ruining porn for you.  I’ve heard that’s what happens when you have a real woman.” Sinder wheeled his chair closer to the futon, so he could lean over Gavin like a psychiatrist.  “Did you ask her out yet?”

 “No way, brah.” He didn’t actually talk like a frat boy except to Sinder, who could recognize the irony.  “Don’t you know anything about women?”

“No. Thanks for the reminder.”   

 “Listen.” Gavin rose to sitting.  Just one minute lying on the rock-hard futon was already making his back hurt.  “You can’t just go asking your student out during the second week of the semester.  You’ve gotta finesse it.  She needs to feel comfortable with you, to learn how much she really respects and admires you, before you make any moves.”

Something sticky touched Gavin’s hand—not that kind of sticky, more like jam or honey, but still, eww— and he jumped up from the bed.  It had to be a sign, clear as if it had been sent from on high by the chair of Sinder’s exam committee, that Gavin had been in Sinder’s room long enough.  

Wait, no—the stickiness was just Gavin’s blood.  He could see the red smudge he had left on the sky-blue comforter.  Anyway, it was still time to go.

“I get it,” Sinder said. “Choose your moment to attack.” The giant dictionary was on his lap now. He was probably trying to memorizing the entire thing.  Gavin had heard that philosophy exams were crazy hard, worse than English exams, though not quite as bad as history, which was the worst.  

“Exactly.”  Gavin stood in the doorway, one foot in Sinder’s room, one in the hall. He didn't bother mentioning the other reason that he couldn't ask Kayla out just yet.  Braden was a step ahead of him, it was true, in the flirting department.  But that was all the more reason for Gavin to hang back, play it cool, position himself as the alternative, the man to Braden's boy.  When the time came for Gavin to flirt, he would flirt circles around Braden.

“See, I never do that," Sinder said. "I usually tell them they’re hot the first time I meet them, or, like, ask to touch their hair or something.”

 Gavin shook his head. “Gives them too much power. You have to show them you’re not interested.”  He recognized the cockiness in his own voice as something he had heard in a movie or a commercial or something.  It kind of freaked him out not to sound like himself.  He wondered if Sinder could tell.

“How’d you get so smart?” Sinder asked.

“Only time confers wisdom, my son.”  Gavin frowned and stroked his imaginary beard.  His voice now was a kung-fu movie, but at least it was on purpose. “When you have reached the venerable age of twenty-nine, then you, too, will have mastered the enigmatic ways of those creatures known as women.” 

"Four years."  Sinder sighed.  "It will difficult to wait, master, but I will be patient." 

<Chapter 5
Chapter 7>