Computers buzz with melancholy, or so it is said. I was hearing a buzzing then, on the couch. It may have been from my computer, lying on my lap, or it may have been from other, wiser wires.
Some text and images on a screen: numbers, names. I read, Number Enrolled: 18. What happened to the nineteenth? How is it she has wandered away? I heard her speak in class once, saw her curly hair.
Well let’s hope that seat stays empty for her ghost.
I’m tired now because it’s Friday. By then, every hair on my head has hurried to bed. But there’s a bright light in my eyes. It reads, Number Enrolled: 19. An intruder. Six days have passed without him there. He must know his place, so I type away.
There are murmurings among my students, eighteen. I had been silent awhile, first, and I had wondered what to say (for the silence was surprise). Really there’s no need for me to speak. He’s a sophomore and as silent as the rest.
Here, I’ll introduce you to the class. Six feet tall. Skinny. Looks a little like me. Short hair. (But not that short.) Eyes like violets. Speaks and sounds annoyed. Trouble.
I yawn at the screen. It’s Yom Kippur. Or Rosh Hashanah. Either way, there’s a void in the place where discussion should be. Lyrical exercise. His own problem, and let’s hope he stays away.
He joins and looks unsure, but that’s just my reading of it.
A second essay fired my way, and thank the Father with hesitation for that. Yet where’s the physical? I hold no paper in my hand, angrily, late at night. I chum around online until I know it’s here. And here it is: a lab report I’ve now forgotten, talking while I churn my legs.
An attachment mistake.
Well, just get it to me very soon.
They say the truth will come to the bright fluorescent light, but to tarnation if I ever see it. Instead, a forced reintroduction. I’ll tell it like a poem, obscene. His lungs are as dark as the cold side of a pillow. He misses Marlboros and his mom, whose disease eats away where he sucked as a child.
There’s a lump in my throat when I think about it.
It turns out the cubicle is occupied, so we meet amidst grandeur—promises, warnings, handshakes, deadlines. He’s confident. I shrug solidly. Wednesday it is.
He doesn’t return.
He doesn’t leave.
I make enough copies for him with each press, and I feel plastic on my finger. My class is perfect, except that they laugh when I suggest that not everyone has a body. I’ve heard we laugh a lot in there, but I say that’s a generalization, and that’s what we discuss in the heat of the sun. We find sentences that take for granted. Elaine Scarry once wrote that “[b]eauty always takes place in the particular.” My students would probably ask me who that is, and I would probably say that she’s over at Harvard or Princeton somewhere, bringing beauty back to the believers. But that’s not why I trust her. I trust her because she’s on a syllabus for a class that makes me think and draws when she should be writing. When I imagine her in a freshman composition class, I think of that worm or snake with a foot in a shoe and a German hat. Such a statement would confuse my students, and they wouldn’t write it out without a wiggle and smile.
Now take out the smile and count.
