Night, Neon

by Joyce Carol Oates

  No reason to believe that he is carrying, inside his loose-fitting clothes, partially zipped parka, khaki work pants with multiple pockets, or in the soiled canvas backpack on his knees, any sort of weapon.

  Yet: you are alerted. Vigilant. Even as you instruct yourself No—of course not. Don’t be absurd.

  You are an individual who prides herself on being enlightened. Calm, poised, inclined to compromise and arbitration. Not alarmist.

  It’s the intimacy of the situation that is unnerving.

  Intimacy—two individuals, middle-aged (female) professor, (male) student-writer/U.S. Army veteran in his late twenties, strangers to each other, finding themselves sharing a cramped space of approximately two hundred square feet in a basement university office.

  Intimacy enhanced by the hour, which is late afternoon of an occluded November weekday, so that by five fifteen p.m. it is dusk outside the scummy half window of the office and the austere old sandstone building known as the Lyman Hall of Languages is near deserted.

  Intimacy so stressful to you, your heartbeat has quickened, pinpricks of sweat are breaking out on your upper body beneath your clothes, though the air in the office is cold from the drafty, ill-fitting window.

  Yet: no reason to believe that G***n K***f (as he has identified his writing-self on his manuscripts) is hostile to you specifically, still less that he will act upon this hostility, though the prose works of G***n K***f you have seen are steeped in violence, cruelty, sadism, and he has hinted to you, in a previous exchange, not in this office in the basement of Lyman Hall but in the corridor outside your seminar room on the third floor, that he has done some things, impulsive things of which I am not proud, Pro-fes-sor.

  Pro-fes-sor. Uttered in a low drawl, with a twist of his lips meant to resemble a smile and a belligerent shifting of his gaze to your face.

  Sometimes adding, as if he has just thought of it—Ma’am.

  Twenty minutes late for the scheduled conference. So that you have been thinking with childlike naïveté—Maybe he won’t come …

  Kroff has missed a previous conference with you, in this office. He has missed a recent class. He has hinted of a life of complications, responsibilities—(is Kroff married? Is it possible that Kroff is a husband, a father?)—from which he can’t easily detach himself, for the fiction writing workshop in which he is enrolled meets on Thursday afternoons, which conflicts, to a degree, with something else he is doing, or should be doing, which might have something to do with his status as a veteran (VA hospital therapy? rehab?) at an overlapping time.

  Why then is Gavin Kroff taking the workshop if it represents a hardship for him?

  Answer is, bluntly delivered, bemused pale-blue eyes and twisty smile, You, Pro-fes-sor.

  Sharp rap of knuckles on the (opened) door of the office.

  “Hello! Come in …”

  Your greeting is friendly, matter-of-fact. Crucial for you to maintain a distance between yourself and the aggressive young man, who has indicated in many ways that he wants nothing more than to collapse the protocol of distance between professor and student, annihilate borders, establish intimacy.

  Yet Gavin Kroff lingers in the corridor, stooping and staring. Though he has knocked on the door and the door is open, as the door is always open during your office hours and you have greeted him and invited him inside, still he appears hesitant, diffident-seeming. His face, almost attractive at a distance, seen close up is creased, suspicious. As if he were thinking—Am I too early? Is this the wrong time? Do you really want me?

  “Come in, please. Gavin.”

  Forcing you to speak louder. Smile harder. Utter his name—Gavin.

  A name that is strange in your mouth, like a swollen tongue.

  It is not an era in academic history when professors address students by their surnames: Mister, Miss. In this quasi-democratic era, first names are obligatory.

  Assuring the frowning young man that yes, this is the time you’d set for your appointment. He is not early, nor is he (very) late.

  Guardedly Gavin enters the office. He is tall, well over six feet, but moves with a slouch, head lowered and shoulders hunched, as if entering a force field that is intent upon repelling him, against which he must be vigilant.

  (Because he is a war veteran? Because he has not fully recovered from being in combat? Because it has become second nature to him to distrust and fear his surroundings? Unless it was always Gavin Kroff’s nature to behave with such unease and suspicion, even before joining the U.S. Army and being shipped to Afghanistan.)

  Muttering what sounds like, “Thanks, Pro-fes-sor. Ma’am.”

  If this is mockery, you don’t acknowledge it. Truly you are feeling hopeful, optimistic about this conference.

  Conference is the preferred term. Students drop by an office, make an appointment with a professor for a conference. Pointedly, Gavin Kroff requested a conference with you this afternoon, following an awkward exchange with him in class the previous week.

  A faint, hairline pulse of a migraine has begun somewhere in the cerebellum of your brain, triggered by the ugly fluorescent lighting you’d been obliged to switch on a few minutes earlier. Otherwise you and Gavin Kroff would be conferring in a shadowy office in the sepulchral quiet of a university building at dusk.

  Clutching his soiled backpack (which appears to contain something heavy), Kroff comes to sit in the chair beside your desk. He sighs, as if releasing a burden. His uneven, discolored teeth are bared in an inscrutable smile.

  So suddenly, so close—only a few inches from you across the corner of the desk. Even as you shrink from seeing, you cannot help but see the young man’s blotched skin, stiff, dust-colored hair receding at his temples, unshaven jaws, and brash, tawny eyes, like cracked glass.

  To the left of his mouth, a thick white worm of a scar. Hard not to stare at this scar, which seems to be staring back at you.

  In one of Kroff’s prose pieces a child is mutilated and maimed by an elaborate piece of machinery into which he is pushed by an older sibling; especially, his face is mutilated. Though you know that you have no right to assume an autobiographical intent, you have assumed that this is more or less how Kroff’s face came to be scarred.

  Unless it is a scar from a war injury.

  In which case, you wonder if Gavin Kroff is scarred elsewhere, inside his clothes.

  And what of the scars hidden from sight?—these are the ugliest.

  If the basement office were larger, the aluminum desk would be positioned differently: you would be seated behind it and students would be seated in front of it. A discreet distance of several feet between you. But the office isn’t large, two bulky desks take up most of the space. Since you are a visiting professor, however distinguished the title a transient hire, your assigned desk is nearer the door; your students are obliged to sit in a chair perpendicular to the desk, facing you at a slant.

  The full-time faculty member who shares the office, whom you have yet to meet, has the desk at the rear, a preferred space beside the drafty window. This individual has filled a bookcase with books relating to the Renaissance and stacks of printed university material, most of which is several years old. On a dusty windowsill is a bust of William Shakespeare of the sort one might buy at a cheap souvenir shop at Stratford-upon-Avon, of the size of a small cat, and on one of the walls a faded poster gaily advertising Shakespeare in Love.

  Your workplace, you think. A seminar room on the third floor of the building and this bleak subterranean office to which you’ve been assigned.

  Of course, you do no work in this inhospitable workplace. It is used for student conferences solely.

  So far this semester, few of these. Except for Gavin Kroff, who seems determined to extract from his relationship with the university, and with you, as much as possible.

  If it were daytime and not dusk! You would not be so uneasy. If Lyman Hall were not so quiet …

  During the day the old building quivers with life, as a corpse may
quiver with electric currents coursing through it: thunderous young feet on wooden stairs that tremble beneath so much youthful energy, weight. Upraised voices, laughter. At such times the bleak anonymity of the human race is muffled, the vanity of human wishes signaled here by the cheap, campy bust of Shakespeare and the faded poster kept at a distance.

  As you wait patiently—(for what choice have you?—you are captive here)—Kroff has been rummaging in his backpack. His head is lowered, he is breathing noisily through his mouth. A faint sheen of perspiration on his blemished forehead.

  You feel a thrill of apprehension—an absurd apprehension, you are sure: that in the backpack, or on Kroff’s person, he is carrying a weapon.

  Gun, knife. His knobby hands would be adept with both.

  In one of his impressionistic prose pieces, a three-foot length of wire.

  And what is the purpose of the length of wire?—you’d asked him.

  Kroff had shrugged, laughed. A pleasurable flush came into his face, and his eyes filled with moisture.

  What could possibly be the purpose of a length of wire, Pro-fes-sor?

  Isn’t the point of literature to inspire readers to imagine?

  (This exchange had taken place in a previous conference, weeks before.)

  Kroff will not intimidate you, you think. No.

  Politely, with a kind smile, you ask the young writer what you can do for him—a formal question that seems to trouble him, as if it were a riddle.

  “Thanks, Pro-fes-sor! But I think you know.”

  “ … think I know?”

  This is a surprise. This is a thinly veiled threat. (Is it?) (Yet Kroff continues to smile at you.) In his perpendicular position at the desk, Kroff manages to twist his neck even further than necessary, as if indeed he were caught in some sort of crippling machinery. Still he is panting, breathing through his mouth. You wonder if he is medicated: if the medications have calmed him or heightened his intensity. Could he be on steroids? Cortisone? His skin looks heated, as it has looked in the seminar when his work is being (carefully, discreetly) critiqued by the other young writers and—eventually, when the others have spoken—by you. Boldly Kroff fixes you with his tawny cracked-glass stare, like the stare of a glass-eyed doll.

  Brazen familiarity in the gesture, which you can only try to ignore; you can only tell yourself that Kroff isn’t fully conscious of the way he looks, the manic fixedness of his stare.

  Intimacy in the way he regards you.

  Intimacy you are determined not to acknowledge.

  Intimacy—knowing too much about the other while knowing nothing essential.

  Indeed, Kroff had entered the office in the sidelong manner in which he enters the seminar room, as if he were looking in two directions at once, like a creature with eyes on either side of its head; you have wondered if perhaps he has some sort of neurological impairment, though it could also be just ordinary clumsiness, a kind of obstinacy. Here I am! Take me or leave me.

  The sort of individual, prevalent (you recall) in high school, usually male, whose awkwardness spills over from him and onto others in his vicinity, as if he were carrying a bowl of something viscous that spills onto others’ feet—or rather, for Kroff inspires in you such aggressive metaphors, he is like one who sneezes without troubling to cover his mouth and nose, sending an explosion of bacteria out into the air, infecting all within range.

  A subsequent impression is that Kroff’s very awkwardness is calculated, as he usually manages to enter the seminar room to arrive after the other (fourteen) students have taken seats around the long, oval table, and so the only available seat is the one nearest the professor, at the head of the table. (By some sort of consensus, students will not take seats close to a professor if they can avoid it. To come too close to the figure of authority is to violate a taboo—if but a minor one.)

  Yet in his way that might seem, to the neutral observer, blundering and wayward, Kroff maneuvers to sit beside you for the three-hour workshop. Skidding a chair along the floor, beside your chair. (But not too close. Even Kroff doesn’t dare intrude too obviously into the professor’s private space.)

  Three hours! In your worst imaginings, it’s like elementary school—a jeering kid beside the teacher and just slightly behind her, making faces to provoke mirth in other students.

  But Kroff isn’t so crude. Nor does Kroff think much of his fellow students.

  Nor would the other students—all of them quite serious writers, one or two genuinely gifted (you wish to think)—appreciate Kroff’s misbehaving in this way.

  More likely, he sits beside you because he wishes to share the authority you represent in the seminar room. Gazing toward you, the others must take note of him.

  And though you are reluctant to acknowledge it, Kroff seems somewhat fixed upon you …

  See? I sit beside you. Could reach out to touch you—your wrist, arm. Hair. Cheek.

  And so Kroff sits beside you at close quarters, gazing, staring, blinking and staring at the side of your face for three hours each Thursday afternoon, as the year wanes, the sky darkens ever earlier, and it is dusk by the time the workshop disbands. Often, if you are speaking, he nods in agreement with your words, sometimes vehemently. Though occasionally (you surmise: you don’t turn to look at him if you can help it) he shakes his head in disagreement. He may even mutter to himself and grimace, shift restlessly in his seat, take fevered notes as if your every remark is priceless, or, pointedly, cease taking notes. He may even lapse into a trance of seeming stupefaction, open-eyed, mouth slack. (Not boredom, he has explained. No! Sleep deprivation.)

  While his work is being discussed, Kroff is very still. Even his restless legs become stiff. His gesture toward disguising himself—identifying the author of the manuscript as G***n K***f—is meant to be a joke. (Maybe.) (But is it funny? No one has smiled.) Once, you glanced sidelong at him as one of the student-writers was speaking in an earnest, pained way, trying to say something nice, encouraging, and inoffensive, and you saw that Kroff’s face was taut with fury. You would swear you’d heard his back molars grind. The most intimate of sounds, you might hear a lover grinding his teeth in the night, his head on the pillow beside yours as you lie awake unable to sleep.

  Unbidden the thought came to you—He would like to tear out all our throats.

  It is an old (urban) university, by American standards. On the bank of a river that has become mythic—“majestic”—in the American imagination.

  Of land-grant, public universities it is not the largest, but it is one of the most prestigious, or has been until recently. Now a Republican governor and a Republican legislature have cut the state education budget by millions of dollars, boasting of “holding professors’ feet to the fire”—a metaphor the media finds amusing.

  In the (approximate) middle of your life, you find yourself a visiting professor here for the fall term. Your title is Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.

  Because you are new here, and because there are few creative writing instructors on the faculty, more than one hundred students applied for your Advanced Fiction Workshop, for a mere fifteen places.

  Very carefully, you have read through these applications and their attached fiction samples. You’ve read, reread. Coolly professional, you ignored pleas by students claiming desperation if they were rejected, for it was their senior year, for instance, or they were longtime admirers of your work; you hesitated before accepting an older, General Studies student named Gavin Kroff, whose writing sample verged upon the obscure, for you’d seen that he had identified himself as an army veteran, and you wanted to give him, as you might have said if queried, the benefit of the doubt.

  And so now you may tell yourself—You brought this on yourself. Indulging in a cliché. No one else to blame!

  Says Kroff in a quavering voice, he’d like to speak frankly.

  So naturally you concur. Of course.

  “What I think is—in our seminar—Pro-fes-sor—I am not being treated j
ustly by the other writers. And by you.”

  To this blunt charge you can think of no reply. Not justly! The very words are unexpected.

  It is true, you have withheld superlatives from Kroff. On principle you don’t believe in lavishing writing students with excessive praise, though (you assume) it is not very difficult for them to determine whose work you think is superior; usually, it is the work others in the class believe to be superior. In Kroff’s case, you are not condemning, for you never condemn; but neither do you praise his work. Your commentary is terse, diplomatic. You dwell on sentences, paragraphs. If there is praise, it is for a certain “originality” of language Kroff exhibits.

  But now Kroff is incensed. Saying he’d been goddamned grateful to be accepted into the seminar with a world-famous professor. It meant so much to him he’d (almost) gotten down on his knees and given thanks—as if you’d reached out and touched his bare, beating heart.

  Now he feels differently. He’s disappointed—disillusioned. Since the first piece of writing he’d given to the seminar for criticism there’s been a kind of … he’d call it a kind of prejudice—“Like racism, almost.”

  Racism?

  “Like, I am a white man—a kind of minority right now in this country …”

  Quietly you try to point out that in the workshop there is a majority of “white” students. Out of fifteen students, at least eleven.

  But Kroff dismisses this with a wave of his hand. Frowning severely.

  “Like, a ‘white’ woman takes their side, you can count on that. All of you ganging up against me.”

  Takes their side? Whose?

  You tell Gavin that you don’t quite understand what he is saying. But—“I’m sorry …”

  “Don’t tell me you are sorry! That is not enough.”

  “But—I’m not sure that I know what …”

  “Then listen! Listen to what I am saying. Don’t interrupt me please, Pro-fes-sor.”