Night, Neon

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Kroff’s voice is quavering with—is it resentment? Rage? The white worm beside his mouth is writhing.

  Very still, you sit at your desk, hoping the fury will pass.

  If you are calm, this incensed individual will be calm. If you breathe normally, this individual will breathe normally. You tell yourself.

  (Quickly your mind calculates: Could you get to the door before Kroff seizes you? No.)

  (Is there anyone in the nearest offices? Anyone in subterranean Lyman Hall at five fifty-five p.m.?)

  Hot-eyed Kroff relents. Seeing (possibly) your look of alarm, fright.

  Saying, “Okay it could be unconscious. It’s maybe not conscious. The ignorant, bigoted things they say about my writing, narrow-minded and banal, they’d say of the prose poetry of Rimbaud or Rilke. They’d say of William Burroughs. Wittgenstein. Because they are not themselves writers—artists. Except for three or four of them, they are all younger than me, and for a long time I was the one who was young.”

  Kroff makes a snuffling sound, indignant. “So I’m saying, what they say of my writing is maybe not fully conscious. Not knowing what real writing is.”

  In a raw, aggrieved voice Kroff proceeds to list examples of bigoted criticism leveled against his work in the class. He has recalled every remark, however hesitant or innocuous. No one has even tried to understand what he is doing, he claims. No one has been sympathetic.

  “They think they’re better than me—’cause I enlisted in the army. ’Cause I served my country and got shot up and that’s for suckers in the U.S. now.”

  Quickly you protest. Try to protest. That is not—true …

  Kroff shoves manuscripts across the desk for you to examine. The pages are crumpled and torn, as if they’ve been retrieved from the trash.

  (Hardly any need for you to reexamine these prose pieces. You’ve read them more than once, more than twice, annotating them for Kroff’s benefit, and that is enough.)

  Prose poetry, he calls it. Not fiction, not poetry. Not real-life, not invented.

  Difficult to determine if Kroff is genuinely incensed or coldly calculating. In the midst of a tirade he seems to draw back to observe how his words, his heated manner, are affecting you.

  Pro-fes-sor. Ma’am.

  Is he furious with you, does he feel betrayed by you? Is it—(though you are certain it is not)—some sort of sexual animosity? Or does Kroff simply hope to manipulate you?

  Does he want something from you?—or does he want nothing at all?

  (Yes, you have seen Kroff, or someone who closely resembles him, in Lyman Hall after class has ended. You have seen him at a little distance in the corridors, slyly observing you. Perhaps he hides in a men’s lavatory on the third floor, and after you start downstairs, he descends behind you in no haste, noiselessly. You have seen: Kroff avoids others in the workshop after class, unless it is that the others in the workshop avoid him. Perhaps he dares to follow you into the basement of Lyman Hall, to this very office. And then perhaps he dares to follow you out of the building and to the parking lot, where lights glimmer at the tops of tall poles …)

  (Perhaps all these sightings, if that is what they are, are but coincidences. Perhaps there is nothing to your concern, it is but the concern of a woman who is alone in a world not so very hospitable to a woman alone, as if aloneness were a brazen and unwomanly choice. You will not inquire, for it is not your way to be an alarmist.)

  (Also, you believe that Kroff is enthralled with you. Despite his rudeness, arrogance. The fact that a work of fiction by you is included in a popular anthology of American literature you are using in the course—very impressive! Not that Kroff has read anything you’ve written or that he cares enough to consider the editorial criticism you’ve offered him attached to each of his compositions, but rather that he reveres the title Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and would hope that some of its luster might rub off on him, as your most talented and audacious student.)

  In the workshop, Kroff is often isolated, silent. His height, his manner, his status as an Afghanistan War veteran, to which he has only peripherally alluded in his prose poems, has made the other students wary of him, respectful and guarded. If he were friendly toward them, they would melt, and exude friendliness toward him; they would ignore, or try to ignore, the nature of his writing, so different from their own. But unlike them and unlike their professor, Kroff does not readily smile.

  When one of our kind does not smile, we are disoriented. We don’t know where to look. We feel threatened.

  In the workshop, Kroff rarely comments on others’ work. His responses are lofty shrugs, indifference—Okay. Not bad.

  Indeed, Kroll is one of the older students in the workshop and (so far as you know) the only ex-military service member; he is the only student not enrolled in the college of liberal arts, but rather in a heterogeneous division called General Studies, where admissions are open to state residents regardless of grades. You assume that as a war veteran, Kroff pays no tuition and may even have a scholarship.

  Occasionally, for some inexplicable reason, Kroff will heave himself to his feet during class, mutter an inaudible excuse, seize his backpack, and stalk out of the seminar room—(for he would never leave the bulky backpack unattended; he appears to guard it with his life); he may be absent for as long as forty minutes, but he eventually returns, with another inaudible excuse, and reclaims his seat in the skidding chair. You are likely to think—He is barely holding himself together. And you think—Post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Not that you would utter this phrase to Gavin Kroff, who sneers at what he calls tired old clichés.

  (But is not tired old cliché a cliché itself, the more clichéd for being tired and old?)

  At the first workshop meeting it was clear that Kroff was a serious writer, for unlike the others, he’d brought with him a swath of material that, he said, he carried around with him everywhere and never let out of his sight.

  He slept with it, in its soiled and dog-eared folders. There had to be computer files of Kroff’s work, for he handed in his assignments via email as the others did, yet to hear him speak of his modus operandi (his word), he could not trust the electronic world, he could only trust the world of hard copy.

  Saying, “If there’s a power outage worldwide, some folks will be devastated, wiped clean. Others will have planned ahead, like squirrels burying their food. It will be survival of the fittest. I plan to be in that category—fittest.”

  Kroff seems never to be satisfied with the work he hands in, yet he is not receptive to criticism. From you, he will accept some editorial suggestions with grudging thanks; when others make suggestions, he becomes stony-faced, resentful. Promising—others have said, cautiously. Strong material, hard to understand, “controversial”—they have said uneasily, searching for the right words.

  No one has said to Kroff what all of us are thinking—Cruel, awful, obscene. Unreadable. No more!

  It’s a memoir he has been assembling, Kroff says. But it is simultaneously fiction—his theme is the incursion of fiction into real life, and the incursion of real life into fiction. “When you are a soldier, there is half of you that is your old, real self—but there is half of you that is some other, stranger self.” When the credibility of his prose has been questioned, Kroff says in triumph—Sorry! It happened just like that. Or he says in triumph—Sorry!—it’s fiction, see? Invented.

  Now he insists upon reading aloud from his most recent prose work, material taken up the previous week in the workshop. You are dismayed, near desperate. This is one of his least comprehensible pieces, breathlessly cascading stream-of-consciousness fantasy that appears to be evoking the futile struggle of an individual (child?) who is being strangled while at the same time he is being sexually assaulted(?). (None of this is definitive, for Kroff aligns himself with Rilke and Rimbaud and will not be tied down to banal concrete fact.) Quietly, stoically, you sit at the desk with your hands clasped tightly together; you
r head is slightly bowed to deflect the imminent migraine that radiates from the fluorescent tubing and to suggest the gravity with which you are listening to Kroff’s agitated voice. Your facial expression doesn’t yet show the pain you are trying not to feel—it is one of teacherly solicitude, attention. There comes, like a tic, the kind smile.

  In truth, you are furious with him. You are frightened. You are hoping to stave off the migraine attack until you are alone. (The last thing you want is Gavin Kroff’s pity, or even his sympathy. You are in dread of fainting, being dependent upon Kroff picking you up from the grimy floor.) It’s as if he has given you a rude push with the flat of his hand, not hard, but hard enough to stun, baffle.

  Kroff’s major subject seems to be the protracted abuse of a child. There has been whipping with a leather belt, and there has been binding with wire, and there has been the elaborate machine. (Sometimes the mechanism appears to be an escalator, with gears exposed, into which a child is pushed.) Sometimes it seems that Gavin Kroff is the abused child, and sometimes, more horribly, it seems that a younger brother of Kroff’s is the abused child and that the abuse is not past tense but present, ongoing.

  This evening in your office Kroff reads beyond the section with which you are familiar, which was taken up in a recent class and had not elicited much commentary from the other students. For what is there to say about a child being tortured, in such obscure “poetic” prose? No one can doubt the seriousness of the writing or the commitment to his subject of the writer. But no one knows how to respond except in terms already aired in the workshop—Hard to understand, couldn’t follow all the sentences, had trouble figuring out what was going on and who was who …

  The new material, which Kroff reads with breathless relish, is even more graphic and painful than usual: a depiction of a garroting, at poetic length, as if Sade, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet had collaborated. In the voice of the eight-year-old victim there is recounted a ghastly torture scene, strangulation by garroting. Each time the boy (Kroff?) loses consciousness, the strangler (Kroff?) releases the pressure of the garrot to allow him to regain consciousness; when the boy has regained consciousness, the strangler again exerts pressure … On and on this goes, in the most excruciating “poetic” language, so that after a time it isn’t clear if there is an (actual) child being tortured or if the prose piece is sheer fantasy. Or (as Kroff has himself suggested) is it an exploration of simile?

  It is pointless to inquire of Kroff if the material is meant to be interpreted as “real”—or “surreal”—for when he is asked this question, he is likely to say, with a scornful laugh, in reference to one of his idols (Wittgenstein, Derrida, Bernhard), that he has created a pseudonymous self—G***n K***f—in order to create a text, and that a text has no ontological existence apart from letters, words, sentences displayed on a page.

  (But she feels so sorry for the little boy!—Caitlin, one of the young women in the workshop, has exclaimed. What Kroff has written might be merely a text, but it has the power to terrify her and to bring tears to her eyes.)

  Of course, all this is true enough. As a writer, a creator of texts, you can’t disagree. Kroff has a naturally analytical mind, it seems, along with a naturally perverse, sadistic, and masochistic imagination, and all that he claims is plausible enough, as his use of profanities, obscenities, and racially tinged insults in his prose is merely textual. His ecstatic flights of prose are texts primarily, assemblages of words. That the words are often impenetrable, and the material often discomforting, is also true, but perhaps not the primary issue.

  How to “criticize” such a writer? If he wished, Kroff could (probably) write as clearly and engagingly as others in the class, on other, less upsetting subjects; but he seems to have no interest in replicating reality, and it has been a cause for wonderment in the workshop (expressed not to Kroff himself, but to you, by other students) that he has so little interest in writing about the army, his fellow soldiers, Afghanistan. Perversely, his prose is set nowhere recognizable, like the prose of Edgar Allan Poe, and his “characters” scarcely exist except as vehicles for impressionistic descriptions of mental states. All is (maddeningly, exhaustively) interior and introverted, lacking psychological depth and dialogue: there are screams, groans, sighs, and utterances in Kroff’s prose, but no conversations. No discernible plots or stories in his prose, only dire existential situations.

  Time seems never to pass in Kroff’s writing, except as it is measured in the torture of a body or the fleeting emotions of a torturer. Indeed, in his typical work time is flattened, stopped. The worst has already happened: both child and torturer have ceased to exist while at the same time they are just about to begin their encounter.

  The child is always eight years old. The torturer is of no fixed age, but from internal evidence seems to be in his late twenties and has been discharged from the U.S. Army after serving two deployments to Afghanistan.

  When Kroff first presented his work to his fellow students, it was clear that they were shocked, discomforted. One of the young women writers excused herself and left the room, and returned an hour later, when it was safe to assume that discussion of Kroff’s work was over. (No one in the workshop has complained to you about Kroff’s writing, and so far as you know, they have not complained to your department chair or to the dean. Perhaps, you think, they are sympathetic with you as a woman professor, a visitor at the university.)

  Yet you believe you can discern in the other students a measure of admiration for Kroff for having created so obsessive a counterworld. His prose is like no one else’s—like a text that has been translated from another language. Words seem inadequate, the structures of sentences as finicky as a spider’s web, requiring many commas, semicolons, and colons in the construction of a single paragraph. The prose is exhausting, like running up an escalator whose steps are moving down. (To borrow one of Kroff’s tropes.) It is possible to make progress in such running, but it is not an easy progress, and as soon as you cease running, you are rapidly descending.

  You have given much thought to Gavin Kroff, far more thought than you’ve given to any other student of yours through your teaching career of twelve intermittent years. You resent him for this reason, and you are not likely to forget him. He is not naïve, you think, but he is primitive. His brain is a sort of machine that has been misprogrammed. His insistence that readers should interpret his work as merely textual, and not “real,” is maddening to you, though as a writing instructor, you are not sure to what degree you have the right, still less the obligation, to refute him.

  “Ma’am?”

  Kroff is looking at you expectantly. He has asked you a question or raised a query, you must respond.

  “So you are saying, Gavin, that the subject of your work is—simile?”

  “No. The mode of my work is simile.”

  Looking at you with an air of disdain, disgust. As if (he knows) you are only pretending to be stupid.

  “This disquisition on the torture of a child is—what? An examination of—”

  (You are speaking without irony. The threat of migraine vanishes all irony.)

  “—of perception.”

  Kroff is smiling angrily at you. Or rather, his mouth is twisted in a grimace of a smile.

  Kroff has become very warm and has unzipped his parka. You feel a thrill of dread. There wafts to your unwilling nostrils the thick, coarse smell of a male body, clothes not recently washed.

  Intimacy—the smell of another.

  Intimacy—all but unbearable when it is unwanted.

  “ … like, scenes for a memoir. From real life I am drawing material, like van Gogh looking at a landscape and painting not what his eyes see, which is what any ordinary person’s eyes might see, but what his van Gogh brain sees.”

  To this you have no immediate reply. It’s a telling phrase—van Gogh brain.

  (Does Kroff align himself with van Gogh? With genius? Or with the madness of genius, in van Gogh’s case.)

 
“Look, Pro-fes-sor—I can accept that others in the class who are basically ignorant don’t ‘get’ what I am doing—but you, Pro-fessor—ma’am—you should. You most of all.”

  You resist the impulse to apologize. You have nothing to apologize for.

  Telling Kroff that you will have to be leaving, soon … Glancing at your watch, signaling to him—Please! Please leave.

  Yearning to be free of him. This terrible intimacy.

  So that you can rush to a women’s room nearby, cup water in the palm of your hand, swallow two powerful migraine pills. Hurry!

  “Okay, Pro-fes-sor. Guess I should leave …”

  Roughly Kroff thrusts his manuscripts back into the backpack.

  Slowly then, he rises. Now he is looming over you.

  That smell of his body again. That strange grimace of a smile.

  You are trembling. Not smiling, not even that weak, kind smile. Only just waiting for him to leave.

  Please please please please. Leave me.

  And then Kroff says, as if he has just thought of it, “What I’m thinking, actually, is—I might drop the course.”

  To this you have no reply. Your natural instinct is to protest—No, but why? But you say nothing.

  “Yeh. That’s what I’m thinking. Why I came to see you, actually, Pro-fes-sor.”

  Looming over you. Knowing that he is intimidating you, threatening you, for how can he not know?—and you are on your feet also, desperate, though trying to remain calm.

  “Whatever you decide, Gavin, that is—that is up to you to decide … But now I have to leave. I’m afraid that …”

  Gavin. That name. Weakly your voice trails off.

  “That’s what you advise? That I drop the course? But I won’t get the tuition back—will I? It’s too late. Too late to drop. I’ve been treated like shit. You can’t just—civilians can’t—treat us like shit.”

  Numbly you tell the aroused Kroff that you are very sorry. Perhaps you could intervene on his behalf, with the dean—

  Kroff interrupts: “You told us on the first day of the workshop that we should try to write ‘memorable work’—right? So that is what I have done, and nobody else has done—yet you are trying to tell me, I think you are trying to tell me, that my work is not—memorable.”