“I mean today but also long before. I know you felt my call. It awakened something in you.”

“I love it when you ladies take initiative.”

But Marta keeps talking, saying something about measures of feeling, about excavating them, how the poet has to get a sense for something that she calls “mahss,” which she says is a German word, which she says does not mean the same thing as “mass” in English; that when making word selections, the poet has to weigh the “thingliness” of the word, the word’s “itness,” whatever this is, which is where Loudermilk switches off the MP3 recorder.

Loudermilk gets up from his “desk” and strides around. He goes back to the desk.

He begins to write something.

Beans is, meanwhile, still processing Marta’s various pronouncements. An irrational thought keeps presenting itself: that it has been she all along who has been writing Loudermilk’s poems, in some not-insignificant sense—that she and she alone has willed all this into being, that Loudermilk, and the minion, and even Beans himself are mere sock puppets for some dialogic impulse the great Marta Hillary is attempting to work out.

“Your boy Loudermilk has a sick, sick Land Cruiser,” Loudermilk intones, interrupting Beans’s despair. Loudermilk scribbles on. “THE JERKSHOP: A Novel,” he whispers reverently.

But moving on from this anointed idiot: Beans is still here and sort of shakes himself awake and another excellent question is—not entirely a non sequitur, this—how did Anton Beans end up in this predicament? For Anton Beans has been working hard. Setting aside for the moment the matter of whether the institution truly deserves his heroism, Beans must ensure the Seminars are defended, that the program won’t become a breeding ground for unserious dabblers like yonder Loudermilk, who clearly want to dilute American literary art to so viscid and anodyne a consistency that it may at last be profitably branded, bottled, and purveyed via America’s proliferating upmarket health-food emporia, if not the soda machines at Panera Bread. Beans is, or so he believes, the only individual conscious enough to recognize the necessity of standing in the way of this eventuality, and it is for this reason that he has elected to take on the far-from-undemanding task of unmasking devious and captivating Loudermilk. And to accomplish this much-needed reveal, Beans must discover the diminutive minion.