The fifth session begins in the midst of the fourth. Harry is not sure what Loudermilk did with the recorder, whether the cut is intentional. Where the fourth leaves off, you can tell Hillary is about to take the floor. Harry wonders if Loudermilk interrupts Hillary on purpose, if he stops the tape because he does not want Harry to know what Hillary is about to say. Or maybe it’s that Hillary is so predictable: You have to assume he’s about to defend Chelsea’s exploration of her grandma’s crawl space, even if he’ll do so through semi-gritted teeth. He has to do this, because this is the basis of Hillary’s “poetics,” if Harry has that term right. Hillary has certain values, has shown himself over time to be an adherent of certain schools (Harry is aware, due to his poetic research), and now Hillary is obliged to set the table such that only those who can eat of the particular meat on special shall be served, recognized. It is a competition—the thing of poetry—if not an all-out war. If Hillary has an actual job—other than continuing to breathe and sit upright in his chair and utter whatever unfiltered industry juice courses into his cranium—it is to continue to purvey and promote a brand of sentimentality, a sentimentality branded and also promoted by certain institutional-poet ancestors of Hillary’s, like the renowned regionalist Timothy Flower and, previous to Flower, the celebrated formalist Jan Batman. Hillary is a straw man, a vacant effigy, not just because he is an alcoholic whose second marriage is about to dehisce, but because it is his job, quite literally, to be an alcoholic whose second marriage is about to dehisce, because he is exactly—and not one iota more or one iota less than—who he is paid to be. If he were a better teacher, or even a slightly better human being, he would surely have been fired from this position long ago.

Never let it be said, Harry should tell someone, that he, Harry Rego, pulls any punches. He may be trapped inside this pathetic physique, gagged by his own ungainly voice, but never let it be said that Harry Rego ignores the world around him. Harry’s eye is limpid, unimpeded by the distorting influence of a viable body or social life. Harry’s mind can, to some extent, be thrown from the corpse it inhabits, and this is why he is of such extraordinary use to Loudermilk, who is, in truth, disadvantaged since sapped by the presence of his own magnificent frame in the world. Anyone who really knows Loudermilk, as Harry knows him, has to feel a certain pity for the guy. It’s a mystery how Loudermilk finds the necessary blood and/or synapses to think at all, given the other needs of his physical form.