Anyway, Anton Beans has for a while been pretty sure that he knows something about young T. A. Loudermilk. He’s been taking notes on Loudermilk, on this wonder stud’s speech patterns. They are a mishmash of several regionalisms, dominated by the normalizing argot of American television and movies, nothing so very out of the ordinary. What is extraordinary, then, is the fact that Loudermilk should have been able to compose the poems attributed to him in the workshop packet, which, even Anton Beans cannot deny, are fairly excellent poems. These poems are written using a highly literate, if eccentric, style. It’s not so much that they’re full of big words, but that the lines are so exactly composed—and with so little effort, or so it appears. The writing is limpid, almost prosy. The command of contemporary syntax is breathtaking. Loudermilk could not have composed these poems, not without a truly aggravated case of personality disorder.

This, at any rate, is Anton Beans’s professional hunch, in his capacity as Doctor of Linguistics.

But Beans wants concrete proof. It is for this reason that he has renewed a conversation with one of his former Bay Area associates, a programmer with a side interest in natural language, someone with a few experimental tools. Beans has made transcriptions of Loudermilk’s more coherent utterances during the course of their workshops together. He has emailed these transcriptions, along with several poems by “T. A. Loudermilk,” to his contact. He wants to know, based on the contact’s research so far, what the likelihood is that the author of the speech of Loudermilk is also the author of the poems attributed to T. A. Loudermilk.

The contact has just gotten back to Beans, now that the semester has concluded with an inebriated whimper. He tells Beans next time, please, more of a challenge if at all possible. Beans skims the data. It’s statistically pretty unlikely, is the long and the short. It’s a significant result.

Loudermilk and T. A. Loudermilk are not the same person.

Beans logs out. He lives on a hill above town in a pointy Victorian, where he rents a monastic, high-ceilinged room. Beans could afford something considerably better but, because he is a sage man, prefers to keep his true assets under wraps.

If Loudermilk is not the author of the poems of Loudermilk . . .

Anton Beans paces. He goes over to his wall chart of outstanding poetry journal submissions and updates it: one new rejection. He puts an X in the column for Electronic Mail, in the row for Method of Reply.