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—”