(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—