The full-time faculty member who shares the office, whom you have yet to meet, has the desk at the rear, a preferred space beside the drafty window. This individual has filled a bookcase with books relating to the Renaissance and stacks of printed university material, most of which is several years old. On a dusty windowsill is a bust of William Shakespeare of the sort one might buy at a cheap souvenir shop at Stratford-upon-Avon, of the size of a small cat, and on one of the walls a faded poster gaily advertising Shakespeare in Love.

Your workplace, you think. A seminar room on the third floor of the building and this bleak subterranean office to which you’ve been assigned.

Of course, you do no work in this inhospitable workplace. It is used for student conferences solely.

So far this semester, few of these. Except for Gavin Kroff, who seems determined to extract from his relationship with the university, and with you, as much as possible.

If it were daytime and not dusk! You would not be so uneasy. If Lyman Hall were not so quiet …

During the day the old building quivers with life, as a corpse may quiver with electric currents coursing through it: thunderous young feet on wooden stairs that tremble beneath so much youthful energy, weight. Upraised voices, laughter. At such times the bleak anonymity of the human race is muffled, the vanity of human wishes signaled here by the cheap, campy bust of Shakespeare and the faded poster kept at a distance.

As you wait patiently—(for what choice have you?—you are captive here)—Kroff has been rummaging in his backpack. His head is lowered, he is breathing noisily through his mouth. A faint sheen of perspiration on his blemished forehead.

You feel a thrill of apprehension—an absurd apprehension, you are sure: that in the backpack, or on Kroff’s person, he is carrying a weapon.

Gun, knife. His knobby hands would be adept with both.

In one of his impressionistic prose pieces, a three-foot length of wire.

And what is the purpose of the length of wire?—you’d asked him.

Kroff had shrugged, laughed. A pleasurable flush came into his face, and his eyes filled with moisture.

What could possibly be the purpose of a length of wire, Pro-fes-sor?

Isn’t the point of literature to inspire readers to imagine?

(This exchange had taken place in a previous conference, weeks before.)

Kroff will not intimidate you, you think. No.

Politely, with a kind smile, you ask the young writer what you can do for him—a formal question that seems to trouble him, as if it were a riddle.

“Thanks, Pro-fes-sor! But I think you know.”

“ … think I know?”