This is a surprise. This is a thinly veiled threat. (Is it?) (Yet Kroff continues to smile at you.) In his perpendicular position at the desk, Kroff manages to twist his neck even further than necessary, as if indeed he were caught in some sort of crippling machinery. Still he is panting, breathing through his mouth. You wonder if he is medicated: if the medications have calmed him or heightened his intensity. Could he be on steroids? Cortisone? His skin looks heated, as it has looked in the seminar when his work is being (carefully, discreetly) critiqued by the other young writers and—eventually, when the others have spoken—by you. Boldly Kroff fixes you with his tawny cracked-glass stare, like the stare of a glass-eyed doll.

Brazen familiarity in the gesture, which you can only try to ignore; you can only tell yourself that Kroff isn’t fully conscious of the way he looks, the manic fixedness of his stare.

Intimacy in the way he regards you.

Intimacy you are determined not to acknowledge.

Intimacy—knowing too much about the other while knowing nothing essential.

Indeed, Kroff had entered the office in the sidelong manner in which he enters the seminar room, as if he were looking in two directions at once, like a creature with eyes on either side of its head; you have wondered if perhaps he has some sort of neurological impairment, though it could also be just ordinary clumsiness, a kind of obstinacy. Here I am! Take me or leave me.

The sort of individual, prevalent (you recall) in high school, usually male, whose awkwardness spills over from him and onto others in his vicinity, as if he were carrying a bowl of something viscous that spills onto others’ feet—or rather, for Kroff inspires in you such aggressive metaphors, he is like one who sneezes without troubling to cover his mouth and nose, sending an explosion of bacteria out into the air, infecting all within range.

A subsequent impression is that Kroff’s very awkwardness is calculated, as he usually manages to enter the seminar room to arrive after the other (fourteen) students have taken seats around the long, oval table, and so the only available seat is the one nearest the professor, at the head of the table. (By some sort of consensus, students will not take seats close to a professor if they can avoid it. To come too close to the figure of authority is to violate a taboo—if but a minor one.)

Yet in his way that might seem, to the neutral observer, blundering and wayward, Kroff maneuvers to sit beside you for the three-hour workshop. Skidding a chair along the floor, beside your chair. (But not too close. Even Kroff doesn’t dare intrude too obviously into the professor’s private space.)