Three hours! In your worst imaginings, it’s like elementary school—a jeering kid beside the teacher and just slightly behind her, making faces to provoke mirth in other students.

But Kroff isn’t so crude. Nor does Kroff think much of his fellow students.

Nor would the other students—all of them quite serious writers, one or two genuinely gifted (you wish to think)—appreciate Kroff’s misbehaving in this way.

More likely, he sits beside you because he wishes to share the authority you represent in the seminar room. Gazing toward you, the others must take note of him.

And though you are reluctant to acknowledge it, Kroff seems somewhat fixed upon you …

See? I sit beside you. Could reach out to touch you—your wrist, arm. Hair. Cheek.

And so Kroff sits beside you at close quarters, gazing, staring, blinking and staring at the side of your face for three hours each Thursday afternoon, as the year wanes, the sky darkens ever earlier, and it is dusk by the time the workshop disbands. Often, if you are speaking, he nods in agreement with your words, sometimes vehemently. Though occasionally (you surmise: you don’t turn to look at him if you can help it) he shakes his head in disagreement. He may even mutter to himself and grimace, shift restlessly in his seat, take fevered notes as if your every remark is priceless, or, pointedly, cease taking notes. He may even lapse into a trance of seeming stupefaction, open-eyed, mouth slack. (Not boredom, he has explained. No! Sleep deprivation.)

While his work is being discussed, Kroff is very still. Even his restless legs become stiff. His gesture toward disguising himself—identifying the author of the manuscript as G***n K***f—is meant to be a joke. (Maybe.) (But is it funny? No one has smiled.) Once, you glanced sidelong at him as one of the student-writers was speaking in an earnest, pained way, trying to say something nice, encouraging, and inoffensive, and you saw that Kroff’s face was taut with fury. You would swear you’d heard his back molars grind. The most intimate of sounds, you might hear a lover grinding his teeth in the night, his head on the pillow beside yours as you lie awake unable to sleep.

Unbidden the thought came to you—He would like to tear out all our throats.

It is an old (urban) university, by American standards. On the bank of a river that has become mythic—“majestic”—in the American imagination.

Of land-grant, public universities it is not the largest, but it is one of the most prestigious, or has been until recently. Now a Republican governor and a Republican legislature have cut the state education budget by millions of dollars, boasting of “holding professors’ feet to the fire”—a metaphor the media finds amusing.