You tell Gavin that you don’t quite understand what he is saying. But—“I’m sorry …”

“Don’t tell me you are sorry! That is not enough.”

“But—I’m not sure that I know what …”

“Then listen! Listen to what I am saying. Don’t interrupt me please, Pro-fes-sor.”

Kroff’s voice is quavering with—is it resentment? Rage? The white worm beside his mouth is writhing.

Very still, you sit at your desk, hoping the fury will pass.

If you are calm, this incensed individual will be calm. If you breathe normally, this individual will breathe normally. You tell yourself.

(Quickly your mind calculates: Could you get to the door before Kroff seizes you? No.)

(Is there anyone in the nearest offices? Anyone in subterranean Lyman Hall at five fifty-five p.m.?)

Hot-eyed Kroff relents. Seeing (possibly) your look of alarm, fright.

Saying, “Okay it could be unconscious. It’s maybe not conscious. The ignorant, bigoted things they say about my writing, narrow-minded and banal, they’d say of the prose poetry of Rimbaud or Rilke. They’d say of William Burroughs. Wittgenstein. Because they are not themselves writers—artists. Except for three or four of them, they are all younger than me, and for a long time I was the one who was young.”

Kroff makes a snuffling sound, indignant. “So I’m saying, what they say of my writing is maybe not fully conscious. Not knowing what real writing is.”

In a raw, aggrieved voice Kroff proceeds to list examples of bigoted criticism leveled against his work in the class. He has recalled every remark, however hesitant or innocuous. No one has even tried to understand what he is doing, he claims. No one has been sympathetic.

“They think they’re better than me—’cause I enlisted in the army. ’Cause I served my country and got shot up and that’s for suckers in the U.S. now.”

Quickly you protest. Try to protest. That is not—true …

Kroff shoves manuscripts across the desk for you to examine. The pages are crumpled and torn, as if they’ve been retrieved from the trash.

(Hardly any need for you to reexamine these prose pieces. You’ve read them more than once, more than twice, annotating them for Kroff’s benefit, and that is enough.)

Prose poetry, he calls it. Not fiction, not poetry. Not real-life, not invented.

Difficult to determine if Kroff is genuinely incensed or coldly calculating. In the midst of a tirade he seems to draw back to observe how his words, his heated manner, are affecting you.

Pro-fes-sor. Ma’am.

Is he furious with you, does he feel betrayed by you? Is it—(though you are certain it is not)—some sort of sexual animosity? Or does Kroff simply hope to manipulate you?

Does he want something from you?—or does he want nothing at all?