“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“His wife said not for the time being.”

I felt humiliation and sadness stirring in me, until they mixed into one, and I hated him suddenly. He hands out his flesh to anybody. Yet, Christ does the same, I thought. Still, it was different. Could this be what the Bible meant by adultery? Yes, it sounded quite right “adult” – ery.

A fly landed on the corner of my mouth. I hit my face. I blew my nose violently. When I opened my eyes, Dr. Timberland contemplated me with the worried concern a true Christian might feel for one gone astray. In large letters, he had already written SIN on the blackboard.

Dr. Timberland was a disappointment to the eye in comparison with Professor Ranji. There was no meat whatsoever on his face, not even enough for a cold cut. He wore thick black glasses, which from some bony angles made his bleached blue eyes magnify like an eerie hallucination. Deprived of meat and muscle, his buttocks were indented and his legs, arched. His mouth was a vague dash, but when he smiled, the thin line opened and stretched into a large cavity as though his face could be literally peeled off. His teeth were a few millimetres too short, which gave him the benign look of a born vegetarian.

Yes, I thought to myself, he must be popular with women, and extremely beloved to have achieved a thinness like Christ’s. I contemplated him days on end.

I wished for willpower, yes, prayed for the willpower to stop hungering for him. I cannot say that I was never alarmed by the contents of my fantasies. It was always the same. There he was, calculating inside a microwave oven. Behind the door, one could hear the eruption of the mushroom cloud, a blown up replica of his intelligent brain. When he stepped out, his glasses were intact but the skin hung from his bones. His eyes were melted and bubbled like raclette. With my teeth, I scraped off the feverish skin, tender as the foreskin of a newborn child. Particles like fig seeds popped out of the taste buds of my tongue and my raw face burned like chilli con carne.

Dr. Timberland ran back and forth, equalizing letters and numbers, x = y², y = 2x – x², sin’s and co sin’s. A parabola fell down, another stood up, one parabola was large enough to contain a feast of fruit, another so thin that only a stork could have drunk from it. He placed his notes, meticulously handwritten into his briefcase, patted them as if he were putting them to bed; he locked the briefcase with a tiny golden key. He had those long, bony fingers one easily associates with pianists, or artists before they’re well known (and well-fed).

I pushed my way to him through a forest of standing bodies and intercepted him just as he descended the podium.

“Dr. Timberland. May I see you a minute in your office?”