some breathtaking, gravityless way that only dead dancers know about.
Sam and Adrian and Jason and Evelyn emptied their nicely stocked lockers into Columbia totes and big blue IKEA shopping bags—sweatshirts and workbooks and rainboots and Nalgenes—as if this were merely a domestic disturbance, as if it were merely time to move out. They didn’t fuss, or fight, or reject the event in any way. Jason’s already been given another post in the textile fibers study. Evelyn can only function if she is doing what she’s told—she seemed to love being told to leave, it was such an easy instruction to execute. She rolled up her Science Under the Stars T-shirt so neatly it fit inside her Nalgene, and then she thunked the Nalgene into the shaft of her rubber boot. The way these things fit together seemed to hypnotize her into deep relief. Sam and Adrian were high when they came in, and in retrospect I realized they had often been high. They didn’t see or care about the beans and the seeds. I looked around the room. These were the only other four humans who knew the beans and the seeds existed, they were leaving two-by-two like the schoolgirls in Madeline, and then the lab would be professionally cleaned out and zeroed, a half hour after we left.
I guess you could say that I like revenge and they like common decency. I guess you could say I don’t approve of myself enough to protect myself. I guess you could say to each their own. The biggest difference between us is that nobody else in our lab had you to lose—you, too botanical for metals or synthetics, you, flowers-only. They studied by the light of their own Joans, no doubt, but I live by you.
Your class continues this semester, indifferent to my absence, as if I weren’t its blood, pumping minerals and force from the second row. Admit that I make you possible. Admit, at least, that you make me possible. So much you already know. Tom and Mishti are taking your class because I told them to. Because they thought we would take it together. They now get to sit in whichever row they pick, in your presence, in your presence that suffers in its luster from the lack of me, because some destinies are kind and some are pickled.
KANSAS
When you grow up in Kansas wearing very large shorts, thinking not very much of yourself, thinking mainly of your knees, looking mainly at your knees, your face a frisbee that can’t fly, your teeth buck, your eyebrows rectangles, your forehead more than half of your face, your shirts shapeless, your shape shapeless, your Kansas shapeless, your lust absent, your legs bowed, your arches flat, your chest flat, your ears your only curves, your ears never pierced, your denim never dazzled, your sneakers white, your socks white, your teeth turquoise with rubber bands, your cheese orange, your milk whole, your bread wonder, your luxury a tuna casserole, your pale a neon pale, your fantasy to race a Mario Kart over the desert and into the final oasis, your earthly oasis a salted pretzel, your solitude total, your urges not even visible to you on the clearest days at the farthest horizons, your blank magnificent, your inertia wild and authentic, your nothing your preference, and then into it somebody walks, a Joan, this sudden hero can really take control.
You’re susceptible first to idolatry, then to study, to apprenticeship, and finally to a kind of patient love that makes fun of itself and believes in itself without limit. Imagine being a pudding cup of a person and encountering a confident, elegant, powerful scholar who knows what to do with her shoulders. Imagine encountering you.
You don’t wear any kind of coat until the first snow of the year. You eat milk chocolate for breakfast and canned pineapple for lunch and sweet potatoes for dinner. You are a very ambitious ice skater. You can count to twenty in four languages and say “God Save the Queen” in Hungarian. You considered joining the Russian Orthodox Church after learning that the ballerino Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train. You ask your students to read Kafka’s diary entry about the Apple Seller before the semester begins to show that administration is everywhere and genius is possible. You celebrate Flag Day. You’re afraid of turtles. You don’t know that I know you’re afraid of turtles. You climbed the Matterhorn. You can drain the insides of an egg