Out Overhead by Carson Williford for Acevedo's

Author's Note:

I wrote longhand and then played with a draft of this that turned out to be too flip. Then I wrote this, keeping really only the concept from the first drafts. I've revised it once, focusing mainly on structure. I want it to feel like a spiral, moving forward while falling back on itself, but I'm nervous I failed. I’m also nervous I haven’t told a story. I’m proud of the thought and underpinnings of this piece and of the emotional potential at least latent in it, but I’m worried it will drown readers in exposition. I’m also pretty sure the characters, especially minor ones, are flat. I suspect some character(s) and the voice are inconsistent in places. I'd appreciate notes on the occurrences. I’m afraid the story may also feel free-floating because the lack of imagery and linear story line. I also think I may lose people with the philosophy, which I found difficult to entwine. I’m most worried, though, that the piece will be tedious. I don’t necessarily want it to be fun, but I do not want it to bore.

Out Overhead

I am a shameful person. I thought so, at least. I wrote that on the wall in Auburn University’s Ralph Brown Draughon library, which is where I spent most of last semester. I found this little alcove up top on the independent study floor my sophomore year and have since imprinted my butt into the cushion of the chair there. The threads are faded. Really. I’m half-proud of that.

I wrote on the wall of the alcove on the second Monday of the semester: I’m a shameful person. In pencil.

            But that doesn’t say much. Consider this:

            You’re at a formal philosophy talk. You’re sitting in a chair you’re thankful is padded because it hurts less when you cross your legs. Your lower back aches because the paper’s already over the hour limit, but you don’t want to uncross your legs; no one else has. You’re on the front row, and though those you can see watch the lectern, you suspect the room is focused mainly on you. You are vaguely aware of this. You also suspect everyone knows of your vague awareness, your sense that they’re watching you, and you feign ignorance because your knowing this is not OK. The positioning of your left foot—which you’ve judged to be the most appropriate to let hang—and whether your pants reach low enough determine your worth in this room. These people are professionals. The paper ends and along with everyone else you clap, and the commotion allows you to uncross your legs, stretch yourself like the other philosophers—which looks to you appropriately like a warm-up for the Q & A—and then recross your legs, only this time the right one goes over.

            You caught about 60% of the argument, most of which you’ve schematized upstairs. You’re proud because you took no notes. Unfortunately, you are too unfamiliar with Kant to give any crucial critique. You did, though, catch the line about Kierkegaard’s works comprising one massive reticular project, and so you decide to ask a question that you truly are interested in, which is, after waiting through a protracted three person exchange with your hand raised, “Do you think Kierkegaard undermines the ethical and the aesthetic ways of life in Either/Or to offer a pretext for the religious way of life in Fear and Trembling?”

            And then the next day for your Ancient Philosophy class you read the word pretext and discover after consulting the OED that it does not mean a text preparing for another but rather a false reason given to conceal. The definition burns like firebrand. You almost without thinking see that your question came off probably as a confession more than an inquiry, an admission that you didn’t know what was going on but wanted to look like you did. And you think all the professors—your professors—caught this admission, knew more about you than you yourself and wrote you off because no one wants to deal with a blowhard, especially a modest one. You’re burning from the definition partly because, yes, you were brash, thought you knew what you didn’t, and on top of that because you want to explain yourself. You want to shake Dr. Lockhart the speaker and Professor Howard your Ancient teacher by the shoulders and tell them about your deep down care, your genuine interest; but you can’t, because doing so would cause even more shame and that whole haunting tableau would lodge in your mind just like your question, just like the high-waters you hated you wore, and you would fear even more than already any attempt to breathe. You are not a professional, and you are vaguely aware of this.

The ‘you’ there—you’re reading him. The burning is what I wrote on the wall. I penciled it on a Monday after Ancient, having discovered ‘pretext’ over the weekend. Professor Howard said nothing in class, but I kept thinking he knew I had read the word and that during his lecture, while he sat at the front table and talked to the fifteen of us, knew I had re-cognized my question and who I had been, just some philosophaster, no good thing. Accepting what I hadn’t known—better yet, feeling myself become it—felt tectonic, tons of mental rock shelf grinding. That caused the burn, the friction. I was in the alcove, enclosed by tomes like The Handbook of Surface Metrology and Cathodic Protection, and still I wanted to curl up, near fetal, shut off the lights. But those lights only turn off if they go out.

Then, what makes all this worth either of our whiles, there was a response: “Why?” I had left Ancient at 12:50, as I did on Mon/Wed/Fri, and found it just above the left of the alcove’s gray Formica table. I was surprised anyone else knew the spot. Though I knew it was public, I had assumed since I found it that I alone used it. I was spooked, looked through shelves for eyes. “Why?” it said. I didn’t respond at first. I had two days to read 125 pages on the pre-Socratics for Ancient, the only class that demanded or deserved effort. I took 16 hours, but the Intermediate German and Ethical Theories and Symbolic Logic and etc. paled. Ancient was the philosophy class, the challenge loathed, feared, at least known by students in the department. It was the arête we had not just to ascend to but balance on, the whole semester precarious, quaking. I was out for more, though. I wanted beside my A’s not just plus signs but drool stains. So I wrote no reply. I read the first half of the pre-Socratic packet in five hours, the usual pace, and then bought a coffee downstairs.

            When I put the coffee on the table, though, I looked again at the writing on the wall. The shame I had felt when I wrote my comment two days before had dissipated, at least been hid. You either shove these things out of memory or you talk about them; you’ll tear yourself in the in-between. I thought so, at least. I wrote, “I was certain about things that weren’t true.” I tweaked that four or five times before I finished my other readings and German writing. I went home about midnight, after rounding off the period.

            I lived for the fourth year with my older brother and two friends we met at Auburn High School. We were ambitious, which I think created the gravity between us. I did philosophy, the others art (though they avoided the label ‘artist’ so not to come off as aesthetes or hipsters). We planned to create a community, we said, learn from each other and showcase our stuff at the house. Jimi played guitar and bass and lived off them, teaching lessons at a local shop and playing at Sky Bar and The Bank Vault and on game days at fraternities. Ross, the other friend, painted, used mainly acrylic and watercolor to create a style he joked was “post-contemporary.” We laughed, suspecting but never acknowledging that he was serious. Ben, my older brother by two years, lived downstairs, his room beneath mine. He acted, had played Peter in Auburn High’s production of Peter Pan and even won a scholarship from the University’s Theater Department.

            We planned our community. Yet, once school began, we burrowed into our caves of achievement and essentially didn’t see each other for four months. I saw Jimi and Ross some Fridays and Saturdays, when RBD, the library, closed at six. We bounced projects off each other—

“Jimi, what are you working on?”

“I’ve been practicing arpeggios for this new song. Jazz fusion.”

“Ross?”

“Check it, been working on something big: Mona Lisa 2.0.”

“You mean out of—”

“Yeah. Acrylic, disjointed perspective. It’s coming along.”

—for maybe an hour while they smoked cigarettes in the front yard, in the unconfined air. Ben, though, stayed in his room watching Netflix. It turned out the shift to college afflicted him with soul-eating stage fright. He dropped out a month into his second semester, said he didn’t like the teaching style. But, as with Ross’ jokes, we suspected more. He abused Netflix, overdosed daily. He used to call it studying.

I’d get home in the early A.M. and find all doors shut. Everyone was still up, Ben’s door outlined in cinema, jazz riffs drifting over brushstrokes upstairs. But I wanted sleep. Tomorrow meant seventeen more hours of Ancient, RBD, more climbing progression toward the names out before me. All this reflected the shibboleth we had lightly adopted: “work hard, work hard.” But, really, we beat Victorian hours.

The community rarely moved beyond communal planning, each of our immediate interests more out overhead. After the moments we spent together on weekend evenings, we got back to it, each of us upstairs, me down the hall to my desk and lambent light. I had the sense of championing something, the hours precious and pulsing. I worked as if at RBD, sedulous, bowed, only now I could hear through the walls and floor basslines and monologues, brushstrokes and trembling hope, a community of artists living in their yet uncreated worlds.

            The wall in the RBD alcove was, on the other hand, inaudible. A week after the first response another appeared: “Certain about what?” As with the first, I hesitated. I didn’t know this person and sure wanted to keep anyone from putting wall to face to name. But again, I responded by the end of the night: “What pretext means.” It looked stupid, I knew, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what the shame was. I felt I should have because, you know, I wanted to write important things about the human experience or whatever. I buried the frustration in Plato.

The writer responded within the next two days. It read, “How’s a wall supposed to know what pretext means?”

“Really?” I wrote. I hadn’t even unzipped my backpack. I leaned back and for some reason expected a response. Jaw clenched, heel bouncing. S(he) should explain the last comment immediately, I felt. If I was going to share, (s)he better treat me like a human fucking being. No clever shit. I was eager to the point of anxiety. It was like the time when my girlfriend, Lacey Sheers, stopped talking to me because I told her I wished she had different parents. I flooded her with texts but couldn’t make her reply. That made studying futile. But at least then every second could bring a response. The hope somehow made it more bearable. She was no wall. I erased “really?” and wrote, “I am not a wall.” Two days later (s)he responded: “Sorry. What’s the shame like?” The joke had been struck through.

Since that whole episode of Lacey refusing to talk to me, we haven’t fought once. I see her two or three times a week (which is partly why I spend so little time with Jimi and Ross and Ben). The two of us met senior year at Auburn High and started dating the following summer. She was more academic than I in the sense that she cared solely about the A’s. There was no desire to be Someone, to get her name or picture in posterity’s textbooks. I bring that up not to say she was nescient—she was brilliant—but that she had free time. She left her Nutrition major on campus, you could say.

We sometimes studied together at my house and got dinner on the weekends, but usually we just slept (and, you know). I’d get home around 12:30 or 1:00 and she’d already be asleep in my bed or limp-lidded waiting there. We woke up early, late, and got into class just as Samford Hall’s clock tower clanged the first of nine chimes. I didn’t tell her about the writing on the wall because then I’d have to tell her about the pretext thing. I wanted to keep that secret because she was there. She had wanted to spend time with me.

 “Will I like it?”

“You might.”

“Can’t we just get dinner afterward?”

“My night’s booked.”

“Don’t joke right now. I want to be with you.”

“Then come.”

            So she came and sat beside me, saw me do my thing. I didn’t tell her I goofed because then she might think I was a phony. I did, however, tell her about my first dose of collegiate shame, the cut infected by the pretext thing.

Freshman year I took Public Speaking, which the Philosophy Department somehow found necessary for my education. I was the only student in the class who was not a fan or utter partisan of Auburn football, though I was the only one from Auburn. The grad student who taught the class was one himself, wore to every session—no joke—a shirt with the university’s logo (an A centered in a U) over the left pectoral. It nearly got me in trouble because it made me burst out laughing in class one day. I noticed that the triangle in the middle of the logo was in fact an A hole. Immature, I know, but in that class what I considered maturity was deemed far worse: boring. So, no real learning took place. We spent hours, a full class one time, chanting about the Auburn Tigers and watching videos of the good ol’ pigskin, and I just tried to keep my composure amid that triangle plastered everywhere.

            Lacey knew about my first speech before I gave it, had wished me luck beforehand. I had to compare myself to an object. Wanting to make the class interesting, and I think kind of wanting to tout my own flag, I compared myself to my speech. Feeling a bit above the others, I wasn’t nervous, and was even more confident when my purpose statement elicited a “that’s so meta” from Autumn, the redhead with thick-rimmed glasses. The next sentence, though, the thesis I had crafted over the previous week, escaped me. Not even on my tongue. I um’d and uh’d, stared at the lectern. I hadn’t printed an outline like the GTA had advised because by my sixth recitation the night before I had memorized verbatim the 593 words. I walked to my seat on the empty rightmost row.

“Really?” the GTA said.

I put my head down, felt an Edenic fall in my 4.0.

“You’re really doing this?”

“Well, he was like his speech,” said Mary Claire with autistic optimism. “Silent.”

            Lacey gasped when I told her. Then she laughed.

            “I’m so sorry,” she said, right hand over her mouth. “I just pictured your face.”

“I think it started a long time ago,” I wrote on the wall later. “This isn’t the first time, but it’s the only time it’s been this unbearable.” The responses appeared now every two days. I’d see them after Ancient, reply, and then have one waiting on me after the next class session. I’d come to not just expect these but to await them. They were in their own way special messages during the semester. They hit me in a place only the writing of Plato could reach. And I’m not sure Plato could have reached there had the alcove dialogue not been underway.

“What do you mean unbearable?”

***

Part of what made it hard to neglect the shame was that Ancient abutted what I was sure was a Public Speaking class: YouTube bits, hilarity, distinct voices quavering just on the other side of the cinderblock wall. The wall, ivory-painted, hardly dampened the sound, which often vibrated the back of the classroom. The memory of that first speech often resurfaced in Ancient because the noise. It became an affliction. I’d close my eyes and press my thumbs into them until I saw technicolor swirls, these and the pressure behind them quickly realer than the whole speech thing.

Ancient was living up to its rumored difficulty. Professor Howard, who told us to drop ‘professor,’ was both the teacher and the mastermind behind the whole Philosophy Department. He had come in young to a group of analytic geezers and gained clout. The story got picked up by the New York Times. Howard was now a geezer himself, his forty-six years at Auburn prominent on his face, but he had the missionary vigor of the fresh PhD’s. He was to us philosophy students what Cam Newton, Auburn’s Heisman quarterback from my freshman year, was to the University at large: kind and daunting, magnetic and revered, partner and idol.

“Bet he’s a demigod,” said Forest Garner, who sat beside me.

“Better yet,” said Bretta Bauman, “one hundred percent God and man. Jesu redux.”

I had had no stricter teacher, and not just in grading. He was a moralist. You could see it in his face, his brow and beard rugged, bust-worthy, that of a war hero more than an academic.

“Well, not exactly moralist,” he corrected me when I asked in class. “If I had to take a title, it would be ethicist, as in ethics, as in ethos, the rhetorical strategy, if you remember from your English Comp classes. Anyone?”

“Appealing to authority?”

“To character?” I asked.

            “Both in a way, but chiefly character. This class and the material we read are meant to build your character. It will challenge you, it will piss you off, but you will come out a better person.”

            On the second day of class, Glenn Childs, a senior retaking Ancient, came in at 12:01 if even past the minute. Howard stopped lecturing and kicked him out. He said, “You have a contract with me to be here by noon. You break that, you disrespect me.” Those words exactly, I remember them.

            What was uncanny, though, was that Howard seemed never to offend a student. Glenn was nearly laughing when he got kicked out.

            “Come on, Howard. Really? You’re really making me leave? All right. I’ll see you in your office.”

            “At five?”

            “Yeah. OK, have a good class y’all.”

After Glenn shut the door, Howard counted to ten and then called him back in. “Since you’re the first one,” he said.

            The assignments, which alternated between 70–130 pages of reading and three page papers on single paragraphs, generated the rumors of difficulty. What I found most difficult, though, was focusing and participating with Public Speaking behind me and a response waiting at the alcove. I had to pay attention, though, had to articulate myself well and give trenchant input. Forest and Bretta and Glenn and I’m sure others in the class, the serious students, felt the same way. Though we never acknowledged it, the class was our arena, our Jordan-Hare Stadium; we didn’t acknowledge it because doing so would mean dropping out, losing. The goal: glory.

            I’d shut up in the class after the pretext thing, had attended mainly to notes and not pressing my eyes too hard. Howard seemed to like me, though, used me in his examples:

“Now suppose Lance is watching shadows on a wall in front of him. He thinks they are what we call reality. Then, he notices behind him the stuffed animals casting the shadows. He compares these objects to their shadows and thinks, ‘These animals are realer. They are reality.’ Then, he sees a light beyond them and pursues it until he exits, sees sunlight and real horses and birds, the outside world. He realizes that he had been inside a cave all along, seeing only appearances, representations of the true reality, which is the outside. He’s escaped Plato’s cave, also known as the common living room.”

            On the day Howard used this example, the class we spent largely on Plato’s cave and his true reality (AKA the Forms), Adam Dorman, who I thought was a sociopath from how placid he was, spoke for the first time I had heard. He interrupted Howard’s lecture, not even raising his hand, to state—not ask—state that Plato’s allegory of the cave needed reinterpreting, that the person who exits the cave finds outside not daylight and Truth but ash clouds and apocalypse, bleak and barren land. He seemed to recite it.

            “Is that a quote?” asked Howard. His face looked as though the lights were off.

            “No,” said Adam, expressionless. Forest and Bretta and others also squinted at each other. Some shook their heads as if disappointed.

            “OK,” Howard said. He slowly turned his body back to the blackboard, staring at Adam. “That’s it?”

            “Yes.” I shrugged at Forest and Bretta. Those of us who thought of ourselves as serious students, those of us in the arena, needed philosophy majors like Adam. They were the great equalizers who regardless of our place in the stadium assured us that we belonged there, had the philosophical future of grad school and acclaim. “Yes,” he said again, Howard still staring. He looked to his notes and began drawing coils. He bounced his heels.

            “Well, bring that up again when we get to Plotinus. With him we’ll talk—or as y’all will see, try to talk—about the what’s outside something like Plato’s cave.”

Adam must have known we were all watching him, had noticed something amiss, like a dialed failed speech, like ignorant certainty. Might as well have said pretext. I pressed my thumbs into my eyes. The current in the room killed me, everyone knowing except Adam until he realized at the end, us able to see him from the outside in a way he couldn’t see himself, as if he was encircled by a two way mirror and all of us watched him from behind it, snickered until he noticed the morphing reflection.

            “But part of what makes Plato fascinating is how self-critical he is,” Howard continued. “Most of the criticisms of the theory of the Forms come from Plato himself.”

“The thing about being ashamed,” I wrote on the alcove wall, “is that shame itself feels shameful. Right now I can call up the pretext thing and feel the downward cower that comes with it, not just the shoulders and neck curling in but me, the thing that’s not a wall, shriveling up too. And then I conceive of that itself as a whole picture of shame, me there burning and belittled, and that image generates more shame, so while the first instance curls me up in its mouth this second one, jaws extended, swallows the first, and then there’s another gaping behemoth after that, this one with the second in the back of its throat and the first even further down. All snap shut.”

            The comments grew long. It probably didn’t help that I’m wordy when uncomfortable (hence “The thing about…”). We’d taken up nearly the bottom three feet of the wall. The alcove was slim, remember, the table being maybe three feet wide and the wall before it two or so inches wider. We stopped at the columns on both sides.

            “What about a fourth behemoth?” said a response, “a fifth? When do they stop?”

            “My questions exactly.”

I still kept the writing on the wall from Lacey. I was engrossed in it, would have woken up early to respond if it were for possibly seeing the writer; but I kept it from Lacey. She and I maintained the usual, made dinner and studied. Sometimes I told her about class. Like how one day in Ancient a Taylor Swift song blared through the wall, and when she sang, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” Howard stopped and asked if we too had heard Socrates in the other room.

Howard was a man born from Socrates. It was on the day he introduced Socratic ignorance and what he called “philosophy as a way of life” that I made profound progress in my shame. This one doesn’t involve Adam. He hadn’t said a word since the is-that-a-quote incident a month earlier. No eye jabbing for either of us, I promise.

Everyone scribbled notes, but I struggled because Public Speaking kept playing the video of Auburn beating Alabama in the final second of the 2013 Iron Bowl. They played it ten or twelve times, and through each of them, Howard, besides in the beginning of class saying that we’d have some entertainment, ignored it. His focus amid distraction borderline appalled me. He went on about philosophy and wisdom while the back wall nearly shook from the sportscast.

“What does it mean to be a philosopher?” he asked.

“Well I guess if this thing comes up short he can field it and run it out,” the commentator said, his voice southern and slightly nasal.

“What does it mean not to be a philosopher?” asked Bretta.

“All right, here we go,” said the commentators. “Fifty-six yarder.”

“Yes, Bretta, philosophers do ask questions—”

“It’s got—no, does not have the length.”

“But for Plato and Socrates, what matters more than questions is how the philosopher understands and asks them.”

“And Chris Davis takes it in the back of the end zone.”

            “It’s not syntax, not rhetoric—though those are important. It is, you could say, the attitude in which the philosopher seeks.”

            “He’ll run it out to the ten, fifteen, twenty . . .”

“Philosophers ask questions to seek wisdom,” Howard said, “wisdom being more than something you simply know or possess.”

“. . . forty, forty-five, fifty. . .”

            “Wisdom, for Plato and for Socrates, is always about who you are. Wisdom is a state of being.”

            “Oh my gosh!” said another commentator. “Oh my gosh!”

            “Glenn is gonna run it all the way back!” The commentator’s voice shouted full-throttle. “Auburn’s gonna win the football game!”

            I accidentally write down “Auburn’s going to win the football game.”

            “What Socrates means when he calls himself wise is that he’s in a certain relationship with himself.”

            “He ran the missed field goal back! He ran it back 109 yards!”

            “Wisdom is, then, simply, a caring relationship with yourself.”

             “They’re not gonna keep them off the field tonight!” The commentator’s voice sounded near breaking. Hysterics from the second commentator in the background.  The Public Speaking class itself broke out clapping and shouting. “Holy cow! Oh my God! Auburn wins!”

At least, that’s how I remember it. There writing notes, Howard lecturing over the commentators. It was the combination of these that reminded me of the time in my Public Speaking class when during an icebreaker I told them I was from Auburn and they pedestalled me.

“What was it like growing up here? Did you go to the games?”

“Where did you hunt, if you did?”

“What church did you go to? I’ve been to at least ten and can’t find one I’m happy with.”

And from most of them: “You’re so lucky.”

It made me uncomfortable. “You’d like my parents,” I wanted to say. My parents have Auburn magnets on their SUVs. They took me to games as a child, me and Ben, decked us out in orange and blue striped overalls. I used to pretend I was Bo Jackson when I played little league and flag football. My dad hunts, has since his dad taught him at five. He took me when I was ten and got me to shoot a twelve gauge (barely braced, cracked my clavicle). My parents define themselves by their twenty-three year membership at Auburn United Methodist Church. Ben and I went when we were little (Sunday school, later youth group and high school leadership team). Ben had bailed out before the leadership team, but I didn’t. I had skateboarded for a few years by then, having disappointed my parents when I quit baseball and football. Then there was the falling out with the church and my faith. AUMC, as everyone called the church, became in me and my roommates’ mouths Auburn Upper Middle Class. We grouped up around that, sort of. I was bitter about the church and its people (“You think too much”; “Faith believes against the facts.”) and was in all ways spiritually disoriented. I read and Idiot’s Guide to World Religions, then found Kierkegaard, saw the figures of Kant and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein constructed out before me. Then I decided I wanted them in my future and myself in theirs. If it weren’t for the scholarship, I’d be out of Alabama. But nope, so there you go: ambition, Auburn philosophy major, artist friends. Voila.

I bring this up because in Ancient, when thinking about Public Speaking, I realized this whole background impressed on me a few general values. They abounded: “Lance, don’t show off”; “You only did that to impress Lacey”; “You just want to look good in front of Brother Charles.” But at the same time life was bad without good deeds: I cut the grass for neighbors, clipped hedges at Morning Side nursing home, volunteered with children at Auburn’s projects. The problem, then, was when the girls pulled out cameras or when Ms. Milton from the cul-de-sac told me how great a person I was and that I was a gift from God. I got shaky. I felt outside, watched from beside myself to make sure that I avoided all but attempts to honestly efface myself. It was like tightrope walking, like standing on a fence between good deeds and pride, self-absorption, the appearance of being so engaged in myself that I was inalterably Other, and this fence ran straight between Ms. Milton and me. I always felt bad afterward. Angry, frustrated, wishing for a past that was otherwise. Compliments were labyrinths.

“We need more people like you in the world,” Mrs. Milton would say.

“Well, I just . . . I don’t know.” I’d shrug. Denying it would be a lie and sound like blowing some humility horn. Yet, accepting it, I felt, would look haughty. All things forced. So I tried to avoid the whole thing, to evade it so that I could go on being an admirable young man. I could never say thank you and mean it.

“You know,” I wrote on the wall, “I’ve only heard ‘shameless’ used as an insult.” My hand was above my head while I stood, the wall below covered in messages like the sticky notes my mom used to leave in my lunchbox.

“Astute. But then being estimable is a shame. Obviously that’s not true, unless you think it’s good to be bad, in which case you’re wildly confused.”

“The South made me this way.”

“If the South made you this way, why isn’t everyone here so torn?”

“I guess you’re right. Well, whatever did it is what I want to call the South.”

“Then (1) you’re more southern than Jeff Foxworthy and the Duck Dynasty folks, and (2) you’re being irresponsible with your words. But hey, I’ve had to stand on the desk to write the last three of these. Seems as though this is coming to an end. Should we meet?

 “I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I’d like to. You seem cool.”

“I would probably disappoint you. I don’t think the person you’ve been writing to can exist face-to-face.”

“We can try.”

            I didn’t reply. I was reluctant to give myself over, more now than when it all started. It was then I realized what had made me give in was the anonymity, the comfort of having no name, no ID tag or picture of that thing I had considered myself out overhead. Anonymity is when God turns his eyes. In it I could admit the stuff that didn’t, say, cohere. Facelessness had a mouth. And I could care enough to say these things only in a general sphere of carelessness. The anonymity was freedom from myself for myself, and to meet in the face would kill the anonymity. It would in a way be like Moses looking at God’s back, because, as I thought so long ago, God knew the inside. But I suppose that now I did too.

            Eventually in Ancient we got to Plotinus, though Adam didn’t say anything about his old apocalypse comment. The second week studying him, now just a week from finals, Howard brought up Adam’s statement.

            “It was that outside Plato’s cave is only apocalypse, correct? Bleak and barren land, I think you said?”

            “Yes,” Adam said. He looked from Howard to his desk, his shoulders curled in like mine when I first wrote on the wall. Forest snickered at something Bretta said.

            “Well, Plotinus, as we’ve seen, would see the outside as the One, a unity that escapes attribution.” Adam wasn’t looking, though Howard talked toward him. “Adam, are you listening?”

            He didn’t respond, sat fiddling with the binding of his notebook.

            “Well, before any failure of language matters, there’s the failure of an attempt to communicate.” Adam sat downcast, though the room was now stiff as it was when he made the statement three months earlier.

            “Adam?” Howard said. And I wanted him to stop, wanted to shout it at him, as if the questions were burning him, the behemoth swallowing what had been made bait. “Adam, I want to discuss your statement.”

            “It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said.

            “Why is that?” he asked. I wanted him to shut up and play Taylor Swift or watch the 0:01 video on eternal repeat. I wanted him to choke on his tongue in front of the class. I raised my hand.

            “Lance?”

            “What do you mean by an attempt to communicate?”

            Forest and Bretta squinted at me as if I had shit intuition. I was, you could say, loosing yardage in the arena. What they didn’t know was that the question was a resignation. I listened, and I learned, but I didn’t ask any more questions than I cared about. Adam took notes the rest of class, never looked up. I felt that I could hold the second behemoth’s mouth open, that that shame stopped when I realized I didn’t have to be alone; the first behemoth had wings.

I could have ended it there. I almost did. The prize had attachments, though. It felt wrong to see my shame reflected in others and theirs in me and do nothing about it. That for my sake and theirs. Self-knowledge bore other-knowledge.

            “I’m here from 1–midnight on Mon/Wed/Fri (till close),” I wrote on the wall.

            A response came on the last class day. “I’ll be there Friday at five.” It was Friday. I’d expected I would have time to prepare, to think of what I would say. I couldn’t study. Instead, I read the wall. A semester of messages accrued like sigil’s on an altar. I would meet the writer shamelessly, give thanks, try to talk as if (s)he were just the wall. But surely, there was more.

            I sat on the desk at 4:45 and waited. Just sat and waited. It was the first downtime I had spent alone since winter break. No writing, no reading, no others. I would make a B in Ancient. A 100 on my final paper would give me an 89.01. My only B besides Public Speaking. I cared and didn’t care, was strung in tension I felt with new intimacy.

            And that was when Adam Dorman turned the column. We had made eye contact and the tension it strung up between us could not be cut.

            “Hey,” he said.

            “Hey,” I said. He looked as if he didn’t want to mention the wall. That he wanted to leave now too, just like me. I suppose I didn’t know then whether it was Adam Dorman who I had spent the semester writing to. The immediate response I had often wanted from the wall now couldn’t be escaped.

            “Thanks for asking that question,” he said. “In Ancient.”

            “You’re welcome. What have you thought of the class?”

            “It’s been all right. The work was annoying.”

            “Yeah. Are you done with your paper?”

            “Yeah. Finished this morning.”

            “Cool,” I said.

            “You?”

            “Almost.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Yeah.”