—
I went into the chair’s office to find this kid’s file. The music kid, not the Mexican kid.
“What are you doing in there?” the office assistant called to me. “You’re not supposed to be in there.” She followed me in and watched me pull open a cabinet drawer.
“Those are confidential,” she said. “That is strictly administrative.”
“I need to see something.” I took out the kid’s file.
“What do you need to see?” she said, coming up behind me and leaning over my shoulder. “You don’t get to see.”
“Could you shut up for two seconds? For God’s sake.”
—
The name of his country was at the top of his file and it surprised me. It happened that his country was in a civil war that year. We’d been bombing them for reasons that had become suspect. It was all over the news. It was a mess.
The file had several notes in it. There was his acceptance date and his refusal letter. He’d received scholarships from several schools. He’d not chosen our school, the letter said. But thank you. Next there was a note from admissions, dated a year later. He wanted to come after all. He’d lost his scholarship from the school of his choice. He hadn’t been able to get out of his country. He was of drafting age. There was a freeze on his passport. But this year, this week, there was a temporary reprieve. He could leave if he had sponsorship. Would we sponsor him? The date of the note put it two weeks into the semester, three days before he’d joined my class.
Any other school would have said, Come spring semester, come next year. But he couldn’t come next year. It was leave then or be drafted and surely die. Probably his second choice and third choice had refused him. Fourth choice. Who knows how low on the list we lay. All I know is our school said they would take him — not out of generosity, it seemed from the paperwork, but sheer incompetence. If he failed this class, he’d have to go back, sign up for the war like everybody else.
—
The odd thing was, I looked at him, and I couldn’t get a read on him. He could live another month, or he could live eighty more years.
—
I went to his musical-composition teacher and asked him what he planned to do about this kid.
“ ‘Do’?” said the composition teacher. “Explain ‘do.’ Can you guess how many students I have?” he wanted to know. “Look, I’m not a blood donor. Do I look like a blood donor?”
“I’m an adjunct too,” I said.
“Okay. You know what I’m talking about.”
—
The adjuncts were always tired. Our classes were over-enrolled. The school didn’t give us health insurance. Every year there was a Christmas party and the adjuncts were never invited. All the adjuncts shared one big office in a space like a spaceship, full of desks and boxes and books. We worked under contract and we were paid nearly nothing. Below minimum wage. People were shocked when they found out how much I made. I hated the other adjuncts, some younger, some older, each with their own cowardly reason for being there. And I hated the associate chair and the smug new-world music he played with his suburban band on weekends, and how he assigned me 99 semester after semester, somehow slotted me in there without even knowing my name. And I hated myself for hating all these perfectly reasonable citizens who were just going about their lives.
—
I needed to just pass him myself. Put a big P on his paper and move him through.
I guess I was in love with him a little. I didn’t want him to go back.
—
I wasn’t used to being in love, not with anyone and certainly not with a student, certainly not one eleven years younger than I, one I barely spoke to. It was horrible. I had to wait for our class and then hope to see him in the hallway beforehand, maybe walk in at the same moment, and I had to wonder whether he’d be going to some performance at the school that night and therefore whether I should go too. I had to puzzle out where he’d be rehearsing and which group he hung around with (the other foreign musicians: the Chileans, the Russians, the Japanese) and where they might be and whether I could sometimes be nearby, watching. I tried to do an especially good job in his class. I stopped reading aloud from the textbook. I required the students to visit the writing center. The papers came back even worse.
I was giving it up, had given it up. He wasn’t even going to pass the stupid class.
—
“That’s some lousy job you’ve got.”
This was the office assistant talking. I was stapling sheets of paper together. I was pulling out staples from papers I had incorrectly stapled and restapling the papers to the correct ones. I looked over at her and could suddenly see that she was doomed. I could see it as clearly and abruptly as if I’d reached over and stapled right through her jugular, put six staples in her neck.
“What else do you do,” she said, “walk dogs? Clean up their crap? This job’s not for you. You should quit.”
A staple lodged under my fingernail. “Hey,” I said, “do you have anyone lined up to do the essays yet?”
“What essays?”
“99.”
“Oh crap. I was going to bribe someone.”
“I’ll do it.”
“No one wants to do it.”
“Put me down.”
“I can’t put you down.”
“Go ahead. Put me down.”
“Can’t do that. You’re not an outside source.”
She was right about that. The outside sources weren’t from outside the school or the country or the planet but from outside 99. The 101 teachers read the 99s. The 205 teachers.
I said, “Who checks? Does anybody check?”
“I check. I’m supposed to check.”
“Don’t check.”
“I’m not putting you down.”
I was surprised by this. In previous semesters, I’d been on the receiving end of mass emails begging someone to volunteer. Anyone not teaching 99 could expect to get asked to come in on the last Saturday of final-exam week. I had thought it would be easy to convince her, that she would be relieved.
—
I’m not saying it’s proper or right to love a student, and I’m not going to pretend I never did anything about it because I did, but I can say I didn’t do much.
All I did was to bring the office assistant to the dance and threaten to kill her.
—
In the movie about George and the angel, the angel shows George what the world would have been like if George had never existed. It turns out that without George the world would be a cold, dark place. Without George people would be poor and lonely. Some people would be dead because he hadn’t been there to save them. Others would be older than they would have been if he had lived. Without George a dark force would be in control, and the population would be suppressed and subdued by it. People would walk, bundled against the fierce winds, to their coal stoves to eat their bland Christmas dinners alone.
The moral of the movie is that, well, it’s too bad that George is so unhappy and that he never got to do the things he wanted to do, that he never even got to form a clear idea of what he might want to do, had instead carried with him in his heart all these years a vague longing, a sense that somehow this was all wrong, that there was a shimmering ship bumping around out there in the dark that he’d wanted to board, not knowing where it was headed but feeling so trapped and helpless where he was that he had to believe the ship would bring him someplace better. It’s too bad that’s how it was for him, that his life had been so sad, but on the upside, look how much his misery was doing for others. His daily struggles, his failures, his defeats, somehow held in place this delicate system so that while the population wasn’t happy exactly, at least they weren’t despondent or dead.