An Amplification
The room where I teach my workshops at the university in S has been renovated. In this old building the high-ceilinged rooms have been cut in two and the floor of the room I am in now floats halfway up the old space. The tops of the old windows, then, arch frowning at our feet. Outside it is gray and cold. What light there is must struggle up, reflected from the dark ground and the stone pavement outside. We talk about the two-step formula of how one gets a story started. There is the "Once upon a time" and there is the "One day." The anecdotal "Once upon a time" seems easy for my students. They understand the chronic tensions of life, the conflicts of family, friends, lovers. They sense the asymmetry of character strengths and weaknesses, the pressures of job and gender, history and place. They know the atmospheric weight of birth and death and the specific gravity of a character's attraction or repulsion. This they get. This they get because it seems like life, the elaboration of conflict, tension, and difference. Life is like this. What is hard is the "One day." What is hard is the making up of the "One day," the thing that happens that sets all of these accumulated and congested details into motion so that more happens. That is the fiction part of fiction I tell them, that is the thing that you make up. It is a coincidence, I tell them, that one day the magic mirror tells the evil queen that she is no longer the fairest in the land. Coincidences like this we accept in stories. I tell them that these coincidences are what make anecdotes stories because the "One day" allows for things to change. Our lives are a systemic melodramatic mess, busy but static. The "One day" is hard to imagine, but this is the part that must be imagined. This "One day" that changes your life. We shake our heads in sympathy with one another. How hard this will be to imagine I tell them reassuringly. How the "One day" has always been not life but the hard part of the art, the artifice of art. And then, one day, a man at a party throws a drink at a woman…
The First Room
But that is not what I want to tell Doctor X in his office when he asks me what I want to tell him. It is now the fall after the party at the end of March where D has thrown the drink, and much has happened. This, the following list of events, is still happening in my head. There is the meeting in W's office with some of the other faculty of the creative writing program where K and H and I talk about what we should do. There is the meeting in my office with the woman who was hit by the drink. And the meeting with the chairman of the department and the faculty members who make up an executive committee in the committee room with its big table, the same room where I used to teach my fiction writing classes. And this is about the time of the meeting before what I call the big meeting, where the creative writing faculty meets to decide whether we should have the big meeting. Then there is the big meeting with the open mikes and the reading of statements. And then, after that, all the small private meetings with individual students who, because of what went on with the big meeting, now have things to say about D and the program in creative writing. And this is before the investigative hearings by the faculty senate in another committee room. The meeting with the graduate students in creative writing I call the blizzard meeting because I made a reference to a late-spring snowstorm that was going on as we met, the wet snow turning the tiny windows in the room white. The meeting at the Thai restaurant and at the bar before. Then, after the report came out listing D's history of behavior but also the program's compla cency and complicit nature. The meeting in the vice president's office where W, K, and H, the other writers in the program, denounced the whole investigation. The meeting in the office of the chairman of the investigative committee when I gave him a memo that made clear how I differed from W, K, and H about what should be done. Then the actual hearing itself where I testified in a room to a committee. The committee sat with its back to windows and I remember the sky being occluded as always, but it was summer then, June, and it might have been one of the bright blue skies worth remembering if I could remember it. D was sitting next to me on the left and the woman who brought the charges on the right. A committee member asks me, "Given all that was going on in your program why didn't you do something?" And I say, "This is what I am doing. I am doing this now." And I could start with that or with the summer writers' conference two weeks later where I am on the staff with D who hears, that week, the results of the hearing and leaves early and where I hear from the new chair of the English department that the other teachers of creative writing, W, K, and H, now are angry at me. But I didn't start in any of these places. I started at the meeting that happens later that summer where I sit for five hours and listen to W, K, and H angrily tell their stories about me and, afterwards, in an office very much like mine, I weep for two hours more, not only because what they have said about me has hurt but because I know that the things they have said have been designed to hurt, and I realize that I need help. I need a way to stop telling the story of these stories. The meetings in meetings. I need, I understand, a story that would no longer nest in a nest of other stories.
An Amplification
Crying is funny. I am holding on to the arms of the office chair I am in, howling. Every time I come up for air, I am conscious of the secretaries outside this office at their desks in the outer office. Surely they can hear these noises, these sounds I am making. The gagging. The sputtering. The hiccups of breath. The empty whoops. The plosive sighs. They must hear this on the other side of the glass wall and hollow-cored door. Filtered I could sound like a Stooge whose own comic sound effects accompanies his beating. Two friends are holding me down, it seems, in the chair. I let them touch me. I want them to touch me. And they are making sounds too, a kind of burbling murmur that comforts me when I hear it and initiates a whole new burst of wailing in me, hearing it, out of gratitude. I have no words but this slurry of speech. I am way beyond words in this place. I am letting go. Perhaps that is why I am clinging so hard to the arms of this office chair, why my friends have collapsed across my knees, wrapped their arms around my shoulders. It is as if I would levitate on all the unsounded breath I am gulping. I believe I am communicating that, for a while here in this office, I don't want to talk anymore. I have come here after five hours in a room in the philosophy department. At this moment, I am remembering just one sliver of what went on. I remember H instructing me on my attitude, my manner, the way I choose my words. He says I have, on occasion, been sarcastic, then defines the word for me, its roots, as the ripping of flesh. When I was a student, a teacher told me that humans use language to convey only one message. "Do you like me? Do you like me? Like me!" I remember laughing when I heard this for the first time, a kind of witty distillation of experience teachers deliver in a classroom and that passes and is passed along as a truth.