About halfway down the aisle she found a television monitor displaying an image of Dex. She sank deeply into a seat and watched him and his comrades. Dex was reading a paper desultorily and she knew it was hers. He flipped aimlessly through it, as though searching for a particular word or phrase, then shook his head helplessly and dropped it back on the stack. Finally the last of them excavated his paper and they were collectively gone, leaving behind several dozen essays no one had bothered to pick up.
Associate Professor Archibald Embers, Learning Facilitator of Freshman English G Group, was regarding a young woman on his sofa and endeavoring to keep his pipe lit. This required a lot of upside-down work with his butane lighter and he thought the burn on his thumb might be second-degree. This particular woman was definitely confrontational, though, and it was no time to show pain. He held the pipe cautiously and reached out with the other hand to drape his thumb casually over the rim of a potted plant, thrusting the roasted region deeply into the cool humus. I am Antaeus, he thought, and yet I am Prometheus, singed by my own flame. They were sitting in the conversation pit he had installed so as to avoid talking to students across his desk like some kind of authoritarian. Or was it totalitarian? He could never remember the distinction.
This woman was clearly high voltage, Type A, low-alpha and left-hemisphere, with very weird resonances. Seeing her through to the end of her crisis would be painful. She had ripped off a lot of papers from the auditorium and had brought them into his space to fine-tooth comb them. She had a problem with her grade, a B.
"Now," she continued, whipping over another page, "let's look at page two of this one, which is about an advertisement for Glans Essence Cologne. 'The point of this is about these foxes. He has a bunch. On him. He a secret agent, like Bond James Bond or something. Or some other person with lots of foxes. Why he has foxes? Is Glans Essence Cologne. They hope you figuring that out, will buy some of it. Which is what they are selling.' Now, next to that in the margin you wrote, 'excellent analysis of the working of the ad.' Then at the end you wrote, 'Your understanding of how the System brainwashes us is why I gave you an A on this paper.' Now really, if you want to give him an A for that it's up to you, but you can you then give me a B? Mine was three times as long, I had an introduction, conclusion, an outline, no grammatical errors, no misspelled words– what do you expect?"
"This is a very good question," said Embers. He took a long draw on his pipe. "What is a grade? That is the question." He chuckled, but she apparently didn't get it. "Some teachers grade on curves. You have to be a math major to understand your grade! But forget those fake excuses. A grade is actually a form of poetry. It is a subjective reaction to a learner's work, distilled and reduced down to its purest essence– not a sonnet, not a haiku, but a single letter. That's remarkable, isn't it?"
"Look, that's just groovy. But you have to grade in such a way that I'm shown to be a better writer than he is. Otherwise it's unfair and unrealistic."
Embers recrossed his legs and spent a while sucking his pipe back into a blaze. His learner picked up a paper and fanned smoke away from her face. "Mind if I smoke?" he said.
"Your office," she said in a strangled voice.
Fine, if she didn't want to assert herself. He finally decided on the best approach. "You aren't necessarily a better Writer. You called some of them functional illiterates. Well those illiterates, as you called them, happen to have very expressive prose voices. Remember that in each person's own dialect he or she is perfectly literate. So in the sense of having escaped orthodoxy to be truly creative, they are highly advanced wordsmiths, while you are still struggling to break free of grammatical rules systems. They express themselves to me and I react with little one-letter poems of my own– the essence of grading! Poetry! And being a poet I'm particularly well suited for it. Your idea of tearing down these proto-artists because they aren't just like you smacks of a kind of absolutism which is very disturbing in a temple of academic freedom."
They sat there silent for a while.
"You really said that, didn't you?" she finally asked.
"I did."
"Huh. So we're just floating around without any standards at all."
"You could put it that way. You should interact with the department chairman on this. Look, there is no absolute reality, right? We can't force everyone to express themselves through the same absolute rules."
When the young woman left she seemed curiously drained and quiet. Indeed, absorbing new world-views could be a sobering experience. Embers found a blister on his thumb, and was inspired to write a haiku.
There came the sound of a massive ring of keys being slapped against the outside of Casimir Radon's door. He looked up from the papers on his desk, and in his lap Spike the illicit kitten followed suit, scrambling to red-alert status and scything sixteen claws into his thigh. Before Casimir had opened his mouth to say "Who is it" or Spike could spring forward to engage the foe, the door was unlocked and thrown open. A short, heavy man with a disconcerting resemblance to Leonid Brezhnev stepped into the room.
"Stermnator," he mumbled, rolling the r's on his tongue like Black Sea caviar. Casimir covered Spike with his hand, hoping to prevent detection, and the kitten grasped a finger between its forepaws and began to rasp with its tongue.
Behind the man was a small wiry old guy with chloracne, who bore metal canister with a pump on top and a tube leading to a nozzle in his hand. Before Casimir could even grunt in response, this man had stepped crisply into the room and begun to apply a heavy mist to the baseboards. The B-man glowered darkly at Casimir, who sat in silence and watched as the exterminator walked around the room, nozzle to wall, spraying everything near the baseboards, including shoes, Spike's food and water dishes, a typewriter, two unmatched socks, a book and a calculator charger. Both the strangers looked around the inside of his nearly barren room with faint expressions of incomprehension or disdain.
By the time Casimir got around to saying, "That's okay, I haven't seen any bugs in here since I moved in," the sprayer was bearing down on him inexorably. Casimir pushed the kitten up against his stomach, grasped the hem of his extra-long seven-year-old Wall Drug T-shirt, and pulled it up to form a little sling for the struggling creature, crossing his arms over the resulting bulge in an effort to hold and conceal. At the same time he stood and scampered out of the path of the exterminator, who bumped into him and knocked him off balance onto the bed, arms still crossed. He bounced back up, weaved past the exterminator, and stood with his back to the door, staring nonchalantly out the window at the view of E Tower outside. Behind him, the exterminator paused near the exit to soak the straps of an empty duffel bag. As Casimir watched the reflection of the two men closing the door he was conscious of a revolting chemical odor. Immediately he whirled and tossed Spike onto the bed, then took his food and water dishes out to wash them in the bathroom.
Casimir had seen his first illicit kitten on the floor above his, when he had forgotten to push his elevator button. He got off on the floor above to take the stairs down one flight, and saw some students playing with the animal in the hallway. After some careful inquiries he made contact with a kitten pusher over the phone. Two weeks later Casimir, his directions memorized, went to the Library at 4:15 in the morning. He proceeded to the third floor and pulled down the January– March 1954 volume of the Soviet Asphalt Journal and placed two twenty-dollar bills inside the cover. He then went to the serials desk, where he was waited on by a small, dapper librarian in his forties.