He walks over to a credenza (cherry, midcentury modern—these things matter) on the far side of the room and flips through a set of hanging file folders. They’re color-coded and labeled with obvious, one-word titles: GRADES, COMMITTEES, PAUL. He’s not looking for anything in particular so much as he’s appreciating the organizational system that he’s created. The clean, sharp edges of papers clipped together. The absence of Post-it notes and frantically written to-do lists. Meandering through the department’s halls, he’ll often find himself becoming mildly disgusted as he pays visits to his messier colleagues. The towering stacks of loose-leaf paper, threatening to topple over if anyone should dare open a window. Books left open on desks, their pages gaping like the ribs of some pathetic dismembered corpse. On two separate occasions, a sleeping bag, stuffed behind a plant with brown and brittle leaves. It’s like they’re trying to patch together nests, Mark thinks. A shitty tangle of twigs and trash. He’d seen something similar last February, on the fire escape outside the bedroom he shares with Paul. A pair of starlings had built it over the course of four industrious days. On the fifth day, Mark knocked it down. The squawking had turned unbearable.
Light spills onto the grass in front of College Hall, where two girls and a shirtless boy lounge with their arms propped up on the feet of a Benjamin Franklin statue. Typically, on a day like today, the lawn would be rammed with undergrads, and Mark would be driven to near paralysis over the options of chests to admire, of abdominal muscles to count. But it’s July. The middle of summer term. The only students on campus are slackers with beer guts who failed a class last fall, or pasty strivers who’ve never set foot in a gym. Maybe the rare refugee who can’t bear the thought of four months back in the suburbs. Point being: the options are not what they should be.
A knock startles him.
“Professor Gordon?”
Amanda Lyons doesn’t wait for Mark to open the door—she knocks and comes right in. They all do.
Mark checks his watch: eleven thirty.
“You said you were available to meet now?”
She holds her iPhone up—evidence to justify her presence—and Mark sees the e-mail that he sent twenty minutes ago.
“Of course.” He smiles and motions to a chair on the other side of his desk. “Take a seat.”
Amanda blushes and lets her bag drop to the floor. She’s dressed like she’s ready for an afternoon date: frayed jean shorts that accentuate her tan legs, a spaghetti-strap tank top, a cream-colored cardigan that she’s currently wriggling out of. Her face is caked with makeup. Many of his female students doll themselves up in similar fashion when they come to see him, and Mark appreciates the effort, the subtle acknowledgment that they’re willing to pursue other arrangements to help their GPAs. It’s misguided, of course, but Mark encourages it nonetheless. He likes the flaming chili pepper that appears next to his name whenever he checks ratemyprofessor.com.
“Right, then,” Mark says. He leans back in his chair and presses the tips of his fingers together pedagogically. “What can I do you for?”
“I … I…” Amanda stutters and grins, realizing what Mark has just said. Then, composing herself, she mutters: “I don’t think I’m doing this paper right. The one on altruism and fairness.” She leans over to fish the draft out of her backpack. Brown hair falls in her face.
“Well, let’s take a look.” He stands, crosses to her side of the desk, and sits on its corner. He picks up a shard of reindeer antler that he found during his last trip to Lapland and strokes a smooth patch of bone. He says, “And remember, all I’m looking for here are your thoughts. Your response to the Knox and Wright texts. How are they speaking to each other? How are they complicating each other? There’s no ‘right’ way to do this, per se.”
He smiles again, pleased this time with the vagueness of academia. Stake-free crises couched in a lovely, untranslatable jargon.
“Right, no,” Amanda says. She hands him the draft. A pink staple binds the pages together. “I know all that. I guess I’m worried that my ideas aren’t, like, flowing? Like they aren’t making sense or something?”
Mark scans the pages, his eyes stumbling past the reductive, empty sentences that he’s come to expect from eighteen-year-old minds: society shapes our identities; every individual is unique. Couched between these half-assed attempts at thinking are a series of vulgar summaries of the readings Mark assigned last week.
Amanda scrolls through her phone. She double-taps a picture. She sends a text.
“You’re doing good work,” Mark says, and sits in the chair directly next to her.
Amanda looks up. “I am?”
“Sure you are.” He flips to the second page. “I guess what I’m looking for now is more of your thinking, though. Here, for instance. You say that everyone’s good on the inside, and that’s why we’re altruistic.”
“Right?” She tucks her hair behind her ear, and tilts her head, showing Mark her neck.
“How true is that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for starters, what’s the ‘inside’?”
“Huh?”
“Are you talking about the soul?”
“I … yeah. I guess that’s what I mean.”
Amanda’s phone buzzes in her purse.
“So you’re presupposing that a soul exists.”
“You don’t think that it does?”
Mark smiles. “What I think doesn’t matter.” He folds his arms across his chest. “When was the last time you did something nice for someone?”
She says, “Last week, I guess?”
Mark leans forward. “What’d you do?”
“Uh, my friend Lindsay was having this massive bed delivered to our sorority house, but she’s doing some internship at a blog in New York this summer so she wasn’t there to sign for it.”
Mark crosses his legs. “So you were there to sign for her.”
“Yeah,” Amanda says.
“That was nice of you.”
She adds, “It was on a Friday afternoon. They gave me, like, a four-hour window, and they were still an hour late.”
Mark says, “You gotta hate that.”
“I was happy to help, I guess.” Amanda shrugs.
“But that’s an interesting point,” Mark says. “Were you happy to help? Or I guess the more vital question is: Why did you help?”
“Because it was the good thing to do?” she ventures. “Because she’d probably do it for me?”
“Tell me a little bit about Lindsay.”
“She’s the president of my sorority. Her dad’s some big producer in L.A. She’s from Malibu. Um…”
“Sounds like she’s a good person to know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want her to like you?” Mark reaches again for the reindeer antler. “Do you think she likes you more for wasting four hours of your Friday to wait for her bed so she could cavort around New York City? Is that, maybe, why you agreed to do it?” Amanda shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “As opposed to, say, out of some theoretical, intrinsic, altruistic ‘goodness’?” He turns the antler over in his hand. He remembers where he found it: in a bed of arctic cotton weed a mile east of Abisko. “Which begs the more fundamental question of when we think we’re being good, are we really just desperately yearning to be liked?”
“Uh.” Amanda looks down. Her cheeks glow red.
Mark’s computer chimes: a new e-mail has arrived.
“Anyway.” He stands, smiles, and shepherds Amanda toward the door. “Something to think about as you revise, at the very least.”
The trio that was lounging in Franklin’s shadow has scattered. Across the lawn Van Pelt Library is ablaze in midmorning glow; the tall windows that line its first floor are slabs of blinding white. Mark slides in front of the computer and clicks on the new message.
From: Alcott Cotwald <[email protected]>
To: Mark Gordon <[email protected]>
Date: June 20
Subject: Re: Incoming