Final Review

"I can't believe it. They think I'm losing it."

My office mate, Bill, looked haggard. Of course, at the end of any given semester, we all do. But there was something haunted and a bit mad about his demeanor. He looked like he had just been told something was malignant.

"Come on, Bill," I said, "you're always like this at the end of a semester. You have shiny fantasies about brilliant students and scintillating conversations about Faust or Don Quixote when you've just posted the syllabus. By the time midterms roll around, you're homicidal. Just before finals, you're suicidal. It's an ancient, sacred tradition. Calm down."

Bill looked at me like I had just dropped a kitten into a bucket of bleach.

"Don't patronize me, Steve. It's not standard issue, existential angst or crumbling idealism. Do you remember when we were gabbing about Frankenstein about a month ago? You were playing defense for the Daemon, insisting that Victor is the real monster--not an original reading, but a plausible one--and I was on about Victor's Schopenhauerian turn, his woeful rambling about the curse of consciousness and what not?"

It was encouraging to see Bill's eyes shimmer a little with literary zeal. The trick to snapping him out of a bad spell of self-loathing was usually simple: get him talking about a poem or a play or a short story. He's got a weird, Heideggerian reading of Carver's "Cathedral" that he will yammer on about for days. I was planning to coax him in that direction, but he was citing evidence, preparing some kind of argument--or a diagnosis.

"Sure," I said, "I think we hit Shelley on the way to Philip K. Dick or Ian MacEwan. I had a 'dead mole in my mouth' hangover that day."

"Right. Anyway, I gave a lecture just after our conversation. It was about Kafka's Metamorphosis. I was panting with excitement about free indirect discourse and the transparent mind of Gregor Samsa, which allows the reader to empathize and identify with his objectification and dehumanization, while his family carries on treating him like a giant insect and nothing more."

"Your usual schtick," I said. "Were they napping? Fucking around with their devices? Reading canned responses to your febrile queries written by ChatGPT4 from the screens of their laptops and pretending they were original? Why so glum, especially a month later?"

Bill got up from his desk and crossed the room to refresh his beloved coffee mug. He came over and sat in what we both call the "Department Chair," an antique on rollers that we ask students to use when they come to complain or insult us during office hours. At close range, I noticed that his nose hair was oddly lush. Marking marathons can bruise one's hygiene.

"Well, I was so caught up in the lecture, and so recently frothed by our jousting about The Modern Prometheus, that I referred to Gregor as Victor a couple of times. I heard myself do it the second time, apologized to all of them and told them about our chat infecting my lecture, but I could tell: they thought I was losing it."

He took a pull of coffee and studied a stain on his shirt. The hair in his left nostril undulated, like a sea anemone in a moonlit tidepool. I have to find my trimmer thingy, stat.

"So what? We all do that now and then. Our heads are crowded with authors and characters, like the grocery store just before a long weekend. Last week, I identified Petrarch as Petronius for a solid forty minutes. One of the Visigoths left a 'Professor Petronius' post-it on my door just yesterday.

They're merciless, but they have short attention spans and their memories have been corrupted by standardized testing. If it's not on the exam, they forget it quickly. Just ride it out." We had started calling the students Visigoths when admission standards were pulverized to jack enrolment. The barbarians were through the gates.

"I've been trying," Bill said, "but this afternoon, during the final review, I gave them a list of ten essay questions, as I always do. I started the discussion with question two, and this semi-literate yahoo in the second row shouted, 'you forgot question one!' and the room was suddenly as taut and tremulous as a cello string. They really think I'm going mad before their dull, listless eyes. I started with 2 just because it was more interesting than 1. I was ready to circle back. I'm sure they think it was a mistake, though. Another fizzled synapse."

I looked Bill over. He was thin, disheveled, exhausted. Nothing odd there. I've mentioned the nose hair crisis. That's easily dealt with. His grades had all gone in on time last term; had they not, I would have found his severed head on his desk. Our department brooks no sloth. I was sure he was alright; just a bit extra Bill, maybe.

"I'm sure you're imagining things. They screw things up. They know we do, too. Unclench." I tapped the toe of his shoe with the toe of mine. It was a familiar, casual sign of solidarity, like one cat headbutting another.

Bill got up and went back to his desk to gather his stuff. It was a simple operation now that everything was online. The days when we would haul piles of essays home to be graded are gone. So are most, real essays. I often wonder if I should just give the essay prompts to an LLM directly and save the students the obligation to play surly middleman, or middleperson, or middlebeing. Whatever.

Bill put on his bicycle helmet. It is not, and has never been, a good look for Bill. I haven't the heart to break it to him. The nose hair waved a lazy goodbye.

"You're probably right. I'm tired and sick of discovering that 'human connection' is the primary theme of every work I have taught this term, according to the Visigoths. I'll be fine after the break."

I wouldn't have to get him going about Carver after all. A good sign.

"See you tomorrow, Bill," I said.

"Goodnight, Victor," said Bill.