BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
by Nathan Phillips (2005)

******

Luis was furious. In twenty-five years teaching creative writing, not once could he recall a group so majestically untalented.

Kristi Nichols' story was about a woman who killed her psychotic husband with bugspray, enlisting the aid of an attractive exterminator who for some reason was chained in the basement. A boy named Eric handed in a sci-fi story whose plot was revealed entirely through readouts on computer screens in an oppressive futuristic society. Aki, an exchange student, contributed a messy piece of incomprehensible symbolism ("My eyes were immediately caught by the strange realization that this otherwise vacant house was littered with floor-to-ceiling stacks of 101-piece jigsaw puzzles").

And then there was Curtis Rosen, the sleaziest, cockiest little fool the professor had ever known. Curtis' stories were invariably all about his wild success at everything he ever attempted, most often his scoring with numerous buxom young girls. "Craig slid under the sheets. 'Another big day coming up, Ingrid.' She smiled. 'But first...' -- here she threw her legs around him -- 'a very big night.'"

Luis burst out of his office and into the classroom; all of the desks shook a bit when the door slammed, and all heads turned to face him. His assistant, Madeline, cut herself off midsentence to look up at him, her eyes wavering disapprovingly above her glasses.

"Rosen!" he boomed.

"Yes sir?" the young man replied, beaming.

"You have turned in five stories, one play, and two narrative poems and I can't tell any of them apart. They all have that stupid line about the 'big night' in them. Please try to use a little imagination, or something, or you are going to fail my class. Do you understand?"

"Aren't we always told to write what we know?"

"Do you know about anything besides nookie, Mr. Rosen?" The class exploded into laughter. Madeline smiled.

Curtis just stared back at the professor in an indescribable fashion that ended the commotion and made everyone feel rather tense. Not a word was spoken, it was just this look.

Luis attempted to appear undaunted. "You are bringing me a new story on Monday and you will write what you don't know or you're gone, permanently. Now go. You're dismissed. The rest of you, continue your discussion."

The boy stormed out. Luis was satisfied with the moment.

***

Word quickly spread about the miniature battle, along with rumors of impending repercussions. Some people were saying Curtis (who was popular with the student body) had some sort of blackmail on Luis (who was not) -- that he was a coke addict or that he'd been seeing a hooker. Others theorized that Luis' influence could get Rosen expelled.

The chatter had taken a toll on Madeline, who gazed at Luis grimly as she walked into their office late that afternoon. After an unnerving pause, she seized the moment. "You should apologize to the boy," she said.

He paused to weigh her suggestion. But finally: "Why?"

"I know you were trying to be encouraging, but people talk. It would be better if you'd just keep his performance between the two of you and concede on this."

Luis, insulted by the idea that he was trying to be encouraging, turned his chair away and leaned back in it as far as it would go, which was extremely far because he'd broken ("tweaked") it for this very purpose. "I don't see what the big deal is. What can he do?"

"Well..." She was visibly frustrated. "He can make you look bad. He already has. People are thinking that you're attacking him for no reason. I mean, how many people who take writing classes are actually any good at it?"

"So I should grade on technical proficiency and not content? That's insane. It's like the stupid cartoon with the little girl and the coat hanger."

"No, it's not like that." She sighed. "All I'm saying is, don't humiliate him any more. He could be dangerous to you."

"Does he keep guns in his dorm or something?"

Madeline rolled her eyes and kicked her chair back against the wall; it left a slight black mark. "I give up," she said, walking out and making sure to slam the door. She tried too hard and it popped back open.

Luis rolled his chair to the doorway and shouted out to her. "I'm not going to concede anything!" He paused, searching for the right words. "Because I'm right, dammit!" He then went back to grading the graphic paper from Gina Cronick about the gang-rape of "a girl I knew."

***

Still bitter about the incident and jittery from all the coffee he'd consumed, Luis spent the afternoon driving around town aimlessly. He wanted to go home but something stopped him.

He was hungry and felt a craving for, of all things, ham. He had become a vegetarian ten years before and had not even thought about eating meat for at least seven. Unable to eradicate the desire, he pulled into the closest supermarket, one he'd never even noticed before because it was turned the wrong way, facing the nearby mall instead of the main road.

It was dark inside, the store poorly lit by track lighting seemingly miles above Luis' head. He walked directly to the meat department, purchased a gigantic ham from the friendly clerk, and began to walk away. In the corner of his eye he noticed, to his silent chagrin, Curtis Rosen in an employee uniform, but he did not stop and made sure to avoid eye contact.

Back outside, Luis felt no need to go home just yet. He'd purchased the Sunbird convertible six months before and had received no opportunity to really enjoy it. On this gorgeous day he decided he'd drive home with the top down.

It felt good to be on the road like this. Luis had always been so careful driving around, but now he wondered why, edging above 90mph. Briefly he questioned why he was doing this and told himself it was foolish, then he laughed and accelerated some more.

The curves were beginning to approach at astronomical speeds, the scenery a blur; Luis turned the radio on top volume. It was NPR, "All Things Considered." He adjusted the bass, taking his eyes away from the winding road for some time and enjoying every second, swerving into the other lane and onto the grass. He laughed some more. 110mph.

Ignoring the approach of a blaring siren, Luis whistled as he let the car reach the top of its speedometer, coming inches away from hitting cars traveling in the other direction. The police car turned into two, three police cars before dropping out of sight.

After roughly ten more minutes, by which time the show had ended and NPR was playing some traditional opera, Luis noticed that his gas tank was barely an eighth full. Not one to take chances, he decided to pull into the next service station he saw. There was a Citgo off Exit 560, and it appeared that they sold Icees, so Luis cheerfully pulled in.

After he pumped the gas, he relished the beauty of the afternoon, staring up into the cloudless sky, grinning, when he began to hear the booming voice.

"We've got you surrounded. Put your hands in the air."

Assuming he wasn't the target of the command, Luis hurried into the store, paid for his gas and bought a cherry Icee only to be cornered by a policeman the instant he walked out the door.

"Hi, officer!" he said.

"Put your hands in the air, please."

"Um, will you hold my --"

"PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR, PLEASE."

In a gesture of compliance, the Icee fell to the ground. Luis was now afflicted with what felt like a sudden awakening. He looked around and, as he recognized the situation, hoped it was all a dream.

"Listen, officer, I... I don't know what came over me. I just got out of school and --"

"School?"

"Yeah, I'm Luis Hernandez, I teach over at the university and --"

"Creative writing?"

"Uh, yeah, and military history once in a while."

The officer smiled and held out his palm. "Class of '88."

The two men shook hands, Luis now assuming it was safe to put his hands down. "Is that so?" he choked.

"Yeah! I wrote that story about the ducks getting revenge on the hunter."

Luis nodded. That story had been handed in by at least forty students. "Oh, right, I remember that one well. You -- you had quite a gift."

"I suppose you're right, but..." -- the officer pointed at his badge -- "...I had a calling. After my son died, you know, I just..." He trailed off.

Luis couldn't fathom why and how he'd gotten into this. "I'm in a lot of trouble, aren't I?"

"Listen, buddy, why were you speeding down the highway running from cops? You got something to hide?"

"No, I... don't really know why. I guess I just wanted to go fast."

The officer laughed with jolly abandon, slapping Luis on the back. "Still full of beans, huh? Well, I'll let you off with a ticket, I s'pose."

He accepted the minor punishment readily. "Thank you very much, officer."

"Stay out of trouble now." The policeman laughed again. "Never thought I'd be tellin' you that."

"Ha ha... yeah." Feeling nauseous, Luis sank into the front seat and began to drive home, this time staying at twenty miles below the speed limit. Along the way he was passed by dozens of vehicles, including the cop who'd given him the ticket.

***

Upon arriving at home, Luis found his inexplicable need for flesh had subsided. Cursing himself for wasted time and money and for giving in to impulse without hesitation, he threw it in the fridge, assuming he'd feed it to the dog at some point. His wife appeared perplexed by this, but soon lost interest and looked back to the pile of National Geographics and Lifes sitting out before her.

"You've been late coming home a lot lately. Is something the matter?" She sounded bored, as if she just felt obligated to ask.

Luis studied her from behind, her back slumped over. It had been ten years since her retirement from field photography, mostly in the Middle East. He'd grown tired of long sleepless nights not knowing if she was dead or alive. He knew it had not been her life's ambition to have her conveniences bought and paid for by his beloved twenty year-old textbook A Quandary of Prose. Their son Thomas had now grown up and moved out, and now more than ever Marcia was living the quiet life she never wanted.

"I got a speeding ticket today."

Marcia frowned. "Oh?"

"Yeah, I... don't really know what I was thinking, I was going over 90 down the highway." He understated the number because he didn't want to be scolded.

"They pulled you over for going 90? Weird. Sometimes I go out just to get on the highway and go 95."

"Yeah... it was a former student. Probably revenge, you know."

She laughed politely. All was back to normal, then she looked back up at him, eyes narrowed. "You never speed."

"Yeah, I know."

"You tell me speeding is stupid."

"Uh-huh."

"When I do it, it's like the end of the world, like when I change lanes and you always go ballistic over it."

"I know, I know."

She seemed to find this situation intriguing. "It's very unlike you."

"Yeah, it is, I don't really know why I did it."

"Well," she sighed, playfully raising her glass of seltzer water, "here's to youth." Luis watched her for a moment before turning and walking to his study to seek distractions for the evening.

***

On Monday, Luis had to scream at Madeline upon discovering that she had screened a George Pal movie for the students instead of giving them an assignment. He was bothered by Madeline because she spoke to him like an aloof senior citizen, and he believed it was a ploy to control him. His goal for the last two years had been to make her cry, and so far she still acted like a concerned daughter; whenever he would lay in with a personal attack, she wouldn't tear up or even glare coldly but just cock her head and say "You need some rest" or "I understand how you feel" or, today, "You need help."

"No, you need help. I will not stand for this. Either you start following my lesson plans or you start looking for another job." Luis thought of this stern but fair rebuttal eight minutes after Madeline left the room. He knew what she'd say anyway -- that it wasn't her fault he never set foot in the classroom except to yell at...

Curtis. The scumbag hadn't even shown up to class, much less turned in the requested story. Luis was pleased and enjoyed the assumption that the kid would now have to accept failure.

***

As soon as he walked into the house that afternoon, Luis was surprised to see his wife approaching him seductively.

"We've got something to talk about, sweetie," she said coolly.

Luis felt playful and was receptive to her manner. "Oh, we do, huh?"

"Yes. Do you know what it is?"

He laughed softly. "No... no, I'm afraid I don't."

"Look in the fridge and find out."

Unable to imagine what kinky artifact he might discover, Luis threw the refrigerator open only to be overpowered by a rather stunning smell.

"That ham you bought?" she went on. "It was out of date."

"They sold me an expired ham?"

"Yes, quite expired in fact. It was past the sell-by date over a week ago."

"Wow."

"Get rid of it, Luis. Now."

"Okay, okay. Jesus, you can't even throw something in the garbage out there?"

"I can't go near the damn thing without wanting to throw up. You're the one who bought it."

Luis picked up the ham and studied it, holding it as far from his face as possible. Some sort of gunk was starting to excrete from the edges of the wrapping.

"All right. I'm going to go out to the homeless shelter to volunteer with Thomas. Don't forget to feed Hamilton."

Luis didn't respond. He thought briefly of taking the obvious path and feeding the questionable ham to Marcia's beloved dog, but realized that this went too far even by his standards. He instead tossed it into the waste bin and trudged back into the house to watch TV.

***

Time seemed to be constantly slowing down for Luis. As the weeks went by, it felt more and more like he was never awake, as if every action and event in his life was just imagined. When the expletives came flying out of his mouth at his assistant, he found himself unable to remember within an hour if the altercation had even taken place. He now went 95 on the highway on a daily basis and changed lanes recklessly. He sometimes went to Hardee's and gorged himself, then spent the afternoon throwing up.

Something was preventing him from stepping into the classroom even as much as he used to. He no longer put much thought into grading papers. He gave everyone at least a B+. If it looked like some tiny effort had been required, he made it an A-.

Madeline constantly made suggestions about lesson plans, all of which were ignored. The class was now watching movies every day. Afterward, thin analyses of the films were handed in. Eventually these became simple fact-checking worksheets. It was so easy even Curtis was showing up again; his papers were, however, marked immediately with F's, until after a while Luis began to feel so sedated that he ceased even this minor discipline. He had other things on his mind.

Madeline. Sweet, kind, shapely young Madeline. He could tell her anything. Maybe he should start taking advantage of her obvious -- if somewhat motherly -- respect for him.

This was why one day, while she bent over to retrieve a pencil she dropped, Luis touched her ass and began stroking her. She leapt up and spun around and looked too stunned to say anything.

Luis grinned. "Yeah." That was all he could think of to say. So he said it again. "Yeah."

The two of them had a lengthy silent showdown that Luis hoped and even assumed was some kind of intellectual foreplay until tears began to form on his assistant's face. If she'd just been a tad pissed, he could live with it, but no, this was real anger, the kind people feel when they discover something they feel they should have known a long time ago.

She didn't slap him, just shoved him lightly, seemingly too overcome with vague emotions to do much else, then turned around and stumbled out the door.

Finally, he had upset her. She'll be back, he thought.

***

But she never did come back. Now, that feeling of determination suddenly returned: Starting next week, Luis would be back in his element, forming young minds in the classroom.

After a lengthy series of procrastinations, he sat down on Sunday evening to compose some plans for the week to follow. He was surprised to find that he had left his office door unlocked and that evidently someone had been inside over the weekend; the place was mildly disheveled, with several things on the shelves turned the wrong way. The immediate assumption was that Madeline had come to gather up some of her possessions.

Then Luis noticed an odd-colored stack of papers upon his desk. Stepping closer he noted a familiar, dreaded eyesore: the green typeface of Curtis Rosen's written work. Rosen's printer had needed a new color cartridge for a number of years but he'd never bothered to make the investment, and consequently all of his assignments were handed in with green text. At last Curtis had finished the promised short story, the one existing separately from his own trivial existence. Luis sighed, plopped down in the broken chair, and set the story aside.

He then sat with his ledger open, pen in hand, for over half an hour, attempting to fathom how to deal with complete cluelessness about what to assign, what to teach, what points to bring up, who to target, how to pad out the class. The worrying became such an ordeal that Luis finally stood up and made coffee, which took up a good ten minutes, then returned to the desk and decided to waste even more time by reading Curtis' story.

"The day had been long for Edward Brimley; he took the vodka out of his bottom drawer and gulped a bunch of it down with that contemplative look on his face. It didn't especially matter to him when he escaped the office. Things just weren't the same anymore. He'd rather be at work than at home... how sad, he thought."

Luis scowled. A bit trite, but a major improvement. He leaned back in the chair and continued, skimming a few paragraphs of excessive description.

"Brimley needed more liquor. Reaching around to the back of the drawer, the part he couldn't see, he was surprised to feel the texture of a dusty, long-forgotten object. It was his photo album. He wept as he thumbed through it. All the pictures, of people whose identities were only vaguely familiar, whose existence was just slightly confirmed by hazy memories. Edward craved the company of close friendship, to listen and to be heard, to reach out and to be reached for, perhaps by any of these individuals whose images now embodied this neglected album. All much-admired acquaintances, never confidantes, to play out their time in his life then drift away. For Edward, life was an endless series of these brief encounters, thrilling only in retrospect, their inevitable closure a prison to which he was forever banished."

It needed editing badly and it was a bit silly, but Luis was moved. The story involved the college professor Edward's loveless marriage and his longing for his assistant, the latest of his miserable imaginary flings. With the close of the story the confession of unrequited desire ended bitterly, allowing Edward's infinite cycle to revert back to its beginning like the numbing transition from December to January.

Mature and heartfelt, this material. Luis felt guilty for yelling at Curtis, yet oddly pleased -- perhaps he could learn to know and love his students. Just like it said in the story, about how Edward's passion had once been to reach every child, knowing so well that all of them had potential as great as anyone was willing to help them realize, and how that ideology had been crushed when hints of glory led to laziness, and that laziness led to increased difficulty. Maybe this was a renaissance for Luis. Maybe everything would start over. God, he needed a drink.

Into the bottom drawer crawled his prying fingers; the story had brought him close to tears and he could scarcely see into the darkness of this miniature pit. Feeling around, he didn't notice any liquor, or beer, or wine, or even a soda, just a half-full bottle of lemonade. There was something he didn't remember, though, something dusty, a book or something with professional binding. A bizarre thought ran through Luis' head, one that was inconvenient to believe and therefore to investigate. Gulping down the last of the lemonade, he closed the drawer and shoved it out of his mind, then returned to his lesson plans with renewed energy, almost but not quite forgetting to mark Curtis' paper with an A.

***

For hours before the first session on Monday morning, Luis sat in the classroom and stared at the walls. It was ironic how much the renowned professor was terrified of the prospect of teaching a course. Irony, he thought. That's a good thing to teach them. Or did they learn that in high school? This was tricky.

The bell rang, finally. He hadn't even noticed the room filling up. Everyone watched him expectantly. "Well!" he began. Time passed. "Here we are." He stared blankly at the students. "I have... some papers for us to fill out?" he said finally, searching for the next move.

The staredown continued. Finally, Curtis, showing his face in front of Luis at last, stood up, cackling. "Okay, Mr. Hernandez! That will be fine!" Luis didn't acknowledge the mockery. Instead he gathered up his graded papers and stood up. Because he couldn't remember many of the students' names but didn't want to let it on, he decided to call roll.

As the pupils answered to their names, Luis gave them their latest stories and was mildly startled to discover that attendance stood at less than half of what it should be. When he reached Curtis Rosen, he stopped and looked straight ahead, avoiding eye contact. "Curtis, I just want you to know that your story was outstanding. Thank you for sharing it with me." A small audience witnessed Curtis receiving his first "A" from Mr. Hernandez. Curtis stared wide-eyed at Luis as if he weren't a professor but an approaching tornado. "Th-thank you," he stuttered. Luis couldn't resist applauding. The rest of the room soon followed. Curtis looked around, bewildered but smiling.

"All right, people," Luis began, seating himself fast enough that the annoying creak of his chair wasn't too intrusive. "Peer editing time." A collective groan erupted in a wave from the back of the room to the front.

"Where's Madeline?" someone said.

"She's left us," Luis replied.

"Why are you teaching us all of a sudden?"

"Because I am your teacher." The class wasn't having it. They couldn't accept the change in regime. Every few minutes someone said "Madeline never made us do this" or "Madeline let us watch movies; she even let us watch talk shows sometimes." Madeline had turned Creative Writing 101 into a lackluster day-care center for young adults.

Luis insisted on peer editing anyway, but the lack of enthusiasm was contagious. There were so many protests, so many cries of "This is stupid" that he finally gave in and brought in the TV so the class could screen "Judge Judy" and everyone would get good marks for the day. In the middle of the room sat Curtis, staring off to the side, a look of -- Luis thought -- resignation across his face.

***

Already prepared to give up his profession again, Luis decided to stay at the office for a while and drink. When he was this depressed he liked the idea of finding his textbook and thumbing through it, brooding over his past glories. Unfortunately, when he was this depressed he also became drunk rapidly, and when he was this drunk he never had a chance in hell of finding a copy of his book.

Sometimes, Luis didn't mind the idea of being the eccentric, bitter, hard-drinking old teacher with a few decades worth of grudges and no friends whatsoever. It struck him as kind of romantic. He wanted to be the liquored-up cliché that sat around alone singing old Bing Crosby standards with a slur in his voice. Sadly, he was not an incoherent drunk, just a psychotic one. Instead of doing all the nifty weird things old drunks are supposed to do, Luis kicked things. He didn't throw random objects or overturn furniture, just wandered around his office kicking whatever got in his way.

Today, Curtis Rosen happened to walk in on such a binge. Undaunted by Luis' sagging countenance, he skipped in with "Professor, I'll never forget what happened earlier." No gretting or setup, he just moved right along to the sentiment. "I would really love to know more about what you thought of my story." He was quieter, more polite, more sheepish than Luis had ever seen him, but the alcohol was more commanding of his attention.

"I DON'T RECALL GRANTING ANY INTERVIEWS, CURTIS," Luis snarled. "I need to be left alone." He wandered over to his huge metal bookshelf stolen from the library, kicked it hard, bowled over in agony, then crawled to the desk to get more liquor.

Curtis whispered something -- whatever it was, it wasn't marked by the same spirit that had enlivened his entrance -- and stormed out. Good, Luis thought, still miffed at the very thought of a student walking in unannounced and badgering him.

Nevertheless, there was enough sobriety in him to feel slightly guilty, and he sat up and stumbled to the window overlooking the parking lot to explain to Curtis that he was very drunk and would speak to him later. Once he reached the corner, though, he only had enough time to see Curtis running across the lot toward the street, throwing his story in the mud. His wonderful story. Luis needed another drink.

***

Luis considered telephoning Curtis to apologize, but it was getting late. He had to rush home for a silent, awkward dinner with his wife before a silent, awkward night of sleeping with her.

In the middle of the night, he was thinking of Madeline and masturbating, the bed bouncing slightly; the creaking of the springs awoke Marcia, who sat up and watched him.

"I don't understand, Luis."

"Huh? What?" Luis was genuinely repelled to learn that she had been observing.

"I don't understand why you need to do that when there's such an able-bodied woman in the house."

Not quite sure he'd heard her correctly, Luis looked at her with deliberate suspicion. "Evidently," she said, looking inappropriately fierce, "you're too slow to follow, Professor. I think we should have a screw."

It wasn't that Luis hadn't understood, just that this was an unprecedented event. Soon enough, Marcia was quite literally on top of him. He didn't even know she was aware that there were positions other than the missionary, although he quickly concluded that she'd learned the truth from National Geographic. She bent down to meet him face to face and smiled wickedly in a manner new to him. Then they kissed excitedly, like teenagers who weren't supposed to be doing it. Luis closed his eyes and reached for her nightgown, which he began quickly to remove.

When he saw what was underneath, his enthusiasm quickly subsided. Her torso was covered with maggots. "Oh, my god," he yelped. "What happened to you?"

"What?" she demanded. He stuck his hand into the sea of maggots to try to brush them off. "What the hell are you doing?" He couldn't find her skin. She seemed to be made entirely of the putrid, slimy beasts.

"Get them off!" he shouted. They wouldn't come off. She was no longer moving around atop him suggestively, now frozen and alarmed. "Get off! Get off of me!"

She held his head down onto the pillow. "No," she said playfully before attempting to kiss him again. The maggots had crawled up to her face and seemed to be knawing away at it. He couldn't let those things touch him. He shoved Marcia off the bed -- she screamed as if she'd been stabbed then began sobbing -- and ran to the bathroom to vomit.

When he returned, he expected the problem to have subsided and for an explanation to be in order, but the first thing he noticed when entering the room was the trail of pupas leading to the corner where his wife was curled up into a ball weeping, covered with unformed insects. He ran back out, vomited once again, and went to the couch to sleep. Marcia continued to cry until dawn.

***

The chasm was now irreparable; painful though it was, Luis no longer bothered even trying to speak with his wife and deliberately avoided looking in her direction. He decided he'd be spending a lot of time at school. Class was unmemorable the next day; Luis only walked in long enough to see that there was no sign of Curtis, and sent the others home early.

That evening, he elected to take the side entrance into the house in order to hide from Marcia. The insant he stepped into the garage he was knocked out by a most unbearable odor. The car was kept outside -- Luis had always found the whole idea of a garage wasteful -- so he only came into this area to tend to the dog and take out the trash, and apparently he hadn't done either in some time. The smell was etched into the walls to such an extent that it was nearly impossible to find the source.

After a few minutes, he reached a spot where the stench worsened, right by the dumpster. It was empty, but he bent down next to it to discover the rotten ham he'd discarded so long ago lying there as if placed in the spot deliberately. He assumed he'd missed the can when he'd tossed it and bent down to correct his error when something happened.

As if a curtain had been removed from over his face, the room began to smell absolutely delectable to him. Cautiously he leaned in to sniff the ham and, to his shock, found that its odor was enough to make him salivate. All impulses and urges he'd felt in his life were no match for the desire he had to open up this weeks-old ham and devour it.

But first he'd need it sliced. An excuse to get away from the house was welcome anyway, so off he sped.

***

In a daze, Luis found himself back within the high ceilings and disconcerting darkness of the grocery store. The sweet, inviting smell of the ham had made it difficult not to knaw on it messily in the car. He was pleased that it had now perfumed his vehicle to make his future rides all the more pleasant.

As soon as he stepped into the building, he began to attract attention. No one could fail to be intoxicated by that ham. Luis gleefully thought of how jealous they all must be of the meal he would be enjoying tonight. Before long, too hungry for loitering, he was standing in front of the meat counter with several butchers glaring at him uncomfortably.

"Please, sir," the youngest one said, sounding like he wasn't sure what either word really meant, "what can I do for you?"

"Can you please slice this ham for me? I just found it in my garage and I really want it for dinner tonight."

The older woman on the far left grabbed the morsel from Luis' arms and examined it. "Sir, this ham expired weeks ago. I don't think it would be a good idea to eat it."

"Please," Luis replied. "I'll pay you." He handed over a $100 bill.

The lady politely refused. "We'll be happy to replace this with a new item for free and slice it for --"

"This ham." Luis was cold and insistent. "I want this ham. I'll pay anything. I'll do whatever you want." The craving was nearly too much to handle. He held up the ham in a gesture that appeared almost triumphant, his arm shaking from what could only be termed deprivation of the sweet juices within this slab of pork.

The butchers looked at each other worriedly in a manner suggesting that the president had just asked them to make a foreign policy decision. "Enough already with the chattering!" Luis exclaimed. He was feeling weak and was now leaning on the display glass, his voice increasingly hoarse and desperate. "I will pay you one thousand dollars to slice this ham for me right now."

The butchers whispered among themselves. Finally, the young one spoke again. "That won't be necessary, sir. We'll slice the ham for you."

Luis closed his eyes in pure bliss. "Oh, thank you. Thank you." Dropping the ham on the table just inside, he spun around and glanced over to the left, where Curtis Rosen stood staring. He thought he noticed a wide grin on his student's face for a split second, but he didn't care enough to say anything. He slid down the glass onto the floor and didn't care about that either. He didn't care about the people passing by staring at him with disgust or the way they all looked miserably nauseated when they came anywhere close to the meat department.

Looking inside, he had a distorted view of the younger butcher struggling with the saw as it sputtered around attempting to deal with the unusual texture of this aged food. The man turned around to gag or cough once in a while. There were faint descriptions of some kind of goo spewing out of the meat. Luis licked his chops in anticipation. He was shaking all over now. The smell was everywhere; people entering the store could be heard commenting about it. Curtis was standing there covering the bottom half of his face, taking a step closer to the meat room every few minutes. The butcher let out a grunt of disapproval, defeat, fear, or masculine achievement, it was hard to tell. It would be soon.

Luis' head was resting on the floor. Things were getting dim and blurry. The voice of the female butcher came like that of an angel in some glorious, orgasmic dream. "Here's your ham, sir. I wrapped it twice for you."

He jumped up from his position with a speed he'd never before exhibited, grabbed the styrofoam tray from the lady, threw a couple of random large bills in her direction, and ran away before she could refuse them. As he made his way to the front of the store, he ripped away the plastic wrap -- the worried, disturbed looks multiplied -- and took out three slices of his wonderful amazing juicy ham and devoured them. It was the best thing he had ever tasted.

He ran to the car and thrust the keys into the door so enthusiastically it took four or five attempts for them to reach the actual slot. Within seconds of his entrance into the car half of the ham was gone; he was shoving it into his mouth in large chunks, swallowing it down while barely chewing, at times throwing his head back ecstatically. In seven minutes, all that remained was the styrofoam tray and the smell, and one last fragment of a slice.

With an intention of really savoring this last bite, Luis brought it to his mouth slowly. Delicious. As he chewed, though, something happened. Suddenly the ham tasted of corpses, of raw sewage. He wanted to spit but couldn't. Suddenly the scent in the car became sickening. He felt as if oxygen were running out while knives were plunging into his stomach.

The slow drive home was confused and sickly. Why had he eaten that ham?

***

"I can't take any more of this, Luis. What is this? What have I done? What is making you act like this?"

Luis was not fond of confrontational moods. At fist, he ignored his wife, but as her questioning pressed on he finally replied "Marcia, I've heard enough of this today" and attempted to continue watching billiards on ESPN2.

She froze, blocking the television. "You spoke to me. Wow. How amazing. Now look at me." He didn't. "I said, look at me." She grabbed his head and forced it up to meet her face.

He was horrified to see worms and mucus spewing from every orifice. He began slapping her, screaming "Go away! Go away!"

Marcia was now more than hurt, more than frustrated. She threw her arms behind the television and flung it to the ground, where it struggled with its power cord before sputtering out.

"Do you know what we are doing tonight, Luis? We are going out to dinner with our son and you are going to acknowledge me and we are going to show him how everything is just fine. Aren't we?"

Yes, they were, of course, but during the drive over it became clear how bad the night was going to be. Marcia explained that Thom had just gotten his first work published -- some pictures in Look magazine -- necessitating Luis' pretending not just that he would have an appetite and that his marriage was in wonderful condition but also that he was in the mood to be a parent.

They arrived at the restaurant, Fitzgerald's, to find Thom waiting in the lobby in jeans and a sweatshirt sporting a new earring and a snazzy pair of sunglasses. Marcia embraced him and told him it was so, so very good to see him. Luis shook his hand and said he liked the sunglasses.

After the ordering and an eternity of small talk, the food landed. "Do you want to see my pictures, Mom?" Thom asked after a few minutes of eating. He handed her a slightly worn copy of Look which she then sat on the table between the plates belonging to her and Luis and turned, as requested, to page 28. There was a full-page photograph of a funeral procession from an off-kilter angle. A few pages later there was another of Thom's photos, this one of patrons at a post office in Boston.

"Very impressive, Thom," his mother said, studying with particular interest the post office photo.

Thom turned to Luis with trepidation. "What do you think, Dad?"

"Looks good to me," Luis said after glancing over and looking away hurriedly. He couldn't look in that direction long or he would see all the slimy bugs and worms crawling all over his wife and the celery he presently knawed on would lose some of its charm.

Despite this encouragement, the boy looked wounded. "Your father is very proud of you, Thom." Marcia elbowed Luis, who retorted with an unintentionally curt "Yeah, I sure am."

There were few words said for a time, with Luis and his son watching one another intently like creatures from opposite ends of a galaxy meeting for the first time. Only Marcia, who thumbed through Look enthusiastically, appeared to be having an entertaining dinner.

"I'm working on a story, Dad," Thom said with his eyes hopeful and wide.

Luis pretended this was fascinating. "Oh. That's excellent, Luis. Everybody ought to have a shot at writing sometime." This was clearly taken as an insult. He had to regain footing quickly. "What's your story about, son?"

He brightened up a little. "Well, it takes place in the '50s, like in Alabama when the schools are getting desegregated and there's this guy, this white guy, who falls in love with this black girl and it causes this big scandal and everybody's really scared of communists, you know, and then there's this kid who's out by the bus stop every day and he's abused at home and all the kids at school beat him up."

"So what ends up happening? How does the abused kid fit into it?"

"Well, everybody has to have their refuge somewhere, you know, is what I'm saying so I'm showing it happening in a time when it was really hard to... have that."

"But what's the story, Thom? What happens to the boy and the girl?"

"Well, nothing really but they... I don't know, Dad! Jesus."

Luis had that feeling that he'd pushed something just a little bit too far and acted defensive to suggest that he didn't understand why they were offended, as this was the easiest thing to do. "What? What? I was just asking where the story was heading."

Thom looked ready to cry. "Look, I'm sorry I can't be a great writer like you, okay? I'm trying!"

"Who said anything about great writing, Curtis? You don't have to be a great writer. I mean, just because you're not --"

"Who's Curtis?"

"What?"

"You just called me Curtis."

"Oh. I don't know. Sorry, Thom. I do know your name, you realize. I don't have to be corrected every time I slip just a little --"

Everything Luis said seemed to worsen the situation so he gave up. He heard Marcia muttering "We can't have one single..." something or other, then looked down and felt himself drifting while he picked aimlessly at the food on his plate. Nobody was where they should have been.

"I was in love with another woman once," Luis blurted out, not really sure why or even who he was addressing. "It was a long time ago. Thom was about ten."

There was a moment after this when everyone froze. Once it ended, Marcia began the procedure of attempting to get up and walk out, but both Luis and Thom were in her way in the booth and her movements were stilted and kind of embarrassing, so she decided to stay put. "This is a great time to tell me this, honey."

Luis was unfazed; he was looking directly at Thom, who appeared exasperated, gazing off into space. "Her name was Melissa. I never slept with her. I never even kissed her. I only saw her an hour every day. But sometimes you know you've found the right person even if it's just a quick brush with them. I stayed because I knew it was the right thing." The expressions of the table's occupants were unchanged. "Now I know that if I'd done the wrong thing you two would have been able to enjoy yourselves a lot more. And I miss her. There's not a day goes by that I don't miss her."

"Do you want your Pepsi refilled?" A waitress had cheerfully skipped up to Thom, who looked grateful. "I think we'll be going soon, ma'am, so no, thank you."

Marcia sighed and climbed over the table to the floor while the waitress skipped over to the next party. "Well, Luis, why don't you go and do the wrong thing now and stop whining about it? And the next time we have dinner with our son, which you only let us do once a year, maybe, I hope you try not to be so pleasant."

Luis felt as if a load had been lifted, and almost whistled a bit as he stood up and threw his scarf around his neck before he realized he was still supposed to be brooding.

"Hey, Dad?" Thom called, turning around and mouthing "Go to hell" before speed-walking the rest of the way to the door.

"Great, just great," Marcia whispered, going out to comfort Thom. After paying for the food, Luis watched through the window, smiling, as his son ran for the street and tossed his Look magazine into the snow.

***

At his next second of peace in the office, Luis reveled in thoughts of Melissa. Until now, all mental strands related to her were kept under psychological lock and key; he hadn't allowed her to come back into his life for many, many years.

Melissa Rafelson was Luis' assistant for exactly seven months and twenty-six days at a time when he was not yet altogether disillusioned with his marriage. While he worked on his textbook, she taught his class and they did the daily lesson plans together each evening at 6:30. Every day was a thrill that enlivened his life because the end of it would bring a session with Melissa. She cared about her work and exposed her own pathology to him; they discussed everything. He yearned to tell her how delighted he was to work with someone so wonderful in the best Hallmark fashion, but he settled for praising her responsibility.

More and more, their planning would take place outside of the office, at a nice restauraunt or the public library or sometimes the laundromat or video arcade, since both of them loved the sound of an urban ruckus. She bought him a book about the Library of Congress -- his dream workplace -- once and wrote underneath the flap of the dust jacket "You are awesome. Happy birthday! Love, Melissa." Luis got into the habit of writing notes to himself to remember the various terrific things Mel did for him; "Melissa bought me a gumball machine and some gum!" was on a post-it he'd recently run into when rummaging through his desk drawer.

Any temptations and thrills were trampled by the duties of life. Luis never had any intention of leaving Marcia and Thomas. He never even thought of Melissa in a sexual fashion until much later. He just adored being around her, and he loved her in a fashion as alien to him as it was gratifying.

Then one day, she left. Her sister was a beautiful young lady just out of high school who'd been picked up under quaintly mysterious circumstances by some millionaire out of New York City. Emily was her name and she was a musician who tried more than once on her infrequent visits to the university to teach Luis to play her guitar. Once married into wealth, Emily cheerfully purchased massive houses in out-of-the-way places for each member of her family and many friends. Melissa had been vocal about her passionate desire to one day live in Montana and never talk to anybody again, ever. Luis found this too silly to be upsetting until it actually happened and he realized where he really fit into the equation.

On a day when her time as his associate was limited, well after they both knew of her imminent departure, he found himself thinking of a spontaneous and impulsive moment when they would kiss once and then never mention it again. So marvelous was this notion that he chewed some spearmint gum to ensure he would be in proper condition if by some ten million to one chance it came to pass, so private was it that he only allowed it into his mind in brief, grinning spurts. It never happened.

Luis walked to his liquor drawer and, finding it unfortunately to appear empty, reached around to the back of it, the part he couldn't see. There, he felt the texture of a dusty, long-forgotten object. It was his photo album. Melissa's last gift to Luis was the album into which he inserted the precious few pictures he was able to snap before she trotted off to her personal island, as well as many of his random, blurted-out memories of their short and strange time together.

Everything finally made sense. Luis suddenly found himself believing in fate and destiny and all that, seeing how it was incredibly appealing at this juncture. Destiny was looking down and telling him he should still be involved with Melissa, indeed ordering him to contact her and return to her. Destiny was basically holding the photo album in front of his face and saying "As soon as you're finished destroying your life, have a look at this and see how you should have been spending the last ten years." Luis obliged. He wept as he thumbed through the album.

Here was a lovely picture of Melissa playing Ms. Pac-Man at the arcade. Here were Luis and Melissa standing together outside his office, her smiling at the camera (which was being held by Professor Hendrick von Loon, now deceased) while Luis glared disapprovingly at a lawnmower that was leaning against the building. Here was Melissa typing, here she was grading papers. Here she was with Emmy, trying to play the tuba she'd had for band in high school while her sister upstaged her gracefully on slide guitar.

The album also had her notes to him, usually about mundane things like frequent student absences and test scores but often spiced with great jokes and drawings of go-go boots, castles, and cubes. There was one thing he hated looking at -- her brief passage on the inside cover of the album, marred by an angular kind of cursive that somehow brought to Luis' mind any number of horrible ghastly things. "Luis," it began -- and this wasn't a good beginning, because she normally called him Professor Hernandez or Mr. Hernandez or even Mr. Luis and to be called simply Luis by her felt empty -- "I hope you like the album. Have a good life! - Melissa."

Even just her signature would have been better. This message made Luis feel that he and the gift and the note were mere footnotes to Melissa in the rapidly escalating circumstances of her richly textured life. Would this girl even remember him today? Did she really care at all about him?

After a few minutes of silent moping, Luis chose to ignore these doubts. He felt all this was a sign, telling him he had to learn to do what felt right. The ham and the speeding and all that had gotten him into trouble, but he was just new at all this, and after all, other people do what they want and come out all right. He would track her down.

There are a mammoth number of Melissa Rafelsons in the United States, and most of them, in Luis' view after he looked up the name on the Internet, are in Montana. This was daunting, not least because he wasn't even sure that she was still there or that she wasn't married. He was keen on tracking down Emily in New York, but then couldn't remember the name of the tycoon she settled down with. He was enormously famous for doing all sorts of great things for the city, but the precise nature of these great things had also slipped his mind, so all the people Luis attempted to consult about this guy who was really really loaded and really really famous and really really lived in New York could offer no assistance.

This ambitious but confined quest for true love proceeded over a period of several days and nights to go nowhere. Luis was scouring the school's records for traces of evidence about former employees, he was Googling the evenings away playing with her name, and when that failed he did the same with Emily's name and eventually found himself sinking all the way to just typing "rich New Yorkers" into the search box.

All the while, he was steadfast in his refusal to clean the mess he'd made in the office that inevitably resulted from his long nights of rummaging for evidence. He rather liked walking into the knee-deep pool of old papers. It reminded him of winter in New Hampshire. However, Luis' late-night information binges in the school library and computer lab attracted bigwig attention. It was soon well known around campus that for a week or so, Luis had been "working" twenty-four hours a day, stopping each evening at the convenience store across the street for a fix of sodas, candy bars, chips, and an Icee. Luis' bosses at the university were concerned that he was working himself to death, a widespread assumption that amused the students who marveled at the fact that the professor was always on campus yet never in class.

The concerned dean Mr. McWorth made a midnight visit to Luis' office one night and could scarcely open the door because of the copious amounts of clutter blocking it. Luis had turned all the lights out and was staring at his microfilm reader, which he was using to look at old copies of the New York Times. He was startled by the intrusion and, with a Blowpop in his mouth, proceeded to chide McWorth for sneaking up on him, although thanks to the Blowpop his speech was not especially coherent, and McWorth expressed his worries about the professor's health, family, and most of all the fire hazard his office had become.

The encounter was over quickly. McWorth knew he had no authority whatsoever over Luis Hernandez, and more importantly Luis knew it too. However, even with no risk of being reprimanded for the condition of his office, more than anything Luis hated it when he could tell people thought he was strange. He was also wary of the reference to his family; he hadn't even thought about Marcia in several days but doubted she was clawing the walls in terror about his absence. Luis needed to do some thinking about his next move.

Step one: Finding Melissa. Where could Melissa be? Why even bother looking for Melissa? He'd never find her. What would he do if he did find her? What a stupid question. Court her doggedly, of course. Ditch the leech woman back home. Luis was proud of having such a concrete answer to that one, but he couldn't begin to form an idea about how best to carry out the plan, so he decided to skip step one and come back to it later.

Step two: The wife. A phone call was in order. At 12:30am? Never mind that, the bonds of family ties are whatever. Luis scurried through piles of old newspapers to the telephone. It only rang once before the She-Creature herself picked up.

"Hello?" she said sleepily.

"Hi, Marcia. This is Luis. I just wanted to let you know that I am at work, looking for the other woman I'm in love with. Just so you won't worry."

"That's great, Luis. Bye." She hung up. Good, step two was finished.

Step three: Cleaning the office. Luis was unmoved by the potential value of the papers sprawled across the ground, so they were all placed inside three huge Glad trashbags.

Down to the last corner, next to the largest of the bookshelves, Luis noticed something gray. Every single piece of paper he had just thrown into the garbage was white. Anything that deferred from the norm so noticably had to be significant somehow. Realizing this was idiotic but curious anyway, Luis bent down and picked it up: an envelope. It took a few casual glances for the reality of his find to sink in, but when it did, he almost fainted.

***

In the days that followed, Luis read the politely useless ten year-old letter probably a thousand times. Within a few hours of discovering it, he had memorized Melissa's address. The Internet had offered a useful tool for locating the telephone number, but Luis had not yet mustered up the courage to call and see if 333 Henderson Ave. in Bridgeview, Montana was still her home.

Without the tiniest ounce of contact with Marcia, he had returned to his habit of sleeping at home finally, again on the couch, always with Hamilton sitting by the closest window and barking with maddening frequency. Coaxing and bribing did nothing to diminish this animal's desire to make noise. Luis taught himself to block it out.

Lately, he had experienced vivid dreams of impossibly bland activities, and he would wake up standing in front of the refigerator making a sandwich or sitting on the couch checking out Lyndon Johnson audio tapes on C-SPAN. Tonight he had another such dream, this one about eating. He ate and ate and ate, everything in sight. Finally he found himself eating the walls, which were delicious. This was an enjoyable dream. The second he noticed it was a dream, his eyes flew open to witness pitch darkness and something furry in his hands.

Luis tasted blood. Mm, good. Groping for a lightswitch, he discovered to his more than mild surprise that he was eating Hamilton.

He thought he'd heard something.

Why was he eating the dog? Had he been sleepwalking? Hamilton could not be salvaged; very little of him remained by now, and what was left could probably fit neatly into the garbage disposal. This was a disgusting situation.

It wasn't time to get alarmed just yet. He just had to think. As it dawned on him how insanely horrifying this was, it became harder to stay rational.

Why would he be eating a dog?

Hamilton's miserable, grisly death made Luis feel worse than if he'd somehow killed a person. It was just so sad.

The corpse was soon enough destroyed not out of disrespect but because Luis feared Marcia's vengeance if she noted any evidence of what had happened. He dumped an entire dispenser of Dial soap on his hands and scrubbed until his skin cracked. There was no trace of Hamilton or his death anywhere, but Luis kept scanning the territory until at last he hopped into his car and left, with no intention of returning for the forseeable future.

His wife's reaction aside, Luis had two intense worries. One was his apparent lack of self-control, and the other was the fact that even somebody with no self-control has no reason to eat a dog.

***

Nausea set in as soon as Luis arrived back at the office. A course of action was quickly laid out: he would sit down for a long long time and revel in being dumbfounded.

He was still for an hour or two, not even reaching for a drink, before his mood improved and he spontaneously thrilled himself by spinning his chair around a couple of times. It was then that the moonlight caught something unfamiliar on his desk.

When the ominous manilla envelope came to his attention, the sweating that had just finally relented reached a new peak. He reached for the item apprehensively and peeked inside, half-expecting a bomb or poison. Instead it was just a stack of papers with Curtis Rosen's green text. He let out a sigh of relief and put it back on the desk before he turned his distressing thoughts toward what he could possibly be receiving from his most bitter student.

Luis crawled under the desk and went to sleep in an uncomfortable fetal position. The next morning, he logged onto his computer looking up everything about Bridgeview, Montana. Within a few days he could recite every fact about the town he could uncover. There weren't many. The population was only 3300. The amusement park, the main source of revenue, closed in 1990 after thirteen years of operation. Its mailbox and a big fiberglass elephant were all that remained. The mayor of Bridgeview was a Hunter Thompson-type idealist named Jacob Burman. No information about Henderson Avenue was to be garnered from any of the major search engines.

Curtis' envelope remained untouched for some time. After his initial investigation it had been placed neatly in the top drawer of the desk; Luis preferred to forget about its existence. All the same, following each of his rare excursions outside the office in the next few weeks (usually to take a shower at the gym or buy beef jerky, a new favorite), the material was always found in a new and marginally more prominent place. On top of the desk, on a shelf, in the middle of the floor, posted to a bulletin board, hanging from the ceiling, eventually taped to the door. This gave Luis the creeps; the more it happened, the less he wanted to read it, and he never was comfortable considering who the hell was moving it around and why.

Finally, the day it was sitting on the floor by his office doorway with several post-it notes marked with arrows surrounding it, he decided he'd better take a look.

Curtis' latest was also about a middle-aged man. Surprisingly, Luis found himself enjoying the story . . . at first. Sheridan Zunel was a midlife crisis-addled loser walking on thin ice after commiting great misdeeds against his wife; he was now terrified of her and believed she might kill him. The tale laid its central ideas on the table in the first page. Luis was gripped and impressed, but slowly his face fell.

Everything in the story seemed like deja vu. "Sheridan was mortified to look up and see his wife's face, covered with maggots." "Sheridan had little interest in his son's peculiar photographs." "Sheridan couldn't imagine why he had eaten the dog."

Luis was ready to pass out by the fourteenth page. He was certain he couldn't make it to the last one, numbered twenty. He skimmed down to the end, but the story wasn't finished.

He had to find out more about this boy who seemed to know a bloated number of details about his creative writing professor's life and to learn how he got his information. He had to ignore the fact that he was gravely frightened and even a bit concerned for his safety. Research was the obvious necessity. Luis had been through plenty of it lately, but now it was more than a silly whim. He couldn't tolerate the notion that someone else was so invisibly close to him. Once his privacy was invaded to this extent, he couldn't guarantee to himself that he was in control of his own life.

This time, the school records proved most illuminating.

***

Curtis Rosen was born in Wichita, Kansas, the son of a soldier who moved frequently. From Kansas he shifted to Florida, then to Colorado, then to Indiana, then to North Carolina, finally here for college. In the essay he'd submitted to the admissions department he had commented on his lack of friends growing up as a result of this confusing arrangement. His parents had a happy marriage. At age seven, Curtis spent three months in a mental-health facility, a procedure repeated twice more before he was twelve. It always happened in May, just after exam time, so that he hardly had any absences from school. The scant amount of medical information available suggested that doctors wondered if it was some sort of fakery to avoid spending the summer at home.

When Curtis was thirteen, he was honored nationally by the Young Authors Association as the top writer of his age group in the country. He failed to mention this on his application but it was noted proudly by a couple of his references. The glory was cut short by the sudden, apparently violent death of his father, Willard. Curtis' grades plummeted after the grim loss. Many of those who commented on the change said they didn't think he ever recovered, and that for the first year, he was absolutely inconsolable.

Teachers in high school remembered nothing but the aloof sarcasm and apathy of someone who truly hated student life, and yet, suddenly, in his sophomore year, the grades picked up. For the last two years, the records were glowing, the testimony from instructors generically gushing with "sure to go far" and an alarming proliferation of the phrase "dauntingly intelligent."

There were a few clippings in the file implying that the Young Authors recognition was no fluke; Curtis had earned a reputation in his preteen years as something of a maverick. He had scored extraordinarily well on his elementary and junior high school writing tests, with authorities in two cases claiming his was the best work they had ever read from a student. Luis felt his instincts as a professor returning. He put in a request to see Curtis' tests and his famous Young Authors submission. Teachers' notes in his permanent record alluded to outstanding comic books, ghost stories, and op-ed articles for the school newspaper; Luis vowed to do whatever was necessary to see all of the material, though he wasn't sure where the excavation was supposed to lead him.

Luis, increasingly off the handle in his idle moments, stripped the shelves of the office searching for bugs or cameras, poring over the room floor to ceiling. It took two days. When he finished, he started again and did it twice before something finally disrupted him. Curtis' test papers arrived in a big priority-mail box, the award-winning story to be shipped separately from another source.

The earliest paper included was a simple composition test from Curtis' first grade year, in which he rambled incoherently about some sort of imaginary friend named Arkeenan. "Sometimes Arkeenan bites me" was scrawled at the bottom in letters bigger than the rest. Subsequent papers from elementary school were deserving of the platitudes. For the test that required the writing of a short story, Curtis had managed to pull together -- in twenty-five minutes -- a masterpiece of economy about a nonexistent younger brother whose adoration of ketchup forced much creativity in an afternoon of forlorn babysitting. The dialogue was brilliant. Luis lamented the lack of material remotely this good to come out of students twice Curtis' age at the time.

For his fifth grade descriptive essay, Curtis again worked wonders with a fabrication. Despite the fact that he lived at the time in an apartment, judging from the address he listed, he claimed that his residence was a shack next to a deserted cornfield along a lonely stretch of highway and that across the street were the remnants of a glorious mansion that had been exploding with life decades ago. His dissection of the mass of wood he conjured up was so thoroughly engaging Luis was convinced that the boy could pull off a thesis about a single brick.

Junior high papers had a different focus, usually the wild adventures of Curtis himself in scenarios directly out of a Robert Louis Stevenson collection that sent him all around the globe, travelling through time, meeting all of the beautiful people and changing the world, usually accidentally and always for the better. At the end of all but one of these, it turned out to simply be the dream of "a failure." Teachers were ecstatic in their praise for these at first, but eventually worried that he was stuck in a rut.

During Curtis' seventh-grade year, everything stopped. Only a couple of the later stories were even readable -- his handwriting took a dive as well -- and it wasn't very different from the material Curtis had once shown to Luis on a regular basis: the mundane activities of a nobody, except that in these old papers the nobody didn't seem so self-absorbed or simple-minded.

Luis concluded that nothing had been resolved by the acquisition of these artifacts, even though he was fascinated by them, but he anxiously awaited the arrival of the holy grail, the big award-winning story. He occupied himself by scouring every room he entered for surveillance materials and seeking out the records of Curtis' mental breakdowns, to try and reconcile the brilliant but doomed young writer with the current stalker and spy.

Medical papers were more readily available to Luis. He sorted through the complex printouts --Curtis had not been the healthiest of children -- until he found a buried reference to Oakwood Mental Hospital. The boy's first admission came as a result of a tendency toward biting himself and blaming it on his imaginary friend, Arkeenan, who he claimed had become "real." Luis felt it was monstrously harsh to place a little boy in an institution over something this trivial and commonplace, but the records indicated that Curtis was "so insistent" about the matter that it "frightened" his parents. Luis was now prepared to chalk his student's problems up to a messy, perhaps incompetent upbringing.

The details of the other two stints at another facility -- Novak Sanitarium in South Bend, Indiana -- were less revealing. The first time, Curtis was claiming that his entire family had lost their minds because of a sudden move to a completely new state and town -- from Colorado to Indiana. His insistence that he already knew this place somehow led doctors to conclude he had been taken there before by his parents or other family members, possibly molested or abused, but the Rosens denied everything. He returned to Novak a year later, this time having disappeared for a week and returned looking downtrodden, barely able to speak. No cause for this was ever determined.

Luis was disappointed that it took just one afternoon to sort through the records. The dread returned immediately. If Curtis knew about all this slightly illicit research, serious trouble could be ahead. Luis adjusted to a new distraction, endless sessions of Minesweeper on his PC. After a few thousand of these, the mines began to appear regularly in his dreams.

One day, someone knocked. Luis had not answered the door in a couple of weeks, spooked by thoughts of what might confront him. He waited five minutes before venturing out to see an oversized envelope on the floor. To try and avoid being noticed if anyone happened to walk by, Luis crawled out on his hands and knees to get it.

This was it. The big paper. The prize-winner. Luis couldn't justify how giddy he felt. The story was different from anything else of Curtis' he'd seen. It was moody, densely layered, dark, but with his usual penchant for pacing. It was about a man who attempted to protect his young son from the entire world and -- after a lot of sophisticated, philosophical exchanges between the two of them through various incidents -- ended up sacrificing himself for the boy in an unexpected and harrowing situation involving a desperate street gang.

It was a thinly veiled love letter to a beloved father who, eerily enough, met a similar fate just after the story was nationally recognized as the work of a genuine prodigy. Curtis' descent now was not so difficult to understand. If Luis could find him, speak with him, maybe they could finally make peace.

The tension only worsened. Luis couldn't stop pacing at night and every sound gave him a fearful jolt. By 4am, he would be climbing up the walls.

***

If Luis' course was still being taught, it wasn't by him. Dealing with students was not on his mind at all until the day Jenny Hawks came knocking on the office door. "Mr. Hernandez?" she whimpered. "I have a problem."

Luis was on the floor staring up at nothing, knawing on a long-unused cigarette holder found behind one of the shelves. He didn't respond, so she invited herself in.

Jenny was a bespectacled, awkward young lady who still seemed very much like a seventh grader. She tiptoed into the room shyly and, when she noticed Luis on the carpet, leapt back a bit. "Mr. Hernandez," she repeated after stating her name, "I'm a little worried."

"Yes, what is it?" he finally answered, sighing in mock frustration.

"Well, it's like..." -- she fondled some of the random objects on the nearest shelf -- "...I really wanted to take this class because I heard so much about you and, I dunno, I feel like I'm not really getting much out of it?"

"Look, everybody's passing. Don't worry about it. I'm busy. Can't you see that?"

"Yes, but... you know, I really wanted to take a course like this for the... you know. The experience or something."

"Listen, miss." Luis stood up and threw the cigarette holder aside. "I don't know what you think this place is, b--" Something stopped him. When he looked her straight in the eye for emphasis and authority, he noticed how beautiful her features were up close and how much she looked like Melissa. Exactly like Melissa, in fact. It was uncanny. He was sure she hadn't been this sexy a minute ago, and now it was about to drive him crazy.

Luis lifted a finger and chewed on it lightly. "Um... my dear, I can understand your concern and I have every intention to correct the problem. In fact, if you close that door behind you then I think we can talk it over right now." She did so. "Jenny... what do you think of me?"

Jenny stood up straight. "I have immense respect for you, sir."

"Would you do a lot for me?"

Jenny's eyes met his. "Yes, sir. Anything."

Impure thoughts raced through Luis' head, and in the next three hours, every one of them became reality.

However, he couldn't shake the feeling that this could only end badly. It wasn't the ethics violation so much as knowledge that something about this just wasn't real. He had never before acquired something he wanted so badly so quickly.

Just as Jenny's incessant squealing reached its peak, the bottom dropped out; the world -- full of questions about what he was doing and why -- seemed to be careening at Luis from all direction. He was shaking uncontrollably now. He looked up and saw Jenny Hawks for what she was: a creature whose sexual existence was not even slightly Luis' business. She looked nothing like Melissa now. She was the girl with clunky glasses and big braces who probably would not have opened up for some time under normal circumstances.

Within two minutes, she was gone. He shut her out with barely a word, leaving her broken but knowing himself that it was the correct move, that the least he could do was try and save her from more of this. She remained outside the door for a while, crying, confused, while Luis leaned against it on the other side, feeling the exact same way.

***

Marcia. Thomas. Luis loved his family. He suddenly knew their tragedy was the same as Melissa's -- they didn't know he loved them.

Marcia answered the telephone in her slightly moody voice. Luis began to blubber. "Marcia, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Is everything okay?"

She wasn't climbing aboard his emotional rollercoaster. "Luis, where in the hell is my dog? Did you forget to let him back inside or something?"

"Marcia, I don't know, but I need to --"

"Where are you? Why don't you come home anymore? Can we please just get a divorce if you're going to act like this? I don't know who you're seeing but I can tell by your voice it's someone. Why are you making me put Thom through this? Please say something, Luis. What kind of sick --"

Luis' need to say something important before some imagined deadline hit was enough to overcome his sobbing and to cause him to interrupt his wife. "Marcia, I think I'm in love with you. I'm sure I'm in love with you. I know it's weird, but... I just can't look at you."

He knew it sounded hurtful, and he knew that was the first thing about it she would notice, but he knew there was no use saying any more, and that she might understand someday. So before she could finish her "What the --" sentence, he hung up and laid back down on the floor, grinding his teeth.

The crying from outside had finally stopped, but before long, there was another knock. Luis initially ignored it, but when he heard the voice of preppy university volunteer Sharon Lupino call his name, he grudgingly decided it would be best to save face and open the door.

"Hi," she said, looking him over suspiciously and holding an ominous package in her left hand. "Someone brought this envelope for you last night. He said you forgot to leave the door unlocked for him." Luis was humbled and annoyed by this taunting from -- he just knew it -- Curtis Rosen. His name was particularly big on the papers inside, irritating him further.

He thought he was prepared for anything by now but discovered almost right away that he was incorrect.

The latest character from the depths of Curtis' imagination was "Professor Wyler." He was a person who operated like a machine. He was going insane with paranoia about being watched and eventually, he seduced a mousy student then was accused of rape. Details were impeccably precise (the conversations between Luis and Jenny were included verbatim), up to the minute (and beyond), impossibly so. The story ended with the man desperate and living in his car.

Luis studied every word at length, then stared long and hard at the note from Sharon giving the time that the envelope had been dropped off -- 11pm the previous night. The implications were fantastic, too sickening. Luis needed to know more.

Curtis' mom never returned phone calls, but Luis did manage to reach one of his old teachers, Mr. Zinnemann, seventh grade english, who was rather surprised to be consulted on the subject. Luis sought him out because of a note in Curtis' records from him about "perpetual grief."

"Oh yeah, the kid was ripped apart with guilt after his dad died."

Rosen hadn't known his own strength back then. "Almost like he seemed to think he was the cause of it somehow?" Luis asked, his voice shaking.

"Exactly. Nobody could talk sense into him. It looked at the time like he didn't have much of a future anymore, but I understand he's done well."

"He has."

***

The car keys were thrown away and Luis went to sleep in the backseat. In his nightmare, he walked down a corridor. When he reached the end, he would just return to the beginning.

***

The next conscious moment was one of terror. He was no longer in his car. There were pools of blood on the carpet, stains on the wall and even some dripping from the ceiling. This room was familiar. This room was Luis and Marcia's living room.

He ran to the kitchen. A trail, a bloody handprint on the wall, signs of a struggle with a pair of scissors and a candlestick. The trail led to the bathroom... a butcher knife in the sink, the plumbing clogged. The bedroom... most horrible scene of all, the bed mutilated beyond recognition, blood spewing from every crevace. Luis backed up, unable to look away from the bed, and crashed harmlessly against the sliding glass door, which had always been hidden by curtains until now.

In the yard where Thom's kiddie pool stood over a decade ago there was freshly dug ground. What had happened? Luis knew the answer but refused to believe it was possible. He continued to refuse even when he noticed Marcia's wedding band, drenched, sitting with ironic precision on her pillow.

Luis wanted to die, then and there. He returned to the bathroom, threw up, and picked up the knife. Soon discovering he couldn't handle this, he scoured the medicine cabinet for pills. Nothing. He no longer had his gun. The urge was going away. Luis decided the ticket was honesty.

He picked up the phone and dialed his son's number but hung up when Thomas answered. What would he say? That she had been murdered, perhaps by someone else? That he had done it while sleepwalking? The truth? The truth was absurd. This was a brutal, horrible killing. There was no way out of this.

Luis let himself fall to the floor. Until the second he pictured Marcia fighting desperately for her life against the man she had married, the doom and the betrayal, he did not realize how much she meant to him.

Luis showered, changed his clothes, and kept going. He did not decide to do this or anything else. He thought nothing, because if he thought, he thought of things that crushed him.

He arrived at work in a daze and marched around his desk, more and more quickly. He cried, vomited, kicked the air, cut himself with the scissors, banged his head on everything in sight, and wrecked the room.

The pacing was at lightning speed by the time yet another envelope slid under the door. On seeing it, Luis exploded with primal rage. He threw his door open and followed Curtis Rosen at a menacing speed, threw himself on him and punched him until he bled. He threw Curtis Rosen against the wall, tackled him again, kicked him as violently as he could, hoped he would die. He wanted Curtis Rosen's last breath to be the most horrible gift he had ever received, and he wanted Curtis Rosen to have to suffer the harshest of misery to gain that last breath.

All the while, Curtis was smiling. So was Luis.

***

Luis was too numb to care about the consequences. When he attempted to kill Curtis, he was already about to be fired and perhaps charged criminally thanks to reports of a pregnant student he seduced. Luis hated the unborn baby and hated the girl along with everyone and everything in the world now, but not the way he hated Curtis Rosen. That hatred was sheer, frigid blackness. Knowing this, the school records barred Luis' intrusion completely. There were armed guards to prevent his finding out Curtis' whereabouts; he had been sent to an undisclosed location to recover from his injuries.

In the car at night, Luis merely functioned, driving, thinking nothing. Curtis Rosen had to be killed. There was no alternative. If he did not die, Luis would. At the rate he was going, Luis -- loathed and detested by all -- wouldn't have a worthwhile life for much longer anyway, but he yearned for revenge and felt the horrific possibilities of more lives thrown away by someone, of humanity ultimately coming to nothing. This was a battle of the wills. How was it going to end?

***

Hours, nights, weeks passed; time no longer meant anything to Luis. He slid between a state of unconsciousness and one of woozy semi-consciousness. The latter was divided in half between a determination to destroy Curtis Rosen and a slightly more awake but still foolish notion that somehow tracking down Melissa in Montana would solve everything. He desperately needed some kind of mercy at this point, a kind he'd only ever seen in her.

Most of the time, Luis simply wasn't sure where he was headed and would sometimes snap out of his daze on a road he could absolutely not identify. He never knew what region of the country he was in. He felt that he was being throttled back and forth in any number of directions, but especially between Melissa and Curtis. He wanted to go to Montana, but he had to find Curtis. Nothing would end until he found Curtis.

There were problems. Sometimes it all made perfect sense. Sometimes even taking a breath took heroic effort. One day Luis rammed his car into the side of a building in the middle of the night. He did it more than once, intentionally, but he couldn't say why except that he was frustrated. Just when he was about to floor the gas and end it all, he stopped and drove away again, bits and pieces of the car hanging down and dragging across the road noisily.

One day, it changed. This was the day that Luis woke up parked neatly in someone's driveway, outside a beautiful and enormous house in a pleasant neighborhood. Luis felt lucid; he knew where he was. 333. This was Melissa's home. At first he was afraid to go to the door and find out, but at this point he finally remembered how little he had to lose by attempting to connect with her.

Luis' knocks were almost triumphant. This was a lovely place. I could live here, he thought. I could die here.

It took some time for the door to open. A decidely unglamorous but comely figure appeared, her hair dripping. Her complexion showed that things had changed for her, but it made her lovelier. She would understand Luis. Finally, someone.

At first, Melissa drew a blank, but slowly some faint memory crept back to her. "Oh my god," she whispered at last. "Luis... Luis, you're... you're hurt. Are you all right?"

Luis wanted to grab her and hug her and reveal every tiny detail to her. "May I come in, Melissa?"

Without a word, she led him inside. "Wow, it's... really a surprise." She sounded a little uneasy or miffed at the unnanounced visit. He assumed she'd feel more comfortable later.

"Yes, I really had to find you," Luis offered. Melissa glanced up at him worriedly. "I... had to."

"Please sit down, I'll get you something to drink."

"No, no, no, that's all right."

There was a long silence, broken eventually by Melissa. "So... are you... still... What exactly are you doing here?"

"Well," Luis said, not exactly sure, "I missed you."

"Wow... yeah, we... we go way back, don't we? It's been a long time."

"Oh, yes. A long time."

"Yeah."

"I, uh... hope you're doing well."

"I am. I am." He wasn't. Why weren't they talking about great subtle things or joking together or maybe even kissing and confessing their love for one another or at least going out for a walk together and catching up? What was happening here? Luis was deflated.

"Loooong time," Melissa repeated uncomfortably. She had not turned any of the lights on in the house and Luis could only faintly see her eyes, which did not carry the same spark he remembered and imagined.

"So how's your sister?" Luis couldn't think of a better way to break the ice. He started to say something about her tuba but felt too awkward to go on.

"Emmy's okay, as far as I know, I... don't really talk to her very often. She's divorced, but she still lives up in New York. Plays in a folk group."

"Huh." Luis had nothing left.

The anticlimactic scene stretched on forever; Melissa finally pulled a dish from the kitchen counter. "Here, Luis. Have some toast." They exchanged smiles and ate toast together but didn't say anything. When she lifted her toast, he saw the wedding band on her finger.

"I'm sorry," he said finally. "This was a mistake." She just looked at the floor, lost. "I did miss you."

"I know, Luis." She looked directly at him. "Everybody misses someone."

Luis munched on his toast and thought of how much he wanted everything to change. In some way, he did feel welcome here.

"Where are you going?" Melissa looked puzzled.

After their briefly poignant exchange Luis had somehow been dragged backward, in his chair, to the door. His heart sank. Melissa repeated the question.

Luis sighed. "I think he's editing."

"What?"

***

The randomness resumed. Luis went back to his notion of a killing rampage but was sent only into a wild goose chase, leading for some reason to Vermont then to some men's restroom in Kentucky. These were just the moments when he had short awakenings of clarity. The cycle reaped no rewards and Luis felt, as he looked out over the water on the day he woke up in his car on an empty beach somewhere, that he could not live like this anymore. There was no escape unless he acted quickly.

Drowning is painful, and Luis had always wanted something faster, but death was by now so attractive that he could not resist the rolling waves before him. He swam out to a point at which the current controlled him, and let himself drift down to the bottom, the whole world enveloping him, the ocean over his head. He could still see the sun. All he felt was relief.

Then he woke up. He was still on the beach, but now he was on the ground, on a painfully rocky walkway, and looming above him was a modest but attractive house. He felt drawn to it. Luis drifted around the property for a moment before he understood fully where he was and walked without hesitation up to a particular window, broke it easily, and climbed inside into the bedroom of Curtis Rosen.

It was staggering, a wonderland. The boy had everything in the world he wanted. Luis was most fascinated by the walls, covered with the pages of what appeared to be Curtis' latest opus. Some were closer to the ceiling, some halfway up the wall, some near the floor, presumably meaning that they were at varying levels of completion. Luis was awestruck. He looked upon this tiny world with greater respect than he'd ever felt for anything else.

"I want to know one thing," a voice said.

During his exploration, Luis had failed to notice Curtis sitting perfectly still against the door. Their eyes met. It did not feel like the meeting of enemies. Curtis continued. "Do you think this sits well with me?"

Luis didn't know what would come next and the thought terrified him, but somehow he relaxed. "I know it doesn't. Why do you do it?" It was the question that had been tormenting him for countless hours, days, weeks, months.

Curtis grinned. "I love to write, Mr. Hernandez. I have to write, even when it takes more than I want to give. Surely you understand that."

Now Luis smiled. He had so many questions for his student.

"Do you think you'll ever stop, Curtis?"

"This is all I can do, you know. It's a curse."

A curse. Luis chuckled. "Was I a good subject?"

Curtis stood up, hands behind his back, and looked up at the window thoughtfully "You know... I thought this story would be so simple. Every single day it felt like it got bigger and bigger. Some days I'm lucky if I get once sentence down."

Luis stepped a bit closer. "Curtis, why am I here?"

He did not turn around, wouldn't look the professor in the eye. "I finally figured out where the story is headed." He added sheepishly, "Sorry it took so long."

Now Luis sat down on the bed. "What is it you're going to do to me now?"

Curtis turned around, looking like he was barely hanging on to his sanity. "Look. I tried reaching out to you. You saw that. I knew we both..."

Yes, both of them, Luis thought. Just like Melissa said.

The boy was beginning to act regretful. "You know I don't really want this. I would just --"

"Curtis," Luis whispered excitedly, "is it a good ending?"

Their eyes met again. "Yes, it is. I have to keep it exciting. It used to be kicks, you know. Now it's art."

"Good, Curtis. Very good." With a million bittersweet thoughts running through his head, Luis surrendered almost joyfully, threw back his head, and let the rest of the action play out as scripted.

***

"The axe had never been used before. The cuts were clean and beautiful. It was fun to watch as the blade sliced into flesh. The intruder was in pieces soon enough. It felt wonderful to destroy him, a true release. The pieces were buried; the police were clueless. Alexander knew he had simply ended the life of a murderer, and his own potential murderer at that. He still couldn't deny how much fun it was."

Madeline Preminger read Curtis Rosen's latest A+ paper aloud to the class with inflections that conveyed her vast enthusiasm for the talespinner. At the gripping conclusion she threw the pages down on Curtis' desk, shook her head and smiled.

"You're something else, Curtis. Hey, look how good you've gotten at this. I told you, didn't I? Sometimes it's better not to write what you know, isn't it?"

Curtis smiled. "Yes, it certainly is." He looked down after she turned away and continued to work on his next story.

******