Tuesday morning. The radiator clicks at me like a person making a small, repetitive criticism. Kit is gone to an eight a.m. seminar; she has left the cap on my pen and the rumor-coffee from yesterday on the desk, lid warm at the rim. The hip the bag rides on is sore in the soft place under the iliac crest, where my sister told me not to put a laptop and where for twenty-three days I have continued to put a laptop.
I open the spreadsheet and add three columns: night studio access, course load, public events on the fine arts calendar in the last twenty-three days. The art building publishes everything. It also publishes nothing it doesn't want me to read.
In the margin of the paper notebook beside the laptop I write mark. Under it: not signature. I close the notebook before I can talk to myself about it. The point is to move it from a thought into a working category, and a working category isn't a place you visit; it's a place you stand on. By nine I have the calendar plotted against my date column. The intersection narrows. I have until ten p.m. tomorrow to send Paul one paragraph, and a paragraph is a sentence you build from below.
The fine arts building was a typewriter factory once. The high windows still have the chain-pulley sash and a grit in the corners the cleaning crews stopped trying to dislodge a long time ago; the corridors smell faintly of linseed oil and run warmer than the rest of campus. I walk in with a tote bag from the writing center on my shoulder and a clipboard I do not need. People talk to clipboards.
The bulletin board outside the main studio is layered three deep. Open call for a juried show. Looking for a model, two hours, twenty dollars cash. A poster for the second-year sculpture review on Friday afternoon, six names in alphabetical order — initials and surnames, no first names. T. Maddox is one. R. Kane is not on it, because R. Kane paints.
I take a picture without raising the phone above my hip and keep walking.
The laugh comes around the corner ahead of its owner: broad, easy, a laugh that doesn't apologize for itself. The man it belongs to is tall enough that the doorframe makes him duck out of habit. Dark skin warm in the bulb-light. A wool beanie pulled down over his ears even though it is only October. He is wider in the shoulder than most of the boys on this floor, and his sweater is heavy and the color of dry oatmeal, with cuffs that run all the way past his wrists.
He is standing with a girl in clay-dust jeans, leaning to read something taped to a door. The thing taped is not interesting. What he says is.
"That piece on the side of the third-year dorm." He puts his palm flat against the door, then takes it back, as if checking the temperature. "It does what walls don't do."
The girl says something I miss.
"No, listen." Quieter, now. "Most paint sits on a wall. That one sits in it. I don't know how he does it. I don't want to know how he does it."
He gestures. The cuff of the sweater swings forward and back; the back of his hand never quite clears the wool. I write tall / dark skin / beanie / wider shoulders / 2nd or 3rd yr — knows the painter or talks like it on the clipboard, in the small print I save for things I should not be writing where a person could read.
He turns from the door and his glance goes down the corridor and through me, the way upperclassmen look past freshmen when there's no occasion to register one. The laugh goes with him around the next corner.
The reading room in Olin is half-empty in the late morning. I sit at one of the long oak tables and put three windows on my laptop: the fine arts roster, the academic calendar, my date column. The studios on the third floor of fine arts log access between six p.m. and two a.m. on weeknights; the building publishes the window, which is a kind of evidence by exclusion. Nine works. Eight of them on weeknights, one on a Sunday.
Of my six men, two seniors are on a residency in Maine. Their advisor mentioned it in passing at the open studios I sat in on last week as a clipboard person, and her phrasing was the kind that meant they had left and would not be back before the leaves were down. I cross out the seniors.
Three juniors and a sophomore. The sophomore is Rivers Kane.
There is no star next to his name and no underline. The four of them sit in the cell where they live and I pretend to myself I am not looking at one of them more than the others. My hands go flat on the wood. The bruise on my hip presses where the bag has been hanging for an hour, and I notice it the way I notice a pulse I had already known was there.
The café in the library lobby has six tables, and one of them is always Mark's between eleven and noon on Tuesdays. I have been avoiding him at it for three weeks. I order a black coffee, and his head comes up before the barista hands me the cup. He is at a four-top with his laptop closed and a paperback open. The paperback is upside down. He flipped it the wrong way when he sat down and hasn't fixed it, which is either a small accident or a small piece of theater, and the difference is moot.
"Hale." He gestures at the seat across from him. There's no reason to say no.
"Heard about Friday," he says. "Sorry."
"Why are you sorry? It's a deadline."
"It's a stupid one." He smiles. He has a good smile, which is part of the problem. "Listen. If you hit a wall and you need a name to call, you can call me. I find people. It's the one thing I'm decent at."
"Find people."
"Half my freshman year I worked for a private investigator. Paralegal stuff, mostly. But also." A small shrug. "You learn how to ask. Sometimes a name is just one more door to knock on."
He pulls a sugar packet from the holder, tears it open with his teeth, and pours it into the coffee that has gone cold next to him. He drinks. The sight of someone drinking sweet coffee on a stomach that hasn't had food makes me want to look away, and I do, at the second packet he has lined up, neat, next to the cup.
"Mark. Are you offering to help me, or telling me you can find the same name first?"
He laughs. It is a friendly laugh, with clean teeth in it.
"Both, I guess. Whichever is more useful to you."
I leave the coffee on the table when I go. He will take it.
Back at the desk in Stratton, Kit's bed is still empty and the rumor-coffee is finally cold enough to throw out. I do not throw it out. I have not developed a system for which of Kit's small kindnesses I am allowed to discard, so I move the cup an inch and pretend the inch counts.
The poster on my phone enlarges. T. Maddox. The fine arts directory the building keeps in PDF gives me Theo Maddox, second year, sculpture concentration, second-floor west studio. Tall. Dark skin. Beanie. Wider in the shoulder. The kind of student who speaks about the painter the way one speaks of a friend whose work one loves and does not entirely understand.
In the notebook margin: Theo Maddox. Not the painter. Someone who knows the painter. Talk later.
The painter, and a list of four with a sophomore on it.
Rivers Kane.
His name is already in three places in this room and the system, such as it is, doesn't need a fourth. The clock above Kit's desk reads three thirty-two. Paul wants a paragraph by ten tomorrow night. I have until then to either build the certainty I haven't built yet or to write a paragraph that builds the appearance of it. I pick up my jacket and go to look at the wall.
The light is the bad light: not dusk and not yet dark, the air between two registers. Facilities have taken the portable floods down for the night because the night is not here yet, and the lamps on the south face haven't switched on. The figure on the wall is grayer than it was last night, bluer in the seams, less itself for being unattended.
There is a person in the path ahead, ten meters off. He is tall and narrow and standing the way you stand when you have come to look at something specific.
The right thing to do is keep walking. The thing I do is stop.
He is looking at the wall the way I look at a draft I have already sent — not anxious, not proud, somewhere between did I get it right and I know already whether I got it right. He shifts his weight onto one foot and tips his head a few degrees, as if to catch the listening ear from another angle. His coat is longer than the night requires. His hair is dark and untidy and unattended.
He turns.
It isn't a turn toward me. It's a turn that happens to be facing my direction, and his gaze passes across me without stopping, the way an eye skims a column for a value it doesn't expect to find in that row. The pass takes less than a second. His face does not change.
Then he walks. Past me, not toward me; the corner of the building is twenty steps off and he takes it. The coat goes around the corner and is gone.
The recorder is in my right hand. The switch under my thumb sits in the off position. It has been there since I left the dorm this morning. I had carried it through the typewriter-factory corridor and the library reading room and the café where Mark drank sweet coffee at me, and I had not once moved the switch from one position to the other.
He left first.
I had thought a great deal in the last twenty-four hours about what it would be like to find him. I had not thought, until standing here now in the bad light with the bruise pressing where the bag hangs, about what it would be like for him to know exactly where I would be standing and to be standing there first.