I sleep four hours. By noon I am back in the fine arts building, and the building at noon smells like at nine but louder: more breath, more shuffle, more turpentine come out from under closed doors.
The stairs are quieter than the elevator. The elevator opens into a hallway full of clay-dust people, and I have no use for being a clipboard person to them again. Studio 314 is on the third floor, the shared room sophomores take. The door is propped open with a cinder block painted gray, a numeral I cannot quite read on the broad face of it.
Inside: four easels — three of them empty, one facing the window. A boy in a black sweater stands at the easel that is working. His left palm rests flat against the wooden frame. The right hand holds a small brush pointing down at the floor.
The hair is dark and untidy. I have seen the angle of that head before, the way it tips a few degrees as if to catch the listening ear from another side.
Half the campus wears that coat, I tell myself. The coat is on the back of a chair across the room. The boy is in a sweater. My recognition was not of cloth.
"Excuse me."
He turns slowly enough that the brush does not move. His eyes find the writing-center tote on my shoulder and come back to my face. Brown so dark they read black under the overhead bulb.
"Rivers Kane?"
"Yes."
"My name is Georgia Hale. Journalism program. I'm working on an essay about street art culture, for a workshop, not for publication. Could you spare ten minutes?"
He looks at the window. The window has nothing in it. He looks back.
"Sit."
I take the stool he gestures to. The legs are paint-spotted in three colors. The notebook comes out, and the recorder. The recorder I put on the floor by my foot, switch up where he can see it, and I leave it off. He registers the switch the way another person registers weather.
"Workshop on what."
"Public art and the people who make it. The professor wants us to push past the campus as a subject. I'm interested in how artists working outside galleries talk about their own work. If they do."
"What do you mean if they do."
"Some don't."
"Some don't talk about it because there's nothing to say. Some don't because saying it is the wrong way of having said it."
It is the longest sentence I have heard from him.
"Which are you."
He looks at the brush. The brush is dry; he has not dipped it since I came in. "I haven't decided."
I let the silence breathe. He lets it sit. I fill it.
"Why walls."
"Because they're there."
"That's a Mallory answer."
"He climbed a mountain."
"You paint a wall."
The corner of his mouth lifts a sixteenth of an inch and is gone. "What does your essay want from me."
"Your opinion. Not your work."
"Whose then."
I open my mouth and close it. He has turned the room on a preposition: my question was supposed to be about him, and now we are discussing whom I am reading. "Other painters. You're one stop."
"What does the essay want from the painters."
"It wants to know if they're writing in the city or writing about the people who look at walls."
Too clean. The kind of sentence I save for the paragraph that needs a hinge. I have given him my actual question, in his words, with the recorder off. He hears it not as a victory, not as a tell. He hears it as information.
"Both," he says. "When it's working."
The stairwell is empty. I press my back to the cinder block and slide my thumb up the switch and down and up again. The switch does not move from off. In the notebook I write three lines: Calm. Not avoidant. Does not leave. Under that, smaller: He asked what my essay wanted. I answered.
Kit is on her bed when I get to the room, laughing into her phone, the pillow at the head of her mattress dented where she has been propped. She raises a finger at me without breaking the call.
"Five minutes," she mouths.
The sticky notes on my desk are in the order I left them and not in the order I left them. The top yellow square has migrated half an inch toward the laptop, the way they migrate when someone has moved a textbook and put it back. RIVERS KANE, sophomore, painter? in my handwriting, blue ink, yellow square. I leave it where it is.
Kit hangs up. "You found him."
A sentence, not a question. She is reading my face.
"I think so."
"Yeah?" She watches me for a beat. "Why don't you look happy."
"Because Mark is going to find him too if I don't move."
"That's a why for a different question."
"How was the seminar."
She lets me. She is the only person I have met since I got to this campus who knows the difference between letting and missing.
Paul has gone gray under the eyes since Monday. His head stays down when I come in; he looks up when I am three feet from the desk.
"Where are you."
"I have a candidate. I want until ten to write the paragraph."
"Mark went into the fine arts building today."
I keep my face flat.
"He stalled at the front desk. He has a clipboard now."
The clipboard line is not a joke. It is also a joke. He is telling me to move and telling me he sees the symmetry between me and the boy he is sponsoring as my hedge, and the symmetry does not move him.
"I'm going to talk to one more person before I send."
"Talk fast."
I leave before either of us makes it worse.
The bench outside the fine arts building faces the brick face of the chemistry annex and the maple that is half down. He comes out at four forty with a satchel and a coffee. I am on the bench with an unopened book. He sees me before he sees the bench, and the seeing-me does not change the steps he was already taking.
"Waiting for someone." Saying it first makes it not a question.
He sits at the other end. Not close. Not away. He sets the satchel between his feet.
"The sculpture review on Friday. Some of those people work on walls too?"
"One of them."
"Is the thinking the same."
He turns his head toward the chemistry annex. The light is going. "It's the same when the person doing it is paying attention. It's not the same in the question."
A real distinction. Not a hedge. I underline it in my head.
"What do you do when a person you're writing about asks you something." His voice is the same volume; the question doesn't announce itself as a turn.
"Answer, if I can."
"Can you."
I think too long. The thinking-too-long is itself an answer. "Sometimes."
He nods. Not a victory nod. The nod of a person to whom a piece of information has been handed and who has put it where it belongs.
The bruise on my hip does what it does when I sit too straight for too long, a steady reminder that I have a body and that the body has been carrying weight.
My phone buzzes in the pocket of my jacket. Paul. Board meeting ten tomorrow. Bring something I can use.
"I have to."
"Go."
The library reading room at five forty is quiet enough that I can hear the clock above the periodicals desk. The paragraph wants to be: Sources at the fine arts building suggest a single individual operating under a consistent visual signature; methodology of recurring placement; the symbol in the lower right reading as a mark, not a signature; the candidate circle is reduced to four, of whom one is the working hypothesis.
I write that paragraph. I read it back. It says the working category and not the name. It is true and it is empty. I send it at nine fifty-two.
Paul opens the file at nine fifty-three. I watch the read receipt move from unread to read. He sits with it for two minutes. He marks it received in the editorial queue. No reply comes.
Worse than displeasure. Displeasure has a reply.
The night is no longer the bad light. It is later, after the paragraph: ten and change. The floods are back on. The figure on the wall is itself again, the seams in their values, the blue restored by lamplight. He is at the wall when I come around the corner. He stands the way people stand at windows.
I had thought about coming with the recorder hot. I had thought about the third encounter being the one where I close the perimeter. Now I am here, and he is here, and there is nothing to close, because what is between us is already in the air.
I walk up. Five feet is too much. Three is too little. Four is what we have.
"You come back often."
"Often enough."
"Why."
"To see what stays."
"Of the work."
"Of the wall."
He looks at me. Not through. At. The pass from the bad light yesterday was not what this is.
"Georgia."
"Yes."
"You're from Campus Wire."
The cold inside the jaw. My thumb on the switch in the off position. My fingers wrapping the housing of the recorder where it sits in the right pocket of my jacket. The bruise on the hip very loud now.
"I've read your last three pieces."
He stays where he is. He is in the long coat I saw last night and the sweater I saw this morning under it.
"So what is it you actually want to know."