This is my office in fair weather or foul. The students know where to look for me, and when I’m there the word quickly spreads. There are five or six other people who provide the service I provide — impecunious graduate students, mostly, down on their luck — but I’m the quickest and most reliable, and I have an enthusiastic following. Today, though, business gets off to a slow start. I sit for twenty minutes, fidgeting, peering into Beckett, staring at Alma Mater. Some years ago a radical bomber blew a hole in her side, but there’s no sign of the damage now. I remember being shocked at the news, and then shocked at being shocked — why should I give a damn about a dumb statue symbolic of a dumb school? That was about 1969, I guess. Back in the Neolithic.

“Mr. Selig?”

Big brawny jock looming above me. Colossal shoulders, chubby innocent face. He’s deeply embarrassed. He’s taking Comp Lit 18 and needs a paper fast, on the novels of Kafka, which he hasn’t read. (This is the football season; he’s the starting halfback and he’s very very busy.) I tell him the terms and he hastily agrees. While he stands there I covertly take a reading of him, getting the measure of his intelligence, his probable vocabulary, his style. He’s smarter than he appears. Most of them are. They could write their own papers well enough if they only had the time. I make notes, setting down my quick impressions of him, and he goes away happy. After that, trade is brisk: he sends a fraternity brother, the brother sends a friend, the friend sends one of his fraternity brothers, a different fraternity, and the daisy-chain lengthens until by early afternoon I find I’ve taken on all the work I can handle. I know my capacity. So all is well. I’ll eat regularly for two or three weeks, without having to tap my sister’s grudging generosity. Judith will be pleased not to hear from me. Home, now, to begin my ghostly tasks. I’m good — glib, earnest, profound in a convincingly sophomoric way — and I can vary my styles.