The Lights

IF NO movement is detected for a certain interval, the professor’s office goes dark. In this it’s like every other office in the building, equipped with sensors meant to conserve the energy wasted when a professor, done for the day, forgets to turn the lights off, and every professor forgets, now and then: the old medievalist known for ranting at any student foolish enough to drift off in lecture forgets; the leanly moral visiting Nobelist prone to conversation-killing silences, widely construed as hostile, in reality the outward manifestation of a soul harrowed by dishonesty or conciliation, whose custom-made bicycle waits in a corner during the weekly office hours he has contracted for and honors to the minute, though only one odd, lonely boy ever knocks, hoping for some word or sign from bare-bones, meager him in his Nobelist’s disguise, and he wheels the bicycle into the hall, closes the borrowed door, and forgets; the professor who had not known what to say to the student in the niqab whose parents have betrothed her to a devout and very wealthy man she has never met but whose alliance with the family will contribute to their status and presumably their safety in their village in a province menaced by Al Qaeda, , hearing again through the scrim of several hours’ ordinary, intervening conversation with other students , forgets; the newly divorced Romanticist gathering keys, phone, messenger bag, and umbrella while discussing iridescence in with the angel-faced graduate student from her Keats seminar turns to the window when the student says and the Romanticist is about to say when the student says and stops and it’s not the stopping, not the Romanticist’s wise failure to say , it’s the reciprocal reverie of standing there wondering what follows that feels like an odd and maybe dangerous gain in intimacy, and she talks distractedly of Keats as she closes her door, hearing herself become heatedly brilliant as if in argument though the grad student is not arguing, in fact isn’t saying a word, and did anything really just happen or not? she wonders, talking fast, closing her door, forgetting; the department chair who consults the time and Instant Heart Rate on his phone and leans back in his chair, satisfied, dissatisfied, before scooting backward to bring the chair squeakily even with the office’s weird, sunk half-window, the tall narrow original, like the rest of the building’s once-elegant fenestration, halved in the course of earthquake renovations, bisected by the reinforced floor so that the office below has the lower half, which for that officeholder is much too high as his is much too low, good mostly for spying on heads, and the chair watches the Romanticist’s familiar ocelot-spotted drop off at his school , and wondering why it’s portfolios now and why teams and how he will make amends and what makes a person buy an ocelot-spotted umbrella, the chair forgets; and behind closed doors their lights burn on until the sensor decides .