I think you are pathetic.
I had to read the first line again. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.
It is not just that I dislike your class. I cannot believe you were ever hired in the first place. Watching you try to lead a discussion makes me kind of sick. I wish that you would leave.
After a few seconds, I carefully pressed the scrap of paper back to the messy double fold I’d found it in. For a long moment I stared at a point of dust on the windowsill, just behind the back of my desk chair. The paper was still cupped in my palm.
“Good lord,” I breathed into the office’s stony silence. And then I sneezed.
The first note was the most ridiculous one. I found it at the edge of the tasseled Persian rug, just far enough that someone could’ve slipped it under the crack in my elderly wooden door.
The next time I led section, just two floors down from the office itself, I couldn’t help scanning the room for perpetrators. None of my students looked particularly malicious. They were just as lethargic as they’d been all semester, regardless of how cleverly I reconfigured the lesson plan. I wondered how many of them would even have bothered to figure out where my office was.
I don’t mean to be rude. I like you, actually.
The handwriting on the second note was completely different. Where the first’s cursive scrawl had barely been legible, this one was written in neat, thoughtful print.
This building has housed some of the greatest literary figures in our nation’s history. You must know that you were hired in a drought. You are only here because they can’t think of how to get rid of you now. The walls know that you don’t belong. Don’t forget to be grateful.
I found that one lying on my desk, curled up and fixed with a rubber band, right beside my MacBook charger. Nothing else about the room had changed. The paneled, forbidding door was locked, like it always was. My swiveling office chair, the biggest object of my own I’d been able to sneak into the room, was just at the angle I’d left her in. The books, most of which belonged to the woman I was borrowing the office from, who had only just notified the department that her health complications would not be improving, all frowned out from the same spaces they had before. Even the dust curling up from the ancient rug – which so triggered my allergies but which I could not work up the nerve to complain about – hovered in the same corners it had before.
After the second note, I began taking walks around the building. Short, ten-minute breaks between emails and grading, to walk slowly down the arching, tiled halls, to pay my respects to the stained glass on the ground floor, to breathe in the autumnal chill at the swinging back door. I never said it to myself, but I was giving them openings to leave more notes. These pockets were just long enough that my heart quickened one beat more than necessary each time I huffed back up the stairs. After some time, they started taking advantage of it.
I don’t hate you, but your instatement represents a change that makes me nauseous.
There is no space for you here. You are being swallowed; I know you can feel it.
I don’t know why I didn’t suspect my colleagues immediately. It was not that the other professors were ever exactly nice to me. The younger ones were good for a joke and had even invited me to lunch a few times. I had a suspicion the older ones didn’t bother to memorize any of their younger colleagues’ faces. Maybe some of them did feel animosity toward me, but I couldn’t believe any of them would take the time to write me a note about it.
I could not think of anyone to tell about the notes. It was the first time, and probably the only time, that I missed the gossiping roommates I’d had the year before. My mom was simply too sick to bother about this, and if she hadn’t been, the amount she would’ve obsessed about it would’ve probably doubled my stress. I could feel the notes bubbling under my skin, whether I was in the building or not.
Finally, it came to a head. I can’t say if what I was feeling was indignation, shame, anger, or just explosive annoyance, but when I opened the door to five different notes littering the carpet, I picked up my bag and stormed out.
An old man stopped me in the hallway. I think he had a specialty in Near Eastern literature, and he looked like he shouldn’t be allowed to attempt the stairs every day. When he noticed the crumpled notes in my hand, he sighed a breathy note that was almost a laugh.
“Give them to me,” he said plainly, holding out his hand. “You can go home if you want, but they only stop if they know you’re not reading them.” He raised his eyebrows impatiently, and after a long moment, I placed the crumpled papers into his palm. “If I were you, I’d get back to that office. I’m sure you can find work to do.”
