WITH ME IN THE VOICELESS AIR
Courtney Angela Brkic
He has never breathed the air she breathes. Never heard her speak. Never been close enough to establish whether her eyes are green or hazel.
He is attuned to her movements, however, tracking her route from the faculty parking lot to the English Department, or across the quad, her progress always slowed by some student or colleague. The Sorenson Effect, he has come to think of it, watching how they lean in like house plants toward a source of light. He hardly breathes as she tucks her hair behind an ear or shifts a stack of books from hip to hip. He imagines touching those curving ledges of bone, deciphering her pale skin like Braille.
Idiot, he tells himself. Then, more viciously: stalker.
That she is unaware of his scrutiny is clear to him. It has been clear since the morning he first spied her beneath his second-floor dormitory window. Bleary after an all-nighter, he had been debating an early morning run when, lo, she materialized between two parked cars, readjusting the waistband of her skirt. It was something about this maneuver in an empty street that snapped him into pieces and, months later, he still cannot make sense of it. He is no longer Cyrus, no longer himself. He is a ghost, hovering at her periphery.
It isn’t that he follows her. He doesn’t. And he consoles himself with the fact that he isn’t really a stalker. Professor Sorenson just hap-pens to be in the places he goes. In the cafeteria, he will turn with his tray and see her head, like a flame, through the window. As he jogs around the track, she is strolling under the line of trees opposite. In his favorite coffee shop, he looks up from his laptop, earbuds drowning out the conversations and coffee cups against saucers, and she is standing at the counter. He watches her pay and turn around and leave. And he goes back to the open laptop in front of him, to that cursor beating like a tiny heart.
The guys who come to Cyrus for term papers call her Red, a nickname so lacking in originality that it would amuse him under different circumstances.
They tell him things like: “Red assigned a comparative essay on Whitman and Dickens for American Lit.”
“Dickens?” he will ask with a frown.
“The dead chick who lived alone and wrote poetry.”
Or he will overhear their conversations. “Red was wearing that dress again today. How am I supposed to concentrate when she wears that dress?”
She doesn’t allow open laptops in her classes, and so they will sometimes turn over handwritten notes in which she has been doodled, naked, into the margins. But never her face, Cyrus observes.
Occasionally, they include him on their text chains: I’d fuck her. Or, Hot as hell. And, once, in an uncharacteristically inspired moment: Are you trying to seduce me, Professor Sorenson?
It started at the end of his first year with a philosophy paper. Cyrus had come in from running to find his roommate, a wrestler with the build of a bulldog, pacing the floor in their room.
“If I flunk this class, my father is going to kill me,” the roommate explained, swinging his baseball cap nervously around so that the visor faced backward. “I’m one step away from academic probation as it is. I tried to ask for an extension . . . “
Cyrus peeled off his jacket without saying a word.
“You’re good at this stuff, right?” The baseball cap was facing for-ward again. “You gotta help me out. I’m drowning.”
Cyrus was on a partial scholarship but there was never enough money for bus tickets home, or for books. Or for all the dozens of little things that his classmates put on credit cards paid for by their parents. And when he looked at the opposite side of the room, at the brand-new laptop (used almost exclusively for viewing porn), at the Bose speakers and the clothes which lay in heaps, something shifted. In the student parking lot was an SUV with a ski rack. Strictly speaking, first-year students were not allowed to have cars on campus, but when your father made generous donations to the university, certain exceptions could be made.
“I’ll pay you, bruh,” his roommate had finally said.
Cyrus let the baseball cap make another half-revolution before responding. “No problem.” He unlaced his sneakers and peeled off his socks. “Let me shower first.”
He can handle: English, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology. Occasionally, he will agree to Political Science but no amount of money, or begging, can convince him to write something for Economics.
At the start of his third year, business hit an unexpected speed-bump. Internet paper mills with names like Essay Share or Paper Trader had been replaced overnight by ChatGPT, and his revenue stream went poof.
For six weeks, he had subsisted on peanut butter sandwiches, and sardines. He watched his savings dwindle. But then, just as he was on the verge of asking his father for money, came news of AI’s strange inventions. A Brazilian author could be born in Iceland. A lesser-known figure of the French Revolution could be reincarnated as a Beat con-temporary of Kerouac.
He fed his clients’ anxiety happily, fabricating tales of embarrassing, technology-generated blunders, F-grades and Honor Council expulsions. He had fun with it, in fact, describing the mayhem—Jane Eyre making friends with the madwoman in the attic or Frankenstein gallivanting through Yoknapatawpha County. The fact that he usually had to explain the unfortunate nature of such combinations only increased his enjoyment. Only now is his money flow stabilizing.
He is relieved to have their business again but feels nothing but loathing for the people who seek out his services. The past three years have led him to the conclusion that there are two types of students: those who cheat and those who don’t. It is as simple as that, a line of demarcation that runs through his peers like a cordon.
The university has an honor code. At a ceremony during the first week of first year students were given copies and asked to read from them aloud. “We take this sort of thing very seriously around here,” the Dean of Students told them sternly through a microphone, in full academic regalia, and they had all meekly signed the papers, stating that they “would neither give nor receive” help on assignments. Cyrus had signed without hesitation, his unofficial part-time job still many months in the future.
Some professors are adept at sniffing out frauds and, ordinarily, he will not touch their assignments. Professor McKinley in the Religion Department is known for making her students provide oral defenses of their written work. Professor Matherson in Philosophy is legendary for his photographic memory – he can identify any paper that has passed his desk in the last thirty years. Several fraternities on campus have stockpiled papers from previous generations of students, but none has been able to get past Matherson.
English is Cyrus’ specialty, although he has been an accounting major since his sophomore year. After graduating, he will return home and do the books for his father’s business. That is the plan. That has always been the plan. But no matter. By the time he is done, he figures he will have written papers for every English professor on campus, no small feat for a college with over 10,000 students.
Running exorcises any misgivings that may arise. He does two or three morning loops around campus and returns to his dorm room, purified. Remembering the piles of beer cans outside the fraternities, the Teslas in the South Student Lot, and the students weaving back to their rooms to sleep, he sits down at his laptop and begins filling the next order.
He has written papers for Professor Sorenson’s first-year seminar and for her Poetry and Poetics class. Now, he is on the hook to write papers for an independent study on World War I poets. He’d been nervous about this one, but the student – a senior named Max who lives in a single across from him – was very persuasive.
“I’ll give you five thousand dollars.”
Max and he have roomed on the same hall for two years running, through some quirk in the student housing lottery. They hang out occasionally, drinking beer or smoking weed. Neither plays a sport or belongs to a fraternity – “Fraternity of one,” Max has told him with a grin, and Cyrus’ business venture doesn’t allow him the time. All in all, Cyrus likes the tall guy from Oregon. He’s a rich kid but without the attitude, and it was a surprise when Max approached him.
“I’ll record our conferences,” Max said. “That way you know exactly what gets said. You can coach me. You’re hot for her anyway, aren’t you?”
Cyrus, who had never made this admission aloud, felt his face growing hot. “Coach you?” he echoed.
“You can tell me exactly what to say and I’ll say it.”
He didn’t take long to think about it. ChatGPT had taken a bite out of his finances. And the idea of a one-on-one with Maggie So-renson, even through the satellite of Max’s head, was too much to refuse.
He is good at writing the papers, and he is good because he is mod-est. He usually only promises B’s. His own grades are A’s but he is too smart to farm them out to everyone else. C’s are beneath his dignity. He promises Max at least an A-.
All semester long, the cheaters accept their D’s and F’s without complaint, without visits to their professors to “discuss” their grades, without taking the option of revising papers or attending extra study sessions. They wait until academic probation becomes a very real possibility. Then they come to Cyrus and expect him to perform miracle resuscitations. He refuses to write A’s for them because sudden turnarounds draw unwanted attention. A student doesn’t go from a title like “Herman Melvin and Whales” to “Delusional Destinies in Moby Dick.” Besides, a well-placed B is usually enough to prevent the axe from falling.
Occasionally, he can be convinced to step it up a notch. Sometimes his client is a girl he wants to impress. Sometimes it is a subject he likes, and he writes the paper in a rush, then doesn’t have the heart to go back and dumb it down.
He had started by writing B’s for Professor Sorenson’s other classes. Then one day he looked up some course information on the university’s website, and there she was, smiling out at him. He had assumed the woman beneath his window was a graduate student but when he saw the sprinkling of freckles across her nose, it all fell into place for him. Since then, he has written only A’s for her.
The first few weeks of the independent study are uneventful, and then one morning he rounds a corner in the English Department as she is leaving her office.
“Hi,” he manages to say in passing.
And she smiles, “Hi.” She looks at him more closely. “It must be awful out there.”
He freezes.
“You’re all wet.” She points to the puddle he is making on the floor.
Following the line of her finger, he is dazed by the reflection of the overhead hallway light but when he looks up, she is already halfway down the hall.
Her voice is different than he’d expected, lower and less ethereal. There is no discernible accent. He returns to her faculty biography. She was born in Chicago and went to school in California. He looks again at her photograph, at the freckles on her nose. He imagines her applying sunblock before taking a barefoot walk on a Pacific beach.
His hunch had been correct; her eyes are hazel.
The World War I poets had been Cyrus’ idea. It was more than his own connection with their poetry, it was a hunch that Maggie Sorenson felt a connection with their poetry, too.
She had been enthusiastic about the proposal he wrote at the end of fall semester, returning a hard copy to Max. You’re a thoughtful reader of Graves, Sassoon and Owen. I’m looking forward to working with you in the spring, she had written.
This old-school move had touched something deep inside Cyrus, and all through the winter break, as he worked in his father’s tool-and-die shop on Long Island, he thought about those words, about the gentle slope of her penmanship. She had suggested books for him to read, including memoirs by Sassoon and Graves. He read them at night, when his brothers were at the bars and his father snored loudly in the next room. He read them on the bus ride back to campus, black lines around his nails from those weeks of work. And he developed a list of questions to ask her – that Max would ask her – because, more than anything, he wanted to hear her speak again.
True to his word, Max uses his phone to record their meetings, sending the files each week. Sometimes, Cyrus walks around campus listening to Maggie Sorenson speak through his earbuds. She reads fragments from poems aloud, and he rewinds to listen a second, third, fourth time.
One day, he sees her reading on a bench, just as she quotes Owen’s letters to Sassoon: I spun round you a satellite for a month, but I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.
Cyrus sits down beneath a tree, pretending to write in a notebook. Really, though, he is just watching her over the top of the page. That’s it exactly, he thinks. Whether he is sleeping, running, sitting in a lecture. It doesn’t matter what it is. Her gravitational pull is constant.
One thing does not compute for Cyrus: Max is not stupid. He has made decent grades for over three years. He is fully capable of doing the independent study successfully, and on his own. It isn’t even a requirement for graduation.
“I prefer to concentrate on other stuff,” he tells Cyrus a little defensively. “I’d rather enjoy my last few months.”
What Cyrus is tempted to tell him, but doesn’t, is: I never figured you for one of them.
Eight weeks into the semester, Maggie Sorenson surprises him by re-citing a Sassoon poem he has never read. She explains that a doctoral student has just discovered the eight handwritten lines in a British university archive.
“Imagine,” she is telling Max. “Nobody has seen this for nearly a hundred years. It was just there, waiting patiently all that time.”
Cyrus is listening to their meeting in his dorm room. He closes his eyes and can hear her joy even over the rain drumming on the windows of her office.
“Wow,” Max tells her.
She reverts to teacher mode. “What do you think the poet wants the reader to understand?”
Cyrus can hear Max shift in his seat.
“Well,” he offers experimentally. “The poem seems a celebration of sensuality . . . “
Cyrus feels Sorenson waiting. “. . . you know, it’s visceral . . .“
He could stop there. The poem is not visceral at all. It is as light as breath. But Cyrus knows that she will eventually cap the silence and move on.
But when Max’s breath catches, Cyrus knows – just knows – that he is about to go rogue.
“Take the woman he’s writing to . . . it’s like he’s saying that even though she has left the room, they are still together. That he has never met her equal.”
Max feels nauseous. The quiet seconds elapse.
“Why do you assume he is writing to a woman?” she asks him finally.
Silence.
“Did you read the biography I suggested?” Max sounds sheepish. “I skimmed it.”
Cyrus rips out his earbuds. He throws open the door to his room and strides to the door across the hallway, but Max isn’t there. The dry erase board on his door boasts a message from someone named Kristin. I stopped by but you were gone. See you later sweetie! The period in the exclamation point is a heart.
Cyrus rips it from his door and throws it down the hallway.
“I’m such an idiot,” Max tells Sorenson in a rush, at the beginning of their next conference. “Of course he’s writing to a man. Mental hiccup.”
“That’s quite a hiccup,” she tells him.
But by the end of the meeting, she appears to have come around, and they are even joking about it. “Read with your eyes open next time,” she tells him in parting.
This recovery emboldens Max. Over the next few weeks, he asks several personal questions: “Do you have any kids?” and, “Life in Marsden must be really different after California?”
To Cyrus’s surprise, she answers him: “No kids.” And, “I like Marsden. More deer, fewer freeways.”
It’s in their familiarity that Cyrus realizes how much he hates Max.
But Max is good-looking and confident. He is smooth-talking in a way that Cyrus will never be. He begins to flirt with her openly. Worse, Cyrus believes he can hear her flirting back.
Then, one day, Max asks for a recommendation for a summer internship at an ecology institute. “I could just go work in my dad’s law firm,” he confides. “But I’d rather do something worthwhile, you know? Make my life count.”
There is silence as she contemplates his words, and then: “You’ll go far, Max.”
It isn’t her augury of Max’s golden future that Cyrus minds, but the easy way she uses his name. He plays their interchange again. Max. Spoken with what Cyrus can only characterize as affection. And, again: Max. Soft, almost breathless.
He considers forfeiting the five thousand dollars. For the first time ever, he debates plagiarizing liberally. He nurses fantasies of cutting and pasting in grandiose fashion. He even finds a paper she has published in an academic journal. He could insert entire paragraphs of her own work and Max would never know until it is too late.
Max, Cyrus can imagine her saying with disappointment at his Academic Infractions Hearing.
He takes himself on punishing runs for miles through pastureland where cows graze on either side. Cars whiz past him as he runs, some of them honking. The luxury class ones invariably have university decals. He presses on in their wake.
“What’s eating you?” Max asks during the next debriefing session, but Cyrus merely shakes his head.
“I’m paying you,” Max reminds him. “So, chill.”
Cyrus wants to hit him. Instead, he turns on his heel and returns to his room.
He spends hours on the final paper, his other “projects” falling briefly by the wayside. He attempts to echo the cadence of Sassoon’s language. He channels the poet’s devastating precision and, as he hands Max a thumb drive, he imagines her printing it on actual paper, holding the pages in her hands.
He goes through the exam period in a trance, churning out several papers for other students, and studying for his own exams. He leaves as soon as the exams are over, making sure that his phone and earbuds are charged for the Greyhound ride back home. He listens to music, having erased Maggie Sorenson from his files.
He tries not to think about her reading his final paper, head bent in concentration, hair falling forward on either side of her face.
He has made enough money over the course of his junior year to stay on top of his tuition gap. He can even take his younger brother on a fishing trip. They will borrow a car from a friend and head to a lake he knows upstate, maybe towards the end of summer when the walls of the house begin closing in on him. Maybe there, sitting with his line in the water, he’ll realize that her freckles, her voice, her poetry have lost their power over him.
But a week before the fishing trip, Cyrus receives a manila envelope from Max. When he holds that weight in his hands, he can no longer hear his brothers’ shouts or the noise of metal against metal from his father’s shop.
Inside, a yellow sticky note on the paper’s title page reads: She figured it out. But there was no proof so she had to pass me. Max had not bothered to sign it.
Cyrus forgets to breathe as he flips to the last page with its skeletal ‘A+’.
Who are you? she has written beneath the grade.
But she will never know. He will never sit in her classroom, never write a paper for her under his own name. He will never know what it is to be there, in her physical presence, as she reads aloud from Neruda. From Plath. From Rich.
He reads the question a second time. A third. It makes every hair on his body stand at attention, like antennae. Like a field of sun-flowers, dark faces tracking the sun.
Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of The First Rule of Swimming (Little, Brown and Company, 2013). Her work has also appeared in Guernica, Zoetrope, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Utne Reader, National Geographic, and Slate.com.