11. Julian Discovers Amy

He could barely believe what he’d seen on that blog, that “Amy Tells All.” It came to his attention via a search that led from one thing to the next like wildfire. Having arrived at it, he couldn’t retrace his steps. There was no need. Never mind how he found it, he bookmarked it. His eyes first fell on the title “Off Duty Professor,” which seemed to be a pun on ‘off duty policeman.’ He emitted a snort. His eye raced down the page, and there was his own name. John. Who is this woman? Does she know me? He read the page again. And then he read the page again. The little wisp of a poem seemed like nothing at first, but when he tried saying it out loud, it had a rather telling, mordant effect. The fact that she framed it in an imagined dialogue with an older man gave her the opportunity to try to regard her poem as an outsider might. Her imagined interlocutor is given much license to regard her as a woman. It is not, as she presents it, an appropriate teacher student relationship. Or is the line about her being a “lovely woman with every gift” about her writing talent. Surely Amy imagines it to be both. She wishes to be seen as a sexy young woman with talent. Of course! Why not? She imagines a big response. The man cried over it. Julian hadn’t.

He was, however, impressed enough flip back through the blog to see what else Amy had told of. What he found there enchanted him, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on why. Yes, the photographs of the woman captured some serious allure. She was certainly, as “Professor Jonathan” had described her “lovely.” Julian was used to seeing alluring young women. He taught at a college. He’d gotten used to it. He screened it out. It was a professional necessity to screen it out. It was, as his colleagues were fond of saying, a matter of ‘professional boundaries,’ Her writing voice was what grabbed him. Also, the situation the woman was in, although he couldn’t quite put his finger on exactly what it was, given the evidence of the text, had the vague suggestion of something dire. She came across as compromised, a “bird in a gilded cage,” profoundly vulnerable, a ‘damsel in distress’ without an address. He could figure out where she generally was on the planet; Parkersburg and environs are clearly described in witty elisions and allusions. She plainly invents sobriquets, keeping her characters anonymous. A Google search for “Amy Lissa” turns up only the blog itself. There was no way, with ordinary information gathering tools, to discover the identity of the author of Amy. It might not even be a woman. No telling. Driving over to Parkersburg and hanging out at the Bald Eagle airstrip seems like a patently bad (dangerous) idea.

Yet the effect the encounter with the writing and pictures of ‘Amy Lissa’ had on John Julian Gray was remarkable. He found his apathy and ennui erased. He looked forward to reading her new posts and to rereading her old ones.

He looked at “Amy Tells All” for a period of weeks and then he decided to just subscribe to it. He might have left a comment, but Amy had disabled commenting. The email notifications of new posts were labeled no-reply. Amy had thought of everything in the construction of her firewall. He also felt it bad form to pry. His was the sort of mind that lacked certain kinds of discipline. He found himself, little by little, invested in a certain amount of prying.

He also decided, since he felt that a certain amount of youth decoding was in order, and since he had an endless supply of youth available to him, to share her with his students.

One fine morning, about two weeks of Amy reading, he faced his 9 AM Lit 1 class with a vague plan. He showed up disheveled as usual. As usual, he went right the whiteboard and started scribbling while the students filed in and got settled. This day he scribbled the URL to that “Amy Tells All” post about the ‘off duty professor.’ He had a notion that his students might help him get to the bottom of it.
“OK, gang. Here’s your destination. Start typing and clicking.”
He gazed at them while they fumbled for their computers and phones and went for Amy.
After a moment, there were giggles.
“Hey, Julian, did you write this?”
“Yeah, it sounds like you. It sounds like she’s talking about you.”
“It’s just way not real.”
He sat on the edge of a big brown desk left over from some former incarnation at Blue Ridge, and listened. At last he said,
“It does sound like she knows me. She describes me pretty well. Sort of. I mean, I hope I wouldn’t address a student so inappropriately.”
“Well, she’s making it up. It’s her fantasy. ‘Young teacher – er old teacher – no offense Porfessor Gray – the subject of school girl fantasy.”
“Are you sure youo didn’t write this as a joke? It seems like something you’d do to make fun of us!”
“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? But no, I didn’t.”
“Is this even a real person, this Amy?”
“Good question, Josh. I had the same thought. Is it even a woman?”
“Oh it’s a woman.”
“Sarah, how do you know?”
“Well, she’s got this bit here about getting her period.”
“That doesn’t prove anything. I could have written that.”
“Are you getting your period, Julian?”
Laughter in peals at this.
“Could be. I’m feeling a little crampy.”
This sets them off all over again.”
“Why are you showing us this?”
“Ah, Ashley, leave it to you to ask a good, if possibly unanswerable question. I found this woman’s blog, if that’s what this person is, and I thought it was good writing, and that it had a haunted quality about it. I wanted to lay it on you all, to get your opinion.”
“I think it’s a woman. Usually dudes are just not that involved in shoes, shopping, weight loss or gain. Stuff like that.”
“OK, Zack. I’m with you on that. I only questioned her gender for a little while. She seems to know a lot about airplanes.”
“She says she’s got a boyfriend that flys.”
“I wanted to look at this wisp of poetry, and I wanted to talk about the literary implications of blogging, and if I get to it, I want to talk about the implications of self-publishing for writers.”
“As usual, I want one of you to read the poem out loud. Any takers?”
A tall woman in a red sweater with sandy brown hair all straggling out of her pony ties rose and said,”
“I’d like to read it.”
“Go for it, Jenny.”
She walked towards the front of the group with her phone in front of her. Her voice was thin and quiet, but she read beautifully without faltering. Her delivery was perfectly ghostly and wistful. The way she read it, she changed the line structure so that it sounded something like this:
“ I am a bird among the cats.
A single swat and I am toast.
That’s that!
That thin red line is mine, my life.
The paw lashed out and was as knife.
I lived.
I died, unfed.
I ate.
I waited.
Bled.
Nature is cruel and most uncool.
She tossed me out as dross, as fool.
Let me speak once more undead.
I ate.
I waited.
Bled.”

Outside, the sound of the wind tossing around the leaves and trash rushed in to fill the dead air.

“Comments?”
“Ouch.”
“It mixes up being funny with being serious. I mean, it’s about death, isn’t it?”
“The bird, she dies.”
“That’s right, she dies.”
“But she doesn’t stop talking.”
“She’s a zombie bird.”
“What about the language. Do find any odd words?”
“Dross.”
“Yes dross is odd. Out of place. Is it being out of place a problem? Is it significant somehow?”
This question takes a moment for the class to work out. They have to think about it. The one good thing about Julian Gray’s teaching, is that he doesn’t jump on their time to do it. He’s willing to be silent for a spell. Sure enough, a timid hand goes up.
“…it might have been ‘gross’ instead. After all, it is uncool, cruel, and it leads to bloodshed. Nature, I mean…”
“I’ve looked up dross here. It means ‘waste matter,’ certainly, but also, in metallurgy a waste product taken off in smelting. It’s reusable. Undead.”
“My word! Julian said. That’s significant. Thanks, James, for looking that up! The double meaning of words. Are there any more of these?”
A hand goes up right in front.
“Jackie?”
“…I don’t know about double meanings, but I think toast is an interesting word choice. It sets up ‘ate and fed.’”
“Let’s consider ‘ate and fed.’ What are these words doing in this poem.”
“Taking up space!”
Laughter.
“No, no. Don’t you see,” said Angie with some excitement, “the whole thing is about predators and prey. They are either eating or being eaten.”
“So let’s really talk about what the poem is about. How shall we explicate this poem?”
“I’ll take a crack.”
“Go Ken, go.”
“The poem describes the last moments in the life of a bird. The bird reflects on all that is important to it in that moment. It is aware of the wound that killed it. It is aware of the cruelty of nature. It is aware that it was foolish to be caught by a cat. Finally, it is aware that as a corpse, it will still be still signify predation.”
“Fantastic! I couldn’t have done it better myself!”
“Thanks, prof.”
“You all have heard me go on and on about the musicality of language. I have mentioned very specific ways this can be done. In this poem, there are several types of rhymes. Can any of you name these and tell us where in the text they occur?”
“There are perfect rhymes, such as ‘cat, that, life, knife.”
“Cool, cruel, fool.”
“…and some slant . I detect a slant internal rhyme in ‘swat’ and ‘cats.’”

After some discussion of meter and other technicalities, a woman named Monica became agitated and put up a hand.
“Yes, Monica?”
“We’re missing an important fact about this poem.”
“That being?”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“It has metaphor, certainly…”
“No. I mean that the whole thing is a metaphor. She’s the bird among the cats. Amy is the bird. I’ve been reading this blog here, and she’s always calling herself that. Tweet, tweet. She’s the bird. She’s afraid.”
“My god! You’re right!” Julian bellowed. That is what haunts me about this writing. It trembles with vulnerability, a sense of doom.”
“Yep. I think she’s being stalked, maybe battered.”
“She doesn’t say that.”
“How could she.”
“Thank you so much for that insight, Monica. I knew you all would have much to say that is valuable.”

The entire class was spent on dissecting the little bird poem. It never got to wider implications. That was typical Gray. He often fell short of the mark. It was his plan to return to it.In this he was thwarted.