Instead I lay on the living room floor, my laptop suspended in the air above my head thanks to a Korean “lying-down desk” I ordered on eBay, and I donated more money to a sickly black goat in Colorado. I’ve given the goat money before. He was born with some sort of terrible disease that prevents his legs from working correctly. He even has one prosthetic goat leg. I watched his GoFundMe video again and again. His owner is a young woman bursting with blond health and yet hysterical with love, worry, and deluded hope over a bloated paraplegic goat whom she has insisted on saving.
I watched footage of the goat enduring his many medical trials, his many backslides into near death. I watched his brief moments of recovery, in which he limps along on his prosthetic goat leg in a hand-knitted sweater or gets pulled down a snowy hill on a sled. I watched the goat’s ears flop in the wind and my heart shredded. He looked so indescribably happy being pulled in the sled. I cried at what I perceived to be his small smile. So vulnerable. So helpless. His pain bottomless, yet he takes his joy when he can. I watched the video again and again until I passed out on the floor.
* * *
Now as I lie here in my office, I hear a knock on the door. Then another. I shiver. Fauve, probably. Definitely. Checking in to see how I’m doing, which is bullshit.
How goes the play, Miranda? she’ll say, looking down at me on the floor. Smiling sorrowfully. Oh dear, performing our misery again, are we?
Normally I would have nothing but empathy for an adjunct. But Fauve is another animal, you know the kind I mean. She believes that it is she, with her PhD in Cats and her spotty career in musical theater, who should be an assistant professor here, not me. That this should be her office. That she should have the privilege of clawing her way to tenure. Because she has the claws, after all. Always freshly painted, always shimmering.
And because I’m a fraud. She can smell it, absolutely.
Where did you get your doctorate, Miranda? she asked when we first met. Like she was only just terribly interested. Didn’t already know the facts.
Miranda’s a stage actor, Grace said, patting me on the back. Grace still loved me then. Loved that I was an actor and not a scholar. That I didn’t have a stick up my ass like the rest of the department.
An actor, Fauve repeated, actually widening her eyes. Really? Anything I might have seen?
I was with a company in Massachusetts for a long time. Defunct. And then Shakespeare festivals, of course. Lots of festivals, I lied. Edinburgh, Idaho.
Idaho, Fauve repeated breathlessly. Really.
I try to remind myself that the adjunct life is a shitty life, that it can turn you into an asshole. That you can’t help but look at the faculty around you and think, Why the fuck are you here permanently and not me? That of course Fauve would turn her gaze on me. Deformed and drugged out of my mind. Forgetting my words mid-speech. CV full of filler and lies. I am easily usurped. She need only bide her time taking note with her neck pen, amassing her case, watching the train wreck that I have become go careening off the rails. And when it does, she will be there, of course, to pick up the pieces.
Anything I can do to help? she’ll say. You seemed like you had your hands full the other day. The students seem so terribly unhappy too.
Knock, knock again at my door.
Not Fauve, no. This is a soft knock. A kind knock. Something in its softness makes my eyes water as I gaze up at the underside of my desk. The spider is long gone.
“Who is it?” I ask the door. I shudder to think of Briana. Even Grace I don’t want to see right now. Oh god, not Hugo either. If it’s Hugo, I’ll—
“It’s Ellie,” Ellie says quietly through the door.
Some darkness in me lightens.
“Helen,” I whisper.
“What?”
“Just a minute.”
I get up, trying not to make huffing sounds. When I rise, I immediately falter and so lean against the desk, casually, coolly. But I can’t meet Ellie this way. So I force myself to sit down in my office chair. The pain I feel upon sitting, the slicing sensation behind each knee, makes me cry out.
“Professor, are you okay?”
“Yes. Come in, come in,” I call.
Ellie enters hesitantly, as she always does. Wearing her sad-girl clothes. Her no-color hair hangs lank around her bloodless face. Her gray eyes are, as usual, mournful. Her hands tremble at her sides, the fingers twitching uselessly, performing an anxious arithmetic. It gives me such joy to see her.
Ellie says she hopes she’s not disturbing me. I assure her she isn’t. Of course not. Never. She is welcome here anytime. Have a seat, my dear.