The Body of the Text

The lecture hall smelled of old paper and cheap disinfectant, a combination that always reminded Gunner of the public high school he'd left behind in Cleveland. He shifted in the plastic seat, trying to find a position where his knees didn't bump against the row in front, and pretended to take notes on his laptop while actually listening to the conversation happening two seats behind him.

"—heard they only take six students. Six, out of like three hundred applications."

"That's insane. What's so special about their seminar anyway?"

"It's not just a seminar, it's basically a golden ticket. You get access to their private library, they take you to conferences, introduce you to everyone. Last year their students all got into top PhD programs."

Gunner's fingers hovered over the keyboard. He'd been hearing fragments of these conversations for weeks now, always the same hushed, reverent tones when anyone mentioned Sebastian and Brie Thorne. The couple who taught together, wrote together, apparently thought together in some kind of intellectual symbiosis that sounded more like mythology than academia.

"They're supposed to be brutal, though. Like, make you cry in front of everyone brutal."

"Yeah, but imagine having that on your CV. Thorne seminar, completed. Doors just open."

Gunner glanced at the time in the corner of his screen. The intro to critical theory lecture had another twenty minutes, but he'd already filled three pages with notes about Thorne gossip instead of Derrida. He minimized the document and pulled up his email, refreshing for the third time that hour even though he knew the application deadline wasn't for another two weeks.

The girl next to him was drawing intricate patterns in her notebook margins. When she caught him looking, she leaned over. "You're thinking about applying, aren't you?"

He felt his face get hot. "I don't know. Maybe."

"Everyone's thinking about it. But they're looking for a specific type, you know?" She studied him for a moment, taking in his Target-brand hoodie, his generic laptop, the careful way he'd introduced himself to the professor on the first day. "It's not just about being smart."

Gunner nodded and looked back at his screen, as if whatever she saw in him was something he could edit out, revise into something more acceptable. He'd been doing it his whole life—learning to pronounce words correctly by watching YouTube videos, teaching himself which fork to use at dinner, practicing the casual confidence that came naturally to students whose parents had explained office hours to them before they even arrived on campus.

Behind him, the conversation had moved on to other gossip: who was sleeping with their advisor, which professors to avoid, the best places to cry on campus. Normal things. Human things that didn't require you to be brilliant or special, just present and willing to participate.

When the lecture finally ended, Gunner packed his bag slowly, watching the other students file out in their groups and pairs. He'd learned to do this—linger just long enough to avoid the awkwardness of walking alone, but not so long that he looked like he had nowhere to go.

In the library, he found an empty carrel on the fourth floor and pulled up the Thorne seminar webpage again. The course description was typically opaque: "Myth and Matter: Embodiment, Narrative, and the Construction of Intellectual Desire." He'd read it at least fifty times, trying to decode what they actually wanted from applicants.

The requirements were simple: a ten-page critical essay on any text, accompanied by a one-page statement of purpose. No prompts, no guidelines, no hints about what might make them notice you among the hundreds of other desperate students trying to sound profound.

Gunner opened a new document and stared at the blank page. He could write about the poem he'd been analyzing for his other class, the one about exile and belonging. He could make it smart, theoretically sophisticated, prove that he understood the concepts they'd spent their careers developing.

But even as he started typing, he could hear his advisor's voice in his head: they want to see you thinking, not just performing intelligence. The problem was that Gunner wasn't sure where his real thoughts ended and his performance of being a serious student began. He'd spent so long learning how to sound like he belonged here that he'd forgotten what his actual voice sounded like.

He deleted everything and started again. This time, he wrote about the poem, but also about the lecture hall smell that reminded him of high school, about listening to other students plan their futures while he calculated how many hours he could work at the library without his grades slipping. About wanting something so badly it felt like hunger, the kind that made you stupid and reckless and honest.

When he looked up, the library windows had gone dark. He saved the document—"Thorne application draft 1"—and closed his laptop. The reflection that stared back at him looked like someone who might be capable of writing something worth reading, or might be kidding himself about everything.

He had two weeks to figure out which one was true.

The next morning, Gunner skipped his usual dining-hall oatmeal and took the bus to the graduate library, the only place that stocked the Thornes’ early monographs. He started with Sebastian’s 2011 book The Will to Metaphor, a forbidding black hardback that weighed like a brick in his backpack. The introduction alone sent him to Wikipedia three times, but he kept going, highlighter between his teeth, filling margins with definitions and half-questions. Sebastian wrote in long, surgical sentences that seemed to dissect their own assumptions as they advanced. Gunner underlined a passage on “the violence of conceptual mapping,” then realized he wasn’t sure whether “violence” was metaphorical or literal; the uncertainty felt like a test he was already failing.

He moved on to Brie’s Archive of Breath (2014), a smaller, cream-colored volume whose pages smelled of cheap academic paper. Where Sebastian’s prose marched, hers drifted, looping back on itself in personal digressions: a description of her mother’s perfume, the creak of her childhood home’s staircase at dawn. She quoted Anne Carson in one paragraph and her own dreams in the next. Gunner caught himself reading whole sections aloud, the cadence intimate, almost embarrassing, like overhearing someone confess to a mirror. A footnote recounted the first night she and Sebastian stayed up until sunrise arguing about whether narrative could ever be ethical; she’d written, “We came to no conclusion, only a shared exhaustion that felt like truth.” Gunner read the line three times, then copied it onto his phone’s notes app, unsure whether he wanted to understand it or simply keep it.

By Friday he had checked out six more books and installed himself in a carrel that smelled of dust and instant coffee. He began to read them in pairs—Sebastian on language’s failure, Brie on the body’s persistence—switching every hour so their voices overlapped in his head like counter-melodies. Sebastian claimed metaphor was a defensive weapon; Brie claimed the body always betrayed metaphor by bleeding. Together they argued across the years, footnotes sparring with endnotes, and Gunner felt himself claimed by the cross-fire. He started a new document titled “Thorne Concordance,” logging every time Sebastian cited Brie or Brie footnoted Sebastian, as if mapping a constellation whose shape mattered more than its stars.

Late one night he found a 2015 joint interview on JSTOR. The thumbnail showed them sitting on the same side of a café table, shoulders touching, hands overlapping around a single coffee cup. He downloaded the PDF, heart thumping absurdly. Asked how they wrote together, Sebastian answered first: “We fight until a third voice appears that is neither of us.” Brie laughed, added, “Then we try to seduce that voice into staying.” Gunner read the exchange twice, then minimized the article, cheeks hot, as if they’d caught him eavesdropping. He opened his draft application and typed: “The voice I want to cultivate is the one that appears only when I stop trying to sound like I belong.” He stared at the sentence until it stopped looking brave and started looking naive, then deleted it.

The more he read, the more their partnership seemed both effortless and meticulously staged. In the introduction to their co-edited volume The Intimate Archive they described their weekly ritual: Sunday mornings, one laptop, two mugs of tea, passing the computer back and forth, sentence by sentence, deleting each other’s adjectives until only what both could claim remained. Gunner tried to imagine the scene—morning light on a kitchen table, the quiet clack of keys, the small satisfied nod when a paragraph finally fit them both—and felt a stab of loneliness so acute he had to close the book. He had never written anything with another person; he’d never wanted to until now.

He began to dream in their cadences. One night he woke at 3 a.m. with a sentence in his head—“The body remembers what the metaphor tries to forget”—and could not tell whether he had plagiarized it or invented it. He turned on the light, typed it into his Concordance, then opened a new tab and reread the application guidelines. Ten pages. One statement. No prompts. He understood suddenly that the assignment was not to impress them but to approximate the third voice they had conjured between themselves, a voice neither Sebastian’s nor Brie’s but the space where their sentences touched. The realization felt like standing at the edge of a cliff he could not see.

The next afternoon he took the bus to their public lecture. He arrived forty minutes early, claimed a seat in the center of the front row, and opened Sebastian’s newest article on his phone so the words would be fresh when their bodies appeared. The hall filled slowly, chatter rising like steam. When the side door opened and they walked in together—Sebastian in a charcoal suit, Brie in a soft black dress that brushed her calves—Gunner felt his pulse stutter. They did not speak to each other, did not need to; their eyes found empty seats, adjusted microphones, exchanged a glance so brief it was less than a second yet carried the weight of every sentence he had read. He understood then that the seminar was not a class but an invitation into that glance, and that his entire life up to this moment had been a rehearsal for entering it without stumbling.

He chose the poem because it was ugly. “Elegy for a Disembodied Voice” sprawled across twenty-three numbered fragments, each one ending with a parenthetical cough. No one in the department had assigned it; he’d found it while clicking through a back issue of boundary 2 during a graveyard shift at the library help desk. The poet—an Albanian refugee who taught at a community college in Newark—had published only that single piece before disappearing. Gunner printed it on the department’s expensive paper, the margins already smelling like toner and panic.

Night one: he tried exegesis. Fragment 4 contained the line “my throat a rented room.” He dutifully noted the Marxist undertow, the commodification of the speaking body, the trope of diasporic eviction. The paragraph read like a obituary for his own curiosity. He deleted it.

Night two: he wrote about the cough. Not what it meant, but how it felt in his mouth when he read it aloud—like a hiccup of language, a place where breath refused to be transfigured into sense. He described the way his own throat closed when he rode the bus at 5 a.m. to open the library, how the cough in the poem sounded like the exact frequency of exhaustion. He let the paragraph run three pages, single-spaced, before he realized he had stopped analyzing and started confessing. He saved it in a separate file labeled “too much.”

Night three: he rewatched the Thorne interview. He paused the PDF on the coffee-cup overlap of their hands, zoomed until the pixels blurred, and tried to write a sentence that would feel like that image—intimate, collaborative, unashamed of needing another person. What emerged was: “The cough is not a symptom; it is the poem’s way of holding the reader’s hand without permission.” He stared at it until it curdled into cliché, then cut it.

By night four the poem had memorized itself inside him. He walked to his shift at the library reciting fragments under his breath, the parenthetical coughs arriving at crosswalks like hiccups. Between shelving returns he drafted on scrap catalog cards: “Voice is what remains when the body is taught to apologize for taking up space.” He tucked the cards into his back pocket like contraband.

Night five: he discovered the poet had died. Not recently—fifteen years ago, liver failure, found alone in a studio apartment whose walls were covered with taped-up pages of the poem. Gunner read the obituary three times, hunting for biographical ammunition. Instead he found only a quotation from a colleague: “He kept writing the same book because no one ever told him he was allowed to finish.” The sentence lodged under his ribs like a second heart. He opened his draft and wrote: “The poem’s refusal to end is not a formal gesture; it is a tenant’s refusal to vacate.” He did not delete it.

Night six: Sebastian’s voice started interrupting. Gunner would be mid-sentence and hear the precise, surgical cadence from The Will to Metaphor asking, “But what is at stake for you in this reading?” He began answering aloud, whispering into the glow of his laptop at 3 a.m.: “My stake is that I have never lived anywhere longer than two years and I want language to promise I can stay.” The admission felt obscene and necessary. He left it in.

Night seven: he printed the essay. Ten pages, 11-point Garamond, double-spaced, one-inch margins. He read it in the shower stall because the dorm bathroom’s fluorescent light was gentler than his desk lamp. Halfway through he started crying, quietly, the way you cry when you recognize your own voice recorded and played back. The essay was messy, too personal, academically reckless. It ended with a confession: “I want to believe a poem can be a home, but I keep coughing myself out of it.”

He almost closed the file without saving. Instead he renamed it “Application_FINAL” and walked across campus at dawn to the English department office. The submission portal was a simple black box: upload, click, confirm. He hovered the cursor, feeling the cliff edge under his feet again. Then he remembered the interview line: We fight until a third voice appears that is neither of us. He clicked. The page refreshed to a blank confirmation screen. No fireworks, no echo. Just the quiet mechanical knowledge that the essay—his voice, his cough, his hunger—was now circulating in the same digital air the Thornes breathed. He shut the laptop and pressed his forehead against the cool plastic. For the first time in a week he tasted something other than toner: the metallic edge of having said exactly what he could not afford to retract.

The lecture hall filled early, a slow tide of scarves and laptops settling into rows that rose toward the back wall. Gunner kept his coat on, the collar grazing his jaw, and watched the doorway for the man whose sentences had colonized his sleep. When Sebastian finally entered, the room’s pitch lifted half a register: coats rustled, screens snapped open, someone near the front coughed into a sudden hush. He wore no jacket, only a charcoal shirt cut close to the shoulders, sleeves rolled once to expose the hard taper of wrist bone. No notes. He placed a single index card on the lectern, squared it with two fingers, and looked up as if surprised to find the audience still there.

“Today we will speak about metaphor’s refusal to stay metaphor,” he began, voice low, almost conversational, yet the microphone carried it to the rafters like a net pulling everyone forward. Gunner felt the sentence land inside his ribs. Sebastian did not pace; he leaned, he tilted, he let silence do half the talking. Each time he asked a rhetorical question he left a beat so deliberate it felt like a dare to fill it. No one did. The hall became a single lung holding its breath.

Halfway through, the argument tightened. Sebastian dissected a stanza—Gunner recognized it from the article he had read on his phone—ripping adjectives away with the calm of a man skinning fruit. He said “epistemic violence” and “semantic bruise” in the same breath, then paused to let the contradiction glow. Gunner realized he was gripping the program so hard the paper had creased into a ridge that bit his palm. He relaxed his fingers one by one, unwilling to look away long enough to check if anyone had noticed.

When the time came for questions, a graduate student in the second row tried to corner him on the politics of citation. Sebastian smiled—a quick, feral thing—and answered with a counter-question that exposed the assumption beneath the assumption. The student sat back as if physically shoved. Applause started somewhere in the middle rows and spread outward, a hesitant rain that grew into a storm. Gunner clapped until his palms stung, then kept them pressed together, afraid the sound of his own hands might drown the last echo of Sebastian’s voice.

Only then did he let his gaze drop to the front row. Brie sat three seats from the aisle, legs crossed at the ankle, hands folded in her lap so lightly they might have been resting on water. She had not spoken, had not taken a single note, but her eyes never left the stage. When Sebastian said, “The poem is a house the reader breaks into, not a gift she unwraps,” her mouth curved—just one side—an expression so private it seemed wired to their bedroom rather than this public room. She did not applaud with the others; instead she inclined her head a fraction, a nod meant for two people only: herself and the man who had just spoken her thoughts aloud.

Gunner felt it like a slap. The intimacy of that glance was not performative; it was muscle memory, the reflex of two bodies that had spent years learning the exact torque of each other’s sentences. He saw, with a clarity that made his stomach dip, that whatever third voice they summoned in print lived first in the air between their mouths at 2 a.m., in the shared breath of a kitchen still smelling of yesterday’s coffee. He was not merely outside that circle; he was unaware of its circumference, its weather, its gravity.

The lights came up. People stood, chairs clacking, voices splintering into small, bright shards. Sebastian stepped off the low stage and was immediately encircled. Brie rose, too, but she waited, letting the crowd flow around her like a rock in a stream. Someone touched her elbow; she answered without turning her head, eyes still tracking her husband’s shoulders as he moved through the adulation. Gunner stayed seated, program rolled now into a tight tube. The ridge in his palm had become a pale welt. He told himself the sting was from the paper, not from the sudden, precise knowledge that he had never been looked at that way in his life—and might never be.

The cursor blinked once, turned solid, and the upload bar filled in a single breath. Gunner’s finger lifted from the trackpad as if the plastic had burned. The confirmation page replaced the submission box: Thank you. Your materials have been received. A case number, twelve digits, nothing else.

He closed the laptop. The latch clicked with the finality of a seat belt locking on take-off. In the black screen he saw himself: cheekbones sharpened by fluorescent light, eyes ringed with seven nights of half-sleep, the collar of his thrift-store coat puckered where he had worried the fabric between his teeth. The reflection looked like a boy pretending to be a man who might one day lecture in that same hall, might stand where Sebastian had stood and feel Brie’s gaze travel across the backs of strangers to find him. The fantasy felt obscene, almost violent in its impossibility.

He pushed the laptop away. The movement sent a stack of index cards fluttering to the floor. He didn’t pick them up. Instead he pressed his palms flat against the desk, feeling the laminate’s fake wood grain bite into his skin. Somewhere inside the server the pdf of his essay—inked with coughs and scholarships and the smell of every transient bedroom he had ever slept in—was already being time-stamped, routed into a folder labeled THORNE SEMINAR 23-24. Maybe Sebastian would open it first, scanning the opening line with that economical flick of the wrist that made ordinary sentences feel like contraband. Maybe Brie would read it in bed, screen glow replacing lamplight on her collarbone, her husband’s breathing beside her a metronome for her thoughts. Maybe they would both lean over the same monitor, shoulders touching, and laugh at the audacity of a boy who compared academic dislocation to an eviction notice nailed on the soul.

He realized he was holding his breath. The room smelled of stale coffee and the chemical lemon of floor cleaner. Around him the department’s computer lab was empty except for a girl at the far end who kept tucking hair behind her ear while she scrolled, the gesture so repetitive it looked like she was trying to keep herself from unraveling. He wondered if she, too, had just handed over a piece of herself to people whose job was to judge whether that piece deserved to live.

His phone buzzed: a calendar reminder—shift at the library in twenty minutes. He swiped it away. The numbers on the lock screen said 07:19, early enough that the grass outside was still silvered with frost, the paths empty of the professors who would later stride across them like they owned the ground itself. He pictured Sebastian’s wrist again, the exposed tendon when he had squared the index card, and felt an answering tug behind his own kneecaps, as if the body could recognize power the way skin recognizes heat.

He stood. The chair’s wheels squeaked, and the girl looked up; her eyes met his for a second, then slid away. He slung his backpack over one shoulder, the strap biting through the coat’s thin padding. The weight of the laptop seemed suddenly negligible, as though the essay had been amputated from him and the machine was now just plastic and light.

Outside, the cold snapped against the thin skin under his eyes. He walked past the English building, past the window of the Thorne office that was still dark, blinds half-open like a mouth asleep. His reflection swam across the glass: same coat, same bruised ambition, but something inside the ribcage had been re-arranged, a door he could no longer shut. He told himself it was only an application, only a seminar, that thousands of students clicked submit every semester and survived the wait. The reassurance felt hollow, a lullaby sung into a metal tube.

At the crosswalk he stopped. The signal blinked red, red, red. In the window of a parked sedan he saw himself again, superimposed over the empty driver’s seat: a boy carrying the afterimage of two professors who did not yet know his name. The signal clicked, turned white. He stepped off the curb carrying the precise weight of a secret that might never be answered, and for the first time in years the uncertainty felt like permission rather than sentence.