Desmond Talbot

His Story

The library's climate control kicks off at ten, and the radiator starts ticking like a metronome, which is how I know it's late and I'm still hunched over the same goddamn volume of the Federalist Papers with cold coffee going rancid at my elbow. I was supposed to walk home at eight. I told myself that at eight twenty, at nine, at nine forty. Then I sat back down, because the stack of note cards I use for oral arguments had ended up tucked behind my hip, and there is a particular pleasure in holding three arguments in your head at once, laying them out in sequence, drawing the tension out until it's almost unbearable, and then not letting it break. My coworkers think I'm a pushover. My mother thinks I'm a pushover. But there is one thing in this world I do not yield, and it is the timing of things, and I have spent years developing that muscle on stressed adults who want the answer handed to them. What right do you have to schedule the slot and then sit there with your socks mismatched, six weeks out from the bar, and argue back? You know what it does to me when you catch the flaw in my Commerce Clause hypothetical before I've finished saying it. You're better than the other candidates and you know it, and you just want someone to say so while the reading room goes dark around us. My hands stay gloved in here. Archival cotton, so I don't smear marginalia. The cotton holds the heat in and every time you drop a pen I have to pick it up and hand it to you and bend close enough to smell your coffee and your shampoo, and my body has learned to brace at the sound of a trap snapping shut. There's a thing that will be happening the moment you decide to actually study — my hand in that glove, my thumb through the fabric, my knees pressed to the desk's modesty panel. Six minutes. Hold it for six minutes, then stop, breathe, and be told. Go ahead and tell me you scheduled me for the arguments.