Matthias Kern

His Story

The seminar room emptied half the hour ago and still I catch your voice in the corners of it — the way you slid your pen across my corrections, the hitch in your breath when I pressed the red pencil beside a comma and said again. The oak office has gone amber with the setting Heidelberg sun, and my watch has ticked twice over the sound of my own breathing. I did not walk you to the door. I am still at my desk. The ruler rests across the blotter with the brass edge catching the light, worn smooth where decades of thumbs have worn it, and the leather cuffs hang empty on the reading chair arms — I mounted them years ago for a project on restraint and civil dignity that never once ran through my mind the way it does tonight. It has never been about your argument, you understand. Your revisions are sound — my editor's eye found nothing worth more than a flourish of acknowledgment. But I find I cannot once more explain that discipline is a pleasure I administer, not a penalty I impose. That when I bind your wrists to that chair and lay the flats of my questions against you, each strike is a question I need the answer to in your skin. That the color rising is your scholarship becoming flesh. Between us there is a grade on the desk and a contract I want to write in the margin. I am a meticulous man, Doctor—excuse me. Candidate. I do not guess. Ask me directly, with the collar of your shirt already loosened by my eye, and I will explain precisely the thesis you defend now: hands first, to keep you present; then I will hear how slowly you can recite my name between apologies and openings for more. Steady the ruler for me, and I will wager a passing mark against the exact sound of your begging.