When he got the post as a research assistant one of his first tasks was to be "representative" — that was the adjective the Professor Emeritus used when he instructed him and he indicated irony by signaling double brackets with four fingers. At a recent seminar Professor Fir had exclaimed that, by definition, he was a postmodernist, but nobody had understood at what level this was supposed to be a joke. Since then he had began using the double brackets' gesture. Anyway, the first task was to stand in the hallway and direct postgraduates to the correct location of the semester's first seminar on "Gender Trouble and Binary Non-Thinking." He stood there directing students to the correct location and he was trying to be aware of being ironically "representative." None of the students, however, seemed to read his appearance as either postmodern or ironic —and he did check their reactions carefully.
Just when he thought his task was over — the time was about 16.20 — this woman in black came up to him and looked him straight into his eyes. "Do you know where they are?" she said and then immediately looked up into the ceiling. She was small and nondescript and her blackness was a neat dress and black high-heeled shoes. He realized that this was the guest lecturer from Portugal, who was going to lead the seminar series about gender troubles. "You are expected," he said. "Follow me." And the clicking and clacking followed him down the corridor.
There was a rather large audience in the seminar room. The woman in black didn't make a success with her first utterance: "Are there any postmodernists in the room?" It was all quiet and the afternoon sun through dusty windows mirrored the effect of boredom that spread in the seminar room. She began talking about literature and literary theory and the silence seemed to manifest in every particle of dust that could be observed in the room in the vague sunlight. He tried to figure her out, a first assessment. Her dress was black but here eyes weren't black; her body was skinny but not without female forms. Her voice was not convincing, but had a melodic quality; her English was rhythmically flawed but without linguistic noise. Everybody must have heard what she was saying.
He later learned that she had met Professor Fir at a conference and somehow charmed him into the discourse of irony. "I am short and I hate short people," Fir had said, "and now the only way you can find out is if you ask him if I am being ironic. And I am not going to answer." She had been somewhat charmed by his naivety. And here she was standing in class talking about the term psycho-gender: "the only way for woman to resist patriarchy is to psyche her gender and gender her psyche, her body must be infinitely a-morphous, amour-phus."
After the lecture he went out to smoke a cigarette. Three blond female students were smoking next to him. One of the students had very big hair and kept repeating the word 'theory.' "It's a con-text," said one of the others, "it cons you into thinking that it is a text." She puffed smoke rings into the ceiling. The third girl nodded and looked very serious: "Every text tries to fool you into thinking that it is gender-neutral and non-binary." The other two nodded.
"Were you caught up here by the sirens?" It was the lady in black. "We must hurry," she said, "Orlando is waiting." Orlando referred to Professor Fir, but his first name had never been uttered before at the Department. He wondered why they would be expected. "You should not mingle with those girls," said the woman in black, "they cannot think." "Well," he said, "they are referred to as the three witches at the department." She laughed a very loud staccato laugh and added: "It looks like rain, said the first murderer — Well, let it come down, said the second murderer!"
Orlando sat in his office, alternately smelling and nibbling some soda bread. "Max, I heard you did a great job directing all those students," he said and bracketed his ironic fingers. His chin protruded, which he knew was a sign of earnest approval. "And Juanita says you contributed to the seminar with some really sharp and intelligent questions." His chin protruded even more. And Juanita uttered something in a strange melodic way — what atonal language was that? — so that his inner ears seemed to curl together. "Max," Orlando said, "I would like you to work with Juanita on a project that I have designed. The title is Gnaws and Gnarls: Second Skin Metaphors in Robert Coover's Prose. Of course this intelligent girl has already re-shaped the project so she will tell you all about it. I would just like my spirit to continue to hover over the project." At the word "hover" he bracketed his fingers. "Meet me at nine o'clock, tomorrow," said Juanita.
"It is really quite an exciting project," Juanita said from behind the desk. "But for you it will be rather boring. You will only scan texts and feed the computer with my textual analyses."
"I'm not easily bored," he said.
She drank gulps of coffee and looked up into the ceiling. "Are you always serious?"
He smiled. "I don't know. But sometimes I put on my serious head."
