Foreign Affairs

They were coming, quiet as a funeral procession. Enoch was slamming the vending machine beside the School of Education exit. Upon noticing them, he steeled himself and glared at the charcoal carpet smudged with wet footprints. None had regarded him, merely swished past Enoch as though he were not there. Not in this realm or another.

But they were his people. Classmates with whom he’d recited land acknowledgements at the start of class each week.

He watched them through the tiny window panels.

They constricted into a circle, arms collapsing on each of their shoulders, faces gathering, inhaling each other’s air. 

So together. So against him.

They dispersed.

Enoch returned his focus to the vending machine glass, waiting for his pack of Skittles. There he was, his reflection.

He’d expected to find nothing, not his own image, not himself as a person.

He wanted to be nothing.

 Enoch Swart, there he was. Tall, slender, swaddled in a black puffer jacket.

Not more than a moment later, the skittles scuttled out of the machine, jolting him back to himself.

He soon left the building, commenced his walk home.

Snowflakes cascaded on him; the frigid wind smacked his face. It was cold as stone.

He hated it, the long winters. It snowed all the time. It was grey all the time. The distant memory of the sun tightened his throat and filled it with dry sobs.

Tedious feelings, tedious South Campus Street, with recollections of the seminar roaming the rooms of his blank mind. Bad vibes had now infected Enoch. Bad vibes usurped his senses.

Winter in Ann Arbor, for example, smelled of nothing, yet a vinegary redolence of wet whiteboard markers transported him back to the Composition Pedagogy seminar.

Long, rectangular, and white tables. Black chairs with no armrests. Open computers and the intermittent click-clack of the keyboard. Blue, post-pandemic surgical masks covering faces. The harsh fluorescent light. The shuffle of paper.

He tried, for dear life, to remember how it all came to this: his classmates’ coldness.

He couldn’t—.

There was nobody to blame.

Enoch often spaced out in class, doodled, and contributed infrequently. Not because he had nothing to say. He’d come to graduate school to learn.

Not his American classmates: they rambled for participation grades, assiduously trained to dismiss stillness. A restless bunch, always eager to deliver their unoriginal mini-lectures with unearned authority. Learning seemed beside the point. The modus operandi was to ramble and regurgitate. It was unnerving, the false theatre of knowledge. It was encouraged, even. Months ago, at the international students’ orientation, someone had said this kind of learning evenly distributes power in the classroom, removing the teacher as authority. If he were being graded, shouldn’t the professor perhaps profess?

Anyway, a waste of time. The desire for a real beginning. Most stories, most memories, have no actual beginning. Always the heat of the action. The suddenness of it all. So, Enoch didn’t quite know how it all started, only that he found himself embroiled in a debate. Not quite a debate. But a scolding from a classmate.

He’d blurted out the words without permission to speak. In class, he was startled by the sound of those words, as though someone else had said them.

“Anyone else’s hamstrings in pain?” he interjected as someone else spoke.

Confusion descended upon the room.

Enoch then imagined himself as a character in a comic panel, a speech bubble pointing out from his mouth filled with his random remark, question marks hovering over everyone else. After all, it was difficult to make out people’s faces with surgical masks covering their countenances.

Someone pointed at the person who’d been speaking, the person whom Enoch had interrupted. Most people exchanged glances. But everyone stared at him.

He couldn’t stop himself.

“I could be wrong here,” he hedged. “But it seems a bit of a stretch, no, the whole decolonial work thing?”

The professor sat at the head of the table and smirked. When she noticed that Enoch had seen her smile, she adjusted her scarf and fixed her mouth straight. Enoch felt a shift inside, a feeling that, for years, had only seemed native to him. Abandonment.

Leah’s unsmiling face reminded him of someone’s love going elsewhere—not to him.

 Enoch would have been quiet if people in the seminar did not seem so pleased with themselves. Arguing—no, agreeing—that allowing students to “bend rules” in composition classes counted as “decolonial work.” Consensus without struggle troubled Enoch.

His classmates completed each other’s sentences. Their bangs and curls shook from endless nodding. Masks adjusted and readjusted in agreement. The ceaseless hmmm…ahh…yessss…righhttt… It was grating, almost quite false. It irked Enoch, it alienated him, and made him suspicious of himself, then of everyone else. It reminded him of the time in Chemistry when everyone’s test tubes held a purple solution, and only his was the colour of dirt. Still, it was as though he’d missed a step, a technique, or had misread the text. He doubted himself.  He doubted everything. A whole conversation was happening, and he was not a part of it. Nobody spoke for a while. People cleared their throats, twisted themselves in their seats.

Leah, the pale professor, turned the colour of watermelon. She made a sound that directed the attention back to her, and then her gaze rested on Enoch. 

“Say more,” she said.  “Explain what you mean.”

“Sure,” he said. “Let me think.”

 He bit his bottom lip, and the metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth. He shifted his mask around the centre of his face, contemplating hiding his whole self.

He could quit now. This was his chance. To say sorry, never mind, I forgot.

But they goaded him, his classmates, glaring as though to burn holes through him. They needed him not to disturb the peace; they wanted him to keep the peace.

Enoch wasn’t good at being good.

Besides, ideologically, they were his tribe, his classmates. Like them, Enoch was “fuck empire,” “fuck colonization,” “fuck the monarchy,” “fuck last stage capitalism,” “fuck everything.” He was “yes we can,” “yes reparations,” “yes redistribution of land,” and “maybe land acknowledgement.”

Last year, for example, while in lockdown in Johannesburg, he’d followed the protests inspired by the police murder of a black man in Minnesota. The uprising had moved Enoch deeply, so he shared resources on his feeds, posted the booklists, and posted a black square.

Across his social media profiles, he brandished #BLM, #SayHerName, the universal gay flag—all the signs that he was a good person, an ally if you will.  He didn’t harbour any strong convictions about anything; he mostly spoke out of boredom and frustration. Like the tendency to confuse opacity in literary arts as some kind of depth. Like hyperlyrical novels by poets, work devoid of whatever made fiction fiction.

For Enoch, there was a line, a fine one, and the line was the use of hyperbolic language favoured by academics, and his classmates had crossed this personal boundary.

“I mean, this is the only place, right, where we reward such behaviour? Like, we tell students, right, to break the rules because English is plural. We tell students to write with their #ownvoices. Yet, these kids, when they get out there, nobody will care for their ‘pluralised’ English. They will be penalised. They will miss opportunities. And I hesitate to say this. But, promoting this laissez-faire thinking to students, it seems almost violent. Rules and standards aren’t actually oppressive. Not everything inconvenient is colonial or oppressive. I don’t mean to be obtuse here,” he said. “But not everything is decolonisation.”

violet—spelled in lowercase to decentre themselves and half of their ancestors (white)—was seething. They sat across from Enoch, shifting in their seat, blowing out breaths that made their surgical mask balloon. When violet spoke, the thin materials shivered.

It was violent, they said, and it was carceral, these “colonial rules forced onto students, [these] rules of the master.” Morrison tells us, right, about doing language as the measure of our lives. “Our work must be liberatory,” they said. Audre Lorde warns us, right, about the master’s tools, they said.

The others mmhhed and mmhhed, nodding.

But Enoch was incorrigible; he merely chuckled. From amusement, from discomfort, from suspicion that under violet’s mask it smelled of cheese curls and spit.

violet was on fire! We were enslaved… Our ancestors… The archive…

They cited several theorists. Fanon. Foucault. Steve fucking Biko. They spat out memorised quotes, repeated this theory and that theory. The more they spoke, the more animated they became. Gesturing with their hands, inching closer and closer to the desk. Enoch feared violet would climb atop the table, concluding their takedown with a triumphant chest thumping.

Their spectacles fogged and cleared when they became silent.

This sort of talk bored him. This propensity to scold, to label, to abase, to banish. What really were the stakes here? Sure, the personal is political—whatever.

They seemed so self-satisfied, in actual catharsis, visibly teary, bending the white cloth of their mask. It brought to Enoch that familiar gladness of debate matches when everyone gave their all. When violet took a breath, Leah dismissed everyone for a quick break. It was halfway into the seminar, anyway.

Sam and Richard didn’t acknowledge Enoch in the men’s bathroom. They stood at the urinals, piss thrumming against the porcelain, all staring at the ceiling.

In the hallway, the others (joined by Richard and Sam), all of them doctoral students in English and Education—except for Enoch, the only M.F.A.—gathered at the cooler, chatting, gossiping, intermittently shooting him a side eye.

It was brutal, an education in American manners.

But he was learning; he was listening.

Walking home, he dreaded next week’s seminar. Now it meant his presentation had to be really good. This was the problem with disturbing the peace; he couldn’t be mediocre and get away with it. But the worry about next week’s class seemed distant, less urgent, and troubling. Something else gnawed at Enoch about the whole situation.

Did it have to get that nasty? Was it good for the race and the advancement of blacks to argue so passionately before white strangers? Would it derail the black political cause, their behaviour, and would the School of Education and the M.F.A. in Creative Writing programme treat black applicants more harshly? By arguing, had they proven the whites right? Urg! Who gave a shit about white people, anyway?

Disagreeing was good. But the spectre of black on black whatever-that-was—wasn’t good.

            Nonetheless, Enoch marched on, and the ground was gummy under his feet. Globs of snow fell from unleafed trees, and icicles hung around the edges of the houses, pointing down, threatening to stab him.

Every so often, he checked for black ice, only to find black traces of mud in the wet mush. He’d come to America, partly, for the snow, for the scenes he’d seen in those Christmas cards—the bewitching white, the enduring white. He felt cheated. He was disappointed. He wanted the magic, the same beauty of the cards he and Thenji, his sister, would leave for their mother when she was still their mother.

Enoch’s phone was brick-cold. He grabbed it from his back pocket, unlocked it, and his knuckles started to burn. Swiftly, to avoid snowfreeze, Enoch swiped the screen and tapped the camera icon, snapping a photo of the muddy snow on the sidewalk.

“You liar! Snow is fucking ugly.”

He stared at his screen, waiting for Thenji to respond.

A memory flared: their father’s people, the morning after their father’s burial, kicking them out of the house. Other than a few clothing items, they could only take the globe from Enoch’s bedroom. Brother and sister, in their one-room house in the township, sentimental, inventing games about the world.

Enoch would vigorously spin the large green ball. Thenji would try to stop it from moving with a finger. Wherever it landed, they had to tell themselves a story.

Tell me where we are.

Thenji said the United States; they only knew of New York from music, television, and magazines. The world is white and beautiful. We’re in New York, tall buildings caked in white, yellow cars on the street. Baba is with us, not in the grave, and Ma is still Ma. We’re all in our thick coats, wearing mittens, rushing to our hotel to open our gifts. There’s a strong wind, a melodious wind, light twinkling, flakes of snow falling on us like weightless white rice.

Thenji replied to the photo and Enoch tried to forget the story.

“Hahaha sorry bro. Hru?”

He shoved the phone back into his pocket. He struggled being honest with his sister. When she’d hugged him at the airport, she’d whispered, “I’m going to live vicariously through you.” Enoch had smiled a tight smile, like Leah, tolerating Thenji’s melodrama. In retrospect, Enoch thought her statement fair. Thenji had been the one who took Enoch in when the preacher their mother married said he couldn’t raise another man’s children. It was a shockingly simple choice for their mother. The priest over them. 

So, Enoch wanted his big sister to imagine that her sacrifices—working retail despite her artistic inclination, feeding him, clothing him—were worthwhile, not a waste. He was desperate to tell her about the seminar, to let her know what really happened, how watching other people ignore him awoke the sorrow of motherloss.

He was breathless when he reached the top of the steep pathway leading to his apartment. The evening had turned pool blue, the white snow absorbing all colour, producing seraphic luminescence. He was holding his phone, facing it. He smiled, with a fist and a thumb, head tilted to the side. 

“Everything is good. Miss u.”

He unlocked his apartment, awash with a grey light. He boiled water, poured it into his bottle, wrapped it in a towel, and ran to bed. He pulled on three pairs of socks and sweaters, then covered himself. He shut his eyes for a second, tried to pray for central heating, that the Lord would guide the landlord to do right by his tenants, but Enoch didn’t believe.

 Ivan, the married man he’d been seeing, had sent a nude photograph of his penis cupped inside his palm. It looked like a frozen chorizo.

“Daddy!” Enoch replied, though he didn’t mean it, though he never meant it.

Studying the photo made him sad, sadness made him horny, and horniness exhausted him. He tossed the phone to the side, dragging the pillow to his face.

***

The email arrived while Enoch shuffled through tabs and apps on his phone. An ambient yellow light flooded his face, the only thing bright other than the moon shivering outside the window. There was a groan, a turn, like plastic gears turning and smacking each other, unlubricated. It was the sound of hunger, thrumming from his stomach. The graduate office had disbursed the stipend a week prior, but after paying rent, phone plan, groceries and toiletries, electricity and water, Venmo splits at drinks after workshop—and sending Thenji rent—Enoch had barely enough. Plus, the M.F.A. programme forbade employment along with a fellowship; it was a violation of some kind.

The email said Leah was cancelling class, for some vague reason. A peculiar hunger-induced self-pity consumed him.

At times, Enoch wished he were good, that he was amenable to others' demands.

At times, he was fifteen again: hormonal, boy-crazed, bepimpled—watching his mother load her things and drive off with the preacher without as much as a glance.

At times, he resented himself and wanted to be good. He felt so sorry for himself when it occurred to him that he could be good and not disturb the peace, that he had that capacity inside of him. He believed that God apportioned goodness to others and skipped him, abandoned him.

The curtain wavered, revealing a slant of the night. Snow like flour spread on a concave surface, suggesting the ground was unsteady. It was beautiful to him, the idea of the world quaking like jelly, penetrable, but white as flour.

Swallow me whole, he said to the night. Bury me under this movable earth.

He sniffled from discomfort, or simply from being awash with melancholy.

Not too long after, he started thinking of her.

Sometimes she flashed in his mind, and he could smell her. Ma seated on the bench by the vanity mirror in their one-bedroom, her thin arms elegantly running the sweet petunia cream that lightened her skin. She was not his mother anymore by the time she left with the preacher. She was a white woman. A fish. She was translucent.  For years, he was not sorry that his mother left; for years, he was not sad because the woman who left was not his mother—she was a fish.

Last semester, in a Poetics of Trauma course, someone said the body carries memory: that to be alive in a traumatised body is to always be in the past event, sensorially, but rooted here, on earth. That week’s session was about temporality and trauma. Then, too, he refuted the claim. As being unscientific, as a kind of intellectualisation of trauma, as a cult of trauma, worshiping at the altar of the bruised and broken—a bit convenient, no? Perhaps not.

The smell of petunias, inhaling them, she came to him. It was never pleasant, her memory. It brought this sense of inadequacy and self-blame. Reminded him that it was his fault that she was no longer in their lives. It was his big mouth.

He couldn’t explain it. He could never explain the reason he needed to assert himself, contradict consensus, to deem it an injustice when he was censured. If not for his big mouth, perhaps Leah wouldn’t have cancelled class.

He thought of it now, the reason his life had turned out this way. The history of his big mouth. It explained his motherloss. It explained why he seemed to enjoy agitating the preacher whenever the preacher invited Ma, Thenji, and Enoch to his house. It explained why his mother shot him a look all the time, why his sister kicked him under the table. Please, stop. Please, our lives could change forever. It was his big mouth. Debating the existence of God. Producing florid speech, to show the preacher that his gayness was there to stay. Causing his mother and Thenji to apologise on his behalf. This caused the preacher to say he was marrying their mother, but he wouldn’t raise another man’s grown children.

He was unworthy, Enoch was. His misdeeds, the crimes of his mouth, they’d depreciated his value in the market of things life gave. He couldn’t be mothered and fathered (again). He was naturally ungood.

If he could have been good, if he could have just listened, if he could have been a good boy—maybe his mother would not have picked that preacher over him; he might perhaps have been worthy of his mother’s and the preacher’s love.

Enoch wanted to be the sort of person who could return with his tail between his legs and beg for forgiveness. To be one of those people for whom saying, “I fucked up, and I’ll do better," came easily. To be the sort of person who could be forgiven, someone who could be wanted.

He reread Leah’s email. “The presentation scheduled for the coming class will continue when we meet again,” her email had also said. She had not called him by his name, reducing him to unimportance. Leah was mad at him, too; Leah did not want to say his name; Leah did not want to acknowledge he existed. It pained him to be treated as though he did not matter. So, it was his fault, and he had to apologise, and he would be forgiven, and he would be loved.

He began to compose the email, and if he said what they wanted to hear, Leah would redeem him from exile.

Dear Leah,  

It has been a great pleasure to be part of this course, and I wanted to write to express my deepest apologies. My behaviour and approach during our last class were unprofessional and combative, against the ethic of care—

Best,

Enoch

The words flew from his fingers, and then the feeble bones sat atop the keyboard, unmoving.

Current, stopped. Language, depleted. His mouth, dry, papery. 

So much deep, dark blue. So early in the evening. Streaks of phosphoric brilliance, reserved for twilight, imprinted on the sheets. The lingering waft of sex: the coppery odour of men’s sweaty bodies; the sweetness of flavoured lube; the nothing-smell of saliva.

He’d had a visitor earlier that afternoon.

Ivan.

The sex wasn’t too good, and not because Ivan was a bad lay. Enoch had embarrassed himself dismally.

He was still raw with shame from two days ago. And as if he relished in this sort of exercise, punishing himself by picking apart what he’d done wrong, the memory of their intercourse bloomed in Enoch’s mind.

He had been surprised by the gymnastics of it all. Ivan had grabbed the crown of his head, dug his fingers into Enoch’s skull, exerting so much pressure on him as though Enoch was the hard shell of a stubborn coconut, one that wouldn’t surrender. Except that Enoch was obedient and didn’t mind. He was impressed by the dexterity, by the confidence. Ivan was thinner than most (many!) men Enoch had fucked. Plus, the whole diligence in his exercise, as though intent on reaching an unknowable surface inside another man: hot!

As it happened, as Ivan thrusted into him, Enoch thought of a single word: holy.

It was holy, their afternoon delight. Or not holy, but the cousin of holiness, holy nonetheless. Sex with Ivan, sex with other men. Holy because it was inexplicable to Enoch that the pressure of another’s body, the force of a single appendage, could access him, and there was no word for it. It was holy because, in being entered, delight bloomed by way of nerves, stimuli circuiting through his body. What, if not this, did not say he was whole and holy? Holy because it was inexplicable, current hitting crevices inside of him he’d never reach by himself, producing feelings for which he had no name.

If not holy, then what, what was the word?

But the sentiment was not mutual; it sat like a kernel of corn at the throat, so he coughed, dryly. Ivan retracted from Enoch’s shoulder at the cough, as if repelled, then, as though bemused, stared down wantingly. The serpent green eyes always reminded Enoch of the immaculate lawn of their old home before his father was killed, before his father’s people disinherited them, before his mother stopped being his mother. Memory was so unfair, so unruly. It came unbidden; he couldn’t stand it. Therefore, Enoch pushed Ivan farther into him with the hook of his leg.

Ivan didn’t move. Instead, he moved, but quite curiously. Not quite withholding his thrusts, but entering Enoch with a sense of contemplation, pausing, before repeating the motion. He muttered please please please at Ivan. It was not exactly un-want, Enoch knew, but an alien register of sex. This mutual want. This lack of control. This submission. This giving and giving and giving not to be emptied but to be replenished. It was holy. They breathed heavily in sync. They were a single breath.

Ivan thrusted with more vigour, maintaining eye contact. Their faces parallel, one going up and the other down, like puppets pulled at different ends. He gleamed with sweat, with sex, with God. His blonde hair, like the colour of honey when wet, had obscured his one eye. Enoch reached over, fingering the threads with his fingers; the hair was stunningly thin, almost repulsive. Yet he wanted more, more Ivan, more sex, more holiness, more God.

Then it shot out of nowhere, ruining the moment, ruining their sex, ruining it the only way possible: by speaking, by asking dumb questions.

“Are you making love to me?”

Hours later, as he thought back to that, Enoch curdled with nausea.

Quiet now, eyes shut, listening to the wind whistle, an image: the contortions of Ivan in the black of Enoch’s mind. Then the scene came back all over again.

Ivan lowering his face, planting his thin lips on Enoch's mouth, huffing coffee breath into him. Enoch kissed him back, thinking: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!

Moments later, Ivan withdrew from Enoch, but he held Ivan's stubble, returning him. In his mouth, Ivan emitted noises of pleasure, finishing. Erasing the question.

Ivan promptly retracted himself, cupping his penis with his hands, and headed for the bathroom. Swift steps, feet barely touching the ground.

The chill of the apartment coursed over Enoch’s body, so he swaddled himself with the sheet from the floor. As he rose, it was as though he’d picked up a recollection from the floor. It was clarity.

Ivan had cheated Enoch.

Enoch knew there was always pressure, like air being pushed up his abdomen—the violence of sex—whenever a man finished—whenever Ivan finished.

 Enoch couldn’t stomach the thought, the implications. He lay on his side and investigated his rear area for semen. He retrieved his fingers. A faint red colour, scarring, and tearing. Blood. He laughed quietly and forlornly, his musty palm covering his mouth. He’d done this to other people before; it had been his expertise, faking completion. He swallowed gulps of air and started to laugh silently again. 

The afternoon wore a silver tint and permeated the room. There was a swishing in the distance and Enoch halted his laughter. Ivan came from the bathroom and landed in the kitchen/living room area, where their fondling had begun. He pulled up his pants and tied his laces.

Not after a while, he walked into the bedroom and kissed Enoch on the forehead. He had to leave, he said, something about his husband and kids, homework and dinner and bedtime—all that marriage equality bullshit, the white picket fence and shiny potato faces on Instagram. Ivan was so, so sorry.

This was nice, you were good, such a good boy, call you later, okay?

He’d said sure, he needed to write, anyway. He was working on a novel, but even that was falling apart.

Even now, though, hours later, there was still the same postcoital stickiness in him. 

It was now after eight in the evening. Ivan’s kids were in bed.

 Enoch liked to imagine Ivan with his husband in their perfect craftsman house, with tall windows and a blue Subaru parked outside, shoes and toys littering the doorstep. He liked to imagine what they ate: bolognese pasta with parmesan. He liked to imagine the mixed-race kids with their fuzzy hair thudding up the stairs. He liked to imagine Ivan and his husband sharing a bottle of wine and popcorn. Enoch blanked, a stinging in his mind: he didn’t enjoy the image of Ivan and his husband fucking.

He turned away from the window and retrieved his phone from the charger. He scrolled through his notifications screen.

Message from Thenji (could Enoch spot her with transport money until month-end?). Messages from his cohort (book swap party at someone’s house). Messages from BSU (protesting the denial of tenure to the black professor). Messages from the volleyball gays (orgy at the hotel and Venmo for blow, Molly, x, etc.).

No messages from Ivan. No I got home safely. No, Yes, I was making love to you. No I miss you. No let’s grab drinks soon.

Enoch knew that, in the natural history of mistresses, his was an unoriginal story; he was in the long line of other women and other young men who were left feeling hollow and disposable. Why couldn’t what Ivan offered be enough? Why complicate it? Why couldn’t Ivan say he was making love to him, just to appease Enoch?

Mistresses are like children: if they want candy to keep them from whining, you do as needed. Ivan must be a bad dad, Enoch thought. So bad at keeping a mistress.

Why couldn’t Ivan be crazy about him? Why couldn’t anyone be crazy about him like Thenji? Why was he this person?

Neediness, even his own, revolted him. 

He’d been reading through his and Ivan’s text exchanges. Mostly late-night sexting. Nothing of substance, but Enoch still felt that in some way, with Ivan, he was alive in his own life and body. He mattered. Ivan affirmed him. 

There was a word for it, not love. Witnessing. Enoch was happy that Ivan witnessed his existence among other species in the world. The same Ivan who hadn’t said anything after leaving.

“Got home safely?” he finally managed to say to Ivan.

Several minutes, a read receipt, but no response.

A grad student was monologuing about “our stories” and “memoir as autotheory.”

Enoch didn’t care for them to finish; he got up and left for Leah’s class. He’d attended because the poster promised free food (courtesy of BSU and OMA). Enoch hadn’t attended the contents of a lecture by a skinny black homosexual activist touring his memoir, a letter directed at dead AIDS activists. Not quite.

            Outside, it was late February. The afternoon had neither snow nor colour, only strong winds cutting his eyes and freezing his lips; he felt nothing when he licked them.

Entering South University Street, Enoch felt as though his diaphragm turned and sat lopsided. Disquiet turning into vertigo. Not only because it was Leah’s class and he had to present. He’d been a national debater and coached a team back in South Africa. Nerves, he used to tell his students, are part of the game. Lean into them, prepare through them, but don’t show the other team. 

It was not nerves, the trouble with Enoch. It was the scene on the sidewalk facing the president’s house. The three faded camp tents, a woman in a thick black puffer handing out flyers, a banner in yellow ink. It seemed so wrong to pass. It seemed cruel to continue with his affairs as though something important were not happening right before him. He could, he considered, pace towards and crawl into the tent and show solidarity.

It would spare him, preserve him, protesting by protesting. It was—a word favoured by his coursemates, often used malapropically—dialectical. He considered writing Leah an email explaining his “dialectical” decision to abscond from class. That a presentation on “corporeal pedagogy”—whatever that meant—seemed less urgent than solidarity with a man who, forty years after being sexually violated by the university's doctor at the university’s sports clinic, still sought justice. It was the moral thing to do; it was embodied pedagogy, he could write, a scene of genuine subversion of power.

He couldn’t stop laughing at the thought. So inappropriate, like laughing at a funeral procession. He covered his mouth with his hand, crossing to the other side.

He decided this was it, this was what he would write about. A Great African Novel About Finding Race in America. White people loved that shit. They paid for that shit. He could write one. He drew his phone from his pocket, wiped the rear camera with his sweater, and switched to portrait mode after opening the camera app.

The camp came into focus. Blue banner with words in yellow: HAIL TO THE VICTIMS. A black folding chair, an old woman handing out flyers (the man’s wife) to people passing. He moved slightly to the side, and he was unnerved, recalling Dunbar’s poem, “Haunted Oak.” The white mansion and its ancient, naked trees gave off a plantation-like quality.

Side-by-side, the barely-attended camp and plantation, it seemed like the slave-owner’s family was camping in front of their yard with their kids. It didn’t look right, and if it didn’t, why not use that to their advantage? Unexploited optics, Enoch suspected, undermined this demonstration and repelled attendants. The politics were right. The picture was off.  No wonder local media had barely covered this.

Last fall, after he introduced himself, a professor shared that he’d protested apartheid at Yale as an undergrad. (People liked to tell him how involved they were in the anti-apartheid struggle.) Enoch thought back to the Yale-educated man’s comments as he walked through the warm lobby of the Education building. Enoch struggled to attribute such political mobilisation—like the camp—as persuasive enough to compel the university to divest from apartheid. The scene of obedience, the respect of grounds—that troubled him. Americans had no appetite for disruption.

The elevator doors opened, carrying him to the fourth floor. He chuckled, imagining a student comrade, back home, telling fellow students to keep the peace, to protest but not disrupt. It was the whole point, disruption through protest, at his university back home, where he read law. There was an effort towards actual change, not just driving a message—an emphasis on collective disruption of life. Optics (notwithstanding other factors), after all, helped to destroy apartheid legally. Optics won students (albeit briefly) a halt in fee hikes back home. Optics helped. Students shook downtown Jo’burg, exerting force on the stay cables at Mandela Bridge, encircling Luthuli House. Students were also shot at, but got what they demanded. The optics won.

The doors retracted. The hallway on the fourth floor, leading to Leah’s seminar room at the far end, was soundless, smellless, airless. The seminar room doors were ajar, and as he entered, the thick smell of Sharpies engulfed him.  It was a windowless, rectangular room with white tables forming a U-shape.

He sat down, facing the door; he pulled out his laptop—the screen was dark, and the lights did not turn on. He pressed and pressed.

For several days, he’d been dreaming about things going completely wrong with his presentation. He had bad dreams about this classroom.

They started that weekend, the bad dreams, the night after he decided to work from the tiny cafè on Liberty, which Ivan and his family frequented. Enoch’s back faced the wall, so he didn’t see him.  Enoch didn’t have to look up, he started to type frantically, pretending not to pay attention.

They were a few feet away. They were all in winter coats and boots, a perfect family of four, straight out of a Macy’s Pride catalogue. The ginger curls of their boy and girl bounced. They had almond skin.

Each dad stood behind one kid. Ivan’s husband, balding and muscular, seemed the stricter parent. The boy and girl, about six and seven, often craned their necks to verify with him if the pastry or another order was fine.

“No, buddy, we’ve talked about this,” the husband said. “Oh, sweetheart, you want tea?”

The children seemed rooted to the husband in a way that startled Enoch. Ivan seemed more auxiliary in this family, somewhat incongruent with the portrait of them—there was a life of this family before Ivan came into the picture, Enoch guessed.

The boy was struggling with his laces, so Ivan crouched to fix them. The boy’s hands moved through the thin hair, the way Enoch’s often did whenever Ivan came over. He felt dirty, Enoch did, felt unclean, unholy, cliché. Like the mistresses before and after him. The glaring reminder that he was selfish for wanting a married man. Yet he was also repulsed by the whole scene. There was an air of suburbia about them. A stiltedness. A sense of routine. He didn’t want this—this Macy’s Pride Catalogue Portrait of a Modern Family.

He was mid-thought when Ivan rose, their eyes meeting briefly. Those green eyes seemed threatening now, threatening when Ivan’s face turned pale, as if registering that Enoch had come to the café for him. After quickly averting, standing with his palms on his thigh, he reached for his husband’s brawny hand. The man looked at both their hands, and from the side, Enoch saw half a smile; they were working on things, it seemed, they were working on being a couple again. Shortly after, they left the café, and a cold seized the space. It felt hollow.

Now in the seminar room, as in the cafe, Enoch’s vertigo, or a feeling akin to it—insides out of place, standing at the edge of a cliff—returned.

Someone walked into the seminar room, planted a bag without sitting, while Enoch fiddled with his laptop.

“You good?”

“Yeah, totally,” Enoch said to the woman whose bangs always shook during class.

He was alone again, his screen black and the buttons cold.

After seeing Ivan, Enoch did not dream of him, but of his presentation instead. Dreams that portended things going terribly wrong. He remembered, as he closed and opened his computer, that in the dream it worked as usual. That, instead of a summary and analysis of “Corporeal Pedagogy,” his search history was projected on the screen.

Cuckolding. Femme boys and daddy. Age play. Race play. Pig play. In the dream, his classmates, led by violet, took turns reading the items on the projector. He found himself suddenly wanting to explain. It’s not how it seems. It is my boyfriend, not my boyfriend, but the married man who won’t love me back. It’s not how it seems, it’s not who I am. I’m decent. This is all foreign to me. It’s foreign affairs.

In the room now, his mouth was growing dry, remembering that in the dream, violet said, “Told y’all. Race-playing, uppity African.”

There was murmuring in the hallway, drawing closer and closer. Enoch ogled around for an exit, for some aperture that led him out of the room. There was none.

Nothing could be done.

Leah walked in, chewing an apple. She greeted him with a high-pitched voice, then settled down and pored over her notes. She shuffled some papers, murmuring to herself. It seemed so private, what she was doing; he felt so close to her, seeing her prepare.

He marched to her, unsure of what he would say. When he reached Leah, everyone entered, chairs screeching and tables knocking before taking their seats in silence.

Leah looked up at Enoch.