Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee

night!” She always exclaimed “Good night!” at times of great happiness. I could not dissuade her from coming, and as I fled the dorm, into the rare, hybrid air of early April, I was wishing for those bad, indifferent parents who had no real interest in their children’s lives. The earth under my feet as I went to him was very sticky, almost lugubrious, like the earth one sometimes encounters in dreams. Stasselova was there, as always. He seemed pleased to see me.
    I sat down and said, “You know, I was thinking that maybe somebody else could take my place at the symposium. As I reread my paper, I realized it isn’t really what I meant to say at all.”
    “Oh,” he said. “Of course you can deliver it. I would not abandon you at a moment like this.”
    “Really, I wouldn’t take it as abandonment.”
    “I would not leave you in the lurch,” he said. “I promise.”
    I felt myself being carried, mysteriously, into the doomed symposium, despite my resolve on the way over to back out at all costs. How could I win an argument against somebody with an early training in propaganda? I had to resort finally to the truth, that rinky-dink little boat in the great sea of persuasion. “See, I didn’t really write the paper myself.”
    “Well, every thinker builds an idea on the backs of those before him—or her, in your case.” He smiled at this. His teeth were very square, and humble, with small gaps between them. I could see that Stasselova was no longer after a confession. I was more valuable if I contained these ideas. Probably he’d been subconsciously looking for me ever since he’d lain on the muddy banks of the Vistula, Warsaw flaming across the waters. He could see within me all his failed ideals, the ugliness of his former beliefs contained in a benign vessel—a girl!—high on a religious hill in the Midwest. He had found somebody he might oppose and in this way absolve himself. He smiled. I could feel myself as indispensable in the organization of his psyche. Behind his head, in the sunset, the sun wasn’t falling, only receding farther and farther.
    THE DAYS BEFORE THE symposium unfurled like the days before a wedding one dreads, both endless and accelerated, the sky filled with springtime events—ravishing sun, great winds, and eccentric green storms that focused everyone’s attention skyward. And then the weekend of the symposium was upon us, the Saturday of my speech rising in the east. I awoke early and went to practice my paper on the red steps of Humanities, in whose auditorium my talk was to take place. Solveig was still sleeping, hung over from the night before. I’d been with her for the first part of it, had watched her pursue a man she’d discovered—a graduate student, actually, in town for the symposium. I had thought him a bit of a bore, but I trusted Solveig’s judgment. She approached men with stealth and insight, her vision driving into those truer, more isolated stretches of personality. I had practiced the paper countless times, and revised it, attempting to excise the most offensive lines without gutting the paper entirely and thus disappointing Stasselova. That morning I was still debating over the line “If we could agree on a common language, a single human tongue, perhaps then a single flag might fly over the excellent earth, one nation of like and companion souls.” Reading it now, I had a faint memory of my earlier enthusiasm for this paper, its surface promise, its murderous innocence. Remembering this, I looked out over the excellent earth, at the town below the hill. And there, as always, was a tiny Gothic graveyard looking peaceful, everything still and settled finally under the gnarled, knotty, nearly human arms of apple trees. There were no apples yet, of course: they were making their way down the bough, still liquid, or whatever they are before birth. At the sight of graves I couldn’t help thinking of Tretsky, my ghostwriter, in his dark suit under the