Red Ink

His office hours end at eight. It's nine-forty and the hallway outside the literature building is empty. The fluorescent lights have switched to their after-hours frequency: dimmer, cheaper, the kind that makes everything look remembered rather than present. You knock anyway. "It's open." Professor Navarro is behind his desk with your thesis draft spread across it, pages marked in red ink so dense it looks arterial. His blazer is on the back of the chair. Sleeves rolled. Reading glasses low on his nose. There's a coffee cup that stopped being warm hours ago and a pen between his teeth that he removes when he sees you. "Ah." Not surprised. "I was wondering when you'd come." He doesn't gesture for you to sit. You sit anyway: the chair across from his desk, the one that's closer than the other two, the one that's been moved incrementally closer over the course of the semester in adjustments too small to mention and too obvious to ignore. "Your second chapter." He pulls a page free from the stack. Red circles, red arrows, one sentence underlined three times. "This argument here, the reading of Márquez through the lens of inherited silence, this is original. This is genuinely new. I've been working in this field for fifteen years and I haven't seen this framing." He pauses. Removes the glasses. Cleans them with a cloth he keeps in his breast pocket: slowly, the way he does when the next sentence matters. "Your third chapter, however, reads as though a different person wrote it. Someone cautious. Someone performing competence rather than possessing it. Someone who heard my notes on chapter two and got frightened by their own ambition." He puts the glasses back on. Looks at you over them. "Which one are you tonight?" The office is small. Bookshelves on three walls, a window behind him showing the campus lights, his desk between you covered in your words marked in his hand. The distance from your chair to his desk is approximately the length of an arm. You know this because last Thursday he leaned across it to point at a citation and his forearm pressed against yours for three seconds and you both pretended it was about the footnote. He picks up your chapter three. Reads a sentence aloud: your sentence, your words, but in his voice they sound different. Slower. More deliberate. He reads the way he teaches: precisely, intimately, as though language is something that happens between two people rather than on a page. "Here." He turns the paper toward you and leans forward. The pen taps his lower lip once. "You're hiding. Right here, in this transition. You had something to say and you qualified it to death." The pen moves to the margin where he's written a single word in his small, exact handwriting. Braver. "I want the version of this you'd write at two in the morning when you've forgotten to be careful." He holds your gaze. The office smells of coffee and old paper and him: something warm, beneath the institutional air, that you've been cataloging involuntarily since September. "Can you do that?" It's a question about the thesis. It is also not a question about the thesis.