In March, Gibson flew to Chicago. His girlfriend was in a graduate program there studying literature, and one night the two of them went to dinner at her professor’s house. Gibson was a professor too. Most of his students were poor. So was Gibson. He suspected that he wouldn’t have liked teaching at the school his girlfriend attended, but he knew it wasn’t anything he would ever have to worry about. During dinner, the professor asked questions about Gibson’s school, saying that he imagined his experience was different from Gibson’s, because his students were privileged and Gibson’s were less so. For a few minutes, the conversation sputtered. The professor opened up another bottle of wine, and then he, his wife, and Gibson’s girlfriend—all poets—argued about poetry. Gibson didn’t drink. He also didn’t write poems. He didn’t drink because he was an alcoholic, and he didn’t write poetry because he wasn’t good at it. “If only that stopped more people,” the professor said.

By the end of dinner, Gibson’s girlfriend, her professor, and the professor’s wife were very drunk. They started arguing about a writer. Close to midnight, the professor slammed his hand down on the table, and when he raised it back up again the sharp edge of a knife was stuck into his palm. For a moment, they were all entranced by this. It seemed like a miracle. Then the professor shook his hand and the knife fell onto his plate. “My God,” the professor said. The wound began to pour blood. After that, the professor’s wife swooped the professor over to the sink. Gibson’s girlfriend said she was dizzy, and the two of them went to a couch.

A minute later, the professor’s five-year-old daughter came out of her room. She wore a tiara and a burgundy costume dress that implied Renaissance Faire. The walls were bookshelves, and the girl took down a thick novel with a bright orange cover, sat down on a different couch, and started reading. The girl’s couch was underneath the far window, and the way she slipped in between two pillows made it seem as if she was playing a game in which no one could see her. She wasn’t all that concerned about her father, who was swearing in the kitchen. Instead, she concentrated on her book. Gibson knew that certain children had crazy sleep schedules, or that sometimes parents made exceptions when they had company, but still he thought it was odd that she was awake and that no one seemed to care. He wanted to ask her what her bedtime was, but he wasn’t her father. Also, he had a hard rule against interrupting anyone while they were reading, and he guessed that included children.

When Gibson had first arrived and was introduced to the girl, either the professor or his wife had suggested their daughter would grow up to be a writer. Other than their own projections of themselves, Gibson wasn’t sure what this forecast was based upon. But Gibson had the idea in his head now. He knew poets, and the girl wasn’t one. She lacked the heroic self-consciousness: that nervous, ecstatic way a poet let you know there was a person inside of them. So, a fiction writer. There was, in fact, a certain Cheever-ness to her situation, her WASP-y, tenured father bleeding in the kitchen. Because of that, the girl’s childhood felt classic.

Whenever Gibson tried to write about his childhood, he was shocked by how violent it had been. He remembered a story he’d wanted to write about his mother’s friend John. Each version of the story had come out a confused mess, but the plot, pieced together over the years, was simple. John owed some money. He didn’t pay it back. Bikers beat him to death. Right before John died, Gibson and his mother went to the hospital to pay him a visit. Gibson had probably been around the girl’s age. That day, his mother was on a lot of drugs. She pointed at John, who was intubated. “Motorcycle accident,” his mother had said. The story had defeated Gibson for years.

Because everything about the professor offended him, Gibson assumed that the girl would grow up to hate her father. Sitting across from her, Gibson imagined that she might, as an adult, write a short story where a girl comes home from school. Around the corner from her house, she sees her father kissing a depressed graduate student. Something like that. Up to her.

In Chicago, Gibson went to the same coffee shop every day. The people who worked there knew his face. He preferred his coffee black with two ice cubes because he wanted to drink it fast and not sip at it. The morning after the professor’s house, when he ordered his coffee, the manager was training a new barista. “Be careful with this guy’s drink,” the manager said. She jerked her head at Gibson. “He’s got the tongue of an infant.”

Afterward, Gibson walked across the street to the School of Business. He treated it like an office. The first floor was a clean, Apple Store–like atrium with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the other buildings on campus. He sat down to work on a story. For two weeks every draft he’d written and trashed had begun with someone driving a car. He would try to put the characters somewhere else—a kitchen, an empty auditorium, the waiting room of a doctor’s office—but then, somehow, they’d end up back in the car. These things happened. In almost every Faulkner novel there was a character walking in a very straight line. The most obvious example was in As I Lay Dying, when Jewel, rather than walk around a house, strides through one open window and out the other. Light in August began the same way—with Lena walking “a fur piece,” which Gibson had read meant traveling a distance of fifty miles. Gibson didn’t know if that meant fifty miles straight exactly, but he preferred to think of it in this way.

He stood up and stretched. It was Gibson’s spring break, but not his girlfriend’s. She was in the humanities library across campus, where the students did stress like other kids did drugs. They craved it. The year before, Gibson’s girlfriend had been reading in the library, and in the carrel next to hers an undergraduate had climbed under the desk, gone into a mumbling trance state, and refused to come out. Meanwhile, in the School of Business, everyone was smiling or having lunch. No one feared death. They wouldn’t even know what you were talking about. The shiny marble floor in the atrium and the enormous potted ferns and the windows at funky angles framed them like TV actors.