It was strange. But then again this was an art college, for profit, private, with branches in major cities. I never relished teaching at these kinds of places, but the stipend was decent, and Ansel Adams had apparently taught there. Plus, the San Francisco campus, up on Russian Hill, had airy views of the bay and Alcatraz Island, the old prison turned tourist site. And it wasn’t as if I’d never taught at such colleges where a Mercedez or BMW was the student car of choice, and everyone on the last day of class brought elaborate platters of sushi or caviar.

At my interview, I was to meet Serena, the director of fine arts. When I arrived, the stony, church-like façade of the college greeted me. To the left of the entrance was a towering spire with a small window up top and to the right, inscribed in the wall, was a date, 1871. I went up two steps and passed through an arched doorway into a cobblestone courtyard. The college on break, it was quiet. Then a dark-haired woman with a helmet hairdo and thick eyeliner appeared. Just short of me, she suddenly did a cartwheel. Her legs splitting into a V as she went over the top, I could feel the breeze her body made. Face to face now, she said, “You must be her.”

For a moment, I was flabbergasted.

She wore a sleeveless black dress, one arm adorned with bracelet-shaped tattoos. The stud in her nose twinkled in the sun.

I introduced myself, and became conscious of my outfit, everything hidden beneath my slacks and long-sleeved sweater. In the world of art, I must have looked stodgy, a misfit.

As we stood in the courtyard, Serena gave me the rundown. I was expecting something weird, but all she said was “we have monthly meetings. Unpaid. But I’m sure you won’t mind attending.”

I nodded, though I was sure I wasn’t going to attend.

Then Serena escorted me to another building. Not as ornate as the campus entrance, it was rather whimsical with round port-hole windows and a ceramic tile roof. Inside, a steep set of metal circular steps took us up one level. There, the very narrow hallway overlooked the first floor, which contained rows and rows of tall, skinny lockers, reminding me of a prison catwalk.

Serena knocked on a door.

It opened a little and Serena slipped in, closing the door behind her.

There were other doors along the hallway, more offices, I assumed, but none ever opened. I had to keep reminding myself that it was the break. But I’d always found empty campuses eerie, imagining how eons later, archeologists, unearthing these lost civilizations, might comb the halls, flashlights illuminating lockers, their faded numbers, some hieroglyphics still intact. Johnny loves Lia. Fuck the world. Is there anyone out there? God sucks. And maybe inside a locker the remains of ancient textbooks—Algebra For a New World, The Trial, Human Sexuality: It’s Perfectly Normal.

The door opened and Serena and another woman stepped out. Shorter than Serena and older, she wore a plaid suit, had wavy, gray-laced hair and ice-blue eyes. She might have been pretty at one time, but her pasty skin made her look cloistered as if she’d been shut away for a long time.

“Dean Fensholt,” Serena said.

I reached for the dean’s hand. It was cold, and she pulled it away quickly. “Please come in,” she said.

It was a box of an office with paper stacks strewn about like every other office I’d seen, except for a wall of glass I immediately went over to and pressed my palms against. It offered the most spectacular view: the glass was all that separated me from the gray-green bay below, the sparkling white prison perched on a rocky slope, framed by a towering guard post on one side and a giant water tank on the other, while colorful boats bobbed on the whitecaps.

“I don’t see how you get anything done here,” I said.

Behind her desk now, the dean said, “You’ve been then—to the prison. The Rock.” The latter being what San Franciscans sometimes called the penitentiary.

I sat down. “Boring inside. All those gray cells. Prisoner stories. The island, though, was pretty, nasturtiums and ice plants. But they don’t let you go out there. It’s all roped off. I got yelled at. And then there’s that tale about the three escapees…” Babbling, I stopped myself.

The dean’s brows furrowed. “Yelled at?”

Blood rushed to my face. I laughed a little. “Well, not really.”

“I don’t know if Serena explained to you—Freshman English has a pre-set syllabus, pre-set textbooks.” She handed me the syllabus and two books.

“But we also need to staff a pre-1A for our international students. You can do whatever you want there. We’d want you to teach both.”

Peering down at The Epic of Gilgamesh, a stone unicorn on its cover, I flipped through a few pages. Like Paradise Lost or Ulysses, it was one of the books I should have but never read. The other textbook was a standard anthology. “What if I just taught the pre-1A?”

“Think about it.” The dean led me back into the hallway, to the catwalk. She pointed down. “HR’s the end of the hallway.”

A week later, at the start of the semester, I passed through the college’s arched entryway once again. Then, I pulled a file out of my bag and looked at my roster:

Moon Ha

Xing Xing Chang

Mei Wong

Krish Bhat

Only four enrolled. But such a small class wasn’t unusual in a private college where the tuition was likely massive.

The courtyard was alive with students now, young people dressed in black with fishnets or nose rings, mohawks, long silver beads, bare midriffs. Some were smoking. As I weaved my way through, their eyes flashed on me momentarily as if I were a moving statue, and then they went back to whatever they were doing.

I walked across the courtyard, finally heading toward my classroom. All the students were on the move too. Then, above me, I heard squawking and saw flashes of green and red swoop across the sky—not gulls but the parrots of Russian Hill. I’d heard about them, these escaped pets, tropical birds, that made San Francisco their home.

The first thing that hit my eye when I opened the classroom door was a thick, floor-length, black velvet curtain covering a wall. Walking over to it, I pulled on the strings, and the whole stunning panorama I’d seen in the dean’s office showed itself again—the frothy, green Bay, Alcatraz rising from it. “Oh my,” I said, and then, turning, realized there were four bodies in the room, sitting behind tables set up in a U-shape.

“Good morning,” I said, my eyes shifting back to the magnetic view.

“Have you been there, teacher?” one of the students, a pretty, long-haired Chinese girl, asked. She had a strong accent.

“Once,” I said. “How about you?” I meant everyone, of course, as my eyes landed on the other students, another girl and two boys, probably all in their early twenties.

I dropped my bag and then wrote my name on the grease board along with the word “Welcome!”

Then we went around the room.

The long-haired Chinese girl jumped in first. “I’m Xing Xing. From China. I paint.”

Then the plain-faced girl next to her—she had short, blunt cut hair and bangs—said, “I’m Mei. From China. I paint too.” She spoke softly, was reserved, and avoided my eyes. She and Xing Xing both glanced at each other though, friends, I could see. Probably roommates.

“I’m Moon.” He sat by himself. “From Korea. I take pictures.” He raised his hands to his face and made the motion of snapping a picture. He was a round, chubby guy wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and flip flops.

“Krish here, Miss.” Sitting opposite Moon, he wore large dark-rimmed glasses, behind them, warm brown eyes. “From Kashmir. I want to be a movie director. I’m transferring to USC.”

“Already?” I said.

Everybody laughed.

“I want to work with Stephen Spielberg. I want to be famous.”

The Chinese girls giggled.

Moon, head cocked to the side, just smirked.

The semester moved along. Missing articles or prepositions, shifting verb tenses, awkward syntax—they all had the usual mistakes in their sentences. Moon was always late and unprepared but good humored, as if everything were amusing. Krish always volunteered first to read. The most literate, he probably could have gone directly into 1A. Sometimes Xing Xing read. It was harder to get Mei to without Xing Xing prodding her. “Go,” she’d whisper, “go.”

Then, toward the end of the semester, two strange things happened. During our fifteen-minute break, the students over at the campus café, I passed by Moon’s seat and saw a contact sheet there, a series of small photographic images. I don’t know why, but I took it and went over to the glass wall and held it up. My body. My legs. My hips. The back of my head, my hair—there I recognized myself, the dozen shots all from behind. Never my face. All on campus.

The second thing that happened was that Krish disappeared from class.

“Is he in trouble?’ the other three asked me.

Then I got an email from Dean Fensholt.

Krish Patel has been removed from your class. You are not to give him a final grade or let him back in the classroom. If he shows up, step out of the class and call campus police immediately.

When I emailed her asking why, she said she couldn’t discuss due to student confidentiality.

Back in class, I broke the news.

Xing Xing flashed me a look. “He got kicked out of the dorm too. We don’t know why.”

I looked over at Moon. Arms folded, he was leaning back in his chair. I hadn’t said anything about the photos. I’d assumed they were for his photography class, body parts on display. But why me? “Moon, do you know?” I asked.

The last week of the semester, I called Krish. I wanted to return his journal, all his personal writings—it seemed wrong to keep them.

I left a message; he called me back.

“They accused me of stealing a camera, Miss, for my photography class. Students can rent them. But they said I stole it. What actually happened is I lost it, but they wouldn’t believe me. Then I got arrested. They came to my dorm and handcuffed me and blindfolded me. They drove me to some jail far, far away. They didn’t give me any food and kept me in a dark cell. Then they moved me again. Then someone questioned me, asked me things about my country, Kashmir.”

Astonished, I wondered if he was making all this up but couldn’t ask. Krish had told me he wasn’t from a rich family, his father had spent all his lifesavings to send him to the States.

“Can we meet, Krish?” I asked.

It was a gray, gloomy day, drizzling and overcast. I stationed myself at the end of Powell Street, where throngs of tourists were waiting in line to board the Ghiradelli Square trolley, and others were just milling around. It was noisy too, with all the car traffic and the trolly’s bell constantly clanging and the chain-like grind the trolly made as it dragged itself along the tracks. Fast-food restaurants, retail shops, and flower stalls cluttered the street. Still, it might have almost been pleasant, the churn of it all, if it wasn’t so grungy, so congested, so damp. Why hadn’t I chosen a quieter spot?

I peeked inside my bag again making sure Krish’s journal was in there. Last night I’d scoured it, but all he ever wrote about were American movies. I still couldn’t fathom it, this camera heist, his detention.

I looked at my watch, Krish, late. And I began to think maybe this was where it ended. Maybe he was in hiding. Maybe he’d been deported. There were only a few more days left of the semester. Then it would be all over.

“Miss! Miss!”

I turned to the voice, a sea of heads in front of me. Then Krish suddenly appeared. He smiled.

I handed him his journal.

“Thank you, Miss.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t finish the class, Miss. How is everyone?”

“I don’t understand any of it,” I said.

“I have to go back to Kashmir. But I’m going to come back, to USC if my father can afford it, if they let me back. I want to make movies. I want to be as famous as Francis Ford Coppola.”

“But are you safe?” I asked.

“Safe, Miss?” He raised his eyebrows, looking perplexed. But then again he came from Kashmir where presumably no one was safe. Or had he forgotten what he’d told me? The arrest? The blindfold? The dark cell?

The drizzle had turned to rain now, drops pelting the ground. Umbrellas went up. I could feel my hair getting wet, water dribbling down my face. The sidewalk was already starting to puddle. I turned my head but couldn’t find any nearby café we might shelter in, and Krish just stood there as if it weren’t raining, as if we weren’t getting wet. Did it rain a lot in Kashmir?

Despite the rain, the crowd around us seemed to grow larger, a moving throng, while Krish and I, standing still, face to face, were getting jostled, bumped here and there. No one said “Excuse me.” Then I felt someone tap me on the shoulder, and another man had come up behind Krish too, putting his hand on his shoulder. And then suddenly we were surrounded by them, people with their arms outstretched, reaching for us.

The last week of class everybody brought a little something. No sushi or caviar. The Chinese girls brought egg rolls and dim sum, Moon, chocolate chip cookies and soda. We ate off paper plates and drank out of waxy cups. No one, I discovered, would be back. They said they hated the school. “Art History is so boring.” They’d moaned all semester. Then Xing Xing said, “It’s not like I’m going to be famous.” With her fingers she pulled the two sides of her mouth downward, making a sad face. “Not talented. Just like art.”

Mei nodded and took Xing Xing’s hand. “Me too.”

After everyone left, I cleaned up the mess, throwing everything in the small wastepaper basket in the classroom. Then I took one last look at the Bay and Alcatraz, the giant rock of a prison, where they let you roam freely with a headset, listening to ex-prisoners’ stories. You could even see the papier-mâché heads, their human hair swiped from the prison barbershop, on the cot pillows, blankets pulled up, just as the escapees had left them, making the guards think they were asleep. According to lore, three of the men had made it out—the fourth couldn’t pry off the grill in his cell—on a makeshift raft, escaping treacherous currents and toothy sharks, and could still be alive today. None of it seemed believable, I thought, as I closed the curtains on the view one last time.

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Janet Goldberg’s novel The Proprietor’s Song (Regal House) was released in 2023. Her story collection Like Human is due out next fall from Cornerstone Press.

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