Kitchen Sink No. 3
Professor Hendricks didn’t introduce himself in the usual way. He walked into the lecture hall five minutes past ten, late enough that all but the last few students had taken their seats, yet early enough that none had debated leaving. He strode down the aisle, a gauche gait with a limp in his left leg—noticeable only once you knew to watch for it—and stopped short of the lectern, as if it had offended him. He set his books down without stacking them, heavily annotated copies of the Folgers, then turned to the chalkboard and wrote ‘HENDRICKS’ in a hand that looked hurried and dissatisfied, the letters climbing uphill.
Without facing us, he said: Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back. He paused, chalk and words suspended in the air.
The room was on the second floor of the North Range—tall windows, dust mites floating in the air like something the light had caught and refused to release, wooden desks carved to ruin by generations of bored students. Around thirty of us that first morning, though I didn’t care to count. Hendricks was old, sixty at least, grey-bearded, with a voice that occupied a room the way an organ occupies a church: not through volume but because the architecture was built to carry it. He turned to face the class, eyeing us like a panel of examiners whose standards he knew too well to expect.
We will not read the usual Shakespeare in this class, he continued. Not Hamlet. Not Lear. Not the plays that reassure you that delay is profound, that suffering is instructive, that language redeems what action ruins.
He underlined his name once, then added Troilus and Cressida beneath it. Shakespeare is most interesting, he went on, when time does not resolve anything, when memory accumulates instead of clarifying, when rhetoric outpaces belief. The plays that survive on syllabi do so because they flatter our desire for coherence.
He turned to face us. This course will be about what remains when that coherence fails.
He asked: Why does no one stage this play?
Nobody spoke. The room settled into a careful stillness—the kind that forms when people are deciding how much of themselves to offer and how quickly. It was the first day. No one wanted to be wrong immediately, to misjudge the man at the front before understanding the rules by which he would be judging us. The silence began to feel deliberate, as though it were doing work on our behalf.
I gave it three seconds. Then I spoke.
Because it fails to forgive anyone. Not the heroes, not the lovers, not even the war itself. Nothing is allowed to mean what it claims to mean. Everyone behaves as though they’re inside a tragedy, appealing to honor, loyalty, necessity, when the play keeps insisting on something closer to a farce. And what makes it intolerable is that none of them can endure that realization.
Hendricks looked at me. Not surprised. Interested. As if he were taking note rather than taking sides.
Go on.
Troilus believes in Cressida the way someone believes in something that has already been built into the structure of their life. Not because it has been tested and found convincing, but because taking it apart would mean admitting how much else depends on it. The belief works only so long as it remains unquestioned. When she betrays him, what collapses isn’t just the attachment itself. It’s the confidence that belief—held carefully enough, sincerely enough—was ever a stable foundation. He doesn’t only lose her. He loses the sense that committing to anything like that was a sensible way to live.
I hesitated, aware of the room again, of the attention having shifted. It felt like standing too close to a mirror.
So it isn’t really a love story. It’s a play about what happens when the framework you’ve been relying on gives way all at once, and you’re left having to decide whether anything was holding at all.
Quiet. Someone behind me shifted in their chair. Hendricks smiled—not warmly, never warmly, but with the recognition of something he’d been waiting to hear. Your name? Thomas Hartley.
You’ll do, Mr. Hartley.
I found the library that evening without intending to. I had been walking off a restlessness that grew unpleasant if it went unattended, cutting through the cloisters where the arches repeated themselves against the deepening sky and my footsteps returned to me a fraction too late. The library stood at the far end of the south range, its door left open, light spilling down the steps in a way that suggested entry without quite requesting it.
Inside, the ceiling disappeared into shadow. Long tables ran the length of the room, each fitted with brass lamps that threw controlled circles of light onto the wood and left the rest in partial darkness. Shelves climbed the walls from floor to ceiling, with ladders on rails for the upper rows. The air smelled of leather and dust and old paper—books breaking down slowly into something breathable. Students bent over their work. Pens moved. Pages turned. The quiet was not natural but maintained by the fear of being noticed.
I wasn’t looking for anything specific. What I needed was something to occupy my hands while leaving my mind free, which is not the same thing. I took a book at random—a commentary on the Henriad, dry and dutiful—and sat at a table near the back, turning pages without reading them, paying more attention to the room than to the text.
She came around the end of the stacks carrying more books than was practical, moving quickly enough that she nearly collided with me. She stopped. I didn’t. We were close enough that the air between us felt unsettled. I could smell the books she was holding—dust, glue, paper—and beneath that something warmer, unmistakably human.
You’re in the way.
She looked at me fully then, irritation held in place rather than discharged. Shiny hair pulled back, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a streak of graphite along the side of her hand where she’d been writing. She wasn’t beautiful in any way that asked for agreement. She was exact. Every part of her appeared to know its purpose.
Are you going to move? Eventually. she shifted the books against her hip and waited. The pause stretched. I stood and stepped aside—not in response to the question, but because the silence had acquired weight and I didn’t want to see what would happen if it continued. She passed me and began shelving, fitting each volume into place with quick, unhesitating movements, her back to me, though I knew she was aware I hadn’t left.
Thomas, I added, extending a hand. She left it hanging, suspended in the air. I know who you are. You were in here earlier.
The words caught. I hadn’t been. I was certain of that—certain the way you are of things that don’t require evidence, things you know because you were there for all of your own hours and can account for each of them. The room was still new to me. The light, the layout, the particular smell of it. I would have remembered. You’ve got me confused with someone else.
She glanced back, brief and noncommittal. Maybe. You all look alike the first week. It was meant lightly. I accepted it as such. But afterward, standing alone between the stacks, I found myself retracing the day—lecture, quad, cloisters, here—fitting each hour against the next like checking a row of figures, looking for the gap. There wasn’t one. The account balanced. And yet she had been sure enough not to hesitate, and I could not explain that surety away by assuming she was careless, because nothing else about her was.
I watched her work. She handled the books with confidence, each one placed where it belonged. I noticed how contained her certainty was. Mine tended to sprawl, to demand more than it could justify. Hers held.
When she passed my table on her way out, coat folded over her arm, I spoke before deciding to. You never told me your name. You never asked. I’m asking now.
She stopped. Looked at me for a moment, as though considering the cost of an answer. Then she told me. I repeated it, carefully. She shook her head once—amused or tired, I couldn’t tell—and went on, her footsteps diminishing down the stone steps until they were absorbed by the building.
I stayed where I was, my hands resting on the open book, aware of the space she had left behind and the uncomfortable sense that something had been initiated with neither my consent nor hers.
That night, I went into town.
Not for a reason I could have named. The restlessness the library had checked only briefly returned, thinner now, more insistent—an irritant rather than a hunger. I left through the back gate. The porter’s lodge was dark, the quad emptied, the oak reduced to a dense silhouette against a sky without stars. I followed the lane toward the high street.
By night, the town seemed to operate under a different set of allowances. Gas lamps dropped isolated circles of light onto the cobblestones, leaving the spaces between them intact. Pubs opened onto the pavement—noise, warmth, the scrape of chairs, a voice raised badly in song. The air carried coal smoke, ale, animal waste, fried food. I passed through it without stopping. Men stood outside the King’s Arms sharing a cigarette. A dog moved down the centre of the street without a collar. I walked past the market square with its shuttered stalls and its sweet rot, past the church with its clock face lit from below, and into the narrower streets where the lamps thinned and women waited in doorways.
I had known where I was going before I admitted it. The house was on a street without a visible name. A red curtain hung in the window. A woman sat on the step, older, smoking. We looked at one another. Nothing needed to be said.
Upstairs, the room was small and close, heavy with incense, perfume, old fabric. A woman—not the one from the step, younger, fair-haired—sat on the edge of the bed and began undoing her dress with practiced efficiency. She gave me a name. I gave her one. Neither of us expected it to matter.
She waited. I stayed by the door. My hands were unsteady. She asked if something was wrong. I said yes, which surprised me—I hadn’t known I was going to say that. She suggested I sit. I took the chair—a wooden thing with a loose slat that shifted under my weight. Through the floor, the woman from the steps was talking to someone. A door closed. The street went on without us. The room did not change, but it seemed to require attention.
Nothing happened. My body declined—not abruptly, not dramatically, simply without appeal. The silence thickened into something familiar, something I had felt before—the library, the girl between the stacks, the air unsettled and neither of us willing to break it.
She stood and refastened her dress. I watched her fingers work the buttons—small hands, a bruise yellowing on the inside of her wrist, a freckle below the collarbone that disappeared as the fabric closed over it. She was careful not to be unkind. These things happen, she said, in a voice worn smooth by repetition. I placed the money on the bed. She looked at it, then at me. Her expression altered slightly—not to pity or contempt, but to recognition. She had seen this before. She understood what I was meant to understand.
I went back down the stairs and into the street. The cold took me at once. I walked quickly, then faster, breath shortening, hands closed. Lamp posts and stone slid past. My footsteps sounded too loud, too close together. Someone called after me—I didn’t register the words—and then the college gate was ahead of me, the lane, the porter’s lodge with a single light, and I was inside, across the quad, up the stairs, my hand on the door to room fourteen, before I noticed having decided to return.
The sink. White porcelain, two brass taps, mounted on the wall near the doorframe.
I turned the knob to hot. It coughed, groaned, ran brown, then cleared. I put my hands under the stream and scrubbed. Hard. Palms, fingers, the spaces between, the backs of my hands, the wrists. The soap was hard and yellow and I worked it until it frothed and my skin was raw and the water ran clean off me and spiralled down the drain. I scrubbed again. The water was too hot now, almost scalding, and I let it burn. The pain served as proof that the body was still mine, still answerable to me, still capable of sensation even if it had refused the one sensation I’d gone looking for.
I turned off the tap. Stood there. My hands were red, shaking, dripping onto the floorboards. The basin sat there beneath me, white, patient, indifferent—a thing that received whatever you brought to it and asked nothing in return. Water, soap, grime. Guilt. Shame. Disgust. Whatever you needed to send down the drain, it took, and it didn’t remember, and it didn’t judge.
I looked at my face in the small glass hung over the basin. The eyes looking back were not tired. They should have been. They looked—I don’t have the right word. Alert. Eager, almost. As though the night had fed them while the rest of me starved. I stood there and the face looked back and for a moment I did not recognise the terms on which it was watching me. Then it passed. Something old settled behind the glass—older than Oxbridge, older than Hampstead, older than the house on the hill where my father stood at the foot of the stairs and watched me leave with the expression of a man appraising an investment he’d already written off. I looked away.
The room was dark. The window gave me the quad—the oak tree, the rooftops, the sky with no stars. I got into bed without undressing. The bed answered with a tired metallic creek. I lay there and listened to the building: pipes in the walls, boards settling, the wind pressing the glass, and somewhere far off the chapel bell striking something—eleven, twelve, I’d lost count.
I thought about the woman in the room. Her efficiency. Her practiced kindness. The way she’d looked at me when I put the money on the bed, as if she were seeing something I hadn’t yet agreed to show her.
I thought about the girl in the library. Her precision. The way she’d said I know who you are as though it were nothing, as though knowing me were the easiest thing in the world, when I was beginning to suspect it was the hardest.
I thought about my hands. Clean now. Raw. Burning still. But they’d need washing again tomorrow. They always did.
Sleep didn’t come quickly. Not this time. I lay in the dark and felt the room around me—small, close, mine—and waited for something I couldn’t name to release me.
When it finally came, I dreamed of water. A dark surface, still, and a boy standing at the edge with his back to me. Small. Watching. He stepped forward and the water took him without a sound, and I opened my mouth to shout but nothing came out, and I reached for him but my arms wouldn’t move, and the surface closed over him as if he had never been there at all.
I woke with my hands gripping the mattress and my heart trying to break through my ribs. Grey light. Early morning. For a moment I didn’t know where I was.
Then I did. Room fourteen. Third floor. October. I got up. Went to the sink. Turned the tap.
Written by Luke Wagner ’26 (lukewagner@college.harvard.edu) and Jonah Karafiol ’26 (jonahkarafiol@college.harvard.edu).
 | A guest post by
|