The thing about papers is that they accumulate in the most tyrannical of ways. They stack up in unruly piles with torn corners and awkwardly stapled edges hanging out everywhere. They are always too many to carry around as a single quantity, and so it is necessary to break them into smaller piles—knowing as you finish grading each pile that this is only one small part of the whole. And most of them, in Binhammer’s experience, offer little more than plagiaristic sentiments by the paragraphful. All in neat little trains of black letters on endless leaves of white. He always thinks about the plural quantity of papers as a “brick of papers,” and uses it in the same way that you might talk about a brace of fowl or a herd of buffalo. “What have you got there?” Walter asks this morning, leaning over the table in the teachers’ lounge where Binhammer is holding a ballpoint pen—in frozen potentiality—over one such brick of papers. He has read the same line five times. He has memorized the words, but he can’t seem to make them stick together or make sense in any way—and down they plummet through the gutter of his consciousness.
