Al sat in the back of the classroom, mostly kept to himself. This was the time before students constantly had their devices open, when social media was a concatenation of two important but only loosely related words. I had been hired, full-time, back in ’96, and despite the protestations of two small children and a spouse who always regretted not traveling more, it was a happy gig. Teaching philosophy to undergrads in Fairbanks. Swimming as a side hobby. Enjoying the rib from the chair and table (the dean). Living, really. The small assets in the bank accumulated. Mortgage cheap. Jenny and Billy who might wake me with a peck on the cheek. Cigarette papers rolled like sleeves. A chalkboard with real chalk, not a white board. And I could go on. Yet Al. His long hair held back by a sweatband rumored to be discarded from the one time the Fairbanks ‘Grizzlies’ (why not ‘Polar Bears’) made it to the Nationals in track and field. Perhaps it was he, team captain. Perhaps an heirloom from some snow-tossed love. But he always had paper and was taking notes, endless notes without saying a word. In the beginning professors asked him to leave. Parents were notified. The Chair arranged a meeting, then the Dean. But no matter what, he would be seated in the same place, the exact same seat, back row, farthest left. Near the window. When in Spring semester the breeze from cherry and apple blossoms would blow through the classroom he was first to sense it, and by the wordlessness of his example garnered participation points. Different philosophy professors were different, of course, but I always had a soft spot for the budding mystics, the ascetics, flagellants, Simeons and Secundi of the bunch. He’d let his hair grow out sometimes, and at other times let himself go so completely you’d think the laughing Buddha were somehow real, eating Ramen with a plastic fork at the back of the class, slurping and in his indecent gastrointestinal soliloquies showing us—demonstrating once and for all—that knowing, that living well, consisted chiefly in between the legs and in the lower torso’s being well-fed. At other times he’d appear gaunt, stark, probing with his eyes the couple square feet that constituted the surface of his desk, as though some answer might leap out suddenly, as though a thought so ephemeral and yet miraculous might surface for the sake of those whose only duty if there are philosophical duties at all would be to catch it, to hold it, let it thrive lest it be lost to oblivion for all time. ‘Kat-zu’, the moment of enlightenment. Even when—as was regular before my tenure but became a special occasion—we would have champagne to celebrate a new faculty book, Al would sit in his seat in repose, unknowing, in a seeming state of meditation. Some faculty would leave a signed copy before him, others candles. At night the janitor would hang a simple garland across his neck as he contemplated, or turning a blind eye to all that is worldly scrawled in his notebook the bare copula ‘is’, ‘is’, in fonts varying like hiccups, like sneezes, like the dressage of student-ease messing over some acute barrier of language while the jockey, frenetic, dreams and hopes of victory, though knowing none of his own successes depended on it. And again there would be a new hire, the police would be called, the meeting with the chair arranged, and the table, the dean would meet, would explain, would qualify, would compare across the scores of students gone and graduated, and nodding, the new hire would come to accept that there were things that must be accepted without being understood: why the semester was so long, why Al would always be there, unblinkingly alive, why ‘I have a hand’ is enough to convince so careful a philosopher as Moore that there is an external world, without itself requiring some further proof that we are not dreaming. Meanwhile Al would sit and smile and look out at the clouds, Zazen Al with his long chestnut hair and learned chopsticks. His regular rotation of band-based shirts which (so we gossiped) were intended for him to ‘fit in’. Alien. Lizard person. External self. God. Angel. Demiurge. It didn’t matter—that’s how committed we were as professors. Only the ideas mattered, the theories (I swear). But there came a day when I realized the truth. I had assigned Descartes’ Meditations. If I were a mere specter, I asked the class, couldn’t I not only imagine myself as not having a body, but also feel as though I lacked a body? It felt like a relevant question, as Descartes’ usual idea that we can imagine ourselves without bodies begins to fall short, if we counter that imagining x doesn't mean that x is possible. But in response to the possibility that I was entertaining, that if dualism is true, it explains why we can imagine that if we were ghosts we could feel as though disembodied—Al’s hand shot straight into the air: Then how is it that I have been here for all these years?