James occupied the office next to mine, his door already open when I arrived at school on Tuesday and Thursday mornings around 9.30. He would be sitting at his desk, his computer on, the screen full of emails. Or he would be sitting in his chair, his feet up, talking to somebody on the phone, loudly, about something important.

Sometimes, students would be leaning against the outside rail, waiting for James as he finished doing something. Maybe he slammed down the phone and started thumping a box or bag around, pushing papers and files off the chair so the student could sit.

His office was full of crap. I don’t know what half of it was. When he shared the office with another colleague, he kept the piles and mounds to his side of the room, but once she moved into her own office, the crap began to inch over, filling her former space.

I would poke around as I talked with him, finding feathers and colored beads and books with ripped covers. Once there was a children’s game board on his desk. Pillows on the floor. Jackets. And just a lot of paper. Maybe a manuscript or two, one that he was writing or trying to write.

He’d laugh about the detritus, push it over some more so I could sit down. But mostly, I stood at the door, my hand on either side of the jamb. We would talk to each other, checking in with each other in our cynical, ironic way, trying to find out what was wrong with the day already and considering how we might fix it. Or if we should even bother

“Idiot,” James would say about someone we both hated or thought we should hate. James was always fighting someone, someone who had wronged the faculty or students or just people in general, so there were a lot of idiots to consider.

“Did you see his email?” James would say, and I had, of course, so we could rip the email and then the sender to shreds in good time, leaving a minute or two to grab our books and get to class.

James was a fighter, and I liked to watch him fight, reading all his emails to others with glee and a guilty pleasure. He was persistent, annoying, and a pain-in-the ass, though he was also incredibly articulate, smart, and funny. He would end all his demands with a “Thanks!” the big ironic bang at the end of the message. Everyone knew he never meant “thanks!” at all. Everyone knew “thanks” was really an “up yours, dick head.”

He picked everyone apart, raked anyone he could over the coals. And then, he’d laugh about it, shrugging it off. Opening a James email was never disappointing.

When James got sick from a brain tumor and went out on leave at the end of the 2007 fall semester, I missed him and our Tuesday and Thursday morning round up of idiots. I missed him wandering over to my orderly office and standing in my door, telling me about something he read or asking me about what I was writing. James was an amazing writer, with a store of novels and stories in drawers and in his computer.

That year without him next to me, I missed talking about writing, Robert Downey, Jr, and my love life, though I didn’t miss talking about women’s soccer, one of his true obsessions--soccer and music.

We had a student in common, a re-entry student named Justin, who loved to write about sex and only sex—and Justin especially loved to read his work aloud in class. James and I named him Devil Student, because he liked to email us both, often. We kept a look out for Justin together, concerned and excited about the next Devil Student incident.

When James was home sick, I visited him maybe six or seven times, driving down to see him in various states of recuperation and illness. I took him to a radiation appointment, to the eye doctor, to the hardware store to buy light bulbs. One visit, we went on a big errand, to buy his wife a nightgown for her birthday and a book for mother’s day, both events the same weekend.

There we were, James with his partially shaved head and me in tow, searching the rounds of nightgowns, the fabric flowing. I held a gown up against me, he cocked his head, trying to imagine his beloved wife instead of me under the swath of silk or satin.

“No,” he said. “That’s not right.”

And we would go to another store and then another, until he found the right one.

I held the gown up to me, tired myself after all this shopping. Finally, he smiled. “That’s it. That’s perfect.”

For a second, the afternoon light slanting in the window, the store calm, the gown soft against me, everything was. Perfect.

I’ve missed James for a year, and now that James has died, I miss him more. I miss him because I know I could go over to his office right now, peak my head in. He of all people would tell me what I need to know about where he is now. I know that even though he has only been dead for less than one day, he has already cased the joint, figured out the workings of the system, and determined who to write an email to.

Thanks! A whole flipping lot, he would write. Double thanks!!

“Tell me, James,” I would say to him now if I could. “Tell me what it’s like. What can we complain about? Who’s the idiot over there? And how can we fix it?”