He came in a windbreaker. I said nothing about the windbreaker. Note that I said nothing.

I had prepared the lesson. It is a good lesson. It is the only lesson: fool me once, shame on you. There is no second half. Students always want the second half. There is no second half, because there is no second time, because the first time I have already killed you.

He sat down. He asked how my flight was. There was no flight.

I began. “Fool me once —”

“Shame on you,” he said.

Correct. Fine. A parrot is also correct.

“And fool me twice —”

And he looked at me. I want it understood that he was not thinking. He was not calculating. There was nothing behind the eyes at all — it was the clean nothing I have spent sixty years failing to put into a single student — and out of him came:

“You can’t get fooled again.”

I have broken arms in that room for less precision.

He did not arrive at it. He fell into it. He was reaching for the ordinary sentence, the one about shame, the one every fool keeps loaded, and he missed, and what came out was the thing I could not say in sixty years of saying it. Shame on me is a lie. Shame on me assumes you are still standing there to be ashamed.

You can’t get fooled again.

He apologized for the phrasing. He said he’d gotten it tangled. He said it was an old saying in Tennessee, or Texas, he wasn’t sure which.

Then he asked if I wanted anything from the kitchen.

I said no. I stroked my eyebrows, which is what I do instead of speaking, and which he did not appear to find remarkable.

The rule of this room is not mine to change. A man lands one, he is my master.

Master. I did not want it to be you.