This River

by James Brown

  They pile out of the car.

  As I’m removing Nate’s safety seat, so I can put it in my backseat, my wife looks around at me. She sniffs the air.

  “Is that booze I smell?”

  “What?” I say.

  “Are you drunk?”

  She knows I’m struggling. I’ve been struggling for years with the bottle and other substances, and after countless failed attempts to quit, I am for the first time actually making real progress. Every evening I attend an A.A. meeting. Every week I go for group and individual alcohol and drug counseling. My compulsion to drink, I’m told, is complicated by an array of long-standing mental disorders, some likely inherited. Even at the tender age of six, not long after my parents divorced, I was labeled emotionally disturbed by the school psychologist and placed in a class for Special Education students.

  “I’ve been clean and sober for a hundred and sixty-two days,” I say.

  “Oh really,” she says. “Too bad you couldn’t do it when we were still a family. You sonofabitch. You bastard.”

  I feel it rising inside me, the anger, a pulsing in my ears, and I want to lash out. But I don’t, and this only provokes her. She is used to fighting. I am used to fighting. We have fought for years, especially toward the end of our marriage, and by not reacting to her taunts I’m breaking a familiar pattern, an ugly cycle, one not altogether unlike that of addiction. Perversely it is her way of controlling me, pushing all the right buttons, triggering my guilt and self-loathing. These are feelings that often lead me to rationalize drinking and using.

  “Do you realize what hell you put me through? What you’ve done to your own flesh and blood? You’re sick and you’ll always be sick. Sober,” she says. “Maybe you can make it a month or two, but you won’t last.”

  Her words hurt because there is truth to them. I have relapsed so many times I no longer bother to keep count. From one day to the next, I cannot say with absolute certainty that I won’t drink. Staying sober requires from me constant vigilance, and I am deeply shamed for the pain my failures have caused my wife and our children. For the adulterer, like the alcoholic, there can be no lasting forgiveness, no real reparation, and to believe otherwise is to believe an even greater lie.

  “Could you pass a drug test?”

  I don’t say anything.

  She climbs into her SUV. “That’s what I thought,” she says, just before closing the door.

  Considering the unfortunate outcome of Yukio’s grade grievance, I’m surprised to find his name on the roster of my advanced fiction-writing course. Easter break is over. It’s the first day of spring quarter classes, and as I’m taking roll I spot him seated in the back of the room, a slight, quiet, diminutive figure of a man. A loner. He sports a scraggly goatee that he likes to tug at, twisting and untwisting the longer hairs around his index finger. On the floor, close beside him, is a briefcase, and he has a habit of occasionally tapping the side of it with his shoe.

  Yukio has a few years on most of my students—I’d say he’s in his late twenties—but by no means is he the oldest in class.

  This is the state university and we get our share of adults, serious, determined students grateful to be here. Most of them have been around the block a couple of times and have some real stories to tell.

  After I’ve taken roll, I ask for sign-ups for the workshop in which each student presents a story to the class to be critiqued. It can be grueling for the writer, having so many readers discuss your work and not being allowed to say a word in defense or explication. To avoid argument, the rules require the author remain silent until the class has had their say.

  Because it’s the first day, I give them their reading assignments for our next meeting and let them go early. The room is soon empty except for Yukio. He approaches my desk.

  “I know you’re not one of them.”

  “One of what?” I say.

  But he doesn’t say anything.

  “If you mean the committee,” I say, “I voted in your favor.”

  It’s true. But I didn’t fight for him, which for all practical purposes is no better than voting against him. As I’m gathering my things to leave, Yukio places his briefcase on my desk, snaps it open, and pulls out an old, dog-eared copy of Lucky Town, my last novel. It’s been out-of-print for years.

  “Will you sign it for me?”

  I take the book from him.

  “Where’d you find this?”

  “A thrift store,” he says. “On E Street.”

  I haven’t produced a book in nearly a decade, and rather than being proud of my last one, it is instead an ugly reminder of the many years I’ve wasted getting loaded. I sign it on the title page, write a short note, and pass it back. “Thank you,” he says, giving me two short, quick nods, an abbreviated form of the Japanese bow. On the way out, he holds the door open for me. I’m hoping he’ll go his own way as we start down the hall, so I can be left to my own thoughts, but for some reason he feels a need to confide in me. Venting to strangers is typical of the troubled. I know because I’ve done it myself.

  He tells me he’s not doing so well.

  He tells me his apartment was burglarized last month. He says he knows who did it because he spotted his stereo in a neighboring apartment. Just by chance, the door was open as he passed by.

  “I confront him too,” Yukio says, “and he denies everything.”

  So he calls the cops, and when they arrive he walks them down to the thief’s apartment. But all they do is talk to the guy. “They won’t even search the place,” he says. “They tell me to fill out forms.” Then later that same night, he pulls into a gas station near where he lives in the ghettos of San Bernardino, pays the cashier seated inside the bulletproof booth, and starts back to his car to pump his gas. Only now there’s a girl filling her car with his gas, and short of yanking the nozzle from her hands, which is not a good idea because there are several large young men sitting in her car, there is nothing he can do.

  “In my Japan,” he says, “people don’t do so many bad things. I mean we do bad things but nothing compared to California.”

  At the elevators, we part ways. He presses the button and waits. I turn the corner and continue down the hall to my office where I find a campus police officer standing outside the door. She is a younger woman with red hair pulled back tight into a bun.

  “Professor Brown?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “James Brown?”

  “Yes.”

  She hands me a manila envelope.

  “I thought it’d be better to catch you at your office instead of the classroom. I’m sorry,” she says. “This is one part of my job I really don’t like.”

  The office door across from mine is open and one of my colleagues is at her desk staring at her computer screen, pretending not to notice. I appreciate the gesture. I also appreciate how the officer serves me here rather than interrupting class and humiliating me in front of my students.

  When she leaves, when I’m alone in my office, I open the envelope and find a court order filed by my wife’s divorce attorney. Basically it states that because I have a history of mental illness and because I have drug and alcohol problems, I am a potential risk to the moral character, safety, and well-being of my children. I am a potential risk to myself and others, and until the court schedules a hearing on the matter, I am barred from having any contact with my ex or our kids.

  No visits.

  No phone calls.

  No letters. Nothing. Any attempt to circumvent the order will result in my arrest.

  For the last few months, I’ve had the boys every weekend and I don’t understand why, now when I’m sober, I’m suddenly regarded as an unfit parent. This is not about protecting the children. No, I think. This is retaliation for my getting sober. This is in reaction to my not reacting, containing my rage rather than matching it with hers, and a return to our worn-out, destructive ways. This is about punishing me for having the audacity to leave her for ano
ther woman, and worse, a younger one. This is about exploiting my inability to pass a drug test. Although I’ve been clean for some time, meth can be detected for up to six months in the hair follicles, and she knows it. The subject was broached in the first discussions between our attorneys.

  Her taking away the children is unquestionably the most violent way of inflicting pain on me.

  In sharp and vivid prose, the narrator of Yukio’s story describes precisely how he intends to set fires at both ends of the hall that houses the offices of the faculty of the Department of English and the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. Soon we will smell smoke. Soon the fire alarms will sound, and when we step into the hall, he picks off everyone but me with an AK-47. He describes the assault rifle in meticulous detail, from the smooth curve of its trigger to how he loads and operates it, switching over from bursts of three to fully automatic. But the kicker is that he uses our real names, and his own, too, as our trusted narrator who envisions himself an unrequited hero.

  I require my students to pass out their stories one class session in advance of their workshop date. Because we only meet twice a week, this gives them plenty of time to get the work read and prepare a written critique. This also gives Yukio’s story plenty of time to circulate and find its way onto the desks of our department chair and school dean whose lives he’s threatened to take. Over the weekend, I get panicked calls from them both. The chair is first.

  “Tell me about this guy,” she says. “You’re the only one he apparently doesn’t want dead.”

  “He’s a little out there,” I say.

  “Jesus, I know that. But do you think he’s serious?”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “Great,” she says. “Now I can relax.”

  “I’d say it’s fifty-fifty. A lot better odds than Vegas.”

  “This is nothing to joke about,” she says. “He’s complained to me twice about losing his grade grievance and he just doesn’t seem to get it. Even if I wanted, I don’t have the power to reverse the committee’s decision. Why is it you guys in creative writing always attract the fucking crazies?”

  “It’s part of being a writer,” I say.

  She doesn’t laugh.

  “Listen,” she says, “I phoned the campus police this morning and apparently there’s no law against threatening another’s life, at least not in a story billed as fiction. But that doesn’t mean we don’t take every threat seriously. You know what happened at Cal State Fullerton. I think you should cancel class Tuesday. Just call in sick. Take the day off.”

  Ignoring the story, however, is to ignore the person, and in Yukio’s case that could be the same as giving him one last good shove over the edge. I tell the chair, as I will the dean later that same afternoon, that following through with Yukio’s story is considerably less jeopardous than deliberately disregarding it. To appease my other students, and in all fairness to them, I’ll make attendance optional that day. I won’t penalize anyone for skipping out or even refusing to turn in a written critique. But I want to hold class.

  “Are you sure?” she asks.

  “I think it’d be a mistake not to.”

  By Tuesday, the word is out that class tonight is voluntary. Only eleven out of twenty-two students show up, but I anticipated even less, so I’m neither surprised nor disappointed. The workshop process is a hard one, and though I try to foster a certain balance, stressing the importance of positive commentary in something close to equal proportion with the critical, I’m not always successful. Today, because of the troubling nature of the material, I don’t know what to expect.

  But I’m watching Yukio closely.

  The whole class is watching Yukio closely. When I ask everyone to put their desks in a circle, he positions his near the door, and of course it arouses suspicion. He does it, we think, so he can make a quick getaway. He does it in case he has to bolt.

  In his story the protagonist, a young Japanese man, comes to California wide-eyed and trusting, hoping to gain from our university the necessary tools to become a writer. Along the way, however, at every turn, he encounters hostility and prejudice. His professors are rude and unsympathetic, and instead of looking at him for what he is, a foreign exchange student learning a new language, they regard him as stupid.

  Outside the university, it’s even worse.

  His apartment is burglarized. His gasoline is stolen at the pumps. He has also been robbed and beaten bloody by a pack of roving teenagers out for a little fun. In each instance, he reports the crime to the local police, and in each instance they do nothing but take a report. And because he makes these reports, believing it the right and necessary thing to do, if only to assist the police in apprehending these criminals before they hurt someone else, he is considered a nuisance.

  A bona fide nut case.

  By now, the class has formed a circle and settled into their seats. I take mine across from Yukio, just one desk away, in the event I have to lunge at him. And I will, if he reaches for a weapon, or starts after a student whose critique sets him off.

  “Who’d like to start?” I say.

  Everyone is quiet. I wait a few seconds, and when I get no volunteers, I call on one of my better students, one who tends to preface her opening remarks with a compliment or two. That’s not the case this time.

  “It’s definitely disturbing,” she says. “I didn’t even bother reading the whole thing. Since I don’t have anything good to say, I don’t think I’ll say anything at all.”

  I glance at Yukio to see how he’s taking it, but his face is expressionless.

  I call on the next student.

  “I’ll pass too,” he says.

  This is not going well. But it’s the student’s right to pass, and so I move on to yet another, an older woman around my age, in her early forties maybe. She’s returning to college after having raised a family and wants to be a high school teacher. She’s also the toughest critic in class and not exactly popular with the other students because of it. She looks directly at Yukio.

  “You,” she says, “need to see a shrink.”

  I interrupt.

  “Talk about the writing,” I say. “Not the person.”

  “In this case I don’t see the difference. He uses real names, and I like these professors he’s talking about killing. So he’s had a hard time,” she says. “So fucking what? We all get kicked around in life. Just because he gets ignored and beat up doesn’t give him the right to grab a gun and start shooting everybody.”

  Again I glance at Yukio.

  Again he maintains a poker face. Clearly he’s anticipated these sorts of comments and already steeled himself against them. If I detect any reaction, it’s the slightest hint of a smile. But there’s no smugness in it, none that I sense.

  Once the older woman takes the lead, the other students voice their opinions, fast and hard and all along the same tough line. If not to defend Yukio, because I think like the class, that the story is indefensible, but as the teacher, and in the name of fairness, it nevertheless falls on me to assume the role of devil’s advocate.

  Any of us, I tell them, even the most sound of mind, might one day find ourselves teetering on the edge. Real or invented, by no means is this character alone or unique. We all have our breaking point. We all have our limits. Who’s to say how much pain and disappointment you can reasonably suffer before you snap. And why does it end on an uncertain note, when Yukio turns the gun on himself, before he pulls the trigger—if he pulls the trigger—suspended in that moment between life and death? The story is about violence, instability, anger, and anguish. It is one, I say to the class, that at some unfortunate point we may all come to know better.

  “Yukio.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s your turn to talk,” I say. “Do you want to add something?”

  He shakes his head.

  “No,” he says. “No, thank you.”

  Years earlier, at the state university in Fullerton, California, lo
cated about sixty miles from where I teach at CSU San Bernardino, custodian Edward Charles Allaway committed the deadliest massacre in Orange County history. After phoning his estranged wife and telling her that this was his “last day to live,” Allaway drove to the Fullerton campus and shot and killed seven people, including two professors. Judge Robert P. Kneeland removed all criminal penalties in Allaway’s trial, finding him “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

  Not long after this incident, at nearby Fullerton Junior College, a male Japanese student, apparently emotionally distraught over his failing grades and his parents’ high expectations for him, fatally shot his apartment manager. Afterwards, he sought refuge in a classroom with massive windows overlooking the campus where in full public view he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. In yet another instance, Peter Odighizuma, a forty-three year old Nigerian foreign exchange student on the verge of flunking out of law school, executed a professor and the university’s dean at point-blank range. Like Edward Charles Allaway, Odighizuma was later declared mentally unfit to stand trial and found “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

  The list goes on, and I suppose it may never end. I also suspect that it is with knowledge of these murders that our Dean of the College of Arts and Letters has a change of heart. Two days after we workshop Yukio’s story, she asks me to intervene on his behalf.

  “He’s a walking time bomb,” she tells me, over the phone. “I want him on the next plane back to Japan as soon as possible, and if that means bending the rules, bend them.”

  The arrangement is this: In lieu of having to retake the class he flunked, Yukio will report directly to me in English 522: Independent Study. He’ll sign a contract stipulating that he must complete several assignments approximately equivalent to those he failed in American Lit. And it’s tacitly understood between the dean, the chair, and myself that I’ll pass him regardless of the quality of his work. In the spring quarter we meet twice a week for an hour in my office, and I go over his writing carefully, sentence by sentence, pointing out unsupported claims, correcting grammar, and encouraging him where and when it’s due.