The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could

by Yxta Maya Murray

  “Where’s your bag?” Tonatzin asks.

  “I don’t know.” I think. “In the car.”

  “Okay,” Tonatzin says. “We’ll wait here. Go to your car and get your bag.”

  Saúl’s chattering at me. I turn around and go outside and walk past the police. I start crying. I go to the car and open up the door and, howling like an animal, get my bag from the passenger’s seat. Then I walk past the police again, heading back. Some of the police are looking at me strange, and some of them are turning away from me, to give me privacy. In the Walmart, there’s a long line behind where Tonatzin and the red-haired lady are standing with Saúl. Saúl’s sobbing because I left. I stop crying when I see him crying. Tonatzin is trying to get the people in the line to go to checkout stand six or four. The red-haired lady is talking about shoes again.

  “The heels on my pumps were all worn down,” she says.

  I pick up Saúl and cry some more into his neck. Then I get my wallet and hand Luz my card.

  “You have to put it into the thing,” she says, looking at Tonatzin with a scared face.

  The little machine with the chip reader, is what she means. I put the card in the slot while balancing Saúl, who’s screaming, on my hip. The machine beeps, and I sign the screen with the plastic stick. Tonatzin squeezes past me and helps Luz bag up my stuff in a paper sack and puts it in the back of my shopping cart.

  “Go somewhere else,” the red-haired lady says to a tall bald man who’s holding a six-pack and complaining about the wait.

  “This is the express checkout,” he says.

  “Bug off,” she says.

  I put Saúl back in the seat in the shopping cart. He’s jerking his arms and hollering.

  Tonatzin and the red-haired lady walk me out of the Walmart, the red-haired lady still holding her basket.

  “What I think is that you can’t fight destiny,” the red-haired lady says. “What you have to do is be very, very grateful for every day that we have. For every second of life. For every breath. You need to breathe in the good air and remember that we are alive. And that everything happens for a reason. Because why else would we be standing here and not be dead like those poor people? Because there’s a plan, a secret plan, God’s plan, and we aren’t important enough to understand it. Why else would I go to the shoe store and not to the Walmart that day? And why else would those mothers and abuelas and children go to the Walmart and not go to the shoe store? Because of fate. Because of the angels. Because of heaven. Because of demons. Because of hell. Because of Satan.”

  “That’s enough,” Tonatzin says.

  Saúl’s crying is splitting my head open. I look at the two women and try to smile.

  “Thanks for helping me,” I say.

  “Aw, sure, honey,” Tonatzin says. “Whatever happened, I’m so sorry.”

  “My grandma didn’t go to the shoe store,” I say. “She died.”

  Tonatzin’s face crumbles.

  “Go home and pray,” the red-haired lady says.

  I take hold of my shopping cart’s handle, but I don’t walk to my Mazda. I squint into the bright sunlight bouncing off the glossy tops of the cars and the police officers in the parking lot. Tonatzin and the red-haired lady don’t move. They stay there patiently, watching me. It seems to me, in that moment, as if time expands, like a pink bubble, so that my grandmother is not dead and I’m not dead, and no one has died. Like time doesn’t exist, almost, because we’re just here, here in the parking lot, which is the same as being at home, or being nowhere. The world’s opened up, and when I look inside, it’s empty. My son is roaring at me. He’s bending over so that the Pikachu on his sweatshirt is getting cut in half. Saúl’s face is as red as a tomato.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” the red-haired lady says.

  “Not really,” Tonatzin says, hugging herself.

  I wipe my face with the back of my hand. There’s meat juice on it.

  “I can’t feel anything,” I say.*

  Known as Michigan’s “godmother of school choice,” DeVos has been one of the top funders of Detroit’s charter schools, which, as a New York Times op-ed commented, “even charter advocates acknowledge is the biggest school reform disaster in the country.” As the Times reported, half of Detroit’s charters performed only as well, or worse, than traditional public schools in the city, which are some of the most challenged in the country. . . . Perhaps it’s not surprising that for-profit companies run 80 percent of Michigan’s charters, far more than any other state.

  ZACHARY JASON, “The Battle over Charter Schools,” ED. (Harvard University), Summer 2017

  During Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) asked DeVos about whether or not her department would continue to provide federal funding to schools that had anti-LGBTQ policies. At first she tried to dodge the question by asserting, “Schools that receive federal funds must follow federal law.” But Merkley pressed, leading DeVos to say, “In areas where the law is unsettled, this department is not going to be issuing decrees. That is a matter for Congress and the courts to settle.”

  ZACK FORD, “Betsy DeVos Abandons LGBTQ Students, Won’t Protect Them from Discrimination,” ThinkProgress, June 6, 2017

  The company, Neurocore, which has received more than $5 million from Ms. DeVos and her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., to run “brain performance centers” in Michigan and Florida, lost an appeal before an advertising-industry review board, which found that the company’s claims of curbing and curing a range of afflictions without medication were based on mixed research and unscientific internal studies.

  ERICA L. GREEN, “‘Brain Performance’ Firm DeVos Invested in Is Hit for Misleading Claims,” New York Times, June 26, 2018

  One picture of private prisons . . . includes barely edible food, indifferent health care, guard brutality, and assorted corner-cutting measures.

  CLYDE HABERMAN, “For Private Prisons, Detaining Immigrants Is Big Business,” New York Times, October 1, 2018

  The Overton Window

  OUR MANDATES are more far-reaching now than under previous administrations, but we must still ensure that our supervisors do not forget their essential responsibilities. We have extended extraordinary latitudes to our more gifted stewards, and our policies encourage them to innovate learning, health, welfare, behavioral, and performance modules within the more generous potentials allowed by public-private partnerships and developments in constitutional law. Nevertheless, we at the Department of Education lead from the top and require our administrators to cultivate the same sound bodies and regulated minds that we develop in our nation’s youths. If an administrator moves too far beyond the Overton Window—that old, handy helpmeet for policy makers—we will not hesitate to pivot his platform back to acceptable settings.

  To that effect, during my investigation of Harrison Carver’s stewardship of the Landingsburgh Program (#180232SC), which I conducted 2/12/38 at the behest of the Secretary, I concluded that certain benchmarks have gone missing

  it appears that in Landingsburgh our standard framework has been modified to accommodate

  it seems that Carver has not

  I’m afraid that Carver has

  I’m afraid

  The day the Secretary told me to check up on Carver started cheerfully enough. I had woken early to make pancakes and waffles for my husband and three children. We live in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in a modest four-bedroom home with a large, grassy backyard that gives the kids plenty of space to play and calibrate. I’m at the office a lot because of the demands of my job as first assistant to the SOE. Still, when I can, I like to spend high-impact time with my family, which I use to manage their personal parameters and do homey things, like cook for them.

  “Eat up,” I’d said that morning, spooning strawberry jam into a sauce boat while I still stood in the kitchen.

  James, my husband, sat at the breakfast table with my eldest, Sheraton, and our twins, Tina and Ulrike. They munched and muttered gentle joshes at e
ach other while drinking orange juice and spearing sausages.

  “Why don’t you sit and eat with us?” James asked, as he finished his pancake stack. He’s a tall, well-built fellow with large green eyes and a short nap of brown hair, like a puppy’s. We met at a Dupont Circle nightclub in ’22, when he studied for his UCPAE at Georgetown and I had not yet started my job at the DOE. James now works as an accountant for Cheshire Inc. in DC. We’ve been married for sixteen years.

  “Sheraton likes the strawberry. I’m just fixing it up,” I said. My name is Petra Eager, and I’m a medium-built thirty-eight-year-old woman with blond hair and brown eyes. James and I go running regularly together, and so I have kept my figure despite riding a government desk for sometimes eighteen hours at a stretch.

  “Your mother fusses over you,” James said, reaching out to ruffle our son’s daisy-blond hair. Sheraton’s twelve years old. He’s a quiet, gentle, sweet boy with clear green eyes and a delicate constitution. He has a small learning disability—he’s two clicks behind in reading, which classifies him as an A/B—which we countered by sending him to one of the specialized charters in DC that Carver had founded so many years before: Middlebrook Elite focuses on Comprehension and Self-Awareness, and Sheraton had been flourishing there. The girls, Tina and Ulrike, are hale, hearty, russet-haired beauties who excel at sports and science, and so we’d placed them in another nearby school, Marlborough, which is Well Rounding them in arts and relationships. They’re solid As.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Sheraton said, smiling at me.

  “I want the strawberry before Sheraton gets it,” Tina said.

  “No, I do,” Ulrike said.

  “Don’t eat all the waffles,” Sheraton said.

  “Enough for everybody,” James and I said at the same time.

  That’s when my phone started to beep. I reached over to the kitchen counter, where I’d placed it before mixing the pancake batter, and picked it up.

  “Need to see you ASAP,” the Secretary’s message said.

  An hour later, I stood on the blue-and-gold eagle carpet that spread out from beneath the Secretary’s huge desk. The Department of Education is headquartered in the Lyndon Johnson Building on Maryland Street. It’s a big, boxy, latticed-looking structure, built in the early ’60s. After the presidential Extension in ’23, there’d been some talk of replacing it with an Addison Mizner–style palazzo that brought together Spanish and Venetian influences, but this plan was quickly scuttled by the Secretary as too accelerated an aesthetic modification. I agreed with her, as during that period, we had already implemented a host of reforms that proceeded on the quick track, and I knew from personal experience that it takes a little time for people to get used to change. You can’t spring it on them all at once.

  “I need you to go look in on Carver,” the Secretary said, tapping her painted nails on a rectangular blue whiz drive that lay on the blotter before her. She’s dark-haired, didn’t look any bigger than a minute behind her huge desk, and bears a tanned and attractive visage adorned with light makeup and tasteful dermatological work. Her easy-does-it appearance is deceiving, though, as she has revolutionized the school system into a for-profit charter landscape through brute force of willpower and an advanced sense of ends-means.

  I wore a plain beige suit with a white silk shirt, brown pumps, and a lilac scarf at my neck. I remained standing, though I could feel my face crease slightly with confusion. “You want me to monitor Carver?”

  “Yes. He’s still in Landingsburgh.”

  “Which has the best metrics in the nation,” I said.

  The Secretary waggled her fingers at me, a sign of tension. “You know that he made it a condition that we leave him alone as long as his numbers stayed up—and he’s been an independent agency since, when?”

  “About ten, eleven years, ma’am,” I said.

  “That long,” she shook her head. “Well, he has kept his stats high. Plus, he started generating liquidity, especially after he began to caucus with other bureaus.”

  I nodded, familiar with all of this. “But?”

  The Secretary looked at me over her glasses. “We’ve been hearings things. Sort of strange rumors. The governor’s complaining.”

  “About what?”

  She waved a hand. “That he’s depressed, there’s emotional issues, something.”

  “Does the governor want him out?” I asked.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “Oh, no, no. But his reports have been only trickling in, so we don’t really have eyes on. I’ve informed Carver’s assistant that you’ll be coming.” She pushed the whiz drive toward me.

  I stepped forward and took up that little burden.

  “Listen, this doesn’t leave the room,” the Secretary said. “But we haven’t heard from Carver in four months. So you need to go out there and see what’s going on.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  Carver was a great man in his way, as we all knew. Army, Harvard, Stanford. Medal of Honor, Magna Cum Laude, NEH Fellow. Before he came to us, he developed his penchant for problem solving by captaining an F/A-18C Hornet during the Iraqi Civil War and helping to retake the Mosul Dam. He then set his sights on education. After receiving his MA at the age of twenty-seven, Carver began teaching in the Maine school system, impressing his superiors by lowering 7–12 truancy by three classifications and 9–12 depravity by eight stages through Core Values tutorials enforced in 4 × 4 block schedules. Within two years of being tapped by the Secretary to lead the DOE’s Rehabilitative Services Bureau, Carver implemented the Clean Bodies, Full Hearts, and Healthy Minds programs for the nation’s students, which tests the subjects on various skill sets and then assigns them a category ranging from A to SubD. His innovations activated a +17 rise in national intelligence and a full rank uptick in self-management metrics observable in units scoring beneath 192 in the General Test.

  When Carver ran the RSB, I had just been hired by the Agency. This was in ’24. The Secretary (her contract’s been reupped eight times) assigned me to the Office of Safe and Healthy Students as a GS-5 assistant supervisor with responsibility for the C class students in the Midwest. Even there, in the Agency’s lowlier precincts, we had heard of Carver’s successes and sought to emulate him. He’d not only succeeded in privatizing the national athletics and humanities curricula but also launched the trailblazing “I Am” and “Listening Traits” pedagogies, which it is no exaggeration to say that he single-handedly invented.

  The first time I laid eyes on the man was in the summer of ’26, when Carver gave the keynote at the six-day New School conference. Carver strode to the podium in quick but fluid moves and radiated an aura of bracing confidence. He’d raised his arms and stared at us with his well-deep, misty eyes for a moment, so that a hush lowered down upon the room. Then, in the most mesmerizing and honey-dark voice I’d ever heard, he said, “Our job is to love and protect our nation’s children, who have been entrusted to our care during a dangerous age of crime and laxity. To fulfill our covenant, we must remember always the hard truths that without mandatory decency there cannot be harmony and that without costs, there cannot be benefits. So armed with this knowledge, we must exert the authority we hold over these little souls by virtue of God’s grace and expend it toward unbounded and efficient good works.” He pounded the podium, his face aglow with conviction. “And only a system rooted deeply in public choice can achieve this!”

  After the roaring and applause, my colleagues huddled together, trading notes. “He increased productivity 89 percent in SubD Belligerents in his Cincinnati Focus Group,” a GS-11 from Federal Student Aid murmured. “In New Jersey, he organized delivery systems that optimized Emotional Resilience in B’s by six stages for the entire region,” a G-6 from the Office of Civil Rights breathed.

  “He’s a remarkable man,” I agreed.

  Like my other colleagues, I kept an eye on Carver’s accomplishments throughout his career. The Secretary had encouraged a culture of Best and Top Notch, and Carv
er embodied those ethics. We wanted to embody them too.

  I grew up in Dane County, Wisconsin, the daughter of Sheraton Hauser, a strict but loving father and English schoolteacher at Jefferson High. I wanted to be just like my dad, and so I earned my master’s in ’22, teaching in a Dane County middle school. I entered a challenged system where the classes were massive—units running sometimes into the seventies or eighties—and the facilities were infested with asbestos and lead. The Publics were then nearly defunded in the overhaul of ’22. At Dane, we had Acute Incidents on a nearly daily basis and two mass shooting in four years, which I understood to be fostered by the combustive interaction between the pupils’ desperation and saturnism and an increasing citizen discontent with the use of tax dollars to teach outlanders.

  After losing six children in a conflict between White vocationals affiliated with a patriot alt-chan site and Hispanic students, I decided that I wanted to be part of the revolution that created safe classrooms and optimized children’s civic characters and brain performances. As soon as I saw the advertisement for the Office of Safe and Healthy Students, I applied. It was lucky too, because after the Second Emergency, we started to see a tidal wave of exciting ideas for how to address children’s behavioral health challenges and government overspending. In those years, almost all of the innovations came from Carver’s own fertile mind, and it always gave me a thrill on the rare occasions I saw him wandering the Agency halls, barking orders into a phone and exuding the centrifugal magnetism of a rising star.

  The Secretary promoted Carver to General Counsel in ’26, and he acquired authority over three thousand schools located in Vulnerable Districts across the United States. Carver soon enough began to focus most of his energies on the “school-to-prison pipeline,” a term developed by the Left to chastise educational and law enforcement technologies that were said to have disparate impacts on SubDs, who were more likely to be people of certain races. Carver did not shy away from this phrasing but rather began issuing a blizzard of increasingly excitable-sounding memoranda wherein he promised that he would not only eliminate the pipeline but also decrease SubD juvenile delinquency at the same time. Carver worked continually toward this goal and achieved a breakthrough quickly enough in ’27. This is when he implemented his groundbreaking Growth Model, which saw his Vulnerable District conservatories becoming an all-inclusive learn-live society. Delinquency in all grades fell to between 22–46 percent at his franchises, and, what’s more, the juvenile felony convictions for his SubDs also plummeted. Perhaps most excitingly for Congress, after an initial start-up period, his Academies also began to pay for themselves.