by Jake Wolff
For most of my junior year, my affection for Mr. Tampari felt like no big deal. Students develop crushes on their teachers all the time. Mr. Smith-Wyatt, the civics teacher who took his wife’s name, had to end class five minutes early to account for the line of girls waiting for him after the bell, their impudent B cups pushing against their tank tops, tempting him to look down, though he never did. But as the school year reached its final weeks, I began to sense a change in Mr. Tampari, and at times—though I couldn’t believe it—he seemed to be flirting with me. There was the day Principal Dee interrupted our independent study to say the odors from the Briggs-Rauscher reaction were bothering the other teachers. After she left, I asked him if we should stop.
He gazed into the beaker, where the liquid had turned a dark, almost blackish blue, the color of squid ink. “Oh, don’t worry about her,” he said. “We good-looking people have to stick together.”
That night, I spent twenty minutes in front of the mirror, trying to see the person he did. The next week, he told me to stop calling him Mr. Tampari—“You can call me Sammy, outside of class”—and there was no way to pretend that wasn’t weird.
* * *
“This is from me,” Dana said, pushing a wrapped box across the table. Her face reminded me of my mother’s, but softer, more serene. When she had the house to herself on weekends, she played the violin.
I unwrapped the box and thanked her. She’d given me a pair of high-tech, powder-blue headphones, which became popular after the lead singer of a prominent boy band wore them to his court date. From Emmett, I received a copy of Stephen Jay Gould’s Bully for Brontosaurus. There was nothing from my dad, though later he did call and leave a short, perfunctory message, his words garbled, as if he were speaking with a mouthful of marbles.
I experienced all of this as if in a dream. My mind was already at the next day, when I had lunch plans with Mr. Tampari—with Sammy—at 1:00 p.m. The goal of my independent study, which met once a week for an hour and a half, had been to prepare for a serious run at the science-fair nationals the following year. Instead, we had spent that time playing with the school’s surprisingly well-stocked, if outdated, laboratory closet. My favorite was the day we made a lightbulb out of a glass jar (also needed: tungsten wire, tinfoil, and a tank of helium), and when the bell rang, and I began to gather my stuff, Sammy looked up from the fiery glow of the bulb and said, “Oh, it’s time to go?”—with a look of such genuine sadness that I felt as light as the helium. The last day of school, confronted by how little we’d actually accomplished, he said not to worry, we could just meet up over the summer. “Like, outside of school?” I asked, and Sammy said, “Yes, exactly like outside of school.”
* * *
We met at a small café on Main Street. I arrived first, Sammy second, and he sat and ordered without looking at the menu. When the food came, he ate quickly, as if he hadn’t eaten in days.
“I have a new idea for your science project,” he said between bites, his voice just a touch too loud for the space.
It went like this: Sammy had a colleague at the University of New Hampshire who had just concluded a pilot study on the effect of electroshock therapy on the memory functions of Wistar rats. Sammy thought we had an opportunity for a follow-up experiment: we could take a handful of the most damaged rats and try to restore their impaired memories. He told me about a Brazilian climbing plant that had been shown to stabilize the activity of neurotransmitters in select animal models. Paullinia cupana.
“If you can show improvements in their memory using a water maze, you can pave the way for future studies of P. cupana for people with all sorts of memory impairments.”
I wasn’t sure. I wanted to say yes to any request Sammy made of me, then and forever, but I also wanted to win. The National Science Foundation offered prizes of up to $50,000. Sammy’s idea reminded me too much of my last science-fair project, which had tested the effects of Asian and South American evergreens on liver scarring. I’d learned the hard way that phytochemical studies were not the path to victory—plant-based medicine was not in fashion. There were also the rats. My previous study had used rat cells, but I hadn’t been handling live rats, subjecting them to experiments. The judges wanted to see teenagers saving the environment and helping the disabled, not torturing rodents.
“But that’s just it,” Sammy said, wiping his mouth with a white paper napkin. “You aren’t torturing them. They’ve already been tortured. You’re the one who’s going to make them feel better.” He took a large drink of water. “I mean, some of them, anyway. A couple will need to serve as controls.”
His insistence confused and excited me. During the school year, his primary goal was always, obviously, to kill time. We once spent a full hour of the independent study taking turns playing Snake on my calculator. Of course, if I said yes, I’d have a whole summer of research with him to look forward to. If I said no …
“Okay, let’s do it.”
Sammy signaled for the check, and my heart sank. The whole lunch had taken less than forty-five minutes.
“Can we get those books you wanted me to read?” I asked. “Are they at school?”
I knew they were not at school.
Sammy shrugged, Why not, and next thing I knew I was at his place—a studio apartment on top of a two-car garage. As he opened the door, he complained about his landlord, a widow who left the house only to hassle him. “It’s like Misery here. One day I’m going to wake up strapped to the bed.” Inside, the shades were drawn, the space lit by a sunlamp on its dimmest setting. I had to inch by his bed to enter the small area of carpet he referred to as his living room, which contained a television and the smallest possible love seat. Sammy was dressed in cotton, coffee-colored slacks and a T-shirt that landed just above his waist. When he bent to clear a seat on the couch, I saw a sliver of skin.
“Here,” Sammy said as I sat, handing me a stapled packet of papers. “Some light reading material.” It was a copy of the electroshock study that had produced the memory-impaired rats. The first figure showed a sedated Wistar with electrodes stuck to his little skull. While I read, Sammy went to the bathroom but left the door open. I could see him rummaging through his medicine cabinet. “My head is killing me,” he called through the doorway. Soon, I would learn he said this every day, as though in a perpetual state of agony. Ironically, the only days he didn’t say it would be the truly bad days, when he went to a dark place that was alien and unknowable, like deep space or deep ocean. On those days, he was so joyless it reminded me of the morning in Winterville I saw a baby goldfinch dying in a soft pocket of snow and, standing above it, its golden-brown mother pecking herself in grief, refusing to migrate.
Although he had promised me science books, I couldn’t see a single textbook in his apartment, only paperbacks with embossed lettering on the covers—mysteries, mostly, and legal thrillers.
“Something to drink?” he asked when he returned from the bathroom. “Water? Cognac? Kidding.”
“No, thank you,” I said, missing his joke. So I added, too late, “That’s funny.”
Sammy raised an eyebrow. “You’re kind of weird about laughing out loud, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, you don’t really like to do it.”
I considered this. I was still at an age when people can tell you things about yourself that (1) you didn’t know and (2) are actually true. This stops happening, forever and with no exceptions, at twenty-five.
“So,” I said. “Those books?”
“Right. Please follow me to my office.”
This was another joke, because his office was exactly one step to his left and only a writing desk. He began moving papers from one side of the desk to the other. I recognized tests and answer keys from his classes, long lists of boiling points and multiple-choice questions about the periodic table. Above his desk, I saw a postcard with a photograph of a harpy eagle in flight, its white, owl-like head squawking in profile.
“‘The Cooperative Republic of Guyana,’” I read out loud.
Sammy looked up from his desk to say, “Oh, that’s nothing,” and I will remember the way he said it (too quickly, defensively) until the day I die.
“Aha.” Sammy lifted two textbooks with broken spines: The Laboratory Rat, Second Edition, and Walter Cannon’s The Way of an Investigator. “Don’t be frustrated if you can’t understand all of this. I’ll help you.”
I had never read a book and failed to understand it, not once in my life, but I didn’t tell him this. When it came to Sammy, I liked the idea of being helped.
He began to hand these books to me, but then he pulled them back against his chest. “Have you ever heard of Ignaz Semmelweis?”
I had. Dr. Semmelweis was a key figure in the history of germ theory. In the midnineteenth century, he argued that hospitals could reduce infant mortality simply by requiring doctors to wash their hands.
“Correct,” Sammy said, his eyes sparking with the delight of my knowing this. “But no one believed him. They said he was insane. He died in a mental asylum, raving about childbed fevers.”
“That’s really sad.”
Sammy held the books out to me again. “Sad, yes, but is it too high a price? To be right, even if it means dying alone, or being called crazy? Would that be worth it to you?”
I tucked the heavy hardbacks beneath my arm. “I don’t know if it would be worth it. But if I knew something was true and could save lives, I would fight for it.”
Sammy nodded and closed his eyes, as though this answer was a great relief to him. But then he said, “Well, I should probably take you home.”
I couldn’t tell if there was a question mark at the end of that sentence, but I could only head for the door, where my shoes were waiting on his tweed entry mat. On the way, I brushed the edge of his bed with my fingertips and imagined the two of us under the covers. I could imagine it, at least partially; I was not entirely green. At a weeklong science fair the previous summer, I’d administered two hand jobs and received one—an inequity I’d dwelled on for months. But the way I felt around Sammy was so much more.
“Con?” Sammy said, when I reached the door. “I think you forgot something.” When he saw me searching my hands, he asked, “What’s missing?”
I turned, and he was holding the electroshock study out to me with a faux-disapproving stare. I’d left it on the couch, as though just holding it had affected my memory.
“Sorry.” I retraced my steps around the bed. I took the article and slid it between the pages of one of the textbooks.
And then the strangest thing happened: We just stood there, the two of us. Doing nothing.
If a timer had been running, it may have reported only three seconds passing, maybe five, but it felt like much longer—as if standing so close, allowing that closeness to be the only thing happening, was a decision we’d made together.
It was Sammy who broke eye contact. “You know,” he said, “Hugo Grotius wrote that the care of the human mind is the most notable branch of medicine.”
“Hm,” I said, unsure why he was pitching me on the memory study when I’d already agreed to do it. I looked up at him, and the loneliness I saw in his face was like an undertow, pulling me to sea. It’s hard to explain how I found the courage to do what came next, except to say that it wasn’t courage, or cowardice, or anything to do with strength. It just felt necessary, like breathing.
“So,” I said, and closed the inches between us to kiss him.
How did I experience this kiss? Was it dry and nervous, our lips meeting together like a pair of paper plates? Was it moist, passionate, his soft lips inviting my own, drawing me into him, enveloping me? Was it actually how I had dreamed, or was it so much better that only then could I recognize my complete failure of imagination, my inability to conceive of what it means to love someone, and to be loved by them, and to get exactly what you want, when you want it? Was it long or short? Was it right or wrong? Was it him, or me, who made that little noise halfway through, that little moan, like an animal who had fallen asleep in the sun? Was it the end of the world, or the beginning?
Then the kiss was over. Worse, I ended it. I lowered my head, felt his lips separate with a sting from mine. Neither of us spoke. I knew that by pulling away, I put the onus on myself to decide what happened next. I could tell him to take me home, and he would. That was option one. Option two was more complicated. If an older woman and a teenaged boy were caught in bed together, people would say, “That’s wrong … but way to go, kid!” If an older man and a teenaged girl were caught in bed together, people would say, “That’s wrong … but have you seen those Facebook pics of the girl in her bikini?” For the two of us, Sammy and Conrad, it would only be wrong, and if someone found out, both of our lives would be ruined.
So I said to myself, In three seconds, I will put my hand on his hand. In three seconds, I will take his hand, and he will know what this means. In three seconds. I closed my eyes and took the deepest, longest breath of my life. One, two, three.
* * *
It took some convincing, but eventually RJ agreed to drive me to Sammy’s apartment. “If we see any cops there,” he said, “I’m not even slowing down.” But as we parked on the street, the view from the car showed a surprisingly peaceful tableau. The widow’s house sat undisturbed on its manicured lawn. The wide driveway was empty of cars, save for her wood-paneled Oldsmobile. A forest of birch trees encircled the house, their leaves so full and green I could barely see the whites of their trunks.
RJ cut the engine. “Seems pretty quiet,” he conceded.
Despite my reassurances, I, too, had been picturing the widow’s house surrounded by cops, maybe a fire engine, a SWAT van, a chopper overhead. Littlefield was a small town, and it reacted to drama with breathless excitement. An errant Fourth of July sparkler once set off a small brushfire behind the Dairy Queen, and every volunteer firefighter in a twenty-mile radius descended on the scene, their walkie-talkies hissing and interfering with one another. The DQ ran out of Dilly Bars.
RJ stepped out of the car and eased the door shut, but I stayed in the passenger seat, watching him—this all seemed to be happening very fast.
“Come on,” he said. “If we’re going to go, let’s go.”
So we followed the tree line around the far side of the garage. We kept low, RJ in front, me trying to mimic his lithe, graceful movements. I peered at the widow’s house, which was the color of pavement and extensively, ominously windowed. I strained my eyes, watching those windows for signs of movement. Sammy’s landlord was a bored, fussy woman—the kind I could imagine peering suspiciously out into the yard from behind her curtains, regularly and for no good reason.
At the back of the garage, a flight of stairs ran up to Sammy’s apartment. In unison, we stopped at the bottom step. There it was, crisscrossed over his door: police tape. I let out a gasp, RJ at my side, watching me with a frightening intensity. I’d climbed these steps so many times, my fingertips numb with anticipation. I used to pause at the door and listen to the sounds of Sammy inside: the tap, tap, tap of papers being evened and cleaned off the coffee table; the whoosh of a comforter spread over a mattress; the clink of dishes being cleared from the sink. This was the most beautiful music—the sound of Sammy preparing to greet me.
We ascended the stairs together. As we neared the top step, I imagined the police bursting through the other side of the door, dragging me down the stairs, and hauling me to jail. An officer in white latex gloves grabs me by the collar and forces my mouth open: “We’re taking a buccal swab. Your DNA’s all over that place.”
RJ peeled one end of the police tape off the door. I removed the key from my pocket, but as I approached the door, I saw I wouldn’t need it—the lock was busted. RJ and I stared at it as if it were a rattlesnake. Silently, and with only the pressure of a single finger, I nudged the door open. Through the narrow slit, I could see the corner of Sammy’s red-oak mission bed, whe
re once, when we were supposed to be working, we’d sat side by side and taken turns reading to each other from a murder mystery about a cheese shop: The Long Quiche Goodbye.
We stayed at the entry for several long seconds. When still we heard nothing, I opened the door wide, and RJ and I looked at each other. Sammy’s apartment had been destroyed.
To the side of the bed, the couch cushions were ripped from the sofa and sat flattened on the floor like deflated balloons, the stuffing torn out and piled in a separate corner. From the doorway, I could see a fist-size hole gaping above the sink, a faint cord of wiring visible in the darkness. Closer to me, Sammy’s recliner lay tipped on its side, the guts exposed, the built-in footrest pruned from the chair. Everywhere, everywhere, I saw papers and books and folders, spread around the room as if they’d been dropped loose-leaf from an airplane. RJ took three tentative steps into the apartment. Seeing the fear in his face made me dizzy.
“Did Mr. Tampari do this?” he whispered back at me.
“No way,” I said, but the truth was that I’d seen him, only a month ago, put his fist through a wall.
“The police?” RJ offered.
I could imagine this: the police finding his body and then rushing to his house for information, breaking the lock to gain entry. But why wouldn’t they ask the widow to let them in? And what were they looking for? I entertained a brief, insane thought: that Sammy had another sixteen-year-old lover, and he’d come here, just like me, to search through the remnants of Sammy’s life.