Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “You need to have a good mixture of accuracy and speed, and it’s hard to get that mix,” said Frederick.

  I wished him well at tryouts, and admired Winston’s superhero costume. “I like the boots, especially,” I said. He was wearing tall hiking boots and his sister’s tights. Lyle had on Incredible Hulk gloves

  I said hello five times in different ways, at increasing volume, and said that I was Mr. Baker, filling in for Mr. Monette. The class went alarmingly quiet. “You guys have been reading these stories and thinking incredibly deeply about them. And analyzing them, and coming up with the conflict in your stories, supposedly.”

  A strange prerecorded crowd sound came from Lyle’s Hulk gloves and everyone laughed.

  “I didn’t mean to do that!” said Lyle.

  I asked how many had started their essays. Lots of hands went up, and I went around reading bits of what they’d written. “I have some grammar issues,” said Anthony.

  “Oh, let Mr. Monette worry about that,” I said, skimming the first paragraph, which described a character who had “twisted the truth” to get what he wanted. The essay continued: I will be explaining more in depth about how his internal and external conflicts that he experienced changed his personality. Without his external conflict, he would probably never have had to experience his internal conflict. After this introduction, I will start my next paragraph with his internal conflict.

  I suggested that he cut that he experienced. “Nice going,” I said. “You wrote that whole thing in class yesterday?”

  “Yes,” said Anthony.

  “Nobody writes anything in the classes I supervise,” I said. “I don’t know why that is.”

  The boy next to him, Sam, had read “To Build a Fire,” by Jack London. “I thought it was depressing,” he said. “Who wants to read about a guy who walks into the woods at seventy-five below zero and then dies? He wants to stab the dog but he can’t because his hands are useless.”

  I told him I thought it was a memorable story, a killer story, especially the part where the snow fell on the fire.

  “That must have stunk,” said Sam.

  I said, “I think you can start with what you just said: ‘Who wants to read a short story about a guy who tries to build a fire and dies?’ That’s a very interesting question. You want to be true to what you actually felt. Because otherwise it’s just a meaningless exercise.”

  Edith, in a facing desk, wearing slightly crooked glasses, was reading The Hunger Games. She asked, “Why do you have a rotten apple on your desk?”

  I looked over at my half-eaten apple. “It’s a scientific experiment,” I said. “I’ll put it away, it’s disturbing you.”

  “No, it’s fine, it’s just weird,” Edith said.

  “You were the substitute when we were making the cubes,” said Sam.

  Edith said she was in the middle of the scene in The Hunger Games where the girl is up in the tree, planning to drop the killer beehive. “Is it okay for me to be reading this?” she asked.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “You’ve already churned out the conflict-and-resolution essay, right?”

  “No,” said Edith. “I just don’t want to do it.” The graphic organizer bored her, she said. She’d read “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The Cold Equations.”

  “The Monkey’s Paw” was scary, wasn’t it?

  “No.”

  I asked her what “The Cold Equations” was about.

  “This girl had to die because she was a stowaway,” said Edith.

  Sam, listening in, gave a long, detailed plot summary of “The Cold Equations.”

  “You know what I like doing?” I said. “You read the story, and then you close it and you say, ‘What in this story was actually memorable?’”

  Edith tapped on her copy of The Hunger Games. “There’s a lot of memorable parts in this,” she said, with a half smile.

  “He picks boring things to read,” Sam said, meaning Mr. Monette.

  I read a paragraph or two of “The Cold Equations” and stopped. Sam was making no progress. “I have a hard time getting stuff on paper,” he said. “I can explain something fluently, but if you ask me to put it on paper it’s like I’m trying to write with a stick, basically.”

  “What if you told it to me and I typed it real fast, and we got it done in two seconds?”

  Sam grimaced.

  To Edith I suggested that she write about being conflicted about having to write the conflict essay when she really wanted to know what happened to the girl up in the tree.

  “She’s down from the tree now,” Edith said.

  Joy walked up with her completed essay about “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Her thesis was that the main character was neurotic and experiencing several conflicts. In this essay, she wrote, I will explain what these conflicts are, and what they caused the main character reveal. I complimented her—nice paragraph, you’re off and running! “To change this from a rough draft to a final draft,” I said, “you just have to add a to before reveal and you’re done.”

  Joy smiled and sat down. I sipped coffee. Derek, bunchy-muscled and curly-haired, made a pained expression and adjusted his chair.

  “That chair is giving you problems,” I said.

  “No, wrestling is giving me problems,” Derek said. “I got second seed in my tournament the other day. I lost to Blake Burnside.” His essay began, In this essay I will attempt to convince the audience that the main character in “The Sniper” has external and internal conflicts. The character traits and actions he performs give me reason to believe this statement. I also say that he is heartless, weather external or external. My first reason is that he feels no remorse for killing anyone except his brother. He congratulates himself on killing the man in the armoured car. I nodded and asked, “What did you feel like when you finished this story?”

  “I felt like this guy is a little bit heartless,” said Derek.

  “Did you feel that the story should exist?”

  Derek frowned, thinking. “It should,” he said.

  “What if you were a person of criminal intent and the story pushed you over the edge and you started shooting people? Not you.”

  “There are a lot of stories like that,” Derek said. “Sometimes you watch a movie about terrorism and you become a terrorist. But there are also movies like that that change people’s lives in a good way.”

  Good point. I told Derek to take a look at the word weather in the third sentence. The boy next to him, Neil, had read Langston Hughes’s “Thank You, Ma’am” and loved it. He’d already written his essay on it but he’d lost it, so he was starting from nothing again. I left him to it.

  “I guess there’s a lot of injuries in wrestling,” I said to Derek.

  Derek leaned toward me and said, in a whisper, “I injured my shoulder the other day. I’m whispering because I didn’t report it as injured.”

  “Don’t you want to save your body for high school sports?”

  “Yeah, but the coach is intense.”

  “Too intense?”

  “Not too intense,” said Derek. “Just enough intense. We did well this season.”

  Sam came up and said that he’d found an external conflict in “To Build a Fire.” The conflict was that a man warned the main character not to go out in the cold. “Good,” I said. “Isn’t that the story where he spits and the saliva freezes before it hits the ground? That’s a beautiful image.”

  “Well, maybe not beautiful,” said Sam. He went off to keep writing.

  Many minutes went by. Nothing happened. The class was wondrously quiet. Everyone was working, or pretending to work, or reading. I had entered a teacherly zone. I was floating in a polar-fleece paradise of studious silence. I read some more of “The Cold Equations.” I checked my iPhone. I unwrapped the end of a bar of coffee-laced chocolate made by Winnipesaukee C
hocolates and gnawed off a piece.

  After a while the silence became unbearable and I walked over to Bruce and said hello as softly as I could. His thesis sentence was, My thesis is that the sniper, according to the external and internal traits, he is brave. I suggested that he cut the he. Done. I didn’t want to mess with the mystically whispery mood of the class any more than that. More minutes passed. Finally a loud zipper-pull of a backpack signaled for people to look up at the clock. The noise resumed. “Where am I going?” said Neil loudly. “Did you dye your hair?” Bethany asked Joy. Nobody said goodbye to me, which hurt my feelings slightly.

  —

  BLOCK 3 TRICKLED IN. A boy, Blake, was wearing red tights, a tight Lasswell wrestling singlet with a paper B taped to it, and a red bandanna on his head. Jessie, in a Catwoman outfit, offered to take attendance, but I couldn’t find the class list. Courtney was writing on Rita’s hand with a Sharpie.

  “Hello! Hello! Hello! HELLO! I’m Mr. Baker and I’m filling in for Mr. Monette, and you guys are supposedly deep into and completely caught up in the idea of conflict. What is this nonsensical notion that every story has conflict? Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yep.”

  “Maybe.”

  A group in the back was telling hall stories and laughing. Sean, dressed as Batman and wearing his father’s Air National Guard boots, said, “Do you want me to get their attention?” He clapped five times loudly. Someone clapped back from the corner of the room.

  I took a deep breath. “Do you think that—DO YOU THINK THAT when Poe sat down to write ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ he thought, All right, what conflict am I GOING TO HAVE IN THIS STORY?”

  “No.”

  The noise was amazing, but I persisted in my little foolish, unenlightening speech. “WHAT HE PROBABLY THOUGHT is, I want to write the frighteningest, most disturbing thing—”

  The noise was just too loud. I started to feel angry. “Hello! Guys! JESUS CRAM.”

  All the kids in the back erupted in happy laughter. “Jesus cram,” they said, “Jesus cram.”

  “I was trying to say jeezum crow,” I said. “So the question is!—” Nobody was listening. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t care. You’ve got work to do.”

  “Guys, you’re rude,” said Jessie.

  Finally things settled down a bit. “So we’re talking about Edgar Allan Poe,” I said. “He’s a small, very disturbed human being, who happens to be a genius, and he thinks to himself, I want to write the most terrifying, nerve-wracking story I can write. And then later on, generations of high school and junior high school students have to read through it and find the conflict in it. I’ve never understood that. I think you should just read the story and find out what happens. You’re either entertained, and you like it, or you don’t and you stop reading. Did anybody read the story and not like it?”

  Nobody raised their hand.

  “It’s good, isn’t it? Are you all pretty far along in writing about it?”

  Nods.

  “So all you have to do is put in a few touches, stuff in a few adjectives? Did anyone try to write a funny essay?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Mr. Monette would not allow it,” said Sean.

  “Yeah, he’s not a very funny person,” said Courtney.

  “He doesn’t do well with humor?” I said.

  “No, and he doesn’t say Jesus cram,” said Sean.

  In the back of the room, the superheroes were gleefully imitating me.

  “LET ME FINISH UP,” I hollered. “I don’t mind a general basic quiet murmur of talking, because I think you’re all responsible almost-adults. But when the noise level gets to be a certain sort of cresting wave, then I’ll make lots of gesticulations and angry sounds, and you’ll quiet down, right?”

  “You’ll make angry sounds?” said Blake.

  “Well, I’ll say, ‘Be quiet.’ Is it possible to have fun writing this essay?”

  “No!” said Roslyn, a big girl with a red streak in her black hair.

  “Seriously?” I said.

  “Yes, that is truly true,” said Roslyn.

  “Can I read your first sentence?”

  “Yes, sir.” She handed her paper to me. It was written in magenta marker. I read, In “The Sniper,” by Liam O’Flaherty, the sniper shows that he is strong and cares about his job. It also shows that he has to go through the many dangers. Period. The sniper was at war. All of a sudden It stopped there.

  “Mr. Monette helped me with it,” the girl said.

  “The many dangers what? That he confronts?”

  “Yeah, I haven’t finished it,” said Roslyn.

  What did she think of the story? I asked.

  “I actually liked it because I like people getting shot and stuff,” Roslyn said.

  “You’re very gruesome?” I said.

  “Yep.” Roslyn smiled. “I like war, and I just—I don’t know—I like scary.”

  I said she was off and running. “And you’ve got a great color of pen, too.”

  The girl next to her, Natasha, said, “I’m doing ‘The Sniper,’ too, but I find it’s very boring.”

  “That’s because you love romance,” said Roslyn.

  Natasha said, “I think it’s boring because he didn’t even notice that he could have got shot—which he did!—when he lit the cigarette.”

  I said, “So it’s not boring so much as it irritated you.”

  “Yeah, that’s the word.”

  “Why don’t you try to tell the truth about what you actually felt?”

  “Okay, I will!” said Natasha.

  “Oh, god,” said Roslyn.

  “You should not do that,” said Prentice.

  I read some more first sentences. Adam, in a Spider-Man shirt, had written: In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Telltale Heart” the main character reacted to the external and internal conflicts determined that he was mentally unstable because he killed the old man just because of the way his eyes looked, and then struggled with his own griefs.

  Suddenly, belatedly, I understood what was happening. Mr. Monette was forcing all his students to inject language about external and internal conflicts willy-nilly into their opening sentences. How touching, how desperate, how wrong. “Great, nice job,” I said. “The only thing I didn’t understand is, did Mr. Monette tell you to put that phrase in there, reacted to the external and internal conflicts?”

  “Yes,” said Adam.

  “The rest of the sentence is great, but that phrase is sort of jammed in,” I said. Could he perhaps put the phrase at the end of the paragraph somehow?

  “He told us to put it in, and he insists,” Adam said.

  If he had to explain to an eight-year-old what the conflict was in the story, I said, what would he say?

  “It’s between the main character and the old man, and the main character and himself. He struggled with himself after he killed him.”

  “Right, because it’s guilt,” I said. “The guilt is coming back to get him. It’s his own conscience. The only part that’s hard to understand is your first sentence.”

  “Yeah, but he kind of wrote it,” said Adam. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t put it in, but . . .”

  “Okay, well, you’ve got a nice flow, good going.”

  I said hello to Trey, who was sitting expressionlessly, rubbing his crew cut. He couldn’t write about “The Sniper,” he said, because he didn’t have his iPad. “It’s in that closet right there.”

  “Are you in trouble?” I said.

  “No, he just keeps it in there, and he gives it to me in class,” said Trey.

  “Are you having fun in this school?”

  “No,” said Trey.

  “Why not? How can you design your day so you actually have fun here
?”

  “We can’t have fun here till one-forty,” Trey said, meaning at dismissal.

  “Seriously, you don’t enjoy any class?”

  “Nope,” said Trey. “I don’t like any of it.”

  “Some of the classes, I have to admit, are kind of dry.”

  “Like this one,” said Trey.

  “Why don’t you just tell the truth when you write? You seem to know how to talk, you’re smart. Why not tell the truth?”

  “Because I don’t write,” said Trey. “I can write, but I don’t write.”

  “Are you in a superhero costume?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I wish you all the best,” I said. “Have fun, tell the truth, be kind, rewind.”

  “I’m going to go get my iPad,” said Trey.

  I turned to Blake. He, too, was writing about “The Sniper.”

  “Another sniper,” I said. “You guys are sniping all over the place.”

  “I think Mr. Monette is trying to send us a message,” said Blake.

  I went to the next cluster, where Prentice was paying a visit to Courtney and Rita. “What’s your kneecap called?” Courtney asked me.

  “Patella,” I said.

  “See? I’m not going to remember that.”

  “Nutella,” said Prentice.

  I said, “So you read the story ‘How I Ate My Donut Yesterday’?”

  “I didn’t read that one,” said Prentice. “I read ‘The No-Guitar Blues.’”

  “You’re the first person I’ve talked to that has read ‘The No-Guitar Blues,’ and that’s very exciting to me,” I said. “Did you physically move your eyes over the page?”

  “Yes!”

  “And so when you finished, what did you remember?”

  “That he wanted to be a musician,” said Prentice. “He wanted to get the money for this guitar he really wanted. He couldn’t get the money, so he set out to do raking and mowing, but it was the wintertime, and nobody was hiring him. He found a dog on the side of the road, wandering around. He was going to bring it back to the owner so that the owner would give him money. He ended up finding an old guitar in the garage.”

  “So it had a happy ending,” I said. “Do you have a guitar?”