Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “Jail.”

  “Jail, that’s correct. Totally, totally correct.”

  Martin and his friend Dallas went up to Mr. Macpherson’s desk with their maglev sketches. They planned to add a rectangular sail for added speed. Mr. Macpherson suggested they use a double thickness of cardboard. “And make sure you measure carefully. You may have to get it down to a thirty-second. You guys are good to go.”

  I asked Martin if they were allowed to blow on the sail.

  “No,” he said. “You’re not allowed to add any force.”

  I wondered what a rectangular sail would accomplish, aside from adding instability to the car, but I didn’t want to introduce doubt. Let them figure it out.

  Another pair of students wanted to make a Spider-Man car.

  “Where’s the cardboard?” said Martin.

  “I’ve got the cardboard,” said Mr. Macpherson.

  “Don, you want to make a hash spoon?” said another kid.

  Mr. Macpherson continued to review designs at his desk.

  “He’s hidden the cardboard,” said Martin. “I’m really getting annoyed.”

  Finally Mr. Macpherson hoisted a box into view.

  “All right, now,” he said to the class. “In this box right here on the table there’s cardboard, there’s also a glue gun, there are some scales, scissors, and magnets.”

  He came over to me and spoke in a quiet voice. “I’ve got a little project for you,” he said. “I’m going to turn you loose.” He showed me a small piece of wood, about an eighth of an inch thick. He wanted me to find more wood of that thickness, which some students could use instead of the cardboard as a stable base for their models, since the cardboard was easily bent. He opened the door to Mr. Masille’s dim, still, unbelievably messy office.

  “You’re going to have to be like a picker,” said Mr. Macpherson. “Don’t leave anything unturned. I’m subbing for Mr. Masille, and he’s been here for like fifty years. He knows where everything is, but he couldn’t tell you.”

  I told him I’d see what I could find. Mr. Macpherson had a shrewd face—what, I wondered, had he taught in college? Electrical engineering? Physics? I asked him. He said he’d taught physical education and coached hockey at Tufts for thirty-four years, and in the summers, he’d taught phys ed at Exeter. When he retired, he and his wife had wanted to buy a house in Exeter, but the prices were too high. So they ended up in Maine, where real estate was cheaper.

  “I love Maine,” I said. “Thanks for the mission.”

  “Good luck.”

  I spent a few minutes hunting around in Mr. Masille’s lair, feeling like Peter Falk in Columbo except that there was no murder. The office was a wonderland of ancient shop books and binders and bolts and broken wrenches and dusty, left-behind student projects. There was no secret stash of wood that I could see. The place made me sad—I’m not sure why. I left and toured the busy wood shop in the adjoining room, where goggled students were using two-by-fours to build a wall with two windows and a door, while the teacher shouted advice at them over the scream of the table saw. I took a left and found I was in the welding area. Gloves and helmets hung on the wall. Nobody was welding, and there were no thin pieces of wood there, either.

  I circled back to my gray stool. Some of the students were cutting their pieces of cardboard. A few of the magnets were very weak. “Be sure you test the magnets,” said Mr. Macpherson to the class. A girl with a long blond braid, Laney, made her magnets jump and click together. She laughed delightedly.

  “Not much luck?” said Mr. Macpherson to me.

  “The scrap wood would have to be planed,” I said.

  He sent me back out to look for small pieces of sheet metal that we could cut to size using scissors. I pawed through a bucket near the drill press, but it held only heavy bars of steel with holes in them. Finally I found some smaller metal scraps in a different bucket and put them in the box with the glue and the maglev magnets.

  “Guys, for weight on your maglevs you have the possibility of sheet metal,” said Mr. Macpherson. “And you have nails, screws, washers, you name it. Use your imagination.”

  Laney and her friend had a glue gun but no place to plug it in. “Can you hook these ladies up?” Mr. Macpherson said to me. I found a spot for them at a table near an unused electrical outlet. They were discussing the possibility of a Christina Aguilera car.

  “Dude, there’s sheet metal,” said Charles, one of my charges. I told him about the narrow spot in the middle of the track, where the cars tended to stall. He made some experiments with his cardboard chassis. “Yeah, it’s totally crooked,” he said. “Totally crooked.”

  Some maglev cars from earlier trimesters decorated a steel door. There was a furry mouse car made of cotton with paperclip ears, a car made of green triangles with yellow accents called “the Blurr,” a mousetrap car, a car shaped like a house, a black bat car, and a car made from a real dollar bill, with a stabilizer fin in the back.

  Mr. Macpherson seemed to want to keep me busy. He told me to repair one of the old prototypes with hot glue. It was made of a milk carton, but its magnet was dangling. There was only one glue gun.

  I went over to the girls with the glue gun. Their car was going to be made of playing cards, but the glue wasn’t flowing. “We tried it in that outlet, and it wasn’t heating up, so we tried the other one,” said Laney. I touched the business end of the glue stick; it was still cold. Using an old radio, I tested several outlets; all of them were dead. “Imagine a machine shop without a working outlet,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Laney said.

  Mr. Macpherson brought over two more broken cars from last year for me to repair. One looked like a bobsled. I told him the electricity was off, and he went off to find the other tech teacher, who knew how to turn it on. We sat on our stools and waited.

  “We’ve got power!” said Mr. Macpherson, returning. Still the glue gun didn’t work and the radio didn’t play. I found a red reset button and clicked it. “Phasers on stun,” I said.

  The glue gun began dribbling and the girls began gluing. Charles came over and said he wanted to plug in the Shop-Vac and suck his face into it.

  “Glue’s working!” I said.

  Martin and Dallas were tired of waiting for the glue gun. “Let’s just call it quits, man,” said Dallas.

  “I want to bend some sheet metal,” said Charles. He clamped a scrap of metal in a green Tennsmith manual brake bender and bent it. He’d taken tech before, apparently. He said, “Martin, come over and help me bend some sheet metal!”

  Class was almost over. “GUYS, MAKE SURE YOUR STUFF IS SOMEPLACE SAFE,” Mr. Macpherson said.

  Charles called, “Guys, how come you’re not helping me?” He bent another sheet metal scrap and held it up.

  I tested the repaired cars and put the glue gun away in the box. Everyone gathered by the door, waiting for the bell. Heather was wearing a blue T-shirt with a tennis racket on it.

  Mr. Macpherson asked, “What’s the circumference of a tennis ball?”

  “I don’t know,” Heather said.

  “Eight inches,” he said. “Anything else you want to know?” He began telling Heather the history of tennis, beginning with its royal origins in France. A member of the British army brought some rackets and balls to Bermuda in 1874, Mr. Macpherson said, and there a woman named Mary Outerbridge discovered the game and loved it. When she returned from Bermuda to Staten Island, she built the first tennis court in the United States.

  Six bongs.

  “Have a good day!” he said.

  I shook hands with him. “Are you roving?” he said.

  “I’m roving,” I said. I thanked him and left.

  —

  NEXT PERIOD I WAS IN Mrs. Prideaux’s remedial math class—the one with the cabinets full of snacks, where I’d spent the whole day the first time I’d
subbed. My charges were Sebastian, who loved mango juice, and Jake and Pearl. Besides Mrs. Prideaux, who was standing on a chair finding some supplies in the cabinet, there was Mr. C., the young ed tech. “Eight kids,” he said, “and they’re all doing geometry. We’re doing area today.”

  Mrs. Prideaux got down from the chair, and Pearl told her about a photograph that she’d seen in her grandmother’s AARP magazine. “She looked like she was just in her fifties,” said the girl. “She was ninety-one!”

  “Wow,” said Mrs. Prideaux, who looked about thirty. “We should be so lucky.”

  A boy named Taylor held up something made of pink and orange Popsicle sticks. “This is a gun,” he said. “A loaded gun. I don’t know where it came from, I just found it.” He handed it to Mrs. Prideaux.

  “That’s so cute,” she said, and handed it back to him.

  “It’s loaded and it’s cute,” said Pearl.

  “Taylor, you know what you have to do,” Mrs. Prideaux said. “You’ve got to finish that little assessment. And I think you have to finish your quiz, too.”

  Sebastian sharpened his pencil for a long time and sat down. From his backpack he withdrew three bottles of mango juice and set them in a row next to a suspension bridge that he’d made from yarn and Popsicle sticks.

  “That’s a lot of mango juice,” I said. “Daily regularity. How’s it going today?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “I haven’t slept in a long time,” he said. “Too much stuff to do.”

  “Have you been making any of those origami cranes?” I asked him.

  “Yeah.”

  “You can work on your core curriculum standards,” said Mrs. Prideaux to Pearl.

  Mr. C. began coaching Taylor. “She did the whole thing on the board yesterday,” he said to her. “This whole thing adds up.” He pointed to the sides of a triangle on the page of a workbook. “This, this, this.”

  “Sh! I want to get started!” said Mrs. Prideaux. “I have some people still finishing assessments in here. Taylor, hurry up!”

  Taylor was indignant. Pete was slower than he was, he said. Pete, an elegant kid with a drawl and a fade haircut, said he’d already done the quiz.

  “Guys, just finish!” Mrs. Prideaux said.

  I whisper-asked Sebastian what he was supposed to be doing. “Do you have to take a test?”

  “Mine’s extra credit,” he said. He got up suddenly to get something from the cabinet.

  Mrs. Prideaux’s finger went out. “Wait, no no no, Sebastian! Either you STAY IN YOUR SEAT over there, or—”

  Sebastian said, “I have to get this! Or what? Or what?”

  “You don’t have to get anything!” said Mrs. Prideaux. She was mad, I think—understandably so—because both of us ed techs had been talking while she’d been trying to get the class started. But she couldn’t get mad at us because we were on staff. There were too many adults in this tiny room.

  Sebastian pulled out a workbook from the cabinet. It had his name on it.

  “Can I get the work I have to do?”

  “All right,” said Mrs. Prideaux. “Just hurry up, sit down, GET STARTED!”

  I looked at my sheet. Mr. C. whispered to me to stay with Sebastian. Sebastian, pissed off that Mrs. Prideaux had yelled at him, pulled a glue gun and a stick of pink glue from his backpack and plugged it in. “Nice glue gun,” I whispered.

  “I put passion in my pink,” he said—an Aerosmith allusion, perhaps.

  “I’m disappointed in you,” Mr. C. whispered to Sebastian.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You didn’t tell me the cafeteria sells coffee.”

  “They don’t,” said Sebastian. “They sell coffee milk.”

  “I bought a coffee this morning,” said Mr. C.

  “Are you going to argue with me? You can argue with me all you want.”

  “Okay, fine,” said Mr. C. “I’m not disappointed in you.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. C.,” Sebastian said. “I know about you and your coffee.”

  Taylor climbed on a chair and wrestled with something in the cupboard, looking for an eraser. A dead spider fell from a shelf onto Pete’s head.

  “Oh, that’s dead,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

  Pete looked up from his test with a puzzled expression.

  “He doesn’t even notice that there’s a spider on his head!” said Taylor, laughing.

  Pete reached up, found the spider, and flipped it away, revolted. Somebody stomped on it. Hilarity.

  I whisper-asked Sebastian if he’d finished reading The Shawshank Redemption in English class. “I buzzed through that in a couple of days,” he said. He explained his Popsicle-stick bridge to me. “I’m trying to put more shapes on it. I have this triangle, I have the rhombus, I have the squares, but I don’t have a parallelogram.” He rubbed his face and rapidly shook his head, as if shaking off thoughts he didn’t want to have.

  “You all right?” I said.

  “I haven’t slept in a long time. I go to bed at eight and I stay up all night.”

  “Just lying there?”

  “I take melatonin,” he said. “I’ve had it for so long I guess my body’s starting to get immune to it.”

  Mrs. Prideaux was explaining to someone how to find the area of a rectangle. “You’re going to put the length and the width here,” she said, tapping the paper.

  “It’s hard to get through the day when you haven’t had any sleep,” I said to Sebastian. “It’s torture.”

  “Oh, yeah. I haven’t slept in two weeks. I doze for an hour or so, and then I wake up.”

  “Area—whatever the length times the width is,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

  “Is that a side effect or something?” I asked Sebastian, figuring he was on some kind of hyperactivity drug.

  “I have no idea.”

  I asked him what his parents said about the sleeplessness, still talking very softly, so nobody else could hear.

  “I haven’t told my parents, because I used to be able to sleep—once I went to my room, I was done. My parents will think I’m faking it or something. I’m not a fan of people not believing that something like that is a problem. I want it to be fixed. I’d probably get mad at them for unnecessary reasons.”

  “That’s tough,” I said.

  “Oh, it is.”

  Pete was explaining to Mrs. Prideaux that he didn’t understand one section of the test.

  Sebastian looked down at the worksheet and crunched his eyes closed for a long time.

  After a while, I said, “If you take some pills every day, they can cause sleeplessness.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know what pills I take in the morning. My parents keep track of that. I’m supposed to keep track of the ones I take at night. I take an allergy pill, and I take melatonin.”

  “The pills you take in the morning may be making you lose sleep,” I said.

  “Yeah, and for the past couple of days I’ve been running outside for hours to lose my energy. I go to bed and I’m extremely tired, and I can’t sleep.”

  “That’s probably a side effect of the pills. If you were always a good sleeper before—”

  “Yeah, I just haven’t slept in weeks.”

  “Maybe you can talk to the doctor? Taper off? I don’t want to presume.”

  “No, I get it. I just don’t feel sane. I feel on edge all the time.”

  “That’s not you, that’s the medication.”

  “I’m so on edge,” said Sebastian. “I can snap at any moment, and I don’t want to do that. Sleep is a good thing.”

  “You’re so right,” I said.

  “I’m afraid I’m either going to hurt somebody, or I’m going to hurt myself.”

  “And you don’t want to talk to your parents about that?”

  He shook his head. “I just want t
o figure it out.”

  “I think you’ve figured it out. It’s probably your medication. If you’re taking something powerful that brings you up, and they’re giving you too high a dose, then that’s why you’re up.”

  Sebastian was silent. He was done talking about pills and not sleeping.

  “That’s one heck of a bridge,” I said.

  Mrs. Prideaux clarified a test question for Mr. C., who was helping Taylor with his quiz. The question was, “What are the properties of a rectangle?”

  “He could put down that the opposite sides are congruent, or that the angles are ninety degrees—things like that,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

  Mr. C. sat back down near Sebastian and me. “What kind of coffee do they sell?” Sebastian asked him.

  “I didn’t check. I just knew that they’d just brewed it when I bought it, and it was pretty strong. Nobody else was getting it. They should charge for it.”

  “KOS is an isosceles triangle,” said Mrs. Prideaux to Pete. “There are three other isosceles triangles here. Which are they?”

  “See, I’m not the only one who didn’t know they sold coffee,” said Sebastian in an undertone.

  “They’d probably make a lot of revenue if more people knew,” Mr. C. said.

  “People spend a lot of money on coffee,” said Sebastian.

  Mr. C. resumed coaching Taylor on the properties of a rectangle. “Two sets of parallel lines,” he said softly.

  Now that the glue was running, Sebastian affixed several more Popsicle sticks to the top of one of the towers.

  “Last night we went and did backflips off the trunks of cars,” said Taylor to Mr. C.

  Mr. C. winced. “There’s something about putting my feet in the air over my head that I just don’t enjoy,” he said.