Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “Gets what?”

  “Basalt zombies.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “People that are high on bath salts,” Charles explained.

  I said, “What do you do, make a smoothie of bath salts and become a zombie? What the hell?”

  “Pretty much,” Charles said. “It’s to the point where you have to take off your clothes. You’re pretty much burning yourself from the inside out.”

  “It’s a form of, like, crack,” said Roland.

  “And it gives you a high?” I said.

  “Well, more than a high,” said Charles. “It gives you invincibility from gunshots.”

  “It’s like PCP,” said Roland. “They could get shot seven times and still be running at you.”

  “And it’s bath salts?” I said. “I’m so out of it. You used to be able to buy boxes of the stuff.”

  “That’s the street term for it,” said Charles.

  “It’s not actual bath salts,” said Roland.

  “How do you spell territory?” said Patrick, who’d returned.

  I told him. I turned back to Charles. “What do you mean they’re zombies? Your grandfather takes care of them?”

  “No,” said Charles, eating his Kit Kat. “They just walk up to his house. They’re screaming and yelling and having a spasm attack.”

  “Why are they there?”

  “They’re lonely up there. It’s way way up Maine.”

  “Everybody seems to be reasonably under control around here,” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” said Charles.

  I asked what was supposed to be happening in the room right now.

  “Nothing, really,” said Charles.

  Roland said, “It’s a study hall, so we can work on things. And if we have nothing to do, then we just sit around and do nothing.”

  “You need a break in the day,” I said. “Constant assaults of nonsense. I just learned about polygons. I never took geometry.”

  Roland said, “The hardest class I have is Algebra III.”

  “The hardest class I have is trash art,” said Charles. “You take a bunch of random items, and you make something awesome out of it.”

  I went back to Patrick. “What did she say?”

  “We can use the words over and over again.”

  “Beautiful.”

  He put isolationism next to the United States. Next to System run by a dictator having complete power, includes extreme nationalism, and often racism, he put totalitarianism. He had trouble reading the word often.

  The phone rang and then stopped. Roland and Charles were talking about pandemics. “Most of us die,” said Charles.

  Patrick and I turned to the next page of the test. The first question was, Italian leader during World War II. I helped him spell Mussolini. The second question was What did he want?

  “What does any dictator want?” I said.

  “Control?”

  “Sure, excellent.”

  Sebastian showed up. “I have a question,” he said. “I was wondering if I could work in here.”

  I said he could if it was okay with his teacher. He left to ask.

  Next question: Pearl Harbor, who, when, where, why?

  I asked Patrick if he remembered anything about Pearl Harbor.

  “No,” said Patrick. “I wasn’t here.”

  I told him about Pearl Harbor, and he began writing the date. “December seventh, nineteen forty—seven?”

  I pointed down.

  “Forty-six?” Down. “Forty-three?” Down. “Forty-one.” Then he asked, “How do you spell Hawaii?”

  He had to give three reasons why fighting in the Pacific was difficult for US troops. The islands were well fortified, I said, and the supply lines were long. “How do you spell supplies?” he said.

  The test wanted him to define two-front war. I drew a picture. Patrick wrote, War is hapening in two diffrent places.

  He asked me how to spell reparation. He wrote about the attitude of the United States after World War I. He wrote about tanks versus horses in World War I. It wasn’t an easy test. “Okay, I’m going to pass this in,” he said. He left.

  I went back to Charles and Roland, who were watching a trailer for a Japanese cartoon called Attack on Titan, in which the citizens of a walled city battle enormous homicidal naked people. “Is it lunch yet?”

  “No.”

  I asked them what year they were in. Roland was a senior, and Charles was a senior, too, but he was going to be a super-senior next year. That got us on the topic of the movie Super Size Me. “I could have done without the scene of him puking,” said Roland.

  “And we didn’t really need to know about his sex life,” said Charles.

  I said I’d once bought four fish sandwiches from McDonald’s and set them up in a row in front of me and eaten them. “They were delicious,” I said. “Now I don’t do that anymore, because I think, The poor fish, there aren’t that many fish left in the sea.”

  “I hate fish anyway,” said Roland. “I like crab and lobster. I don’t like shrimp.”

  Patrick returned holding his test, which the teacher had already gone over. I’d led him badly astray on one question—I’d prompted him to list the three Axis leaders, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, when he was supposed to list the “Big Three” Allied nations and their leaders. “Who were the three good guys?” I said. Patrick wrote down the USA and Russia, and then he was stumped. I did a Churchill impression: “We will fight on the beaches!”

  “China?” he said.

  “He was a British sort of man,” I said.

  “France?”

  “British, English.”

  “Britain?”

  “Boom.”

  After some more prompting, he ended up with Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill. He left. Then he came back smiling—he’d gotten an 80 on the test.

  Roland, Charles, and Patrick packed up to go. Charles was off to work on his reading. “Before I got to this high school, I was an illiterate,” he said. “I can read to a third-grade level right now. My comprehension is way up there, higher than the school average, but I’ve got dyslexia and stuff. When I was in kindergarten, they said, This kid will never learn how to read.”

  “Wow, that’s kind of a triumph,” I said.

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

  Roland and Charles waved. “See you!”

  The PA lady came on. “Mr. Nicholson Baker to the main office, please. Mr. Nicholson Baker to the main office.”

  My heart started thumping. What had I done?

  In the office Paulette asked me if I was available Wednesday and Thursday. I told her I wasn’t, unfortunately.

  Walking back to Mr. Bowles’s room, I heard snatches of conversation: “The dentist made my gums bleed.” “You’re wrong, very wrong.” “It was like this weird fashion show thing.” “Did we pass?”

  Mrs. Meese was in Mr. Bowles’s room talking to Lucas, one of the mud-truck aficionados from Day One—blinky, wiry, and slow moving. Drew was lounging out. I asked him how biology was going. He said they’d moved on from geographical tongues and hairy knuckles; now they were extracting DNA from wheat germ. “We’re putting soap in it, like Dawn or something, and we’re putting in rubbing alcohol. Next time we’ll use a stirring stick to pull out the DNA, put some blue dye on it, and look at it.”

  “And then,” I said, “you will witness the secret of life—a little blob of something on a slide.”

  “That’s where babies come from,” said Drew. “From test tubes.” We were quiet for a bit, while Mrs. Meese helped Lucas with his history. “It’s my least-favorite class, though,” Drew said. “I didn’t like it first trimester and I don’t like it this trimester.”

  Drew liked English best, he said. “I’m learning how to
make proper sentences. We watched a movie, too, Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, about the Holocaust. It was really interesting, I liked it. I mean I liked the movie, I didn’t like what was happening.”

  Mrs. Meese was working with Lucas on his history—helping him spell Roosevelt.

  Drew began eating an apple in a strange way. He ate one half completely, right down to the core, and left the other side untouched. That morning, he said, he woke up and didn’t want to move, he just lay there. “People are always saying sleep is so important, and yet school starts so early.”

  “All right, Lucas, you did it!” said Mrs. Meese. She emailed his history assignment to his teacher.

  Lucas came over to my side of the class and sat down. “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Nothing much,” said Lucas.

  “Drew’s eating an apple,” I said. “He eats one side at a time.”

  A girl came in looking for a paperclip to fix her shirt.

  “I eat oranges like that all the time,” said Drew. “It tastes really good to me. After I eat the orange peel, if I take a sip of water, I swear it’s the best sip of water I’ve ever tasted.”

  “I’ll have to try that sometime,” I said.

  Lucas looked up. “Peanut butter and mayonnaise,” he said.

  “Together,” I said, “or apart?”

  “Together,” Lucas said. “I had to eat it when I went into solitary.”

  “Solitary what?”

  “Juvenile hall,” said Lucas. “That’s what they give you, because they can’t give you fluff, because it has sugar in it.”

  “No,” I said.

  “They make it look like it’s fluff. They make it thick, but it’s mayonnaise. If you go in the hole, that’s what they give you.”

  “You were in the hole?”

  “Yep. I punched a guard.”

  Mrs. Meese was explaining to a student how dot-dot-dots worked when you quoted a paragraph in an essay and wanted to leave something out. I leaned forward. Drew made a start on the second half of his apple.

  “But you’re a kid,” I said. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “You’re a senior, right?” said Drew.

  “Yeah.”

  I asked Lucas why he’d punched the guard.

  “I went in there because I got charged with a Class A felony. I did like four months. I was in there, and the guard kept giving me crap, so I just punched him out. I did probably two weeks in the hole.”

  I said, “How much contact with the outside world did you have?”

  “You go in the TV room. You only have two windows, and that’s all you see. Woods.”

  “That’s hard on your mind,” I said.

  “You’d think that people would see their mothers and stuff, but you don’t want to do that. Somebody asks for an interview, you say no, or people will say you’re a pussy.”

  I said I was glad it was over.

  “I’m out now,” Lucas said. “I done my time, and I’m doing good. I did anger management classes. Couple incidents here and there. But I’ll say right now, any kid in this room wouldn’t want to be in my shoes at that time. Any kid in this school wouldn’t last three seconds there. When I was there, I was lifting weights, situps, pushups.”

  I asked him what constituted a Class A felony.

  “Well, I quit school and took off. Walked down the street, and a kid owed me money, and he didn’t pay me, and he punched me, so I punched him and knocked his head against a pole and slammed him with a shopping cart. I ran to Walgreens. I was sitting in the bathroom there for a while. Went home, went in my bedroom window, changed my clothes, acted like my bus came in. A cop comes to my house, he goes, ‘Where were you around one o’clock today?’ ‘Home!’ He goes, ‘Nuh-uh.’ I knew I was busted. I told my mom, I said, ‘I’m done.’ They took me to the station, read me my Miranda rights, said, ‘You’re under arrest.’ I thought I was the toughest kid, but when I went in there, you ain’t. I saw a kid ahead of me put his head right through a sheet of glass. The glass is this thick. He shoves his head, boom. He was bigger than that door. It took like four guards with shields to zap him down.”

  “Like riot shields?” said a girl, who was listening.

  “Yeah, and he was in there. I’m like the shortest kid. D block is when kids are bodybuilders—you’ve got to get like fourteen cops to get at them. So I was in E block. I remember this kid would always scream at night. On and on. I finally said, ‘If you don’t shut up, in the morning, you make me lose my lunch this time, I’m going to go in there and beat the hell out of you.’”

  The class had gone quiet. Everybody was listening to Lucas, while pretending not to.

  “So he screamed that night,” Lucas went on. “The guard goes, ‘You lost lunch.’ Because the kid wouldn’t get up in the morning and they always took lunches from all of us every time. I didn’t think they could do that. I told the kid, ‘Come over here. We lost lunch?’ So I peed all over his boots, the guy. I said, ‘There’s your lunch. You can eat that.’ I went in the hole for that. Came back out, and the kid still screamed. His mind was messed up. When he first went in there, he was great, didn’t scream or nothing. Three weeks in, his mind, it’s like you’re not there anymore. He was reading kids’ books.”

  “He really lost it,” I said.

  “He really lost it. So at nighttime, the kids in the cells would crack their doors. The kids would fart into the door. One time I farted and a guard came by and he goes, ‘Holy snap!’ One time I broke a pen and put it on the shaving cream bottle. I put the shaving cream on the door handle so the guard couldn’t open it. He tried to open it and all the shaving cream turned to, like, slime. So he goes, ‘Yep, who did this this time!’ Going into the shower he got me good. Pepper spray and oil and wax. That stings. He goes, ‘How does it feel to be back?’ So the kid was still screaming. Finally he followed me out for lunchtime. I went around and beat the crap right out of him. I said, ‘You made me lose lunch for two weeks.’ He stopped screaming after that. I’m sorry for that.”

  Mrs. Meese said, “Pearl?” She and Pearl began working on Pearl’s English paper. Drew started talking to Mr. C.

  Lucas didn’t want to stop talking. “A new kid came in, trying to make a name for himself,” he said. “He slit a kid’s throat. So the kid came back and killed him.”

  “In juvie?”

  “Oh, yeah, people don’t know. They don’t tell the outside world. Like if someone died, they won’t tell. This one kid came in, new kid, they’re beating him up every day. I went over to him. I said, ‘What’s your problem?’ He goes, ‘I’m not guilty.’ I said, ‘Everybody did something to come in here.’ This girl got him in for drug running. She passed him the stuff and got him in there. He couldn’t fight at all. He didn’t know nothing about fighting. Kids would beat him up so bad that the kid wouldn’t get up. I told him, ‘Get up.’ I went to Sergeant Stamm and I told him, ‘He’s going to die. The guys are going to get to him and he can’t fight back.’ In the shower I said, ‘Watch your back.’ They run up and stabbed him. I said to the guard, ‘What did I tell you? He’s going to die.’ Sergeant Stamm goes, ‘Yeah? So? This is your house, you’re supposed to take care of it.’ The kid made it out, and I go up to see him, and he says, ‘I might take my life tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Don’t do that.’ That night he woke up, he made stuff out of sheets, a noose, jumped off the thing, killed himself.”

  Activity block was almost over and the class was noisy now. Lucas got up and I walked him to the door. “So I did my time, I came out, and I told my mom, my grandmom, my grandfather, I’m not going back in there for anything I do. I kept my promise ever since.” Now he boxed, he said. “My dad coached me.”

  “That’s quite a story,” I said.

  “I learned how to break someone’s arm,” said Drew, also standing by the door.


  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

  “Good talking to you,” I said.

  “Can you email that, Pearl?” said Mrs. Meese. “Lucas, thank you so much for all your hard work. Awesome job!” When the students were gone, she gathered some papers. I took a bite of a cheese sandwich. “This trimester just seems to fly for me,” Mrs. Meese said. “I’ve got blocks one, two, and three, and I’m just busy, busy, busy, and then I have a little chill here, but yet, I’m busy. And then four and five I’m just busy, busy again.” She bustled off.

  Ms. Gorton came in to get a notebook. She asked how things were going. I said I’d just heard the whole grim story of juvie from Lucas. She shook her head. “If I listened to all the stories, my heart would be irrevocably broken,” she said. “Bro-ken!” She left.

  Mrs. Batelle and a third ed tech came in and began comparing notes on the isms history test, so that they could help Drew take it. I went out to make some instant tap-water coffee in the kitchen and said hello to Mrs. Carlisle, the sub who’d played the relaxation tape. Cutting through the library, I saw a poster on which was posted the SAT word of the day. The word of the day was exodus. Yesterday’s word was languish, and before that it was frank, and before that nullfy, spelled without the i.

  When I got back, the ed techs were shuffling fruitlessly through their history notes in order to find which of the isms was the correct answer to What was the foreign policy of the United States after World War I?

  I put on my headphones and listened to some music. After a half hour Mrs. Batelle and Ms. Gorton went away and Mrs. Meese came back to have some yogurt. I told her that I was concerned about Sebastian. “I don’t know how much to say,” I said. “But I think he’s taking some kind of med that is keying him up too much.” I didn’t say that whatever he was taking—Strattera or Concerta or some such—was on the verge of making him psychotic.

  “Well, he’s ADHD,” said Mrs. Meese.

  “Yes, but he said, ‘I haven’t been sleeping, and I haven’t slept for days.’ He’s up, up, up.”

  “I had him first block, and he wasn’t up, up, up, he was fine,” Mrs. Meese said. “Some of that is to see how much sympathy he can get. But he is severe ADHD—I’ve never seen somebody as ADHD as he is. Right now he’s on restricted pass, because he was signing out to go to the boys’ room, but instead going to the cafeteria and hanging out with friends. He’s not allowed to leave his classes at all.”