Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “It is hilarious,” I said, giving her a sour look. “Then they go to this display that I had never seen before. It’s human hair. It’s a massive, twenty-foot-long display of human hair. And there are displays of the clothes that they confiscated from people. It’s just a massively depressing immersion in one of the most horrible things that happened in human history.”

  Amity and Dolores started talking about their hair.

  “What’s up?” I said. “You’re talking about your hair? What I want you to think about is, why would you want to subject people now to that tormented period? What is the point of seeing stuff that’s that intense? It’s about an hour of seeing dead bodies. Why would we want to do that? You’re all eighteen, seventeen?”

  “Sixteen, seventeen,” said Tom.

  “Is it a good thing for you to spend an hour looking at that much death and destruction? Is that good for your souls? Or what?”

  Brandy said, “It’s probably good for our ways of thinking. Not necessarily for our souls, but it could influence the way we think about things.”

  “We take things for granted,” said Rose.

  Brandy said, “If it speaks spiritually, it might actually benefit our souls, because we’re wanting to connect directly with the event.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said. “Because I was thinking that maybe you would watch something this bleak and you would think, What is life all about? If they’re capable of doing something this horrible, why are we striving and struggling here?”

  “It puts things into perspective,” said Dolores.

  “It puts things in perspective,” I said. She was right. “So that’s a recapitulation of what you would have seen if the technology had been working. Now, do you have lots of homework from other classes that you’d like to do? Would you like to sing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’?”

  “I would like to read my murder poems,” said Brandy.

  “You would?”

  “No, I’m not going to read them.”

  “You keep talking about it, as if you want to read them,” I said. “You’re desperate to read them. But you don’t want to.”

  “She’s afraid to share,” said Tom.

  “As are we all,” I said. “All right, I’m going to be brave, and read a poem, gosh darn it. I’m seriously going to read a poem, if I can find it.” I flipped around in the anthology looking for a Robert Frost poem I’d seen earlier.

  “Is that documentary on YouTube?” said Eugene.

  I looked up. “Yes. If you want, you can put in your earbuds and watch the documentary solo. ‘Oprah Wiesel full documentary,’ it’s called.”

  Eugene got the movie going on his iPad, and then he connected the iPad via AirPlay to the projector by typing in a code. “There it is, I’m going in,” he said. “I’m going in hard. We don’t ask no questions.”

  The video came back on, and we turned up the volume. Oprah said, “Bodies were burned in open pits. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel witnessed these atrocities as a boy, and gave the world his account.”

  The class watched attentively, especially Brandy. When we got to the part that looped back and repeated, Eugene skipped ahead ten minutes. “I’m going to go hard with it,” he said.

  “You are really into that phrase,” I said.

  Oprah said, “It was here in Auschwitz One that the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the angel of death, conducted sadistic medical experiments on prisoners, infecting them with diseases, rubbing chemicals into their skin, and performing crude sterilization experiments, in his quest to eliminate the Jewish race by any means possible.”

  We watched in silence. When we got to the part about the display of suitcases, the video stopped again, buffering endlessly. Still nobody spoke. Nate tried to get it going again on his iPad, but the school’s Wi-Fi was down.

  “Well, thank you for watching what you could watch,” I said. “It was a pleasure having you in this class.” I listened as they talked quietly about random things—razor burn, water bottles, crutches, locked iPads—for several minutes.

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Mr. Markey came in to retrieve the computer and the tiny speakers.

  In homeroom, while waiting for the buses, Madonna and Chelsea drew quite a beautiful magenta tree on the whiteboard. “You’re such an A,” said one girl.

  “Language,” said her friend.

  Some boys stacked the chairs on the hexagonal tables.

  An alert-looking kid named Braden was standing near me. “Are you energized?” I asked him. “Filled with knowledge and ready to confront the afternoon?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Me neither,” I said. “I’m exhausted. Is it an engine of oppression, school? Yes, no?”

  “Nyeah,” he said.

  Six bongs. “Tootles,” said Gloria.

  I wrote a note for the teacher: “Dear Mrs. Kennett, All went well. Block 1 kids worked (with varying degrees of intensity) on the soundtrack project—and the rest of the day was spent watching Elie Wiesel. Mr. Markey was very helpful in setting up the A/V—and the kids were cheerful and good-natured. Thanks for letting me sub in your classes. Best regards, Nick Baker. P.S. I hope your daughter is feeling better!”

  Outside, I saw Sebastian sitting by himself on the front lawn, plucking at a tuft of grass, waiting for his ride. I asked him how he was doing. “You sleeping better these days?”

  “Eh,” he said. “A little.”

  I walked out to the car and fished around for my key, which wasn’t in my pocket. At the main office I told one of the secretaries that I stupidly might have left my car key in the classroom.

  “Does it look like this?” She held up my key. “It’s been on the counter all day.”

  Mr. Clapper, the principal, said, “Thank you for being here today.”

  “My pleasure, thank you.”

  Day Seventeen was over.

  DAY EIGHTEEN. Tuesday, May 13, 2014

  LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, NINTH-GRADE SCIENCE

  THE MAN WHO NEEDS IT DOESN’T KNOW IT

  BETH GAVE ME A JOB as a ninth-grade science teacher. I got to Lasswell early and parked on a gravel path in a cemetery not far from the school. Among the gravestones were many little American flags poked into the ground, motionless, curled like upside-down sugar cones. I recognized some of the surnames from school—French names, from the Quebecois who came down to work as loggers and in the paper mills, and Scots names, descendants of the prisoners of war sent to Maine by Cromwell in 1650.

  To work. At seven-fifteen I checked into the office and walked to the North Building, to Mrs. Moran’s classroom, which was large and neatly arranged, with two pink file cabinets in front of the teacher’s desk and inspirational quotes everywhere you looked. “Don’t make lemonade, get mad, make life take back her lemons,” said Cave Johnson. “Never, never, never give up,” said Winston Churchill. “Don’t fight a battle if you don’t gain anything by winning,” said Erwin Rommel. “Believe you can and you’re halfway there,” said Teddy Roosevelt. In the very middle of the whiteboard, in tiny red letters, someone had written

  (Fuck

  my

  life)

  The carpeting was black, with flecks of yellow and green and purple in a stain-hiding pattern, and pushpinned to a corkboard was a chart of LEARNING TARGETS MET! and seven festive diagrams of the layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, all made by ninth-grade students. One was done in colored pencil, with a blue thermosphere and black stars. One was done in watercolor, with a yellow stratosphere. One was a circle cut out of mattress foam. And one was a yellow balloon with the layers drawn to scale in black marker: the troposphere, the ozone layer, the stratosphere, the mesosphere, and the thermosphere. I’d never heard of the thermosphere. All the chairs were stacked on the tables. Everything was waiting to happen.

  Mrs. Moran’s sub plans began wit
h a capitalized command: “PLEASE LEAVE ME A NOTE TO LET ME KNOW HOW THE BEHAVIOR WAS FOR EACH CLASS.” The class rules were: (1) listening to music was allowed in all classes during independent work; (2) students didn’t have to ask to go to the bathroom, although they did have to sign out, and only one student was allowed to go to the bathroom at a time; and (3) “If iPads or phones become a problem you have the POWER to confiscate them.” Block 1, from 7:30 to 8:28, was a “FREE BLOCK!” While I was reading the plans, a math teacher said hello. She looked done in. I asked her if there was anything I should know. She hesitated. “They can be challenging,” she said.

  Ten minutes into my free block, a guileless, big-boned girl, April, dressed in aqua knee pants and black sneakers, came in to work on her atmospheric model. She had painted a Frisbee blue and glued it to a piece of cardboard, surrounding it with white pipe-cleaner clouds. “Can you be honest with me for at least two minutes?” April said, bringing her project over to my desk. “I don’t know if you’re a mean person or not. How does that look?”

  I told her I thought it looked very good. “You’ve conveyed what’s going on,” I said.

  “That’s the Earth,” she said. “It was originally green, so I painted it blue, to look like the water.” She’d made labels for the mesosphere and the thermosphere that she was going to glue onto the cardboard and she had some coloring left to do. “You see those ones?” She pointed to the “Student Exemplars” on the corkboard. “That’s what I’ve got to get this to look like, but not exactly. In my own way.”

  She was 90 percent there, I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. She sat back down and began positioning the labels.

  Long ago, I said, when I’d learned about the Earth’s atmosphere, they hadn’t mentioned the outer layers. “That’s all new. I like your idea of using the Frisbee as the Earth.”

  “I have three Frisbees,” April said. The one she was using for her project she’d found at the beach. “I looked down and I was like, Oh, interesting.” One of her other Frisbees got broken. “And I got one for Christmas that was pink, and it glowed in the dark.”

  I said, “It’s interesting to think of a Frisbee flying through space, in some giant game of ultimate Frisbee.”

  April began hunting around for something. I asked if she needed some colored markers.

  “Nope, I’ve got about forty-five Sharpies. If you don’t believe me . . .” From her backpack she pulled a large clear plastic envelope filled with every color of Sharpie you could think of. “Forty-five Sharpies,” she said.

  “You are set,” I said. “That’s more Sharpies than I’ve ever seen in one place.”

  “Sixteen bucks.” She gave me a savvy nod, and went back to arranging the labels. “Tropo,” she said softly. “Strato. Meso.”

  How easy and pleasant it was to be in a large classroom with one student, or two, or three—even four or five. Above five was when the noise problems began. One grownup can’t teach twenty digital-era children without spending a third of the time, or more, scolding and enforcing obedience. What if we cut the defense budget in half, brought the school day down from six hours to two hours, hired a lot of new, well-paid teachers who would otherwise be making cappuccinos, and maxed out the class size at five students? What if the classes happened in parental living rooms, or even in retrofitted school buses that moved like ice cream trucks or bookmobiles from street to street, painted navy blue? Two hours a day for every kid, four or five kids in a class. Ah, but we couldn’t do any of that, of course: school isn’t actually about efficient teaching, it’s about free all-day babysitting while parents work. It has to be inefficient in order to fill six and a half hours.

  April was coloring in her troposphere. “You’re in the home stretch,” I said.

  “What’s the home stretch?” she asked.

  “If you’re in a horse race, the home stretch is the last bit of the race where all of the horses go full out—it’s seconds away from the end.”

  I read aloud to April from the sub plans. Assignments were to be found, wrote Mrs. Moran, “in the lime green milk crate on my hot pink file cabinets.”

  “You can’t miss it,” April said. “She did that herself.”

  “She painted the file cabinets? That is dedication.”

  “She loves pink and she loves green.”

  I asked April which class she liked best.

  “I loved Mrs. Tucker, the math teacher, and then she had to go out because of labor. She had a baby.” She tipped her head in the direction of the math classroom and went down to a whisper. “Ms. Webb is a . . .” She shuddered. “She low-grades everyone. I shouldn’t be saying this. Mostly everyone on this team had nineties. Now we’re all down to fifties, forties. All she’ll grade is our test scores. She’ll grade our worksheets, that she gives us in class, but she’ll put down a one, two, or three in responsibility. I don’t like math at all. Most people on this team don’t like her—just in general. Mrs. Moran I had last term. I fricking hated her. But now it’s like, You’re not bad. Mrs. Marsh is okay for English. She can be grouchy sometimes, and then other days she’s perfectly fine with happiness.”

  I asked her what made for a good class—was it the kids, or was it the teacher?

  “It depends on what kind of a day it is,” April said. “It may be a gloomy day, but the teacher may be happy. I have a few classes with class clowns, which is hilarious. In this class, I cannot work at all. And we have you last.”

  “Everybody’s tired,” I said.

  “But that’s not really the reason I can’t work. It’s because of the loudness.”

  It’s especially hard for a substitute to keep the noise level down, I said.

  April said, “We have this sub, I don’t know if you know him, he’s Mr. C.? He’ll just sit there and do nothing. Just like literally sit there.”

  “That’s when you give up,” I said. “I’ve done that.”

  “The kids try to overpower every single substitute on this team. The only one they don’t overpower is Mrs. Carlisle. She likes it here. She’s trying to get from being a sub to being a full-time teacher. Everyone loves Mrs. Carlisle.” She stopped and held her hand to her mouth, thinking. “Technically, I should be working,” she said. She took out a worksheet on which she was supposed to fill out the temperatures and kilometer thicknesses of the different atmospheric layers.

  “Good luck,” I said. “Don’t let me bother you. I’m going to study up in case somebody has a question.” I flipped through the geophysical sciences textbook.

  Something else occurred to April. “It’s nothing against you,” she said. “It’s just that we might not ask you for help.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s sort of awkward to have a totally new person.”

  April said, “With a sub, pretty much the only class that gets their work done is honors. My class does no work. I will try to work, and the girl next to me, Marcia, she will try to work, too. And then there will be a girl named Daisy sitting there, where my purse is. At that table in the back. And there will be a girl named Jill. That one’s blond. Daisy, Jill—all they do is goof around.”

  “I know what I’m in for,” I said. “And I don’t take it personally, because I think one of the things a sub can offer is a little break from the routine. But I feel sorry about people like you who are bothered by the noise.”

  April said, “I use my headphones, but then once I get sidetracked, it’s like, Oh, I’m going to message my friends in class, and I’m not going to partake. I’ll put my backpack in front of my iPad or use my best friend’s phone. I use it for a certain messaging app. And then when I do try to work, it’s like, Oh, there’s not too much of class left.”

  I read the textbook and April worked on her work. Then I dashed out to my car to get a power cord. “Troposphere,” I whispered to myself.

  Two boys were laughing at the doorway to t
he North Building. “I’ve got gas, I’m telling you,” one said.

  Back in class, April was gone and a boy I didn’t recognize pointed at me and said, “It’s HIM.” He was eating a bag of chips. He left. Others showed up.

  “I’m going to go to the vending machines,” said Penelope.

  “That’s a very important mission,” I said. “And I’m going to write my name on the board.”

  I wrote “Mr. Baker” and sat down. My car key dropped out of my pocket.

  “You dropped your key,” said Rob. He picked it up and handed it to me.

  Block 2 was called “Intervention,” and there were only eight names on the roster. I asked Rob what the class was all about.

  “Basically we make up work,” Rob said.

  “How’s that going for you?”

  Not well, Rob said—he was behind. “I got a concussion,” he said. “I was out for a year and two months. I was hospitalized. And I got suspended recently.” The concussion, his third, happened during a football game. “For two and a half months, it was constant headaches every day,” he said.

  I asked him if he’d stopped playing football.

  “No, I’m playing next year.”

  “Dude, that’s frightening,” I said.

  “My mom doesn’t want me to play,” Rob said. “My dad said I just have to be careful.”

  “How can you be careful? You’re going to get creamed once in a while.”

  Six bongs. Class was in session.

  “Especially if I play running back,” Rob said.

  Next to Rob was a kid called Bucky, who had a little mustache. “Do you play football as well?”

  “I play basketball,” said Bucky.

  Rob said, “My sister’s ex-boyfriend—we were playing basketball, and he was probably like fifty feet away from the hoop at one end of the driveway. The basket was behind his back and he just threw it up and got it in, from one end of the driveway to the other. I don’t know how he did it. All luck, no skill.”

  Time to meet and greet other students. “Let me know if I can be of assistance in your endeavors,” I said to Rob and Bucky.