Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “Today is your day to talk to me about big things that you read in your alcohol article,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said to the class. “Your job is to teach the class, so I can just sit back and fall asleep.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” said Renee.

  “Doesn’t it?” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “So say Marjorie starts first. She’s going to talk about something that’s a big thing to her that she learned about alcohol. And if I call on Ray next, Ray has two choices. He can make a connection to what Marjorie said, or he can come up with a whole new alcohol fact. Got it? This is what they do in college.”

  “Lots of fun,” said Ray quietly.

  “In some colleges, anyway,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “Sometimes you’re in a class of a hundred and fifty and they just lecture to you for eighty minutes. But sometimes there are discussion classes. You’re expected to come prepared for class and you’re expected to discuss. It’s a big responsibility. So who would like to go first?”

  Randy, in Top-Siders, raised his hand. He said, “I picked out from the article that you’re actually more likely to hurt yourself and others and commit more crimes, and go to jail.”

  “Can anyone make a connection to that and explain why?”

  Toby said, “It messes with your nervous system and your brain. You could think that something is completely normal and fine, when your real conscience knows it’s wrong.”

  “So it affects thinking skills,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “It’s really hard to stop and think when you’re under the influence of alcohol. How many of you have seen someone who has had too much alcohol, but they think they’re just fine?”

  Hands went up.

  “Look around the room, that’s your evidence,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “When people drink alcohol, they think they’re fine, because their brain is under the influence of what?”

  Alcohol.

  “Of what?”

  Alcohol.

  “And alcohol is a what?”

  A depressant.

  “A depressant, nice job. So I’m under the influence of a depressant, and I think I’m doing just fine. There’s absolutely no reason I can’t teach, there’s absolutely no reason I can’t drive. If your brain is not under the influence of a depressant, then you would look at me and say, I don’t know what’s wrong with her, but there’s something way different about her. She can’t even walk straight. She’s mumbling and she’s not making any sense. But my brain is telling me I’m just fine, because I’m under the influence of a depressant. Is it okay that people either love the Yankees or they love the Red Sox?”

  Yes.

  “Is it okay if you’re friends with somebody who likes the opposite team? Can you tolerate that normally? Do you like it? Not particularly. I don’t particularly like it when someone’s a real Yankees fan, but I can still be friends with them, and I don’t have to fight them. I don’t have to argue with them, and I don’t have to beat them up, and I don’t have to kill them over it. But that’s what people do when they’ve been drinking. There have been people at Fenway Park and at Yankee Stadium that have died because they have worn the opposite team’s jersey. Emotions escalate, and people end up being shot or killed or seriously injured—over what? When we boil it all down, it was over what?”

  A team.

  “They liked a team that I don’t like. Deal with it! Deal with it. But it’s not easy to deal with it when you’re putting a chemical in your body that changes the way you perceive things.”

  A tall floor-mounted fan sent a breeze of coolness over the drowsy class as we learned more about the horrors of alcohol. Melanie raised her hand to say that what she’d learned from the article was that alcohol is made by fermenting certain fruits. Mrs. Fitzgerald dismissed that fact as irrelevant. Alcohol was a poison, she said. Our liver filters out poisons, and alcohol is filtered out by your liver, therefore we know that alcohol is a poison. It couldn’t help you get better grades, and it couldn’t help you decrease the stress you feel from school. “We don’t want to be drinking to decrease stress. Are you serious? You want to put a poison in your body to decrease stress? It’s not a strategy to help you with stress. When you look at the reasons why teenagers use, I just want to tell you, they look like a bunch of excuses to me. You guys are too smart to use those as excuses. You guys are too smart to think that alcohol’s going to relax you. You know better than that.” What we needed were healthy relaxation techniques, she said. “Think of something that you personally do that decreases your stress, that makes you relaxed, that would be considered healthy.”

  “Play sports,” said Randy.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald nodded. “That’s a healthy redirecting activity.”

  “Sit on my horse?” said Anita, who kept eyeing Randy.

  “I draw,” said Marjorie.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald said, “What’s the end result if I draw, or I walk my dog, or I lay across on my bed for a little while and just relax? Or I do yoga, or slow breathing, or I doodle, or I read or write?”

  “It decreases stress?” said Marjorie.

  “When I read, how does it decrease stress?” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “For those of you that love to read, when you get yourself into a good book, how does that decrease stress?”

  “You get distracted by it,” Cary said.

  “You get distracted by it,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “If it’s a good character, or a good plot, it kind of takes you away. When I get done reading, I don’t feel sick, I don’t have a really bad headache, I’m not vomiting in the toilet, I haven’t said something or done something to somebody that I didn’t mean to do. How about when you draw? What do you notice? You get better at it. When you drink, you get better at drinking, because your body gets more dependent on it, and it needs more to get the same feeling. People that practice drinking get very good at it. People that practice their drawing get very good at it. Which very-good-at-it would you like to do? You guys don’t need alcohol. Am I going to feel better about myself if I feel sick? Am I going to feel better about myself if somebody shows me on their phone that they took a video of me doing really stupid things, and now it’s viral?” Alcohol, she said, will not help you fit in at school. “Who are you going to fit in with when you’re acting like an idiot? Other idiots. Is that who you want to fit in with?”

  Mrs. Fitzgerald moved on to the dangers of driving while under the influence. “Think about your brain as like an iPad that has too many apps open on it. What happens to your iPad?”

  It goes slow.

  “It goes real slow. So under the influence of a depressant, my brain goes really slowly, and I have a hard time multitasking.” That’s what led to car accidents, and snowmobile accidents. She wrote “FETAL ALCOHOL SYNDROME” on the whiteboard and told us about it. “The baby’s born addicted to alcohol,” she said. “It has physical deformities, and/or emotional and mental disabilities.” A boy raised his hand to ask how to spell deformities. “Women aren’t using to hurt their babies, they’re using because they’re addicted to alcohol. They made a personal choice to go down the road of addiction. The alcohol is making the decisions for them.”

  It sounded like Mrs. Fitzgerald was a total prohibitionist, but in fact she wasn’t. After about age twenty-four, you could drink. “If we could keep alcohol out of your hands, and out of your bodies, until your prefrontal cortex is fully developed, there wouldn’t be as big an issue with alcohol in our country.”

  I walked—faintly querulous, wanting a cold beer—to the next class, which was taught by Mr. Fields. He handed a bag filled with empty candy wrappers to a girl named Paloma, who wore a blue plaid bucket hat. “Would it wake you up if you were to go up to the board and count out how many of M&M wrappers are in here?”

  “Probably not,” said Paloma. “The entire class is math.”

  He handed the bag to Bobby instead. “There’s no food in there,” Mr. Fields said. “We took the food o
ut and fed it to other people.”

  “There’s just two,” said Bobby. He wrote a two next to “M&M” on the board.

  He gave the bag to Paloma.

  “Is it the hat that makes you so sleepy, or is it something else?” said Mr. Fields.

  “I’m stuffy,” said the girl. “Can’t . . . breathe . . . through . . . nose.” She counted out two Fruit Roll-Up wrappers and wrote a two on the board.

  Roxanne counted one Three Musketeers wrapper. Whitney counted four Snickers wrappers. Bobby, up again, counted two Milky Way wrappers.

  “Mr. Baker, can I leave you in charge of the bag of candy wrappers, so that Paloma doesn’t wake up and start to go through it to see if there’s a piece of candy left in there?”

  Then Mr. Fields handed around another plastic bag, this one filled with arithmetic problems on slips of paper. Each student fished out four problems.

  “Do you want to pick four as well, Mr. Baker?”

  I said that I’d be honored.

  “This is all about going over division by five and six,” Mr. Fields said.

  Bobby did his problems aloud: ten divided by five is two, thirty-five divided by five is seven, twenty divided by five is four, and eighteen divided by six is three.

  Paloma was next. She spread out her four division problems. “I would really love to breathe,” she said. Thirty divided by five is six. Thirty-five divided by five is seven. Forty divided by five is eight. Twenty-four divided by six is four.

  “Do you notice anything about these?” Mr. Fields asked.

  “Five and six seem to reoccur,” said Paloma.

  “Okay, anything else that you notice? Do you have any prime numbers as an answer?”

  “I don’t know,” said Paloma.

  “She has eight, four, seven, and six, are any of those prime numbers?”

  “No,” said Bobby.

  “Seven is,” said Mr. Fields.

  They went around the class doing simple division.

  “And Mr. Baker, what did you get?”

  “I got fifteen divided by five equals three,” I said. “Twenty divided by five is four, twelve divided by six is two, and ten divided by five is two.”

  “And what do you notice about your answers, if anything?” Mr. Fields said.

  “I’ve got a prime number in there, three.”

  Mr. Fields tooted a large old-fashioned automobile horn and handed it to me. “Whenever you feel the urge, do that, and that means we have to go around and get another pick-four from people, and see what they remember. Any time you want.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Do a practice one.”

  I honked the horn.

  “Do it a little louder so that it wakes up Whitney.”

  Honk!

  Whitney screeched.

  “That is loud,” I said.

  “Do it often,” said Mr. Fields.

  “Don’t do it, it irritates me,” said Whitney.

  Mr. Fields shook the bag of candy wrappers. “Probability is the topic here,” he said. “What does probability mean, Jaden, in your own words?”

  “The possibility of it getting done?”

  “The possibility of getting something done,” said Mr. Fields. He wrote a capital P on the board. “That P just stands for ‘probability.’ Last week the big capital P on the board stood for what measurement, Paloma?”

  “That if you put some more letters in there it would be my name,” said Paloma.

  “Thank you.”

  I honked the horn.

  “Hey, okay!” said Mr. Fields. “There we go. Paloma, quickly. Eighteen divided by six?”

  “Three.”

  “Thirty divided by six?”

  “Not five,” said Paloma.

  “It is a five!” said Mr. Fields. “Twenty-four divided by six?”

  “Gahhh!” said Paloma. “Four.”

  “Nice guess,” said Mr. Fields, turning. “Bobby, ten divided by five. Don’t be insulted. You’ve just got to know these things.”

  “Five! No. Two.”

  “Of course it is,” said Mr. Fields. “You’re just messing with us. All right, Mr. Baker. You should probably go and visit Mrs. Christian.”

  “Can I do it?” said Whitney, meaning toot the horn.

  “I don’t like giving the students control of this,” said Mr. Fields, hugging the horn. “Chaos is sometimes good, but not today.”

  I went downstairs to Team Nile, where Mrs. Christian’s seventh-grade science class was in the midst of a cell biology project. She briefed me on it. “They’ve all picked a system, whether it’s a school, or a factory, or a sports team, and they’re trying to figure out, like, what the nucleus would be in the school, or what the nucleus would be on a sports team.” She pointed out several kids who might need help, warning me that some might not want help. I went over to Gabrielle, who was sitting and thinking her thoughts. She had a packet in front of her about parts of the cell. I didn’t want to interrupt her, but I did anyway. “Can I check in?” I said. “What’s your analogy?”

  “What?” she said. She had a kind, despondent face.

  “What’s your comparison?”

  “A farm.”

  “Great idea! So the nucleus is the place that everything is directed from? That’s a tough one. What did you come up with?”

  She paged through the cell packet. “I couldn’t find anything.”

  I pulled up a chair. “What place on the farm is where everything gets made, and is sort of the center of the farm?”

  “The barn.”

  “The barn, interesting,” I said. “Not the farmhouse, the barn, I see that.”

  Gabrielle said nothing. Her packet was filled with words like mitochondria, cytoplasm, ribosomes, and vacuole, and she didn’t know how to pronounce them, or what any of them meant.

  “Mitochondria,” I said. “What are those? Those are the squiggly things, right?”

  She was silent.

  “I don’t know what that would be on a farm. Do you have any rivers, or creeks, or irrigation ditches?”

  She looked up at me and smiled slowly, waiting for me to go on to someone else, which I did.

  Matthew had chosen a movie theater as his analogy. He’d drawn the plan of a movie theater on a blank piece of paper.

  “Great idea!” I said. “Did you come up with that?”

  “No,” he said.

  “So what would the projection booth be? Hm, interesting.”

  He stared at the page, waiting for me to move on. I swiveled and talked to a kid behind me, Cooper. “What’s happening, man? Good stuff?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah.” He’d just written a definition for endoplasmic reticulum.

  “That’s a word, eh?” I said. “Good god, you sometimes wonder why scientists don’t come up with simpler words. So what are you comparing yours to?”

  Cooper looked up at me. “Jail,” he said.

  “Nice. So what equals a nucleus in a jail?”

  “The warden?” Cooper said.

  “Ah,” I said. “Good one. And the endoplasmic reticulum? What does that do? I don’t remember.”

  He’d written, Moves stuff around. Made up of complex membranes. “The guards?” he said.

  “The guards, yeah,” I said. “They push around those carts. Good choice. This is a pretty interesting assignment.” I waited. Cooper didn’t want me there. I was pretty much poison in this class. “Good luck,” I said, and greeted Dawson.

  “I’m doing the Boston Red Sox,” Dawson said.

  “I’m doing a grocery store,” said Egan, the boy next to him. “It took me ten minutes to write all this stuff down.”

  I asked Egan what the nucleus was in a grocery store.

  “The manager, because in a grocery store the
manager is in charge.”

  “Good point,” I said. “Do the bathrooms at a grocery store count? What would they be equivalent to? Or the cash registers? That’s hard. This is a hard assignment. I kind of like it, though.”

  “Yeah, I can’t remember what those things are called that get rid of waste,” Egan said.

  “Is it the mitochondria?” I said. “Or is it the endoplasmic reticulum?”

  “The endoplasmic reticulum stores proteins,” said Egan. “Maybe it’s the mitochondria. The mitochondria gives energy.”

  “I’ve got a question for you,” I said. “What would money be?”

  “Money would be the protein,” Egan said. “Because money goes into the store, and the endoplasmic reticulum stores it.”

  I said, “Then maybe the endoplasmic reticulum would be the cash register? Or the safe?”

  “Yeah,” Egan said, not entirely convinced.

  I turned back to Dawson. “So the Red Sox,” I said. “What would be the batting cage?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dawson.

  “I don’t know either,” I said.

  “I think the proteins would be the food stands,” said Dawson.

  “I think the ribosomes would be the food stands,” said Booker, who sat next to Egan. “Because ribosomes make protein, and food is protein. Depending on what you have in the food.”

  I read Dawson’s definition of the nucleus: holds the genetic information of the cell.

  “That’s the coach,” said Dawson. “John Farrell.”

  “The man,” I said. “Good luck, dudes.”

  I crossed the class to a couple sitting together. “What’s happening here?” I said to Fletcher, who swiped something away on his iPad.

  “I’m trying to be stupid is all,” Fletcher said.

  “That’s top priority,” I said. “Are you doing one of these comparisons?”

  “Huh?” said the girl, Vanessa.

  “Are you doing one of these comparisons with the cell?”

  “I already did that,” said Fletcher.

  “We already finished that,” said Vanessa.