“That part of the romantic equation has already been solved,” enthused the angel. “She already adores our boy. You merely have to awaken similar feelings in his heart.”
“Why does she adore him?” asked Maternus, recalling in his mind’s eye the little he had seen of the trembling, sweaty lump of neuroses that was the diminutive Abdul Rathman.
“Aha!” laughed the demon. “I told you, Worthy, he’s smarter than he looks! A very good question, soldier boy. Although yet a child, Edith has clearly already acquired the full perversity of a mature woman. They’re just dumb that way, Matty. To love a better sort of bloke, she’d have to be able to do some thinking.”
“Yak, yak, yak,” said the angel. “Don’t listen to him — he doesn’t know the first thing about women.”
“You do?” said Banewill.
“I at least have a wife, sir.”
“Oh, I forgot,” said the demon and pantomimed slapping himself on the forehead. “For twelve thousand years you’ve been faithful to the same white-haired chick in a bed sheet. Twelve thousand years of waking up every morning to do a few hours of praying at the side of a winged babe who remembers the woolly mammoth. Just thinking about it makes me hot,” he said and pretended to fan himself. “Trust me,” he added with a wink at Maternus, “the babes who’ll curl your toes are all downstairs in the big sauna.”
“Will you let me get on with this?!” demanded Mr. Worthy, showing some uncharacteristic anger at the demon’s antics. “The poor man will never get his first assignment if you keep interrupting me.”
“They burned their candles at both ends,” said Banewill, once more speaking on top of the angel. “Now they simply burn.”
“Enough!” declared the angel, and with a wave of his hand he made the demon’s mouth vanish. “He’ll get his lips back when we’re done here,” Mr. Worthy explained to Maternus while Banewill made frantic motions with his hands and produced a muffled humming sound. “Now then, my friend, you needn’t know why the girl likes Abdul, you only have to do your job. Do you have any other questions?”
“The school term has ended,” said the Roman. “There are to be no more classes until September. How will I have contact with the children?”
“In point of fact, regular classes are concluded, yes,” said Mr. Worthy. “There is, however, a special school, called the summer session, for special students.”
“The dumb ones?” asked Maternus.
“I wouldn’t say dumb, my friend,” said the angel and waved away the unpleasant word. “‘Dumb’ is such a cruel term. Besides, both Abdul and Edith get above average grades. Edith has to go a little extra because of, you know, her special problems. I mean the fighting and so on. The spitting on other children, the vile language, etc. And the teachers have seen Abdul get into so many scrapes, they assumed he was somehow responsible. He’s being kept longer as a sort of punishment, the poor thing. Thus they will both still be at your school the entire summer.”
“How will I know the task is completed?” asked Maternus.
“We will appear to give you your second assignment. Anything else?”
“Yes, but not about this,” said the soldier. “That church you sent me to. The service, the people, the sermons — they are all very boring.”
“They can’t help it,” said the angel. “They’re Methodists. If I had set you among a more muscular strain of Christianity, you might have jumped ship on the first Sunday. Buck up, son, you know as well as anyone that there are worse things in the world than boredom.
“Now, if that is everything you need to know…” he said and made a long, high arc with his hand, and the next thing Maternus knew he was awakening in his bed, and it seemed as if his conversation with the angel and the demon had occurred inside a dream.
For two weeks that June the Roman went to his job every afternoon and from a safe distance observed the girl Edith and the boy Abdul go about their separate routines. Years of combat had taught him that a good soldier needed to know how the enemy moved on the battlefield long before they came to blows. For Edith, her routine meant terrorizing the other girls so unfortunate as to be sharing their summer with her. Seldom was the noon hour when someone did not run from the girl’s restroom in tears, only to have the glowing Miss Pink emerge from the same swinging door a few moments later. Abdul, meanwhile, hovered in the dark corners created by Susan B. Anthony Middle School’s many hard angles; wherever a stairway passed over a storage space or in the blind spots created by the unused classrooms at the rear of the school. Abdul could sometimes be spotted for a few seconds at a time, darting about like a frightened deer on the edge of a forest. Should he let himself be seen for too long in one place, he was sure to attract bullies eager to take a swing at the one boy in the school certain not to fight back.
Which one should he approach first? Maternus wondered. In his campaign through the Great Book series, he had reached Freud and was thus well aware how complicated modern human psyches had become. His great fear was that speaking directly to either child might scar the little one and thus violate Mr. Worthy’s admonition that he do no harm to other humans, in addition to making it impossible to complete his first task. Therefore he consulted other sources to find what path he should take with Edith and Abdul. In the library he located a book — one situated far from the Great Book series — titled Advice on Dating for the Parents of Young Adolescents, in which he read:
“Since girls mature more quickly than boys, by age twelve or thirteen they have often already developed strong feelings for their male peers. Boys of the same age are typically still more interested in sports and other activities than they are in romance. Because of this relative lack of sexual maturity in early adolescent and pre-adolescent boys, young girls may come to feel they are physically unattractive or somehow otherwise undesirable to the opposite gender because they are unable to arouse the attention they so strongly desire. A thoughtful parent will have observed a young girl’s non-sexuality based interests and will use these interests to instill a sense of self-worth in their daughter; a caring, nurturing adult will also utilize the opportunities these other interests provide to praise their girl’s innate vivaciousness and beauty. For example, let us say your daughter is active in the Girls Scouts and has recently earned a merit badge for selling cookies. A good parent will praise his or her daughter as ‘the best little salesperson in town,’ and this same parent will add: ‘And you are also the prettiest one in town.’ If your girl is artistically inclined and has recently completed an oil painting, a thoughtful mother or father will same something like: ‘This is beautiful, honey. The only thing more beautiful in the whole wide world is you.’”
As nearly as Maternus could tell, Edith’s primary interest was assaulting other children. Again because of his reading of Freud, he was not entirely convinced this or anything else she did was entirely non-sexual, as the Austrian doctor had found Eros lurking even in the shape of household utensils, yet being a bully did seem to be something she was very good at. Moreover, the book on dating had sounded very certain about the advice it offered, and the Roman reasoned that no one would have a book in a public library unless it were advocating the truth. After all, the government itself was paying for those books. So he resolved he had to be brave and speak to the girl.
He took his first, last, and only approach to Edith one afternoon immediately after he had arrived at the school. Maternus happened to spot a blonde girl in corduroy jumpers running down the hallway as tears poured down her face. Around the corner from which the weeping child had emerged at once came Edith Pink, grinding a fist into the palm of her other hand and sporting an expression of gruesome delight upon her small face. Her long, single eyebrow had slid low over her squinting brown eyes.
As she stomped past, Maternus cleared his throat and dared to say:
“You certainly are an effective female boxer, Miss Pink. You are also an attractive one.”
Edith forgot the girl she had been pursuing and turned h
er glowering visage toward the Roman. She took a small cylinder from her fanny pack and held high it above her head, as though she were about to strike Maternus with the object.
“Back off, creep,” she growled. “I’ve got mace.”
The thing surely did not resemble any mace Maternus had seen the northern barbarians use in battle, but the child certainly appeared to be prepared to use it as some manner of weapon. There is some sort of danger here, he thought. Maternus took a step to the side the instant she hit the button at the top of the cylinder and sent forth a cloud of spray that narrowly missed the Roman’s face, but did cause him to cough. He retreated farther from the girl while Edith kept the device pointed in his direction. A few droplets of the spray settled on his skin, causing a irritating sting that confused Maternus, as he had no experience with chemical weapons. He wiped his cheek with his hand, only making the irritation hurt more.
“I will take the little monster by the ankles and smash her head against the wall the way I would a stray cat!” he thought, and assumed his combat stance: right foot back and left foot out, while he coiled to lash out at her.
At the last second he thought of Hell, and of Mr. Worthy’s warning about not losing his temper, and he inhaled and let his muscles go slack.
“Back to sweeping the commons room,” he said and forced himself to make a smile before he retreated from her presence. She scowled at him until he was gone from sight.
A new course of action was clearly needed.
In his effort to understand how he should accomplish the task Maternus next did something even more foolish than approach the girl directly — he consulted his friends. When he asked Stephen’s Uncle Jerry how he might help a boy at this school win the affections of a young girl, the vile old man told the Roman, “First, he should show the little bitch he’s the boss.” And he recommended the boy do something that was so outrageous it would have earned Abdul a death sentence in Maternus’s less enlightened time, and a long prison sentence in the modern age. Maternus could scarce believe an elder schooled by a long tenure upon the earth would offer such terrible advice. The filthiest German barbarian would not have entertained such thoughts, and Maternus questioned the apparent goodness of prosperous Aurora if it could be home to a man as defective as Uncle Jerry was.
Stephen himself knew as little of girls as he did of women, and could not give even bad counsel to the Roman.
“Girls, you know, exist in a different kind of social construct,” he said when the soldier asked him about Edith. “They’re conditioned to be different, the nurture instead of the nature.”
“I am thinking I should begin with the boy, Abdul,” said Maternus. “What do you think he should say to the girl?”
“Boys … boys … I think they have to grapple with different cultural realities,” decided Stephen, who wished his new friend would speak of something else, something that did not embarrass him. “Different nature, different nurture. I’m not an expert on these things because they lean too much on psychology rather than on sociology, which is really the lens we should look at things through.”
That did not help the Roman overmuch.
Shen felt no embarrassment about affairs of the heart. He had certain knowledge to share with Maternus when the Roman asked him about the timid boy and terrible girl. Shen’s knowledge, however, was limited by his inability to conceive of a situation in which the female was not immediately drawn to the male.
“Guys broadcast a kind of sexual aura women pick up on,” he told the Roman. “She recognizes he complements her half of the cosmic possibilities. She can tell the man will bring light and earth to her musky darkness. The Yang he-thing it’s called. My ancient Chinese brothers had it all figured out.”
“That is very interesting,” said Maternus. “She already favors the boy. I am asking how I can make him feel likewise.”
“Why would you care one way or the other?”
“I have a capital-R Romantic heart,” said Maternus, whose reading in the Great Books had included Goethe.
“All guys naturally like girls,” reasoned Shen. Soon after he spoke Shen recalled a small club in Cherry Hills where he sometimes read poetry for silk-clad real estate agents while they sipped wine stingers; the clientele there bought Shen Ward Eights and saw to it he had their business cards with their personal phone numbers written on the back of them before he could get out the door. Remembering the men in that small, tasteful club did not shake his convictions concerning women. He went on, “All guys — even the ones not interested in girls in the conventional way, like girls, because, you see, only women know how to praise us. Other men talk us up because they want something. Women give praise because they want to be nice, want to embrace the world. Women are like pets — they never have an ulterior motive. What’s there to dislike?”
Maternus had lived in the time of Empress Faustina, the black spider who had given birth to and then shaped the monstrous Emperor Commodus. He, unlike the poet, could envision a woman having an ulterior motive. What he could not envision was Edith Pink willingly praising anyone unless a gun were pointed at her temple. Maternus would have been pleased if Abdul could speak to Edith and be certain she would not harm him. Being completely ignorant of romance, the Roman did not suspect that Shen, a man woman adored, could know less about the subject than he did.
Lacking good advice and doubting the books in the library could tell him anything he could use, Maternus reverted to thinking like a soldier and scouted the opposition, as it were, to see if observation could instruct him how to act. He noted Abdul usually hid behind a dumpster beyond the fence at the rear of the gymnasium in hopes of escaping his physical education class. Whenever the class instructor hunted Abdul down, the round, brown boy was forced to wear embarrassingly short blue trunks and made to trot around the oval track encircling the football field until he slowed to a shambling walk. Soon after he slowed down, his tormentors — most of whom were not so swift in the classroom — would overtake him and punch Abdul in the arm, or muss his hair as they went past. The plump, defeated boy responded to their abuse by making a high-pitched sound that, to the Roman’s ears, sounded like the noise tortured pudding would make, had pudding the ability to whine. The other boys never became more amiable to Abdul, while Abdul never seemed to learn anything from the repeated humiliations. Every time the other boys approached him Abdul invariably tried to be pleasant; he was too far away for Maternus to tell what he was saying to his abusers as they drew near. The Roman deduced from Abdul’s attempt to laugh that he was trying to tell jokes to the larger boys, as little as that did to appease them. Had anyone mocked him in a similar manner, reflected the Roman, he would have cut off their head and put it at the end of his spear. The old darkness of his former self fell upon him as he kept his eye upon the running track, and he wished for ten minutes he could be Abdul — he would put an end to this bullying then! Maternus fought the darkness out of his heart when he remembered the angel, and what would happen if he did not contain his temper. Not matter how well he contained himself, he realized he would never be able to care overmuch for the boy, which was why, he thought, the angel and the demon had given him this cowardly child to save.
On the twenty-first of July, a muggy, nondescript Wednesday at the middle school that was so ordinary even the gung-ho gym teacher ceased feigning interest in his routine, Maternus was again watching the running track from afar. The Roman janitor was standing under the mobile bleacher stands, peering through the rows of wood slats and metal support beams much as a prisoner would look out the barred window of his cell. At a little after three o’clock the P.E. instructor ambled back to his office to check his e-mail, leaving the boys in his charge to loiter aimlessly on the track infield, near the pole vault pit. Several youths were practicing throwing a heavy platter Maternus recognized as a discus; the Roman had previously seen one like it on the small statue of an athlete one of his old commanding officers kept, though Maternus had never before looked upon a real d
iscus. Another cluster of boys was playing with a long, pointed instrument Maternus at once knew was a javelin, a lighter version of the pilum. When one of them hoisted the javelin over his head and made a feeble toss of perhaps thirty feet, Maternus could not help but laugh at the boy’s inadequacy. For five full years, before he ever was in combat, he had drilled with the weighted javelin every day as part of his military training. Thousands upon thousands of times he had tossed the pilum at a target fifty paces away, until hitting the mark had become as automatic as breathing. The motion was something his right arm could never forget. He went through the movements even while he watched. Maternus could likewise not forget that his instructors had taught him weapons were not to be played with, and he instantly resented how one large boy snatched up the fallen instrument and began harassing his smaller mates by jabbing at them with the point of the spear, as if he were going to impale them. When the bully poked the weapon at Abdul, Maternus stepped from underneath the stands and walked swiftly toward the infield. He would later reflect that he was acting before he had considered the many good reasons why he should have remained hidden.
“You there!” he called to the large boy with the javelin. “That is not acceptable behavior! You could injure him!”
As the angel had told him on the first day in Aurora, Maternus’s appearance and the dynamic manner in which he moved were frightening to modern Americans, whether the Roman wished them to be or not. The boy with the javelin and his mates were consequently terrified when they saw the determined man in gray work clothes striding toward them.
“It’s Frankenstein the janitor!” one of them whispered the nickname the boys had attached to the stranger months earlier while they watched him tidy up the school hallways. The largest among them, a boy named Cody (a designation he shared with seventeen other boys and two girls at Susan B. Anthony Middle School), was holding the javelin and resolved not to appear a coward in front of his friends. As Maternus came closer, Cody swung about, directing the point of his weapon at the Roman.
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