by Miranda July
There was his car. But it came early; it was parked in front of a house at the other end of the block from his own. Maybe everybody else knows what this means. My first thought was Alzheimer’s disease, and I worried for myself and my career in the hands of this man who couldn’t remember where his own house was. It had been a year since I’d graduated, obviously long enough for his life to go to pieces. Madeleine must have to do everything for him. Oh, Madeleine. And he was sitting in the car. I had heard of this, Alzheimer’s patients who return to their pre–combustion-engine minds and cannot remember how to open the door. As I walked toward him, I could feel my new career take hold. I was the nurse of Madeleine L’Engle’s husband. With my help, she would have enough time to write the sequel. I was everything a good daughter should be, except I was paid. It was wonderful to be needed; I was headed toward the car.
At first I thought he had a cat in his lap, and then I saw it was Theresa Lodeski. We were both in Early Chinese Philosophical Texts junior year. She hadn’t graduated, but now I could see that, in a way, she had. Theresa Lodeski was very, very pretty, but she had an identical twin sister, Pauline, who was somehow infinitely prettier than her. If you lined up their faces and tried to locate the difference, feature by feature, you couldn’t find it. But everybody knew. The only reason to look at Theresa was to check to see if she was Pauline. When she wasn’t, you looked away; when she was, you looked a little longer. This was definitely Theresa; she had come into her own.
I should have left the second I saw he didn’t have Alzheimer’s. But I had a tingling in my arms. I was an angel looking down into the world, into one car on the world, into two members of mankind, into their souls, and into the place behind their souls: the void. She looked up, our eyes clicked, she remembered me from Early Chinese Philosophical Texts. Madeleine L’Engle’s husband opened his mouth. I could tell he was about to use one of the five question words: who, what, why, where, or when.
What?
That woman.
What woman?
She’s gone now.
Did she see us?
Yeah. She was in Early Chinese Philosophical Texts.
What?
We were in a class together.
Are you fucking with me? You knew her?
I should probably go.
Fuck! This is fucked! Did she see me?
No. I’m going now.
Is she still out there?
No, she’s gone.
How does anyone ever let go of anything? My book was a long glove clasping the dark shape I had loved. Inside the glove was one very pale young hand that had never learned to grip skin. It was so raw it looked wet. I fell into the eyes of every person I passed on the street. Food seemed impossibly strange. Children thought I was a child and tried to play with me, but I could neither play nor work, I could only wonder why. Why do people live at all. I read every single ad in the classifieds section each week. Real Estate, Employment, Counseling, Home Services, Getaways, Musicians Market, Dating, Women and Men Seeking Each Other and Themselves, Chance Meetings, and Automotive. I had narrowed it down to either Power trio seeks excellent 2nd guitar for heavy rock or Angela Mitchell LCSW, therapy supporting the integration of body, mind, spirit, and world. I settled on Angela Mitchell because the power trio wanted an experienced gigger, and I wasn’t sure what that was. But as I rose in the elevator toward Angela’s office, I whispered the words “experienced gigger” to myself, and they calmed me. I hoped Angela Mitchell meant her ad literally. I imagined a couples counseling/séance for me and the dark shape.
But when I was sitting in her big soft chair, staring at an abstract print of orange circles inside of oranger circles, I found that I was mute. When she finally asked why I had come, I said I had broken up with my boyfriend over a year ago and still regretted it. She bludgeoned me with a look of such limitless compassion that I immediately began to cry. I wondered briefly if she might adopt me or hire me as her assistant or become my lesbian lover. I blew my nose, and she asked if I had ever seen the musical South Pacific.
I think I saw it on TV once.
Do you remember the scene where the women are washing their hair?
No.
They sang a little song, do you remember what it was?
No.
“I’m Going to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.”
Oh.
Do you understand what I am saying?
I think so.
Is there anything else you want to talk about?
Well, I’ve been thinking maybe I should get a job. Do you think I should?
Definitely.
The special-needs assistant helps the special-needs teacher who teaches the children with special needs. Buckman was in transition when they hired me. Originally, it had been a school for kids with all different disabilities, but now the kids with physical challenges, the kind you can see, were sent to Logan Education Center. Logan had amazing play structures for students in wheelchairs, and “soft rooms” where those same students were taken out of their wheelchairs and encouraged to do free body movement. They were reminded that movement is about more than just getting from A to B, it is nuance and emotion, and they were the inventors of New Gesture. Once a month they were visited by a group of researchers from Microsoft. The researchers would take off their shoes and lie on the floor and just let it all happen around them. Apparently, this is how the computer touch pad was invented. Every week we heard stories about Logan, and it made me and my students feel as though we were not on the cutting edge. We were slow readers, and speed-readers with no comprehension, we were too nervous to learn, too happy to learn, too angry to learn; learning seemed beside the point.
The older students were allowed to keep their orange bottles of Ritalin and Adderall in their desks, and legally, they could raise their hands and ask to be excused for almost anything. The side effects of Ritalin are headaches, anxiety, sleep disorder, irritability, depression, gastrointestinal upset, and the jitters. I was assigned to the ones who needed extra help with their reading skills. I knew where I was headed: to the bottom of each page and the top of the next. I felt like I could do this forever, because nothing mattered more than anything else. I was patience defined, patience misspelled, patience sounded out slowly, letter by letter, with the t pronounced “shh.”
In the spring a special-education school called Obley shut down because of asbestos, and Buckman had to absorb all the Obley students and teachers. We had extra room because of the students who had left for Logan, but it was still a nightmare. The kids adapted easily, but the teachers resented one another like in-laws. We were all sure our way was the right way, and there were endless petitions hanging on clipboards in the staff kitchen, mobilizations against lining up before the bell, or for cursive. I was for cursive. I wrote my name on the pro-cursive clipboard. I left the kitchen and walked back to my room. I tidied the teacher’s desk and wrote PUEBLO on the chalkboard. I held my breath as I drew the o. I drew it slowly, oh so slowly. There was a knock at the classroom door. The o was done. I put down my chalk and walked to the door. Oh, the pounding heart. Oh, the held breath. Oh, how did I know. I opened the door. He had sandy brown hair and was taller than me. His face was an animal face, a cat-giraffe face that said everything in the absence of language. His clothes were careless and perfect, just areas that loosely mapped his nakedness. He said he was sorry he was late, and I said, Well, you’re here now, and I hugged him and his darkness swelled around me for an instant and whispered, Hello, sweetness into my blood. He pulled away, the teenager pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands. He gave me a note.
Dear Teacher,
Please excuse Steven Krause for his absence. He contracted bronchitis during his last week at Obley and was not well enough to join Buckman with the other students in April. He is well now and will make up any missed work.
Thank you,
Marilyn Krause
He was not swift of mind, why should he be. He was a blur. He was a
teenager needing me, as I had been a teenager needing him. And so I helped him. I sat beside his desk, and together we pushed through paragraphs, painstakingly sounding out the words, knitting them into human sentences that said very little. Suddenly, it seemed that language was nothing at all. Saying, You were my phantom lover would clarify nothing. I had already tried this, of course, right away. I brought in my book, the one that did not lead to a career in writing, and I sat nervously at his side as he sounded out the entire prologue, all the disclaimers and claimers and dedications to him, my dark shape. My gorgeous, pubescent, and mildly autistic onetime lover, lover-to-be.
I’m going to ask you a few questions to test your comprehension, okay?
Okay.
Is the book a true story?
Yes. No, wait—no! No.
It is a true story.
Oh, that’s what I thought, but then I thought it might be a trick question.
No, these are all real questions.
Okay.
So when the author says, “When I was fifteen, a dark shape came into my room at night,” who is she talking about? Who is the dark shape?
Who?
Yeah. Is it her father? Is it you? Who is it?
Ummmmmumumum. I don’t think we know yet at this part of the book.
You’re right, we don’t.
That was kind of a trick question.
I’m sorry.
And so there was a kind of divide. I knew him, and somewhere deep inside, he knew me, too, and it was up to me, as the special-needs assistant, to remind him. I saw myself as a kind of Anne Sullivan figure. There would be a breakthrough moment, like when Anne pumped the water on Helen Keller’s face and Helen spelled the word “water” on Anne’s hand, first slowly and then faster and faster, laughing and crying. Anne Sullivan wrote of this moment: Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. Only it wasn’t the mystery of language we needed revealed, it was mystery itself, before language, still draped in the mists. I saw the darkness swirling inside him. I saw that his feet did not touch the ground when he played basketball at recess. In moments, he was flying. Not like a bird but subtly, like a person.
Of course, there was only so much I could do as the special-needs assistant. One thing I could do was pray. I prayed while I looked into his eyes, and my prayer was Hello, hello, hello. Sometimes I heard my shape reply, and I had to press my knuckles against my thighs to keep them near me and away from the boy. The boy, who himself was so compelling in the way boys can be. How he pushed his hair off his sweaty forehead, the mineral smell of him, his hand holding a pencil, holding a pencil, holding a pencil, his hand! Our old affair was so easy, it was the dream that lovers have of consuming each other entirely. Now there was this extra thing, the boy, and the feeling I had carving into my gut, the feeling of wanting to fuck him, as he had fucked me when I was fifteen—into other galaxies.
I began to think this was as close as I could get to him, the shape. So after a while, I did not try very hard to help him read. I decided that reading was the wrong direction for our relationship. Not everyone has to be literate, there are some great reasons for resisting language, and one of them is love. The boy’s disability was the shape’s way of saying, I love you, I am here, it is me. I tried to be satisfied with this, and in the meantime, the boy himself began to love me. This was terribly, horribly, wonderfully sweet. It was, I supposed, the thing I had missed out on in high school. He would look at me and look away and look back again and look away and break the tip of his pencil and say fuck and blush and look at my leg and then look at the floor. A long hard look at the linoleum floor, in which he no doubt saw other things, the tits and spread ass of his young teacher and what he would do to them. Have I ever adored anything as much as I adored the sight of him glancing down at his own boner to see if it was hidden by the desk. It was.
There is only one way this ever happens. The student is walking home from school, and the teacher drives by and asks if he wants a ride. The boy looks at his teacher. The sun is shining into his eyes and he squints, and there is a pause wherein the shining of the sun and the squinting of the boy are the only two movements on earth. Even the birds stop. The teacher is momentarily paralyzed by the squinting and shining, but it is not enough to save the boy. She leans across the car and unlocks the passenger door, and with this movement the boy’s youngness ends and he becomes old.
Should I take you home?
Whatever’s fine.
Do you have to be home at a certain time?
No.
Is there somewhere you’d like to go?
Well, we could park.
For the first six months I just walked around in a constant state of amazement. I looked at other couples and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren’t even holding hands. When Steve and I held hands, I had to keep looking down to marvel at it. There was my hand, the same hand I’ve always had—oh, but look! What is it holding? It’s holding Steve’s hand! Who is Steve? My three-dimensional boyfriend. Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy. I supposed I would go on being happy forever. I knew I would not mess things up by growing bored. I had done that once before.
There were a few complications. There was the fact that he didn’t know we had dated previously. As it turned out, this didn’t matter. Loving is all in the blood anyway. He called the feeling between us “weird,” and I had nothing to add. I kissed the backs of his legs and they sang. He reached around and pulled me down onto his back and I lay there, like on the warm sand of a beach. Just that. That is all there is. That is the whole point of everything.
There was also the issue of our age difference. When you are dating someone much younger, you start to notice other couples with the same issue. You meet people who are dating people fifteen or even twenty years older or younger. You get to talking.
I think it’s a turn-on.
Oh, me, too. I would never date a guy my age, they have to be at least ten years younger.
Steve is ten years younger than me. I think he likes it that I’m older.
Of course he does. All guys fantasize about older women. It’s a mom thing.
Yeah, but thank God I’m younger than his mom.
I’m not. Gabe’s mom is forty.
Oh. How old are you?
Forty-three. How old are you?
Twenty-four.
We learned to be discreet. It helped that nobody really cares about anyone but themselves anyway. They check to make sure you aren’t killing anyone, anyone they know, and then they go back to what they were saying about how they think they might be having a real breakthrough in their relationship with themselves. People are always breaking through, like in the Doors song “Break on Through (To the Other Side).” But I really had. I had broken through twice now, and my feeling about the universe was that it was porous and radical and you could turn it on, you could even fuck around with the universe. And this whole time I was still the special-needs assistant. I was helping kids right and left. I was tapping in to their essential energies and leading them, if not into literacy, at least toward eventual pleasure. I wanted all of them to know love one day. I wanted the girls to pull their shoulders back and walk fearlessly into darkness. I wanted the boys to settle down a little. There was a group of boys in the back who never paid attention. They passed notes that weren’t even folded into the smallest possible square. Notes floated across the back row like large white sailboats. It was completely infuriating and made me want to humiliate them until they would never dare pass such a big note again. Why else was folding invented? I lurched toward the back of the room and grabbed the first sail I saw. It wasn’t even folded in half once. It said: Caitlin gives Steve K. head.
Maybe it should have been a relief that it wasn’t my name. It wasn’t a relief. My breathing reversed itself. I was complet
ely unprepared for this moment. My thighs disintegrated into waves of contractions, and suddenly I understood why people liked guns. Not to shoot, God no, I’m a total pacifist, but just to have. To know that it is there. If there had been a gun in my drawer, I could have thought of it now and it would have calmed me. I would have taken a deep breath and scolded the boys. But because there was no gun, I walked over to Caitlin’s desk. I looked into the circle of her face and asked her to please step into the hallway. It was difficult to shape air so precisely, into those exact sounds. She rose and walked ahead of me across the room. When I passed by Steve, he looked down like a fifteen-year-old boy who is in trouble with his teacher. Caitlin and I stood in the hall. It smelled like wax and old bananas.
Do you give Steve head?
Steve who?
Steve K.
Oh. I thought you meant the other Steve.
Steve Gonzales?
Yeah.
No. Are you his girlfriend?
Steve Gonzales’s? No.
I meant Steve K.
Oh. Yeah. We go out.
Her hair was in two French braids, and she was wearing a sweatshirt that said tommy girl. She wasn’t even afraid of me. She asked where I got my earrings and I said my aunt gave them to me for Christmas and she said she hadn’t gotten shit for Christmas and then we walked back to the classroom. I didn’t look at Steve. I didn’t know if he had made the first move or if the dark shape had a thing for teenage girls, or even what I was really talking about when I said the words “dark shape” to myself. I pressed my hot face against the chalkboard for a few seconds and then I wrote the word peace. That is the only good thing about being the special-needs assistant. You can write “peace” on the chalkboard any time you want. Who could complain? It was peace. It can only ever help to write it.
This morning I woke up to the sound of the neighbor trimming his tree. I told myself he would stop trimming only if I got out of bed. The tree got smaller and smaller. Soon it was just a stump, and he had to go underground and start trimming the roots, and still I couldn’t get up. The roots were gone and he was sawing through the earth and I told myself that when he came out in China, I would get up. It took him all day. I wept and curled and uncurled myself in a way I couldn’t control. I was actually writhing in heartache, as if I were a single muscle whose purpose was to mourn. But by the time my neighbor hit the molten core, I was motionless. I had exhausted myself into a blank stare, a full-body examination of the ceiling. I could feel him pushing up underneath the streets of Shanghai, and to my horror, I felt hunger. The body’s expression of hope. As he burst through the ground and into the Chinese air, I sat up. He plowed into the sky, upward through tree leaves and then the clouds. My neighbor sawed into outer space. He cut through the Milky Way, right through the stars and stardust. He went around the universe in a giant circle. And then he landed, with a quiet thud, back in his yard. I lifted the curtain and saw him putting out the sprinkler. It was dusk. If he saw me, I would live. Look up, look up, look up. He raised his eyes, as if it were his own idea, and I waved.