by Steve Toltz
On day after class he asked me to wait behind. All the other students winked at me to signify they thought I was in trouble and it pleased them to know it. But it was only that Mr. White wanted the recipe of the chocolate cake Brett and I had made that day. I told him I didn’t know it. Mr. White nodded for an unnaturally long time.
“Do you believe in the Bible, Jasper?” he asked suddenly.
“In the same way I believe in ‘Hound of the Baskervilles.’ ”
“I think I understand.”
“The problem is most of the time when God’s supposed to be the hero, he comes across as the villain. I mean, look at what he did to Lot ’s wife. What kind of divine being turns a man’s wife into a pillar of salt? What was her crime? Turning her head? You have to admit this is a God hopelessly locked in time, not free of it; otherwise he might have confounded the ancients by turning her into a flat-screen television or at least a pillar of Velcro.”
From the look on Mr. White’s face, I could tell he wasn’t following the lucid argument I was, not proudly, plagiarizing from one of Dad’s midnight sermons. Anyway, what was I talking about? Why was I haranguing a man who looked like the rotting stump of an old tree? It seemed I was able to do anything for a suffering man except be nice to his Deity.
What I should’ve said was this: “Why don’t you quit? Get out of here! Change schools! Change jobs! Change lives!”
But I didn’t.
I let him go on thrashing about in his cage.
“Well, anyway, I guess you’d better get to your next class,” he said, and the way he fiddled with his tie made me want to burst into tears. That’s the problem with people who suffer right in your face. They can’t so much as scratch their noses without its being poignant.
***
Not long after that, Dad came to pick me up from school. That wasn’t as rare as you might think. After exhausting his daily activities- waking up (an hour), breakfast (half hour), reading (four hours), walking (two hours), staring (two hours), blinking (forty-five minutes), he’d come and get me as “something to do.”
When I arrived at the school gate, Dad was already waiting for me in his unwashed clothes, his face carelessly shaven.
“Who is that grim man gaping at me?” he said as I arrived.
“Who?”
I turned to see Mr. White peering at us from the classroom window in a trance, as if we were doing something strange and fascinating, and I suddenly felt like a monkey to Dad’s organ grinder.
“That’s my English teacher. His son died.”
“He looks familiar.”
“He should. You harassed him for about forty minutes one day.”
“Really? What do you mean?”
“You came into the class and abused him for no reason. You don’t remember?”
“Honestly- no. But who keeps track of things like that? You say he lost his son, eh?”
“Brett. He was my friend.”
Dad looked at me with surprise. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“He wasn’t my best friend or anything,” I said. “We were just, you know, hated by the same people.”
“How did he die? Drug overdose?”
“Suicide.”
“Suicide by drug overdose?”
“He jumped off a cliff.”
Dad turned back to Mr. White’s sad face peering out the window. “I think I might go and talk to him.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not? The man’s grieving.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly,” Dad agreed, though to a totally different idea from mine, because the next thing I knew he was striding over to the classroom window. The two of them stared at each other through the glass. I could see it all. I could see Dad tap on the window. I could see Mr. White open the window. I could see them talking amiably at first, then seriously, then Mr. White was crying and Dad had his arm through the window, resting it on Mr. White’s shoulder, even though the angle was awkward and unnatural. Then Dad came back over to me, his lips pursed as if whistling, though he wasn’t. He was just pursing his lips.
After this shadowy conference, Mr. White went crazy in class. Of course, after his outburst, no matter how much they made short gasping sounds and said things like “I don’t believe it!,” no one on the staff was really surprised, and they couldn’t even see what I could see all over Mr. White’s sudden eruption: Dad’s influence.
It happened like this: One morning Mr. White came to class with the face of a thumb that had soaked too long in the bath. Then he commenced the lesson by staring wide-eyed and penetratingly, singling out students with his eyes without letting up, then moving on to the next student. No one could match him. You couldn’t sustain eye contact with a pair of peepers like his. All you could do was lower your eyes and wait for him to pass over you, like the Angel of Death. He was leaning against his desk, this hollow man with the X-ray eyes. It was morning and I remember the windows were open; a layer of milky mist wafted in, and the air was so thick with the sea you could almost taste the plankton. There was an oppressive silence, just the sound of the ocean rising up and falling on the shore. The students watched him in breathless suspense.
“It’s funny that you need training to be a doctor or a lawyer but not to be a parent. Any dolt can do it, without so much as a one-day seminar. You, Simon, you could be a father tomorrow if you wanted.”
Everyone laughed, and rightly so. Simon was not someone you could imagine fucking anyone, ever.
“Why are you here? Not just in this class, but in the world? Do you think your parents wondered why they had you? Listen to what people say when they have new babies: ‘It’s the best thing I ever did in my life,’ ‘It’s magical, blahblahblah.’ They’ve done it for their own enchantment, to satiate their own emotional needs. Have you ever noticed that? That you’re a projection of other people’s desires? How does that make you feel?”
No one said anything. It was the right thing to say. Mr. White moved through the desks to the back of the classroom. We didn’t know whether to keep our eyes forward or to turn them toward him or to tear them out.
“What do your parents want of you?” he shouted from the back. We swiveled to face him. “They want you to study. Why? They’re ambitious for you. Why? They look at you as their personal fucking property, that’s why! You and their cars, you and their washing machines, you and their televisions. You belong to them. And not one of you is any more to them than the opportunity to fulfill their failed ambitions! Ha-ha-ha! Your parents don’t love you! Don’t let them get away with saying ‘I love you’! It’s disgusting! It’s a lie! It’s just a cheap justification for manipulating you! ‘I love you’ is another way of saying, ‘You owe me, you little bastard! You represent the meaning of my life because I couldn’t give it to myself, so don’t fuck it up for me!’ No, your parents don’t love you- they need you! And a hell of a lot more than you need them, I can tell you that!”
The students had never heard anything like it. Mr. White stood there breathing noisily, as if through a clogged tube.
“Christ, I’m getting out of here,” he said suddenly, and left the room.
Unsurprisingly, within hours the whole school had feasted on the scandal, only it came all distorted: some said he had attacked his students; other said he tried to whip a whole bunch of them with his belt. And more than a few whispered that unmentionable word that people hate (read, “love”) to mention these days: pedophile!
***
I wish that was the end of it. I wish I could end on that happy note. Happy? In comparison with what happened next, yes. What took place that same afternoon sits solidly in history as my first official regret, remaining to this day number one. Any good I’d done in my life up to that afternoon was about to be demolished, and any good I’ve done since has been an attempt to make up for what I did.
Here’s what I did: I followed the Towering Inferno all day. I watched her reading in the sun, as Brett described, pulling compulsively
at her stockings with her cobalt-blue fingernails. I followed her across the school grounds as she clutched the hand of a girl with a face like a spade. At lunch I stood behind her in the canteen while she ordered a meat pie, and when the woman wasn’t looking she grabbed a handful of squeezable tomato sauce packets and shoved them in her pocket, then sauntered off, having adorably stolen complimentary items.
In the afternoon I trailed Mr. Smart, the biology teacher, as he chased her through the musty halls. When he caught her, she held her head as if it were an heirloom.
“Why weren’t you in class?” he demanded.
“I have my period,” she replied defiantly, with a look that said, “Prove I don’t.” Good one! The broken man cast his eyes to the floor, wishing he were at home with that weird collection of moss he brought in one time.
After school we used to stand around at train stations for hours (try doing that into your twenties- the thrill is gone, believe me). The train guards were always telling us to go home, but there’s really no law against standing on the platform not catching trains. That afternoon I shadowed the Towering Inferno to the far end of the station. She was standing with her usual crowd and I was gaping from behind a pylon thinking my usual obsessive thoughts: wishing she would fall into some danger so I might rescue her, spitting on myself for fetishizing a girl I’d never met, longing to take a personal memento from her as a holy relic, indulging in a sexual fantasy in which we intersect at right angles, and generally planning a systematic exploration of her cathedral-like edifice.
She and her friends kept edging farther down the platform, so to keep my eyes on her I had to step out from my hiding place. One of her friends- Tony, a boy with a slight hunch I knew because he had once taken a pack of cigarettes from me in exchange for the observation that my eyes were set too close together- unzipped his fly and gyrated his crotch in the Towering Inferno’s general direction. She turned away in disgust and found herself trapped in my stare. It caught us both off guard. Then a strange thing happened: she stared back. Her eyes, unblinking and wild, dared me not to look away. The moment stretched its way into infinity, then snapped back to about a nanosecond and rebounded, so all in all it lasted about eight and a half seconds.
I turned away and moved to a public phone. I put some coins in the slot and dialed a number at random.
“Hello?”
“Hello.”
“Who’s this?”
“It’s me. Is that you?”
“Who is this? What do you want?”
“Never mind that,” I said. “How are you?”
“Who is this?”
“I told you. It’s me.”
I could still feel the Towering Inferno’s eyes on me. I knew what to do: I shook my head vehemently and laughed a loud, unnatural laugh before pausing to nod sagely, as though the person on the other end of the phone had made a funny yet offensive comment that on further reflection proved wise. I turned casually to face her, but her back was turned. I felt a tiny thorn prick my ego.
It was getting dark. Everyone wordlessly agreed that loitering on the station platform had gone stale- until tomorrow- and when the next train arrived, we all filed in.
At the other end of the packed carriage there was a commotion, and a small crowd formed a circle- bad news for someone. Circles of people always are. Honestly, sometimes I think human beings should be prohibited from forming groups. I’m no fascist, but I wouldn’t mind at all if we had to live out our lives in single file.
I heard happy cheers and joyous laughter. That meant someone was suffering. My heart felt sick for the poor sucker. Thankfully Charlie was home sick and Brett was dead, so whoever they were humiliating this time had nothing to do with me. Still, I pushed through the crowd to see who it was.
Mr. White.
The students had torn the hat off his head and were waving it in the air, asserting their power over him. Mr. White was trying to get the hat back. Ordinarily even the most rebellious young crackhead can’t physically assault a teacher- emotionally and psychologically, sure; physically, no- but Mr. White was a teacher made evil by gossip, and that made him fair game.
“Hey!” I shouted.
Everyone looked over at me. This was my first stand against the bullies, against the ruthlessness of the human pack animal, and I was determined not to disappoint myself. But then four things happened in quick succession.
The first was that I noticed the person holding the hat was the Towering Inferno.
Second, my shouting “Hey!” was interpreted not as a heroic “Hey” but a “Hey, throw me the hat.”
She threw it to me.
I caught it with my cheek. It rolled on the floor, toward the door. Mr. White trudged through the carriage after it.
The third thing that happened was that the Towering Inferno yelled out, “Get it, Jasper!”
She knew my name. Oh my God. She knew my name. I ran like a maniac for the hat. I grabbed it. Mr. White stopped midcarriage.
Then the fourth thing, the final painful event, was her delicate high-pitched voice commanding me again: “Throw it out!” I was under a spell. I half pushed open the train door, enough for my hand to hang outside the carriage. The brim of the hat danced a waltz with the wind. Mr. White’s face had frozen with a sort of forced nonchalance. I felt sick.
Sick. Sick. Sick. Self-hatred was at an all-time high. Why was I doing this? Don’t do it, Jasper. Don’t do it. Don’t.
I did it.
I let go of the hat. The wind picked it up and threw it out of sight. Mr. White ran toward me. I bolted for the door at the end of the carriage. Rain smacked me in the face. I opened the door of the next carriage, ran in, and closed it behind me. He tried to follow, but I blocked the door with my foot. He stood in the rain on the tiny rattling platform between the two carriages, trying to force it open. I tied the strap from my bag to the door handle, held it down with my other foot, and let physics do the work. In no time he was drenched to the bone. He swore through the glass. Finally he gave up and turned back. The others had blocked the other door. It rained harder. He turned back to me, banged on the glass door again. I knew if I let him in, he’d have me for lunch. He was stuck. It rained even harder, a stiff hard rain. Mr. White stopped screaming and just looked at me with old-dog eyes. I felt something in me sink, but there was nothing I could do. At the next stop we both watched the Towering Inferno step onto the platform. Through the dusty window, she gave me a smile that said, “I’ll never forget what you did for me, Jasper Dean, Destroyer of Hats.”
***
The following morning I walked through the long, airless hallways and silent stairwells into the quadrangle for a special assembly. The headmaster stepped up to the podium. “Yesterday afternoon, our English teacher, Mr. White, was terrorized by students from this school!” A murmur snaked through the crowd. The headmaster continued his diatribe. “I would like the students involved to please step forward.” Everyone looked around to see if anyone was owning up. I looked around too. “Right. We’ll just have to find you. And we will find you. You are all dismissed. For now.”
I walked away thinking that my time at this school was almost up, and it wasn’t twenty minutes later in the science lab that the bell rang and rang and rang, and I heard that old delighted cry of “Someone’s jumped! Someone’s jumped!” I ran out of the classroom while the bell kept on ringing. It was the suicide bell- I think we were the first school in the country to have one; now they’re all the rage. Like inquisitive sheep, all the students ran to the cliff edge to see, and I had not just a bad feeling but the worst one, that feeling of dread, because I knew who it was and that I had put him there myself.
I peered over the cliff edge and saw Mr. White’s slumped body thrashed by the waves on the rocks.
That afternoon it was as if I were looking at life through a rolled-up newspaper. I had drained the remaining dregs of innocence from my heart. I had put a man in the ground, or at least aided his descent, and I loathed myself into the
future and beyond. Well, why shouldn’t I? You shouldn’t forgive all your trespasses. You can’t always go too easy on yourself. In fact, in some circumstances, forgiving yourself is unforgivable.
I was sitting behind the gym with my head in my hands when a school prefect, a sort of benign Hitler youth, came up and told me the principal wanted to see me. Well, that’s that, I thought. I walked to the principal’s office and found that his pliable face had been shaped into a picture of weariness.
“Mr. Silver,” I said.
“I understand you were a friend of Brett’s.”
“That’s right.”
“I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind reading a psalm at Mr. White’s funeral.”
Me? The murderer reading a psalm at the funeral of his victim? As the principal went on telling me about my role in the funeral proceedings, I wondered if this weren’t some sort of clever punishment, because I felt transparent sitting there, maybe even more see-through than that- I felt like the site of an archaeological dig, my old clay pot thoughts revealing all about the civilization that had ruled there in its ignorant and doomed way.
I said that I would be honored to read a psalm at the funeral.
What else was I going to say?
***
That night I read it over. It had everything you’d expect in a psalm: heavy-handedness, hit-you-over-the-head metaphors, and Old World symbolism. I tore it out of the Bible thinking: I’m not lending my voice to this oppressive nonsense. Instead I chose a passage from one of Dad’s favorite books, one he’d horrified me with a couple of years earlier, one that had seared my brain. It was a passage by James Thomson from his book of poetry, The City of Dreadful Night.
The morning of the funeral, I was called again to the principal’s office. I went thinking he wanted to go over the running order of the event. I was surprised to see the Towering Inferno waiting outside his office, leaning against the wall. So we’d been fingered for the crime after all. It’s just as well, I thought.