by Peter Selgin
The crying stopped.
You turned and walked away, home through the snowflakes without stopping, past the gas station and the railroad tracks and the library and Mullaney’s store, determined to forget this experience, to pretend that it never happened. But you wouldn’t forget.
IF I MIX A LITTLE FICTION WITH MY NONFICTION, A LITTLE lie with the truth, it’s by way of making the truth even truer. Think of Ellison’s invisible man adding his single drop of black to an enormous vat of white paint to make it “whiter.” The truth works in this paradoxical way, I think, since to give it context, to put it into perspective, the truth’s “truthfulness” demands a touch of dishonesty, just as the most intense pleasure demands a measure of pain or as the brightness of a rose in landscape painting depends upon the relative dullness of the surrounding plants and flowers. You can’t have the truth without lies. Or you can – it may be there – but you won’t see it, it won’t stand out. I think what I’m saying here is that lies brighten up the truth. The key is to blend them – those drops of black paint – thoroughly so they’re invisible to the naked eye.
* * *
THE ELOQUENCE AND POETRY OF PAPA’S PATENT APPLICATIONS (“The secondary flux which links with the line winding is seen to consist also of two components. Of these one has the line frequency ωL, the other the frequency ωL– 4ωR.”), how they manage, or try very hard, to achieve a scrupulous objectivity, something that (as every writer knows) is hard if not impossible (see Robbe-Grillet).
Compare and contrast your father’s patents with the memoir you’re writing and which the reader is reading: how different they are as “performances.” Though not all the inventions they describe were successful, however successful they were, as pieces of writing, as works of postmodern art or irony (something like the “postmodern” motor you built in the Building’s back room), they’re impressive and even sublime in their eloquence. And this memoir? What it can’t claim in objectivity or accuracy or even integrity – does is make up for in “art”?
This reconstructive nature of memory can make it unreliable. The information from which an autobiographical memory is constructed may be more or less accurately stored, but it needs to be integrated according to the demands of the present moment, and errors and distortions can creep in at every stage. The end result may be vivid and convincing, but vividness does not guarantee accuracy. A coherent story about the past can sometimes only be won at the expense of the memory’s correspondence to reality. Our memories of childhood, in particular, can be highly unreliable. Thinking differently about memory requires us to think differently about some of the “truths” that are closest to the core of our selves.
CHARLES FERNYHOUGH, Pieces of Light
I refuse to regard remembrance the way the rest of you usually do, as a very clumsy form of self-expression. When something great, serious, beautiful happens to us, there’s no need to pursue it afterward in memory; rather this event must from the outset merge with our innermost being, meld with it, shape within us a new and better “I,” and live inside us eternally, co-creating ourselves into the future.
GOETHE, in a letter to pianist Maria Szymanowska
When I use my memory, I ask it to produce whatever it is that I wish to remember.
AUGUSTINE, Confessions
United States Patent No. 2,541,107: LOW-CLEARANCE ANTENNA. “This device relates to high frequency antennae and particularly to an antenna for radiating a vertically polarized wave substantially uniformly in all horizontal directions.” Application date April 12, 1947.
XI.
Everything You’ve Learned is Wrong
Bethel, Connecticut, 1970 – 1971
YOU ADMIRED THE TEACHER’S INTENSITY, HIS IDEALISM, the relentlessness of his standards, his intolerance of small, narrow minds, of pettiness and mediocrity.
Mediocre: it was a word the teacher used constantly. Most adults – the same mass of men that Henry David Thoreau characterized as “leading lives of quiet desperation” – were mediocre. They accumulated and spent money. They ate and slept. They fornicated and reproduced and carried out other biological, social, and economic imperatives while watching too much television. They lived their lives less in accordance with their principles or in response to their own unique perceptions than in timorous obeisance to conformity and authority. They were ignorant, insular, shallow, backwards, and provincial. They indulged in petty discourses and rivalries. They lacked imagination and creativity. They were to be pitied and feared: mostly feared, since they were dangerous.
What people don’t understand they tend to hold suspect and resent, the teacher said to you one day as you sat with him in his cottage. And the sad truth is most people understand very little. Why do you think there’s so much persecution in the world? Jews persecuted by Christians, Catholics by Protestants, Buddhists by Hindus, Muslims by Buddhists, blacks, Latinos, and Asians by whites.… It comes down to the same thing: people fearing those not of their ilk, who don’t think or act as they do. What they really fear is love, is their own innate sense of compassion. They fear it as a weakness.
You see it right here in this town, the teacher went on to say, all around you, on a much smaller scale. You’ve experienced it yourself, I’m sure.
You nodded, recalling Bobby Mullin punching you at the bus stop.
IT WAS MAINLY through the teacher that you first came to realize the frailties and fallibility of adults. The more he frowned on them in your presence, the more he called them “mediocre,” the more you took for granted that you yourself would never be “mediocre,” that you would be – in fact you already were – above average: special.
This sense of superiority didn’t come without a price. To earn it you worked hard. The teacher’s standards were high not just for himself but for you and all his students, especially those in his fifth-period class. His homework assignments were challenging and copious. You had to read a book every two weeks, and write one paper, and sometimes more than one. On top of that, each of you had to produce one long paper for the term, at least fifty pages long and typed. All this and your creative projects, stories, poems, songs, short plays, and films. To these projects you were encouraged – required – to bring not only the ability to read and write, but as many skills as possible: drawing, painting, music, sculpture – even, when appropriate, science, mechanics, and magic.
Halfway through the spring semester, at the teacher’s urging and under his supervision, you and your fifth-period classmates launched The Hatted Tattler, Bethel Middle School’s first ever underground newspaper. It featured two op-ed pieces, one protesting the Vietnam War, the other against the school’s long-standing injunction against wearing hats in the hallways.
No sooner was the underground newspaper distributed early one Wednesday morning than the administration snatched it – its pages still warm and reeking from the spirit duplicator – out of the grips of curious students, and marched its distributors to the office of the principal, who doled out suspensions to each of them.
It wasn’t long before, red-faced and indignant, the teacher appeared. With the principal, the vice principal, and himself behind it, the principal’s door closed. It remained closed for the next half hour or so, after which the teacher emerged. Without a word, he guided his flock back to their respective classrooms.
That afternoon in the G.P. (general purpose) room, the student body gathered for a special assembly. With you and your fifth-period classmates seated in the very first row, on behalf of the entire school administration, the principle apologized for having “inadvertently interfered” with your First-Amendment right to free speech.
SUCH VICTORIES WEREN’T without controversy. They put many noses out of joint.
Meanwhile, rumors about the teacher spread and flourished. He was a communist, an agitator, a radical spreading lies, propaganda, and dissent, corrupting the town’s impressionable youth. His methods were not merely experimental, they were subversive. Desks in a circle! Underground newspaper
s! When not having orgies with them, he did heroin, LSD, and other drugs with his pupils.
You had to laugh, you and your brother and others in the teacher’s special class, the rumors were so outrageous and unfounded. Even the teacher found them laughable, to a point, until the rumors singled you out for slander.
Have you heard what they’re saying about us? the teacher asked you one afternoon in his cottage a few days after your fourteenth birthday.
No, you answered (though of course you knew perfectly well).
When the teacher repeated the worst of the rumors, you smiled.
You find it amusing?
Sure. Don’t you?
No, said the teacher. And neither should you. I don’t see anything amusing about it.
Let them say whatever they want. Why should we care?
I wish it were that simple, the teacher said, frowning.
Why should we care what a bunch of stupid, gossiping, narrow-minded mediocre assholes think? (“Narrow-minded” was another term the teacher had taught you, along with “mediocre,” “tunnel-visioned,” and “self-satisfied.”) Hell, we shouldn’t even be talking about them. We shouldn’t dignify them with this conversation.
I’m afraid we need to talk about it, Peter.
Since when? Since when do other people’s opinions matter that much to you?
Since they may end up hurting you.
Fuck them. They can go to hell!
You were sitting at the teacher’s Japanese-style table. A fire belched and roared in the stove. The teapot sat cold in its cozy on the table alongside your two drained cups. On the chessboard the chess pieces were arrayed in their starting positions.
You don’t have to worry about me, you said, moving a white pawn. I can look after myself.
You sound awfully sure about that, said the teacher, moving his own pawn.
It was a question. You moved a second pawn. The teacher did likewise.
I know who I am, you said. I don’t need anyone else to tell me.
You advanced one of your two bishops.
The teacher waited a moment before speaking. Then, having moved a knight, quietly, he said:
How can you know who you are? You’re still a work in process.
You said nothing. You moved another pawn.
You’ve only just turned fourteen. In ways, you’re mature. In other ways, you’re still growing up. Don’t be offended, Peter. Hear me out. The point is you’re still very young; you have a lot to learn. You’ve barely encountered reality. You haven’t suffered yet, not yet, not in the ways that adults suffer. You’ve experienced some joys and pleasures, but you still haven’t known the half of either.
You said nothing. You moved a rook.
I’m not criticizing you, Peter, just stating a few facts. When you leave here later on today you’ll go home to your parents, who feed you and keep a roof over your head and see to it that your lower needs – the ones at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid – are met. Your folks also fulfill your higher needs by caring about you in other ways.
The teacher conveyed his queen to the other end of the board, where it challenged your bishop. You slid a pawn into its path.
You don’t know what it’s like to be completely on your own, the teacher said, with all the forces of the world bearing down on you, forces that can twist and corrupt you in all kinds of ways. They’ll go after your humanity, Peter. They’ll attack it the way white blood cells attack bacteria. You’ll have to fight them. I hope you’ll turn out to be one of the lucky ones, that you’ll end up being as strong in the future as you think you are now. I really hope so.
As you moved your own knight you felt tears tugging at the corners of your eyes.
But it’ll be a while before we know that, won’t it? Until then, I have to take some responsibility for your future, Peter. Not just as your teacher, but as a friend. Which is why – he paused – I think we should start seeing a little less of each other.
You felt a tightness in the far back of your throat as more tears tugged at your eyes. You did your best to hide these things, along with the other signs of distress, but it was like hiding a highway billboard.
Don’t take it so hard, the teacher said, reaching his hand over to grasp yours. We’ll get through this. You’ll see. It won’t be so bad. You’ll come here with George and your other friends. Come with them as often as you like. And we can still get together otherwise, just not quite so often. Okay?
You nodded. But you knew it wouldn’t be the same. For a while you’d existed in a special realm all your own, enjoying its privileges, partaking in its rites and rituals, relishing and sheltering the mysteries and sacred orders of its reign. Now that kingdom – one small enough to fit into a former carriage house, its command post an unvarnished slab of tea-soaked wood – had run its course, and with it your role as young prince and counselor to the emperor.
The teacher changed the subject then, announcing that he had a birthday present for you: a travelling chess set, one much smaller but nearly as beautiful as his, with squares of rosewood and holly and closing lid flaps.
* * *
ENGLISH NIGHT TOOK PLACE THE THIRD WEEK OF FEBRUARY. It was held in the G. P. Room and open to the general public. There would be readings of poems, short stories, and short plays, as well as screenings of short films and displays of journals, term papers, and other creations of the students in the teacher’s fifth-period English class.
The crowning event would be the presentation of the English Award for best term paper. Yours was titled “Pollution and its Effects on the Environment.” You’d spent a hundred hours on it, typing away on a teal Olivetti that your parents had given you for Christmas. Days before the award ceremony, the teacher took you aside and warned you that, though your term paper was indeed the best, you wouldn’t win the award.
It wouldn’t look right, the teacher told you. It’s not exactly a secret that you and I are friends. People will assume I’m playing favorites. You do understand, right?
And though you had understood, when the time came for the award announcement, in the gloom backstage, in that realm of curtains, ropes, battens, sandbags, and dimmer boards (all stained blood-red by workers’ lights), it tortured you to know that Vivian – whose term paper was about Sylvia Plath (“Sylvia: The Life and Death of a Poet”) – would win, despite the fact that not only was her paper shorter than yours by eleven pages, its subject had been dimwitted enough to stick her head in an oven.
As the teacher reeled off the names of the finalists you stood there, choking back your tears, hearing the words “winner” and “Vivian” paired over and over again, so often and loudly that when it came you weren’t sure you heard the real announcement correctly. Then you heard it again, unmistakably clear this time.
You’d won the English Night Award for Best Term Paper.
As he handed you the citation, the teacher whispered:
Fuck ’em.
A WEEK LATER, that’s when you learned that the teacher was leaving.
It was a Saturday after another blizzard. Everything was covered in snow. You and the teacher walked to a nearby playground, one with three baseball diamonds. At the remotest and least used of them, you wiped the snow off the bleachers and sat. High over your heads, on top of the rusty backstop, a pair of crows cawed extravagantly, reminding you of the fight your parents had the evening before, one that ended with your mother scrawling with a black china marker on the living room walls that she had just painted an ugly purple a week earlier. Having agreed to visit him that morning, you left the house early, trudging through drifts of unplowed snow, arriving at the teacher’s carriage house with a runny nose and frozen toes. As more snow fell you knocked on the blue door and waited. You knocked again.
The teacher said he’d be there. He promised.
You knocked again. You stomped the soles of the black cowboy boots that you’d impulsively (and foolishly) worn and exhaled into your cupped hands to warm them (in your eagerness you’d
forgotten your gloves, too).
On the ground near the doormat on which you’d been stomping you noticed a bent rusty nail. You picked it up. Before you knew it, you were carving the words THANKS FOR KEEPING A PROMISE into the door’s blue paint. You carved each letter slowly, carefully. Then you sat down on the icy doormat with your back to the door.
A few minutes later the teacher arrived holding a grocery bag under each arm.
Nice. I’m sure my landlord will be pleased.
I’ll pay for it, you said.
The teacher shook his head.
I mean it, you said.
I’m sure you do. In fact I intend to hold you to it.
So how come you’re shaking your head?
The teacher smiled. Dear Peter. So easily hurt, so easily hurting others.
THE TEACHER INVITED you in. By then you were freezing. Come, he said, sit by the stove. Not too close, he said. It’s not healthy to heat up too suddenly from the cold. I assume you’d like some tea?
After you’d had a cup of tea and warmed up, that’s when the teacher suggested a walk to the playground. He had something important he needed to tell you. It was like going to the doctor for a vaccination shot. You know the needle’s coming, but when it comes somehow it’s still a shock. It still hurts.
Meanwhile the two crows kept cawing – so loudly you couldn’t hear yourself think, you couldn’t hear a thing. More snow fell. The Catholic Church steeple rose high above the naked treetops. The sky was an inverted gray ocean.
They’ve put us in a box, the teacher was saying. That’s what people do with things they can’t understand. They find boxes to put them in and stick labels on them. Whether the labels fit or not doesn’t matter.
Where do you plan to go?
I’m not sure. I’ll probably travel for a while. I’ve never been to the Far East. Japan. India. I’ll start there, maybe.