Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “The guy’s fucked-up,” put in Colin Boudreau, an authority on such matters. “It’s obvious. He doesn’t know if he’s coming or going.”

  “Dude, this story sucks.”

  “The last one sucked too.”

  “I didn’t read the last one.”

  “What was the last one?”

  “Let’s settle down,” Oren said, “and just pretend for the sake of argument that there may be something interesting going on here. Sophie? What do you think? Is there anything Hawthorne can teach us here?”

  Sophie Fontana—whose parents had, Oren remembered too late, divorced the previous year, setting off a plunge in both grades and general deportment from which she had yet to right herself—gazed out the window at a pair of geriatric clouds, tattered and gray, lowering themselves onto the cold shoulder of the mountains. Sophie was a tall, semi-attractive girl with slumpy posture. He’d have liked to tell her to straighten her spine, that it would make all the difference, would show off her high intelligent forehead and her arresting blue eyes, but then he remembered his own posture was lousy much of the time when he was her age and he’d never appreciated being reminded of it, so why would she? He was about to give up and call on someone else when he heard Sophie murmuring quietly into her shirt.

  “Sorry?”

  “He’s bored,” she said. “He’s bored with his life.”

  “Wait, he’s bored with his wife?”

  “His life.”

  “Ah,” Oren said. “Very interesting.” Very interesting, as a synonym for not very interesting, was Oren’s reflexive response to pretty much any student contribution in class, however meager or unformed. But in this case he actually meant it. “Do you mean he left because he was bored, or he went back because he was bored, or what?”

  But Sophie had now fulfilled her quota of interesting remarks for the day. She lifted her burdened shoulders imperceptibly, then dropped them again. It was less a shrug than a rhetorical gesture in the direction of a shrug, and not much of one at that.

  “What does it say on page three?” Oren was now in rhetorical mode himself. “‘He was now in the meridian of his life’…meridian means ‘high point,’ right? He left his life at the high point.”

  “In Latin it means ‘middle point,’” Jenny informed him promptly. “My mom and I looked it up.”

  “Right. ‘Middle point.’” Was it a dismissible offense to strangle an eighth-grader? Or should he just go ahead and strangle himself? “The point is, the guy seems to be doing just fine, right? He’s perfectly comfortable and happy and well-adjusted to his society. So why the sudden change then? Hawthorne never tells us. What do you think?”

  Nobody appeared to think anything.

  “Okay, maybe Sophie’s right—he changes just to change. Maybe he’s more bored than he knows. Maybe it gets to be a drag, being comfortable and happy and well-adjusted all the time. So he decides to conduct an experiment. Or maybe he doesn’t decide, he just does it impulsively, not knowing why. But here’s my question,” Oren said. “Once Wakefield’s already left, for whatever reason, done this very weird, mysterious thing—why does he decide, twenty years later, to suddenly go back?”

  “He’s retarded?” Colin said, offering his standard line of literary analysis. “He’s a total dweeb?”

  Oren hesitated. Was Colin some kind of savant in idiot’s clothing? Because it struck him in that moment Wakefield did have a rather dweebish and retarded quality. And perhaps by extension Hawthorne did as well, conjuring this feckless being in the first place and loosing his metaphysical riddle upon the world. And perhaps this same quality be might further extended to include Oren himself, for mediating this unhappy transaction between the dead, misfit author and these living, well-adjusted sons of farmers and shopkeepers’ daughters, plunging them headfirst into that troubled space between the lines and margins of the text in search of ontological meanings, on the assumption that mastering the dark, byzantine arts of hermeneutical inquiry would help them prosper in their later lives. Which judging by his own later life, Oren found ample reason to doubt. Hadn’t they just read the previous week, in gassy old Emerson, that the great gifts are not got by analysis…the mid-world is best?

  Still, they were here, for seventy-five minutes a day: they had to talk about something.

  “So. What do the rest of you think?”

  “Ooh. Oooh.”

  “Jenny?”

  “Maybe he’s mad.”

  “Okay, good. But why would he be mad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what do you think, though?”

  “Maybe ’cause his wife doesn’t miss him more?”

  “Interesting. And why do you think she doesn’t miss him?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenny pouted, like the spoiled little specimen she was. She’d misinterpreted his question: he wasn’t asking her to speculate about Mrs. Wakefield’s motives, he was asking what evidence could be quarried from the text in support of her argument. But he didn’t bother to correct her. Her sense of entitlement was such that if she didn’t get the right answer, she wanted it awarded to her anyway, by virtue of being first to claim it. In his irritation Oren decided to direct his question to someone else, anyone else—even Kyle Fuller, who wasn’t listening as usual, preoccupied as he was by his ongoing project of defacing his desk—until Jenny surprised him by adding, “Maybe she never liked him so much in the first place?”

  “Ah! Very good! You may just be right, Jenny, I think.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course there’s no way to know for sure. But Jenny here has raised an intriguing possibility. Think about it, people. What if Mrs. Wakefield really wanted her husband to leave?”

  “I wasn’t saying she—”

  “Or, okay,” he said quickly, “even if she didn’t want him to go at first…what if, say, after he does leave, she sort of changes her mind? What if she discovers she’s kind of glad to be rid of the guy, who maybe wasn’t such a great guy in the first place? Hawthorne doesn’t tell us much about their marriage either way. But marriages are complicated, right? It’s hard to know what’s going on from the outside.”

  The students—children, he reminded himself—nodded grudgingly, precocious in their skepticism regarding all things marital. As who wasn’t, Oren thought.

  “Could the whole thing boil down to the fact that Mrs. Wakefield gets used to her husband being gone? Adjusts to it emotionally I mean? Or at the very least logistically? Because people do adjust to new things, even bad things, don’t they? I mean when they have to.”

  “He doesn’t,” Sophie pointed out, addressing her remark to the window.

  “No, Wakefield doesn’t,” Oren agreed. “That’s true. And you can’t help wondering why not.”

  But apparently you could help wondering why not, as Sophie Fontana and the rest of her classmates were only too eager to demonstrate.

  “What was that line from Emerson we read last week? ‘Every ship is a romantic object, except the one we sail on’…? Maybe for Wakefield the only time his life looks interesting, looks real even, is when he’s standing outside it, looking in. What do you think, Kyle? Any ideas?”

  Kyle Fuller ducked his round, vacant head, searching for an idea amid the blizzard of dandruff on the surface of his desk. Did Kyle’s mother know they sold medicated shampoo over the counter these days? Oren would have to remember to say something, gently of course, inoffensively, at their next parent conference, presuming they showed up, which most parents didn’t. And thank God for that. Because now that he’d taken on Don’s class in addition to his own, bluffing and prevaricating his way through parent conferences, trying to keep them all straight in his mind, his students and their various needs and prospects and learning issues and so forth, wasn’t easy. Still, Kyle Fuller stood out, especially with these sociopathological tendencies he was manifesting at this moment with real diligence and enthusiasm, hacking away at the much maligned surface of his desk with the m
etal backside of a pencil (the eraser nowhere in evidence), gouging some kind of deep, encoded logo or message that unfortunately—the students were looking up at Oren, expectant of release, the last minutes ticking off the clock—there wasn’t time to read or deal with at the moment, other than to note the presence of a familiar and at the same time weirdly exotic-looking name:

  Oren Pierce.

  Strange: in the past weeks Kyle Fuller had shown few indications of literacy of any sort, fewer still of tolerating, or acknowledging, or even noticing Oren’s presence. But then Oren remembered Teddy Hastings’s little speech that day he was first hired, about the dynamics of early-adolescent brain development—the thirst, during these boom years of cerebral expansion, for raw materials and good scaffolding—and it struck him that even a limited and well-camouflaged young mind such as Kyle Fuller’s must on some sub-or unconscious level be loitering around the academic construction site, waiting to be put to work. Perhaps Oren had tapped into that latency. Perhaps without realizing it he’d gained an acolyte, a protégé. Teaching kids was like that, an invisible process, a seeding ground for transference, like psychotherapy—and here was a subject Oren felt very qualified to talk about indeed—in its dependence upon trust. Trust was the key. From trust came security, from security came receptivity, from receptivity came knowledge, from knowledge came empathy, from empathy came depth of feeling and breadth of perception, and from depth of feeling and breadth of perception came identification with the longings and tribulations of other animate beings, of the whole history of other animate beings, since the first single-cell organism divided in two. That was the mechanism of enlightenment. The flowering, inexorable beauty of it. In the beginning was the word, and the word spread…

  Whether the word had spread all the way to Kyle Fuller; whether he’d been levitated these past weeks, by the silver wand of Oren’s pedagogical charisma, into some heady transcendent orbit he lacked the facility to describe; whether his apathy in class, his sullen jokes and rude monosyllabic grunts, were only a defensive screen for his fear, confusion, and excitement in the face of the unknown; whether, in his transferential haze, he’d lashed out indirectly by writing—okay, gouging—onto his desk the name of the awesome guide who’d led him into this bewildering new place…Oren didn’t know. Couldn’t know. And that was good. Because as long as he couldn’t know, he too would have to depend on trust, would have to keep plugging away in earnest at this teaching thing until he figured it out. Because Kyle Fullers were everywhere: slugs, deadbeats, morons, mouth-breathers. Kids with minds like idling screens, waiting for someone to push the button that lights up their circuitry…

  “Ooh. Ooh.”

  A couple of other words too, he noticed, were floating on Kyle’s desk in a festive, inky cloud. Something about socks or sacks…

  “Ooh. Ooh.”

  “Anyone other than Jenny?”

  Out in the corridor, lockers were slamming. The basketball players, grinning and graceful, began to ease out of their chairs and gather up their backpacks. They let the jocks out early on game days, so they could head off to play. To compete.

  Something about cooks or cokes…

  “Well, okay, quickly then…and, Jenny, we’ll resume with your comment first thing tomorrow…but for tonight, think about that passage I just read, and see if you can connect it to what’s going on in the rest of the story. On the one hand Mrs. Wakefield thinks her husband’s dead, so there’s nothing more she can do about that. Which makes it easier for her, you might say. Still, on his side, he’s not dead. On the other hand he’s not quite alive anymore either. He’s—”

  The bell rang. Despite himself the sound still excited him.

  “—between,” he announced, though no one was left in the room to hear him.

  As he approached the hospital, the light was waning over the foothills, the sky gone grapy and thin. The heater was on high. The roar it made was impressive, but the steering wheel remained icy, the breath continued to fly from his mouth in pale, scudding clouds.

  It was visiting hour: the lot was full. Through the frost-embroidered windshield he spied the red flare of brake lights ahead. He clicked on his blinker and waited. The driver, and this annoyed him, was adjusting her makeup in the rearview mirror. While he waited for her to finish, he turned up the music on the car stereo—a new CD his friend Sandy Krause had burned for him, by a band he’d never heard of—and tapped out a bass line on the dashboard. If there was one thing from his former life Oren really missed, it was going out to hear new bands, new music. He liked not knowing where a song was going; not being able to anticipate, in the silence between verses, the makeup and tempo of the next. It was important to stay attuned to the new music, he thought. Once you let go it would never come back. And then in its absence something lazy and insidious would move in to fill the empty space, some soft, pendulous sag in the brain wires, some mental flabbiness and spread, which inevitably like all processes of incremental corruption led to a loss of the new and its replacement with the old. Oren feared that process and fought against it and complained about it, even as he recognized that with every passing year he was succumbing to its pull a little further.

  Which may have informed his decision to yank out the CD right now—he did not care for this new band after all—and put in an older, more familiar one instead.

  So intent was he at that moment on finding the right music to listen to that he almost failed to recognize, in the awkward do-si-do of parking, Gail Hastings backing out of the space he’d been waiting to back into.

  As she passed, they exchanged a pair of silent, civil nods from behind their respective windshields—hers warily acknowledging; his reluctantly acknowledged—and that was fine, really. But after she’d gone, and the billowing clouds of her exhaust had dissipated into clarity, he discovered in letting it out that he’d unconsciously been holding his breath the whole time. Why? And why had he slumped so low in the seat, as if he were hiding? And why too, given that unlike his first trip to the hospital he’d smoked no marijuana this time and was hence enjoying none of its benefits, was his mouth so dry, his head so hazy?

  He felt caught out, exposed. Just the casual flicker of her gaze had left a burn on his cheeks, a capillaried stencil of guilt and shame. Because this was not in fact his second obligatory trip to see Don Blackburn at the hospital. It was not his third either. Or his fourth. It was his fifth. And it was no longer obligatory, not in any sense that Oren—or, he supposed, anyone else—could even pretend to understand. Least of all Gail Hastings.

  His second trip to the hospital had been the Wednesday after his first one. His third had been the Wednesday after that, and his fourth had been the Wednesday after that. And now here he was again, the Wednesday after that, and still sneaking his way through the corridors like a truant, still edging away from eye contact in the elevators, still no better able to articulate what had drawn him back to this place, why afterward he felt better about himself, and not, say, worse, as a result of having come, and why the emotions engendered by hanging out in a stroke victim’s room—helplessness, sadness, clumsiness, boredom—were emotions he or anyone would seek to recapture. But recapture them he did. Every Wednesday afternoon, from approximately four fifteen to five, he squatted dutifully by Don Blackburn’s bedside, saying nothing, while Don, red-faced and bug-eyed, stared vacantly at the wall, saying nothing back. It was madness. Perversity. It was as if he were operating under some weird, inexplicable compulsion every bit as meaningless as Wakefield’s. Sunk like a bag of wet sand, week after week, into the same chair, running his eyes over the same generic get-well cards from school, the same blue plastic vases full of what appeared to be the same roses, lilies, tulips, and irises, with the same double-jointed head-and-shoulder shots of the Hastings girls, Mimi and Danielle, lined up politely on the bedstand like ministering angels, or fates.

  Men like to look at pretty girls. It gives them a boost.

  Every Wednesday afternoon, as if reporting for d
uty, Oren submitted himself to their knowing, mirrored inspection. Every Wednesday afternoon he’d sit waiting for the clock to release him. Every Wednesday afternoon, in a fugue of boredom and low blood sugar, he’d shock and appall himself by stealing another chocolate from the otherwise-unviolated sampler on the bedstand. The ethics of which were made somehow both better and worse by the fact that he was the one who’d bought and put them there in the first place, a sequel to the pricey bouquet he’d delivered earlier and then watched wither and die with astonishing speed. Hence he was not simply stealing candy from Don Blackburn: he was also stealing from himself.

  How complicated and strange, all these forces that guided or bypassed or thwarted a man’s will and conspired to strand him here, in a sick person’s room, beside a sick person’s bed, stealing that sick person’s chocolates, then eating those chocolates in full view of the sick person himself. If only he could bring some clarity to that region of the brain where self-understanding takes shape! But it seemed his brain had no such region, only the hope of one, the stubborn enduring need of one, like the vestigial myth of a sunken continent.

  Pensively he nibbled his (that is, Don’s) chocolate, his teeth fighting for traction in the dense, clingy nougat, seeking a core that might for a change prove worthy of the effort to reach it. With every bite he sank deeper into his chair, feeling that much more the interloper, the trespasser, the voyeur. And at the same time that much less. His flesh had by this point molded itself so seamlessly into the contours of the visitor’s chair he no longer felt like a visitor at all. He felt like a proprietor. The chair belonged to him, or he belonged to it; in any case the two of them belonged together. Such is the nature of repetition. Slowly, over the weeks, the strange becomes familiar, and the familiar becomes strange, then familiar, then strange again, until all such distinctions seem arbitrary, moot.

  His body wanted him here in the hospital. He had no idea why. Perhaps his body was sick; perhaps it knew something the rest of him didn’t. Every Wednesday afternoon, descending in the elevator to the ground-floor lobby, he’d utter the same silent vow not to return; but then the next Wednesday would roll around, and at the buzz of the eighth-period bell he’d rear his head like a docile dog and lope out to his car. He was no longer driving to the hospital—he was being driven to the hospital, or so it seemed, by the force of some unnameable necessity. Not an urgent necessity but a solid, boring, structural one, as a hinge is necessary for the swinging of a door, open and shut.