by Dan Josefson
Sunday there was snow. Ripples of white spread around the Mansion and across the bare branches. In New Boys we were quick out of bed and into the showers, then back in our pajamas pulling on boots and coats.
The cold stung my eyeballs and made chilly tears pool in the corners of my eyes. Loose snow spun around everyone’s shins and flew easily from our shovels. To make sure that no fights arose that would keep us from brunch, we kept quiet as much as possible. When there was something to say, we all employed a careful excess of politeness, which quickly became a joke. Snow continued to fall as we worked. The rectangular swaths of macadam I cleared were soon covered with a layer of fuzz pocked with footprints.
I leaned on my shovel and looked out over the snow-covered hills, the gray trees, and the wet, black road. My face had gone numb. The sky was like a white wool blanket. Deep folds of silence lay everywhere. On the way into the Cottage, we bumped into one another softly just to create occasions to apologize decorously.
“Oh, terribly sorry, didn’t see you.”
“Not at all, not at all. Quite all right.”
Back inside the Cottage we rushed to grab our blankets. We slowed on our way back outside and did our best to look sleepy and bored as we walked to the Mansion. The brunch was a gift from Aubrey, and racing to the Great Hall would make our compliance seem too cheaply bought. I had my own reason to seem aloof. I expected Tidbit to be there, and people might notice if we seemed too excited or spent too much time together. I had to be careful not to look for her, to ignore her if I saw her. I would be treacherous and true.
In the Great Hall, neither brunch nor the cartoons had yet arrived. I kept my head down and then very casually, as I walked, stole quick glimpses around the room. New Girls and Alternative Boys were arrayed around the Great Hall, draped across the long couch with blankets spread over their legs or sitting in groups on the rug. I didn’t see Alternative Girls anywhere. A fire glowed in the huge fireplace to one side of the couch. A group of girls lay in front of it flipping through a large book.
I saw Pudding marching through the Great Hall calling for a staff member. Ellie was in the Reception Room, where the teachers and dorm parents generally spent time when their students were in the Great Hall for an event. “Ellie,” he said, finding her with Marcy and Spencer. “This is a really dishonest Cartoon Brunch, wouldn’t you say? No cartoons and no brunch? I think we might need to have a meeting.”
I hadn’t seen Pudding in months. It was nice to see nothing had changed.
Some of the New Boys tried to convince the girls lying on the couch to let them squeeze in. There wasn’t anyplace for me to sit other than on the rug. I sat down by the girls near the fireplace, who were looking at what I now saw was an old photo album. I just stared at the fire and ignored them. I figured Alternative Girls were either still out doing their snow job or that they hadn’t gotten checked out of cleanup in time. It wouldn’t do any good to ask. I had to keep our plan hidden.
“Where are Alternative Girls?” I asked.
The girls looked at one another. “You’re Benjamin. You’re new, right?” one of them asked.
“Not really. Not anymore.”
The girl had large dark eyes and long blond hair with the ends dyed black. She looked at me like one of those dolls with weighted eyelids. “I’m Carly,” she said.
“I know.”
“This is Torrin. She’s new.”
“Hi.” New Boys had seen Torrin before, but no one knew her name. She was pretty in a perfect, absolute way. In front of girls like her, I found myself acting as though they didn’t actually exist. It was rude of me, but I don’t think I could really help it. Girls like her seemed to exist in a world different than mine. I wondered why Carly didn’t introduce Bev, who was sitting right beside her.
“How come you want to know about Alternative Girls?” Carly asked.
I shrugged. I turned to watch Pudding, who was arguing with Ellie about whether he could ride the oversize rocking horse. “You’re only saying no because I’m fat,” Pudding said. “You can’t discriminate just because I’m fat.” He held the wooden dowel that went through the horse’s head and rocked the horse back and forth on its rails.
“It’s for decoration,” Ellie said. “Do you see anyone else riding it? Any skinny people? Stop rocking it.”
“What’s with Pudding?” Carly asked.
I shrugged again. “He’s needy.”
“That horse is technically off campus,” Carly said. “Touching it is just the same thing as running away. Someone should tell him.” Bev was staring at me. I wondered what she was thinking. “Don’t you think Torrin’s pretty?” Carly asked.
I looked at Torrin. She was staring at the carpet and didn’t react. Was Carly teasing me or trying to cheer her up? “I guess. Can I see that album? What is it?”
Carly turned it so that I could see. There was a black-and-white photo of a room that took me a moment to recognize as the Great Hall, the room we were in. The furniture was different, and there was some kind of bunting hanging from the landing on the second floor. “It’s pictures of this place from before it was a school,” she told me. “From when the family that built it lived here.” In the picture everything seemed to fit better. I wasn’t sure if there was more furniture or what.
“The girl’s dead,” Bev said.
“What girl?” I asked.
“The girl who lived—”
“Um, I know you didn’t know this,” Carly interrupted, “but Bev’s ghosted, so no one’s really supposed to talk to her.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
I looked at Bev. She nodded. “I am.”
Carly opened her mouth to say something, but caught herself in time. She sighed.
I looked around the Great Hall. In comparison with the photograph in the album, everything looked simultaneously too big for people and too small for the room. The large couch seemed to swallow up all the people sitting on it. William Kay and Eric Gold had squeezed between the girls on the couch. The furniture seemed thin, as if it were made of plywood. The couches and chairs in the photograph had big buttons sunk deep in their cushions.
On the next page there were two more black-and-white photographs. There was one of the back garden, with the same stone path leading to and then circling the fountain. But instead of the shrubs on either side of it there were trees whose branches reached out to one another high above the path. A corner of the gazebo could be seen beyond the trees. The other showed a young couple. The woman sat in a chair and held hands with the man, who stood beside her. She had long dark hair that fell in ringlets over her shoulders. He wore a tie, and his collar came all the way up to his chin.
Floyd pushed open the doors to the Mansion dining room, where he had set up the brunch bar. On the long dark table there were warmed trays of scrambled eggs, mozzarella sticks, sausages, and jalapeño poppers. “You all must have kissed the old man’s ass till it was good and shiny,” Floyd shouted as the students filed into the dining room. “I got a note to bring the hot chocolate machine over, too.”
Marcy and Spencer left to get the AV cart from the Cafetorium. We all got food and sat back down. Torrin rushed to get a seat on the couch, leaving Carly, Bev, and me alone with our plates on the rug. We sat quietly, watching the burned logs turn white with ash and letting the heat sting our faces.
It was then that Aubrey first walked through the Great Hall. No one noticed him until he was halfway through the room, and it was only when we all stiffened, as if we had been caught doing something wrong, that Aubrey seemed to realize that the hall was full of people. He was unshaven. He clearly hadn’t expected anyone to be in the Great Hall. He muttered something, then continued. When he had almost made it across the hall, he turned and hurried back across the room and out through the Office, the way he had come. It was the first time I’d seen him in a long while.
Marcy and Spencer arrived with the AV cart and plugged it in. Snow had stuck to the wheels
of the cart and was melting into puddles on the hardwood floor. Marcy popped in a tape of cartoons, and Ellie dimmed the lights so the students could better see the television. The tape was a mix of Woody Woodpecker and Tom and Jerry episodes, but they were recorded off of television and the best parts were the old commercials. Ellie and Marcy went around the room administering morning meds, checking the students’ mouths in the flickering light of the TV or, in Bev’s and my case, of the fire. When they were done with meds, the faculty left us alone to go sit in the Reception Room.
By that time most of the students sitting on the couch had finished eating. They passed their empty plates to be stacked on the floor. When they were sure the faculty members were gone they sank down and slid against one another, resting heads on each other’s shoulders or chests. Some pulled their blankets up to their chins so their hands could move unseen.
This was the primary attraction of Cartoon Brunch. Spencer, Marcy, and Ellie chose not to worry about it. The faculty members always felt they were due a break, and they would have felt hypocritical trying to keep us from doing what they thought was only natural. And brunch was also a gift from Aubrey, so there was probably a certain vicarious satisfaction in letting the students abuse his generosity. Instead of watching us, they sat back in the deep couches of the Reception Room and made fun of us.
Spencer told a story about a fight that New Girls had once gotten into in the bathroom while he was covering the dorm. “I didn’t know if I should go in to break it up or what because, you know, it’s the girls’ bathroom. But then I heard a mirror break. Just shatter. So I tell them I’m coming in, and when I enter I see these two girls wrestling on the floor. But before I can try to get them apart I notice all the girls who weren’t even involved in the fight. They’re all so anxious about what’s going on right in front of them, the two girls pulling hair out and everything, that they’ve all picked up broken shards of the mirror and they’re all cutting away at themselves like crazy.” He laughed. “Every one of them.”
I figured that Alternative Girls wouldn’t be coming. It actually made things easier. This way Tidbit and I wouldn’t have to avoid each other. I’d just see her in the morning, and then we’d be gone. Carly went back to flipping through the old pictures in the album. I watched the kids on the couch.
Suffused with sugar and fried food, they didn’t say much as they began grabbing at one another, slipping hands under flannel tops and past elasticized waistbands. William grabbed the thin wrist of the girl beside him and directed it toward his arcing erection. He turned to see that it was Torrin, her face turned away from him so all he could see was the corner of her jaw and strands of hair that curled behind her pink ear. She pulled her hand back.
“C’mon,” he said, “touch it.”
Torrin laughed. He grabbed her arm again and she slapped his hand.
“Come on,” he whispered now. He wrapped his arm around her waist. “If you don’t I’ll have to sneak into your dorm later and rape you.”
She smiled. “That’s gross. Then I’d have to have a little rape baby. No way.”
William didn’t let go. “C’mon, it’d be adorable. And you could knit it mittens and things.” Torrin laughed and slapped him again.
Aubrey walked through the Great Hall for the second time and everyone stopped. This time we recognized his shuffling gait immediately. He paused as if he were waiting for us to so much as acknowledge him. He could feel that he had interrupted us, the students on the couch in front of the TV or on the floor by his fireplace, the faculty members lounging in the Reception Room. We were clearly having a fine time without him, and we were just as clearly waiting for him to be gone.
Aubrey wouldn’t say anything, but he didn’t leave us alone either. He opened the door that led down to the basement and walked down the stairs. But just as everyone in the Great Hall had relaxed and returned to whatever it was we’d been doing, he came back in through another door.
This is what Aubrey did for the rest of the afternoon. He wandered back and forth across the Mansion, up stairs and through the Office, looking distracted but intent on vexing all of us. He would disappear for a time, then return. At one point he must have exited and walked around the outside of the building, so that he crossed the Great Hall twice in the same direction. When it became clear that he would continue doing this, we weren’t particularly bothered. We watched the cartoons and ate more brunch. I wondered whether Aubrey had initially been looking for something he had lost or what else might have been the matter with him. But no one said anything about it. Certainly no one said anything to him.
At some point, though, I became aware that Aubrey had ceased his perambulations and was standing quietly at the edge of the room opposite the TV, rocking slightly, as though waiting. “ ‘And these mine enemies,’ ” he finally said, and everyone quieted down. A slide whistle sound came from the television, and someone jumped up to turn off the volume. Aubrey stood silhouetted, with his back to a window. Nacreous light poured in over his shoulder as he began a speech that I find I can recall to this day. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the light, and although Aubrey stood still he seemed to emerge from a darkness.
“ ‘And these mine enemies,’ ” Aubrey said, “ ‘all knit up in their distractions.’ ‘Their distractions’? ‘My distractions’ is more like it. The TV, the food, the fire. And you sitting and staring and staring and staring in your pajamas. You’re like initiates in some tribal ritual where the body’s left behind while the soul goes walking. And what do your souls witness on this vision quest? A hideous bird, devoid of character, and a smug, murderous mouse. As you’d say, whatever. It makes time pass, I guess. For me time hardly passes at all anymore; for me the day just drags and drags. It drags from the windows and it drags from the woods, and the walls, to be honest, I don’t want to talk about the walls. It does give me a chance to think, though—the dragging does. Today I’ve been thinking about all the things I know and you don’t, trying to understand what they are and whether any of them are worth the trouble I take trying to get them across. Across what? Now there’s a question. Maybe that’s something that you know and I don’t, how could I tell?” Aubrey said. “You know, Erasmus said that ‘every definition is a misfortune.’ No you don’t know that, why would any of you know that? Well, he said it, and I think that must make you some of the most fortunate ignoramuses anywhere. Because there are so many words that mean nothing to you, precisely nothing, probably the majority of words in the English language may as well be foreign to you. Like ‘perspicacity,’ for example. Or ‘decorum.’ Or ‘gratitude,’ certainly gratitude. The word ’immensity, to choose another, leaves you all completely baffled, I can tell, no matter how loudly I say it you simply cannot understand it. In fact, the louder I say it, the more perplexed you get, immensity, immensity! Whereas I have such a deep understanding of the word that I have no need to give voice to it at all.” He paused and squeezed his eyes shut. “See?” He opened them again. “While you’ve all been so raptly sitting here, I’ve been walking around the Mansion and down to the basement and outside, through the garden and past the fountain, across the Ornamental Pond, into the Enchanted Forest and out again, off to the Farm and back to the garden, through the gazebo, where I sat for a time, thinking about what, I’ve forgotten already, back to the Office, and so on and so on. And every time I stepped inside the Mansion, the building seemed larger to me than the entire outdoors, the entire valley. And then I step from the Office into the Great Hall, I see its enormity and sense with absolute clarity that this one room dwarfs the entire Mansion,” Aubrey said. “What is more, when I look into my own mind, I find it even vaster than the Great Hall we’re in at this very moment. Isn’t that something? On a science program I once saw on television I learned that a black hole the size of a snowball would be almost entirely empty, just a point at the center that would weigh ten times as much as the Earth. I think it was on NOVA. So maybe it’s not so surprising. Of course, this would be true of your min
ds as much as mine, God help us. The human brain is so complex. About three pounds, and so powerful that a child, if you halved his brain or hers, would grow up fine. No problems to speak of. Never tried it, but maybe some of you have. Worse than devils, some of you, and yet I let you live right here in my own home, an awful thought. Not that I expect your thanks or need any. You know, most schools hound their alumni for years after graduation, asking for donations. Maybe you don’t know, why would you? We’ve never done that here, I’ve never done that. When you’re done, you’re done. That’s the way it goes. That’s what Reciprocity Detail is all about, that’s what Regular Kids working in the lower-functioning dorms is all about. I make sure that you don’t leave until you’ve given back as much as you’ve taken, and then we’re finished, even-steven. No, my fondest wish is that this place leave no traces, that it disappear into your lives like a pharaoh sealed inside his tomb. If you so much as remember ever having been here, I will have failed,” Aubrey said. “Is that extreme? Who can tell anymore. I don’t ask you for anything, and it’s lucky for me I don’t, ingrates that you are. Just ‘a pot of cheese so I can feast when I like.’ Maybe one of those jalapeño poppers there.” Aubrey walked into the dining room and came back with one. “You know what’s like fielding a ground ball?” he asked, still chewing. “Working on the margins of wisdom. That’s where I try to stay—if you’re on the margins, on the perimeter, you can keep all of wisdom there in front of you, quite a thing to see, wisdom hopping like a grounder but then again also like an enormous lake shining in the sun, and me sitting on the shore watching it lap against the stones. Not that any of you would know what I’m talking about. I try to bring you all with me, there to the stony shore, but you just turn your backs on all that great wet wisdom sloshing about, you turn around and, like mules, wait to be led back home. And then you lift your tails and it’s a good trip ruined. Never field a grounder that way. It breaks my heart. It absolutely does, the trouble you all have. You simply can’t seem to come to terms with life’s ordinary happiness. Or even for that matter with life’s ordinary unhappiness. No, you all seem to be after a rather extraordinary unhappiness. It’s heroic, really, if something pointless and infantile can be called heroic. But most things called heroic are pointless and infantile. Another definition, more misfortune. Well, so what? The point is, you pursue the legend of your outrageous unhappiness unrelentingly,” Aubrey said. “Nothing and no one can get in your way, least of all me. No, no, nothing can get between you and your beloved unhappiness and I, for one, am too smart to try. You all imagine that you’re rebelling against me, that somewhere there exist rules that for whatever reason are important to me and that you simply cannot accept. But that’s not right, that’s not right at all. The rules aren’t important to me, very little is. I could pen you up like barnyard animals and go about my day. No, you’re the ones who start it. You show up here so angry, you don’t know what to do. So I give you something to expend your energy on. I build a little house, and I let you tear it down. Then I build another house, and I let you tear it down. Another house, tear it down. Then I build, you understand, this goes on for a while. What I wouldn’t give to have someone do that for me, someone to give shape to all the chaos. I’d keep her on retainer. As it is, every day I have to decide anew what’s allowed and what forbidden, what to ignore and what to jump up and down about, where the lines lie between one thing and another, what constitutes an idea, and, in the complete absence of criteria, I must determine who can rest and who must suffer. Every day I put a face on that which has no face, no face. Goodness, it’s frightening, why must I repeat it? No face, no face, no face. Speaking of which,” Aubrey said, “I saw some wonderfully terrifying masks on my trip through the Classroom Building earlier. Also, an amazing fantasy mansion constructed entirely out of Popsicle sticks. The things you all get up to in your classes, it made me sorry I haven’t paid more attention to what goes on. But really. And I picked up this Popsicle palace and turned it in my hands because more than anything I wanted to look into its dark, inscrutable interiors. But I couldn’t see inside, and the more this tiny fort frustrated my attempts, the more curious I was to see what it withheld. Surely there must be something there, why else would it be hidden? But I knew that if I cracked open its little rooms, if I even had the strength to, what I wanted most to see would be gone. Only in sleep can the eye embrace its goblin. I put down the wooden playhouse and I felt, when I saw it there before me, that this, this was the real world. Sticks, string, and glue. Compared to these, my thoughts seemed vague apparitions. This Mansion we’re in, the Cafetorium, the Classroom Building: sticks, string, and glue. The process I invented for you all to follow: sticks, string, and glue. And each of you, even me, I thought, looking at this strange little Popsicle world that had somehow invaded our own, what are we but a band of puppets dancing foolishly, or dragging listlessly, no need to exaggerate, things are falling to pieces fast enough, dancing or dragging through the hours? And what are puppets but sticks, string, and glue? And sometimes pieces of felt and, what’s it called, foam rubber? There are so many types of puppets: hand puppets and shadow puppets and finger puppets and rod puppets, dummies and marionettes, shoulder puppets and glove puppets, singing puppets and dancing puppets and automatons and Javanese puppets, animal puppets and people puppets, puppets with soft rope for hair and puppets with bald wooden heads, miscreated puppets and sock puppets and demi-puppets, parade puppets and articulated puppets, Vietnamese water puppets, a profusion and embarrassment of puppets, you wouldn’t think we had time to do anything else. But then no, we really aren’t much like puppets at all; they don’t melt away like we do, like I am,” Aubrey said. “I’m so disgusted with myself, really, every word out of my mouth’s a lie. It’s shameful going on like I do, and ridiculous. I fear it sometimes, no, always, how it must seem, parents leaving their children with me to be raised, and me with none of my own, a barren nurse. But I had a son once, it’s true in a way. He was one of you, an absolute terror, a monster, really, and his parents finally wanted no more part of him. So I adopted him, signed the forms, and paid the fee or whatever it was. And he lived here like any of you do except that when he wanted the school to have a basketball team for him to play on, I put together a basketball team, and when he wanted to learn to play guitar I bought him a guitar, because he was my son, and that’s what you do. And I loved him. It’s pathetic, really. The lengths I go to and no one cares, not for me, not the least bit. And of course my son, one morning he was gone, had drifted away through the tall grass, along with the two girls who were in the band I’d let him put together after he’d gotten his guitar. How hurt and humiliated I was, was that it, yes, humiliated, and I missed him so much. Too sad even to be furious, though I put on a show as you can imagine. And after some days had passed, Floyd from the kitchen told me that things had begun to disappear from the refrigerators overnight, and I felt a faint glimmer, it was almost too much to hope for, that it might be him, my son, nearby and stealing from my kitchen. So one night I skulked by the kitchen’s back entrance, hidden, and waited. Skulked and saw nothing, though hope sprung anew when Floyd told me the next morning that nothing had been stolen. So I skulked about another night and another. And then I saw him, I saw him, it thrills me now just to say it, I saw my son enter the kitchen, that cruel clever boy, and then leave with a bag full of stolen food. I followed him to the gym and stayed outside into the early hours, standing in the chill grass near the school vans, waiting to see if he would leave, where he would go, waited until the birds in the woods awoke with a cry just before sunrise, and I was sure he wouldn’t come out. On subsequent nights I snuck back, to discover that he and the girls were living in the gym, behind the stage where the costumes are kept. I guess because they couldn’t do laundry, they had taken to wearing the costumes, and the few times I saw them they looked like something out of Perrault. I didn’t dare confront them lest they leave, though I knew I should, and I told no one. When Floyd suggested putting locks o
n the refrigerators to stop the thefts I told him to ignore them and order extra food. Because it was good to know my boy was safe and good to have him near. And soon I lost even that, soon he was gone for good; of course, he couldn’t live behind the stage in costume forever, and he must’ve known it, I didn’t raise any fools. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since. Oh, it’s true, it’s true, I’m a fool and a sad old man. And those poor girls, I just let them disappear, they were my responsibility, too, but who knows what happened to them? Who knows what happens to any of us. You children think you’ll have plenty of time, that life will be lenient and filled with second chances because you’re so adorable. And you are, but you won’t always be. Time moves in one direction, and each time you fuck up, you’ve fucked up forever. And you,” Aubrey said, raising his voice and turning to the Reception Room where the faculty members were sitting, “you think there’s time to repair the damage you’re doing to your personalities, which weren’t wonderful to begin with. I hear the way you laugh at these kids, the way you laugh and belittle them, make them the butts of your stories and jokes. Someone who’d just arrived here might have the illusion that you’re just blowing off a little steam, but I didn’t just arrive here and I don’t have any illusions. If only I did, good heavens. Don’t you realize how much more you laugh than they do, doesn’t it startle you? You get nervous and you laugh; you get angry so you make fun and laugh; you laugh when you’re happy, when you’re hurried, when you’re grim. Yet see how sober the students are. They’re so funny but so rarely laugh. They impose great, unheard-of disciplines on themselves to stave off laughter, and not only do you seem unperturbed by this, you hardly seem to notice. You’re their role models, that’s what I hired you for, yet your near-constant chuckling is repaid with icy silence. You think your cynicism is a fleeting joke, but more and more it’s etched into your character. What to do then? To do some good, to find or force a chink in our students’ seriousness, to help them crack a smile? The only way forward: we must not teach them to care; we must teach them to tickle. Only this will open the floodgates of laughter. Because if they are tickled they’ll laugh, they won’t be able to stop, and they must be tickled, because one cannot tickle oneself. Go ahead and try, you’ll see. No, that’s idiotic, listen to me prattle. How would it even work, teach them to tickle? No, no, no, full of shit, so full of shit I can’t listen to myself for another second, and yet on I go, contemptible me. Why, I couldn’t tell you. All this time spent, these stupid, stupid lies, abhorrent playacting, trying to say what? I don’t even know. What do all of you want from me? Explanations when I have none to give, to help you when I can’t? Cannot. To keep this place, to keep it from spinning out of control, spinning and spinning and spinning, it’s too damn much, just too too fucking much. Where can I, where else, there’s no place else, no place. Oh, you all think you’re the only ones, the only ones …” Aubrey’s mouth hung open. I could see the white stubble on his chin. After a while, he staggered across the Great Hall and up the Mansion stairs.