Reactions to the unit, which put us a week behind the other section of American history, taught by Mr. Rye, a very tall man with yellow teeth, were mixed.
“Man is crazy,” said Gideon Peel after the first class. “He smoke too much weed.”
“He is a disciple of the pipe,” Ronald Kaplan said. “His thoughts are unsound.”
David Metzger liked the idea that the Indians were from Israel. “Jews, yo!” He pumped his fist in the air. “You honkies can all get off our land!”
“Dude, even if the Indians were Jews, that doesn’t make us honkies,” said Gideon Peel.
“You are so a honky,” said Ronald Kaplan, whose father was Jewish.
“And besides, we did this last year. History is repeating itself, man.”
I kept quiet. There was no way I could have explained what I felt when I looked at the maps, how, running my finger over the big whiteness between the coasts, I went queasy with excitement, as though what Charles had told me was literally true, and my father was hidden somewhere on the map, a tiny black dot, not reproduced at this scale, but there all the same. As though, when I looked at the map, I was also, in some obscure, magical way, looking for him.
At the end of the week Mr. Savage divided us into groups, each of which had to make the case that a different people had discovered America. The group that made the most convincing argument would receive a pizza lunch. I was, with David Metzger, Andrew Ames and Matt Bark, the Chinese, not a good assignment. We met in the school library, where we found no books on the subject of the Chinese discovery of America, no mention of it, even.
“Well, so we make it up,” said Matt Bark.
“We can’t make it up, that’s plagiarism,” said David Metzger.
We argued about whether it was plagiarism if you were just lying, and concluded that it might be all right. But I held out for facts.
“There are no facts,” said Matt Bark.
“Just rock and roll,” said David Metzger.
“It’s not fair,” Andrew Ames said. “We should have got the Vikings.”
I said that I could probably find some facts, and that afternoon I took the Broadway bus to the public library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. It was the first time I’d ever gone there, and of course I wasn’t allowed in; only adults could enter the Reading Room. My first encounter with the library was an anticlimax; I was shunted to the Mid-Manhattan Library two blocks south, where men in smelly coats coughed in the fluorescent light. I leafed through a book on the Chinese navy, and another on ancient seafarers, and learned about the Polynesian islanders who navigated by means of knotted strings, an interesting subject but not one that convinced Matt Bark to change his plan.
“String, fuck, this isn’t a report on string.”
“But imagine, if the Chinese had these string maps …”
Matt put up his hand. “Shut up, weather boy.”
“Weather boy.” David Metzger laughed.
“You shut up,” I said.
No one acknowledged me. I slumped in my chair and closed my eyes. There was no use in fighting them; the facts were all on their side. How could I argue when I didn’t know what kind of clouds rained and what kinds didn’t?
On the appointed day, Gideon Peel reported to our class that archaeologists had found Norse houses in northern Newfoundland, dating from around the year 1000. If the Vikings hadn’t discovered America, he concluded, prudently, at least they’d been here before Columbus. John De Luca stumped for the Phoenicians, the first masters of the ocean; he described the Phoenician inscriptions found on rocks in Brazil, and also certain man-sized slabs of stone found in a cave in New Hampshire, which, he said, smiling, were probably sacrificial altars left behind by the Phoenician priests. John explained that the Phoenicians sacrificed human beings to the great god Baal, whose wrath could be appeased only by blood, so probably virgins had been tied to these New Hampshire slabs, and stabbed, and stabbed, with bronze daggers, which by the way people had also found in New England. When the harvest was bad, or the wind blew the wrong way, or someone was angry, whoa, human sacrifice! The blood of the virgins steamed on the cold stone, and John’s smile grew wider and wider, and the great god Baal too was pleased, because he was a god of war and destruction and he could drink gallons of blood …
“OK, John, thanks,” Mr. Savage said.
John sat down heavily. Wayne Echeverria spoke briefly for the Basques, then Matt Bark gave our group’s report on a certain Admiral Ho, who was blown across the Pacific by a storm, and founded a Chinese colony on the California coast. The proof of it was that there was more Chinese food on the West Coast of America than there was on the East, not to mention the dish that was actually called Admiral Ho’s shrimp, which Matt Bark had eaten in Los Angeles and which was, he assured us, very tasty. And then there were the Chinese place names in America, for instance, San Francisc … ho! and San Dieg … ho! and even, even the legendary El Dorad … Ronald Kaplan began making strangled laughter noises halfway through, and before Matt Bark could finish he put his head on his desk and moaned, “Oh, my god, oh, my god,” and he wouldn’t look up, even when Mr. Savage yelled at him to stop, and that was it, everyone was laughing, and when Mr. Savage tried to raise Ronald back to a sitting position, Gideon Peel thought we were finally going to get the jujitsu demonstration, and howled, “Flip!”
Mr. Savage took Ronald and Gideon out and stood them in the hall; he came back and told the rest of us, quietly, without anger, that it was good to laugh sometimes, and that it was true, sometimes the things you studied as history were just stories that someone had made up, but the important thing, in this case, was to make up a good story, he didn’t expect us to understand, but he would tell us anyway, that this effort was in some ways the most important thing, more important than memorizing dates or the amendments to the Constitution, and that if we learned anything from him that year, it was that we should try as hard as we could to tell a good story, if we tried hard enough we would get to the truth somehow. No one reminded him that if we learned one thing, it was supposed to be that violence was serious, but we must all have been thinking it.
“The Vikings win,” Mr. Savage said.
I tried to catch his eye, to communicate that it hadn’t been my fault, but he wouldn’t look at me. The Vikings went out to pizza and American history picked up where it had left off. The Puritans were making treaties with the Indians, the French were up to no good in the woods, the Dutch founded schools, among them Nederland, glory, glory be. The story about Admiral Ho got back to Mr. Rye, who was the head of the History Department, and Mr. Rye talked to Mr. Savage, and that was it, there were no more deviations from the textbook. Oh, but I got my revenge: with the help of something the middle-school principal let slip, I figured out how to log in to the school’s accounting system, where I gave Matt Bark and David Metzger each a five-thousand-dollar charge for athletic equipment.
Soon afterward we had Christmas vacation. I spent most of it in my room, avoiding my mothers, who were embroiled in a series of small but bitter arguments about the holiday parties to which Marie was invited and Celeste was not. On New Year’s Eve, I went with Celeste to a party in a SoHo loft that belonged to a famous art critic in her sixties. When we arrived, the critic was sitting on a black leather sofa, her legs folded under her, like the stone image of a primitive god.
“You’re early!” she shouted at Celeste. “Why did you come so early?”
“The invitation said ten o’clock,” said Celeste hesitantly. I’d never heard her hesitate before.
“How stupid of you,” said the critic. “Now you’ve interrupted my meditation.”
“I’m sorry. We can go.”
“Too late! I’ve already come out of it. You’ll have to sit down and endure my displeasure. Well, sit!” The critic lit a cigarillo and poured herself a glass of bourbon; the bottle stood on the table in front of her, an aid to meditation, I supposed. “What are you working on?” she asked.
This was the era when Celeste was working with fabric: she made costumes for bodies that could never be, gowns for women with no heads or arms. At home, she talked about the costumes as explorations, but now, fixed by the critic’s stare, Celeste froze. “Clothes,” she said finally in a schoolgirl’s voice.
“Clothes!” boomed the critic. “You’re letting your sister’s job rub off on you. Celeste, my darling, when are you going to understand, it’s not an advantage to be a twin?”
Celeste blushed, but the critic’s attention had already turned elsewhere. “Is this your son? He looks interesting. What does he do?”
“Tell her,” murmured Celeste.
“I write computer games,” I said.
“Yes,” said the art critic. “And you like music?”
“I guess so.”
“Who?”
“Sex Pistols?”
“Ha!” said the critic. “You’re just at the beginning.” For two hours she talked about the musicians she’d known in the East Village in the seventies: Johnny and Lizzy, Debbie and Patti, Richard, Lou, and David who wore a dress everywhere. The names didn’t matter, although years later I would learn who they were, some of them.
“David in a dress?” Alex would shake his head sadly.
“You are an ignorant motherfucker.”
“Why, who was that, David Byrne?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of the New York Dolls? Oh, you child.”
When I was a child, what mattered to me was the critic’s face. Her eyes were partway closed and her head turned to the door, as though one of the people she was talking about might walk in at any moment. Time didn’t work for her the way it did for me; she had her finger on the crossfader and she could slide it back and forth. Present, past, present, past. She was mixing. Of course I didn’t think of it in those terms; at most I had a dim awareness that in the notion that goes by the name of history, there might be room for more stories than even Mr. Savage had told me about. Now and then the critic interrupted herself to pull a record from a sagging shelf of records and play a song or part of a song. As she lifted the needle from the record, she poked at me with her cigar, and said, “That’s the real stuff, isn’t it?” I hadn’t ever heard anything like it, and if it had been played for me in another context, I wouldn’t have been sure that it was music at all. It was the sound of cavemen figuring out how to make cars, and I liked it immensely. Celeste was on the point of asking a question, then she turned toward the window and shrugged impatiently. In vain. The critic was lost in her own memories; she no longer saw either of us, or the apartment, or herself, as she talked on and on about basement clubs and the dead. When I came into her view again, she closed one eye, opened it and said, “You should get a Mohawk.”
Then it was midnight. We drank champagne from plastic cups and watched the fireworks rise into a bank of low cloud. At twelve-thirty the other guests began to arrive, some of them people I knew; there was Celeste’s friend Donatello DelAmbrosio, and Hugh Heap with his wife, who looked like an ornamental pillow, and Javier Provo in mirrored sunglasses and a leather vest, leaping in the air, crying out. As the guests arrived, Celeste looked more and more disappointed, as though she had been expecting something that became less likely with every body that entered the room. At one o’clock, when it was no longer possible to move from one side of the apartment to the other, she put her hand on my back and said it was time to go. I’d been drinking champagne unobserved for some time, and on the subway home I told Celeste about Kerem, the authentic punk rocker, and how I used to go to parties with him in Thebes, and met a boy whose head was partially shaved, and maybe I would get a Mohawk the way the famous critic had suggested, did Celeste think that was a good idea? “Sure,” she said, then went back to staring at her reflection in the window of the subway car. Just before we reached our stop, she did something I’d never seen her do before, she stuck her fingers in her hair and combed it forward, so that it covered her forehead and hung down over her eyes.
A couple of days later, Nederland resumed with another assembly in the Great Hall. I found myself sitting next to David Metzger, who had turned a deep orange-brown in the interval. We sang our school song,
From the shore of Noten Eylandt
To the Zuyd River’s strand,
We ne’er will forget thee,
Our old Nieuw Nederland,
et cetera, and as we filed out of the Hall, David Metzger hissed, “You’re dead.”
I went through the day waiting for someone to beat me up, and in the afternoon, puzzled but no longer frightened, I found Spencer Bartnik, he of the spiked hair and nosebleeds, in the courtyard, talking to a sophomore named John Littlejohn, who had very pale blue eyes and was reputed to have given himself a blowjob. I had just mentioned certain bands, whose names I’d learned from the famous art critic, when Mr. Geist, the middle-school principal, appeared between me and the low winter sun, looming like a rock formation with a human-shaped profile. He pointed at me and said, “Get up.”
Together we climbed the grand staircase, which was not ordinarily used by students, because it led only to the offices of the school administration, and walked down a corridor, which, I swear, if I did not remember better, I would say was lit by torches, to a heavy barred door, or rather to an ordinary door, behind which Mr. Van Horn waited. Around his office hung portraits of the former principals of Nederland, beginning with the recent ones, who wore coats and ties, like Mr. Van Horn himself, but adopting, as you looked around the room, stranger and stranger forms of dress, until, at the back of the office, behind Mr. Van Horn’s desk, they wore lace cravats and white wigs; these portraits, however, were the most recent of the lot, they had been done as a result of the head librarian’s research, which pushed the date of the school’s foundation further into the past. From what models they were painted I do not know.
“Come here,” said Mr. Van Horn.
Mr. Geist put his hand on my shoulder and guided me forward.
“We know what you’ve done,” Mr. Van Horn said. “I understand that it began with a certain”—Mr. Van Horn licked his lips—“with a certain Admiral Ho.” He told me the whole story, how I had come up with this preposterous tale about Ho, and how, when it didn’t work out the way I’d planned, I had taken revenge on my partners, who were, in fact, opposed to the Ho business from the start; how I had used my formidable computer skills to alter their financial records, alarming Mr. Metzger, who was, did I know? on the Board of Trustees, and creating an embarrassing situation for the school.
“But …”
Mr. Van Horn held up his hand. “There isn’t anything for you to say. Every step of your catastrophic career has been witnessed.”
“But …”
“It may surprise you to learn that men are more intelligent than machines,” Mr. Van Horn said. “You may fool machines, but men, never.” He licked his lips again. “This is my question for you. Do you understand that what you did was wrong?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you feel that it was wrong?”
I looked around at Mr. Geist. He nodded, but I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t feel anything. I did what I did because I had figured out how to do it, which, it seems to me, is the main reason why things like that happen, because angry, slighted people have figured out they’re possible. They open the door, they go into the next room. Who knows whether what they will find there is good or bad.
Mr. Van Horn sat up in his chair. “Let me offer you a metaphor that you will understand. In this world, there are ones and there are zeroes, just like in your computer. Only they are not perhaps in equal numbers. This is a school for the ones. What are you?”
I didn’t answer.
“I expect you will have a great deal of time to ask yourself that question,” Mr. Van Horn said. He left it to Mr. Geist to take me back to his office and explain that I had been expelled.
LOST THINGS
What I found in the next room was a semester of danger at Interm
ediate School 44, where I relearned a number of subjects that I had mastered in the fifth grade and became dodgy about physical violence. My grandfather, when he heard that I’d ended up in public school after all, told the Celestes that I ought to learn a trade, and for a brief but frightful moment it seemed as though I might spend the summer studying woodworking in his basement. It’s odd that the prospect of going to Thebes should have been frightful. I had cried when my grandmother put me on the bus to New York, only a few months before, and after the bus pulled out of the station I took a pocketknife from my bag and scratched SHELLEY on the plastic window. I don’t remember when or how I lost the desire to go back to Thebes. Probably I didn’t lose it all at once; Thebes faded in me as a season fades; it dropped its leaves and a new kind of weather moved in. When, in March or April, Celeste asked me if I would be interested in learning carpentry, because my grandfather was willing to take me on as his apprentice, what came into my mind was not the Thebes where I had kissed Shelley, or even the Thebes where I was in love with Yesim, but a hot, stuffy Thebes that was made from my grandfather’s workshop and visits to antiques shops and long dinners listening to the news from the Catskill Eagle.
“Can’t I go to camp?” I asked.
Celeste raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I thought you liked spending the summers in Thebes.”
For years I’d wanted her to acknowledge that fact; now that she had, I contradicted her without hesitation. “Thebes is stupid,” I said. “There’s nothing to do there.”
I couldn’t really have forgotten about Kerem and Shelley and Yesim; rather, I think Thebes was always a picture done on both sides of the page, and I was able to keep only one side in my mind at a time. Now I had turned the page over. If I had gone to Thebes that summer, I would probably have been surprised at how interesting it was, and surprised that I hadn’t remembered. But I went to Camp Hockomock, in Maine, where I became friends with Spencer Bartnik. It was a happy coincidence, a little thread of continuity, like a drumbeat carried by a DJ from one song to the next. We spent the summer smoking cigarettes that Spencer’s brother sent him in the mail, and listening to the heavy heavy monster sound of Madness. I didn’t think of Thebes once, or if I did, it was as a place I had been a long time ago, or maybe a place I had read about, where everything was smaller than in real life and very close together, like the figures in a diorama, who represent different aspects of native life, say, washing clothes and hunting, faithfully, but not the distance that would have kept those activities apart. That’s how my summers in Thebes are in my memory, and even now, as I try to return them to their actual size, I notice that the interesting events cluster together, as though all that was good or decisive in that part of my life happened all at once, to relieve me of the burden of having such a long past. Was the summer Kerem got his computer really the summer after I was in love with Yesim? Was the summer I was in love with her even the same summer as Man and Woman? I don’t know. It might just be that I’ve run the tracks together at the point where their beats match, to keep things going, to keep there from being a long moment when no one dances. If so, I’m sorry, and I hope you will understand. I’ve been wanting to dance, myself, and maybe to have others do a little dancing.
Luminous Airplanes: A Novel Page 11