Stormfuhrer

by E. R. Everett

  Richard Hayes awoke in a state of pitch-black burning filth. His nose and eyes were raw. He could barely breathe; all was dark in the plastic helmet, his chin and neck coated with drying chunks of vomit. Richard crawled to his makeshift desk and reached for a knife. He began to cut the straps and flung the helmet off his head and across the room, hitting the tile floor with a crack and finally rolling across the kitchen's linoleum. Fraulein had been lying next to him. It was her whimpering that awoken him.

  Staggering, he stood and looked at the computer. He thought of his classroom, the computers, the cables, the painted window, the speckled sound-absorbing school-house ceiling tile, the aircon blowing against the cardboard boxes. It all looked different in his mind. He immediately thought of the students, some probably having experienced what he had experienced—maybe far worse. Which were guards? Which were prisoners? He pitied them. As of this morning, this wasn’t just an online game.

  Richard stayed home the following week. He had months of sick days saved up and used up a small fraction of them while recovering from the mental and physical exhaustion of that Saturday morning. He didn’t touch the game in that time but rather took long walks with Fraulein across the scrubby fields and even worked a little in his small, weedy garden of spicy peppers and cilantro. He also started to plan classroom routines that didn’t involve the game, like in years past, before he discovered it, when he would rotate students through computers and Internet activities in pairs and small groups. Daily, he faxed new lesson plans to the school secretary. Most of the students wouldn't be happy though some might be relieved. The refrigerator boxes would need to be flattened and moved out of the room.

  When Hayes returned to school, a few students showed some concern for his absence. A rumor had begun to circulate that he was getting chemotherapy treatments. Cards and small gifts filled his desk and mail cubby: “To the greatest teacher ever! Get well soon!” A shiver ran up his back as he read these, looking out at the classroom and wondering about the individual experiences that had occurred within those dark boxes.

  Over the next weeks, Richard Hayes still used his computers and students worked collaboratively through applications via the normal Google browser. He had discontinued the use of the game, avoiding any reference to it when he could, almost as if it hadn’t ever been played. When students started to complain after the first few days of his return, realizing that this wasn’t just a temporary stay in their learning routine, Hayes would simply mutter something nebulous about the browser not working with the new software upgrades. Several of the brighter students offered to help him get the problem fixed, but Hayes would just smile. “Thanks guys. We’re doing what can be done.”

  Hayes pretended not to notice when students insisted on the game, repeated daily for a while, during every period by some of the more vocal seniors. Gradually, however, routines began to reshape themselves. Learning continued in his history class though enthusiasm waned well below what it had been. Over several weeks, senior attendance dropped. A few students had just stopped showing up.

  CHAPTER 5

  Spring 2023

  Naturally, it started with armbands.

  The word was written in white on a black background: “Erwachen!” (wake up). Some, for some inexplicable reason, had it written in Chinese.唤醒 . Two seniors had come up with the idea and began wearing the armbands as paper and tape constructions. Some of the girls wrote it in pink, some with pretty hearts and matching bracelets. A few football players included their jersey numbers on the armband along with “Seniors 2023”. Toward the end of the spring semester, nearly half of the seniors had armbands.

  The other half of the senior class, by contrast, wore a small green button, almost invisible, on their lapels that read “Schlaf!” (Sleep!) or simply wore nothing at all. Eventually, as it was rumored amongst the faculty, those refusing to wear the armband were forced to wear the button—by some of those wearing the armband. No adult member of the staff, however, could find out whether or not this was true. It was more likely, thought Hayes, that the buttons began as a rebuttal to the armbands and were worn proudly, both sides wearing signs of their prior roles in the game in terms of sides. Only a couple of students refused to wear either. It was as if the game continued though it hadn't been part of Mr. Hayes' lesson plans for months.

  The game had been real and highly addictive, not like studying indifferent equations or disembodied facts in a history class or forgettable terms like “iambic pentameter” and “endoplasmic reticulum.” The game had appealed because, unlike nearly all other learning at the school, it had slant. You couldn’t avoid choosing your side. Being and choosing was the game. It wasn’t an indifferent essay on the narrative structure used by a bright little Jewish girl writing in a journal while hiding with her family behind a bookcase in Holland. You were either the little girl in a train or in a camp or in a ghetto trying to stay alive past the next culling, or you were the one dragging out families from hiding, incrementally climbing the ranks with every capture. You could find a family and drag them all to an awaiting truck or lock them into a windowless, packed boxcar and hose them down through the high bars on a cold winter’s night, with frigid water meant to bring frostbite to maybe eliminate some of the weaker ones. That sort of thing could mean promotion. You could be a camp commander and issue reprieves to a group of political prisoners at will--risking a stab in the back by an inferior or the possibility of becoming fodder for Polish bayonets the very next week. That had been the game. It was over now.

  In the weeks after Richard Hayes put an abrupt and unexplained end to the game, the groups began to form. In the lunch lines, for instance, some noticeably allowed those wearing the Erwachen band into the front while the seniors wearing the green buttons lingered behind; many even stood behind underclassmen, taking their places in the rear. Richard had even noticed a few juniors and sophomores wearing the armbands.

  Hayes wasn’t the only adult to notice the radical behavior of the seniors. Administrators and some teachers had condemned the armbands from the first day, some even giving wearers punitive after-school duties and even in-school suspension. A particularly vocal parent, however, an Equal Rights lawyer who had a particular interest in school law, defended the students’ rights to freedom of speech, citing a recent incident in California that was eerily similar, in which the court unanimously upheld students’ rights to wear armbands as a symbol of political voice.

  After a few weeks the legality issue went to the School Board. The Directors, already busy with the State’s new testing models and the hiring of several school principals in the district, gave in, trying to avoid an ugly and expensive legal battle in which there was already a precedent. Ultimately, the students only went a few days without the freedom to speak from their respective cliques in the forms of buttons and armbands and sometimes stickers on the shoulder straps of backpacks.

  It was in this climate of Game withdrawl that something really disturbing began to happen, as far as Richard Hayes and some of the other teachers were concerned.

  “STEVEN IS A GAY JEW. HE MUST DIE.”

  This first appeared on Mr. Perry’s whiteboard one Tuesday morning. Steven Muniz, an awkward sophomore, known for keeping to himself and wearing shirts displaying his favorite death-metal bands, hadn’t been seen in his classes for several days. Then, according to the more reliable teachers’ lounge sources, Steven Muniz was placed on home-bound services for the rest of the year, having suffered a car accident the previous week. Administrators kept tight-lipped on the matter as it was still under legal investigation. Clearly, it was more than a car accident.

  The principal, Coach Mason, called Richard Hayes into his office in early March. It was a mild afternoon, and Richard had been chatting with a female colleague during bus duty. He was summoned through the intercom.

  Mason stiffened as Hayes walked in and sat himself down in a chair opposite the principal’s desk.

  “What do you know about the armbands and the gr
een buttons?” Mason wasn’t wasting any time.

  “Seniors playing politics or something. Fairly harmless, as far as we know,” Hayes responded. He had his doubts about this, but nothing was yet proven. He was blushing; he knew the strange behavior of the seniors had much to do with the game, but after all, it all started after he ended the game, so he still thought others might not see the connection. He hated the dishonesty that this position implied, but his career, after all, was on the line.

  “Do you know about Steven Muniz?”

  “I know he’s homebound. Was it a traffic accident?”

  James Mason paused, staring Hayes in the eyes, Mason’s small blue eyes darting from one eye to the other. “He was beaten by one of the armband-wearing thugs.”

  “Beaten?”

  “It was what they’re calling a hate crime.” Mason, a principal for many years at the school, spit into his trashcan and adjusted the tobacco in his lower lip with his tongue as he spoke, revealing small, discolored dentures.

  Hayes had not remembered old Coach Mason ever seeming so direct with him before. No talk about the price of cotton or the high taxes the local people were paying to keep the State’s nearly-bankrupt system afloat. Nothing about the travails of his wife, a French teacher at another district, where teacher-student ratios were nearly 40 to 1.

  A huge fish tank stood in a corner. The large goldfish and snails that Mason had brought in to keep down his blood pressure seemed to work. Nothing fazed the man. He’d seen it all. Until now, maybe.

  “Do they know who did it?” Hayes was by now sitting up in the faux-leather black seat.

  “Nope. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Nothing,” replied Hayes.

  “Well, I have to ask. I’m asking all the teachers and staff what they know. No one seems to know anything. He was found in a ditch in front of his house on Monday morning, October 21st. He was gagged and bound with duct tape. I won’t go into too much more detail, I can’t really, but he had been . . . impaled.”

  “What?”

  “A pole or something was . . .”

  “I . . . I know what impaled means.” Hayes frowned. He felt a chill of fear run down his back and arms. His heart was beating fast. Both men were silent for some time.

  Hayes began, “No suspects? No evidence? What about fingerprints?”

  “Whoever he or they were wore gloves, we think. He had been in a nightclub parking lot in McAllen. His car was found there with the keys in it.”

  Hayes thought for a moment and looked down at his own hands. He remained silent.

  “You still playing that game in your classroom? What is it . . . that Nazi game?”

  Hayes shook his head. “No. Not any more.” Hayes knew that Mason knew the answer to the question already. “Trying to cover all the State objectives, you know. Can’t hit them all with just one method.”

  Mason was old fashioned and thought textbooks were still the best way to teach. Still, he knew a good teacher when he met one and it didn’t take much observing of students totally absorbed from bell to bell, year after year in this teacher's classroom, to convince him that the school had a rare one in this Richard Hayes. He spit again into the can.

  “They’re gonna want to look at that game of yours. It’s just too weird all these arm bands and cliques among the seniors, I mean more so than the usual nonsense, and then the Muniz kid. He didn’t have many friends, but his parents don’t know of him ever having been threatened before either.”

  “How do they know it was a bunch of students that did it? The armbands?”

  Mason mused. “Yep, just the armbands, that's all we have . . . and talk about your game. Somebody had written, ‘Steven is a gay Jew and must die’ on Perry’s whiteboard. You heard about that, right?”

  Hayes thought quickly. As much as he hated the idea of a student he’d seen walking the halls getting hurt, self-preservation began to fight against the desire to learn anything more that might tie it to him. “I heard about that. Still, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with waking up or sleeping . . . or any of that stuff they put on the armbands.” No, he didn’t want to know any more for still another reason. Sure, the less he knew, the less he’d be dragged in. But he would also want to find who did it and wring from them what the game had to do with it, if anything. Was it a game experience they were acting out?

  “You know the armbands didn’t start until weeks after I moved on to another method. They weren’t playing the game when the first armbands appeared.”

  “That’s what I gather,” Mason responded, smiling, standing up to put on his coat, a sure sign that the meeting was over. “If you hear anything, let me know. This is a butt-ugly business. Retirement sure is sounding sweet these days . . . what with all the teacher cuts and what not.”

  Hayes motioned to leave when Mason sat back down with a growl, dropping his coat on his desk as he did so. “Wait. Just one more second.” Mason sat with the fat fingers of his meaty hands locked together. He looked at his hands for several moments with eyes narrowed but sharp.

  “I want you to bring back the game.”

  “What?”

  “Like you said, there’s no real connection between the game and this kid’s situation. It’s not like he was attacked while playing it. In fact, maybe he was attacked because the kids stopped playing it.”

  Hayes closed his eyes. He wasn’t liking where this was headed.

  “The fall semester’s senior attendance was the highest it had ever been in the history of this school--even compared with the 1950s. Hell, their absentee rate last year was lower than the other three classes combined. Teachers were starting to collaborate around what you were doing . . .”

  “I’m not thinking that’s such a good idea.”

  Mason continued without seeming to hear Hayes’ comments, “You know, I was in a conversation with one kid--that Martinez kid that’s always in and out of Alternative. Well, he hadn’t gotten writ up all first semester and all he talks about is your game. No that’s not right. All he talks about is what he’s learned in your game, history stuff. He actually said that he was afraid to get into trouble because if he was taken off campus he wouldn’t be able to play your game.”

  “It isn’t my game. There are other ways to . . .”

  “You know, I sat in on a geography class a couple of years ago--won’t mention the teacher by name of course--and not one kid in the class could point out where Poland was on the map. In October, I believe it was, I listened in on some kids talking back by the back stairwell. You know what they were talking about?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “They were working up what they called a “counteroffensive” in case the Germans decided to invade Russia.”

  “Barbarossa . . .” Hayes began.

  “Yes, I figured that out pretty fast. I did teach world history for twenty-seven years.” Mason smiled, giving his head an ironic tilt. “Well, they were detailing out between three of them how they could get such and such numbers of horses and supplies to the troops in Ukraine to bolster the border’s defense. The game is teaching these kids about planning. There’s math in it, there’s science, there’s history.”

  “Yes, sir. There’s also morality. They were forced to make choices about whether or not to sacrifice themselves, their careers, their lives, for others, for what they knew to be the right thing.”

  “Exactly! Moral dilemmas . . . right and wrong. We need to be teaching that kinda thing nowadays! God knows too many parents don't!”

  “The problem is . . . at least this is what I suspect . . . is that they were mostly making the wrong choices. Promotion . . . sometimes survival . . . in the game often requires them to make choices that hurt other players.”

  “They were learning dammit!” Mason’s face was turning bloodshot.

  Hayes was quiet. “They were learning,” he repeated. That was certain. It was hopeless trying to convince Mason to keep the game out of the school. Sure, the school got more
funds when attendance was up, but that wouldn’t completely explain why, even in the face of a lawsuit, a guy like Mason wanted to keep the game going. Hayes himself knew the incredible educational value of the game, and Mason thought that it might act as an outlet for the students, a relief valve for their teen angst, but Hayes saw a danger in it that Mason wasn't seeing. He doubted that bringing it back would make the armbands disappear.

  Then again, these seniors would graduate in May and that would be the end of it, regardless of what happened in their lives afterward. No, the school still had a responsibility to keep students safe, even if it meant that they learned less, a lot less. Mason, as rare as he was--an instructional leader among managers and highly-paid state exam clerks--didn’t see the game as a safety issue. That meant he didn't really link the game to the Muniz boy's assault. To him it was just an online game.

  Richard left the man’s office. Hayes’ balding crown was sweating, and the edges of his curly tufts of hair had become damp. He wiped his pate and looked at the perspiration on his hand. It wouldn’t be long before everyone in the small town knew that the Muniz boy was never in any car accident. It was even likely that Hayes was one of the last to find out. There would be hell to pay if anything like this ever happened again.