The Voices in Our Heads

by Michael Aronovitz

  He’d picked up on their dislike of him and made it a point to go all the way with his commitment to code, overcompensating to spite them and himself, and during his preps he planted himself outside the boys’ bathroom on floor two, policing it, timing the visits, writing kids up who weren’t even on his watch, obsessed with making as many students hate him as possible it seemed, just so he could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was the one in control.

  Ben had asked him earlier in the year if he really didn’t mind that he sit at his desk in the corner during the accounting academy. Of course Tanner claimed he didn’t mind in the least. What else could he say? Barring Ben from the class would have meant that he had something to hide, and according to “the book” he was doing exactly what he should have been doing. Hence, Ben was witness to a Tanner disaster every Friday third period. Oh, Ben told himself that he played squatter, pretending not to watch nor hear, because he did his best planning at his desk where he had his floor file-case handy, and his bookshelf close by, and his dictionary and thesaurus and computer at arm’s reach, but it wasn’t a matter of convenience and he knew quite well that both of them knew this. Clearly, it had gotten to the point that his ditching would be taken as a sign that it was too painful to watch, that the ship had gone down, and on the other side of the see-saw, if Tanner asked him to vacate, it would be an admission of absolute failure, that his troops hadn’t been properly trained for prime time, that he had to reboot behind closed doors and start over. Oh, they were locked into each other by the same twisted logic that made Tanner play bathroom sentry, the difference being that the same rotten bastard-kids became angels for Marcus, and a reminder of his talent didn’t hurt him any.

  “All right, sit down, sit down, ladies and gentlemen.” Tanner’s hands were clenched at his sides. He made the center of the room and put them on his hips. His brown eyes were flat and hard.

  “Do it now,” he said, “I mean it.” They quieted a little, but next to him Rasheed was clearly ignoring the command, still standing under the TV, still reaching, dress shirt bucking up showing flab.

  “Let’s go,” Tanner said, trying to guide him by the shoulder. Rasheed turned and said smoothly,

  “Hands off, niggah.”

  “Then sit.”

  “K . . .”

  Sheed made for the aisle, but took his sweet old time about it. He had on a Sponge Bob backpack four sizes too small.

  Wassif sat his gangly, pimply self smack on the corner of his chair, upended it, and fell to the floor. Mikey Nagle jumped up immediately. “Yo, you spilled my juice!”

  “Shut up,” Malikah said.

  “You shut up,” answered Randall from across the row.

  Shaneeka stopped trying to apply lipstick using the back of her iPod as a mirror and slapped it on the desk.

  “Mr. Tanner, when the portfolios due?”

  Someone chucked a paper airplane. Off in the corner someone with a bubble bottle was blowing off floaters, and Tanner turned his back to the room. He went to the board and started writing down names.

  “That’s wac, yo,” someone said.

  “Hey Tanner, can I have a calculator?”

  “Tanner, I lost my pad of graph paper.”

  “Yo, Tanner, what’s the tax code for married no children, I forget.”

  “Get out your textbooks,” he said, “or I’ll put all your names up here, I swear to holy God.”

  “It’s not nice to swear,” Lovie Jones said. She smiled, batted long fake eyelashes, and reached under her desk for her book. A few students groaned and followed suit. There was mumbling, but quiet mumbling now. Tanner walked to the center again, clearly feeling as if he’d grown taller.

  “Page 242,” he said. “Chapter 17. Everyone will read a paragraph out loud starting with Stephen in the back, then going to the right, and snaking back row by row.”

  Ben frowned and forced himself not to shake his head in disdain. The good old round-robin. The strategy banking on the idea that each student listened to what the other was saying, all of them comprehending the chapter together like a quaint little family. But of course that was never the case. Even now, he could see the kids subtly pointing, counting off, predetermining the paragraph they’d be responsible for so they could silently rehearse.

  He did shake his head a bit, couldn’t help it, goddamn it. Reading aloud was a performance skill, not a reading skill, and it was hell and gone from anything that even remotely had to do with accounting. How could one be expected to know what was coming next, line by line, in a fucking read-aloud? As much as English teachers claimed there were “rules” and “guidelines” to writing, all writers contrasted one another dramatically, in voice, in pace, in intent, in form, and even the driest of expository texts read as differently from its given brothers and sisters as the King James Bible and Gone with the Wind.

  And Tanner didn’t give a shit in a tin can if it was a good lesson or not, now did he? He wouldn’t even care if they learned the concepts well enough to pass an exam, and a recent conversation came to mind that Ben had had with a student named Maurice, after a particularly nifty class where Ben told one of his famous family mishap stories, the one where Max at age six had tried to piss in an empty Deer Park container because they were caught in a traffic jam in front of a toll booth. Accidentally, he slipped out of the rim and unloaded all over Kim’s hair. It was a good story, a funny story, and on his way out after the bell, Maurice Johnson had winked and told Ben,

  “Now that’s the way to keep us niggers in our chairs.”

  The difference was that Ben’s story had sparked a discussion about captivity that led to a serious analysis of their Frederick Douglass text. Tanner’s lesson was going to lead absolutely nowhere.

  “Stephen, read the first paragraph please. Stephen. Mr. Wagner!”

  “Huh?” Stephen had been leaning back in his chair there in the back row, neck stretched and twisted so he could watch the trees outside bow in the wind in front of the School District of Philadelphia’s main office building across Broad Street.

  “Stephen, turn around. Stephen! Look at me and put the front two legs of the chair on the floor.”

  Ben felt his stomach twist. Stephen Wagner was one of his favorites, skinny as a rail, light brown skin, freckles, and a reddish Afro claiming there might have been something Nordic or albino somewhere in the ancestral chain. He didn’t test well, so Ben had differentiated back in September, doing everything orally, and the kid had a pretty good memory if you busted things down to manageable terms. He had excellent verbal responses too, you just had to have him repeat things so you could wade through the vernacular. At least he listened. And you never had to tell him to stop texting in his lap. He was one of the rare urban poor who couldn’t even afford a cell phone.

  “Hey, Tanner,” he said, eyes slits, chair still resting on the back legs.

  “Mr. Tanner.”

  “Yeah. Miz, I mean Miz . . . ter. I got a question.”

  “Yes, Stephen?”

  “Why can’t I go on the zoo balloon?”

  “Stephen.”

  “That’s my name, niggih.”

  Tanner took a step forward, pointing a finger, loose six-gun with all the digits spread and curled.

  “Now that’s the second time I’ve heard that word today, and I won’t tolerate it. Being a black man, I find it offensive as hell.”

  “Oohh!” someone said. “You cussed. I’s telling Johnson.” Tanner jerked his glance over.

  “Go right ahead. I’ll follow you down. The next student who says the ‘n’ word gets suspended. Period.”

  Mutters. Stephen’s hand was in the air.

  “What?” Tanner said.

  “Why can’t I go on the zoo balloon?”

  “That’s not the subject of the lesson.”

  “Why can’t we have class outside?”

  “Stephen, please read your paragraph.”

  “I ain’t never got to go on no zoo balloon.”

&n
bsp; “Stephen, read the first paragraph—”

  “I ain’t no monkey in the jungle, dog!” That got a laugh from the crowd, and a couple of animal sounds on top of it. Stephen looked around and laughed with them a bit.

  “Stephen!”

  “What? Y’all don’t have to holla.”

  “Chair legs on the floor. Now.”

  Slowly, Stephen let the chair legs down, and his elbow remained slung over the back as if he was ready to run away at any moment.

  “Thank you, Stephen. Now read the first paragraph on page 242 or I am going to apply a consequence.” Stephen looked over toward the far wall.

  “Shut up,” he muttered. It was barely audible.

  “Excuse me?”

  Louder now, but he still wouldn’t look directly at Tanner. “I ain’t reading. That book’s dumb. It’s boring. It’s—”

  “Stephen.”

  “What?”

  “If you don’t read I am going to give you a detention.”

  “Go ’head.” He leaned back in his chair again and craned his neck toward the windows behind him. The class had gone quiet. Tanner spread his feet, battle stance.

  “Stephen, if you don’t put the chair legs back on the floor and read my paragraph, I am going to apply a harsher consequence.”

  Stephen pushed his knees over the side of the chair, still leaning back, ass barely on the edge, as if he was ready to run, no, ready to fly through the plate glass.

  “No,” you could hear him say. “I ain’t doin it.”

  “Stephen.”

  “WHAT?” He’d turned his head toward Tanner, face squinty and twisted in like a screw.

  “If you don’t read my paragraph—”

  “Ain’t yo paragraph! What, did y’all buy it at Walmart?”

  “If you don’t read the paragraph at this point I will report to Mrs. Johnson that you are not cooperating.”

  “Go ’head. I ain’t reading.”

  “Stephen.”

  “What?”

  “If you don’t read my paragraph—”

  “Y’all a busted record.”

  “If you don’t—”

  “This ain’t no jail.”

  “Just read the—”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause.”

  “Just tell me why?”

  “No.”

  Tanner nodded, closed his eyes, and made a loose fist with one hand, the other flat and open. He spread the affair and slowly brought the fist to the open hand before him, straight-armed in a slow, nearly rhythmic clap. He spoke with the beat, sort of.

  “Fine. You’re suspended, Stephen.”

  “For what?”

  “I will write the blue slip up after class—”

  “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “That’s the point, Stephen. According to the school handbook, refusal to work is an assault.”

  Allen Adams spoke up from the other side of the room.

  “Yo, Tanner, chill. Waggie’s already got three. Y’all about to get him kicked out.”

  Tanner kept right on slow-clapping, eyes shut, going up on his toes a bit when his hands connected.

  “He should have considered that before acting out.”

  “But Tanner—” Stephen said.

  “You should have taken into consideration—”

  “Tanner!”

  “You should have—”

  “I’ll erase the board for you for a week!”

  Tanner kept shaking his head to the beat of it and slow-clapping.

  “Not good enough.”

  Stephen was on his feet now.

  “Y’all get me expelled I gotta go to Germantown. I don’t wanna fight every day, watch my back, carry a blade.”

  “Not my problem.” Stephen had come a bit from behind the desk, dirty dress clothes hanging awkwardly off the points of his skinny frame.

  “I’ll carry your book bag.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll bring up your box of calculators every day, sharpen the pencils, wash your car.”

  “No.”

  Stephen’s voice went raw, throaty, forced up. “ I . . . can’t . . . READ, all right?” He was hyperventilating and tears shone on his cheeks. He rubbed them off with the heel of his hand, then the back of the other. Some snot stuck on like a sagging mast-line. He rubbed it all on his pants and looked around at all the eyes. He kicked over his chair, and it gave an insignificant bounce on the dark blue rug. He walked out and slammed the door with a loud clap.

  Silence. After what seemed a lifetime of a pause, Georgia Smith started reading the first paragraph, voice shaking a bit. Everyone in the room had their noses in their books now, following along with their fingers. Tanner didn’t even bat an eye. He taught the rest of the class with a smug, even control. He lost one and gained nineteen.

  That son of a bitch.

  Ben knew what he was going to do, and it scared him. He’d been a perfect little soldier his whole adult life with this, wearing the gloves, reaping the rewards, suffering no real consequences. He’d always thought he would blow it some day because he had no real will power, at least in all the other facets of his existence. If he got it in his head he wanted a Carmello bar, he wound up buying one at the CVS on the way home from work. If the vision of a Whopper danced into his mind, he’d make up a reason to go pick up cream, or eggs, or the Chocolate Truffle ice cream Max still liked so much, so he’d have an excuse to go through the Drive Thru and eat the fucking thing on the way to the Superfresh. He drank three or four beers a night and he watched Bully Beatdown, he smoked cigars once in a while and looked at old Playboys if a friend revealed that he kept a collection up in the attic. He was slave to his temptations and desires, didn’t even bother fighting them really, but the glove issue, and what caused the glove issue, had always been something to truly hold in awe, to actually fear. Plainly, he had a huge weight of responsibility on his shoulders with this, a gargantuan stone suspended over his head by a thread, pick your metaphor or allusion—he had been tied up in this since he decided to ingest the first half of it, and Ben didn’t want anything to do with the latter. The magic was too strong, and at least now, holding steady with what he’d gained, there was balance. To tell the truth, Ben had remained terrified all these years that swallowing the other half of that thing would make him believe he could beat the odds, and the thought of being that proud, that bold, that brazen, shook him to his very core.

  It would be like challenging God.

  On the other hand, what he was about to do was like playing God, and that could be interpreted as worse, depending on how you looked at it. Ben thought hard about this, thought about Stephen and his malnourished frame, his snotty tears, his chances in life. From what he had heard, Stephen’s father was dead, his mother was in jail, and he lived with a grandmother in a small dirty row house in the North Philadelphia ghetto. Rumor had it that they turned on the stove burners for heat in the winter months, and that Stephen slept on the floor of the living room with thirteen relatives. He was illiterate and was about to be thrown into the world, through suspension or social promotion, pick your poison, and dollars to donuts he’d be dead by the time he was twenty.

  Ben couldn’t save the world, but he could save one.

  Maybe.

  He could give the kid a fighting chance.

  By playing God.

  Plainly, Ben Marcus had engaged black magic way back when, and he’d gone all these years thinking it was as easy as controlling his own vices and desires. He’d never considered having a partner. The risk here was simply enormous.

  But there were fail-safes. And Ben was going to bank everything on the fact that one didn’t have to be literate to understand this.

  The bell sounded, and his last-period “C” class bolted, Belinda Barnes and Joy Rawlings joking and tugging on each other a bit too hard, the rest shouting in the stairwell just to get the good echo, as was a tradition with students with senioritis. Gerry Griege
r, Harold Newlander, and Skip Jennings lagged a bit, arguing over who was better, Kobe or LeBron, and some kids from Ben’s homeroom stopped up quickly to grab jackets and stick blazers in his desk for the weekend. Stephen came up last for his hoodie.

  “Stephen.”

  “What?”

  “Sit down, I want to tell you something.”

  Stephen turned, sweatshirt already half on, one arm in, the other searching for the opening.

  “What, Marcus? I got to make plans. Now I’s gonna get kicked out and I gotta tell my Gramma.”

  “You’re not getting kicked out. I’ll talk to Johnson myself. Sit down, please. I need to tell you something.” Ben sat back. Folded his hands in his lap. Looked at the affair. “I want to tell you why I wear gloves. The real reason. The secret reason I’ve never told anyone else, not even my wife.”

  Stephen shoved his arm through, grabbed a chair, and yanked it over to the other side of Ben’s desk. He stared intently. Ben took a deep breath.

  “It’s going to change your life, Stephen. Are you ready for that?”

  “What do you think, Mr. Marcus?”

  Ben sat forward, got out his wallet, and dug in behind the flap area that housed his Blue Cross insurance card, his debit card, the Discover that was maxed out, and his driver’s license. Carefully, he drew out a small fold of tinfoil, so old there was greenish tint in the folds and wrinkles. He blew off the lint. Opened it. Drew out a large pill, flattened a bit from his years sitting on it, dark maroon, hard gel, half gone, you could see the grooves where the two front teeth had run it through.

  “Shit,” Stephen said. “What is this, the Matrix or something?”

  Ben met his glance and held it.

  “Better. This half-pill makes you smarter. A lot smarter. But there are conditions. Rules. Can you handle that?”