The Babysitter at Rest

by Jen George

  A large computer printout of a digital picture of a real picture of The Teacher’s aunt acts as wallpaper on the walls of the office. At the north end sits The Teacher’s desk at which conferences take place and where one-on-one critiques and guidance are given (also considered the best place for in-Warehouse sex, under the table blowjobs specifically). Upon the desk sit pens, a notepad, a tabletop calendar with large red X’s through all the days for the following year, and a jar of all The Teacher’s nail clippings from the past thirty years. Behind the desk, a chalkboard upon which nothing is ever written.

  Behind a closed door inside the office, there is a closet-sized room, or an actual closet, in which a television is always on. Students may go in the room/closet to watch on breaks.

  Mandatory job interview via Craigslist (#3 of 24)

  Job description (Accounting/Finance): Part-time bookkeeper/liaison/HR, Greek diner UES.

  Two hours wait time in small basement room partitioned from Head Office with ten other applicants, six female, four male, aged twenty to sixty-seven, all clothed in polyblend professional attire.

  Interviewer/Greek Restaurant owner/Boss (wearing gold necklaces and a gold crown): We maintain very high standards. Duties are interfacing, accounts payable, payroll, petty cash, financial statements, insurance records, processing, recording, depositing, permitting yourself to be the subject of degrading, thinly veiled jokes/threats of a sexual nature, tracking employees’ spending habits, pretending to be friends with employees, then providing weekly personality assessments on each employee (15–18 at any given time) plus divulgence of any confidences shared over the week, firing, help behind the counter during busy times, sweeping. We do not like our employees to have much of a social life. No friends are allowed at the restaurant. There is no discount on food. The perks are: an hourly wage that, given the current economic and geopolitical climate, is quite fair. You must write an assessment of one of the other interviewees currently in the waiting room. You have three minutes to write in order for me to judge your abilities to fulfill the position. Begin.

  I write. The Interviewer/Greek restaurant owner watches me as I write.

  Interviewer/Greek restaurant owner: Read it to me.

  Me: Assessment of woman in gray rayon skirt suit, gemstone Santa broach, with dyed red hair sitting on the folding chair with no backing foam cushion: lives close to the poverty line, most likely in the outer boroughs (possibly Staten Island), two grown sons, no husband, buys lipstick at Walgreens, age between fifty-five and sixty. May eat spare french fries, take smoke breaks, befriend sympathetic employees, and make up nicknames for coworkers. Loyal but unhappy. Is hungry often, keeps cookie chips in her purse because she read in an online women’s magazine that it’s a healthy snack at a hundred calories per half portion. Will die in a hospital bed with one of two children by her side. The night of his mother’s death the child, an adult, will go alone to a diner his mother used to take him to when he was a child and order a root beer float. Possibly french fries—she always liked them.

  Interviewer: Your description is overwrought, rambling, excessive. I fear you yourself may be too sympathetic to employees and prone to shit-talking your superiors.

  Typical school day at The Warehouse, week one

  Get to The Warehouse early so as to exhibit dedication and desire to work hard. Morning jokes amongst students. Someone goes to take a shit in the bathroom in which everyone knows they are taking a shit. Collect tubes, wires, circuit boards, pliers, try to make the circuit board light up. Jokes about attending technical school. Someone’s brother attends technical school. Apologies. Work for three hours on required projects, then stadium and vendor stall maintenance for three hours, then begin/continue work on the week’s horse grave (a.k.a. digging) for four hours, then back to The Warehouse for lecture/instruction for three hours. No one spends free time watching the television in the closet room.

  Notes

  The Teacher spends eight minutes in The Warehouse bathroom each morning. Eight is the perfect number. Infinity.

  DVB’s

  Teacher’s Sample DVB: Screen grabs of horses fucking women, an aerial shot of the Griffith Park Observatory, compound pulleys, Niagara Falls, a still from a commercial for white chocolate (a blonde-haired blue-eyed woman dressed in white stands in the snow holding a single piece of the product), a Google Maps image of an early 21st-century American street: Blockbuster Video out of business, zumba and yoga classes coming soon.

  “This is fundamentally bad, but it gives you an example of range. Say the theme is self-serve frozen yogurt,” The Teacher tells us.

  Bill’s DVB: Screen grabs of news reporters on location getting hit by bottles, trash, errant branches from windstorms, being overtaken by hurricane waves, getting stuck in mud or snow, swept away by flash floods.

  Teacher’s Critique of Bill’s DVB: Don’t use weather bloopers as an idea. The use of anything with news reporters is populist comedy of the lowest level.

  Alice’s DVB: Images of made-for-TV-movie witches and images of the boy who was in Alf from a People magazine “Where Are They Now?” interview.

  Teacher’s Critique of Alice’s DVB: The use of epochal network television movie and sitcom imagery is populist nostalgia of the lowest level.

  Clyde’s DVB: Fan art pencil/ballpoint pen on paper portraiture of George Jones.

  Teacher’s Critique of Clyde’s DVB: Are you into George Jones?

  My DVB: Screen grab of an eBay shopping results page for “Old Navy T-shirts holiday season” and an image of the New Mexican desert.

  Teacher’s critique of my DVB: This is perfect, Ranchera. Just beautiful.

  I’m wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a large scarf tied in a bow around my neck. The Teacher/older man with large hands begins calling me Ranchera from this point forward. Bill and Alice look at my DVB for a long time. Clyde sands the new countertop for the Cinnabon vendor stall.

  Oh Teacher

  The Teacher has such large, beautiful hands. The Warehouse comes to life in his presence. We’ve studied volumes of his works. We’ve read all of his memoirs chronicling his early to mid-early years and even some of his early-mid years. We’ve attended lectures by him. His good looks are devastating. We watch him get his coffee from the coffee maker and come down the stairs from the raised office. We watch his face as he waits for the bathroom. We watch him come out of the bathroom. We do our work with him in mind. We paint the signs and sweep the grounds thinking of him. We follow him to the center of the racetrack. We watch him show us how to dig the perfect horse grave. None of us can do it like him; the ground is so frozen it takes us a day’s work just to break the surface. Once we begin digging the dirt falls in the hole. Our holes are too shallow, too deep, too lopsided, too poorly constructed. Our weaker bodies have a hard time dragging and lifting the horses. No one does it perfectly except for The Teacher. The Teacher is perfect in this way. He knows exactly what he is doing. His large hands implement his will. His hands are made to do everything seamlessly. We wait for him to look at us. We wait for him to see our work. Everything depends on The Teacher. We love The Teacher. I love him, in a way. I love his hands.

  In the office

  “Ranchera, you have such lovely skin.” The Teacher puts his large hand over my head, covering my face entirely, blocking my eyes, nostrils, and mouth.

  “I don’t even hardly wash my face,” I say. He pulls up my wool skirt. I pull my wool tights down. The Teacher has a beautiful penis, like his beautiful hands. He comes inside of me. I see everything. I love The Teacher.

  Notes

  No longer say stupid things out loud. No longer say stupid things.

  Inside the freshly dug horse grave/gratitude

  While on my hands and knees at the bottom of the horse grave, The Teacher fucks me from behind and has the tip of one long index finger up my ass. With his free hand he holds me by the hair and smashes my face into the cold ground. I want to live inside the horse grave. It is perfect. The bea
uty of its construction brings me to tears. I admire The Teacher’s work as he fucks me—the smooth walls, the even floor. I want concrete to be poured on top of us so that we can stay this way always. I have never felt so full. The Teacher takes a handful of the frozen, claylike soil and shoves it into my mouth. I am fuller. “My Ranchera,” The Teacher says. We fuck all night and sleep in the horse grave.

  Teacher/Student conference: love

  Teacher: I was in love with my aunt as a child.

  Me: When she was a child?

  Teacher: No, when I was a child. She was older.

  Me: I had crushes on older guys, my mom’s boyfriends, my doctors.

  Teacher: No, not like that. I was actually in love with my aunt. I would cry when I left her or she left me. I wrote her love letters. I was consumed by thoughts of her. My heart ached for her.

  Teacher/Student conference: mother & father

  Teacher: Who is your mother?

  Me: My mother fell asleep in the passenger seat on car rides of any length. Her head would roll around and her mouth was wide open. She’s still alive. She lives in California. She goes to Subway once a week. It’s heartbreaking to watch her order her sandwich in exactly the same way each time. It’s almost too painful to even talk about.

  Teacher: She probably enjoys the routine and flavors very much.

  Me: I find it impossible to see it that way.

  Teacher: My mother lives alone. She has no friends. All of her sisters, including my beloved aunt, have died. It has only recently occurred to me that she will die very soon. She may die alone and this will be my fault.

  Me: Mothers are sad, but I think fathers might be sadder. Who is your father?

  Teacher: A ghost. Who is your father?

  Me: My father died when I was very young and for years after he died I thought they kept him in a cage at the hospital. I used to think and dream of him often. He’s gone somewhere else now; he’s left my memory. There’s no more father.

  Teacher: Welp, there will always be a father, you know, in the larger sense.

  Me: I think the time of the father may end.

  Teacher/Student conference: the right place in time

  Teacher: It is very lucky you and I have met here, in this place.

  Me: Could it have been any different?

  Teacher: I’ve watched many science fiction programs and what I’ve learned is there’s always the possibility that any moment in time could be entirely different.

  Teacher/Student conference: advice

  Teacher: When people tell you something is just between you and them, it’s never just between you and them.

  Me: Who is it between?

  Teacher: Them and everyone else. It is important to be solitary and reserved in order to protect yourself.

  Teacher/Student conference: astral projection

  Teacher: I’m over here now.

  Me: Where?

  Teacher: Over here.

  Me: Oh, now I see you.

  Teacher/Student conference: practicing telepathy

  Teacher:

  Me:

  Teacher: Me.

  Me: Teacher.

  Teacher: Kiss.

  Me: Bang bang.

  Teacher/Student conference: desire/consent

  Teacher: I want to.

  Me: So do I.

  Notes

  My worktable is piled high with books I’d like to read but haven’t. They take up the entire surface so that there is little room to work.

  Notes

  When I look at The Teacher I see him as a little boy, a teenager, an adult, and an old man. It is always so easy to see men this way. The Teacher has always been The Teacher, though, even as a little boy.

  Works

  In the second month of class, I make an oval 30’ x 20’ sculpture out of fairy wand quartz and aqua aura I’ve had shipped from Mexico titled Portal #369: Forgiving Everything Undesirable in Others So As To Be Forgiven for Everything Undesirable in Oneself & Other Venal Acts. “Good, Ranchera,” The Teacher says. “What I want from you are big things. You should begin work on the other three hundred sixty-eight portals.” I call the crystal warehouse in Mexico, but they are out of crystals.

  Works and dinner

  The third month of class I write a raga for the winter solstice called A Woman Trying to Believe in the Inherent Benevolence of the Universe that She’s Read About in Self-Help Books and Spiritual Manuals. La Monte Young comes to The Warehouse to perform it. Everyone goes to dinner after the performance. We drink wine and champagne and eat oysters and caviar in a dark room lit only by candles and light bulbs so dim it’s as though they’ve just burnt out. Our mouths are purple. We laugh. We look at each other fondly. We discuss darkness. The Teacher follows me to the bathroom, which is entirely without light. “That tune really turned me on, Ranchera,” The Teacher says. “You are doing things. This is all I want, for you to be active.” All of my work is for The Teacher. We screw on what I think is the sink.

  When we get back to the dining room, everyone has left. The bill for dinner is ten thousand dollars. “Fuck,” The Teacher says, “fucking shiiiiit.”

  Notes

  When The Teacher begins to dig a horse grave he breaks up the ground first in little motions and then plunges the shovel, forcing the smaller broken pieces to open up a hole.

  Bill on Apprentice Jockey

  I wrote Apprentice Jockey about life and work at The Warehouse. I’ll admit now that it was not the best title, but I was twenty-three when I wrote it. I think The Teacher was disgusted with me for writing about the experience—it was antithetical to everything we were taught. But, I’m almost positive he never read my book. Would I change a lot of things about it now? Yes. But when I wrote it the experience was still new, so the book sort of serves as a testament to the naiveté of youth—the divine and the stupid. Mostly stupid. Also, I was new to the city, had just gotten into sex and was fucking a lot, so there’s a lot more pornography in it than there probably should have been, especially seeing as it was poorly written, not erotic, and it had nothing to do with The Warehouse, with the exception of the experimental student orgies that took place outside of Warehouse hours. I could have pulled back on a lot of things, reined it in, so to speak. There’s a reason the cover was green. Some of the sentences in it, like “… our hands are raw as hamburger and it’s fifteen degrees out,” or, “High on pseudoephedrine, Lola sucks my dick and it occurs to me I have a project due in less than three hours,” are incredibly embarrassing—totally amateur. Talking about homework, like it’s real. But Apprentice Jockey became a definitive text on The Warehouse, a kind of cult hit. Some say it popularized the prestigious art school/workplace/maintenance training model, or at least illuminated what had previously been considered a mystery to the public.

  Bill on Lee

  Lee was loved or at least very desired by The Teacher. Everyone knew. I guess she was sexy, she was sexually attractive, but not my type. She was unaware but totally self-conscious. Simple yet complex. Young yet old. Subtle yet overt. Blonde yet brunette. Chubby yet skinny. Dumb yet deep. She always looked like she was about to cry. Or maybe she was actually crying all the time. I don’t know. She worked hard. We all did. I think Clyde also loved her immediately.

  Bill on Alice

  Me and Alice were together for some time after The Warehouse, when she was doing those elaborate shrieking performances inside the Statue of Liberty while it was closed in preparation for the coming war. She was crushed when The Teacher, interviewed for an article about Alice making it big, said Alice was a supreme buffoon and too attention-seeking. It was unkind of him, even if it was an accurate description. Alice cared deeply about The Teacher’s opinion of her and her work and was inconsolable, stayed in bed for days and didn’t work for a while after that. He always liked Lee’s style better. He saw himself in Lee, I think, more than anyone. And Lee produced the best work that came out of The Warehouse.

  Bill on Clyde

  Everyone t
hought Clyde would be an excellent maintenance man or groundskeeper, with speculation that he could be the best groundskeeper to have ever lived. If the students didn’t materialize as artists, they were looking for more practical things and some of them wanted a full-time job as head groundskeeper at the track, especially with talk of the war—it paid well, with immediate benefits, and the nature of the work would survive major political, societal, or technological upheaval due to the population’s resolute gambling addiction. Clyde excelled at his duties—mowing, finishing, water-proofing, planting, insulating—he knew the track like the back of his hand. People who were more focused on practical aspects of the program thought he was gunning for the groundskeeper position, but he wasn’t. He just had a natural intuition about the place. There was a rumor he was a reincarnation of a certain prize horse that’d been buried under the track a couple decades before, but I don’t know where stuff like that came from. Clyde had no ambitions whatsoever. The first day of class, he told me he hadn’t even applied to The Warehouse; he just showed up because he got an acceptance letter that told him where to be and when to be there. He didn’t know who The Teacher was beforehand. He didn’t have any idea of what he wanted to do, I think. It was the same way when he left. He walked out past the stables and didn’t come back, like it was just time to leave. At least I think that’s how he left. I never saw him after that anyway.