Playground Zero

by Sarah Relyea

  “Other Paths?” The woman furrowed her brow. “Never heard of it.”

  Alice slumped in her seat.

  “Well,” pursued the woman, “I thought today was the first day of school. Am I wrong?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should be there—at Other Paths.” The woman’s eyes had become warm and humorous, as if she’d just heard a marvelous, improbable story and was eager to impart it soon.

  Alice squirmed in the chair, wanting to speak. But she only said, “I suppose.”

  “I’m sorry,” concluded the woman. “Then you really shouldn’t be here, should you, if they’re expecting you on . . . other paths. It’s the law, you know.” And she peered for a moment at the army insignia on Alice’s shoulder before glancing around the humongous room.

  “I know,” Alice said, her tones echoing oddly. She paused and then forged on, “But they sent us away early.”

  “Oh?”

  “I went this morning. I was early, maybe, because when I got there, no one else was around. Well, I found a teacher—three of them—in a kind of storage room—”

  The woman suddenly laughed.

  “—and then as we were talking some others came, they were older than me, and one of them, well—”

  “Please go on.”

  “One of them played the saxophone, and a girl in clown face was dancing—there was a lot going on, but when I thought we’d be starting classes, the teacher told us we were through for the day and should come back tomorrow.”

  “I see,” said the woman, furrowing her brow. Alice no longer shrank from the look. “And what were you supposed to do all day?” the woman demanded.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe—” But the morning’s fervor had no reasonable sequel. “Just have fun, I guess,” she concluded, though the idea sounded improbable.

  “I see.” The woman glanced at her, as though turning something over in her mind. “You could go home, you know. Maybe that would be best.” As she spoke a smile warmed her face, erasing her words.

  “No, please,” murmured Alice. Then pulling herself together, she added, “I really can’t. There’s always Tom and Charles, Tom and Charles—”

  “And they are—?”

  “Tom is my father. My mother plans to marry Charles.”

  “I see.”

  “My mother has an awful lot to say about them both.”

  “I can imagine.” The woman laughed loudly. “Well,” she went on, “you’re enrolled in school, it seems. So maybe you should spend the afternoon here. I could show you how to search for books—you know, the card catalogue and all.”

  “That would be very good of you.”

  “Come, I’ll show you around, and then if you think of something you’d like to read, I can help you find it.” She paused and held out her hand. “Call me Fernwood. And your name?”

  “Alice.”

  “Welcome to the Central Library, Alice.”

  They shook hands.

  Fernwood led her toward the stacks of books. “What do you read?”

  “I’ve been kind of busy.”

  “Tom and Charles?”

  “Well, and other things—”

  “You need something to do, I can see,” Fernwood observed. “But where shall we begin?”

  “I used to read Lord of the Rings.”

  “Oh yes, everyone reads that. Hmmm . . . do you enjoy adventure books, then?”

  “I’m not sure . . . yes, I suppose.” Alice really had no idea what she wanted to read.

  “And how old are you? I’ve been trying to guess.”

  “Seventh grade.”

  Fernwood frowned. “I imagined you were older. Hmmm . . . I’ll round up some books, then, and you can choose.” She moved off through the stacks, pausing now and then to pull something from a shelf. As soon as she had an armload of books, she returned to the table. “Have a look through these.” Then, as she turned to go, “I assume you’re planning to come back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. If there’s something you want to see again, I can hold it for you at the reference desk.”

  “Thank you.”

  Fernwood returned to her work. Alice reached for the books; on top was a magazine. She opened to the cover story, on the war, and began reading. The page blurred before her eyes. She had assumed she would be in school—now, it appeared, she would be on her own. There were many things to study—or so she’d heard. But she knew only the words: algebra, chemistry, French. She’d learned some French phrases, but only a few, and how would she continue on her own? She’d never seen a book for learning languages. She glanced over at Fernwood, who was busy sorting a stack of index cards; she would inquire tomorrow. And she’d always been good at math—Joel Cohen would teach math, her mother had promised. She would see about that.

  When she reached home, she ran to her room and hung the Finnish army jacket deep in the closet, where her mother would never go. Maybe that was the problem: like the Finns, she’d always been caught up in someone else’s fight. From now on, she would be fighting for herself.

  OTHER PATHS HAD an unbalanced core, formed around Joel, Raymond, and amorphous groups of students. A class schedule appeared, but the classes had odd names—Philosophy of Games; Randomness and the Unconscious; Race Rap; Urban Survival—and none of Joel’s staff had done much teaching before coming to Other Paths. Moreover, each class gathered weekly for only two or three hours, following a college plan—or so her mother announced when shown the weekly schedule, her face aglow as though she and her daughter would now be sharing a source of pleasure and power. Coming from her mother’s glow, Alice was dismayed to see Joel, Reggie, or Jerome showing up for class and then hurrying away, like roguish uncles, in the company of a chosen young person or two, leaving Raymond to play camp counselor. The regular school would have more going on, but her mother had chosen Joel’s newfangled program, and Alice had her own reasons for going along. The place seemed safe, at least, and she’d had enough of being harassed. Even so, there were days when she had nothing to do, and Other Paths had no reading room, only a girl who slumped in the foyer with a book. Alice found herself dropping by the school in the morning, in case something was happening, then passing a few hours in the Berkeley library.

  During the early days, Alice clung to hopes of Joel, though he always seemed to be conferring with older students, sharing a sly camaraderie. Only by demanding something specific would she engage him, she concluded. And so one day, finding him alone in the large meeting room, she crossed the room and asked if she was old enough for the math class he offered.

  “Old enough?” he asked softly. “Why are you asking me?”

  “Because I’m only in seventh grade,” she responded.

  “And so?” Joel’s eyes surveyed her, unimpressed.

  “And so I’m wondering—”

  “Yes, I see. But why are you asking me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, feeling she was annoying the Big Man.

  “Because you’re the one who has to choose. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Joel paused. “If you want to see if you’re ready, come to class. Then you can choose. But I’m not choosing for you.”

  Alice wondered if she’d just had a lesson in unlearning. Maybe—or maybe Joel was more like her father than he seemed. Though he was unimpressed by her, she could deal with that. She would call him on his bluff.

  Joel’s math class assembled on Wednesday mornings in a small wood-paneled room. The group around the large table had less hippie glamour than Maya, Manny, or some of the others; they were Joel’s club of older boys. For a moment, Alice thought of leaving: the group was clearly over her head. But before she could go, Helen came through the door in a purple bandana, her moody energy zapping the room just as Joel appeared.

  Soon Alice understood why Joel had been so casual about her level. He spoke eagerly, though
incomprehensibly, about concepts and symbols she’d never heard of before, but there were no numbers or equations. Nor would there be any way of measuring her progress: there, as well, he was leaving things up to her. Having nothing to lose, she chose to stay and see what would develop.

  One day Joel introduced a class project: designing a new Happening, to be known as “Asylum.” Modeled on a game, but occurring as a real event, the Happening would be performed in the streets according to rules designed for Berkeley, Chicago, or Paris. Peopled by cohorts of hippies, cops, and workingmen, it would include pop-up performers empowered to transform the rules mid-game by formulating a few changes and then announcing them to a chosen cohort. The other performers would then have to deduce the changes from the cohort’s subsequent moves.

  Joel had a plan—he was teaching them to change the rules and choose for themselves. But as he lay the groundwork, Alice’s thoughts caught on numbing images: the group on Telegraph Avenue, drugs, her defeat by Johnny. Had she chosen those experiences? Or had they chosen her? And once such things had happened, how could she unlearn them?

  As she pondered the day with Johnny—he was the real reason she was here, that much was becoming clear to her—a boy waved one arm, ending her jagged daydream. Small and sharply wound, one of the younger boys in Joel’s group, he had brown, sun-bleached curls and John Lennon glasses. “I remember learning to play chess,” he announced, leaning over the table’s scarred wood surface. “I learned from my older brother. But there were some rules he never told me, and so we’d be there, playing a game, and suddenly he’d do something I had no idea could be done. And I would be, ‘Man, you just cheated,’ and he would be, ‘Oh wow, maybe you were high and just forgot.’”

  The group laughed. Joel nodded. Alice remembered how annoyed she’d been when her brother played that way with her.

  “So, what I wanna say is—how do you know if they’re performing a new rule or if they’re just cheating? You dig?”

  Joel was nodding joyfully; the boy had clearly scored. “Oh yes, Andy, I can dig. You’re bringing up something important: When do we have a real change of rules, and when do we just have cheating? How can we know a game changer from a fraud?”

  They change the rules on you—sure, they’re cheating, thought Alice. She remembered how her father had probed, demanding that she remember facts and rules—but that was long ago. In Washington, the number of congressmen had seemed worth knowing; now Congress was a phantom player in a faraway game, while the real odds were unfolding here. Johnny had trampled her; he’d changed everything. She’d been taught rules, but now the game was to break them. She wandered among wolves.

  In the glow of Joel’s encouraging gaze, Alice remembered how she’d seen Valerie that day, before Johnny had found her. She’d been looking for someone familiar when the boy had come along and duped her . . . She could feel her face blushing with shame. If only she could go where no one would see her; but an older boy—he was named Jonathan, and he wore a pony tail—glanced over. Why was she always feeling caught?

  Joel leaned on the wood and pumped, as though engaged in some form of pushup or maybe a summoning of the dead. “Well,” he pursued, pondering aloud, “let’s consider chess for a moment. Do we know all the rules of play?”

  “We could find them—they’re in a book,” Andy responded. “I know, ’cause I had to go and read them.”

  “And what happens when someone changes them?”

  “You mean my brother?” Andy paused. “No, man, you don’t understand. He never changed the rules—he just never told me some of them.”

  “So, one day you found a book and read them for yourself.”

  “Damn sure. And he never won another game.”

  Helen leaned back and gave a mocking cheer: “Go, Andy!” Then she unbound her purple bandana and began rumpling her hair.

  Joel pursed his mouth and gazed around the room. “Now let’s ask: When are there rules for changing the rules?”

  Another pause followed. Jonathan, the boy who’d caught Alice blushing, spoke up. “In sports. You know—rules change in overtime, or when there’s bad weather, or . . .”

  “Good.” Joel nodded slowly around the room, letting the insight seep in. “Now, let’s go back to our Happening. Someone changes the rules—are they cheating?”

  Helen folded her arms. “No, as long as they’re changing the rules the way we say they can. As long as they’re not like Andy’s jerky brother.”

  One of the older boys laughed. Helen eyed Joel, hoping for a nod from the Big Man, but Joel changed gears.

  “Let’s move on,” he suggested. Helen’s hand went up.

  Joel frowned. “If you have something more to say, then go ahead, Helen,” he responded coolly. “But no hand-waving here, remember?”

  “I forgot,” Helen sighed. “Never mind.”

  Joel folded his arms and paused. They were unlearning hand-waving, Alice concluded.

  “Oh, just go on,” Helen groaned.

  Joel resumed. “Let’s take up something more real than chess—let’s make some rules for the Berkeley performance.”

  Alice could sense a change in Helen’s mood. She glared around, flamboyantly bored, as some of the boys began by recalling the People’s Park days. Then Andy jumped in.

  “Okay, so in the Happening we’re gonna occupy some land.”

  “Where?” someone demanded.

  “Anywhere. Who cares?”

  Helen scoffed, “Hey, Andy’s got his own commune somewhere.”

  “Maybe,” Andy shrugged, undaunted. “But anyway, here’s my idea. Once we’ve got our land, we can choose a pop-up performer. I say we choose Helen—that way she won’t be so moody. Then she can take some LSD and change all the rules.”

  “Andy, you’re so lame.”

  “You’re just mad because Joel’s ignoring you.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Let’s go back,” Joel said calmly. “The group is occupying some land—and you’re empowering one performer to change all the rules. But when you have so many rule changes, no one can figure out—”

  “Exactly. That’s my idea.”

  “But that’s anarchy.” Joel paused, contemplating. Then he gave a joyful nod. “Very good!”

  When the class ended, it was nearly noon. Andy and Helen announced they were heading for the campus. Off they ran, leaving Alice alone with Jonathan.

  “Fences are for jumping,” Jonathan remarked, perusing Alice with steady gray eyes. He had the clean, regular features of a handsome older boy. “Helen and Andy are busy changing the rules. How about you?”

  “Not sure.”

  “No?” He paused. “You say that a lot.”

  She wondered how he could know. They’d never spoken before.

  “We could go to the campus ourselves,” he proposed, scanning her face for signs of interest. “Unless you know of something better to do.”

  “I’m going to the library.” She was glad to have found a response. She would enjoy having someone to hang out with, but the boy’s presence made her nervous.

  “The what?”

  “The library.”

  “That’s what I thought I heard. Just wanted to make sure.” He let forth a moody, languorous sigh. “Wow, you had me fooled.” He paused. “So, how come you’re here?”

  “For school,” she shrugged.

  “Other Paths—school?” Jonathan leaned in, amused. “You sure seem young,” he murmured. “Well, have a good time reading.” And then he turned to go.

  For a moment she stayed in the foyer alone, wondering what other response she could have made. Helen would have found something more to say—where had she learned that? And what of Andy? Maybe he was one of the group that gathered at Joel’s house on Parnassus Road. There were rumors of the classes Joel held there—surely he had a role in the school beyond the rare appearances at Finnish Hall. Many days, she’d heard, he was happening in another place, on another schedule. Some of the older boys had a
passageway to Joel, an open door for them alone on Parnassus Road.

  That afternoon, when Alice entered the Central Library reading room, Fernwood was nowhere to be seen. Above the door hung a large clock: nearly one o’clock. Alice roamed the shelves, opening math books, searching for something she could comprehend. One book used unfamiliar symbols; another had spheres and graphs. Wondering how she could learn what they meant, she opened the book to the beginning and began to read.

  Suddenly Fernwood appeared by her shoulder.

  “I see you’ve found something new,” she remarked, leaning over the page.

  Alice held up the cover. Fernwood frowned, as usual; the frown expressed thought rather than annoyance. “That’s a college math book,” she observed. “You can look, of course, but you may not be ready for it. What kind of math do they have you doing over at . . . over at that other path?” Fernwood was forever mangling the name of Joel’s school.

  They had learned something today, Alice thought, wondering how to convey the Happening.

  “You do have math?”

  “Oh, yes, Joel had math today.”

  “Algebra, I would imagine. Usually that comes before . . . what do you have there? Oh yes—advanced calculus.”

  Fernwood was playing dense on purpose, Alice supposed.

  “No, we made up a game—a Happening.”

  “What fun. Do tell me.”

  “Well, you can choose Berkeley or Chicago or Paris. There are performers and pop-up players—the pop-up players can change some rules and then everyone else has to figure out the new rules.”

  “Hmmm. Sounds like a playground gang. And was there an object to the game?”

  “Um, occupying land and . . .” Alice was searching for a response. “Changing the rules, maybe, so the others are stumped. Then you can win.”

  Fernwood frowned, unamused. “I see.” She was glaring, though not at Alice. “And where does the math comes in?”

  “There are rules for changing the rules—otherwise you’re just cheating. And sometimes too many rules change—for example, when a pop-up performer takes LSD and changes all the rules . . .” Alice gulped; she’d revealed too much. “Joel says that’s a bad game, because when all the rules change, no one can figure them out.”