by Sarah Relyea
“True enough.” Fernwood glanced slyly at Alice. “You have a brother, I suppose.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I thought so.” She frowned once more. “Come, we’ll find you an algebra book.” And she led the way along the shelves.
THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY, when Alice showed up for Joel’s math class with a graph of 3x + 4y = 12 + 7y, she learned that the class had been canceled. Coming from the hallway, Jonathan informed her that rehearsals for the upcoming Happening would now be convening on Mondays. Alice was annoyed by the impromptu change; the morning had barely begun, and she would have nothing to do. Jonathan’s gray eyes engaged her; he was more handsome than she’d remembered.
“Another library day?” he inquired, coming up close.
“Maybe. They open at noon.”
“Man,” he sighed, whistling softly, “you even know the schedule. That’s sad.” And he went off, humming the opening bars of “Eleanor Rigby.”
She’d heard rumors about the school’s Happenings: the year before, they’d gone shopping in clown face and made merry among the women shoppers, until someone complained and the manager banned them from the store; they’d appeared in a film. Even so, day after day nothing much happened at Other Paths. Pondering where Joel could be, she wandered toward the hallway.
Jonathan was there, still humming “Eleanor Rigby.” Leaning in as she passed, he murmured in a cajoling tone, “How come you’re always ignoring me?” He was handsome, maybe, but he was becoming annoying. She was blushing when Raymond came from the foyer.
Raymond paused by the door, purring, “Jonathan, my man.” Then he glanced over and added encouragingly, “I’m glad you’re having some fun, Alice.” Jonathan laughed and moved off. She found herself alone in the gleam of Raymond’s eyes.
She was suddenly angry. Though Jonathan seemed harmless enough, he’d made her remember the hassling at her old school—and was she imagining things, or was Raymond joining in? A song pounded in her head—the only things she remembered these days, it seemed, were songs and songs and songs . . . Raymond hung in the doorway regarding her, and she wondered if he was surveying her and judging her as too aloof.
Raymond fingered his mustache. “I see you know Jonathan,” he commented.
Confused by Raymond’s purpose, she held back. There was a comradely tone in the remark, a suggestion of brotherly warmth, but she refused to play along. After all, he was supposed to be a teacher.
“Not really.”
“Oh? Then who are your pals?”
She shrugged. Raymond leaned there in old jeans, unlaundered and greasy; he had gnarled, tangled hair, like moss from some dry riverbed. Though he seemed useless as a teacher, her mother had endorsed Other Paths. And so every morning she appeared in the abandoned foyer of Finnish Hall, as though sure school would be happening.
“Hey, I’m no enemy. But you’ve been here a month already, and no one knows you.” Raymond assumed a teacherly tone. “You should hang around more, be more involved. We have some cool people here. Have you met Manny?”
She was feeling too ashamed and confused to respond.
“You know, the guy who plays saxophone? You must have seen him.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“He’s gonna be the new John Coltrane. And he came to Other Paths because we agreed to work with him, let him learn what he wanted. So he’s learning about wind instruments, rehearsing a final project with a band.”
Though impressed, she had no thought of playing a saxophone.
As though reading her mind, Raymond went on. “Maybe you don’t play saxophone, but you probably do something. So all I’m saying is, hang around and find what’s happening that you can be part of.”
Several older girls appeared from the foyer: Helen and her group, followed by Maya. Helen’s group usually showed up for Raymond’s classes. Maya, the clown from the opening day, dropped in only for Joel; other days, she was busy dancing. She found her pals among the boys.
Over the heads of the others, Maya piped up, “Hi, Raymond.”
“Hey.”
“Where’s Joel?”
“He canceled.”
“That’s so Joel,” she laughed. “He’s on Parnassus Road, then.” Maya glanced around, barely nodding to the others, then floated off, leaving them with Raymond. Confused by Maya and her easy freedom, Alice began feeling a growing anger at Joel.
Raymond gazed around at the older girls. “Hey, we’re starting in a few minutes.” They wandered through the doorway to the large room. Then he turned to Alice. “Maybe you should come to my class today—Race Rap. Or do you have something else to do?”
She shrugged.
“Hang around then—you should be in class. Ten-thirty, in there.” He nodded toward one of the small rooms. “Oh, and on Friday, some of us are going to San Francisco—my Urban Survival class. You should come.”
Though she was unsure of Raymond, he was the only one there.
A few minutes later, the class began. They had been meeting for a month already; Alice was the newcomer. Raymond’s rap soon focused on Other Paths, as he harangued them for forming separate groups, white and black. Alice remembered her old school, but she no longer blamed herself for these problems.
Helen glanced at Raymond as he spoke. “But Ray—”
“No, let me finish. You guys seem to feel you’ve done the hard work merely by coming to Other Paths. Then everyone finds a group of people just like themselves, where they feel safe.”
“That’s not true, Ray—”
“Just a moment, Helen—you’ll have your turn. Now, is there anyone here who honestly feels you’ve done what you should to reach across the color line at Other Paths?”
“Ray, I’m not sure why you’re blaming me for every bad thing that happens here.”
“I’m not blaming anyone, Helen. I want us to look at the problem and start dealing.”
“You’re saying I do nothing to reach out, and that so unfair.”
Raymond leaned back, arms folded, and gazed around. “I want everyone to look around the room.”
Alice exchanged an uncomfortable glance with a nearby girl.
“Who do you see?”
Andy responded, “I see Helen and Don and Becky and—”
“Unh-unh, you know what I mean.”
Helen tossed her head and leaned back, suppressing a laugh. Her eyes flashed at Raymond.
Raymond’s face had gone red. “C’mon, someone has to acknowledge the ugly truth.”
Alice was annoyed by the game Raymond was playing, censuring them for the absence of black students in a class he’d arranged. Wondering why she should care, and emboldened by a growing outrage, she responded, “Everyone in the room is white. So what?”
Raymond pressed on with the program. “And why has no one of color chosen to be here?”
Andy perked up. “Maybe you’re unpopular, Raymond.”
“Good. And what else?”
Andy shrugged. “A lousy dancer?”
There was laughter.
Raymond massaged his mustache. “Anyone else—any thoughts?” He paused and then flung the gauntlet. “Let me reframe. Darryl Saunders and Greg Jackson turned down the class. I want to know why. What happened?” The glance was clearly accusatory.
“Oh, Ray, of course they—,” Helen began, but Andy interrupted her.
“You asked them to come?”
“I pleaded with them. Darryl was just here. Then he cut out.”
“Wow. Something really gnarly must’ve come up.”
“No, Andy, it’s not only about them.”
Darryl was a handsome, swaggering boy—and he’d blown Raymond off. Alice was amused, but then Raymond eyed her as he fingered a pen.
“Who knows Darryl?” he demanded.
Andy leaned forward, fingers drumming on the table. “He’s enrolled at Other Paths. And he’s some heavy dude.”
“When have you hung out with him—ever?”
“Naaah, he’s t
oo cool for me—knows I’m a punk.”
“Anyone else? Who hangs with Darryl, Greg, Clarence, Anita?”
“I see them every day,” Helen said, “usually on the front steps.”
“And what do you know about Clarence?”
“I saw him nodding off,” murmured Helen. She lay her head on the table and closed her eyes.
Andy thought for a moment, tapping the wood with a pen. “Clarence . . . You mean the lanky dude with the big ’fro?”
Raymond slammed one palm on the table. “You’re here every day—and no one knows Clarence? Man,” he nodded, red-faced, “I used to be just the same—absorbed in my personal world, unaware of how anyone else was living.” Raymond raked a hand through his gnarled hair. “That’s enough for today,” he summed up. “I hope you’ll have more to say next week.” Shuffling the papers that lay unused on the table, he rose, faced them down for a moment, and then strode from the room.
As the room cleared out, Alice was savoring her anger. Raymond’s performance had been unreasonable—so unreasonable that it was freeing. She owed Raymond nothing; she’d come here for school, not a harangue. Even so, she blamed Joel as much as Raymond. Joel was the Big Man; Joel was why she was here.
Soon enough she would be gone.
A DOZEN STUDENTS crowded around a long oak table in one of the side rooms of Finnish Hall. Joel breathed deeply, closed his eyes for a moment, and let the words flow.
“Today we’re going to try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine we no longer want to speak of ourselves as objects in uniform space-time. That’s how our modern Western languages teach us to see and represent the world, using a subject-verb-object grammar that gives us a subject-verb-object model of the world. ‘You do something to me.’ ‘I do something to her.’ But as we know from quantum physics, we can’t fully understand the world through the dead mechanics of Newton. The real world—revealed to us by modern physics—is eternal movement, indivisible into separate objects or essences. There’s no way to cleave one part from the larger movement and regard it as an object—a thing or essence—unless we’re willing to generate a fragmented and therefore false model of the world. ‘You do something to me’ and ‘I do something to her’ are poor models for what really happens. And so, to speak truthfully about the world, we need a language that truly represents the world. Something along the following lines: Happening is; and happening encompasses us all. There are no doers, objects, observers—only unfragmented movement that our modern language represents through false categories, such as ‘you’ and ‘I.’
“Now, we can imagine a language in which happening is primary. In Hebrew, for example, the root forms of many words are verbs; these verbs can generate nouns, adverbs, adjectives. By contrast, our modern English has many words that are simply nouns—things are often primary. ‘Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.’ We have our nouns: Japan and Pearl Harbor. Our grammar tells us that the happening belongs to Japan, the subject, the doer. Then we have the deed performed and who was impacted. Finally, we have a name for the whole: ‘the attack on Pearl Harbor.’ But how can we make movement primary? How can we speak of happening in terms of the whole—happening that involves the whole world, not just the big guns that conquered other big guns?”
Andy looked up, staring at Joel and then around the room. He leaned forward, ready to speak, wagging a finger in the air.
“Andy? You have something you want to say?”
In the pause Alice compared the sentences “Andy is speaking” and “Speaking is happening.” She wondered why it was always Andy who had something to say.
“That’s okay, Joel . . . you finish.”
“Any one of us can speak here, Andy, you know that. We’re no longer playing the permission game—we’ve given that up.”
“Okay then.” Andy removed his glasses and leaned back, forearms on the table, fingers drumming on the wood. “Are you saying—these are my own words—but are you saying . . . For example, me and my girlfriend, we’re really getting it on.” He paused, fingering the glasses, then plowed on. “And what’s really happening is: fucking is happening.”
“Go, Andy.”
The cheer came from a bearded boy who leaned back, hands laced behind his head. Alice was feeling uncomfortable.
“I mean, maybe I could say, ‘I’m fucking her,’ but there’s a truer way of speaking. There’s both of us; fucking is happening.”
Joel nodded encouragingly. “Yes, Shakespeare had a real insight when he referred to sex as ‘making the beast with two backs.’”
The bearded boy laughed. Alice glanced at Andy’s boyish body—was he joking? She could feel her face turning red.
“So,” reasoned Andy, struggling with an idea, “in the new language we can say what’s happening, but leave out the ‘me me me—’”
Helen groaned. “You should try it, Andy.”
“Oh man, she’s so rude,” Andy responded in an undertone.
“Let’s try what Andy’s suggesting.” Joel turned with a flourish to the movable blackboard and, forming square capitals one by one, produced the word “bonding.” Then he moved away. “Let’s use the prompt to speak of happening—get away from the ‘me me me’ and focus on the whole, the happening. Remember, we’re rejecting the dead forms and learning to think in a new way.”
Alice was ready; she could use words and would have something to say on paper. Rustling began as the class searched for pens; then the rustling ceased. Through the window, Alice could see swaying branches, red leaves—a plum tree.
Bonding. Her mother and Charles had taken them to Spenger’s Fish Grotto, near the harbor. They’d gone for fish and chips, and Charles had enjoyed the lobster tanks and the sawdust on the floor. She’d been wearing sandals and could feel the sawdust on her feet . . .
She wrote the word “bonding,” but nothing came to mind. Then to her dismay she remembered a scene having no place in her day—a happening that had unfolded in the girls’ bathroom of her old school. She was in the bathroom during lunch hour, examining a red blot on her underwear. Here was something new—though she’d heard such things would happen, she was unprepared. She pressed her thumb on the dampness, as though for fingerprinting; it came up covered in red swirls. A musky odor rose and hung among the common bathroom smells, the sharp reek of urine and ammonia rising from the floor and walls. Pulling some paper from the dispenser, she rubbed uselessly at the blood. There would be more during class. Feeling baffled by the new problem, she wondered what to do.
From the playground came the sound of boys arguing, then a girl came running in, feet thumping loudly. The girl would leave soon enough, Alice thought, and she would figure out what to do. For several moments the other made no sound. Then, sensing something near her feet, Alice glanced down and saw a boy’s head coming through the space under the door, face peering up. Prone on the damp floor, one shoulder jammed in the gap beneath the door, a black guy was ogling her and her bloody underwear. There was no hope of eluding the boy: his face lay at her feet, daring her to respond. She made a move with one leg and he jerked away, reappearing in the other corner of the stall. No longer pausing, she pressed her sandal on the boy’s head and shoved. For a moment he shoved back, before surrendering and fleeing. The sounds faded; she was alone . . .
She could have stomped the boy’s head, but she’d controlled herself. Now she was simmering mad as she remembered. Joel would condemn her for having such feelings.
On Joel’s blackboard, new words had appeared: “confide” and “crave.” She heard one of the girls laugh; the others were scribbling. On the paper before her, the word “bonding” refused to happen, as if marooned. She added “plum trees,” then “seagulls” and “blood.” She thought for a moment and wrote “weeds” and “fingerprint”—things rather than happenings. Frustrated, she turned the paper over and looked around the table. The bearded boy slouched, hands laced behind his halo of curls.
Joel looked up. “Are we ready? Yes, Don?”
The bearded boy leaned forward, reading from the page he’d covered in a sloping scrawl. “Some of us are occupying the land; we’re being pressured by the cops. We’re bonding—with the land, with others in the group. We’ve got bombs, in case the cops come in, and all around, unseen by the enemy, there’s a larger group harboring us. We’re holed up in the woods, up in Mendocino or maybe Canada—”
“There’s some incredible forest in Mendo,” Jonathan said.
“Yeah, Mendo. My band is playing in a redwood canyon—”
“So amazing—”
“Yeah, the sound is happening. There’s a group of us, men and women. We’re getting it on in the forest—”
“Oh wow,” Andy yelped, “an orgy!”
“Yeah, group bonding—”
“Let’s hold that thought.” Joel was pacing, his face in his hands, contemplating. “Here’s the problem,” he announced. “You’re describing a closed group—what I would call a perverse group. Closed groups come together for refuge, for self-defense; they can become rigidly authoritarian. But when we think in terms of happening, we’re dissolving rigid boundaries. What would bonding mean if we were to see it as happening?”
Helen jumped in. “A bay—water flowing in and out—a refuge, but open. Pearl Harbor—bombs—and soon there are waves everywhere. World war.”
Don was drumming his fingers on the table in a syncopated beat as she spoke. “Man, that’s so crazy.”
Joel held up one palm. “Someone always has bombs, and someone else can always respond with more bombs. But we’re not looking for world war. How can we respond to bombs—waves of sudden change—in an open way? How can we use the energy for building our world? We can run away, as you say, Don; but we can choose another way—we can use the enemy’s energy for new purposes.”
“Wow!” Andy exclaimed. “Destroying and creating—that’s what’s happening!”
“Yes, and from the crumbling old order, we can use the happening to organize our own imagining of the future.”
Alice was looking through the window at the plum tree. In the pause she heard a car passing along a nearby street, and then the warbling of a bird. From the beginning, the class had made her uneasy. Bombs; sound and orgy; closed, open, and perverse groups; the crumbling old order: here was a vocabulary for ideas she’d never imagined. The others were older; they thought in terms that were beyond her. She would understand someday, she supposed, unable to imagine a metamorphosis that would prepare her for an orgy in a redwood grove. The thought was appalling. What were her father’s words? “They have to learn these things.” No, there would be no telling Fernwood, much less her mother—even in the moments between Tom and Charles, Tom and Charles.