by Kate Gray
“You did nothing and Donny does this?” He holds his pipe to his mouth. “Unlikely.”
In North Korea, justice is based on loyalty to the state. Every family is placed in a class: core, wavering, or hostile. If hostile, no possibility of hospital or education, little food. If caught talking to foreigners, you disappear. Interrogation is kneeling with metal rod held between thighs. It drops, and they use it on you. No nice-nice, like talks with pipe-smoking lion pacing in his cage.
“Mr. Zurkus needs help,” I say.
He stops. No more Doppler effect of the sound. When the source of the sound wave moves, the frequency and wavelength depend on that motion. The sound appears to bend. Now, it’s a direct hit.
He turns, faces me. “What the hell is wrong with you? Your career is ruined, the school is smeared all over the TV, and you think Donny needs help? God, man.”
Who can say what teenagers do? Some of them study, take notes, go to Harvard; some lie awake and devise pranks, Young Sirs of Mischief and Misrepresentation; and some hang from rafters.
“Maybe he’s stuck in Hamlet,” I say.
“Come again?”
“Ask an English teacher, ask Alta.”
“Song, don’t be glib.”
“Glib, I’m not.”
Mr. Headmaster looks away, moves to his desk. His shoulders are rounded. He leans over the mess of his desk. The lines around his eyes are deeper; the circles are darker. What Administration means is barrier reef. They keep storms off shore. What happens when a storm is too big for them to keep away? Crashing. Destruction. What Administration forgets is the flesh. Donny is a boy, perhaps malevolent, certainly misguided.
And waves have anomalies. The sneaker wave can occur anytime, anywhere, in moderate and dry conditions. Undersea depth irregularities often focus wave energy, waves from offshore storms encounter shoaling, strong currents exacerbate incoming waves, and sneaker waves can snatch a grown man as much as 100 meters up the beach. Never turn your back on the ocean.
Sneaker-Wave Zurkus.
“We have to do something and do it now. Couldn’t come at a worse time.” He lights another match, sticks it in the pipe. Ugly habit.
“Suspending me from teaching is not action?”
“Not enough,” White says. He sucks the flame down the pipe.
What action could quell the hunger of reporters? In Korea there were incentives for neighbors to rat on neighbors. Too little food makes everyone conniving. Saying that someone sat on a pile of newspapers with pictures of leaders on the front page meant that person disappears. Saying someone plots to leave North Korea, the family disappears.
“What do we know about Zurkus?” White says. “Christ Almighty, his father is Union Textile.”
“Didn’t you go to school with him or summer in the Hamptons?”
White looks up, the stupid pipe sticking out from his mouth. Who in this century smokes pipes? He’s staring at his bookcase.
“No, he’s not a Princeton man, but Stanford.” White turns to me. “Didn’t your friend Okinawa go there?” His eyes are hot blue in the middle, like flames from Bunsen burners.
“Sam? Omura? Yes.”
Those who graduate from private education are one percent of the population. They become the top ten percent who run and own the country. Behind the scenes they operate a very simple wave model, called Destructive Interference:
Two scientists hold either end of a string. One yanks his end down, sending a wave, while the other pulls up by exactly the same amount. When the waves meet in the middle, each will cancel out the displacement of the other. The tricky thing is that the waves will not dissipate. The waves will pass each other and continue on their merry way.
In other words, each wave may lose its original intent, but each will be satisfied. That’s how it works. Donny and I don’t talk. Other people make things disappear, even though the energy keeps moving.
Sam Omura, the top donor to the sciences, the top alumnus. Mr. Teacher of Teachers. He might know Bad-Boy’s father. He might know the right words to say.
White says, “I’ll make the call. Sam Omura and Charles Zurkus III are a good match.”
Taylor / The Turbine
After Alex and his maple smell and Crisco tucking me in, taking the couch, I slept hard. You’d think I’d dream of Song and dodging reporters, of Kyle and his smashed city. But no. Water was white and everywhere.
Big water, churning, a turbine. The noise was a dump truck with gravel on a washboard road. It was the middle of the Delaware Memorial Bridge at rush hour. It was bigger than sound, no sound, just Sarah and me. Her hair was this way and that way out from her head, no weeds caught in it, yet.
Her face was shining like she was glad to see me, the big cheeks, the eyes going almond, doing the thing they do, stars for eyelashes. We could have been on the rug in the college dorm, laid out, facing each other, looking at each other, which we did sometimes, chins on crossed hands. Except we were in a turbine. Except we were in the Schuylkill. I knew that.
And in the dream we didn’t say anything, looked at each other like we were mirrors. It was like we were skewered, a metal rod through our stomachs as we faced each other, looking in our eyes, at cheekbones, at chins. The two of us pierced, turning over and over in the middle of the Schuylkill.
And with her cheeks pulled into her smile, Sarah said to me, “It’s okay,” and her brown eyes did their star thing. And she started to move backwards off the skewer, backing away.
And as soon as I moved my arm to reach for her, she turned into a crane, a red paper crane, crimson with gold shapes, folded perfectly.
And as soon as I saw the origami crane, the sound came back, and I was sucked into the turbine, tossed around, the water up my nose, white everywhere, the sound inside me, a wave taking me under, up, spinning, and there was nothing I could do.
Song / Not There
Mr. Oral Fixation made the call to Sam, related by college to Donny Zurkus’ dad. The old-boy network. This time I’m connected. Vectors of relation. While the old boys do what they do, make things go away, play Ollie North, White sends me to Rehoboth Beach, a Board of Trustee member’s summer cottage, away from reporters, carnivores of carnage. Call me Mr. Roadkill.
“Taylor, this is Song. Please excuse the intrusion,” I said into the white phone with the little note taped to the table next to it: Please use your own long-distance calling card. Of course, Miss Cheapskate Cottage Owner.
“Song, where are you?” Ms. Rower said.
“On holiday.”
“Right. Just a little vacation,” she said. Sarcasm. Smart for a rower.
“Of sorts. I’m calling about Carla.”
“You heard.” Ms. Rower’s voice went quiet.
“Bad news, you know.”
“Mrs. White loves to talk.”
“Queen Gossip.”
“Well,” Rower said, “Carla’s in the psych ward.”
“Wilmington?”
The shiny linoleum, the fluorescent lights, the smell of Pine-Sol that takes a half-life to get out of your nose, all floors are the same. The blood unit. The psych ward. East Coast hospital, West Coast hospital, all the same.
“She went last week, should be out soon.” Her voice didn’t rise, a flat wave.
That’s what we always said about our grandfather, “He’ll be out soon,” from the concentration camp, Total Control Camp No. 7. When my father and his brothers were very young and very hungry, my grandfather stole a beet root on the way back from his fourteen hours at the mine. He was arrested on the spot, and that’s the night my father and the family left for China. Then, they made their way to South Korea, came to the U.S. That’s the story. Somehow we learned where my grandfather was taken. No one ever saw him again.
“For what?” I said to Ms. Sounding Guilty.
“She said she was going to kill herself, had it all planned out.”
“And you believed her?” These new teachers, gullible.
“Heard o
f contagious suicide?”
“Psychobabble.”
“You weren’t there, Jack.”
“No, but you aren’t exactly there, either, Taylor.” The dinners where she stopped her fork midway to her mouth, didn’t pass the gravy to Eager-to-Feed Second Formers, walked through the halls with her long rower arms hugging her books like they were life vests.
“What are you talking about?” Ms. Rower’s voice goes up. More air, less space to pass through.
“You’re a new teacher. You haven’t taught a year.”
“But I know what she said.” Ms. Rower’s back in grade school.
“How can you be sure?” My father’s voice in my mouth, the riddles, the twisted logic is the ventriloquism of age. No science in that.
“What’s your point, Jack?” Young Rower turns resistance.
“There were options.”
“Maybe for you.”
“Meaning?”
“You know her. You know St. Tim’s. St. Tim’s knows you,” Alta says in her high voice, too little air through too few years.
“Empirical evidence suggests the school knows little of me.” I point out the obvious. “I will always be the outsider.”
“You’ve been there awhile.”
“That’s true,” I say. The weight Newton failed to measure transfers from Rower Dyke’s shoulders to mine. “And you are too new to know what twists the adolescent mind will take. Carla is like Kyle, too bright, too different.”
She takes a breath. “Exactly,” she says, “Carla is too much like Kyle.” And Alta turns into a planet, creating gravitational pull. I might explain G or any number of things I didn’t tell Kyle. The power of connection, through blood, diseased or not, the hyo of loyalty between siblings or students, all of it collides. The vacuum created by collision is filled by responsibility, mine to Kyle, mine to Carla, and the greatest, to my family.
“You’re right, Taylor,” I say.
Houston, we have touchdown. Ms. Rower, the teacher, has landed.
Carla / Tape #1, Side B
Me again. Other side. Day Fucking Four.
One of the most awesome things about tape recorders is the clicking, especially with used tapes. This huge, old recorder really catches the sprockets of the tape. Click, click, click. You know what they remind me of? You’re going to love this. The deathwatch beetle. They bore into wood, like in old houses, and their name comes from people who were waiting for their loved ones to die and couldn’t sleep, and they’d hear the bug doing its thing at night in the quiet. These tapes? They’re my deathwatch. Thanks for being on watch with me.
Do Little wants to know how I feel about death. You die, c’est fini. Es el extremo. Das Ende. Life sucks in lots of languages, ya know?
Reverend Moose says humans create what they need for the afterlife because life lived is too much to bear. What d’you think? You’ve been dead for how long? What’s your afterlife? From where you are, do you know what Doug’s is? I know he’s not dead.
Last time I saw Doug, he was my age. The judge opened the paper, guilty, and the courtroom turned totally flashbulb and people standing up, and Mom standing up but not saying anything, reaching for him, and Doug in his orange jumpsuit and that hair, not shaggy any more, officers leading him away. He didn’t look up, except at the door. He turned like he was trying to get the hair out of his eyes, and he looked right at me, not Mom, and he put his lips together like he was saying something, and he smiled, a little, mostly in his eyes, his eyes in my eyes.
I don’t know if I got what Doug was saying.
It’s been years since then, and they still won’t let me see him. Too dangerous or something. Was he saying, “You”?
I hate death, but I’m not going to tell Do Little. He’ll lock me up like Doug.
The poser van-fucking-Gogh says he’s not afraid of death. Why’d he miss his brain? The Whiner says everyone would be better off if she were dead. C’est vrai.
I don’t want anybody dead. Dead is lonely.
Alta and I should be closer because of dead. All I wanted to do was talk about it. But when I get around her, I get mosquitoes inside.
In her apartment before she narked on me, the mosquitoes were like old war movies, Pearl Harbor. When we watched old movies, Dad turned off the lights, and all four of us were on the couch in front of the black-and-white TV, and out of the dark, there was the buzzing sound, closer, closer, loud, all of us huddled down, and we cheered for the Americans and booed the Japanese.
You’re Japanese or half Japanese or something, right? Or adopted by Japanese? You would’ve hated my dad for lots of reasons.
Why wouldn’t Alta talk about it? Can you read her mind, Kyle? Can you let me know? I’m all twisted up about her, hating her, and other stuff.
It all makes sense when I think about that day way back. The town beach. I was maybe ten, little for ten, and Doug was maybe fourteen. Doug and I stayed after everyone else had gone home. We were out there by the cattails looking for bugs. He always loved the water ones, even more than me. Perfect time for crawdads and skimmers. A little dark, a little cool.
We had our backs to the beach, didn’t see him coming, and anyway, he might have come the whole way underwater. But all of a sudden, a big iron arm goes around my middle, and I’m up in the air, pressed flat to his wet chest, and he slides his other hand under my robin’s egg swimsuit, the one Mom bought me at Macy’s, with fish on it. I screamed and kicked, and Doug’s eyes were big, and I saw the lake and the night and heard crickets, and Doug was scared.
“Put her down, Dad,” Doug said. He was such a boy.
“Why should I?” Dad said, and he rubbed his nubby chin into my neck.
Doug’s hands went to fists, but Doug was a twig in front of us. Dad’s hand was crawly and hard under my suit. The sun setting and his arms squeezing me, I could barely see Doug.
“Cut it out,” Doug said.
“Make me,” Dad said. And he lifted me higher.
Doug didn’t move. His chest caught the light left on the lake. His chest was concave.
Dad was breathing slow and regular. He moved me a little up and down. He took deep breaths. My back got prickly rubbed against his chest.
“Tell you what,” Dad said. “I’ll make you a deal.”
“Leave her alone,” Doug said. His voice went up like it did when he was mad.
“You,” Dad said quiet, “for her.”
Dad’s arm let go a little. I pushed down, tried to wiggle out. His arm tightened back, and his other hand let go of my suit and came around my neck. He squeezed.
“Shhh, stop,” Dad said to me, like he was tucking me in. I stopped wiggling.
His hand was so big on my neck, his fingers all around. I couldn’t breathe.
“Okay,” Doug said. “Okay let her go.” Doug came toward us.
Dad said, “Good. That’s how it’ll be from now on. You for her, and no one says a word,” and he tossed me up in the air behind him. I flew, and splash! I dropped underwater. Water up my nose. Didn’t know which way was up. I swallowed. My feet were rubbery. Then, I found the sand, and the splash stopped rocking me so much, and I stood up.
It was darker, and I couldn’t see where Doug was.
Doug said, “Go,” from somewhere in the reeds.
Running was hard with rubber legs and sand and beach, and Mom was in the car in the parking lot with the lights on. Mom was supposed to pick us up. Dad was supposed to be at the gallery.
I was wet and breathing hard, and Mom said, “Where’s Doug?”
I pointed to the water.
“What’s wrong?”
“Doug,” I said, and that’s all I said. It was cold. Mom looked at the lake, got out of the car, and took a few steps toward the beach.
She said, “Doug,” like somebody might call a lost dog.
Right then Doug walked out of the dark, the horizon barely light behind him, a flat crack far away, and the crickets loud.
“Sorry, Mom,” Doug said
. He got in the front seat.
I got in the backseat. I was shaky and wet, and we never talked about it. And we didn’t tell Mom. And after that I didn’t go in the peach trees.
After that, Doug was quiet and lifting weights. He got big, weird big. He hung out at the gym with other boys with weird big muscles.
Do Little would scribble all over his yellow pad with his pencil and still try to make eye contact with me if I told this story. He’d draw lines to connect the dots: bad dad to abused brother to suicidal me.
But it’s not that easy.
Never is.
So how would your chart go? Kid tormented to suicide? Too easy.
Maybe if I can go back to the courtroom, I can figure out what Doug’s mouth said. I know he cut Dad’s throat. He took the tree saw, the pointy teeth of it, and dragged it across Dad’s throat. He did it that night after Dad gave me the car, after I told Dad to fuck off. At least, everybody said Doug did it. If I’m back in that courtroom with the shiny benches, everyone standing, and Mom reaching for him, if I see Doug’s jumpsuit and his hair cut short, him turning to me, I think he says, “You.” I think he killed Dad for me.
Tell me you didn’t hang yourself for me. Tell me you didn’t kill yourself because of me. Give me a sign.
Song / Resistance
Near where I grew up, there are beaches like these, shallow waters and sheltered expanses. Destruction of rocks and continents, sediment washed out by streams, carried to shore by littoral drift, the long parallel current caused by waves crashing at angles, and then the packing of sand by oscillating waves moving perpendicular to shore. Rehoboth Beach, playground of the elite, and their teachers.
No lab books to grade, no students to tuck in. Young men of distant parents, we teachers in loco parentis. But not any more.
Little notes on index cards everywhere in the house: Please take garbage with you, and Jiggle handle if toilet runs. Loopy handwriting, most polite. A woman’s writing.