Thomas Rayfiel

              People say, Write what you know. I hate that. If you know, what’s the point? You’re just daubing description on the outside, trying and failing, again and again, to get back in. I prefer the lightning bolt approach. The sky tears apart and where there was nothing is now a smoking corpse. Unrecognizable. That’s what you know. Its strangeness, its alien nature, has been revealed. That’s writing, to me.

              Which made my position at the college tenuous, at best. The idea that there was sickness, an unsettling mystery, at the bottom of everything, did not sit well with the current attitude towards Fiction and the Novel (neither of which, by the way, is the word used to denote it). “But that’s what really happened,” was a common defense when I suggested that a scene, a character, an emotion, was self-serving, was a grotesquely contorted attempt to pat one’s own back.

              “If you accept the world as it is presented,” I warned, “then whatever you do after, all the strenuous innovation, strident truth-telling, searing honesty, is for naught. You were bought-and-paid-for long before you ever sat down.”

              “See, it’s ‘naught,’” Mary tried explaining.  “They don’t know what that means.”

              “They should. They could look it up.”

              “It makes you sound old.”

              “I am old. There is nothing wrong with that.”

              She visibly refrained. Winced.

              “Also…” She scrolled further. “Jesus Christ, Alex! You called him lobotomized?”

              “I did not. I suggested that his work—”

              “His novella.”

              “Oh, please. …might benefit from less engrossed, enraptured mirror-gazing. Is that a crime? I call it helpful advice.”

              “He says he was abused as a child. He says, in the piece, he’s trying to work through that.”

              It was as if she had announced it was snowing green cheese. I waited patiently for the non-sequitur to dissipate, but all that did was give her the opportunity to follow it up with another.

              “His parents pay over $78,000 a year for him to come here.”

              “Belying claims of abuse,” I murmured.

              “And while he’s a student, he has a reasonable expectation to be treated courteously. Not told—"

              She went back to the screen. I saw her eyes widen.

              “That was a pleasantry,” I argued. “Well, an unpleasantry.”

              “Do you want to be censured?”

              “I actually think he’s got talent.”

              “Why don’t you tell him that?”

              “I am!”

              This last concession was wrung at some cost. I don’t like the boy, but he is not bad. He could be good, if… If what? If he was an utterly different person. Which it is not impossible to become at his age. At any age?

              “I’m happy to give him an A,” I said feebly.

              “I would hope so. Considering the abuse he’s taken from you.”

              “Oh, how I hate that word.”

              “Nobody likes it.”

              I looked at her. She knows what I think. That people do, in fact, like that word. They use it enough.

              “You need to get him to withdraw the complaint.”

              “And if he doesn’t?”

              “As chair, I will have to bring it up before the committee.”

              “I can’t be forced out.”

              “No. But you can be recognized. Rewarded for your years of service.” She drew forth the word I fear most in the world. “Made emeritus.”

              “Yes, well we both know that title doesn’t apply to me.”

              “That’s your problem, Alex.”  She tried to convey the threat more forcefully. “You place too much faith in language.”

              When I got home, Jason Hood was sitting on my front steps. It looked as if he had been there for some time. He sprawled in a particularly disrespectful manner.

              “Technically, you’re trespassing,” I called.

              We have a bike stand just inside the gate. Had a bike stand. Now it has become something else. An altar. We salvaged it when they closed the elementary school. It is an assemblage of steel bars with troughs for the wheels. Ellen used one spot, always. She was very particular. I roved. Still do, up and down the same-yet-somehow-different options. Except her space. I leave that bare. All these superstitious memorials.

              “Must be my lobotomy,” he answered.

              He is a handsome lad. Curly hair. Health. That is the chief quality students have. The one they never see. They spend hours primping and preening every aspect of their presented self, blind to the overwhelming powerful message they cannot help but put forth: that they will never die.

              “Don’t you wear a helmet?” he asked.

              I chose a spot several spaces down. Sometimes, when I want to feel close, I nudge right up against her. It’s maudlin, I know. I turned and looked at him, so consciously aware of the barriers that exist between us—seeing us both, really, as nothing but barriers, guarding no content—that I almost said, “I am wearing a helmet. What do you think this is? This knob on the top of my neck.” Instead, I made a show of gathering the packages I had brought, pretending to be a man of affairs, and waited for him to move. I wanted him to be gone.

              Begone! I thought, a wizard or warlock pronouncing a spell, then wondered if I had said that out loud.

              Apparently not, for he was still there.

              “Ms. Fontanini said I should talk to you.”

              “Professor Fontanini.”

              “She says to call her Mary.”

              “At your peril.”

              I was standing in front of him. He did not seem inclined to move, less rude than clueless. But is there really a difference?

              “What does that mean?”

              I had, in its case, my laptop, some foodstuffs, as I have taken more and more to calling them because that is what I do, stuff them in my mouth, and, embarrassingly, a tall bag with two bottles that clinked at the slightest provocation.

              “I’m afraid I can’t invite you in.”

              “Can we talk out here?”

              He is twenty-one. I checked. I wanted to see that, if I committed violence on him, it would be considered Child Murder. Just an idle thought. But he has a trick, and I know he’s aware of it, employs it, of looking up at you through dewy lashes. My arms were aching so I let go with a rather dramatic crash of everything but the bag with the sherry, Directors Bin, and scotch, a single malt, for nights, for those hard-to-reach places. That, I cradled as I sat beside him.

              “Did you just drop your computer?”

              “—knock some sense into it,” I mumbled, staring at the zipped-up rectangle. No fluid was leaking out. No data or whatever the bloodlife of such a machine might be. “What did Mary—?  What did Professor Fontanini say you should talk to me about?”

              “Hash out our differences,” he quoted.

              I admired that metaphor and thought briefly about instructing him on it, traveling backwards, up and through the imagery.

              “I’m sorry,” I said, “if I offended you with my comments. I didn’t intend to.”

              “But you kind of did, didn’t you? Intend to, I mean.”

              “Yes,” I smiled, mistakenly believing we were about to have a real conversation.

              He reached into one of those absurdly capacious backpacks, a lady’s handbag really, that had migrated, become a hump, and produced a printed-out version of what before only existed as weightless text.

              “You call me—”

              “The protagonist. Not you.”

              “There’s no difference really, is there?”

              “There is all the difference in the world.”

              “‘…not gifted with the intelligence God gave a common dog.’”

              “Dogs, particularly mixed breeds, are remarkably self-aware.”

              “And that my mother—”

              “The mother in the story. The novella.”

              Surely that last admission was going to save me. I looked longingly at the bike rack. The altar. Thinking maybe Ellen’s beautiful green Raleigh had reappeared.

              “‘—has every right to say these things to him if he is truly as unconsciously cruel as he…’”

              He couldn’t go on. He pinched his eyes together and began to cry.

              “There, there,” I said, mesmerized by his trembling shoulder.

              If it was an act, it was a good one. If it was an act, he was psychotic.

              “Listen,” I tried again. “Would you like a sardine?”

              “Why?” For some reason that got through to him more than my previous tone of concern. “Why would I want a sardine?”

              “Because I just bought them, so they’re, well, they’re not fresh, of course, but right here.” I retrieved them from one of the bags. “And they have these pull-tabs now. So you can lift the entire lid. See? Like so.”

              I had gotten carried away. I am, at heart, a teacher. I love to demonstrate. But he hadn't said yes and even if he had, we didn’t have a fork. The smell of cheap soya oil and a rather dubious-looking mustard sauce rose between us. His sobs had lessened or perhaps choked.

              “I’m a vegetarian.”

              “Vegan or vegetarian?”

              “What does it matter?”

              “I have cheese.”

              I began diving back into the bag. I wanted to do something, something irrelevant. Not deal with a situation for which I had no expertise. I am a vegetarian myself when it comes to the carnivorous nature of social interaction. But unwrapping a block of sale-priced Gouda, without tearing the plastic so you can seal it back up again, preserve its moisture, there I am in my element.

              “I’m not hungry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

              “The two are not mutually exclusive.”

              “What?”

              “You can be hungry and sorry. Simultaneously.”

              “I don’t understand.”

              Now he was completely out of his grief.

              Grief! You mean his hissy fit of self-pity? a voice argued.

              “Most of the time, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

              “That’s because you haven’t learned to write yet. But I could teach you.”

              Oh, now you’ve done it, the voice went on. Now look what you’ve let yourself in for.

              And what happened to the sardines? Ellen asked (for the voice, of course, was hers), when we resumed our séance via my nightly medium of Glen Farloch.

              I ate them later. For dinner.

              Alone?

              Of course alone. You think I invited him? I haven’t allowed anyone into the house since—

              I meant did you have the sardines alone?

              No. I dumped them on some pasta.

              Were they good?

              What do you care?

              I was angry. Angry with myself. (I am the only one here. I know that.) She didn’t answer. When I stray off-course, don’t follow the conversation where it is meant to be heading, she fades. It is like that old game. “Warmer!” or “Colder!” you chant, as the person bumbles towards whatever is hidden. Which is arbitrary. It is the concealment that matters.

              I told him we could meet, over the summer.

              I looked down at my glass. Was there any left? It was hard to tell. Does a slick count? If tilted, would it form another swallow?

              So he’ll withdraw the complaint?

              It didn’t come up.

              But I imagine he will.

              She made me sound like a master manipulator, whereas I was acting instinctively, emotionally, honestly. Don’t I get credit for that?

              Climbing the stairs was a more pressing matter, peeling away the last of my protections, facing the bed. I occasionally make forays to her side but keep them brief. Like a rat scuttling in and out of a temple.

              You know, Alexander, she began.

              What? I asked. And when she did not go on, prodded, Do I know what?

              But I was Cold, apparently. Freezing. I had wandered too far. I can tell when she is silent for the night. When she goes wherever she goes. When my brain gets tired of this act, disgusted with its bad ventriloquism.

              Last class. Of the semester. The room, knowing this, took on a certain aura. The last time it will be used in this fashion, with this group, with me trying to tap into all their specific resonances, encourage a conversation, something more than the halting platitudes of the first day.

              “Lester Young.” I looked them over. Those who had bothered to attend. My children. My missing children. “Anyone know who he is?”

              “Was.” Ibrahim Ba, a student from Senegal, corrected. “American jazz musician. Circa 1945. He is deceased.”

              “Yes.” I tried to infuse my tone with gratitude. “Thank you, Ibrahim. Are you familiar with his music?”

              He shook his head as if to ask, How is that relevant?

              I tried to include them all. All eight. There was a shaft of sunlight between us.

              “Lester Young, when on the road, used to play solos each night, self-contained pieces of music; but the band members who traveled with him began to notice that the solos themselves were part of a grander composition that evolved from engagement to engagement, spanning the cities they visited.”

              I raised my arms, to indicate the width, the breadth, of the conception. I became a bridge.

              “I would like to think that in a small, pathetic—pathetic in the true sense of the word, arousing pity through vulnerability—in a small pathetic way, during our meetings this semester, we have been trying to do the same.”

              …I certainly have, I didn’t add.

              I expose myself enough as it is, relying on their crude, nascent sensibilities not to notice just how much stock I place in their nods and occasional comments, how wounding I find their yawns and shrugs.

              Then, as if to immediately cancel my statement, a bell started tolling. I had taught a number of years in that particular building and never heard such a sound, a rhythmic, deep, central BONG which made the walls shake. It took us a full minute to respond.

              “Fire drill?” Melissa Antony queried.

              “Miss Antony, I believe you’re right,” I told her, for the first and last time.

              None of us was moving. We listened in a kind of trance. Waiting. The space between each strike was even and grave.

              “Or a fire in fact,” Ibrahim Ba proposed.

              There now came from the hallway sounds of shoved furniture, doors opening, cacophonous footsteps, the trappings of herd mentality.

              “Perhaps we should—”

              At that point they all left. My authority as teacher did not extend beyond my subject, if indeed it still existed there. They were gone, taking their possessions, their packs and bags and devices. The shaft of sunlight remained. I sniffed and did not smell smoke. A prank. Pan. Panic. The room and I communed for a moment. I, too, had things to collect, but they did not coalesce as easily as those of my students.

              Former students.

              At least there were none of those awkward last goodbyes which always sounded to me like calls to Abandon Ship. I fussed at the desk. The continually tolling bell knocked each attempted train of thought back down to zero. More simply put, I did not know what to do with myself.

              Where is it? I wondered. The source of the tolling?

              Because there was no belfry. This was not a repurposed chapel.

              I found myself absurdly clutching the bouquet of roses I had hidden behind the room’s archaic map of Mesopotamia. It is my practice to give away flowers, a bloom to each, as students exit for the last time.

              The door opened. A man with an axe came in.