Eye of the Cricket (2 page)

He nodded. "Hurt bad?"

I told him I didn't know. Neither of us said anything else until we pulled in at the hospital.

"You want me to come inside with you, man? Or wait out here?"

I shook my head. "But thanks."

"Anything I can do, you let me know."

"I will."

"Tough, huh?"

I'd started away when he called out: "Lewis." He leaned down into the passenger window so we could see one another. Put a
closed hand to his ear. Call me.

One might have expected to see Craig Parker, with his elegantly understated clothes, blond hair and strong features, in the
pages of a fashion catalog rather more than in this chaotic, bloody, antiquated ER. Yet, surrounded by junkies and drunks,
gunshot wounds, knifings, crushed limbs and cardiacs, the breathless, he seemed strangely at home here—calm and in control.
A rare fortunate man who had found his place in the world and begun to flourish.

He thanked me for coming, turned to a woman nearby and said, "Cover for me, Dee?" Three other people were all talking to her
at the same time. "Sure, no problem," she told him.

"Come with me, please, Mr. Griffin."

We went down a hallway straight and narrow as a cannon.

"Something I need to tell you. Bear right, here, sir.... Shortly after we spoke, the patient arrested. He came back pretty
quickly, but whenever the bottom drops out like that, it's a tremendous shock to the system. We've put him on a respirator,
chiefly to take some of the strain off his heart. It—"

"I know, Dr. Parker. I've been through this before." Searching for LaVerne's daughter Alouette, first I had found her premature
baby, on a ventilator in a neonatal intensive care unit up in Mississippi. Alouette herself had been on one for a while.

He nodded. "I wanted you to be prepared. Most people aren't. Here's the book, before I forget" He pulled it from one bulging
side pocket of his lab coat.

The cover was all but torn away, mended top and bottom with Scotch tape. A horseshoe-shaped section like a bite was gone from
the lower right corner. Cover, spine, pages, all were filthy, mottled with a decade and a half of spills.

I hadn't seen a copy in years but, holding it now, I remembered—with a physical lurch of memory and an instinctive motion
to save myself, as though about to fall from a precipice—the day I sat writing thefinal chapter.

"He's in here, Mr. Griffin."

Through the open door I saw several people standing over a gurney. On it lay a nude, catheterized young man. One of the workers
was between us, and I couldn't see the young man's face. A bright green ventilator stood by the wall, squeezing air into him
through plastic tubes that danced with each respiration. Other, smaller tubes snaked down from poles hung with bags of saline
and medication. Tracings of his heartbeat, respiratory pattern and blood pressure stuttered across the screen of a monitor
overhead.

"Anyone called for a pulmonary consult?" one of those in the room asked.

"They're all up on pedi, one of the hearts went bad on them. We're next on the list."

I looked around, back along the corridor. There were windows far away, at its end. Lots of windows. Rain washed down them
all.

Water boiled up everywhere out of the canals and drainage system, streetcars and buses ran irregularly if at all past businesses
closed down from flooding, large animals, small cars and children were being swept away, and still these kids showed up to
talk about literature.

My childhood bends beside me, too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly: Stephen Daedalus at his teaching. But these
(as I kept reminding myself) weren't kids, and comparing our childhoods didn't even make it to apples and oranges.

I remember a musician friend, a guitarist, telling me he got gigs mostly just because he made them, because he always showed
up. That was pretty much how I'd wound up teaching English Lit Who's taking Modern European Novel this semester, with Adams
off in Berlin? the chair asks at a department curriculum meeting. And someone says how about Griffin over in Romance Languages,
fee'sa novelist Does a great job with Modern French Novel. Next thing I know, I find myself on temporary trade, like a ballplayer.

How much of our life occurs simply because we don't step backwards fast enough?

So I find myself quoting, instead of Queneau or Cendrars or Gide, feeling an impostor the whole time, Conrad, Beckett or Joyce.
Surely they'll find me out.

I added my own to the line of half-furled umbrellas aslant against the back wall. Likefirearmson a stockade wall, strange
trees growing upside down out of pools of water.

"Last class, we were talking about Ellman's biography of Joyce." I pulled out my folder of notes. Water dripped along my sleeve
into the satchel's interior. Three spots fell onto the folder itself, raising small blisters.

"In another context, and of another writer, Ellman remarks: 'If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which
we suffer. And this, he says, this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men do in their degree.'

"Never has there been, I think, a more determined world-creator than Joyce."

"The sequence is phantasmagoric, equal parts dream or nightmare and drunken carousing, Freud, E. T. A. Hoffman and vaudeville
all whipped up together in the blender. Here, more than anything else, it resembles Beckett's work. Like Beckett's, it's about
nothing—and at the same time about everything.

"Even historical figures like Edward the Seventh," Kyle Skillman said. Limp blond hair, face forever red as though recently
scrubbed. A yoke of dandruff when he wore dark clothes.

"Or Reuben J Antichrist the wandering jew." What was this one's name? Taylor, Tyler, something like that. Couldn't remember
his ever speaking up in class before.

"But why?" Skillman finished. His aching for a world where everything could break your heart. I found myself wondering, not
for the first time, if he might be in some kind of emotional trouble.

"Anyone want to answer Mr. Skillman's question?" I looked around the room. Eyes sank to the floor as though on counterweights.
"Mrs. Mara?"

"Obviously dreams are a kind of art, our most personal expression. One of the ways we make sense of our world."

"Or, in a sense at least, re-create it: yes."

Mrs. Mara swung her leg at all of us in approval.

I, for one, beamed at our collective brilliance. But Skillman still looked worried. Loose pieces everywhere.

"Let's look, then, at this most telling of resurfacings from the Night-town sequence: the sudden appearance of Bloom's dead
son, which ends it.

" 'Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit
with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads fromrightto left inaudibly, smiling, kissing
the page.' "

And so our discussion continued for most of the hour, rain slamming down outside, pools of water from umbrellas flowing into
one another, Sally Mara helping urge reluctant students from point to point like some fine intellectual sheepdog.

Near the end, Kyle Skillman put down a well-mashed, half-eaten tuna sandwich to raise his hand.

"Sir, you haven't told us when the firsttest will be."

"I wouldn't worry about that just now, Mr. Skillman. There will be a final, at least; perhaps a midterm. Let's just wait and
see how things shape up. I'm sure you'll all do fine, whatever.

"If there are no further questions, I'll see you all on Wednesday."

I replaced my notes in the satchel. Their own went into briefcases, book bags, folders and accordion files, backpacks.

One by one, umbrellas left their posts at the back wall.

"Mr. Griffin?" someone said as I stepped into the hall. "You have a minute?"

Older than most of them, hair cut close, black suit giving him a vaguely Muslim look. Collarless white shirt buttoned to his
neck. Left hand curved around a history text. He held out the right one.

"Sam Delany."

"You're not one of my students."

"No, sir. Though I would be, if my schedule weren't so tight."

"Walk with me? I'm heading for my office. Russian history, huh?"

"I needed another history elective. It fit between Theories of Modern Economy and Dynamics of the Body Social IV. I'm pre-law."

We went down the stairs and into a storage room the school insisted upon calling my office. I shared it with another part-timer
who fortunately never used it You got both of us lodged in there, and a student by the door, I don't know how any of us would
ever have gotten out "So what can I do for you, Mr. Delany?" I waved him into the chair across from the desk. He was thin
enough that he almost fit there. Idly clicked on the computer to see if it might be working today. Nope.

"I've heard a lot about you, Mr. Griffin. You're kind of a hero to some of the students, you know. They look up to you."

I had no idea what to say to that, so I kept quiet.

"Not for a long time."

He shook his head. "I read your books. Some of them are hard to find."

"Some of them probably ought to be a lot harder."

"They tell the truth, Mr. Griffin. That's important."

"Yeah.... I used to think so too."

"That they tell the truth, or that it's important?"

"Able to find a chink in your tight schedule, then?"

We crossed from the campus to a corner grocer that had four-seater picnic benches set up in the back half of the store and
from ten till they ran out served some of the best roast beef po-boys, jambalaya and gumbo in town. Most of the kids stuck
to burgers and fries. A student once told me that she'd lived off burgers since she was fourteen, never ate anything else.

We got coffee in thick-walled mugs and snagged a table just as two business types, coatless but wearing short-sleeve blue
dress shirts and ties, were getting up. Delany wiped off the table with a napkin, piled everything on the tray they'd left
behind and took it to a hand-through window near the back. Both the window's broad lip and a steel cart alongside were ajumble
with bowls, trays and cups.

"Youfind people."

Sometimes, yes. But as I'd told him earlier, not for a long time now. I'd let teaching become my life, drifted into it because
the currents were flowing that way. I wondered again how much of our life we really choose, how much is just following chance
road signs.

"I take care of my family," Delany said. "Financially, I mean. My father disappeared when I was four. The other kids' fathers—I
have one half brother, fifteen, two sisters, eleven and eight—they disappeared a lot faster. I look out for them all."

"And your mother?"

"She's still with us. Alive, I mean. It's been hard for her, she's..."

"Used up."

"Yeah. I guess that says it, all right."

"She the one you wanted to see me about?"

He shook his head. Looked over to the line by the counter. "More coffee?"

I pushed the cup towards him and he brought it back full, with just the right amount of milk. He'd watched me closely earlier,
but I hadn't thought much of it at the time. This peculiar intensity hovered about him anyway, as though details were a lair
where the world lived, coiled like a dragon; as though everything might depend on our noticing, on our taking note.

He took a mouthful of coffee, held it a moment, swallowed.

"One day last week, Thursday, Shon leaves for school same as every morning, scooting out of the house half-dressed and already
half an hour late. After school he's scheduled for the four-to-eight, so no one's looking for him till late—"

"Where does he work?"

"Donut shop up by the hospital."

"Touro?"

"Yeah. And sometimes one of his friends would drop by the store about the time he got off and they'd hang out awhile, so it
might be ten, eleven before he showed up home. But that night, ten comes and goes. Mama's home by then—I stay with the girls
while she's at work—but we still justfigure Shon'U be along any minute. Next morning, couldn't of been later than six, not
even light outside yet, Mama's at my door with the girls."

"Shon was a no-show."