Mean Boy (38 page)

“You mean the Torture Chamber?” he said. “Yeah, come by this week and I’ll show you when nobody’s around. It’s really gross.”

I remember being disappointed. I had been planning on rounding up a few guys and taking them with me to witness this greatest of our childhood mysteries revealed. But Wayne’s offhand affirmation—sure, the hidden exhibit existed; yes, it was gross—stripped the thing of its allure. It sounded like nothing; it was probably boring. The hidden exhibit was just another story the island told itself about the world beyond its shores—a world of spooky shadows, plastic bogeymen. I decided it was no big deal, that I could just as well see it alone.

That’s what I was dreaming about last night. The day Wayne showed me.

Jim arrives not quite ten minutes into class, rosy with rush. He favours us all with a grin and an apologetic wave, dumping a pile of handouts onto his desk and raking a hand through his windswept, unrutted hair. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without the comb ruts all of this new year. He looks like Claude after his congratulatory noogie. Jim hums to himself—the long, quavering notes of Hank Snow—taking a few moments to organize the handouts into piles, and pausing between hummed verses to glance up at us all and mutter various benedictions—good to see everyone, hope we’ve all been writing, everyone ready for the Creighton reading, and so forth. A few people up front, including me, answer him. It’s impossible not to—he meets our eyes in expectation and his demeanour draws it out of us. The atmosphere Jim has brought with him—and, I realize only today, Jim always brings an atmosphere—is light, intangibly festive. It reminds me of how he was at the beginning of the year, and, now that I’m reminded, the exhilaration of that time comes burbling back, like a stream unleashed, water bursting through ice.

The Jim-thrill—there it is again—straightening my spine, singing through my veins. I am surprised to realize how long it’s been, but already I’m forgetting what the lack of it was like. I lean forward. Jim winks as he places a batch of copied poems on my desk for me to pass back. He goes to tousle my hair with one hand but enjoys the feel of my head so much, he brings his other hand into it and massages my head like I’m a dog, growling with affection.

The class laughs. Jim laughs. I laugh. And—it’s spring.
In real life I was alone—ushered by Wayne—but in the dream Janet was with me, although sometimes it seemed as if Janet, like Wayne, was an employee of the museum and had known about the exhibit all along. In real life it was Wayne who drew back the curtain, but in the dream, sometimes, it was Jim. In real life the first thing I looked for was the naked lady on the table, and that’s what I looked for in the dream as well. In real life she wasn’t really naked, but naked under a sheet, and you could see the dent of her groin, the muscular triangle of her legs, spread open, tied apart. You could see her nipples, eternally erect. The look on her face was stunned and the requisite leering madman hovered a couple of feet away, hands clasped against his chest as if to say, Goody!

In the dream the lady was naked. It was as if I had come upon her too late. The sheet had been torn aside, the stunned look had been wiped from her face. She was no longer tied up because there wasn’t any reason. She had been alive just moments before but now she was dead, and the madman was nowhere in sight—perhaps hiding.

She was Brenda L. She had been Brenda L.

“That asshole,” said Wayne in my dream, annoyed in a janitorial kind of way. “Shit.” And he went and placed the sheet back over Brenda L.’s torso and tied her hands and feet again, which I thought was ridiculous.

“You’re not fooling anyone,” I complained to Wayne, who was Jim, and told me to shut up.

“I
won’t
shut up,” I declared, feeling nervously audacious and wandering off toward the next exhibit. Janet had gone off on her own ahead of me but every once in a while would cast an amused look over her chubby shoulder.

It was true. In real life most of it was true. There were spikes through heads. There were dangling eyeballs. There was a guillotine—even though a guillotine has nothing to do with torture, per se, a guillotine is simply death—and I doubt if it actually worked, as people had said. The guillotine cradled a freshly decapitated victim—you could see the severed spinal cord in his neck, surrounded by a red murk of muscle and tissue. Placed before the guillotine was a basket, of course, and in the basket, a baffled head.

In real life Wayne remarked, “I mean, that’s sick. They really did that, apparently, back in the old days, the goddamn frogs. What in hell is wrong with people, eh?”

“I hear it’s actually pretty humane,” I said for something to say. “As far as executions go.”

We stood side by side gazing into the basket.

“Yeah, it looks really goddamn humane,” Wayne replied. He killed living things for sport, my cousin Wayne. It struck me for the first time that this bestowed its own kind of wisdom on a person.

Next, Jim lets us know about everything we can expect from Abelard Creighton’s visit to Westcock this week, making it sound like a kind of intellectual Mardi Gras. Creighton will be giving a lecture in the Social Sciences department as well as an unprecedented two readings—one in the daytime for students and faculty only, and one in the evening for whoever wants to come. Jim encourages us to attend both events and ask questions, particularly at the student reading. To that end, he hands out five of Creighton’s poems. I flip through the pages. All mercifully short.

After the Thursday-night reading, he adds, a reception will take place in the lobby of Grayson Hall, to which we are all of course invited.

“The reading’s at Grayson Hall?” I ask, not bothering to raise my hand because it isn’t that kind of day.

Jim nods, “Yes, Larry—thanks. I should have made that clear to begin with. Grayson Hall, everybody. Eight o’clock. Write it down, please.”

A murmur sounds among us, for we are impressed as a group. Grayson Hall is where convocations are held. Jim must be expecting a huge turnout.

In the dream there was no guillotine, but there was a head—a tiny one like the kind you see in movies about cannibals, who carry them around on sticks. The head had been shrunk, and looked like a shrivelled orange gone brown and hard, forgotten in the fridge—an oversized raisin with a pinched, angry face. A wild dog sat chewing and pawing at the head compulsively. Panda. Panda with rabies.

“Everybody,” says Jim, placing himself in his favoured pedagogical position—in front of his desk, buttocks lightly poised against its edge. “One more thing before we begin today. I don’t think I’ve told you all how much I’ve appreciated your support this year, let alone what a great group of students you’ve been. We’re coming up toward the end of the year and, yes, it’s been a bumpy one. You’ve all been patient, loyal, and somehow not one of you has managed to lose sight of the most important thing going on here—the thing that really matters. The work. You’ve all continued to grow and develop and explore, and I want you to know I really admire you for that.”

There is something going on here. Jim’s words are generous and wonderful. I can feel the people around me loosening at the sound of them—hardened layers of tension, built up like
plaque on teeth over the past few months, now crumbling away. Behind me, I hear actual sighs wafting toward the ceiling.

But I’m not loosening. I’m tightening. My shoulders seem to be inching themselves up toward my ears.

Jim shakes his head, smiles whitely. For a guy who’s never placed that high a premium on personal hygiene, his teeth have always dazzled.

“Anyway, we’re coming into the home stretch here folks, and I just thought you should know how well you’ve all done in your own way. You’re one of the finest groups I’ve ever taught, and I thank you. I just really thank you.”

This sounds like the end, but Jim continues to ramble a bit longer and I know why. He has to say more, because he’s not really saying what he’s saying. He’s saying something else. I know it, and so does one other person in the room.

“Anyway, I’m rambling,” apologizes Jim. “I just wanted to say thanks to all you folks. And let you know that you’ve done great, and—all is well. All is well.”

Somehow I know the code. I know the message. The message is
forgiveness
, and it isn’t meant for me.

THE DREAM SETS OFF
this mini-cascade—it’s as if a dammed-up part of my brain has broken through. I write sixteen ghazals in the course of one marathon afternoon at Carl’s. Six are about the hidden exhibit, its various displays. Four are about the Hollywood Horrors itself, and going there with my friends as kids—forcing ourselves to get used to all the awful human dummies in their monstrous predicaments. Tippi Hedren squinting through her spider-lashes at the descending flock of crows. The violent mess of black in the air above her.

dangling, mid-attack
, I describe the crows,

from dusted wires

Another one is about staring into the guillotine basket alongside Cousin Wayne. I describe the anticlimax of finally seeing the hidden exhibit, and the way Wayne’s dull, familiar presence de-toothed it in my mind. But then the last few couplets evoke how Wayne surprised me with his compassion for the head—how he saw the guillotine as not just a cool, gross gimmick the way thugs like him were supposed to, but a mark of something real and upsetting about people.

his humanity
, I end the couplet,

throwing heat into mine
.

I sit back after that one, liking it. I’m not sure about the word
humanity
, it might be too straightforward, but I like the last line, the idea of shared heat. I can go back and work on
humanity
later. This is wonderful. This hasn’t happened to me in ages.

I wonder if there is a word for developing an immediate fascination for something, or someone, you immediately despise. For fixating on it, and being able to speak and think of nothing else, precisely as if you were in love. I read somewhere that hate isn’t the opposite of love—indifference is. So if hate isn’t anti-love, it can only be a sort of insulted version of it.

I should say first and foremost that the five poems Jim gave out by Abelard Creighton were not bad. They read a bit like jokes, some of them—or cocktail party anecdotes—starting with an image or a scenario, usually well evoked, and then ending with a wry kind of punchline observation which tied the thing together, made you sort of go,
huh!
They were clever. They were too short and sharp to really blow my mind, but they made me interested enough to want to read more. As Jim might say, they held promise.

The poems Creighton reads today are not short. In fact, he is about five minutes into the first one before I even understand that it’s a poem. He announced he was about to read a poem. He said the poem had to do with an experience he’d had in Paris with “the tourist trade,” and smiled around the room for a moment. Then he gathered up the sheaf of papers resting on the lectern before him, glanced down at them through a pair of bifocals and started to talk.

“There I was in the city of Proust,” said Creighton. “City of poets. In Hemingway’s cafés I lingered, light-footed in the city of lights. Ah, but those bastard sons of the great white hunter and gun, there came the American dreamers …”

This went on for a bit, Creighton telling us about Paris, what the women were like (“smokey-slim”), and how young he was (“green as grapes”), how entranced by the city’s romantic past, when a bunch of Americans showed up and ruined everything by being vulgar and boorish. Eventually I leaned against Sherrie.

“I wish he’d get on with it,” I whispered.

She lowered her head to hiss back. “You don’t like it?”

“I just wanna hear the poetry.”

Sherrie turned her head to listen. I thought for a second she was just pausing to pretend she was listening, the way she did in Dekker’s Shakespeare, but after a few more stories of cobblestones and cafés she ducked her head toward me again.

“I think this is it, Lawrence.”

I sat up and searched Sherrie’s face for seriousness. She nodded. I turned and paid very close attention after that. Todd was leaning so far forward, his ass was practically hovering over the seat of his chair.

So Creighton reads for forty-five minutes. Every single poem he reads is about Americans or America. Every single poem begins
with the words
I was
, or
There I was
, or
Here I am
, or
I am
. Every single poem talks about Creighton being somewhere and meeting Americans, and the Americans being some combination of stupid and greedy and vulgar and cruel. Actually, that’s not true. Some of the poems talk about Creighton being somewhere and talking to a Canadian who doesn’t think Americans are all that bad. Then the poem goes on to reveal the combination of stupidity, greed, and vulgarity in the featured Canadian.

Forty-five minutes of this. I keep waiting for Jim, sitting up front, to throw up his hands in an uncontainable show of mirth and yell April Fool’s or something. I keep looking around expecting someone to leap to his or her feet in outrage, denounce the proceedings as a sham, a joke. At the very least, I expect to meet the indignant eye of someone like me, someone desperately looking around for someone like them.