Teach Me (18 page)

escape velocity

Panic.

It’s the worst kind of suction of all.

It comes from your center, makes a gravity well around your heart, pulls everything bad to you.

I slam into the car, fumble to get the door open. The instant I hear the ignition catch, I’m peeling out, bumping one tire up over the curb. I tear out of there, not even caring if Schuyler’s got his door shut. I’m trying to achieve escape velocity.

For the first mile I leave the windows rolled up, holding June inside the car as long as I can.

“Wonder what temp she keeps her air on, freezer burn?” Schuyler says. His voice sounds odd, rushed. “Maybe old Vince is embalmed. He would fall to mush without it.”

I hear him, but I’m not hearing him. I’m still measuring the distance between my heart and Mr. Mann’s. He is my sun, and I’m moving farther and farther away. Crystals are forming in my blood.

Is this where you’ve left me, Richard? Is this what getting old is all about?

Is this what I have to look forward to? Barb’s frozen world? Desperately sucking the life out of people, even strangers, to get someone to listen to me, be with me?

Faster.

“You want to slow up a little, Nine?” Schuyler says. “Stopping would be even better. Did I mention my hunger? It’s become apocalyptic.”

I shiver, glancing at the recipe card poking out of Mr. Mann’s chapbook. Schuyler pulls his seat belt tighter.

Faster, faster.

Wilkie’s underinflated tires are shrieking as I move from lane to lane, dodging other cars.

“Okay, to keep from thinking about dying in a gasoline fire, let’s recap,” Schuyler says, voice tremulous. “Mr. Mann once owned a Sit ‘n’ Spin. His mother, subphylum
Party animalia antiquus
, likes booze in her beans. Booze in anything, probably. His father rents out his frontal lobe as a loofah sponge.”

My heart is trip-hammering so bad, it’s come loose in my chest. I keep waiting for it to reattach itself. I feel Schuyler’s eyes on me. I press down on the gas pedal. Where am I running to?

“And how about Vince’s bone structure?” Schuyler says, voice a pitch higher. “Definitely something supraorbital going on there.
Australopithecus afarensis
, my good doctor?”

I stare straight ahead, the lines on the road starting to blur.

“Okay. Not quite that remote,” Schuyler says. “His knuckles were pretty clean.
Homo erectus?
But maybe without
erectus’
s stately charm. Say,
Australopithecus robustus
? Wait. I know what you’re thinking, Dr. Leakey. There’s not one thing robust about that man.”

I feel him looking, looking.

“
Homo habilis
, then. That’s my final offer.”

We’re roaring along. The other cars are falling away now. My face is locked. Schuyler leans over and speaks directly into my ear:

“Vince has three testicles. The one in the center is able to divine the future.”

I laugh.

It bursts out of me like a jet of water under pressure. My laugh gets louder and louder. I laugh as if I might be cured or go insane.

“Hey, ease up a little,” Schuyler says.

I pull over finally, nearly weeping with laughter. I collapse against his chest. I can’t stop thinking about Vince, oracle-like on the toilet, communing with his loins.

I feel Schuyler tense—I’m scaring him.

“You okay, Nine?”

His chest is hard. I like touching it.

“You okay?” he says again.

The laughter is going down inside me; I’m deflating like bag-pipes. This takes a long time. When it’s over, I push him away more forcefully than I mean to. I swipe at the corners of my eyes. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

“What was that?” Schuyler says.

“I don’t know. I feel like I could throw up. I think it must’ve been a panic attack. I felt like I was dying. God.”

“You scared me.”

“I’m sorry. Really. I’m sorry.” We sit awhile, watch people trundling groceries to their cars. The world has snapped back to its regular shape. My hand brushes Mr. Mann’s book. I suddenly remember—

“A reading!”

“What?”

“Barb—she said Mr. Mann is doing a reading at UTC. Some kind of poetry thing!”

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow night.”

“That’s what she said.”

Schuyler starts to smile.

Perfect.

wet

Home.

I smell the sauce the minute I come through the door. Mom senses something is up. She’s making manicotti.

“Your favorite, darling!”

She hasn’t done this in months, maybe years. It’s the fanciest thing she cooks. This is what she does when she doesn’t know what else to do for me. Maybe someday I will get the connection, the motherly cause and effect.

“Let me help you,” I say.

She pours out the egg batter into micro-thin shells. When they’re done, we stuff them with ricotta, mozzarella, cottage cheese. Ladle sauce over the top and pop them in the oven. While we’re waiting for the timer to ding, I give her an oregano peck on the cheek.

“You’re sweet,” I say. “I’m sorry about everything lately.”

“I’ve just been so—” She dabs at her eyes with a pot holder and honks into a tissue. “Your father and I, we—”

“It’s all right, Mom.” I hug her narrow shoulders. “Everything is all right. Please don’t worry so much.”

We watch TV. I feel as if I haven’t eaten in a hundred years. When the manicotti is ready, I eat as though it’s my last meal. Later my chest burns in the dark; I can’t sleep, thinking about Mr. Mann.

Tomorrow night. The plan.

Mom hears me stumbling to the bathroom for an antacid and gives me some melatonin. “You father takes them,” she says.

It’s supposed to make me sleep naturally. The trouble is, I want to sleep unnaturally. I’m burning alive, thinking about my last time with Him.

Turn on the computer.

Kitty Nation curls around my feet. Niagara Falls at night could be anywhere. Newark, New Jersey. But I know they’re still there, the couples, in their rooms, touching each other in the dark.

I close my eyes. Maybe they dress after making love. Get up while they’re still liquid, flow down the halls that look the same at any hour of the day or night.

They stream outdoors past the sleepy clerk in the lobby. They’re barefoot; the cement is cold leading to the falls. They hold hands. The closer they get, the louder the noise, a sound that makes them feel very small in the nighttime. They draw together in horrified fascination. A spray wets their faces. They’re at the edge now, touching the cold aluminum railing. They can’t see the spray, can only hear the thunder as the whole river throws itself over the abyss.

They jump.

smaller

Morning.

I’m still here.

But I wake up flat. Something has changed.

Something about meeting Mr. Mann’s parents, seeing where he came from, his pain, his reality—everything is flat.

It’s dead and flat.

The person I fell for, what part of him was ever real?

What if his whole life he has pretended to be someone else, whoever he needed to be? Maybe it’s all a kind of survival mechanism. And the by-product of his survival is this: he makes you fall for him—that ’s how he survives it. How he survives life, love, anything. Maybe he’s like that all the time, not just in class? It’s just like he said—it’s all an act.

That’s his gift.

Was there ever really a chance for us?

What is down in the middle of him, his very center? Does he even have a center, or do you just cut away the layers, away, away, away, until you are left with nothing?

Every inch of Barb and Vince’s cold, dead house—now it’s tangled up with my thoughts of him. My memory of him, my image, my love—it’s there, frozen in time with all the rest of it. There is no changing him now. No going back, ever again. It’s flat.

I’ve lost.

The beautiful part of the love has leaked away—the part that mattered most. The only part that’s left is the flip side, the animal side, the side that wants to gore and rut and bite.

Consume.

I jump out of bed and stare into my mirror—if I could just see his eyes right now, I would know if it’s still there. I would know. But it’s flat. A flatness spreading out before me so long and low and brutal, a flatness big enough to swallow years, lifetimes—I’ll never be three dimensional again. He’s stomped my whole universe, made me into a plane, a line.

A point.

I’m so tiny, I’m about to vanish. You can’t atom smash me any smaller. There’s nothing left. The part of me that was real, the God particle, is gone.

Did it ever exist at all?

No, there is no changing that now.

So there is no changing what I have to do, either. Somehow the flatness—it makes me stronger, more certain of my direction, sets my track. I turn away from the mirror. It’s time to teach him. Teach him how you make something real.

looking for lincoln

The plan.

Time to execute it.

The Crackling Forest is different too. I can feel it.

The light? The wind in the leaves? How can spring not feel like spring?

But the weather is changing. A bank of black clouds is ripping the sky in half diagonally. We’re racing into the black part without even moving. The Firestone Holy Tire Palace is silent, its bays closed and forbidding. A truck whistles by like an animal squealing for cover.

My mind is full.

Is this the last time? Is this where it all ends?

Can I do this?

Can I say goodbye?

I slither out of my bra, toss it in the trunk. Schuyler is waiting in Wilkie Collins. He has promised not to look. I wouldn’t care if he did. Not today. Not ever again. I could give him that, at least. Before I go. What does it matter anymore?

I slip into his mother’s things: an old emerald green pants suit that buttons aggressively snug up the center. What kind of material is this? It bunches and clings, feels like a cat’s tongue slipping over my little boobs. I hope my nipples show. Mom would die. I haven’t shaved my legs in days.

No deodorant.

Suede Birkenstock clogs, an olive beret. I mass my hair toward the front, covering as much of my face as possible. New shades; they look like round orange mirrors. Again I feel the confidence of anonymity descend upon me.

I’m a girl-woman in my mid- to late twenties. Occupation: Professional Student. Cocky in my element. An über-educated, hairy-pitted man hater. I change my own oil, dispose of it with respect for the environment, then charge back indoors to research my interminable doctoral thesis on George Eliot and Willa Cather. Title of? “The Burgeoning Feminist Imperative.” A worm of sweat cools my temple. Come on, make me fierce in my rankness.

Something’s missing.

I rummage in the trunk. The black bag is hot; some of the makeup is running. But I don’t need it anymore. Ah, there it is—I pull out a long red sash, symbol of the Anti-Sex League in George Orwell’s
1984
. I cinch it like a tourniquet around my waist.

Ready.

“Fleetwood Lindley,” Schuyler says when I get back in the car. His disguise is less elaborate: a slouch fishing hat swiped from my dad and rectangular Walgreen shades.

“Huh? Scoot over. Aren’t you going to say anything about the way I look?”

“Fleetwood Lindley.”

I’m starting to get pissed. I don’t want to play this game right now. I’m nervous. I’m thinking about Mr. Mann at the podium in the lecture hall.

“Okay, you got me for a change,” I say. “Who’s that?”

Schuyler pulls down his shades, frowning. “I’m disappointed in you. Fleetwood Lindley was the last surviving person to ever see Abraham Lincoln. Well, his body, at least. In 1901 they exhumed Honest Abe to put him in a new tomb. Fleetwood’s dad was in the honor guard. He hauled Fleetwood out of school to see them open the casket.”

“Okay?”

“This is important! Fleetwood knew he was checking out something nobody would ever see again. Here’s what he saw: Lincoln’s face was covered with white chalk somebody had used to try to freshen the old boy up on the funeral train. His eyebrows were missing, but his beard was still there. You could definitely tell it was Lincoln. His chest was covered by a moldy flag—nothing but the stars were left. They put the top back on and Fleetwood got to help lower the casket into the new vault. He was thirteen. He had Lincoln nightmares for six months.”

“And the reason you’re telling me this is—?”

“To take my mind off the fact that you’re wearing my mother’s clothes.”

“—!”

I make a sound that’s not a word and kick his leg hard with the clogs.

We hurtle in reverse out of the Crackling Forest. “Did you bring your watch?” I say. “What time is it?”

“7:09.”

“Dammit. The reading starts in six minutes. Is your watch fast?”

“It’s synched with my XP. That’s another quarter you owe me.”

Buzz.

We rush down the interstate, pushing into the storm.

Schuyler navigates to the exit and the UTC campus looms. The grounds are a mix of stately older buildings and more recent disasters. The light is menacingly beautiful under the blackening sky. I wonder if this is how things look to a prisoner on his way to be hanged. Colors so full, everything sharply delineated, easy on the eyes.

Pure.

Only the important things are important now. The rest of it—

“Don’t worry, we’re almost there,” Schuyler says, scattering my thoughts. “That way. Downhill from the science building.”

“So you know where to go inside?”

“Yeah. I used to come here for meetings of the North Alabama Archaeological Society. I helped them with the slide shows.”

“Doors?”

“Lots of them, all along the front.”

“How many people?”

“You never know. The building holds at least three hundred. They wouldn’t let us use it after our membership dropped below fifty. The national group disbanded our chapter.”

“Aw.”

“Rednecks apparently don’t give a crap about Jewish necropoli—you just missed your turn.”

“Shit!”

I hit the median hard, crank Wilkie’s powerless steering around with the force of Starbuck driving home a harpoon. My shades bounce off; Schuyler slams against me. Wilkie waggles across the grass median. The horizon of low mountains dances, settles again, this time in the rearview mirror. Schuyler’s face is the color of floured wax paper.

“We’re going the right way now,” I say.