Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  Mathias and Pat were planning to go to the JV lacrosse game at six.

  “I have a science Keynote to do,” said Wynonna.

  “Oh my god,” said Phyllis. “I forgot about that.”

  “All right, hi, hello,” I said. “HELLO.”

  Mathias and Pat just kept talking about lacrosse. I clapped my hands. “All right, so the deal is, I’m Mr. Baker, I’m the substitute, filling in. Hello, hi. Mrs. Kennett’s child is sick, so she’ll be back tomorrow. What you’re going to do today is watch an incredibly depressing movie.”

  “Hah hah,” said Cece.

  “In which Oprah Winfrey takes a Holocaust survivor named Elie Wiesel through Auschwitz. There are a lot of really tragic images. You’re supposed to watch this movie, and while you’re watching it, you will want to be thinking about whether it’s a better way of conveying what is actually going on—”

  Several conversations sprang up simultaneously. I stood watching their young, heedless mouths open and close. I waited for them to be quiet. Wynonna said, “Shh.”

  “The sound on the video is really soft,” I said, “so if you want to hear it, you have to be quiet.”

  I started the video. “It’s my girl, Oprah,” said Remington.

  “I can’t hear,” said Cece.

  Oprah was saying, “. . . where it’s estimated that one point five million Jews perished—here in the Holocaust, most of them Eastern European Jews.”

  “Stop talking,” said Phyllis. Laughter. Two softly muttered conversations in the back. Again, horrifying pictures of death on the screen.

  I walked to the back. “Just be quiet,” I whispered. “Just listen to the movie, okay?”

  “Yeah, dudes,” said Remington.

  “Well, I can’t hear it,” said Cece.

  “That’s because you’re talking,” I said.

  “When American and Russian troops finally liberated the remaining camps,” said Oprah, “all they found left behind were the dead, and the walking dead.”

  “The Walking Dead TV show,” said Remington, but nobody laughed. The class was listening now.

  “Each time I come,” Wiesel said, “I try not to speak for a day or two or three, and just to go back and find the silence that was in me then. And I say to myself, How many of us did not live, and simply vanished?”

  They listened quietly for maybe three minutes, and then two boys started joking about the word “non-negotiable” on the assignment sheet. When Oprah said that Wiesel, on arriving at Auschwitz, smelled “the stench of burning human flesh,” they went quiet again. Phyllis and Wynonna began quietly discussing whether they should quote from this part of the interview, which led to more talk about whether one of them had handed an earlier assignment in or not. Somebody laughed.

  “Guys,” I said irritably, “watch the movie. Or don’t watch the movie! It doesn’t matter. Just don’t make a lot of noise, okay?”

  They were quiet for two minutes after that. Then more whispering arose like frail weed sprouts from the girls. Cece and her friend Christina simply could not shut up. What was I supposed to do? She was chatting rapidly about some grievance she had with a teacher while Oprah talked about the deportation of Hungarian Jews. I wanted to turn off the movie. “. . . were packed into the gas chambers by the thousands,” Oprah said. “As the toxic pellets mixed with air, cyanide gas was released, and felt like suffocation.” I waved at the loud table to be quiet. These high schoolers were being tortured to the point of numbness and indifference by gruesome imagery—those few who were paying attention—and the Holocaust was being trivialized through inattention, both at the same time. Why was this happening? Why was I a part of this? We came to the section that repeated. “Once naked,” said Oprah, “mothers, their babies, children, the elderly, and anyone else deemed unfit to work were packed into the gas chambers by the thousands. As the tox—” I skipped past the overlap. The conversations in the room continued. I went over to Remington and his knot of compulsive chatters and confiscated a disputed water bottle. “Just go to sleep,” I whispered.

  “How can we watch the movie if we go to sleep?” Cece asked. She was wearing a yellow shirt. She sounded just like the girl in the selfie song.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Just don’t sit and talk.”

  But I had no authority. There were five separate conversations now. “I was like, Oh my god,” said Cece. We came to the part where Wiesel is talking about the suitcases of the dead. Not a soul in the class was listening. It was almost time for lunch. I stopped the movie.

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. The class left. “I have a boyfriend!” said Cece.

  Mr. Markey came in to ask if the movie played all right. It had. I guess he thought it was a good assignment because mass murder is real. But it wasn’t a good assignment. I don’t want to be a substitute teacher who forces teenagers to shake hands with the dead. All they want to do is flirt and joke and get through the day.

  Everyone came back from lunch, laughing and coughing. Christina pointed to the screen. “Are we watching this the entire time?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Fabulous,” she said.

  I gave Remington his water bottle back. “If you’re not interested in watching the movie, I understand,” I said. “But just don’t make a lot of noise.”

  “Yeah, girls,” said Remington.

  “Remington, shut up,” said Cece.

  I hit play. Wiesel and Oprah looked at the suitcases and the shoes, and the hair. The class talked quietly about their lives. I hissed, “Shh.” I stood up. I wanted them to see the hair. We came to the end. I turned on the light.

  “So how many here have read Night?” I asked.

  “Never heard of it,” said Cece, who was scrolling through things on her iPad. She read aloud a repost from a Tumblr blog: “I was just about to fall asleep and then I sat up and almost screamed because I was struck with the realization and I discovered the ultimate truth of the universe: Teletubbies are called Teletubbies because they have televisions in their stomachs.”

  That pissed me off. I gave Cece a hate smile and I said to her, “Why don’t you go up in the front and read that, to the class? Why don’t you go ahead? I’d like to hear it. It’s kind of a different approach.”

  “Do it!” said Remington.

  “Go on!” I said.

  “Do it, Cece, do it!” said Christina.

  She couldn’t have read it aloud, even if she’d wanted to, because the class was too noisy. Christina said, “I have four sisters, well, three sisters and it’s four including me, and there’s four Teletubbies, so we’re each a Teletubby.”

  “I see,” I said.

  To anyone who was listening, I said, “Thanks for watching the movie. It’s really too intense, I think, to show in a school. Too many dead bodies.”

  “Thad!” said Cece.

  “You guys are so pathetic,” I said aloud—and not in a whisper, either, although nobody heard me. I waited for a while—we still had ten minutes of class left. “Guys, can I ask you a question to think about? What’s the difference between—” And then I stopped. Nobody had quieted down. I didn’t exist. I tried again. “What’s the difference between trying to tell—” I stopped again. I was going to ask them about the difference between watching a documentary and reading a book, but there was just no way, short of yelling like a maniac, to be heard over seven full-strength conversations. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “I want to hear the question,” said Zach.

  “It’s not that interesting a question,” I said. “It doesn’t matter, because I don’t care, and they don’t care.”

  “Then don’t bring it up,” said Cece. “You make us curious.”

  “We were listening,” said Zach, smiling.

  I tried again. “When I watch a documentary like that, I—”

 
; Cece made a disgusted laugh, and I asked her what she was laughing at.

  “It’s Cece, she always laughs,” said Carter. “Just ignore her.”

  “The tallest sub in the world,” said Cece, scornfully.

  “I learned something from that movie,” said a boy named Gibb. “They had to make handmade clothing, for children.”

  “In that movie, you learned that?” I said.

  “That’s what they said,” Gibb said.

  “What should happen now?” I shouted. “Independent reading?”

  “I don’t know how to read,” Gibb said.

  “But you know how to listen,” said Zach.

  “Come on, you know how to read,” I said.

  “I can read, but I can’t read books,” said Gibb.

  I opened a window to let out some of the noise. Remington was recounting a dream he’d had: his brother was chasing him with a butter knife. Zach and Carter stood up. I asked them where they were off to. “We need to stand,” one said. “We’ve been sitting down for too long.”

  I took a bite of an apple. Cece said she couldn’t wait for summer. “You know how when you try to tie your hair in a knot,” she said, “and it always comes out?”

  “Yes, I always do that,” said Christina.

  “Because the more healthy your hair is, the loosener it gets,” said Cece.

  “Not really,” said Christina, “but I hope so.”

  A large girl, Cloris, said, “Guys, I can’t even tie my hair in a knot. I’m proud of my hair.” She floofed it.

  Kids in the back talked about basketball and video game upgrades.

  Cece said, “I wanted to cry the other day because I found dark-chocolate-covered pomegranate, and all I wanted to get for my mom was dark-chocolate pomegranate and all the stores were out of it and I could not find it anywhere. And then I found it after at CVS.”

  I stood by the door, waiting for the bongers to bong. “What normally happens in this class?” I asked Remington.

  “It’s about like this,” he said. “She’ll yell at us when we get too loud, but she usually lets us do what we want.”

  Thad startled me by tearing up the Holocaust assignment sheet and throwing it in the trash can. “You just tore it up,” I said.

  I asked him what he’d like to do in the class.

  “Play games.”

  “Dude, you’ve got a thirty-five in this class,” said Zach.

  “You don’t need an education,” Thad said.

  “The rest of us have nineties,” Zach said, joking.

  “How’s your mood?” I asked a silent girl, Betsy. “Stable?”

  She made a seesawing gesture with her hand.

  “I hate asking kids to do what they don’t want to do,” I said. “Nobody wants to sit through the movie.”

  Betsy gave me a pitying look. In the pecking order of the class, she was low, but I was lower.

  “Twist the cap, Thad,” said Cece.

  Zach, Carter, and Remington were off to a math class. “Dude, you ready for the test?”

  “No,” said Remington.

  “Everyone’s failing that class,” said Zach. “Culver’s got like a thirty-eight.”

  Six bongs and they were all gone. I had a long stretch of quiet until the new class began to arrive. A girl named Amity sat down, checked her makeup, and asked me what the movie was about.

  I said it was about the Holocaust. “And it is grim. It’s seriously grim.” I really didn’t want to play the movie again.

  “Hi, Amity, how are you today?” said Eugene.

  Unenthusiastic response from Amity.

  “How’s your foot feeling?” said Eugene.

  “Better,” said Amity.

  In the back, Wade did fist bumps with his friend Ross. “Yeah, break my knuckles. Come on, break them. Yeah!”

  I passed out the Holocaust assignment sheets. “How’s everybody doing? I’m Mr. Baker, I’m substituting for Mrs. Kennett. How does this class normally go? Do you talk about stuff, or do things, or have fun, or what?”

  “Have fun,” said Wade. “Strictly fun.”

  “Well, this will fit right in, then,” I said sarcastically. “The Holocaust essay. May fifteenth it’s due. You’re supposed to watch this movie, which is Oprah Winfrey walking around with a Holocaust survivor talking about terrible things that happened. The point of this assignment is to look at the movie and think about the way you’re learning about what happened, versus if you read, let’s say, a book about the Holocaust, or if somebody writes a poem about it. You’re trying to figure out which form will have the most immediate impact. Do you learn more watching a documentary? Do you learn more when you’re in the immersive world of a book? I find I learn more sometimes watching a ninety-minute documentary than I learn reading a three-hundred-page book. I don’t know about you. That’s the question that this essay is all about. So watch the video and think about how much you’re getting from it. It’s got some appalling images. It’s what you’d expect a movie about the Holocaust would look like.”

  “Shut up,” whispered Rose, who was playing a number game on her iPad.

  “What is your issue with him?” said Tom, who was also playing a video game. “Bear’s done nothing to you.”

  “Is there tension?” I asked. “I feel tension right here.”

  “She has tension with me, I have none with her,” said Bear.

  “One more thing about the movie,” I said. “These speakers are not very loud. So if you want to hear what somebody’s saying, you have to be quiet and listen. Or else move sort of towards this side of the room. And even if you don’t want to hear what they’re saying, it would really be nice if you just were quiet.”

  Amity’s hand went up. “Can I go down to the tech department to get my iPad looked at? It’s still not fixed.”

  “How tall are you?” asked Wade.

  “Six four and something. I never know. Let’s watch the movie.”

  “You never know?” said Wade.

  “Okay, the movie’s going. Oprah Winfrey is talking!”

  Oprah said, “It is here, right here, on this railroad track, that a young teenage boy arrived in a cattle car, with his family, friends, and neighbors, in 1944.”

  This class was quieter, it turned out. “I thought, Maybe it’s the end of history,” Elie Wiesel said. “Maybe it’s the end of Jewish history.”

  After a while, the little white laptop ran out of battery, and I had to plug in a power cord. “Hang on, guys, technical excitement here.”

  “Do you know Mr. C.?” asked Wade. “You and him should have a sub showdown.”

  I said, “Mud wrestling or something?”

  “Pig wrestling,” said Wade. “I’d put my money on you.”

  I positioned the laptop on a chair so that the power cord could reach it. We waited for it to reboot. Tom said he’d read Night. I asked him whether, so far, the book was more powerful, or the movie.

  “The book, probably,” Tom said. “He goes into details about what happened.”

  Rose helped me log back in to the school network. We messed with system preferences and display preferences. While I was fiddling, Tom threw out a pair of broken sunglasses. “Nothing gold can stay,” he said, quoting Robert Frost.

  “I say we just have a study hall,” said Wade.

  “It’s the orange button,” said Rose, pointing to the projector.

  “I’ve been pressing it like mad!” I said.

  Amity began braiding her friend Dolores’s hair, saying that her father had texted her that he needed to borrow her hair straightener. Amity had texted him back, “What do you need it for? Haha, don’t want to sound disrespectful, I’m just curious.” She said, “What the heck does my father need my straightener for?”

  “I told you,” said Dolores, “he wa
nts to straighten his hair.” She swiped through her iPhone photos. “My brother’s such a faggot.”

  “That’s okay,” said Amity, “because my brother’s more of a faggot.”

  “Which one, Gregory?”

  “No, Kenny.”

  “Oh,” said Dolores. “I like Gregory.”

  No signal, still, coming from the projector. “This is really not happening,” said a blue-bandannaed goth girl, Brandy.

  “Does somebody have a beautiful piece of writing they want to read, while I fuss with this darn thing?” I said.

  “Come on, Tom,” said Amity.

  Brandy said, “My poem consists of murder.”

  “Just murder?” I said. “Is there sometimes a happy moment?”

  “No,” said Brandy.

  Amity got a text from her father about the hair straightener. “He says it’s for ‘uniform maintenance,’” she said. She sat for a while.

  Dolores said, “I want to go home. I want to die.”

  All this time, I was trying to get the projector and the computer to handshake properly. “Maybe we could chat amongst ourselves,” I said.

  “Like a study hall?” said Rose.

  “Very similar to a study hall,” I said.

  “I could read my murder poems,” said Brandy. “Just kidding.”

  I said, “I think we should have an interesting chat about anything at all.”

  “How about the economy,” said Brandy.

  “The American economy,” I said.

  “No,” said Amity. “Let’s talk about the European economy.”

  Dolores suggested we play a game.

  I said, “Like with winners and losers? I’m not sure about that.” I gave up on the computer and stood up. “I just want three minutes of your time. Since I can’t get this thing to play, I’m just going to tell you what happens. Elie Wiesel, the survivor, was there when he was fifteen, and he fortunately was one of the people rescued in 1945. So Oprah Winfrey takes him around, and they look at the big room where the Zyklon B gas came down from the ceiling. Zyklon B is a kind of crystal, and when it’s exposed to air, it turns to cyanide, and it was used to kill people.”

  A girl in the back burst out laughing.