Mariela now stared at the empty green couch. She knew of no one who cared about that girl as much as he did or as much as Mariela did, because hatred is the most concentrated care. Nothing had a frame. Nothing was a square of wall. It was as if the ceiling had been taken off the world and that girl had been sucked out by the force of the vacuum made when the world lost its boundary.
He had made it back to the Public Safety Center, which was a remodeled church next to the railroad tracks. Crosses of lighter brick had been built into the top corners of each brick wall. So much for separation of church and state, he thought. So much for that. He could hear a train whistle off to the right, off in the middle distance. It was getting closer, going through town slowly. Getting closer, it crowed its train crow, and he answered inside with his man-rooster crow, and he opened the door. The train got closer and closer, slowly, crowing.
The day it happened, your mother had let the world soak too long before she washed it. She had left it too close to the whites she was bleaching, and there was a splash. She hadn’t ironed the selvage hem and it puckered the sky at the corners. I wanted it to look its best for you, so I got out the washboard and the soap, as anyone would have done, anyone but the spoiled city folks who don’t do chores because their parents never made them, but I am the anyone who would have. So I did. I scrubbed and scrubbed and washed and washed and rinsed, and that’s what happens when you do a thorough clean like that—you lose the spores of mold clinging to the fabric, damp too long. You lose the pattern and the print, you bleach the whole thing out to match the spot. You iron away the wrinkles, iron them away, and what’s left becomes a plume of smoke rising in the horizon between the sunflowers and the sky. Dirty just in passing until the spot is cleaned away, cauterized, burned entirely out.
barbara duffey
is the author of the poetry collection i might be mistaken (word poetry, forthcoming july 2015) and a recipient of a national endowment for the arts creative writing fellowship in poetry. her prose has appeared in cutbank and the collagist. “and
all night long we have not stirred” is part of a longer mystery novel in progress. duffey is an assistant professor of english at dakota wesleyan university in mitchell, sd, where she lives with
her husband and son. you can follower her on twitter @barbaranduffey or on the web at
www.barbaraduffey.com.
A DULL BOY
DAVID JAMES KEATON
“All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.”
—proverb
I’m telling a visibly bored class about immunostaining, the process for using colored dyes to gate out dead cells under a microscope in order to identify rare cellular populations, when the starstruck girl in the front row who has been giving me meaningful looks since day one, slowly and seductively blinks to reveal the words “Red” and “Rum” drawn on her eyelids.
My name is Danny Lloyd, and I’m a professor of biology at Emmanuellatown Community College, although, when I lose my students’ full attention, I’ve succumbed to the theatrics of chemistry demonstrations on occasion. When I was seven years old, I played the part of “Danny” in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. For months at a Colorado ski resort, I pretended to be a borderline psychotic but otherwise normal 5-year-old boy. The most distinguishing part of my performance, besides shivering and drooling like a rabid squirrel, was supplying the guttural voice of my index finger, Tony. This is the part of the film that is the most enduring, and that finger still follows me to work, decades later. For the record, I’ve never named any of my fingers. Not even whole hands, or fists, which seems to be in fashion here in the South, judging by some of the skirmishes in our hallways. When I began studying biology, I wasn’t prepared for how self-conscious I’d feel whenever I’d use my finger to point out anything on the dry-erase board. To avoid any jokes, pretty early on in graduate school I stopped using that finger for essentially everything. And trying to indicate to someone to please, “Wait a minute” was always a mistake, even a noble “Watch out!” led to ridicule. And innocently scratching my ear was sometimes interpreted by King fans as Tony telling me a secret. Which was ridiculous because the finger thing wasn’t even in the book, and real fans should know this.
I’d managed to lay low through my first several semesters at Emmanuellatown when my full-time teaching career began. Then, one day during the semester before all the rooms were finally outfitted with projectors, I made the mistake of writing something backwards on the overhead. A boy in the back had obviously heard from a friend of a friend of my short-lived movie career, and he shouted out in his best Tony growl:
“Redrum!”
I lost my temper that day, likely lost the respect of that class. But imagine how difficult it would be to kick someone out of the room without being able to point. However, there were plenty more classes to come, and hundreds more chances for that movie to disrupt my life even more.
It was about six years later, right after I received tenure, when technology introduced cell phone smuggling into classrooms. And with most instructors, me included, The Great Texting Cold War had finally begun. The policy on my syllabus was always, “Don’t let me catch you texting. If I see this happening, you will lose all points for the day and could be asked to leave the classroom.” I also explained that texting while driving was like having a 1.9 blood/alcohol level and illegal for this very reason. How could I have any confidence in their ability to follow my lectures if they were drunk? Someone grumbles something about Stephen King writing Cujo while drunk, and I moved on. But this one kid, Kevin, who sat in the back and should have been exhausted at the effort he put into entertaining everyone around him, was harder to catch than most. In fact, I lost a bit of ethos by demanding he stop playing with his phone, only to suffer the embarrassment of his slow, exaggerated removal of a phone that was buried deep in his book bag, which was actually a little plastic box of candy shaped like a phone. He claimed he’d been warming his hands between his legs, and that’s why he looked so suspicious. Foolishly, I accused him of being covered in phones. And when he protested the unfairness of it all, I shrugged:
“The trust is gone, Kevin. I’ve busted you texting way too many times.”
Hands were cold, my ass, I was thinking, You want to talk about cold hands? Try eating ice cream for 47 takes while Kubrick makes the guy from The Harlem Globetrotters cartoon cry.
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
The verse that everyone has recited at least a dozen times, those ten words that show up as jokes on most of my Teacher Evaluations, besides being that famous representation of writer’s block in The Shining, was spoken in The Bridge on the River Kwai, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an Alice in Chains song, Twin Peaks, Melrose Place, it showed up on the chalkboard during an intro for The Simpsons, which means, of course, it was in Family Guy, too. But it surprises some people to learn that this wasn’t in King’s original book either. Although he did jam it into Pet Semetary, I’m told.
Less frequently heard is a ten-word variation, the follow-up first recorded in 1825’s Harry and Lucy Concluded by Maria Edgeworth, where she added, “All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.”
That’s a line that could have really haunted someone later in life, so I guess I lucked out.
They hired me for that movie because of my name. The boy’s name was Danny in the book, and they used my name on the set, “Danny,” so I wouldn’t get confused.
So I wouldn’t get confused? Maybe someone should have told me they were making a movie and there would have been a lot less confusion.
“Jack” and I were the only ones that shared names with our characters. He must get confused easily, too, I figured. I had one up on him though, as there are two Dannys, two Jacks, and two Lloyds in that film. My first and last name wraps around his Jack, mere toy or not, whether he had me on his lap or I was spilling Advocaat on his jacket.
Actually that was eggnog, and it was deliciou
s.
I’ve read in interviews that I was supposedly told they were making a comedy, so I wouldn’t be scared. Did they even wonder how my definition of comedy might be affected forever when I watched them filling an elevator with gallons of blood?
One time, I made the mistake of Googling my name and came across a blog post where a colleague at Emmanuellatown wrote, “I ran into the kid from The Shining today at work. He had the same eyes. I knew him immediately. We’re not supposed to talk about it, and it’s driving me crazy.”
I know there’s little oversight in the Arts and Humanities, but I wonder if this instructor has considered how terrifying this might sound.
I understand that people want to talk about the movie all the time. And they never believe me, but I’d never even seen the entire thing until recently. I swear this is true. For my birthday, my sister was supposed to order me a copy of Shine, because the music instructor who shares our building’s copy machine had been talking about the sudden burst of Rachmaninoff after that film’s surprise Oscar wins. He said it was similar to the post-Sideways Pinot Noir upsurge (more like Merlot hatred), which was bad enough to endure. But my sister is a lot younger than I am, and she doesn’t understand my lack of interest in the film, even if I wasn’t starring in it. Actually, in her own way, she’s the one who steered me towards my PhD, as she was the only one in real world who insisted on calling me “Doc.”
I guess I can understand her obsession, seeing my tricycle up on the little screen, then seeing it parked in our garage. Yes, it’s a tricycle, not a “Big Wheel” like so many reviewers claim. That misidentification is why I no longer drive my Dodge 4x4. I thought it was a good choice for someone in Kentucky, but I switched to a Prius when my cousin laughed, “Look, Danny still likes Big Wheels!” Actually, the tricycle was a gift from Mr. Kubrick, and once it was handed down to my sister, it was easy to imagine her imagining herself peddling around those hallways.
But instead of Shine, she sent me The Shining and feigned ignorance (she made a similar joke when Shining Through came out, too), and I immediately printed out the proper return forms, repackaged it, and put it downstairs under our apartment’s mailboxes to ship it back. But our vestibule doesn’t lock, and someone stole the parcel. I know this because I placed it there at 9:00 p.m., walked down to C.C.’s on the corner for some ice cream, and when I returned at 9:25 p.m. it was gone. Infuriated, I sat in my living room and listened for any clues to the caper, immediately suspecting the kids who’d just moved in above me, and whose distracting bass-heavy sound system was usually all I could think about. So I listened for them to watch the movie, ignoring the much more likely scenario, that they’d sold it back to the Music & Movie Exchange for a quick five bucks of gas money. I sat on the couch all night, staring at the ceiling, careful my head was angled up and my eyes weren’t rolling back in my head, never allowing myself that spaced-out look Kubrick had become famous for. I’d successfully avoided the film all my life, but couldn’t help catching sight once a year of my own five-year-old face drooling and contorted in seizures.
Eventually, I realized that I would have no idea if they were watching the movie or not. I only knew Jack’s angry rant over the typewriter because I was on the set that day, pretending to nap on a nearby couch. And I only knew a spattering of my own lines. So I went down to the Music & Movie Exchange for my own copy. And I watched it.
It was a pretty good movie.
Jack went crazy kind of fast though. Every time a title card said “Monday,” “Tuesday,” “Wednesday,” or “Two Months Later,” I imagined it saying, “12:19,” “12:25,” “12:33,” and “Five Minutes Later” instead. Can anyone switch gears that fast from rational to homicidal? Kind of ridiculous.
Every year, our class takes a field trip to Kackleberry Farms to get some pumpkins for our hydrogen peroxide experiments, a variation on the classic Elephant’s Toothpaste demo that you see in most grade schools. Hydrogen peroxide is mixed with liquid soap. Then a catalyst like potassium iodide is added to make the hydrogen peroxide break down quickly, and the foam puts on quite a show. Not enough to fill up an elevator, but it wakes them up for a day nonetheless, even keeps them from texting. More important, no one does a Tony imitation with their clamshell phone.
The formula, 2H2O2 → 2H2O(l) + O2(g), is deceptively simple, considering how a bit of mad science actually opens their dead eyes for a week of lectures afterward. Something about that foam busting through the eyes and mouth of Halloween pumpkins makes the job fun all over again.
But this year the farm doesn’t just have pumpkins.
They have a hedge maze, too.
Many times, people have congratulated me on my nine-year-old character’s ingenuity, when we backtracked over our footprints in the snow to save Danny’s life.
Now, I don’t want to overanalyze the film. In fact, lately, there have been Post-it notes on my door with “Room 237!” scrawled on them, which steered me towards a recent documentary of the same name. I wasn’t surprised by its popularity among my weakest students. From what I’ve seen, if it wouldn’t be such a distraction to show it in class, I could have used it as a hilarious example of horrible inductive reasoning. It’s bad enough they’re using exclamation points on anything, since it’s not only term papers that suffer from that sort of breathless punctuation. Each semester, I explain that students are allowed one exclamation point, whether it’s in emails or more substantial assignments. I tell them not to waste it, in case they really need to scream about something important.
But now that I’ve finally viewed The Shining, I realize that it was never backtracking that did this. If you look real close at what I was doing in the maze, if you squint right there in the bottom left corner of your screen, I was actually covering some of them up. I like this idea better.
Once, I had two sets of twins in my classroom. The one set of twins was our turtles. I’d turned the corner at the Science Building one morning, and there in front of my huge off-road vehicle were two box turtles, side by side in the parking lot like they were going to live forever. I took them into our classroom, and with the students, we filled up the empty 20-gallon tank that had been gathering dust in the corner, and gave our new turtles a home. I numbered their shells, “52” and “81” as part of an extra credit assignment. The numbers represented tellurium and thallium on the periodic table, two elements which produced a green flame when burned. Anyone who solved this riddle received fifty points, more than enough to cancel out a texting deficit. Despite the numbers, students would assign their own names, Kevin called them “Cuff” and “Link” every chance he got, and asked me how I could possibly tell them apart.
“Exactly,” I’d say.
Someone drowned the turtles a month later, pinning them to the bottom of the tank with our textbooks. I upended the tank into the parking lot, not far from where I’d found them, working their way through the cars for months, the creek they couldn’t see mere feet from their heads at all times. I dream of their journey some nights. More often, I dream of the food in the freezer that Scatman Crothers showed Shelley Duvall and me in the film. I would dream of sitting on a sack of coffee beans and eating peanut butter with my hands. Some days the dream comes back, only now I dream of hooking wires to the metal shelves, and applying a series of electric shocks to rows of foods in that freezer, as well as thousands of shelves in hundreds of grocery stores. I would hit the switch and watch the sparks turn the labels first to numbers, then to white, then removing all identifiable features from every product.
My students joked that I’d numbered the turtles so I wouldn’t get attached, as if I was going to experiment on them. As if they weren’t the experiment from day one.
The other set of twins weren’t twins exactly. Just two girls of the same height, color, and degree of disinterest. They fought the No Phone rule tooth and nail, more like tooth and claw. They would see my own phone shining through my linen pants, and say sweetly, “Aren’t you going to answer that?” They
also worked for our campus newspaper, The Street, and one of them, possibly both of them, wrote about my brief acting career, violating the unwritten rule of avoiding the topic. The article said things like, “His only other film was an undistinguished role in Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy, where he again played a boy named ‘Danny.’” And, “Rumor has it that they told him he was in an adventure film, not a biography of the Watergate architect” and, my favorite, “Professor Lloyd wears checkered shirts every day, just like the carpet in the Overlook Hotel.” I think the little shit was thinking of Twin Peaks.
Once the article hit, the jokes were more and more frequent. The “red” and “rum” on the eyelids of the twins mocks me once a week now, and I understand that it’s not due to my minor celebrity. Then there was the ridiculous unease when I used terms as innocuous as “Overview” on the top of my semester calendars, waiting for the snickers. Recently, there was one student who claimed he heard me say “gravy” instead of “grading,” but I thought he said “Grady.” As in Delbert Grady, the smooth-talking Iago of Kubrick’s adaptation. I kicked him out, and later swore to my Division Chair that I’d caught him texting. I didn’t feel bad about the misrepresentation. It probably saved his life.
Exigencies Page 19
