by Steve Toltz
“Why are you here? Not just in this class, but in the world? Do you think your parents wondered why they had you? Listen to what people say when they have new babies: ‘It’s the best thing I ever did in my life,’ ‘It’s magical, blahblahblah.’ They’ve done it for their own enchantment, to satiate their own emotional needs. Have you ever noticed that? That you’re a projection of other people’s desires? How does that make you feel?”
No one said anything. It was the right thing to say. Mr. White moved through the desks to the back of the classroom. We didn’t know whether to keep our eyes forward or to turn them toward him or to tear them out.
“What do your parents want of you?” he shouted from the back. We swiveled to face him. “They want you to study. Why? They’re ambitious for you. Why? They look at you as their personal fucking property, that’s why! You and their cars, you and their washing machines, you and their televisions. You belong to them. And not one of you is any more to them than the opportunity to fulfill their failed ambitions! Ha-ha-ha! Your parents don’t love you! Don’t let them get away with saying ‘I love you’! It’s disgusting! It’s a lie! It’s just a cheap justification for manipulating you! ‘I love you’ is another way of saying, ‘You owe me, you little bastard! You represent the meaning of my life because I couldn’t give it to myself, so don’t fuck it up for me!’ No, your parents don’t love you—they need you! And a hell of a lot more than you need them, I can tell you that!”
The students had never heard anything like it. Mr. White stood there breathing noisily, as if through a clogged tube.
“Christ, I’m getting out of here,” he said suddenly, and left the room.
Unsurprisingly, within hours the whole school had feasted on the scandal, only it came all distorted: some said he had attacked his students; other said he tried to whip a whole bunch of them with his belt. And more than a few whispered that unmentionable word that people hate (read, “love”) to mention these days: pedophile!
I wish that was the end of it. I wish I could end on that happy note. Happy? In comparison with what happened next, yes. What took place that same afternoon sits solidly in history as my first official regret, remaining to this day number one. Any good I’d done in my life up to that afternoon was about to be demolished, and any good I’ve done since has been an attempt to make up for what I did.
Here’s what I did: I followed the Towering Inferno all day. I watched her reading in the sun, as Brett described, pulling compulsively at her stockings with her cobalt-blue fingernails. I followed her across the school grounds as she clutched the hand of a girl with a face like a spade. At lunch I stood behind her in the canteen while she ordered a meat pie, and when the woman wasn’t looking she grabbed a handful of squeezable tomato sauce packets and shoved them in her pocket, then sauntered off, having adorably stolen complimentary items.
In the afternoon I trailed Mr. Smart, the biology teacher, as he chased her through the musty halls. When he caught her, she held her head as if it were an heirloom.
“Why weren’t you in class?” he demanded.
“I have my period,” she replied defiantly, with a look that said, “Prove I don’t.” Good one! The broken man cast his eyes to the floor, wishing he were at home with that weird collection of moss he brought in one time.
After school we used to stand around at train stations for hours (try doing that into your twenties—the thrill is gone, believe me). The train guards were always telling us to go home, but there’s really no law against standing on the platform not catching trains. That afternoon I shadowed the Towering Inferno to the far end of the station. She was standing with her usual crowd and I was gaping from behind a pylon thinking my usual obsessive thoughts: wishing she would fall into some danger so I might rescue her, spitting on myself for fetishizing a girl I’d never met, longing to take a personal memento from her as a holy relic, indulging in a sexual fantasy in which we intersect at right angles, and generally planning a systematic exploration of her cathedral-like edifice.
She and her friends kept edging farther down the platform, so to keep my eyes on her I had to step out from my hiding place. One of her friends—Tony, a boy with a slight hunch I knew because he had once taken a pack of cigarettes from me in exchange for the observation that my eyes were set too close together—unzipped his fly and gyrated his crotch in the Towering Inferno’s general direction. She turned away in disgust and found herself trapped in my stare. It caught us both off guard. Then a strange thing happened: she stared back. Her eyes, unblinking and wild, dared me not to look away. The moment stretched its way into infinity, then snapped back to about a nanosecond and rebounded, so all in all it lasted about eight and a half seconds.
I turned away and moved to a public phone. I put some coins in the slot and dialed a number at random.
“Hello?”
“Hello.”
“Who’s this?”
“It’s me. Is that you?”
“Who is this? What do you want?”
“Never mind that,” I said. “How are you?”
“Who is this?”
“I told you. It’s me.”
I could still feel the Towering Inferno’s eyes on me. I knew what to do: I shook my head vehemently and laughed a loud, unnatural laugh before pausing to nod sagely, as though the person on the other end of the phone had made a funny yet offensive comment that on further reflection proved wise. I turned casually to face her, but her back was turned. I felt a tiny thorn prick my ego.
It was getting dark. Everyone wordlessly agreed that loitering on the station platform had gone stale—until tomorrow—and when the next train arrived, we all filed in.
At the other end of the packed carriage there was a commotion, and a small crowd formed a circle—bad news for someone. Circles of people always are. Honestly, sometimes I think human beings should be prohibited from forming groups. I’m no fascist, but I wouldn’t mind at all if we had to live out our lives in single file.
I heard happy cheers and joyous laughter. That meant someone was suffering. My heart felt sick for the poor sucker. Thankfully Charlie was home sick and Brett was dead, so whoever they were humiliating this time had nothing to do with me. Still, I pushed through the crowd to see who it was.
Mr. White.
The students had torn the hat off his head and were waving it in the air, asserting their power over him. Mr. White was trying to get the hat back. Ordinarily even the most rebellious young crackhead can’t physically assault a teacher—emotionally and psychologically, sure; physically, no—but Mr. White was a teacher made evil by gossip, and that made him fair game.
“Hey!” I shouted.
Everyone looked over at me. This was my first stand against the bullies, against the ruthlessness of the human pack animal, and I was determined not to disappoint myself. But then four things happened in quick succession.
The first was that I noticed the person holding the hat was the Towering Inferno.
Second, my shouting “Hey!” was interpreted not as a heroic “Hey” but a “Hey, throw me the hat.”
She threw it to me.
I caught it with my cheek. It rolled on the floor, toward the door. Mr. White trudged through the carriage after it.
The third thing that happened was that the Towering Inferno yelled out, “Get it, Jasper!”
She knew my name. Oh my God. She knew my name. I ran like a maniac for the hat. I grabbed it. Mr. White stopped midcarriage.
Then the fourth thing, the final painful event, was her delicate high-pitched voice commanding me again: “Throw it out!” I was under a spell. I half pushed open the train door, enough for my hand to hang outside the carriage. The brim of the hat danced a waltz with the wind. Mr. White’s face had frozen with a sort of forced nonchalance. I felt sick.
Sick. Sick. Sick. Self-hatred was at an all-time high. Why was I doing this? Don’t do it, Jasper. Don’t do it. Don’t.
I did it.
I let go of the hat. The w
ind picked it up and threw it out of sight. Mr. White ran toward me. I bolted for the door at the end of the carriage. Rain smacked me in the face. I opened the door of the next carriage, ran in, and closed it behind me. He tried to follow, but I blocked the door with my foot. He stood in the rain on the tiny rattling platform between the two carriages, trying to force it open. I tied the strap from my bag to the door handle, held it down with my other foot, and let physics do the work. In no time he was drenched to the bone. He swore through the glass. Finally he gave up and turned back. The others had blocked the other door. It rained harder. He turned back to me, banged on the glass door again. I knew if I let him in, he’d have me for lunch. He was stuck. It rained even harder, a stiff hard rain. Mr. White stopped screaming and just looked at me with old-dog eyes. I felt something in me sink, but there was nothing I could do. At the next stop we both watched the Towering Inferno step onto the platform. Through the dusty window, she gave me a smile that said, “I’ll never forget what you did for me, Jasper Dean, Destroyer of Hats.”
The following morning I walked through the long, airless hallways and silent stairwells into the quadrangle for a special assembly. The headmaster stepped up to the podium. “Yesterday afternoon, our English teacher, Mr. White, was terrorized by students from this school!” A murmur snaked through the crowd. The headmaster continued his diatribe. “I would like the students involved to please step forward.” Everyone looked around to see if anyone was owning up. I looked around too. “Right. We’ll just have to find you. And we will find you. You are all dismissed. For now.”
I walked away thinking that my time at this school was almost up, and it wasn’t twenty minutes later in the science lab that the bell rang and rang and rang, and I heard that old delighted cry of “Someone’s jumped! Someone’s jumped!” I ran out of the classroom while the bell kept on ringing. It was the suicide bell—I think we were the first school in the country to have one; now they’re all the rage. Like inquisitive sheep, all the students ran to the cliff edge to see, and I had not just a bad feeling but the worst one, that feeling of dread, because I knew who it was and that I had put him there myself.
I peered over the cliff edge and saw Mr. White’s slumped body thrashed by the waves on the rocks.
That afternoon it was as if I were looking at life through a rolled-up newspaper. I had drained the remaining dregs of innocence from my heart. I had put a man in the ground, or at least aided his descent, and I loathed myself into the future and beyond. Well, why shouldn’t I? You shouldn’t forgive all your trespasses. You can’t always go too easy on yourself. In fact, in some circumstances, forgiving yourself is unforgivable.
I was sitting behind the gym with my head in my hands when a school prefect, a sort of benign Hitler youth, came up and told me the principal wanted to see me. Well, that’s that, I thought. I walked to the principal’s office and found that his pliable face had been shaped into a picture of weariness.
“Mr. Silver,” I said.
“I understand you were a friend of Brett’s.”
“That’s right.”
“I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind reading a psalm at Mr. White’s funeral.”
Me? The murderer reading a psalm at the funeral of his victim? As the principal went on telling me about my role in the funeral proceedings, I wondered if this weren’t some sort of clever punishment, because I felt transparent sitting there, maybe even more see-through than that—I felt like the site of an archaeological dig, my old clay pot thoughts revealing all about the civilization that had ruled there in its ignorant and doomed way.
I said that I would be honored to read a psalm at the funeral.
What else was I going to say?
That night I read it over. It had everything you’d expect in a psalm: heavy-handedness, hit-you-over-the-head metaphors, and Old World symbolism. I tore it out of the Bible thinking: I’m not lending my voice to this oppressive nonsense. Instead I chose a passage from one of Dad’s favorite books, one he’d horrified me with a couple of years earlier, one that had seared my brain. It was a passage by James Thomson from his book of poetry, The City of Dreadful Night.
The morning of the funeral, I was called again to the principal’s office. I went thinking he wanted to go over the running order of the event. I was surprised to see the Towering Inferno waiting outside his office, leaning against the wall. So we’d been fingered for the crime after all. It’s just as well, I thought.
“We’re fucked,” she said.
“We deserve it,” I said back.
“I know. Who’d have thought he’d react so badly?”
“No talking,” Mr. Silver snapped as he opened the door and beckoned us in. The Towering Inferno flinched as though slapped, and I wondered at what age she had discovered she possessed the power to convince men to throw hats out of trains. If I asked her now, would she remember the day? The moment? The event? What I wouldn’t give to exchange the tale of her strength for the saga of my weakness.
In the office there was a skinny middle-aged woman sitting with her hands in her lap, her narrow eyes closing a quarter of an inch with every step I took into the room.
“Well, you two,” the principal said, “what do you have to say for yourselves?”
“She didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said. “It was me.”
“Is that true?” he asked the Inferno.
She nodded guiltily.
“That’s not true,” the woman said, pointing at me. “He did it, but she was ordering him around.”
I took offense at that, because it was true. I stood up and placed my hands on the principal’s desk. “Sir, just take one second and look at the girl you are accusing. Are you looking at her?” He was looking at her. “She’s a victim of her own beauty. Because why? Because beauty is power. And as we learned in history class, power corrupts. Therefore, absolute beauty corrupts absolutely.”
The Towering Inferno stared at me. Mr. Silver cleared his throat.
“Well, Jasper, it’s unforgivable what you’ve done.”
“I agree. And you don’t have to suspend me, because I’m quitting this place.” He bit his lip. “You still want me to read at the funeral?”
“I think you should,” he said, in a cold, serious voice.
Damn. I knew he was going to say that.
The funeral was more or less a repeat of Brett’s: everyone standing there as if dignity mattered, the polished smile of the priest making your eyes squint, the sight of the coffin closing in on you. The Towering Inferno was staring at me, though I didn’t want to be stared at just then. I wanted to be alone with my guilt. Despite myself, I looked at her, the Angel of Death with great legs. Without even knowing it, she was the central figure in demolishing a family.
I peered over the cold body of Mr. White and silently pleaded: Forgive me for throwing your hat out of the train! I didn’t know your head was still inside! Forgive me! Forgive me for throwing you out of a moving train!
The priest nodded at me, the nod of a man tight with Omniscience.
I got up to read.
They were all expecting the psalm. Instead, this is what I read:
“Who is the most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself; yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.
“The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
Creator of all woe and sin! Abhorred,
Malignant and implacable! I vow
“That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world.”
I finished and looked up. The priest was gnashing his teeth just as it’s described in his favorite book.
IV
After returning home from Sizzler, I stood alo
ne in the labyrinth, staring at the moon, which looked to be just an empty wreck of a rock, burned out, as if God had done it for the insurance.
“I’m worried,” Dad said, coming up behind me.
“What about?”
“My son’s future.”
“I’m not.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Go overseas.”
“You don’t have any money.”
“I know I don’t have any money. I know what an empty pocket feels like. I’ll make some.”
“How?”
“I’ll get a job.”
“What kind of job? You don’t have any skills.”
“Then I’ll get an unskilled job.”
“What kind of unskilled job? You don’t have any experience.”
“I’ll get some.”
“How? You need experience to get a job.”
“I’ll find something.”
“Who’ll employ you? No one likes a quitter.”
“That’s not true.”
“OK, then. Who likes a quitter?”
“Other quitters.”
Dad left me with a melodramatic sigh that trailed after him like a smell. I don’t know how long I stood in the cold trying to see past the veil covering my future. Should I be a baker of a male stripper? A philanthropist or a roadie? A criminal mastermind or a dermatologist? It was no joke. I was caught in a brainstorm, and ideas were clamoring for prime position. Television presenter! Auctioneer! Private investigator! Car salesman! Train conductor! They arrived without invitation, made their presentation, then made way for the others. Some of the more persistent ideas tried to sneak back in. Train conductor! Television presenter on a train! Car salesman! Train salesman!
I spent the next day staring into empty space. I get a lot of joy out of air, and if sunlight hits the floating specks of dust so you see the whirling dance of atoms, so much the better. During the day Dad breezed in and out of my room and clicked his tongue, which in our family means “You’re an idiot.” In the afternoon he came back in with a loaded grin. He had a brilliant idea and couldn’t wait to tell me about it. It had suddenly occurred to him to throw me out of the house, and what did I think of his brainwave? I told him I was concerned about him eating all his meals alone, because the clinking of cutlery on a plate echoing through an empty house is one of the top five depressing noises of all time.
