by Sam Munson
Alex didn’t cry. This time. She was a prizewinning essayist, now. And crying does not befit such eminence. She steeled herself. Tossed her inky hair. I noticed as I glanced back up the aisle, looking into the now über-uncomfortable legions of my schoolmates, I noticed that the look on her face reminded me of someone. Someone I’d met recently and could not summon up. But someone nonetheless infuriating. So instead of going and sitting down, I kept singing. At the top of my horrid voice. Think of a frog being sodomized. I turned back to the seated Singing Tigers and yelled, “Come on, you fuckers!” at them. I started waving my hands: Up, up, sing!
Nothing happened at first, except that large swaths of the audience started laughing at me. I could hear Digger howling with glee. The more people laughed the more frantically I waved, and eventually to my amazement a few Singing Tigers took up the song, and then a few more, and then they were all on their feet roaring along with me, with this unknown miserable boy, this child, they were singing the stirring trivial song in their mingled voices, masking my horrible screech. Dr. Karlstadt’s face was now the same gull color as her scarf, and Mr. Vanderleun was on his feet, and those not singing along just barraged me and Alex and the whole disastrous show with whistles, yells, and catcalls. Nobody could do anything to shut us up. Their authority, their pukey authority, was for the moment suspended. I didn’t know any of the Singing Tigers. I didn’t know any of the people in the upper rows. I didn’t know their names or their hopes or their vices. And I knew that they thought I was ridiculous, absurd, pathetic, frail. Yet we sang together, out of boredom, out of disgust with piety, out of the innate adolescent impulse to lawlessness and disorder. For three solid, rousing choruses of “The Colonel Bogey March,” Hitler’s Testicles edition:
Hitler
Has only one big ball
Göring
Has two but ver-ree small
Himmlers
got something simmler
And Joseph Go-balls
Has no balls
At all.
Imagine this dumb insouciance lifted up on a geyser of voices, lifted up to our auditorium ceiling, which is painted with patchy frescos, Plato and Frederick Douglass and the Marquis de Lafayette and Kennedy himself, a catastrophe of time. Stiff, self-pleased figures arranged without sense or purpose. They smirked down at me all my four years at Kennedy. Four years! The choir fucked up the words at first, but by the second chorus they’d gotten it right. Some of the Singing Tigers even clapped out a countertime. It was primordial chaos. When people lift their voices together, you don’t have unity. That’s a lie. You have a tremendous, inarguable cacophony. Warm, vivid cacophony. In the ranks of chairs, people sang, whispered to their friends, stood up to mock my gestures, making pinched faces. One guy in the third row did a cruel and perfect mimicry of my movements, my uncertain, spiteful movements. And we’d never spoken. Never even seen each other, that I could recall. The Singing Tigers came to a crescendo, and cut the tempo, so that “No balls at all” came out as a long, dragging flourish. Then, silence. One breath. Mr. Vanderleun was still droning away like an impotent burglar alarm. I gave two stiff middle fingers to Alex and her academic sponsors.
The applause and laudatory shouting started as the Singing Tigers bowed and danced around, out of sync now after their improvised performance. The students were NOT cheering me. I was a distraction from the big show, an eccentricity. Let’s get that clear. I am anonymous, and I like it. This was not Addison Schacht’s Big Moment. Those cheers were part of the insuppressible surge of gaiety and anger, not a response to it. They were for the Singing Tigers, our collective voice. The Tigers are much better at what they do than our mediocre sports teams. They’re always winning regional contests. People always cheer them. And anyway it was all gestural. I know that. It accomplished nothing. I dare you to blame me, though. For even a millisecond. That outburst during Alex’s speech was the only half-decent thing I’ve ever done in my life. And I know the decayed and worthless nature of my character. I’m not good for many more such acts. If any. I marched back to my seat, hoarse and singing. Digger was laughing helpless laughs. Soon my tenth disciplinary action over the course of four years at John F. Kennedy would descend. That’s two-point-five offenses per year, on average. Kevin had none. Digger has two. What makes me so delightful to behold?
And I did figure out whom Alex Faustner reminded me of. It took me until I got home. After a spittle-flecked lecture from Mr. Vanderleun, with Dr. Karlstadt supervising, cooing out how disappointed she was in me. By chance I examined my copy of Rage, lying on the floor next to my bed where I’d hurled it. It was Nathan Levitan, world-famous Jew and author. She reminded me of him. With his permanent, sad grimace of … disappointment? Complacence? Who the fuck knows. Fucking Levitan! I cackled when I realized, whooped and crowed. My father shouted down to ask what the matter was. He has a good ear. Dr. Karlstadt suspended me for eight weeks, and sentenced me to a further twelve weeks of sensitivity training at the hands of the Diversity Outreach mediators. I would be getting back to school right after Christmas break. Just in time for the start of the new millennium. I had been expecting much worse.
XIX.
DO YOU KNOW ABOUT LACRIMAE RERUM? I said before that Virgil was an exception to the desertlike inhumanity of Latin writers. And lacrimae rerum is one of the reasons why. It’s from when Aeneas is looking at those murals I mentioned before? In Carthage? The full lines run: En Priamus! Sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi; sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Solve metus, feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem. Sic ait, atque animum pictura pascit inani. They mean “‘And Priam! Here, too, his glory has its reward; here too are tears for things, and mortal matters touch the soul. Away with fear. This renown will save,’ Aeneas said, and his spirit drew sustenance from the unreal image.” Beautiful stuff, no? Exactly what you’d expect from an epic hero. Aeneas seems to be saying that, despite all the murder, all the smoke and death, despite Neoptolemus, “glory has its reward.” Tears will be shed, life will continue, and the fame of glorious deeds will redeem us from our sufferings. And maybe that’s true.
But you have to admit: the very last word of the scene is inani, which means “unreal, insubstantial.” Even “empty.” Doesn’t that call everything coming before it into question? I mean, Aeneas is crying as he says all this, weeping in front of his best friend, Achates, and even if you take him at his word, it’s still not a very comforting proposition, and if murals ratifying your glory are supposed to be so fucking great, why does Virgil then remind us that they’re unreal? Just images? I’d say it’s a trick on his part, a typical one, like the thing with having Aeneas return to the world of the living through the gate of ivory. I’d say (and maybe I’m wrong) this scene implies that even in calm, splendid Carthage, you can see the hideous, corrosive nature of existence. Imagine it: Aeneas has come all this way, his city is destroyed, the victorious Greeks are hurtling through its streets and laughing, his wife is dead, he’s lost a huge number of men, he’s overcome all these dire obstacles. Then he arrives in Carthage, and what does he find? This whole mural depicting the sack of Troy, the wreck of his own life. He can’t escape from it! It confronts him, pursues him. Wherever he goes. He leaves Carthage, eventually, and Dido kills herself, like I said. But before he goes, he explains to Dido and her court what happened, which is how we find out. About the Trojan horse, about Sinon’s treachery, about Neoptolemus. About everything.
So isn’t Aeneas kind of saying these “tears” are universal? Permanent and ubiquitous? Sunt lacrimae rerum can be read simply as, “There are tears for things.” The verb to be sometimes works that way in Latin. Tears for things: inherent in their existence, almost. You can’t get away from it. All you can do is try to impose a shape on it, like Aeneas when he’s telling his own sad story to the Carthaginian nobility. Probably every lasting thing created by human beings has a touch of this quality, of being infused with tears. Right? Is that crazy? It seems right to me. Eventually you have to l
ook at the horrifying facts of your own life, of life as a general proposition; whether it was your fault or not that things went wrong, eventually everybody has to look at the shape of their life. You can’t avoid it, and if you try to you’ll probably end up like Mr. Vanderleun, incapable of knowing anything about anything, and filled with fucking certitude. I don’t understand how in my life, which has basically been a safe and sheltered one, I could even have had these ideas. I guess you can’t worry about the sources of your thinking. I’ve had too much time to think, recently. Which has had its usual bad consequences.
What do you want me to do, though? Life has been sort of dull since they suspended me. I knew it would; I tried to prepare myself for it. But it’s still been really fucking boring. I sleep a lot. I read Virgil. I’ve been spending two afternoons a week at the grocery store as well. I had never gone to one under my own volition before. I mean to do like real shopping, for a household. It’s mostly for me, because one morning I got absolutely enraged: there was literally no food in our house. Not a decade-old can of salmon, not pumpkin pie filling, not sourballs, fucking nothing. Not even ketchup. Why? Why was this the case? I mean, the fucking store is right around the corner. A three-minute drive. Sometimes, when the sun is out and casting stark, pale winter shadows, I even walk there, through the mild cold, my breath condensing and spiraling away.
Don’t think I’ve gotten all sentimental or anything like that. I have literally nothing to do, and it’s sociologically amazing to shop for food in the early afternoons. The store is mostly empty, but the people who are there are the biggest congregation of freaks I’ve ever seen, and I’ve met plenty of freaks. There’s this one woman, a regular, who buys two canned hams and a carton of cigarettes every time she comes in, or at least every time I’ve waited behind her in line. She has a whole collection of watered-silk muumuus, with childish daisies or koi printed on them. Then there’s Old Knobby, as I call him in my head, whose hands are pebbled with these brown, leathery-looking nodules, some kind of weird skin condition. From the wrist to the tips of his fingers, dun-colored lumps and protrusions. It’s fucking nauseating. And remember that junkie I saw in the Tip-Top the morning Digger and I hatched our plan? He’s an afternoon customer too! I rammed him with my cart. I didn’t mean to. Or I only sort of meant to. He was shuffling down the produce aisle at this glacial pace, and he didn’t even really respond when the front of my cart smashed into him, just grunted and kept fondling the heads of iceberg lettuce. This is my new tribe. I’m glad to say that my food purchases are more normal than theirs: regular old staples like tangerines and jarred peanuts. Although I have purchased a carton or two of cigarettes. So who am I to judge?
Lieutenant Huang came by, right after my latest exile began. He wanted to ask my father a few follow-up questions about the broken window. Neither of them had been able to find the instrument of its breakage: Lorriner’s banner-wrapped brick, which I had returned to its saddening owner. So Huang was understandably puzzled, and my father was a bit afraid, but they managed to work it out between them so that neither one lost much face. They shared another awkward handshake, and Huang told me he’d read about my postering exploits. “I think you know my opinion of Arch Sexton’s work as a journalist,” he purred, “but I want to assure you that, really, we have everything under control.” Fidgeting with his ring again. I guess that’s why he was taking time off of heading a murder investigation to look into some stupid act of vandalism. Because he had everything under control. Then he was striding out of my house, and my father and I watched him go. Pompous, fruitless gusts of wind filled the skirts of his stone-colored trench coat. He doesn’t matter. My father took almost an hour to calm down, however. Now he’s put Huang’s card on our fridge, with a magnet shaped like a strawberry the impossible red of welling blood. Next to it is a photo some benevolent stranger took: my father and Fatima at the Cochrane Institute party, in their absurd getups. By some miracle, they are both laughing, mouths stretched and vulnerable-looking. They’re holding hands, touching fingertips, really, across an empty space on the institute’s black-and-white-tiled marble floor, and hemming them is a crowd dressed in rich, clashing colors and fabrics, dominoes and monkey masks, bandages, fake fangs, capes and swords. Everything you’d expect. I wanted to hate it—the picture, I mean. I found that I could not.
I don’t have much else to say. What more do you want to know, anyway? Factually, I mean? Still after my dick measurements, are you? You can ask Digger. That’s Phoebe Anna Zeleny. With the vast resources at your disposal, you can track her down. She wants to go to MIT. I’m 99 percent certain she’s going to get in. See? See how easy I make your job for you? Here’re some more facts, free of charge. Sexton’s eventual article referred to me as a “troubled young man.” Which may be the one honest sentence of his career. Alex donated her prize to Planned Parenthood. My father is still seeing Fatima. She and I have started speaking to each other. It’s hard, because her English is terrible and she expresses her insecurity about it as haughtiness. But whatever. I’m guilty of much worse. Also, I am hammered. I’ve been drinking wine, which I never drink. Red wine, from this bottle coated with the waxen traces of other people’s handling. The label says in huge Gothic script, Brindisi Rosso. Red wine tastes sour. It stimulates our highest faculties. At least everyone in the ancient world makes this claim. I swiped it because I agree with them in theory, because I needed to mull something over, something difficult. I have no weed. I haven’t even smoked any since my conversation with Mr. Broadus. I guess I still need stimulation to wrangle my way through problems, though. As soon as I got even a marginal buzz, my thoughts started flowing and my heart pounded in a cerebral way. The time is now 12:56 a.m., Sunday, November 22. My house is so quiet I can hear even in my room the faint roar of the kiln, and the asphalt compressing when a car goes down my street.
Digger and I are back on speaking terms. My performance at the assembly did the trick, I think. I haven’t bought or sold any drugs. And I’m actually looking forward to going back to school. My suspension will expire in about a month. I imagine things will be a lot calmer when I get back. Kevin’s still dead. Noel’s still fat. David Cash is still scary as fuck. I’m assuming these last two things are true. Haven’t seen Noel or David for a while. How likely are they to change, though? It’s been fine. Everything has been fine. So why did I take this essay up again? The deadline is almost here. Why risk it? The first draft, which was empty of truth and met all your requirements, your word limits and whatnot, was sitting on my desk in my room, under the new framed lithograph of Virgil Digger got me for my birthday. (This past Tuesday. I can finally buy cigarettes legally.) It’s an illustration from the Inferno. Drawn by Gustave Doré. Of when Virgil first appears. Dante doubts his worthiness of such a guide, after Virgil has explained his purpose. He’s tall and thin—Virgil, I mean—with the face of an exile. A wise, troubled, smooth face. Dante just looks like a muddled coward, but that’s all right: he has Virgil accuse him of cowardice pretty soon after this meeting, so he probably thought he was, on some level. Although he did assign his political enemies to some creative and brutal tortures. So who the fuck knows.
She gave the picture to me with a little ceremony. She bought me a cupcake and stuck a candle in it, and sang. She has a good voice. Much better than mine. Though that’s not hard. We were at my house. And she kissed me on the cheek. I don’t know what that means. It’s probably irrelevant anyway. In the light of what I’m about to explain to you. I didn’t object. I’m not stupid. We had turned off all the other lights, so the candle glimmered more brightly. She laughed a low throaty laugh, and her hand caressed the back of my head, where the scar and the soft stubble of newish hair lie, and her fingers did not flinch. We heard my father come home, and the shower start up. And his warbling. He grins and sings all the time now. Who knows for how long? I think it’s Fatima. No accounting for taste, right?
So what the fuck’s the problem with all this? Digger’s been bringing me my
homework, so I don’t fall behind. I’ve been doing college applications, too. I’m applying other places, you know. So act fast, you assholes! I have to admit that your application, despite the boring stuff on it, was the best. Also, according to your informational material you have the single biggest library building in America. Which is fucking cool. Not the biggest library system qua system (that belongs to Harvard) but the biggest single facility. I’ve been working on this essay for a long time. I didn’t plan that. I wrote one version, just some nothing version, a thousand words, like what you’re probably used to getting. I was planning to send it you about two weeks ago, with all the rest of the crap you demand: transcripts, recommendations. Mr. Dwight and Ms. Erlacher. I asked them through Digger, without much hope. They both agreed, to my complete surprise. I guess Ms. Erlacher doesn’t hate me as much as I imagined. Maybe she fucking misses me or something. Or maybe they’ll both write me long series of backhanded compliments. The check, fifty dollars, covering the “application fee.” That’s genius, ladies and gentlemen! I wish I’d thought of some similar fee in my old line of work. I could have made a fucking bundle.
All this stuff fit into a large manila envelope, addressed to you, postage affixed, the flap sealed. All I had to do was mail it. I didn’t. I kind of got off on just letting it sit there, knowing all I had to do was drop it in the mail and things would change for me. I’d get to leave this striving, awful town, no more Vanderleun, no more Black History Month. I mean, maybe college is permeated with the same bullshit that high school is. I have zero experience. But I’d be fighting through it on my own, not with a fucking audience over my shoulder, my father, David, Kevin, whoever. I’d be free. Greenswards and elysian sex, all the fun you could want. And I could study the major texts of Latin literature, to say nothing of higher-level philological pursuits, all the time. Do you know how much that excites me? Not having to do classes whose subjects are hugely, impossibly vague—like World History, like English. You know, to anchor them? So they don’t dissolve because of their meaninglessness? I’ve looked through the sample catalog. Holy fuck! Satire and the Silver Age. The Roman Novel. Love and Death: Eros and Transformation in Ovid. The Founding of Epic Meter. I salivated when I saw these names, because they indicate this whole world of knowledge from which I am excluded, and which I can win my way into, with luck and endurance. Right? Right? Please tell me I’m right.
