Topics About Which I Know Nothing

by Patrick Ness

  The Future?

  Despite all these complaints, Conetti and indeed most of the competitors still unironically swear that they expect this year’s Competition to be the best.

  ‘11,000 competitors performing their hearts out,’ pleads an impassioned President. ‘What more could you want?’

  Haldor Gudmundsson agrees: ‘It’s still the biggest, you know? Yes, you have all those smaller versions, the Commonwealth War Games and what have you, but you just ask anyone here whether they’d have a Commonwealth Gold or a Competition Gold. The man who says Commonwealth is a liar.’

  And so Irena Sultanova lines herself up for another go at flinging her body into the air as hard as she can. If it’s a less artistic jump than whoever wins the silver medal, then maybe that’s no longer the point. I watch as she gathers speed and makes her attempt, this time nailing the jump beautifully, landing perfectly, but still hitting only one target out of three.

  ‘Not good enough!’ screams Gudmundsson from the coach’s bench.

  Let the Competition, for better or worse, commence.

  the gifted

  WE ARE GHOSTS HERE, TELLING this story. We will not make it to the end. We would like you to know this up front, because it is exactly the sort of thing we, as a group, would have delighted in telling you ahead of time, with serious and concerned looks on our faces, before our circumstances changed as they did, before we became simply these voices with a story to tell.

  We would have wanted you to like us. We realise now that we probably would have failed.

  ‘LET’S SEE,’ SAID MISS PRIVET, ‘shovels and spades. Picks, brushes, rakes, spoons, gloves. I think that’s it. Are we ready?’

  All together we said, ‘Yes, Miss Privet.’

  The digging could at last begin on Phase 1.

  MEMORIES WITHIN MEMORIES. THE STORY comes to us in a rush, all its bits and pieces simultaneous as is the way with things here. It is difficult, even for us, even with the resources we brought to this place, to keep from vomiting it on you all at once. We’ve never wished to be an inconvenience, and we will try our best not to be so now. But this story is two stories: the story of how we got here, of course, which is easy as everyone remembers their journey, but it is also the more difficult story of who we were.

  Who were we?

  We were Group A (we were), and we, under the leadership of Dagmar Hewson-Hill, 12, had chosen equality as our over-riding theme, which was a predictable, teacher-pleasing gambit that fooled no one, not even ourselves. Dagmar, nascent feminist, nascent crusader, nascent woman, was the tallest in Group A, also the most interested, also the most vocal, and so our natural leader. She was the focal point for the gang of us that had coalesced, almost unconsciously, almost so that emotionally eagle-eyed Miss Privet didn’t even notice, into our usual playground clique when Miss Privet had instructed us to split ourselves into a Group A and a Group B four weeks before the digging. We were, naturally, separate from our class’s other obvious group.

  ‘Isn’t it possible,’ Miss Privet had said, smiling the kindly, twitchy, slightly sarcastic smile of a young earnest adult compelled by instinct to supervise children and about to say in ironic tones that we had done something terribly disappointing but not to bother ourselves about it too much, ‘that we could have a little more diversity within Groups A and B? Remember when we talked about diversity? Remember how I wrote ho-mogen-e-i-ty and het-er-o-gen-e-i-ty on the board? Remember …’ She sighed. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘This is supposed to be fun.’

  And so our normal group, our customary half of the class, became officially Group A, and Group B formed of the usual herd of hangers-on that surrounded Jasper Wheeler like big, fat, black bees casting themselves on the leaves of a dying flower.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Privet,’ said Dagmar and Jasper, looking directly at one another.

  ‘THIS IS GROUP A’S AREA,’ said Miss Privet, opening her scarily bony arms to indicate a tree-enclosed glen. ‘You can start marking out your quadrants and getting burial depths as soon as the rest of us leave. I believe we all know what to do, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dagmar and a fair portion of the rest of us in Group A. We were eager to begin.

  ‘You might have a little trouble with tree roots,’ said Miss Privet to audibly impatient shuffling from some of the more intense-eyed members of our group, ‘but I think this a good spot.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Privet,’ said Dagmar, the sharpness in her voice only barely disguised. This was finally the fun part after four weeks - four weeks! - of classroom work.

  ‘Okay, then.’ Miss Privet smiled. ‘We’ll leave you to it.’ She loved nothing more than to see us excited to be learning, when in fact we were far more excited at the opportunity to demonstrate our maturity at being allowed to work at least partially unsupervised. ‘Group B, follow me!’

  Miss Privet walked out of the trees, heading towards a spot a couple of hundred yards off where Group B would start their digging out of sight and earshot of Group A.

  ‘Good luck,’ Jasper Wheeler said, lingering behind. Overt sneering would have been too obvious. The simple ‘good luck’ let us know exactly where Jasper Wheeler thought we stood.

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to need any luck,’ said Dagmar, unflinching.

  ‘Come on, Jasper,’ called Miss Privet from a harmless distance. ‘Time’s a-wasting.’

  ‘So it is,’ said Jasper, quietly, watching us as he left. ‘So it is.’

  WHO WERE WE? WE WERE half of the Gifted Project, a shifting inexact title thrust upon our welcoming heads, thirty of us in the class in total, and a group as dispiritingly homogeneous as Miss Privet’s dearest left-wing nightmares.

  To a student, we were middle-class at least, with two parents or one parent and one variously selected co-parent who, as a rule, read to us at home while working professional non-blue-collar jobs (doctor, patent lawyer, orchestral arranger) that nonetheless allowed them to lavish attention and interaction upon us. These parental figures of ours never swore at us, rarely yelled, and when we were bad, were ‘disappointed’ and never, ever ‘pissed off’. They never struck us, always fed us, regularly trumpeted our achievements. We had been stimulated as infants (classical music and poetry played for us in the womb), allowed to read in corners as our independence developed, taken to zoos and theatres, even the occasional opera, taught to cook simple meals when we expressed curiosity and encouraged to turn household chores into various games. We usually had interesting and/or conscientious grandparents. We were smart, yes, some of us scarily so, but we’d had the added benefit of homes that made us bright, too.

  And so when we attended regular schools with regular pupils, we were bored out of our little minds. School was much less stimulating than the sensual primary-color pleasures of the homes that our entitled parents - so nervous not to over-discipline, so keen not to stifle - had provided for us. We were the most demanding pupils in our respective classes dotted around the Tacoma Public School District: of attention, of motivation, of extra sensory input. We had already read all the books our teachers recited in patronising tones to circles of our dumbstruck classmates. We already had years of finger-painting and papier-mache experience under our 14-inch belts. We found the songs of the sing-alongs unchallenging and insufficiently polyphonic.

  All of which was enough for an eager school district to use us to inaugurate its new ‘gifted’ program for especially talented youngsters in that deadest year of our childhoods, 1982. And so we were to be whisked away from our classmates, like farmers in flying saucers, and dropped off in the brightly lit, innovatively-laid-out classroom of tall, wiry-haired, Miss Privet, a woman desperate to mold us, desperate to encourage a clutch of geniuses, and often just desperate. Perfect for a pilot program, then.

  An unknown civil servant, however, came up with a humane and terrible idea, a wrinkled caveat to the new gift of our extraordinariness. We were all to be retrieved by a gifted bus from our gifted homes scattered around the huge, urban
school district and driven miles and miles and miles to Plisterfeld Elementary, the poorest school in the entire city. Not just poor, it was the main elementary school for the dilapidated housing project that surrounded and engulfed it, meaning that its students were invariably the poorest of those poor, often the children of adults with less learning and coping ability than the new crop of thirty students bussed in from points opulent. Even our inexperienced 10-, 11- and 12-year-old brains could see that this was a bad idea, in fact the worst of ideas, not because we were afraid of the underprivileged students - though we were - but because we were instantly, despite the best of intentions, a reminder of exactly how underprivileged the underprivileged were. Even in our extreme youth, perhaps without even knowing the word, we could tell we were thirty living, breathing examples of civic condescension.

  We were hated. Immediately. Plisterfeld loathed us with a surprisingly creative passion. Sudden brutal turf wars at recess left us sequestered under the rusted monkey bars near the far fence. Lunches in the cafeteria so often ended in mashed burgers, spilt milk, and tears that we were eventually allowed to eat in our own classroom. School assemblies were a rain of spitballs from behind and a surging tide of farts from the front. If it felt like we were under siege, it was because we were. We even noticed that Miss Privet, young, gender-neutral, full of new ideas, was snubbed by the other teachers, save the thousand-year-old Mrs Giberson, who was far too senile to notice that Miss Privet was rightly regarded as an untouchable.

  We didn’t blame them. We were too patronising for that. We merely gave each other deeply felt speeches about how difficult it must be and how hard their daily lives no doubt were what with all of their fathers in jail and all of their mothers alcoholic and all of them clearly subjected to daily abuse by ominous visiting ‘stepdads’. We swelled our hearts with pity and avoided them like the plague.

  If anyone had asked any of the children on either side of this miniature Cold War, eloquent denunciations of the adult-sponsored plan could have been easily provided. Children are, though, the last to be consulted on issues of their own welfare, so our opinions went unheard. Besides, the adults thought this was a brilliant idea, one celebrating the ‘specialness’ of Plisterfeld, one indicating that the elected School Board played no favorites among the disparate income levels across the sprawling district. And of course, once you so publicly give something to the poor, you can never take it back, no matter how disastrous its effects.

  We were therefore a world unto our own, ostracised by the other students and left to our own paltry defenses. This should have inspired solidarity among us, a herd instinct in which we should have thrived against adversity.

  It didn’t. It inspired two solidarities, separate ones. And in any system of two competing herds fighting for the same territory, co-existence is never possible. One herd must always vaniquish, and one herd must always be vanquished.

  OUR FIRST TASK WAS MARKING our burial site with a string border and then further string quadrants within that border. Pratip Mukherji, our designated string-layer, was poised to begin. Taking our cue from Dagmar, though, no one moved until Miss Privet and Group B had completely disappeared behind a series of low rises and trees. We waited a beat more, listening to the chirps of birds and rustlings of pine needles.

  The digging sites were located in a mysterious wooded area behind the school. We were never fully informed as to the exact nature of the area, only that it was normally forbidden for students to trespass there. Miss Privet, backed no doubt by a School Council frantic for its Gifted Project to make some kind of heretofore unseen breakthrough, won permission for us to dig there. It appeared to be some division of the housing project abandoned in early construction. There was a paved, looping road and concrete driveways, but no houses. There were one or two foundations, but it seemed as if the government had suddenly run out of money or motivation. The roads, driveways and foundations were left, and nature had returned, tall trees growing up where kitchens were supposed to have been, raspberry bushes instead of lawns. It was an eerie place, with the feeling of a world after the human race had died.

  We loved it. It was spooky, the right kind of spooky, meaning brightly lit.

  ‘All right,’ said Dagmar, taking a deep breath, her brow deeply serious. ‘Lay the string, Pratip.’

  As GROUP A, WE WERE - though not at all racially - the unspoken white group. The unsoiled, untainted group, if you will, but not in any physical or wealthy way. We were not any cleaner than those in the other group, nor of any special privilege that they lacked, nor of any higher economic strata.

  We were the precocious group that knew what adults wanted to hear from children they regarded as intelligent, and we fed them those lines regularly and without hesitation. We were so good at this, so eager to please, such obvious toadies pandering to comfortable grownup expectations that we sometimes disgusted ourselves. To select one example among many: when asked in Sunday School class to make a list of his favorite activities, Robbie Normer, one of a number of tow-headed members in our group, not only wrote down ‘concentrating’ as his most favorite activity, he then asked his Sunday School teacher Mrs Asbjornsen if he had spelled it correctly. This was not because he in any way suspected that he had misspelled it, but because he wanted to be sure that Mrs Asbjornsen noticed and paid due attention to the fact that he not only knew the word ‘concentrating’ at such a tender age but also professed to do it in large and self-entertaining quantities. When Robbie confessed to us at school the next day, quite redfaced at what he had done, Tom Hulver said, ‘You should have just been honest and put down playing with yourself.’

  Because, you see, our precocity did not extend to when we were on our own. We regarded that precocity as an act deployed on easily manipulated adults to get what we wanted. It was shameful, it was dirtying, it was felt to be beneath our true talents and skills, but as a group, it got us places. Miss Privet’s gifted class with liberal unsupervised learning modules, for one.

  Jasper Wheeler’s group was nothing like us. We didn’t understand Jasper Wheeler’s group at all.

  * * *

  AFTER PRATIP LAID THE STRING in suitable quadrants, Dagmar redeployed our digging instruments so that strength was matched with strength, so that we all became equivalent diggers.

  ‘That shovel is too big for you, Terry,’ she said. Terry Yotter (and the name helped not at all) was the class androgyne, and we had gone an amazing eleven days at the beginning of our first school year together before Tom Hulver finally worked up the nerve to directly verify Terry’s gender (male, though it really was impossible to tell since Terry wore big hair, thick glasses and baggy clothes that made it seem as if he was trying to use his own body as a hermitage). ‘Take David’s spade and give the shovel to Chris. Linda, you give your rake to David and take Chris’ brushes.’

  ‘But I want to dig with the rake,’ said Linda Zhang, our skinny-but-growing second-generation Chinese representative who was forced to practice three hours a day on a cello twice her size by parents with specific ideas about How to Excel in the Land of Opportunity.

  ‘Your mom and dad don’t like you to get your arms too tired.’

  ‘But you let me swing on the monkey bars at recess.’

  Dagmar smiled patiently. ‘This is much harder than monkey bars. You know Miss Privet will get another letter if your arms run out of steam when you’re practicing tonight.’ Dagmar rubbed Linda’s shoulder sympathetically. ‘You can lay out the artefacts when it’s time.’

  ‘Thanks, Dagmar.’

  ‘No need to thank me,’ said Dagmar. ‘We’re a democracy, remember? The work is divided equally.’

  ‘Can we start already?’ said Tom Hulver.

  ‘There’s no need to wait for me,’ said Dagmar, in a tone just slightly too instructive. We forgave her when she picked up her own shovel.

  THE ASSIGNMENT WAS INTENDED TO teach us about archeology and ancient civilizations. Since textbooks were clearly not interesting or stimulating or
exciting enough for us gifteds, and filmstrips and videos insufficiently cutting-edge (played, as they were, on a massive early 80s tank VCR that seemed straight from a newsroom with its top-loading cartridges and array of small plastic tabs), it was clear that something revolutionary needed to be done lest our brains atrophy from boredom. We remain, even in our present state when such things should no longer be a mystery, unaware of whether the idea came from Miss Privet, a modern teaching guide or an invisible curriculum committee somewhere, but for once, we did not mind. The idea was blindingly good.

  In order to find out not only how archeologists recovered rare artefacts and reconstructed dead civilizations but also to inflame our imaginations about the day-to-day existence of those civilizations and to throw a bit of mythology and a bit of art class into the mix, we were asked to do nothing less than actually create a civilization with its own overriding themes, its own laws and traditions and beliefs, and most importantly, its own artefacts.

  ‘Artefacts have power,’ said Miss Privet, in an uncharacteristically metaphysical moment. ‘They’re the crystallization of everything that the civilization was, of everything the civilization thought about itself. Don’t underestimate the sort of magic and history that is contained in a relic.’

  ‘But these will be fake,’ said Jasper Wheeler.

  ‘That’s not quite the point, Jasper. You’re creating a whole civilization, and the artefacts you create will be a concentration of all your imaginings about it.’ She seemed lost in some sort of teacherly reverie. T want you all to keep in mind that you’re not just making bowls or paintings. You’re representing entire worlds, entire peoples. Fictional or not, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘And these things have power?’ asked Jasper, pen poised.

  Miss Privet shrugged a friendly shrug with the look of a woman in the ecstasy of really connecting and interfacing with her students. ‘A kind of power, yes, I think so. All the power of an entire people filtered down to one object. It could be very powerful.’