Topics About Which I Know Nothing

by Patrick Ness

  Using Apple-provided workbooks, we learned how oil was created (though ‘dead dinosaurs’ was the only bit of the complicated process that sticks with us now), the different kinds of rocks that trapped it (shales and … other rocks that also managed to be easily forgettable), and how oil companies did years of research before drilling in specific sites to ‘maximise the saving of the environment while providing clean and efficient fuel for the convenient use of everyone’. We were to take the knowledge gleaned from the corporate workbooks, study our map of Atlantia, perform computerised tests, analyse the results, and then decide on potential drilling sites.

  Though there were minor variances because of the slightly different batches of students in the successive years, the two oil-drilling groups were essentially the same as the archeology teams. The Carbonites were headed by Dagmar Hewson-Hill. Texxon, Inc. by Jasper Wheeler. The project had added frisson in that we were in direct competition. Whichever side found the most oil in their five drilling sites would win a pizza lunch while the other group would be stuck with their normal brown bags.

  The drilling took place on the project’s final day. After all our research and tests, each group had drawn up lists of preferred squares with lists of alternates should the other group duplicate one of the choices. Higher aggregate scores on various geology pop quizzes allowed Jasper and Texxon, Inc. to make the first selection. The lIe was placed ceremonially at the front of the class, so that both groups could see the success (or not) of the alternate drillings. Jasper Wheeler walked up to the front with a smirk on his face.

  ‘P, 9,’ he said, typing in the coordinates. There were brief quizzical looks within our group. P9 was nowhere on our list of possible sites. Could we have missed something? The computer took a dramatic pause as an oil well was painstakingly constructed onscreen, then a shout of joy from Texxon, Inc., as drops of oil shot from the top of the well.

  ‘15 million barrels,’ said Miss Privet. ‘Not bad.’

  Jasper looked annoyed. ‘It should have been a gusher.’

  ‘15 million barrels isn’t bad, Jasper,’ Miss Privet repeated. ‘Dagmar, would you like to take your turn?’

  Dagmar went up to the computer looking like a vet regretfully having to put a brave horse to sleep. ‘C, 3,’ she said.

  ‘C3?’ Jasper said, an incredulous look on his face.

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  Again the oil well constructed itself. The pause seemed even longer this time, then the screen turned bright green and the word ‘GUSHER!’ blinked off and on in all caps. Jubilant cheers arose from us in the Carbonites. Miss Privet clapped. ‘Well done,’ she said. ‘Very well done. Congratulations.’

  ‘Something’s wrong, Miss Privet,’ said Jasper. ‘C3 shouldn’t have had anything.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Jasper.’ Miss Privet’s voice was tender, gentle even. ‘Except maybe your calculations.’

  ‘Miss Privet -’

  ‘Please have someone from your group take your next turn, Jasper.’

  Jasper Wheeler stared at her. A quick flick of his head sent up Laura Mariotti. She typed in Dl, again not on our list over in the Carbonities. She received 25 million barrels, not bad, but nowhere close to our 100-million-barrel gusher. Tom Hulver went up next for our group. The same pause, the same all caps announcement. After two turns, Texxon, Inc. had 35 million barrels. The Carbonites had 200 million barrels. The rout was on. By the end, we had hit four gushers out of five and received 50 million barrels for the one non-gusher. Through whatever miscalculation was permeating their statistics, Jasper Wheeler’s group ended up with just 85 million barrels total. We won on our first turn.

  ‘Something’s not right, Miss Privet,’ an angry Jasper said as our celebration raged. ‘Our calculations

  ‘Must have been off,’ Miss Privet said. ‘I’ve checked this program over, Jasper. There’s nothing wrong with it. I told you you should have done more tests.’

  ‘We did plenty of tests.’

  ‘But the Carbonites did more.’

  ‘Miss Privet, I really don’t see -’

  ‘You lost, Jasper. I know you’re disappointed, but one of life’s big lessons is learning how to be gracious when you’ve been beaten fair and square.’

  I don’t think it was fair and square -’

  ‘That’s enough, Jasper.’ Miss Privet gave him her ‘that’s enough’ smile. ‘It’s how life goes sometimes.’

  ‘We’ll share our pizza with you,’ Dagmar cut in. ‘We always intended to all along. It wouldn’t be any fun watching you guys not have any.’

  Jasper’s lips pursed, his nostrils inflating. Dagmar’s face gave nothing away, but her gaze held his.

  ‘Now, isn’t that nice, Jasper?’ said Miss Privet. ‘Everyone wins. Shouldn’t you say “thank you” on behalf of your group?’

  Jasper’s voice was cold enough to cut through our victorious chatter. ‘Thank you, Dagmar, and congratulations,’ he said, the temperature in the room dropping. ‘May you get all that you deserve.’

  ‘SO FAR, ALL IT SEEMS to be is something about time, maybe time travel, and something about human sacrifice,’ said Terry Yotter.

  Dagmar rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, my gosh, how completely immature.’

  Dagmar had been seething ever since Phase 2 digging was stopped by Miss Privet. Not only did all of Group B’s artefacts centre around bloodletting and an obsession with clocks, we hadn’t found their Rosetta Stone, leaving us unable to decipher any of their laws and manuscripts and forcing us to guess about most of their society. This was in the rules. Miss Privet had allegedly supervised burial of the required parts of the project (though she was nowhere to be found when we buried our own Rosetta Stone), and therefore, if we missed anything important, it was our own fault.

  ‘Real archeologists don’t have a map,’ she told a steaming Dagmar. ‘Look at it as a bigger challenge. I know you’re up to it.’

  This encouraging compliment, normally the ne plus ultra of our gifted existence, only served to make Dagmar angrier. She returned to our working-half of the classroom.

  ‘He didn’t bury it,’ she whispered angrily. ‘I’m sure of it. Either that, or he broke the rules and buried it too deep or outside of their area.’

  ‘We dug everywhere,’ said Richie Goldstein.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dagmar, ‘we did.’ She punched Tom Hulver on the shoulder.

  ‘Ow.’

  ‘Don’t be a baby.’

  ‘Well, we’re gonna have to come up with something,’ said Linda Zhang, whose anxiety over potentially getting less than an A was starting to tell.

  ‘Like I said.’ Terry Yotter gestured exasperatedly at the mosaic, the dirty piles of papier-mâché clocks, the bewildering assortment of knives. ‘It’s time or time travel or something stupid like that.’

  ‘And the mosaic,’ started Chris Tyler.

  ‘The mosaic should get them flunked,’ spat Dagmar.

  The mosaic was a hallucinatory, Grand Guignol nightmare. Either Jasper or Dale Chalmers, his main artist, must have found a Hieronymus Bosch print somewhere - Bosch and Dali being the two patron artistic saints of the gifted child - and ran with it. The mosaic was littered with small figures, most in the process of disembowelment or decapitation or flaying or immolation or infanticide or drowning or defenestration or any one of a number of deaths. Upon closer examination, it got worse. Each murder seemed to be perpetrated by the same man dressed in black upon the same woman dressed in white. The man looked a lot like Jasper, and the woman looked a lot like Dagmar.

  ‘I think you may be reading a bit more into it than is really there,’ said Miss Privet to a further outraged Dagmar. ‘Lots of older societies were fairly brutal, and some of them even seemed to have the kinds of massacres shown here.’ Her smile was anodyne. ‘It’s not my cup of tea, but you guys need free rein to your imaginations.’

  The outer edge of the mosaic was painted with clocks which, when read clockwise, seemed to be moving backwards in time. At t
he centre of the mosaic was a single larger version of the Jasper figure holding a knife over the prone Dagmar figure. He was more priest-like in this pose and seemed to be praying.

  ‘Maybe he can go back in time so he gets to kill her over and over again,’ said David Middleton.

  ‘Shut up, David,’ said Dagmar.

  ‘Are you getting taller, David?’ asked Terry Yotter, out of the blue.

  David shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Maybe.’

  ‘It’s just … you used to look shorter compared to Dagmar than you do.’

  We all glanced over at them to look. To our surprise -

  ‘Equality?’ Jasper’s taunting voice broke in. He stood just outside our work area. ‘That’s your theme? Equality?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to be over here, Jasper,’ said Tom Hulver.

  ‘Well, I’m bored,’ said Jasper. ‘Your civilization was so pathetically easy to figure out, we have an amazing amount of time left over.’

  ‘Go away, Jasper,’ said Dagmar.

  ‘And equality.’ He stressed the word, as if it was something distasteful. ‘Of all the predictable, simpering, softheaded things you could have picked. Equality.’

  ‘It’s better than some stupid, childish thing about human sacrifice and mass death,’ Dagmar said. ‘I mean, come on, Jasper, how predictable could you be. Yawn, this is me yawning.’

  ‘You do realise of course that all equality really means is that you’re as weak as your weakest member.’ He looked at David. ‘Which would probably be you, faggothands.’

  ‘Miss Privet!’ called Dagmar.

  Jasper changed tactic as Miss Privet got up from her desk. ‘How are you coming along with ours?’

  ‘You cheated,’ said Dagmar. ‘You didn’t bury your Rosetta Stone.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we did,’ said Jasper. ‘You just didn’t find it.’

  ‘Jasper, come away from there now,’ said Miss Privet.

  Jasper laughed as he returned to his group. ‘And that’s not the only thing you didn’t find,’ he said, just loud enough for us to hear.

  WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN MORE, once. There was an attempted defection, early in the second year. Marlon Lerner, an extremely portly new pupil with a crewcut, who prided himself on reading British science fiction and who religiously played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (to the point of having lead figures and wooden dice, even the four-sided one), had taken the gothic seriousness of Jasper Wheeler’s group as something he could fit his heretofore shameful manias into. Unfortunately for Marlon, all that was lacking in Jasper Wheeler’s group at the time was a scapegoat, a whipping boy to be the target of their leader’s insults. These were fairly typical to begin with: ‘Prepare for an earthquake, Marlon’s about to run’ or ‘Are you going to have two birthday cakes, Marlon? One for you and one for your guests?’ Jasper Wheeler’s group would laugh. Marlon would laugh along, too. Even some of our group, overhearing, laughed at a joke at the expense of someone besides ourselves.

  But then Jasper started to take a particular avenue: ‘How long has it been since you’ve actually seen your penis, Marlon?’ ‘Are you sure you even have a penis? Are you sure you’re not a girl underneath all that flab?’ ‘You’ve got breasts, Marlon, maybe you should start wearing a bra.’ We would hear these comments underneath the rusted monkey bars where our class was forced to take refuge each recess. There was little room for the two groups to separate, but we did our best. The taunting, though, remained audible to all. ‘When you play AD&D, are you a sorceress? An Amazon? A witch?’

  Marlon would try to laugh, but we watched him falter as the days went on. ‘Do you think a nice man would ever want a fat wife like you, Marlon?’ ‘Has your mother talked to you about period pains yet, Marlon?’ ‘How do you know what you’re feeling down there isn’t just a flap of your maturing vagina, Marlon?’

  It surprised no one in our group when Marlon started talking to David Middleton, who played AD&D himself. First in class, then in the more important monkey bars, Marlon began to spend time huddled with David, even on occasion laughing in a manner that was other than self-inflicted. We, not excluding Marlon, waited with some anxiety to see what, if anything, Jasper would do in response to this rejection of his side of the class. Seven days passed. Ten. Marlon became a regular feature in our group, though tending to stick mainly with David out of shyness.

  Then one recess, just as we were all reaching the point of forgetting that Marlon had ever been anything but one of us, Jasper brought out an instant camera.

  ‘Look what I got for Christmas,’ he announced, though it was only early October. He flashed a picture immediately, a print of surprised-looking members of his group fading into view moments later on the celluloid-backed slip of cardboard the camera spat out. Even our group was curious, watching Jasper snap photos of his friends and disciples. He kept looking over at us, his face smug.

  ‘Hey, Marlon,’ he called.

  Marlon, doing his best to look small against the edge of the monkey bars, said, ‘What?’

  ‘I think maybe we can help you out.’

  ‘Help me out how?’

  ‘Prove once and for all whether you’re a girl or a boy.’

  ‘Fuck off, Jasper,’ said Marlon, afraid, and the air positively crackled at his words. You could hear our collective intake of breath even on the noisy playground. Gifteds, raised in good homes, were above such profanity.

  “What did you say, MarlonJasper said, coming closer.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Leave him, Jasper,’ said Tom Hulver.

  ‘Shut up, Tom,’ said Jasper. T do believe this fat little piggy told me to eff off. Which is not something I think I can tolerate.’ Jasper nodded, giving some kind of signal. Derek Bartlett and Rainer Schlossberg, his two largest henchmen, moved forward and grabbed Marlon by either arm.

  ‘Now we’re going to find out once and for all if this fat, disgusting slob of a thing …’ He lightly smacked Marlon’s cheeks. ‘… is a boy or a girl.’ He grabbed the buckle of Marlon’s belt and started undoing it. Marlon struggled, his body thrashing, but Jasper landed a fist in his stomach. The violence shocked us all. Marlon went through the rest of his ordeal in a terrified and terrifying quiet acquiescence. Jasper undid Marlon’s fly and pulled his pants down to his knees, then grabbed his underwear and yanked them down.

  We did nothing to stop this. We still do not know why.

  Jasper knelt with his camera and aimed it at Marlon’s penis, a penis we all saw right there, pink and small and hairless, exposed in broad daylight on our own playground. Because we could be assumed to take care of ourselves, we were a blind spot on the playground monitor’s radar. The other kids, having won our exile to the monkey bars, ignored us. We were Marlon’s only possible defense, but we had turned somehow into merely his witnesses.

  Even with the bright overcast, the camera flashed when the picture was taken. Marlon flinched at the light burst, then we saw yellow liquid flow from the small bit of flesh that we all knew we should never have seen. Rainer and Derek held Marlon until he stopped wetting himself. By then, the picture had developed, and Jasper turned it to Marlon’s face, now a mess of tears and snot.

  ‘What do you know?’ Jasper said. ‘She’s got a dick after all.’ He slid the picture into his pocket and turned his back. Rainer and Derek let go of Marlon. An empty zone appeared around him. He pulled up his soggy underpants and trousers, his chin trembling. Dagmar took the first step towards him.

  ‘Marlon

  ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he said fiercely, almost hysterically.

  ‘But Miss Privet should -’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone!’

  ‘But -’

  ‘Please,’ he said, looking at all of us. ‘Please.’

  It was something we would naturally have done, tell Miss Privet. We were exactly the sort of children who would go running to her in an instant to report the wrongdoing of a classmate. But as Marlon Lerner tried to brush the urine on his trousers to ge
t it to dry, we agreed to his request out of shame that none of us had tried to help him, that not one of us had intervened to prevent this unimaginable recess. We were silent out of our own guilt, out of the chance that we might get into trouble too. Which was unthinkable.

  Marlon Lerner attended classes for another week or so, a pariah from both groups, until his unhappiness was so obvious that his parents took him out of the gifted program, deciding that he must have missed his friends from his old school, friends that we all knew from our own experience did not exist.

  ‘BUT MISS PRIVET, HE SAID we didn’t find everything.’

  ‘Dagmar, you know the rules. Each group had the same amount of allotted time to find what they could. Real archeologists don’t even know what they’re looking for and have to recreate civilizations from less than what you’ve found.’

  Dagmar took a deep breath, preparing the argument that went against everything our group believed about itself. It was necessary, though, and we supported this tactical surrender.

  ‘But we’re not archeologists, Miss Privet,’ she said, through regretful clenched teeth.

  ‘Dagmar -’

  ‘We’re students. We’re -’ Dagmar gulped,‘- little kids. Jasper’s group buried his Rosetta Stone too well. There wasn’t enough time for us to find it.’