by Steve Toltz
To myself, Your Honor, was that not clear?
That morning I had leapt out of bed and examined shadows that didn’t seem to correspond with the objects that cast them. A neighbor let out a fake cough designed to get attention, and I shouted at him to get a life and stormed around the apartment tearing down the notes—the one to turn off the faucets (I am that tenant who repeatedly floods the bathroom), the note to shut the windows (whenever I leave a window open at home it invariably hails at a forty-five-degree angle)—and with a broom I tore down a spider’s web that frankly made no architectural sense. I was experiencing a severe episode of clinical frustration. It wasn’t my first.
That overdose on Stella’s hospital bed, that failed suicide attempt, had really rocked my sad world. Ending my own life wasn’t a decision I had come to lightly. I had visited a psychologist I found in the Yellow Pages. A box of Kleenex and an ability to rephrase the client’s questions seemed to be all the qualifications required. He asked why I had come. I told him it was to find courage to take the next big step in my life. Is that why you’re here? he asked. To find courage? Yes, I said. Well, Aldo, he said, that’s already very brave of you. I agreed that it was the height of bravery. Now, courage to do what, Aldo? To kill myself, I answered. One million ordinary human beings end their own lives every year, why can’t I? I don’t know, he said. Let’s puzzle it out. Well, for a long time, I said, the very idea of suicide had been my sole means of support; it had worked as hard as a single parent. Problem is, no sooner do I pick up a blade, I feel my authority challenged. He asked, Why do you think that is? I said, One merely has to google the phrase failed suicide attempts to find the most hideous outcomes known to man or beast. He said, But surely you know that those outcomes are statistically unlikely. He wasn’t a bad therapist; his transparent strategy over the following weeks was to pretend to help me conquer my fear of suicide while in reality talking me down off the ledge. In the end he had some minor victories. He got me admitting guilt about being alive when Veronica is dead, and to realize that my self-conception of laziness and giving up easily didn’t square with my actions, that my BRFs (behavior restricting fears) were contradictory—such as my fear of being misunderstood and my fear of being transparent—and that my chronic migraines were somehow related to the heavy responsibility and burdensome guilt for having unwittingly, through excessive teasing, goaded Leila, my mother, into unnecessary elective surgeries—gastric bypass and stomach stapling. I wept copiously about my inability to decide on my worst fear: loneliness or physical suffering, and he gleefully plied me with Kleenex, as if he were being paid by the tear. Through his window I could see exhaust-gray clouds and trees groaning on their trunks. All this talking helped, it was true, but not in the manner he intended. His ploy to pretend to help me confront my fears of suicide actually helped me confront my fears of suicide. He came with me to my lookout point over the valley of the shadow of death and showed me it was a clean jump. So I did it. Drank two entire bottles of vodka. Yet I woke in angry confusion. A month later (nobody attempts suicide twice on the same day) I sat in my out-of-town neighbor’s car in their garage with the engine running; yet again, I woke up groping the morning. The third time I binge-drank and took an overdose of pills, yet again waking with a dungeon-like hangover, exasperated and near deranged with grief but also somewhat spooked, the sensation of my beating heart causing the prickling of the hairs on the back of my neck. Each time, I had woken to find life—that inexplicable dream that overstays its welcome—restored against my will. Why couldn’t I do it? These were not lighthearted attempts or a cry for help. Why couldn’t I pull it off? I had one half-baked theory, but it was too absurd to contemplate. All I knew was I was the flea on my own back.
The phone rang again. I answered it, shouting, “What? What? What is it?”
—We saw your sign, the voice said. We need someone to come and fix a rat hole in the school hall, patch up some leaky pipes, paint over some graffiti, a janitor’s job basically.
—Where? I asked.
—At Zetland High.
My old high school, Your Honor! I burst into tears. And after weeks of nonstop no’s, I said yes, fuck it, why not?
III
The old high school was standing where it always had, between the shoe wholesaler with the bloodstained back staircase and the grocery store selling dust-covered chocolate bars. It was a daunting concrete structure set in a bland expanse of concrete, with concrete rails and concrete staircases and concrete floors, lit up by asymmetric beams of ghastly fluorescence. You couldn’t burn it down even if you wanted to.
I hopped over the low wire fence to cross the old quadrangle where dozens of festering pigeons still plagued the schoolyard like a Venetian piazza, where my good friend Liam and I used to try to out-obscene each other, and where Stella had once played a protest song for me, which I had discreetly viewed from the science lab. I spent a few minutes gazing into the same windows I’d spent years gazing out of, at the boys clawing at their ties in surly silence, and the girls so young and dazzling I had to neuter my male gaze. Then I went to work: fixed a couple of leaky pipes, dragged out the dead rats and stuffed them in garbage bags, nailed wooden planks over their escape hatch, cartoonishly hammered my thumb, sent the tools falling down the staircase, ran after them as children made disparaging comments I needed an urban dictionary to understand. Yet my overwhelming emotions were regret—that I didn’t enjoy my youth more—and compound loss; I was nostalgic both for my childhood and for the days, in my late twenties, when I was first nostalgic for my childhood.
I grabbed a sandwich from the cafeteria, then roamed corridors that didn’t smell of books or pencil shavings, but of the inside of an air-conditioning unit, and then for old time’s sake moved into the vestibule for the headmaster’s office, an austere area with a single fern and wooden benches where I used to sit and imagine I’d been shipwrecked and washed up alone in the lobby of an off-season hotel. It was at that moment, Your Honor, that I overheard three teachers inside the office discussing the objects that got thrown at them in the course of a normal school year—chalk erasers, apple cores, chairs, and one of them asking if either of the other two had ever been tempted to sleep with a student. “No way!” they shouted in scandalized tones, then after a moment of silence, exploded into the most sinister laughter I’d ever heard.
—You go first, one said.
—No, you.
Low voices followed, though from my covert position outside the office, the substance of their conversation eluded me; I caught only a name (Mimi) mentioned several times, accompanied by more black laughter. Then footsteps on carpet, and a door swinging open to reveal the teachers: two men and a heavy-set woman.
—What are you doing here? the woman asked, in a mannish voice.
I said that I was closing up the rat hole in the floorboards in the school hall.
—That was this morning, one of the men barked. What are you still doing here?
I would have thought that the universal pastime of eavesdropping needed no introduction, but there you are. I explained that I’d had lunch in the cafeteria.
—You know what, Mr. Benjamin? That’s not OK.
All three teachers lectured me on the inappropriateness of a forty-year-old man—I was thirty-nine, but I let it go—with no business in a high school, lingering in the hallways. I thought: Surely a creature who excites faculty members of both genders is at least worth a look-see. I made my apologies, and promising to leave the grounds at once, went straight out to the concrete quadrangle to interrogate the students. I crouched in an alcove underneath a staircase that smelled so bad someone must have pissed on it when the cement was still wet. There I asked boys who couldn’t write their names without a spell-check if they knew this infamous Mimi. No luck. I asked girls who’d overplucked their eyebrows so that they resembled the scary dolls they cradled as toddlers. Nada. I took a long, hard look at their faces and tried to guess how many would end up sleeping on the streets.
Frankly, I couldn’t wait for their twenty-year high school reunion so I could turn up out of nowhere and rub it in their craggy, homeless faces.
It was then, Your Honor, that I heard a familiar voice.
—Don’t feed the pigeons, Donaldson!
IV
It was inconceivable that Mr. Morrell was still forbidding students to feed the pigeons. I edged forward to get a good look at my old art teacher. He was still tall and sinewy, and his overtanned skin still made him look like he’d been dragged out of the wreckage of a collapsed sunbed, and he was still peeling a mandarin.
—Jesus Christ, Mr. Morrell!
Morrell turned around and peered intensely at me, his former student.
—That isn’t Aldo Francis Benjamin, surely.
—I’m afraid so.
He moved close enough to pat my potbelly.
—The good life, eh?
—What do you think I am, a sixteenth-century nobleman? This here’s mostly glucose and saturated fats.
Morrell laughed and gripped my arm in a way he wouldn’t have dared when I was a student.
—What are you doing here?
—Some odds and ends. Rat hole needed fixing. A little plumbing.
Morrell blinked, uncomprehending.
—But you haven’t come here to your old high school as a janitor, have you? Oh Lord in heaven, that’s grim. When I didn’t say anything, he said, In every moment of our lives, we always choose the least worst option, so for you to be here today, there must have been something terrible waiting for you elsewhere that you were eager to avoid.
I remembered now his penetrating way of burrowing in, and how he could demolish a student with a cutting remark, how he enjoyed understanding and interpreting behavior, then sadistically enlightening said person to that behavior. It was due to him, I suddenly realized, that I had first taken an interest in amateur psychoanalysis as a lethal weapon, and began to listen actively to people’s stories and learned to hear the words they didn’t say more clearly than the words they did. Morrell’s eyes turned to a student giving pigeons mixed messages: scattering breadcrumbs on the ground, then stomping his feet.
—This generation is the absolute worst one yet, Morrell said.
—You used to say that every year.
—It’s true every year, he replied, and rubbed his hand over his head as if in hope his baldness was a temporary mistake. He asked me how old I was and I told him I was nearly forty, and he seemed to think that reflected badly on his own lifespan.
—Children?
—At what age does one become childless anyway? My whole life I’ve been childless, but now, suddenly, it’s official?
Morrell stared at me in astonishment.
—Listen, Aldo. Do you mind if I point you out to a few students as a possible worst-case scenario?
Typical Morrell zinger. I actually didn’t mind. Nevertheless, for good sport I felt I must retaliate, so I asked the obvious question, which was why was he still moping around this tragic place when he always said he was going to dedicate the last half of his life to his art.
—I’ll be retiring soon to concentrate on my painting.
—Ah.
We both remembered him saying the same thing twenty years before. Now the curtain of sadness had fallen on us both. I had never seen the fear of one’s illegitimacy so pronounced on a human face.
—It really is a pleasure to see you, Aldo. I’m sorry things aren’t working out for you.
—And I’m sorry your dreams remain unachieved after all these years.
We were like two dehydrated hikers who had bumped into each other on a deserted trail. Neither had water.
And I object to your objection! This does in fact relate to Mimi Underwood, Mr. Crown Prosecutor, because some memories sit like puddles and refuse to evaporate. It was at that moment it hit me; I excused myself and ran to the boys’ toilets on the third floor where in the fifth stall, carved into the wall with a penknife, faded by time but still perfectly legible, were the same words that I had seen more than twenty years earlier: Mimi. Underwood. Sucks. Teachers. Cocks.
I knew I had seen her name before! The Mimi the teachers spoke of was of course the deceased, the same woman I had helped four months earlier remove pornographic posters put up by a man who, I submit, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, set out to slander and humiliate Mimi Underwood and later murdered her. Maybe. That’s one possibility. We don’t want to rule it out.
Mr. Morrell was still in the quadrangle, and I had to shout over wailing ambulance sirens and the deafening roar of a plane passing overhead.
—Do you remember a Mimi Underwood?!
—Why? What have you heard?!
Someone yelled out, Morrell sux! He laughed without turning around, and I remembered how he always acted like he’d put your hatred in his desk for safekeeping.
V
—As you might remember, Aldo, Morrell said, once the plane had passed, it was the great pleasure of my teaching life, a pointless joy perhaps—like the love of telling librarians to be quiet—to discover poets, musicians, and painters among all those budding physicists, dreaded footballers, and drug-dependent oversharing sex-addicted shopaholic knife-wielding porn aficionados. Basically, I preferred creative souls who had a burning gift to offer the world and who knew how to degrade me with panache.
—What’s this got to do with Mimi Underwood?
—She’s a photographer. She illustrated a children’s book.
—With photos?
—Black-and-white photos. The book was called The Fussy Corpse. It seemed too adult and cerebral for children but what do I know? I’m just a teacher. The evening after reading it I wrote her a letter, care of her publishers: Dear Mimi Underwood, it said, students often see teachers as peripheral to their education, but I wonder if you’d stoop to remember me anyway: Angus (“Mr.”) Morrell. It’s with great pleasure that I, etcetera, etcetera. In short, I congratulated her on her meritorious achievement, and wondered if it was not too forward to ask for a signed copy of her magnum opus. Only after I sent the letter did I realize I had forgotten that a newly published success must be inundated with appeals for friendships and merchandise, and when a month passed without response, I wrote a second letter apologizing for the first, and to lighten the situation I asked if she remembered our last encounter, when I spotted her outside Pitt Street Mall selling umbrellas in the rain.
—Who was selling umbrellas in the rain? Mimi?
—It is a reliably awkward displeasure to unexpectedly run into students in the outside world, I wrote in my second letter, but there was something especially depressing about the sight of you drenched to the bone with cheap black umbrellas hanging off your arm. I had feared that you were mistreating yourself into an early grave, though you certainly wouldn’t have been the first highly gifted student to make a garbage dump of your life. “How long has it been?” you asked me in a voice that sounded hoarse from singing. Normally it is the student who knows how long since she left school, and not the teacher, and I said as much, adding that time moves so fast there are not even discernible epochs anymore, and I knew people five generations apart with only twenty years between them.
I stood speechless, frozen by the strange manner of repeating his own letter verbatim like some arcane party trick, and I was reminded what a weird and amusing and eccentric man he was. Morrell went on:
—I remember you remembering me, I wrote Mimi, and you laughed, but then your face became a disquieting mask of what I took to be the deepest unhappiness, and after an awkward good-bye I remember smiling as I walked away, because in truth it is often a more sincere pleasure to see a depressed former student than a happy one, because in the happy ones I can see the disheartening process by which they became happy: high ambition, repeated failure, discouragement, eventual giving up, settling for less, reluctant acceptance, and finally contentment with the little things, somewhat beautiful in the individual, but depressing when it occurs by the thousands year aft
er predictable year.
—Did she write back?
Morrell shook his head sadly. He looked totally depressed.
—Oh well, one gets used to ingratitude, he added, and as he walked away, I thought: That’s perfectly right, one does.
VI
The salesgirl at the third bookstore I tried suggested the local branch of the public library. I know what you’re thinking, bailiffs, what is this, 1996? I raced through the streets as if through a time tunnel, to the bland underwhelming brick building behind the train station. My heart sank when I came across an island desk with twenty computer terminals, leather couches and espresso machines, but upon asking, the librarian directed me to the appropriate shelf. It was there, The Fussy Corpse, written by Elliot Grass, illustrations by Mimi Underwood. I took it to a leather couch beside loud-whispering students.
