by Habash, Gabe
I listen to “So What” so many times in my room that Perry marches down to my door and begins kicking it.
I remember a time, back in November and December, which is no longer the case, when I only didn’t miss Linus when I was with Mary Beth and vice versa. This is no longer the case, as I said.
Hargraves drills me and Linus every day. He tells both of us we are Oregsburg’s only hope.
One time, months ago, I found winsome in the Barron’s and I saved it for Mary Beth to call her it.
Is Stephen Florida fatuous or just glib?
Silas’s backup key is under his welcome mat. I’ve seen him get into his house that way. So one time, I went out to his house early and took the key out from under the mat and went back to the hill. When he came home a little while later and found the key missing, he went around the far side of the house and didn’t come back around. I guess he climbed through a window.
During the midterm Pervis sits in the seat right next to me and copies everything I write. So this is what it feels like to be desired for your brains. During the listening section I know all the songs’ names, I’ve listened to all of them over and over in the music department, listening for codes.
One night, Zachary (who I’ve never seen) tells Linus about his brother, because they’ve gotten to that point already. I can listen by approaching in my socks from the side and keeping my feet outside the frame so they can’t see my shadow. Then I can lean over and hear all I want. Zachary’s brother, as I hear it, worked in a city doing construction on tall buildings until one day a steel beam went into his head. They thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. They fixed him in the hospital, but when he woke up he had a different personality. “Different how?” Linus asks sensitively. Different like he was mean now, and aggressive, and generally didn’t give a fuck about anything. He whipped his privates out and would slap strangers over nothing because you have no inhibitions after something lances your head. And then the most horrible thing happened: he got Cushing syndrome, his face and body started to change. “And I thought the sickest thing, I thought, ‘My brother’s starting to look like the horrible new person he’s turned into.’ Here’s a picture of him,” Zachary says, and I listen to the span of time in which Linus looks. The brother broke up with his girlfriend, he moved away to Utah, he told everyone he didn’t want anything to be how it was before the accident. I listen to Zachary sniffle and Linus give him solace and peace.
I go back to my room and decide to write a threatening note to Silas. But first I fall asleep for a few hours and have a nightmare I can’t remember, one that doesn’t last long but rips me out of sleep convinced that Fink is in my room, and so I quickly turn on the light and check the corners. “Where are you, little shitman?” I check the lock on the door, even under the bed and inside the closet, separating the shirts, already not believing in my fear anymore. I don’t bother to look at the clock, dismayed at myself, and fall immediately back asleep like I have the vapors.
I walk across the school to Opal in the dark, trying to whistle, with images of Zachary’s moon-faced brother haunting me like a gutted building. Then I think back to how I was in August when I told Linus about my parents. I couldn’t have been as pathetic as that cheesecake Zachary, could I? I get to the Jazz classroom and slide the homicidal Silas note under the door. All the lights behind the doors are out, I put my hood up to shelter my head from the snow. It’s when I’m in the staircase back at McCloskey, on the other side of campus, thinking about a hot shower that I realize I’ve made a mistake. I run back to Opal, cursing myself for thinking I’m invincible. I sneak my fingers into the door crack, but it’s only wide enough for a sheet of paper. I walk to the side of the building and look toward the center of school. The clock tower says a little bit after six. Because of everything that’s been happening, they’ve started a new policy where all the classrooms are locked until the professors, the only ones with the keys, show up and open the rooms. I wait until it gets to be a believable time for a request like this, and then go to campus security.
“I need a room in Opal unlocked.”
The security guard, who looks up from four or five black-and-white televisions, says, “We can’t unlock doors except during emergencies.”
“This is an emergency, goddamnit. I left my pet turtle under my desk and he’s going to freeze to death.”
“It’s not our policy.”
“Your policy has a big gaping hole in it, right there in the fucking middle.”
I skip Geography to hover near the door. Well, that’s it, my goose is cooked! A few times, teachers walk by and I think they’re going to unlock it but they go to different rooms. A few minutes before class, two of the females in the class wait by the door with me.
“What did you think about the test?” one with brown hair says.
“I don’t know.”
When I spot Silas, my stomach tightens. He reaches into his pocket and takes some keys out. I position myself right where the door will open.
“Good morning,” he says.
“Good morning,” I say.
I take my coat off and he opens the door. I push forward immediately and take a step into the doorframe and pretend to drop my coat, drop it right on top of the paper. “Sorry.” I pick my coat up and scoop the paper into it. Everyone takes their seats. Pervis, the greatest eccentric I’ve ever known, doesn’t show up.
The class is about Ella Fitzgerald. I barely hear any of it. Half an hour in, he tells us he’s going to let us go early. The female who talked to me outside asks him about the midterm, and he says he’s still grading. He puts a record on the player and right before it starts playing he says, “Stephen Florida, can you stay after, please?” The song is Ella Fitzgerald scatting for six and a half minutes. Silas stares right at me while the nonsense sounds of the woman bang off the walls. “Feel free to go whenever,” Silas yells above the music, and it sounds threatening, so pretty soon people sheepishly leave. When the song’s done, I’m the only one in the room. In my extravagant coat, I walk down to his desk and he lifts the needle.
I say, “You know Pervis is cheating off me, right?”
He’s in his chair with his head down, ruffling through his bag. He fingers through some papers, and his delayed response almost causes me to demand just what the fuck is going on, but then I remember that I’ve nearly been caught a number of times recently, and so remain quiet.
He pulls out my midterm, which has at the top 100 written in red pen. I haven’t gotten a hundred since a ninth-grade vocab test.
“How do I know you’re not the one cheating off Pervis?” he says, glaring at me.
I take the test in my hand and look at my handwriting in all the question blanks. One hundred percent free of error! When it’s sunk in that the document is real, I stare back. I have new teeth and I give him my Sunday smile. “Do you truly believe it is I who’s been the cheater?”
He undoes his ponytail so it flops out like a horse mane and then puts it all back in. “No, I don’t think that.”
“I’m very interested in jazz,” I say unhelpfully.
“Do you play?”
“Play what?”
“Music. An instrument.”
“No. I wrestle.”
“Why’s that?”
“What?”
“Why wrestling?”
“I don’t know. I guess because sailboating and horse jumping, kite contests, golf, those aren’t sports. Anything that needs an object or water or an animal is not a sport. Wrestling is genuine and true and real.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Have a drink with me.”
“O.K.”
“I’m busy until Friday.”
“O.K.”
“Honky Tonky all right with you?”
“Yes.”
The television in the student union reports that a suspect is being held for one of the rapes that took place during the tornado. The news anchor says the ra
pe happened outside “a local bar,” but then the television cuts to the road between Oregsburg and the Honky Tonky. The news anchor goes on to say that the victim will remain anonymous, but that she is an Oregsburg student. Over the next few days, with nothing new to report, they just reiterate the same information. But then a few days later they have a new development: the suspect, Frank Florence, forty-four, two-time convicted sex offender, first turned himself in to the Aiken Police Department at two o’clock in the morning a few days prior, seriously bleeding. He was suffering from a groin injury and had to be rushed to the hospital. Authorities released part of his statement, which claims he was the recipient of a “ritual castration” as “punishment for what [I] did to those girls” and that “now [I] have the courage to turn [myself] in for what [I’ve] done.”
Hargraves says: “We’re gonna use these two weeks to tighten up the little stuff, eliminate the little mistakes that can cost you a title. You’re the first ones in history from Oregsburg to go to Kenosha. You’re the only hope. I want you to think about that. I want you to feel like the explorers you are, you’re going into uncharted territory as far as we’re concerned.”
“If we are both Oregsburg’s only hope,” Linus says to me later in the locker room, “doesn’t that mean we’re Oregsburg’s last two hopes? Meaning neither of us is the last at all.”
One night, I hear Linus like a forty-one-year-old man telling Zachary about a service he uses. It’s a student on campus, a philosophy major who’s a junior, who writes papers for you. “He wrote all my history papers, and he’s got two of my sociology ones right now.” Zachary gets the student’s name and location, which I also take note of.
It is psychologically healthy every now and then to experience something you don’t tell anyone, that you don’t let out for any reason, that’s only yours. But perhaps I’m doing this too often. The thought arrives sometime after midnight in the bathroom while spiders crawl around me in the stall. The way to tell if you’re dreaming is to look down at your feet. Linus and Zachary are laughing about something behind their door.
When they search Frank Florence’s trailer, they don’t find anything directly related to the crimes, but they find a large number of knives.
Sometimes, once or twice, I’ve gone away from school and found a disused track of the Soo Line, it ends out in some weeds, the ties just stop. They remind me of my stitches.
Mrs. Willard drags her desk chair to the front of the room, sits down, and tells us about the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, which happened in Illinois during the war, when people kept waking up and smelling gas and throwing up because of it. Next to me, a girl begins drawing a full-page chart of the incidents, and there are a lot to keep track of. Footprints were found beneath windows, window screens were found torn. There were so many reports of people smelling gas in their houses that anyone who made a report but wouldn’t submit to a medical exam would be arrested. A woman named Bertha Burch described a figure as a woman dressed as a man. “Women’s footprints” were found at the scene. Mattoon had a diesel engine manufacturing plant. A lot of the authorities chalked it up to “female hysteria.”
And then she says that a whole similar set of circumstances had happened ten years earlier, in the county of Botetourt, Virginia.
At the end she asks all twenty of us in the class what we thought was wrong, what was going on in these two towns separated by hundreds of miles. No one answers and she says, “That’s too bad.” And then the class is over.
It is an altogether funny feeling to hear about faraway events in the world and realize you had nothing to do with them, like voices outside your window. All the time these days, I’m reminded of what Mary Beth said about serious things: in the long run they usually only seem serious to a small number of people in one place.
More and more things keep happening to me. Insignificant things and significant things and boring things and sacred things and terrible things and nice things and strange things. They disguise themselves as new events but really I know what they are, they’re ancient events that have happened before and they’ve just run to the back of the line to wait their turn again.
Without enough evidence to go on, they let Florence go.
I pay a visit to the philosophy student. He lives in Leon and trustingly lets me up to his room.
He’s bigger than me but has a jaw that’s never been knocked around. I like a challenge.
“Can I help you with something?”
“You do papers for people?”
“Sometimes.”
“You any good at it?”
“Do you want to come in?”
“Of course not. What do you charge?”
“Fifteen per page. If you get less than an A-minus, I discount to ten, but I’ve never had to discount.”
“Do you by chance have a paper or papers from Linus Arrington?”
“Yeah, he gives me his papers.”
“Maybe I would like to come in.”
His room is basically the same as mine, except with blackout curtains and a lot of personal photographs of himself with people taped on the concrete walls. It becomes clear he is a sort of man about town. There’s a big bong on the floor, next to a paper titled “Pythagoras Was Not Real, He Was a Group of Men.”
“Is that true?” I say, pointing at it.
“Yes.”
“You do philosophy?”
“Yeah.”
“In my experience, philosophy is just like the parabola and the axis, always approaching the axis, closer and closer, like that, see my hands like that? Closing the gap but not ever closing it.”
“What you’re describing is an asymptote.”
“What do you think of Wilhelm Fliess?”
“He’s not my favorite.”
“Goddamnit! Is that the papers you’re working on?” I point to his desk, at an overstuffed manila folder labeled paper business in red pen.
“That’s it, yeah.”
Quickly, I reach over and grab a bunch of papers from it, and shove them down the back of my pants and snatch the bong and wave it at his head. Water flies out the end and douses him. “Hey, what the fuck?” The rest of the papers flutter to the floor.
He takes a step toward me but I swing wildly and he ducks away. I lick my knuckles.
“Listen to me. I would recommend you write them bad. Badly. Linus’s papers only. I know you’ve got two sociologies. I don’t care about the rest of these. I admire your hard work a little bit. But if I find out he gets anything higher than a D on the ones you have, I’m going to the provost or whoever with this.”
“Jesus Christ, man. I don’t care, just put my shit down and leave.”
“All right.” I set the bong on the carpet. “Which philosopher would you recommend if you like Wilhelm Fliess?”
I’m running out of things to say, though I never had much to say to begin with.
I wait a few nights outside Linus’s door to hear the results of my visit, but they don’t ever talk about it. I get so frustrated about this, it drives me so crazy that I take the hairs from my shave and fling them on their threshold to find.
I wonder. If at the end. Life is a very bright light. That you just wanted turned out.
An anagram is an ingenious rearrangement.
Daphne Floister.
Levi Silas and Roland Fink are not anagrams but it doesn’t matter, does it?
And I guess I never should’ve been surprised Fink turned out to be a temporary problem, an inconvenience. He rolls to the left side of my skull when I tilt my skull to the left. An inconvenience was never going to realistically threaten me, Kryger and the rest of them were never really going to threaten me. They’re all just like the skeletons on springs around the funhouse corners, they’re all thin dreams and smoke and fake threats, I can wake myself up from all of them.
When I open my eyes, it’s sometime in the night and my mom is sitting in the desk chair.
“Hi, honey.”
“Hi. What time is it?
”
“It’s pretty late.” There’s an unlit cigarette in her hand. “How are you doing?”
“I’m O.K. Where’s Dad?”
“Oh, he’s somewhere around here.”
I hear footsteps in the hallway. It smells like smoke.
“I saw all the bad things. It’s all very sad. I’m worried about you.”
“What are you worried about?”
“Your father had tendencies. He could be a real knucklehead. Did I tell you about his urination charge?”
“Yeah.”
“There were times I thought the M’Naghten rule should’ve been renamed the Gerry rule!”
“What are you worried about?”
“Did I tell you about one-trial learning?”
“Mom, you sound like the therapist.”
“Don’t say that. I don’t like her. I don’t sound like her.”
“You’re right.”
“Is your finger O.K.?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me see it.” She gets up and places the cigarette in her mouth. She holds my hand in both of hers, turns it gently, and warmth goes everywhere at once. “You need to stop biting your nails.”
“I know.”
She puts her hand on my forehead. The cigarette wobbles when she talks. “Please take care of yourself.”
A door opens in the hallway.
“I have to go now. I miss you very much.”
