by Hari Kunzru
Why couldn’t I remember? I felt it reflected badly on me that I couldn’t. I felt it was my duty.
He would have opened up his desk and closed it again, out of despair or resignation. He’d have put his hand up and asked permission from Brearley to go and get toilet paper to clean up the mess. Or he’d have taken his handkerchief and tried to blot the spreading stains, transferring ink onto his hands, his white school shirt. I remember him with ink on his shirt. He was clumsy. That was another of Babcock’s attributes. He could bugger up the simplest manual task. It meant he was hopeless at sports, picked last for cricket and rugby. His ungainly cloak body wasn’t built to shin up the ropes in the gym or jump the vaulting horse or do handstands on the mat. There was a game we’d play at break time, a game he made up himself—this was Babcock’s terrible abjection—called Babcock Chase. He was It. He was always It. The game consisted, self-evidently, of chasing Babcock, then pushing him to the floor and inflicting whatever play punishments or dominations we took it into our heads to make him suffer. The problem was that he wasn’t entertaining to chase. He was slow and lumbering. He took the rugby tackles and pinches and punches passively, phlegmatically. So we never played it for long. A couple of times and then we’d go off to do something else. And if he felt that by allowing himself to be roughed up he’d earned entry into the next game, he was always disappointed. Once again he’d be left on the sidelines, trailing along in our wake until someone told him to go away.
Maybe he felt amorphous to himself. That was how he felt to us. Not quite there, not quite a person. An ectoplasm, a jelly, a fog. Why couldn’t I remember him blotting the stains with his handkerchief or a wad of toilet paper? Why couldn’t I remember his expression—of sorrow or resignation or despair, probably not anger, almost certainly not anger—as he opened the scarred wooden lid of his desk?
Babcock’s doughy body floated in front of me, wearing its indistinct lens smear of a face. I could hear Brearley scolding him: it was all his fault, he was “thick-headed,” a “dolt” a “clot,” silly old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon epithets that made us boys scream with laughter. Brearley was playing to the gallery. He was an insecure man.
I was thinking about Brearley, about his sleeve garters and the sharp-edged metal ruler he carried in his jacket pocket, when the stewardess touched my arm and told me we were about to land at SFO.
I walked through the terminal in a daze. At baggage claim a driver was waiting with an anagrammatized version of my name on a sign. He wheeled my suitcase through the parking lot and locked it in the trunk of a vast black town car. I settled myself in the back and checked my phone. My partners had been on the West Coast for a couple of days. They confirmed that they’d be meeting me at the campus, no other issues. My floridly venal bastard of a lawyer had sent a long billable voice mail about nothing. That was it. No firefighting on my way to the meeting. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. As we merged onto the freeway I ought to have been going over my notes, reminding myself of the bastard lawyer’s list: positions to take and not to take, promises to avoid making. Instead, I sat back, feeling the diagonal pull as we crossed streams of traffic and accelerated toward the car-pool lane. Traveling on that white salt-flat ribbon felt like purgatory. I might as well have been trudging forward pushing a handcart. As a trick to get my head back in the game, I tried to focus on money, the buffer it would provide between me and the world, the soothing balm it would rub into the sore joints of my marriage. Instead, all I could think about was Babcock. How could he have been such a dolt, such an ox?
All those things Brearley called him were true. Why would he never show any spark, any glimmer of wit or rebellion or even anger at his terrible situation? He did nothing to deserve the abuse he got. He never swore or called people names. He never provoked anyone, unless he was trying to start a game of Babcock Chase. But there were some evil bastards in our class. They needed a human toy and Babcock fit the bill. One little animal—Grayling or Grayson—would spit in his lunch, whatever plate of silvery liver or indeterminate pie we’d been served in the grim school refectory. He’d spit phlegm in Babcock’s food—a “gob,” a “greenie”—and he’d force Babcock to eat it, under the gold-leafed names of the prize winners and war dead, the sepia eyes of a hundred years of first elevens and fifteens. All of history’s great ones, present to witness Babcock’s humiliation.
We drove south, billboards and tract housing spooling past the tinted window. At length we turned onto a huge corporate campus, discreet glass blocks set among rolling landscaped lawns. Employees rode about in golf carts, dressed in chinos and button-down shirts. They wore dark glasses and carried brightly colored reusable flasks of drinking water. It was a brave new pantone-colored world, where nothing was more than ten years old and everyone had agreed to standardize certain basic protocols of dress and manner so as to be maximally compatible. A sort of cultural ISO was in operation. It was probably how everyone would behave in eight or ten years’ time. I’d been there before, of course, many times. It felt like nowhere. After a day or two of meetings, one always had the suspicion of having slipped into some highly regulated afterlife.
My partners and our lawyer were waiting for me in the lobby, accompanied by a couple of polo-shirted grinners who I presumed were our hosts. I tried hard to wrench myself away from my memories, but it was as if I were drowning. As I was introduced I barely caught their names.
Babcock never courted the anger of the masters by playing pranks or humming under his breath or giggling in chapel or any of the nonsense the rest of us got up to—but somehow he would attract it all the same. Brearley, in particular, hated him. That sour old bastard, despite his gray hair and his old-fashioned affectations—the springlike metal garters he wore on his shirtsleeves, his dandyish mustache—was a thug. Brearley had a bad temper, and in those days—and that place—where corporal punishment was routine and it was not considered out of order for masters to strike the boys—he was fully able to express it. I once saw him drag a boy to the door by his hair. Another time, when the class had infuriated him by the old trick of shuffling our desks forward every time he turned to write on the blackboard, he picked someone at random for retaliation. That someone was Babcock. Go to the headmaster, he said. Going to the headmaster meant the cane—six strokes with shorts on or off depending on the offense and the headmaster’s degree of arousal. I know from bitter experience the sensation of waiting for a punishment whose dimensions grow like some great black amoeba as one stands there in a dark corridor outside a study door.
I saw the CEO step out of the lift, a man whose broad, blunt face was familiar to half the world from magazine covers and clips from his famous presentations at product launches. He acquired my hand in a double-alpha death grip, his left hand clasped over, in case I escaped the viselike clutches of the right. Onstage he would work himself into a revivalist frenzy, yelling at the crowd, sheened in sweat. He said something to me that I didn’t catch.
Babcock refused to go. It wasn’t fair, he said. And he was right, of course. He was no more responsible for the prank than anyone else. Brearley had just chosen him because he thought he’d go quietly. An easy wicket for the masters XI in the match against the boys. Doubly outraged at this unexpected insubordination, Brearley grabbed the lapels of his jacket and tried to remove him physically. Babcock resisted and as they struggled, he slipped down and down, until he was clinging to Brearley’s legs like a shipwreck survivor to a spar. Brearley, his face contorted with anger, started to flail at him with his ruler, so he let go and made a grab for the door frame. Brearley tugged at his legs for a while, without success. Then, completely unable to control himself, he slammed the door on Babcock’s hands. The crunch was sickening. Babcock screamed, a high-pitched sound like a fox or a cat. That sound. One day I hope I shall forget that sound.
For a long time I have been trying to let go of the past. I am committed to celebrating the person I am today. You may scoff at such greeting card banalities. I don
’t care. You have to think of it like Catholicism or the religion of what men of my father’s generation used to call “the benighted Hindoo.” All the smells and bells—the garish colors and blood and so forth—are only for the great unwashed. The point is what lies beneath. Have faith. Don’t look back. “If you spend your whole time looking into the rearview mirror, you’ll find yourself under a truck.” I forget where that one is from but I’ve often found it useful and at that moment I said it, possibly out loud. I was suddenly enveloped in silence. The various courtiers were looking to their Visionary Founder and CEO for guidance. The man had evidently asked me a question and I had not replied. Instead I had muttered something about a truck. The CEO was still holding my hand. I mumbled a few words, which may or may not have been apposite. Something about traffic on the freeway. The truck theme. It was supposed to be a save. One of my partners shot me a worried look. The CEO squeezed my shoulder in a manner suggestive of both twelve-step mentorship and training in some kind of obscure energy-circulation massage practice. Our little group made its way down a bright corridor which did not smell of mud or floor polish or muscle rub or rugby kit. We were shown into a conference room with a view of sprinklers and green lawn. Around me, people made small talk, mostly about the specifications of their devices.
I don’t remember that we were shocked, particularly, at the injuries Brearley inflicted on Babcock. We probably found it funny. Babcock was sent to matron, and sat in class for a couple of days with bandaged hands. After that, he vanished. His parents must have taken him out of school. On what terms, I never knew. Perhaps there was a lawsuit. Perhaps not: Brearley was still around, yelling, lashing out at us with the metal ruler he carried in his jacket pocket.
The point of positive thinking is it works. How does it work? You can’t ask that. You have to think positively. If you ask questions, it doesn’t work. That should come as no surprise, because asking questions is not thinking positively. It is asking questions. Two totally different things. In the conference room I was digging deep, trying to stay “in the moment.” I visualized some damn thing or other and was suddenly drenched in sweat, my damp shirt chilling on my back. I peered down at the central air vents in the floor; I half expected them to be exuding some kind of narcotic green gas; the Joker playing a trick on Batman. If someone had poured me a gin-and-tonic right then I would have kissed him, but there was no gin to be had in that overcooled Californian tomb. Gin was not part of our buyer’s corporate culture. There was a fridge full of some kind of bottled fruit-and-seaweed slop. There was, for some reason I did not comprehend, a bowl of memory sticks on the table, like some terrible parody of snacks. I suppressed a powerful desire to lean over to one of my young partners, who were sitting on either side of me, to put my forehead close to Rajiv’s or Jared’s shoulder and whisper, “I’m scared.” But neither of them were what you might call “tuned in” to the nuances of human emotion, and all I would have bought with my meltdown was some kind of in-flight checklist conversation about the absence of determinate threats in the room, and the guess that perhaps it was earthquakes I was scared of, was I scared of earthquakes? Not a hug. Not that. I had a powerful need to be hugged right then. I was hearing a loop of that crunch, the sound of Babcock’s fingers breaking.
Across the conference table was a man about my age, one of a dozen or so people the CEO had brought to the meeting. There was nothing distinctive about him. He was dressed like everyone else, his bland, doughy features registering no particular emotion or intensity. At first I thought it was impossible. Then my body was flooded with elation, a physical flush of joy which almost lifted me out of my seat. All the lives he could have lived, all the things that could have happened as a result of his torment—the despair, the lonely rooms—and here he was in sunny California, in a high-level meeting at a billion-dollar company. He was here. That meant he was safe.
“Babcock!”
Someone else had been speaking. The Visionary CEO. My appalled partners were staring at me. I reached out a hand across the table.
“Babcock, is that really you? Brearley put the fear of God into us all right!”
Babcock looked confused. “Excuse me?”
And in that moment I realized I couldn’t remember his first name. I must have known it at one point, but we’d never used it. He was always just Babcock, just those two spat-out syllables.
“Pulaski,” said the man. “My name is David Pulaski.”
The awfulness of it. Not to know his first name. The shame.
“Oh God, I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m so sorry.” I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I waited for the CEO to carry on.
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