Epilogue
2011
The day had been a muggy slog, everything moving at half speed. He had the windows open and the fans on, but the air just sat in the room, menacing them. The looming final exam made him rush through the lesson, lecturing more than he liked to. Ordinarily, once the weather turned this warm, sophomores would do anything to avoid the indignity of actual learning, but the extreme heat had sunk them into a state that resembled attentive silence. It was also the class period before lunch. They didn’t draw chalk-dust penises on loose-leaf paper and slap them on each other’s backs, or put on goofy accents when asked to read, or read unbearably slowly on purpose, or read the last word of every sentence in unison. He used to love these muggy days at the beginning, but now that he was a veteran, now that he commanded respect and attention, they were the days he enjoyed least, because he could feel the limits of his craft. There was always room for improvement. He felt almost pleased when Carmine Priore threw his book in the air and told him to end the charade and let them out early: at least it was a sign of life.
Toward the end of class, he realized he’d forgotten what they were discussing, what point he was about to make, even what book they were talking about. He turned to the blackboard for help, but found no clue there, save for a single word, “Empathy,” scrawled and underlined, apparently by him. He looked to one of the desks in front. The Metamorphosis. He began to panic. His first thought was Alzheimer’s, and terror moved through him. He was only thirty-four.
He took a deep, deliberate breath. He simply had to relax. He knew The Metamorphosis. He knew these kids too: there was Nick Indelicato and Tommy Daulton; there was Marvin Neri; there was Brendan King; there, asleep—he slapped his hand on the desk and the boy jerked up violently—was Carmine Priore.
As for him, he was Connell Leary, Con-Man to his friends, Mr. Leary to his students. He would be Mr. Leary to them when they were forty and had kids of their own.
He tried to shake it off, but the waterlogged, blank feeling persisted in his head. Terror welled up in him. It was no dream. His room, an ordinary classroom that he shared with a colleague in the history department, was appointed with maps of the ancient and modern world, a poster of Shakespeare, another of Thomas Jefferson, a framed reproduction of David’s Death of Socrates. The faces of the boys flashed with delight as the electric silence deepened. They looked at each other and began to murmur.
“Quiet!” he shouted. “Quiet this instant!” He heard his own voice and thought he sounded not like himself but like one of those teachers in the movies, impossibly stuffy. He needed to act quickly if he wanted to maintain authority. “I will wait here all day until you gentlemen are ready to learn,” he said, walking over to his father’s desk. “And you can wait with me.” He paused, long and fruitlessly. “We’re going to do something important. We’re going to take control of our educations. You gentlemen are going to own this material. You’re going to teach it to me as if I don’t know it. One of you is going to come up here and be the teacher.” They emitted a collective theatrical groan. “Or else we can have a surprise quiz,” he said, to louder protests. He settled on Justin Nix in the back row—Justin of the kind, broad face and the nearly perfect indifference to the grammatical conventions of standard written English. Justin pointed to his chest and mimed looking behind him for another student as the kids laughed.
“Okay, Mr. Leary,” Justin said, rising and high-stepping toward the front of the room. “Here I come. I’m going to be Mr. Leary, guys.”
He handed Justin a piece of chalk. “Go to work,” he said. “What do we know? What do we need to know?”
He fell into his chair, overwhelmed by the hothouse smell of teenage boys baking in the heat. He heard Justin at half volume, as though from the bottom of a pool. Justin wasn’t teaching The Metamorphosis. He was doing an impression of the way Mr. Leary stood at the board, the way he rubbed the top of his head and pushed his glasses up. Justin had his gestures down cold. A minute into this pantomime, Connell felt the air come back into his lungs. The kids were watching for his reaction. “You’ve really helped,” he said, trying to sound calm, sarcastic. He didn’t want them to know he meant it. “I think we’ve all benefited enormously from this little display. Give him a hand.”
They burst into exaggerated applause, ironic hoots, and arm pumps—a release of pent-up energy. He brought another kid up, and a third; they said some things about the book. Then he rose from his chair, willing himself to feel refreshed and in possession of all his powers.
“What I want you to consider,” he began, “is that as soon as the door is opened and Gregor’s parents see the enormous bug for the first time, they immediately know it’s their son. Did this strike any of you as strange? Why didn’t they rush to check for Gregor in the closet? Why didn’t they go to the window to make sure he didn’t break his leg jumping out? Why do they instantly assume their son has been transformed into a—what is he again, Trevor?”
“A cockroach,” Trevor said.
“We’ve gone over this. What Kafka called him in the original German can be translated as something more like vermin. We also know that toward the end of the story Kafka has the cleaning lady describe him as a certain kind of insect. Justin, since you’ve done such a good job already?”
“A dung beetle,” Justin said.
“Great! A dung beetle. Which eats, as we’ve discussed, feces.”
They groaned in unison. He felt himself in something like a fugue state. He knew he’d be able to finish what he’d started. He’d stood before a class and guided it through a text often enough to do it now without falling apart, without even an apparent hitch in his delivery. Inside, though, he was boiling with fear.
“Just for that extra bit of humiliation for Gregor. Anyway, how do we explain his parents’ instantly knowing that that dung beetle is their son? Maybe it’s not a stretch for them to see their son as a vermin. Maybe they’ve been seeing him as less than human all along. He’s been serving their needs, propping them up. Maybe his spirit, as they see it, has finally found the body it deserves.”
The bell rang. He reminded them to do the reading and gathered his things. He kept his head down. He could sense a couple of them assembling at his desk. Danny Burbano was there, as well as Justin. Danny was always there. Danny was embarrassed to speak in front of the others, but he liked to talk about the books they read. Connell usually indulged him.
“Not today, Danny,” he said as he brushed past. “Tell me tomorrow.” He could sense the hurt pooling in Danny’s chest. He was gruffer than he should have been, but he had to get out of there. Justin followed him out the door, hustling to keep up.
“Am I in trouble?”
“You? For what?”
“That impression I did.”
“Nobody’s in trouble,” Connell said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
He was down the hall and through the doors before Justin could respond. He looked up from a flight below and saw Justin watching him descend the stairs. He knew he must have looked like a man on fire.
Outside, he broke into a trot. The light at the corner was turning red and he sprinted across the avenue. He ran several blocks, all the way to the park along the Hudson’s edge, where he slumped on a bench and tried to catch his breath. His shirt was soaked with sweat. He hadn’t run that hard, that long, since high school. He took deep, fugitive drafts of the river air and tried to focus on the sun on his neck. A passing tugboat let out its foghorn. The sound reminded him of a bullfrog lowing, and he had a strange, familiar feeling that he couldn’t place. He looked at the diaphanous vapors in the atmosphere and out at the boats passing slowly and the competing skyline across the river, and he thought of the way life arranged itself around water.
He’d had intimations of this moment before. Once, he’d stood in the predawn dark in the kitchen, unplugging his wife’s phone from the charger and plugging in his own, and as he held it in his hand he realized that he could not recall the device’s name. He pressed his hands against the countertop’s edge and leaned his forehead into the microwave, fighting through a thick, aphasic fog, and, after at least a minute had passed, he began to feel a panic like the kind he felt when he cut off the circulation to his arm in his sleep and woke with a start and called out, shaking and flapping it uselessly for so long that he was sure he had lost the use of it forever, until the blood came pumping back in and he recovered sensation in painful stages. All he’d been able to conjure had been the last line of a vaguely recollected poem—blackberry, blackberry, blackberry—and then he’d remembered the poem’s title—“Meditation at Lagunitas”—and finally realized with a mixture of relief and fear that BlackBerry was the very name of the thing he was holding, that his subconscious mind had been faster at retrieving it than his conscious mind, and that this could be an augury of what was to come.
Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs in his career, Hank Aaron 755, Barry Bonds 763. Hack Wilson set the single-season RBI record with 190 in 1930, though decades later historians found a discrepancy in a box score and changed the number to 191. Lou Gehrig played in 2,130 consecutive games, Cal Ripken 2,632. Orel Hershiser pitched 59 consecutive scoreless innings in ’88, eclipsing Don Drysdale’s record of 58 1/3. Cy Young won 511 games, Walter Johnson 417, Christy Mathewson and Pete Alexander both 373. Barry Bonds walked 2,558 times, Rickey Henderson scored 2,295 runs, Hank Aaron drove in 2,297 men, and Pete Rose got 4,256 hits, passing Ty Cobb’s 4,191—some say 4,189—in ’85. Mickey Mantle finished with a .298 lifetime batting average because of some mediocre seasons at the end of his career. Ted Williams lost the MVP award in 1941 to Joe DiMaggio and his 56-game hitting streak, despite hitting .406 that year. Dwight Gooden struck out 276 men as a rookie. Ralph Kiner won 7 home run titles despite playing in only 11 seasons.
Maybe he should have committed other facts to memory. Maybe he should have learned the dates of elections and political coups d’état. Maybe he should know the presidents in chronological order and their vice presidents and the dates of their elections and deaths, or the history of Mesopotamia or metallurgy, or the basics of quantum mechanics, but he didn’t know those facts, he knew baseball facts. He’d learned baseball facts originally because his father had known baseball facts and he liked having them to share with him, and then eventually they were just what rattled around in his head.
Roberto Clemente had a .317 lifetime batting average, was voted to start 17 All-Star games, and finished with exactly 3,000 hits. His plane crashed in Puerto Rico during an off-season relief mission he attempted to fly to Nicaragua in 1974 to deliver food to starving people. He was elected to the Hall of Fame immediately, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America forgoing the five-year waiting period they gave themselves to consider the value of a player’s contribution to the game.