The rest of the day drifts by weightlessly. There isn’t much to think about: tying up loose ends with students who are overconcerned about their grades, reviewing basic concepts for final exams. Nothing really new to the students who’ve studied all year, and nothing the ones who are behind will suddenly be able to grasp. You’ll be easy on the ones who’ve tried and come up short; you see their faces as you go over material from two months back, their exaggerated concentration, as if the right attitude now might mitigate the disaster awaiting them when you place the exam booklets on their desks next week. There are some teachers who hold cram sessions at their own houses this time of year—University of Chicago grads, people who’re going to change the world through secondary education; they’re a little much sometimes. One has to keep one’s boundaries pleasantly firm, you think. What if the students just started following teachers home for free tutoring? How would you redraw the line, once you’d let them smudge it? But nobody follows you back to your apartment from school today, because they don’t need to: they’ve already looked up your address in the phone book.
This is something that will make your story harder for later generations to understand. Why is your address right there in the phone book? You’re a teacher; public school teachers have targets painted on their backs. If a student gets mad about his grades, “Better safe than sorry” is the watchword. You never know what these kids will do. Some of them have guns. Didn’t you hear about that one teacher in Massachusetts? Just twenty-four years old.
But no, you haven’t heard about Colleen Ritzer at Danvers High. Philip Chism will not slit her throat with a box cutter and stuff her body into a recycling barrel until 2013, forty-one years from now. Jennifer Paulson won’t be shot walking to work at Birney Elementary in Tacoma until 2010. You haven’t heard about Toby R. Sincino, who shot two teachers and then turned the gun on himself at Blackville-Hilda High in October 1995. You haven’t heard of Neva Jane Wynkoop-Rogers, sixty-two years old on the day she was killed alongside eight others and five wounded at Red Lake Senior High School, on the Red Lake Reservation up in Minnesota. You wouldn’t think to take any measures to protect yourself from your students. Occasionally a few will confront you about their grades, but these are usually college-bound seniors, worried about future prospects. The idea that any of them might try to hunt you down with the intention of killing you is absurd. They have a hard enough time focusing on social studies for a single class period. They’re not killers. They’re just kids.
There’s a little pastrami left, so you have that on a sandwich for dinner with some roasted potatoes. It might look modest to the outside world, a sandwich and some plain potatoes with butter and salt. Some feast! If there were an especially sensitive poet walking past your window, he might muse awhile about the quiet pains of solitude, maybe bleed you for a few good lines—“the woman at the table, reading alone,” something in that vein. But in fact you’re quite pleased with yourself: while the potatoes were roasting, you’ve toasted the bread, steamed the pastrami over boiling water for a minute or two, and then dressed it with a little cheese and mustard. It’s a joy, a little sandwich like this, the potatoes on the side a little oily, steam rising from them when you break the pieces open with your fork.
You burn a little incense afterward, skimming a chapter in the Carlos Castaneda paperback you found in the laundry room last week. You ran across it halfway through a stack of books that had been left on the folding table with a little note beside: “Free!” The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge is pretty wild fare, but it’s entertaining enough. It reminds you of a more grown-up version of the fantasies you used to indulge in as a child, dreams of leaving the world behind and going off to live in the desert among the wild animals; or maybe up in some cave in the mountains, surrounded by mossy trees and cool, running streams.
It’s lovely to think of, though for you these reveries only last for the time it takes to burn a stick of incense while idling awhile on the sofa. But people entering adulthood seem to hold tight to childish dreams nowadays, even carrying them into the lives they make for themselves. Might the future hold, for you, some unmooring like the one your divorced neighbors seem to be having: new and unknown horizons, unexpected spiritual awakenings? Did you have plans for the summer, plans that could have included some personal inventory like the one all your fellow grown-ups seem so invested in at present? I don’t know; it seems unlikely. At any rate, the Castaneda book in the laundry room, whatever else people might have made of it later, could have meant something or nothing. In order for us to know, someone would have needed to explore the foggy territory of your unremembered daydreams, and these aren’t the avenues people pursue in the wake of a catastrophe. One thing seldom asked of those on whom disaster has laid its hand is what their future plans were before the flood.
* * *
THEY PULL INTO THE PARKING LOT after you’ve gone to bed. Seen from the outside, they’d almost seem comic: first they have to find your car, and then they circle the parking lot arguing about whether parking next to it is a good idea or a bad one. Then, when they’ve agreed that it’s probably a bad idea, they argue about where a better place to park might be—on the street, or a block away, or across the parking lot next to some other cars whose owners don’t figure into the story at hand.
Most of the argument consists of a running monologue from Gene, but as Jesse begins to apprehend the reality of his situation amid the unusual sticking power of Gene’s pipe dream from the previous night, he raises objections or notes possible complications. “Anywhere you park, somebody might see,” he volunteers, interrupting, and then, a minute later: “They built most of this in the last couple years, it’s all going to have streetlights.” Jesse has a fear of consequences whose constant presence at the periphery of his consciousness is a sort of tribute to his father.
This irritates Gene, who likes Jesse for his passivity, his use value as a sponge: he soaks up the runoff from Gene and never seems to saturate. “If you wanna puss out, say the word, little brother,” he says, pulling up abruptly near the enclosed swimming pool, whose lights shimmer dreamily through the window. “I’m only doing this for you, anyway.”
“Gene, I’m just saying, a lot of people live here, probably somebody’s going to see.” Gene, staring through the windshield toward the swimming pool, is plotting points on a line whose arc is really only a rough guess. “You know? Just, probably somebody.”
Gene has made up his mind. “So?”
Jesse laughs, despite himself. “So nothing she’s got in there is worth anything to us in jail.”
Gene punches Jesse on the shoulder—not hard, but hard enough—and smiles. “What do you know about jail?”
“What do you?” says Jesse, punching him back, but tentatively: there is an order here, one whose terms Jesse understands instinctively. These constraints are comforting, known parameters. It’s good to have someone to mark out the boundaries, to keep them consistent. Some people wait their whole lives for such a person.
“About as much as I’m gonna know,” Gene says, suddenly parking the car in an available space and killing the engine. They remain there for quite some time, smoking cigarettes with the windows down and watching your building like amateur detectives on stakeout, waiting until the last light in the last window has gone dark.
5.