The Bigness of the World

Dr. Daneau’s Punishment

Dr. Dunno. That is what the boys call me, what they write on desks and in bathroom stalls, a play on my name — which is Daneau — and on the fact that, day after day, that is how they respond to my questions. “Dunno,” they say with an elaborate shrug and the limp, unarticulated drawl that has become ubiquitous among teenagers in a classroom setting; they cannot even be bothered to claim their ignorance in the form of a complete sentence, to say, “I don’t know,” a less than desirable response to be sure, but one that does not smack of apathy and laziness and disdain.

They arrive each day with matted hair and soiled faces, a lifetime of wax and dirt spilling from their ears. “Ear rice,” the Koreans call it, referring, no doubt, to the tiny balls that a normal person, one who attends to his ears on a regular basis, is likely to produce — not to the prodigious amounts produced by thirteen-year-old boys oblivious to hygiene. However, I cannot sit beside them each morning as they prepare for school, coaxing them to apply just a bit more soap, to consider a cleaner shirt. No. My realm is the classroom, my only concern that when they leave it, they possess at least a modicum of proficiency in that much-maligned subject to which I have devoted my life: mathematics.

Would it surprise you to know that I have students who do not understand the concept of ten, who, when given the task of adding some multiple of ten to a number ending in, let us say, four, cannot predict that the sum will also end in four? This, of course, suggests a much bigger problem — an ignorance of zero itself. The Romans developed no concept of zero and we see where that got them, the Roman numeral system in all its past glory relegated to the role of placeholder in complex outlines and on the faces of clocks.

“Imagine your lives without zero,” I once challenged my students in a moment of folly, thinking that I was offering inspiration, a new window onto the world, but they had stared back at me blandly, no doubt wondering what zero could possibly have to do with eating and sleeping and unabated nose picking.

“You mean like sports?” said James Nyquist. I had not meant sports, for sports is a topic to which I never allude.

“Kindly elaborate, Mr. Nyquist. I have yet to see your point.”

“Like in the beginning when no one’s scored,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, and then, more forcefully, “Yes!” for I meant precisely this.

“We’d just start at one, I guess,” he said.

“One?” I repeated. “But one implies that you’ve already scored.”

“You said to imagine our lives without zero,” he pointed out. “That means it doesn’t exist, right? And if both sides start at one, it’s the same as starting at zero.”

It was as though I had eliminated Pringles from their lives. Fine, they would eat Ruffles instead. That easily was zero dispensed with.

* * *

This week, we are discussing averages, concerning ourselves only with mean averages, the general consensus among my colleagues being that median and mode would simply muddy the already none-too-clear waters. Toward this end, I gave young Mr. Stuart the following task: to average five test scores ranging from 77 percent to 94 percent. After much button pushing (for no task can be performed without a calculator firmly in hand), he announced that the average score was 264 percent.

“That, sir, is impossible,” I replied. I have found that few things annoy an eighth-grade boy like being referred to as sir by a grown man.

He, however, was quick to provide me with incontrovertible proof. “See for yourself,” he said, surprisingly smug for one whose chin still bore a dusting of toast crumbs, and thrust the calculator in my face. Indeed, through some mismanagement of the keys, he had arrived at 264 percent.

“Do you not understand what average means?” I asked.

“It means you’re like everyone else,” he said.

“Well,” I replied. “Yes. Except for those who are above average. And, of course, those who are below.” I did not make it personal, did not point out his obvious qualifications for the latter category; I am, after all, an educator. Moreover, I have been reprimanded for such things in the past. Just last month, it was brought to my attention that the names I had given to the three math groups in the class were inappropriate. The most proficient, and not incidentally smallest, group I chose to call the Superheroes, a name that I considered attractive (dare I say motivational) to boys of this age. The middle group was dubbed the Bluebirds, an innocuous but not unflattering moniker. It was the name that I selected for the third group that raised some ire. The Donkeys.

“But didn’t you consider the implication?” the principal asked. “Donkeys are slow animals.”

“I am quite familiar with the characteristics of the donkey,” I replied indignantly. “In short, I found the comparison apt.”

“Well, perhaps you would like to explain that to the boys’ parents?” he said.

Although I was spared having to answer to that particular pack of irate mothers and fathers, I was required to submit a list of three appropriate replacements for “the Donkeys” by the following morning, a request with which I complied; by noon, I had been invited back to the principal’s office to discuss my suggestions.

A word about Thorqvist, my principal. First, I find him an affable fellow, though a bit less affability would work wonders with some of these boys. I also cannot object to his sartorial choices, nor to the fact that he is always well pressed, a state of affairs that his wife is surely behind. He is somewhat of a malapropist, particularly in regard to clichés, which he uses liberally and generally manages to botch. On one occasion — and here I said nothing because I supported his cause if not his phrasing — he urged the faculty to be careful in making sweeping curriculum changes, lest they “throw the baby out with the dishwater.” Another time, during an assembly when it would have been inappropriate to correct him, I had literally to take my tongue between thumb and index finger as he cautioned the boys not once but thrice: “Each of you must learn to take responsibility for your educations if you do not wish to find yourselves up a creek without a ladder.”

Lastly, there is Thorqvist’s habitual misuse of the reflexive pronoun “myself,” which he insists on employing as a subject, a task for which it was never intended. (Forgive me for stating the obvious.) Thus, he began our discussion of my suggestions for a replacement name as follows: “The vice principal and myself have reviewed your list and find your suggestions no less objectionable than ‘the Donkeys.’ ”

I removed my spectacles and cleaned them thoroughly, and when I resumed wearing them, I found that my list had appeared in front of me. Across the top, I had typed “Suggested Name Replacements for the Slow-Learners’ Group” and beneath this, in slightly smaller print, “Submitted by Dr. Michael Daneau.” In the middle of the page, indented and prefaced by bullets, were my suggestions:

• the Mongrels

• the Chain Gang

• the Spuds

“I am not sure that I understand your objections, sir,” I said, after pretending to review the list. “First, I doubt that the boys, or even their parents for that matter, will be familiar with the first two. Most people prefer the simpler term mutt, and chain gangs have long since fallen out of favor, at least in this country. That leaves only Spuds, and what, may I ask, is objectionable about the potato?”

He peered at me for a moment, hoping to decipher my tone. “Well,” he said at last. “First, there is the question of why, out of all possible names, you are drawn to a nickname for the potato. There is also the matter of sound, Dr. Daneau. Have you not considered that Spuds sounds a great deal like Duds?”

“Surely you are not telling me that we must consider rhyming?” I gasped.

“I am not saying that we must consider rhyming per se, but we must consider implications.” He sighed heavily, a familiar enough sigh, for it was the same sigh that I produce when dealing with some particularly obtuse student, Peterson, for example, to whom I had applied this sigh just the day before after a long and unsuccessful attempt to teach him basic test-taking skills.

“Quickly now, Peterson,” I had cried out in a fit of exasperation. “If I were to wad this test of yours into a ball and throw it, where would it land? A. across the room, B. in North Dakota, C. in India.” As you can see, I was not above stacking the deck, but Peterson looked back at me as though I had asked him to calculate the precise distance from his desk to the sun.

“Well?” I pressed him. “What strikes you as obviously wrong?” My point, as it always is in regard to multiple choice, was that he should begin by eliminating; therein lies my objection to the format, for when does life itself proceed in such a fashion, offering us just one correct option presented amid a limited number of others that are so patently wrong?

“I don’t know, sir,” he said. He was one of the politer boys, the type who gets along largely on manners, by jumping up after a movie to reopen the blinds or to rearrange the desks. He added miserably, “I’m sorry, sir. I’ve never been much good at geography.”

That is when I produced the sigh, the sigh meant only to alleviate my own frustration. Still, as I sat in Thorqvist’s office the next day, listening to him emit a similar sigh, I did experience a twinge of remorse regarding young Peterson.

Thorqvist and I are both great believers in civility, and so we chose to disengage briefly, to turn our attention away from the matter of names while we both calmed down. Casting around his office for a momentary distraction, I noticed a new sampler on the wall behind his desk. “More of your wife’s work?” I asked. His wall had previously featured six of her embroideries, each containing a proverb whose message she apparently found so inspiring that she felt compelled to reproduce it in small, exact stitches.

Thorqvist nodded — sheepishly, dare I say? He is no genius, my principal, but neither, I believe, is he the sort to be swayed by the bland, lowest-common-denominator wisdom of proverbs. It is true that he has a fondness for clichés, but proverbs are a far different species. Clichés are a speaker’s convenience, a linguistic shortcut uttered, in most cases, entirely without thought and received in the same fashion. They are like mosquitoes, ubiquitous and annoying but ultimately harmless. A proverb, however, is much stealthier: like the bite of a snake, it is meant to change a life.

I stood before his wife’s seventh contribution, a Slovenian proverb according to the final line of stitches. “Thorqvist,” I said, fumbling for words. “Have you actually read this… this Slovenian nonsense?” I proceeded to read his wife’s sampler aloud: “An ant is over six feet tall when measured by its own foot-rule.” Still he did not reply, and so I turned to him and spoke urgently: “Thorqvist, don’t you see that this message is antithetical to our very mission as educators? Certainly our boys would all like to be measured according to their own foot-rule as it were, but that is precisely the point, is it not? The boys must understand that it is the world’s foot-rule that matters.”

The sampler hit on a sore spot with me, for it reinforced a growing trend in education — namely, the notion that we are the keepers of our students’ self-esteem and, as such, must never allow them to feel that they have failed. Just recently, for example, we were expected to spend an entire day being lectured at by one of these ponytailed pedagogy types hired from the university for an exorbitant fee to beat the latest theories into us. He began the session by waving a handful of red pens about.

“Who can tell me what these are?” he asked, and when enough of my colleagues had taken the bait, calling out, “Red pens,” he announced theatrically, “Ah yes, everybody is familiar with red pens, I see. Well, teachers, I am here to tell you that the red pen, bleeding its way across the students’ work all these years, is finally and fully finished.” With a flourish that underscored his rhetoric, he tossed the entire handful of pens into a nearby trash can.

“May I point out,” I said, raising my hand, “that red allows the student to differentiate his work from my corrections and thus to see clearly his mistakes.”

He regarded me for a moment, yanking on his ponytail as though, I could not help but think, trying to start a motor. “I believe that I hear a bit of the sage-on-the-stage mentality in your comments, Mr….”

“Doctor,” I corrected him. “Dr. Daneau. Mathematics.”

“Dr. Daneau,” he repeated, patronizingly of course, as though I were a child who had informed him that I was not six years old but rather six and a half.

“If by sage-on-the-stage mentality you are referring to the fact that I know math and they do not, then I must confess that I see no problem with that mentality. Indeed, I see no alternative.”

“This,” he said gravely, spreading his hands wide, “is why these professional development days are so important.” The implication, of course, was that something I had said was the referred-to “this” that demonstrated his point.

He consulted his watch. “I was not expecting quite so much discussion on the topic of red pens,” he quipped. A few of my colleagues chuckled — obedient, baaing laughter — and he glanced in my direction to see whether I had noted it. I looked around at my colleagues, who fell largely into two camps: the older teachers, who viewed professional development as something to be sat through whilst offering up the least possible resistance, and the new teachers, impressionable, enthusiastic note takers who were having their beliefs shaped by ideologues such as this, this sage on the stage as it were.

“Gang,” he called out. “Take ten minutes, and then we’ll reconvene to role-play some of our new ideas.”

I did not partake of the ten-minute break. Instead, I went home and took to my bed for the afternoon, overcome with fever at the thought of role-playing.

* * *

After I had let Thorqvist know my opinion of his wife’s sampler and he had refrained from replying, we returned to the matter of names. I was about to offer up the Penguins as a compromise when he said, “The vice principal and myself have come up with a name for the group in question. I hope that it will be to your liking, Dr. Daneau.” He paused, and I knew what this meant — that the name would be so far from my liking that he hesitated even to speak it aloud.

“Well?”

“The Cheetahs,” he declared.

“The Cheetahs?”

He nodded, presenting a wolfish smile.

“I am being asked to reward them for their sluggishness? No,” I said, and then even more vehemently, “No, I cannot do it. I will not take part in this emperor’s-new-clothes approach to education.”

“I am afraid the decision has been made.”

“By the vice principal and yourself?” I replied peevishly, making a jab that went unnoticed and thus afforded me no pleasure. A moment later, I turned desperate. “Can we not compromise?” I asked and, inspired by his smile, said, “How about the Jackals? I believe that they are also known for their speed.”

He showed me the wolfish smile yet again, though I think that he considered it wistful, even worldly. As I rose to leave, he said, “One catches more flies with honey than with nectar, Dr. Daneau.”

* * *

The Provinces, we called places such as this when I was a lad growing up in New York City, meaning it to sound sophisticated I suppose. Such are the foibles of youth. I have been living here, in the Provinces, almost twenty years. How I came to be here would be of little interest to most; suffice it to say that it involved love of an unrequited nature and that I brought myself here as a means of penance, penance for having allowed myself the folly of unrequited love. Here, to be more specific, is Minnesota, a stultifyingly cold place offset by good manners. I have been able to get by with a series of houseboys, young men who value age and education. Do not misunderstand me, though: houseboys must be paid.

Marcos, my current houseboy, is studying to become a teacher himself. I flatter myself to think that my influence has led to this career choice, though on more lucid days I understand that he has made this choice despite me, despite my constant complaining, despite the late-night phone calls, sometimes two or three in a week, filled with snickers and threats and commentary of a flatulent nature. At night, after he has served our meal and we have eaten it while speaking of our days, after he has washed the dishes and I have attended to my paperwork, we return to the table, where we spend an hour preparing him for the state teachers’ exam. He will be leaving me soon, and though I do everything within my power to help him, I do so with the knowledge that I am working against myself.

The other night, he opened the exam book to a math question and looked up at me expectantly, as he always does. “Start with the extremes,” I reminded him. Only then did I glance down at the question: “Which measurement would be most appropriate to use when discussing the weight of a pencil? A. ounce B. quart C. pound D. ton.”

“But surely this is not a real question?” I said, pointing to the words pencil and then ton to make my point. In doing so, I brushed his hand where it rested on the page, a brief and largely accidental touch but deeply sustaining. He smiled at me gently because that is his nature. He is sweet and kind, more so than any other houseboy whose services I have enlisted, and so he did not begrudge me this fleeting touch of skin, this small morsel of pleasure. I worry about Marcos, worry about what kind of teacher he will be if he can so easily be convinced to give himself over in this way.

Marcos arrived from Brazil five years ago, and when I employed him two years later, he was still pronouncing his past tense verbs as though the — ed were an extra syllable to be emphasized emphatically as he spoke: “Yesterday, I talk-id to my friend and then I walk-id to the school.” We spent the first months of his employment undoing this habit, but others have been harder to break, particularly his tendency to translate from Portuguese with no thought as to whether it will make sense in English.

“Doctor, truly I do not know whether to get married or to buy a bicycle,” he will say when faced with a dilemma. He knows the English equivalent, which places one between a rock and a hard place, but does not care for it. “Why a hard place, Doctor?” he asks. “It is not very poetic, I think, to say ‘a hard place.’ ” His tone, as always, is delightfully unsure.

Somewhere along the way, he has developed a penchant for the expression “Close, but no cigar,” which he finds numerous opportunities to use. “Are we having lamb this evening, Marcos?” I will ask, and he will reply, “Close, but no cigar, Doctor,” even when I am not at all close, when it is not lamb but fish that he has prepared. I do not have the heart to correct him, to tell him that this expression has gone the way of carnivals, from whence it derives, and cigars themselves.

Each evening when I arrive home, I sit in my armchair and flip through the paper, acquainting myself with the day’s events while Marcos bustles about, making the final preparations for dinner and fixing my cocktail. Tonight, he appears promptly with my martini, carrying it on a tray as he has been taught.

“Doctor,” he greets me, setting the drink down.

I nod. “Thank you, Marcos. What are you preparing for this evening’s meal?”

“I am roasting a chicken,” he says happily, and when I nod again, he sweeps back into the kitchen.

Certainly Marcos is not the most talented houseboy that I have ever employed. The chicken will be tough, the breasts, in particular, so dry that they will become edible only after being diced and tossed with mayonnaise and mustard. Jung was my most capable cook, though he favored garlic a bit too strongly. I do not like the smell of food on my body, and the garlic was always there, each time I opened my mouth or lifted an arm.

My martini is fine but not exceptional, for Marcos lacks consistency. I drink it anyway while passing through the first several pages of the paper, which I do quickly, as much of the news is devoted to the upcoming elections. I will vote, of course, for I am a firm believer in civic duty, but I do not wish to have these people intrude upon my daily life.

In the back section, which contains the local news, my eye is caught by a photograph of a young man standing beside an airplane, his hand resting on the wing in a proprietary manner. The headline attached to the article reads, “Pilot Plummets to Death,” but I notice this only later, so struck am I first by the photograph and then by the text beneath it, which, incredibly, gives the young man’s name as Thomas Jefferson.

One of my colleagues recently told me that his unusual first name, Gifford, was chosen by his grandparents, fanatical campers wishing to pay homage to Gifford Pinchot, the man largely responsible for establishing park conservation under Theodore Roosevelt. It strikes me that living up to a name such as Gifford is possible and, more important, that not living up to it can at least remain a private defeat, for most people have never heard of Gifford Pinchot — which is not the case with a name like Thomas Jefferson, a name that would have always left this young man feeling hopelessly inadequate.

I skim the article, wanting to know what minor accomplishment this young Mr. Jefferson has achieved, and thus learn that the young man staring back at me, a twenty-four-year-old pilot from White Bear Lake, attempted his third solo flight yesterday. I say attempted because shortly after takeoff, a bird flew directly into Mr. Jefferson’s cockpit windshield, shattering the glass and blinding Mr. Jefferson, ending his career as well as his life. I sip from my martini, but my hand is shaking, and I end up spilling far more than I consume. I try to imagine his final moments, how he felt as he went to his death in this way, sitting in his beloved cockpit contemplating the ineluctability of gravity, robbed of the one sense that could save him while the other four endeavored to offer assistance, all of them, even taste, focused single-mindedly on the moment of impact, his life reduced to that one certainty.

I am reminded of Miriam, a woman I knew many years ago in graduate school. Several years before she and I met, her husband was killed by a speeding truck after he pulled over on a Los Angeles freeway and stepped from his car. The police were not able to figure out why he had stopped that night, but Miriam said that she was haunted less by the mystery of this than by the constant replaying in her mind of the moment when her husband looked up and saw the truck nearly on top of him, saw reflected in the driver’s eyes his imminent death. Miriam was a rational woman in every other way, a student of mathematics like me, but she could no longer drive on or near the highway — a main artery of Los Angeles — on which her husband was killed. She told me this story as we studied together over coffee late one night, by way of explaining why she had left Los Angeles, where even attending to simple errands had become complicated and draining.

I understood, of course, the way that memory worked, the way that one could see or smell or hear almost anything and be reminded of lost love. Passing a certain deli, I would think, There, once, I purchased a bit of expensive cheese in hopes of enticing him to share my lunch; and a few blocks later, On that bench, we professed our mutual disdain for sentimentality while watching pigeons toss bread crumbs about; and finally, awfully, There, at that corner, as we walked together after a performance of what was to have been Mahler’s ninth symphony but which Mahler, overcome by superstition, had called his tenth, hoping to trick death as Beethoven and Bruckner had been unable to — there we parted ways for the very last time.

I sit for some minutes, staring at the face of young Mr. Jefferson, thinking to myself, “This beautiful young lad is dead.”

“Doctor,” says Marcos, and I drop the newspaper, startled by his presence.

“Dinner?” I say, struggling to my feet.

“Telephone,” he replies.

“I did not hear it ring.”

“Your principal,” he mouths, his expression serious, for my principal never phones me at home.

I go into my study to take the call. “Good evening, Thorqvist,” I say.

“Daneau. Sorry to trouble you at home. The, ah, your…” he says, struggling for words to describe Marcos, who undoubtedly introduced himself as my houseboy.

“My houseboy?” I say, attempting matter-of-factness.

“Yes,” he says, clearing his throat directly into the phone. “He assured me that I was not calling you away from the table.”

“Not at all,” I say.

“Excellent. I, listen, we must speak tomorrow. First thing.”

“Very well. I will stop by your office. Seven thirty shall we say?”

“Fine.” He sounds distracted, and in the background, I hear a woman, his wife no doubt, asking querulously, “Well, what does he say for himself?”

“Good evening then, Thorqvist,” I say and hang up.

As usual, the chicken is dry, but I spend an inordinate amount of time praising it, sidestepping Marcos’s questions regarding Thorqvist’s call. After dinner, I beg off of our nightly study session. “Headache,” I explain, touching my temples, and though it is only eight o’clock, I go off to bed.

In fact, my head is throbbing. I realize this only when the room is dark and I am lying very still, listening to the familiar sounds of Marcos’s cleaning. When I interviewed Marcos three years ago, we walked through the house as I described his duties room by room, ending up here, in the bedroom, where two full-size beds sat side by side. “Yours would be the right one, though if you prefer the left, that would be fine,” I explained nervously. This was the moment when interviews crashed to a halt, when the houseboy-to-be exploded angrily out the door or made some awkward excuse and left. With those few, like Jung, who stayed, a round of negotiations ensued, during which the salary crept upward while I assured them repeatedly that nothing more was required than their nightly presence in the other bed. This was true, though I did not mention that without it, I could not sleep. Only Marcos knows this — Marcos, who took in the two beds and my nervous fumbling and said, “Doctor, when I was a boy, we were very poor. My brothers and I slept in one room. I miss that very much.” He smiled, and I clasped my hands together and smiled back.

Finally, I doze off, awakening when Marcos slips into his bed. Moments later, the room fills with the uncomplicated and reassuring sound of his snoring.

* * *

“Ah, Daneau,” Thorqvist greets me heartily the next morning.

“Dr. Thorqvist,” I reply, waiting for an invitation to be seated, but he is busy rummaging through papers, no doubt seeking out the newest bit of damning evidence. “Coffee?” he asks at last, looking up. I nod, and he rises and leaves quickly, almost, I think, gratefully. Out of habit, I glance at the row of his wife’s samplers, noting that an eighth one has appeared. Its focus is also the ant, though this one offers an Iranian perspective on those troublesome creatures. In faulty English, it reads: “For an ant to have wings would be his undoing.”

“Sit. Sit,” says Thorqvist, bustling back in with two coffees.

“Thank you,” I say, accepting one of them, and then, “Your wife seems quite enamored of the ant.”

“Yes.” He settles himself back behind his desk. “She finds them industrious and underappreciated and—” He waves his hand about to indicate that there is a third adjective he cannot recall.

“Iranian, this one,” I say. “Have I told you my favorite Iranian proverb, Dr. Thorqvist?”

He stirs his coffee.

“He’d hang if it were free,” I say.

“Who?” he asks, looking up quickly.

“No,” I say. “That’s the proverb. Well, it’s not exactly a proverb. It’s what one says of a cheapskate. He’d hang if it were free.” I laugh suggestively, and he spits out a halfhearted chuckle that turns into a thundering bout of throat clearing, at the end of which we both fall silent.

“Dr. Daneau,” he begins tentatively. “I wonder—” He falters when I hold up my hand warningly, for he knows how I feel about the word wonder, not the word itself but the usage that has been imposed on us by the Critical Friends, a nervous, giddy group of experts brought in by the school to help improve classroom performance. The Critical Friends is their actual name, a name far better than any I could devise by way of satire, and they employed it without a trace of irony when they introduced themselves at the first meeting of the school year. “We are here to help,” they continued earnestly, the frequency with which they made this assertion calling it into question, just as the fact that they referred to themselves as friends when they were so obviously not underscored that discrepancy.

They would be coming into our classrooms to observe us, they explained, after which they would discuss with us what they had observed. This process, the process of discussing their observations with us, was referred to as reflecting, a word once used to define the capabilities of mirrors and perfectly still bodies of water. No more. Now, we cannot act, speak, or read without being obligated to reflect, publicly and aloud. Reflections have become the bookends to our days, the benedictions to our meetings.

At a meeting last month, for example, we were placed in pairs and told to reflect upon our days; after several minutes of this, we were instructed to reflect upon our partner’s reflection, at which point I lost all patience and cried out, “Sir, we are fiddling as Rome burns. I have students who cannot say how many inches are in a foot, who do not understand that four times five begets the same answer as five times four.” This outburst, as it was termed, merited a visit to Thorqvist’s office, where he explained that the exercise had been intended to promote faculty camaraderie. How, he asked me, did I suppose Miss Thoreson felt about my outburst?

“She was telling me what she had for lunch,” I replied. “A bologna sandwich. I can elaborate if you like, but please consider my feelings, being asked to reflect upon the inadequacies of her lunch. Quite honestly, I do not wish to know the details of my colleagues’ lives nor to share with them the details of mine. I do not wish to hug my colleagues or reveal to them my favorite song. Certainly, I do not want them feeding me Jell-O from a spoon gripped between their teeth.” These were all references to activities introduced by the Critical Friends, who emphasized closeness and frankness and transparency but who, in fact, operated like a secret society, sweeping in and out of classrooms, sequestering themselves with individual teachers, and introducing a whole new vocabulary, which I privately referred to as the Orwellian Code. Under their tutelage (and here I return to my point, having digressed), we are no longer to speak of our concerns or dislikes, freighted as these words are with negativity; we are instead, the Friends explained, to wonder about such things, or, reverting to the noun form, to share a wonder.

“But that has just the opposite effect,” I had shouted, half-rising from my seat. “If one of my esteemed colleagues were to wonder at my idea, I would understand immediately that my idea was so poor, so ill-conceived, so beyond the pale, that he felt compelled to resort to euphemism in order to conceal his horror.” Several of my colleagues chuckled, but their amusement did not keep them from complying, and eventually I was the only one left still speaking of weaknesses and concerns.

Thus, when I take umbrage at Thorqvist’s use of wonder, he squeezes his eyes shut but quickly reopens them and says, “Fine, allow me to rephrase,” and I know then that the matter before us is serious. He clears his throat and begins again. “Dr. Daneau, I am… concerned by reports from parents that you are making the boys hold hands with one another.” He coughs excessively before asking, “Is this true?”

“Why, yes,” I say. I do not know what I had been expecting, but it was not this. “I have been employing this punishment for some years, quite effectively I might add. When two boys insist on pummeling each other, punching and roughhousing and such as young boys are wont to do, I have found that nothing works better than to make them sit side by side for the rest of the period holding hands. If they can’t keep their hands off each other, I advise them, then they shall spend the period with their hands directly engaged with each other. I, of course, impose this punishment judiciously.”

Thorqvist stares at me, a look that I cannot fully decipher. “Parents have complained,” he says at last.

“Parents complain about everything these days, except for the most troubling fact of all — that their children are lazy and spoiled and entirely ill-equipped to face the world.”

“Dr. Daneau, I must say that I am surprised, surprised that you, of all people, have chosen to use such a method.”

“I am afraid that I do not follow you.”

He fidgets with his pen, somersaulting it from nib to end several times. “Well, Dr. Daneau, I prefer to address this delicately, so you will forgive me for being roundabout — it is simply that, given your personal situation as it were, I am surprised that you would consider such a thing… well, appropriate.”

“Dr. Thorqvist,” I say sharply, “I do not see your point. However, I do ask that you think carefully before pulling your support for discipline.”

“I am afraid that you misunderstand the severity of this matter, Dr. Daneau, so let me be very clear: there will be an investigation. Furthermore, I must inform you that you have been officially placed on leave. A substitute has been called. You are to leave the building immediately without having any contact with the students. Do you understand what I am telling you?” I gather my energy to stage an angry rebuttal, but his soliloquy does not end there. “Please make this easy on both of us, Michael,” he continues instead, quietly, using my given name for the very first time in our long acquaintance.

It has been years since anyone has called me Michael in this way, intimately, urgently. The last person to do so was he, the night that we walked together after the Mahler, a performance that left me in a precarious state. The baritone was a moody, Heathcliffian presence on the stage, and the words, sung in German so that I received them secondhand from a translation printed in the program, affected me profoundly. I began to shake and then, as the baritone repeated the final, haunting word, Ewig, to sob. In the half-lit hall, I reached out and gripped his arm, but it was as though my touch burned, so quickly did he pull away.

We left the concert hall and walked aimlessly, not speaking, not even exchanging small politenesses about the cellist who dropped her bow midmovement, until we reached the corner, that corner, where an elderly woman approached us carrying a metal lunchbox. It was clear from her eyes and the thickness of her lipstick that she was mad, and when she spoke, she held the lunchbox to her mouth as though it were a channel for her words.

“Please be so kind as to tell me where to go,” she said.

I might have ignored her, but he was not like that. “Ma’am,” he began, but she interrupted him, crying out, “I cannot hear you. You must speak into the box. Please,” and she held the box to her ear, waiting. He, of course, leaned forward, doing as she asked. “Ma’am,” he said, “you must take this money and find a place, a safe place, where you can eat and pass the night.” He held out a five-dollar bill, which she regarded cautiously, as though trying to determine whether it was money or a snake. Finally, with a grunt, she seized it and gestured for him to listen.

“Only we can know,” she whispered into the box, into his ear, and though there were numerous ways to interpret her words, which were nothing more than the words of a crazy woman after all, I could not help but hear them as a request, a request that I be excluded. She walked away, box in one hand, money in the other, and, as though heeding her directive, he turned to me immediately and said, “We must not mingle with each other, Michael.”

He was Iranian, but his English was very good. Still, there was no way for me to know what he meant by this, to know why he had used mingle, which was something that people, strangers, did at cocktail parties. Of course, he might have been thinking of the word in a purely physical sense, for he was a scientist, my former chemistry professor in fact, and in this capacity, I had heard him use the word often to speak of the way that liquids came together, mingling in the beaker. He moved close to me one last time, shook my hand formally, and uttered the very same words that, twenty years later, my principal would use in asking me to leave the building: “Please make this easy on both of us, Michael.”

Thorqvist concludes our meeting with one of his usual malapropisms, urging me to “keep my lip up.” It is this, and only this, that keeps me from becoming emotionally indiscreet, that allows me the fortitude to walk out of his office and across the parking lot to my car. It is October, a likable month I have always thought. The air is chilly and crisp, and as I drive, I study the sky, imagining young Thomas Jefferson’s family also gazing up at this moment, gazing at this very same sky and thinking, “That is where he died.” It seems to me unjust, supremely and sublimely unjust, to have as a reminder such a vast, inescapable expanse.

Marcos is studying when I arrive home, studying with the stereo turned up loud to some awful music of a type that I have never known him to enjoy. He shuts it off immediately, looking concerned to see me home. “Are you ill, Doctor?” he asks.

“Yes,” I reply. “I am unwell, Marcos. Help me into bed.” He does, taking my arm and leading me to our bedroom, where I sit on the edge of my bed while he removes my shoes.

“Marcos,” I say, “when I was a boy and feeling unwell, my mother allowed me to sleep in her bed during the day so that when I went to my own bed at night, it would feel fresh and cool and unfamiliar. May I rest in your bed today, Marcos?”

“That is an excellent idea, Doctor,” he says, and he pulls back the covers of his neatly made bed and helps me in, then perches on the edge. “Is it the headache from last night, Doctor?” he asks with great concern.

“It is everything,” I tell him. “It is everything in the world.” I begin to cry then, cannot stop myself, and Marcos, who will be leaving me soon, takes my hand and holds it, stroking it gently with his thumb. Such torment, but I do not ask him to stop, for this punishment is what I need and what I deserve.