The Withdrawal Method

LONG SHORT SHORT LONG

IN A SCHOOL in London, Canada, there was a classroom. In it: a teacher, Miss, weary in her skirt but standing, and twentyeight fourth graders silent as the sky in rows at their desks. Miss clapped her hands four times and said, "Ta, tee-tee, ta," one clap to each syllable. Then a translation: "Long, shortshort, long." And the students all died.

With laughter, like a cloudburst.

Why so funny? Miss didn't understand, fresh from Althouse and already of waning hope, B.A. History with a minor in Music also. She held up her hand in a gesture that meant: silence. It took a while; the laughs were a downpour, a drizzle, the occasional drip from a drainpipe. "Shhh," the one named Trish encouraged them, though Miss was sure she had been the first to laugh. Then, okay, quiet enough.

Miss tried again. Clap, clap-clap, clap. "Long, short-short, long."

Boom. Down rained hilarity.

Miss threw up her hands and retreated behind her desk. When her students had settled she decreed, "Work period," and from her book bag got out some marking, set to it, trying not to think about the basement bachelor apartment she rented with the towels for drapes, her life.

IF MISS HAD been watching Bogdan, the pale boy by the door, when the words short and long had come from her mouth, she would have seen him tense. And after, if she had looked up from her marking, she would have seen him sitting there staring straight ahead, paralytic, while the rest of the class lifted the lids on their desks and went rustling around inside for work.

But Miss didn't notice Bogdan, the thin one with the dark, sunken eyes and hair cut short on top and left long in the back, the one who huddled with that tiny first grader, Farid, in quiet corners of the playground, the one Trish had run by one day pointing and screamed, "Short-Long!" And Miss didn't know that "Short-Long" was what they all called Bogdan now. What she did know was that the week before during lunch hour she had discovered Farid lashed to the baseball backstop with his own belt, Bogdan commanding him, "Talk, you filthy cur!" and smacking him in the face with a catcher's mitt. Miss freed Farid, who went bounding so happily off across the playground that she didn't feel the need to punish Bogdan. Besides, he had such a cute accent and sang so sweetly.

But yes. A short-long haircut and Bogdan lived in The Coop and wore Zips, brought his lunch of weird leftovers to school in an A&P bag, had sported high blue socks since coming to London at six years old. Suddenly in the fourth grade high blue socks were not okay — but that was all he had, seven pairs! So then sneaking his mother's tennis socks from her dresser and with the pink bobbles popping up over the tops of his Zips during phys. ed. volleyball it was worse, even worse than before. Trish had bumped Bogdan's serve into the ceiling, and when he grinned at her through the net she pointed at his feet: "Short-Long's got girl socks!" Bogdan's next serve rocketed by so close to Trish's little blonde head that it ruffled a few curls. All the other kids went, "Ooo-ooo," and Bogdan had been asked to sit out the rest of the class.

What Miss could not have known was that in that quick empty moment after she said, "Short-long" and before the class lost it, something electric zipped up Bogdan's arms and exploded burning in his face: the music teacher he liked was with them too. And their laughter had risen like a wave and crashed down over him, leaving Bogdan wilted and lonely and lost.

MISS WAS A NOMAD in the school; she didn't have a classroom of her own. At the end of each period she transferred herself down the hall for another forty-five minutes of autoharp and scales. She was teaching her students the music of different cultures — Indian, Japanese, Australian Aboriginal, Dutch — and wanted to show them how, while the melodies and song structures were different, the rhythms were often the same. "Syn-co, pa, ta, ta," she could have said to illustrate this, or "Tiri-tiri ta" or "Ta-ah-ah-ah." But she chose "Ta, tee-tee, ta" because it was easy and she was tired. Miss didn't know what it meant.

She didn't know that in Morse code, "Ta, tee-tee, ta" (long, short-short, long) is noted like this: — . — Or that in Morse code, — . — signifies the letter X. Miss didn't know this, but Bogdan did. When Bogdan's father had still been alive he had taught his son Morse code — for emergencies, if the house were raided — tapped out on the floorboards or flashed in the dark from a lantern. Sitting there Bogdan realized that the rhythm "ta, tee-tee, ta" was — .. - or X. And X represented an unexplained variable, a mystery, an unknown.

These were the things that Bogdan thought, staring up at the front of the room at Miss marking behind her desk. He tried to understand what she had done. It had been like torture, like punishment, like how Bogdan would track The Arab down at recess, pin him to the ground, and spit at him through clenched teeth, "I am going to break your glutinous maximums, you filthy Muslim dog," bending the small boy's arm behind his back.

One time Bogdan had pushed his arm too far; The Arab began to cry, the quivering lip and then the whimpering. Bogdan felt a sudden emptiness in his stomach and pulled away. "What kind of friend are you?" The Arab asked, rubbing his arm, tears streaming down flushed cheeks. "We are not friends," Bogdan said. "You are the enemy."

The Arab stiffened, looked at Bogdan's face as though searching for something, then turned and sprinted across the playground. He spent the rest of lunch watching kids play King's Court from the portable steps while Bogdan dug a trench around the climbers with a stick in the mud. But the next day, as always, The Arab returned.

Thinking this, Bogdan stared at Miss. Back and to his left was Trish, who he didn't want to look at. When he did she would mouth "Short-Long," lips pursing as if for a kiss on the SHOR, teeth bared on the T, tongue lolling for the L, the open mouth of ON, the final sneer of G. Trish always did that to him in class, the stealth of it exasperating. And Bogdan would spin around in a sweat. Even thinking of it, his palms grew damp.

A SHORT-LONG was how his mother cut his hair. And hairdresser was her job!

She cut her son's hair in the shop she had set up in their duplex, before the mirror with the combs and scissors in blue jars of antiseptic juice. On the turntable in the corner of the room she would play the only album she had brought with her on the move to London, Canada: the Sticky Fingers LP with the actual zippered trousers on the cover, which Bogdan occasionally fingered but never dared unzip.

Every two weeks when the haircut was done Bogdan's mother stepped back and told him, "There, you look like Mick Taylor," which meant that Bogdan looked like his father, who had looked like the Rolling Stone Mick Taylor. And the wistful smile on his mother's face in the mirror made him feel nice, sad but nice, closer to something in a country that no longer existed and every day he felt sliding even farther away.

MISS WASN'T REALLY marking. Sort of, but more she was waiting to look up sharply and order some loud kid: "Out!" She hoped it was Trish. Trish in those stirrup pants like an acrobat, prissy, too eager with her head of perfect blonde curls and private voice training and hand shooting up fluttering to correct Miss on something Trish had learned at the Conserva-tree (like the Queen, she said it). "Miss, Miss!" and then, "Actually. ." Doing harmonies when the class sung "Happy Birthday" even.

When Miss told her friend Lindsay back home in Newmarket about Trish late nights on the cordless phone under the covers in her basement bachelor, her futon in the den, the den in the kitchen, she resorted to the second person. "You little bitch!" she screamed into the receiver at Lindsay, who became a proxy for Trish, such were the intensity of Miss's feelings.

Bogdan wiped a dribble of sweat from the front of his shortlong and stared at Miss. She was so small and pretty and nice — why did the kids torment her so? While the rest of the class murmured to one another in an effort to make her yell, Bogdan sat demurely. Not working, but at least silent. He stared at Miss and a thought began forming somewhere faint in the back of his mind, way out back where short became long.

THE SHORT-LONG took Bogdan's mother exactly three minutes and fifty-two seconds to style. Bogdan knew this because she timed it to the first song on the second side of Sticky Fingers. It was a game — the rush of scissors and both of them laughing as the music began to fade and there was still more snipping to be done. On this song Mick Jagger's singing was garbled. The only words that Bogdan could make out were, "When you call my name," which were then followed by something like, "I sell a bite like a padlocked hog." This he imagined: a pig in a cage, grudgingly hawking bacon from its own hide.

BOGDAN ONCE CALLED Miss "Mother." He said it in line at the pencil sharpener, and even before Trish, behind him, announced it to the class and the class screamed, his face blazed. Why had he called his teacher that, he wondered now. She did not look like his mother. She was too young, too thin and nervous. He liked Miss plenty but still it made him feel weird — and especially weird around his own mother that night at home, as though he'd betrayed her.

Thinking about this really got Bogdan sweating. Temples, armpits, hands — feet, even, squelching around sockless inside his Zips. He watched Miss. He knew she was waiting for the whispers of the class to rise above a trickle, to burble up into a running stream, and he knew the class knew this and were flirting with that line, testing her like swells against a levee.

Bogdan felt that he should hate Miss, or something. How could she be so dumb? But his anger dissolved into pity. Look how she floundered about at the front of the classroom, how easily she gave up. And so tense! Whenever he got his own work back from Miss, Bogdan could feel the bulge of curlicues on the back of the page, so hard she pressed with her red pen a loopy sort of Braille pushed through to the other side.

Around the classroom the other kids whispered. Part of him felt glad they had for the moment forgotten about him, felt Miss deserved it for provoking them, and another part of him felt like screaming, "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" But that would be impossible. Still, in his brain something was beginning to take shape, the particles of it collecting into a thought, an idea.

ON THE OTHER side of Sticky Fingers was a song Bogdan knew the words to better. Mick Jagger sang clearly and sometimes his mother would sing along and so would Bogdan. But this song opened with something Bogdan didn't think was true: "Childhood living is easy to do." What? Sorry? For people like Trish, maybe. For people with thermally regulated lunch bags and Nike Airs and ankle socks; people who got good, curly, cute haircuts at proper salons, not one owned by their mothers with all middle-aged women for clients except one kid, her son.

WHAT MUSIC DID Miss listen to, at home alone in the basement where she lived? Not the music of many cultures: whatever was playing from the radio-alarm clock beside her futon (U2, The Eagles, Cher). On nights her calls to Lindsay went unanswered Miss poured herself a glass of pink wine and cranked the volume and the music came out tinny and faraway from the clock radio's speaker while around her one-room apartment she twirled and sipped and spun.

At the front of the classroom Miss sat with her pen hovering over a test on the various dances of the Spanish-speaking world and suddenly missed very much playing her trumpet in the free-jazz band she and some other students had formed — was it already five years ago now? But then she had been robbed of her trumpet (as well as all her CDs, her stereo, her VCR, and a very expensive knife) by a roommate with a coke problem. Something inside her left with that trumpet. It had never come back.

She should buy a proper stereo. By the monophonic rattle of a clock radio, that was no way to live. Miss marked the test B = iBueno! the pen carving down through the paper and into the enamel of the desk below. Bogdan watched, imagined the tip of the pen etching some sort of secret message on the other side.

The students kept up their whispering. Miss flipped to another test, Trish's, always a struggle not to give an A+. She stared at the test, but instead of marking it laid her head o1 the desk, forehead first. And then, seeing this, it came: Bogdan had an answer, a crazy answer. Miss had been giving him a signal. She had been using a code. She had been sending him a message. He knew now what it was. Long, short-short, long: Mission X.

IF SHE GOT HER haircut done in time, Bogdan's mother whisked off the apron and pulled her son down from the chair and danced with him in waltz-time to the next song on the record. They swung each other around, one-two-three, one-twothree, and though it was fast and fun, Bogdan couldn't help but think slow thoughts of his father and mother doing the very same dance to the very same song in the kitchen of their old apartment. "Ta, tee-tee, ta," "Long, short-short, long,"-.. - these were all waltz-time too: one-two-three, one-two-three. Bogdan and his mother laughed and waltzed while the guitar jangled and the drums drummed and Mick Jagger sang, "I'm gonna tear my hair out just for you."

HIS FIRST GRADE four math test Bogdan had (a) got back, (b) seen his result (14/45), and(c) eaten. It was on fractions. The other students were eyeing one another's papers, commenting on the marks — "Trish got perfect!" — and out of fear that someone would see his, in a panic Bogdan tore into little pieces which he popped in his mouth, chewed to mush, and swallowed down. The test was one page, double-sided, not too much to eat, but Trish noticed what he was doing and started screaming.

"Why?" Admin asked when Bogdan was sent down with the ragged page as evidence. After three years in Canada Bogdan's English was good, but on occasions when he needed it most, it failed him. So he sat there in silence. Admin sent him back to class, but instead he went home. And at home he sat with his mother and cried and cried and cried.

The next day he came to school and kneeled on The Arab's chest and spat in his face. Miss again found him doing it and this time took him down the hill and watched him cry, and although spitting on someone was a horrible thing she said nothing, just sat there. After a while The Arab came over and sat with them too. The Arab put his hand on Bogdan's back and said, "It's okay." When the bell rang the three of them waited a long time, well after everyone else had disappeared into the school, to go back inside.

Sitting in the classroom surrounded by whispers, watching Miss with her head down on her desk, Bogdan knew it was time. He accepted his mission, Mission X. He knew what he had to do.

He opened his desk. The contents were ordered neatly into piles: textbooks on the right, workbooks on the left, a nifty row of ruler, pens, pencils, and a math-set in between. And the scissors. He slid his thumb and forefinger into the two loops and removed them slowly, opening and closing the blades as he did, and the sound of metal sliding against metal sent a shiver through him. They came together with an icy snick. And he opened them again so he could see how, yes, they formed a cross. Or the letter X.

THE LAST SONG ON Sticky Fingers was Bogdan's favourite. Sometimes his mother had another client coming in for a haircut and they couldn't make it to the end; other times her afternoon was free and they would get there. She took Bogdan in her arms, held him close, and he laid his head against her chest and closed his eyes. They swayed gently in place like that as the song rose up slowly from the turntable: pretty guitar and piano and singing from somewhere faraway. Bogdan nuzzled into his mother, the two of them wobbling there amid clumps of hair strewn all over the floor, and for a minute that was all there was in the universe: the two of them, and the song.

BOGDAN STOOD. The whispers continued. If any of his classmates noticed him it was in passing. They were mostly watching Miss, her face buried in her marking. Bogdan looked around, back at Trish. She regarded him at first with disdain, as usual, and seemed to be readying herself to mouth his nickname, but then noticing the scissors in his hand Trish's face changed. It took a moment for Bogdan to realize what that look was, her mouth parting slightly, the eyes widening: fear. For once, Trish had nothing to say. Bogdan slid out from behind his desk.

The scissors in his hand felt light; his body seemed distant. It was as though part of him were there in the classroom and part of him were moving through his life leading to that moment: now tapping out Morse code back home with his father, now lying down with his mother on a mattress on the floor of their new duplex in The Co-op in London, now dancing, now eating a math test, now from across the playground watching The Arab sitting alone on the portable steps, now here. And through it all he heard that song, the last one before the needle would lift and leave them in silence: the cymbals crashed like waves and the drums came rumbling — and, oh, the violins! They were saddest of all.

Bogdan stepped toward Trish. The class went quiet, snapped off like a radio. Bogdan raised the scissors, now at Trish's desk. Miss looked up blearily. It took a moment for her eyes to focus. What she saw was a shaggy-haired boy standing there in the middle of the classroom with a pair of scissors in his hand, and the girl at her desk beneath him staring wideeyed at the blades, and every face in the classroom turned toward them in wonder.

"Bogdan," said Miss. "What are you doing?"

It was Mission X, he wanted to say. But he was elsewhere. In his head he heard the song at the end of the record, the one he and his mother would dance to, and things were rising up and rising up and it was all cymbals crashing and the music became thunder.

He moved in. His thumbs worked the hinge and opened the blades of the scissors. Trish's hair was a perfect little nest of golden curls. He reached out with one hand and grabbed a fistful. Everything seemed to happen at the same time: Trish screamed and he snipped, and a big clump of sand-coloured ringlets went spiralling down and landed on the floor beneath her desk.

Miss put her hand to her mouth. But she didn't do anything else. She made no move to stop him. She said nothing, just watched Bogdan looking down at the little blonde twists lying between his Zips. Trish had gone white. She sat there staring up at Bogdan with her mouth a perfect round 0. No sounds came out. Bogdan grabbed more hair and cut again, snipping away another chunk from the top of Trish's head. "Short-long," mouthed Bogdan. "Short-long."

But then he was tackled. Someone hit him from behind in the lower back and took him down, hard, onto the classroom floor. "You freak," came the voice of a boy pinning him to the tiles, and then there were hands wrestling the scissors from his fingers. He heard Mick Jagger singing softly, "Let it go, now," and then, "Yeah, let it go." So he let it go.

Lying there on the floor Bogdan had a perfect view up the row of desks to Miss, sitting there at the front of the classroom covering her mouth. The song in his head was fading: the end was just like the beginning, with the guitar light as air and piano sprinkled over top like bits of glass. Bogdan's eyes met his teacher's. Was she smiling behind her hand? In her eyes was something.

As one boy crushed his face into the floor and another twisted his arm behind his back, the song in Bogdan's head disappeared. In its place, with the wisps of Trish's hair scattered all around him, Bogdan could hear whimpering, and the whimpering became weeping, and Bogdan smiled, because the weeping was desperate, wailing and lost, and it was the most beautiful music he'd ever heard in his life.