A Paper Son (2 page)

The disdain was mutual. Though we were early in our school careers we all knew the difference between adults who liked kids and adults who were forced, for one reason or another, to tolerate them. At recess we often discussed the many careers we felt Ms. Ferguson was better suited for—dog-catcher, garbage collector, bridge toll-taker. The two-way antagonism abated for a few minutes each day, however, when she talked to us about birds. In the final minutes before lunchtime she would introduce us to the Bird of the Day (the “Daily Aves,” she called them), and for that short time we struck an unofficial truce—she forgot she was our teacher, and we forgot we were Plan B. Her voice would soften as she described the traits and range of a cedar waxwing, a condor, an emu. Her gestures would become graceful and her eyes would shine behind her thick glasses. She would almost become pretty.

Once the Bird of the Day had been the mourning dove. My upper-middle-class classmates lived lives of blithe contentment, and even I was still a few years from learning what it meant to mourn, so we all assumed that this dove had been so named because of its preference for conducting business before lunchtime. In the way of playground rumors this one captured our attention and grew until it was widely held that all mourning doves had to vanish at noon—where they went, or what would happen to them if they stayed around, were the subjects of wide speculation. They slept in trees because they awoke early, and grew tired; they hid in underground burrows because the sun got too hot for them. A couple of days later I was sitting alone in my backyard after school, watching the trees move in the breeze, when a mourning dove landed on the fence. I recognized it immediately from the whistle its wings made as it landed, which Ms. Ferguson had imitated perfectly for us. It looked right at me for several seconds before it took flight, accompanied again by those staccato whistles. For a long time I wondered whether I'd seen something I wasn't supposed to see, or if I'd been singled out by the birds to receive the message of their true and secretive nature. Either way, I didn't know what to do. I didn't tell anybody.

Back in the kitchen I capped the bottle of Scotch and brewed a cup of tea. I set it on my desk, angling myself so that I could see the reflection of my overhead light fixture in its surface, and I stared into it. Shades of meaning flipped back and forth in my head—what separated a hallucination from a vision? A schizophrenic from a seer? My tea revealed nothing. No steamship appeared. The steam rose and spread.

That night as I lay in bed I thought about the woman at the railing, her husband and children, the looks on their faces. I tried to see into their futures. I tried to see where the ship was going, but there was only mist.

***

The next morning it was still not raining. After a night of sound, Scotch-assisted sleep, a square breakfast, and two cups of coffee which remained only coffee, I nearly managed to convince myself that nothing amiss had happened the day before. Ike's daily puddle had yet to collect, but when I reached the corner I felt my head anyway. No hat. In my classroom I inspected my tea-making paraphernalia—electric kettle, pot, mug, tin of leaves—as though seeing them for the first time. I turned on the faucet and filled my kettle. Yesterday it had been water but now it was a confluence of molecules, the simultaneous arrival of billions of atoms, each of which had traced its own pathways around and over the planet, through rivers and rains, glaciers and clouds, down throats and through cell walls, each through countless years. When I thought of it this way, all those long journeys collecting in my teacup, it seemed strange that there would only be one ship in there. I poured the water over a tea bag and sat down at my desk, feeling a little trepidation. The water settled, and there it was. Now I could see beyond the ship's prow. I could see what the family was seeing. It was a vast, dark city, with columns of smoke rising into a late afternoon sky.

“My mom says some people can tell fortunes from tea leaves,” a voice said. It was Eliza Low, her toes parked exactly at my door's threshold, in accordance with my pre-bell rules. “Are you one of those people?”

“Not that I know of,” I said. I looked back at the family and the dark city before them. “Do you want to see them?” I asked. Eliza nodded and I beckoned her in. She approached my desk and stood just opposite me. The ship remained where it was, bearing toward the city's port. I didn't know if I wanted her to see it or not. Eliza leaned over and peered into the cup. The steam rose as if from the ship itself and parted around the contours of her forehead.

“She says fortune-tellers look at the way the leaves land on the bottom of the cup, and the pattern tells the future. But I think that's ridiculous.”

“People certainly have a wide variety of beliefs,” I said.

She didn't bother to suppress a flash of annoyance. “Yes,” she said. She stared back into the water. “I only see little wet leaves,” she said.

I lifted my cup, shaking the image free, wondering how I was going to get through my teaching day with phantoms floating through my beverages. I took a sip and imagined the smells of cooking fires, of fish and oceans, hiding within the layers of my jasmine green. “There are people who tell us the future, actually,” I said to her, working to keep my voice steady. “The weathermen. And they say this is your last chance to play tetherball.” I pointed at the clock. “So I'll see you back here in seven minutes.”

Throughout the morning the sky continued to darken and the rattling of the tree branches grew more feverish, but by lunchtime the rain still had not arrived. I headed for the faculty lounge and found it to be as quiet as I'd hoped. With the specter of the long-ago travelers steaming through my thoughts, I was even less prepared to make small talk than usual. Among the few gathered in the lounge was Franklin Nash, our principal, a massive black man with a gray beard and a gray suit, who made the furniture in his vicinity look as though it had been collected from dollhouses. He noticed me and approached, navigating with effort through the maze of tables and chairs. Whenever I saw him like this, moving in tight quarters, I had the impression that he would have preferred to simply kick things out of his way. Despite the imposing bulk, the kids loved him for his smiles and warmth and for his tie collection. Today's selection featured ice-cream cones.

“Peregrine!” he said, enveloping my hand in one of his. He handed me a yellow sheet. “I found this and thought of you.”

It was a flier announcing the launch of a new literary journal, to be called
The Barbary Quarterly
. Now accepting submissions of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, it said. A Grant Street address was listed. I had all but abandoned my attempt to assemble a collection of short stories. A few years earlier, I'd managed to finish and send out what I thought were two decent stories: one about a vengeful architect and the other about a deaf poker player. The latter had been picked up by the in-flight magazine of a regional airline based in Indiana, which had since gone out of business. In the heady days following my receipt of the acceptance letter, I'd formulated a plan to put together a batch of fifteen stories or so and submit them for wider publication. If they were good enough for Midwestern puddle jumpers, I figured, they'd be good enough for anyone. I wrote one more, about a vagabond minister, and then I ran out of ideas. I forced myself to finish a story about a haunted mobile home but it was as terrible as it sounds. Since then I hadn't written much beyond grocery lists and lesson plans.

“Thanks, I'll check it out,” I said, forming no plans to check it out.

He drifted toward another of the seated groups. “Let me know how that goes,” he said, as he went. “I'm still hoping to read something of yours someday.”

I slid a bowl of leftover lasagna into the ancient microwave and punched in several minutes, which usually wasn't enough. I had watched it make a half-dozen revolutions on the carousel when a voice asked, “Interesting show?”

Annabel Nightingale appeared at my side. Her straight black hair fell down on either side of her face and curled in slightly just beneath her chin. Her eyes were wide and as dark as her hair. Her skin was pearlescent; a small jade circle hung from her neck on a silver chain. Faint crescents of pink on her cheek were the only indications of an interior made of blood and tissue, and not snow or cream. She held a red plate, upon which a pair of shish kebabs flanked a mound of yellow rice.

I tapped the microwave door. “Lasagna,” I said. “It's a rerun.” Actually, it was to be the fourth consecutive meal (not counting breakfasts) that I would have mined from the pan I'd made a couple of nights earlier. Not wanting to sound like too hopeless of a bachelor, I kept this information to myself.

Annabel had just joined us the previous fall, and as her “buddy” teacher I'd been unofficially tasked with welcoming her to Russian Hill Elementary School. Every year, each third-grade class was paired with a kindergarten class, and each third grader was assigned a kindergarten buddy. A few times a month we'd get our classes together and give the partners a project to complete. In the process my third graders shared their wisdom and experience with the kindergarteners, earning in return their little partners' admiration and a sense of maturity that lasted until the moment our classes parted ways. Our first semester had produced among other things some amusing art projects, a treasure hunt, and an afternoon of comical skits, but hadn't revealed much about the newest addition to our faculty.

Annabel pulled a fork from a drawer, yanked a skewer from its queue of steak and vegetables, and flipped it toward the trash can. A burst of light caught it in midair; the murmuring groups behind us fell silent. There was a lone gasp, and then the scraping of a chair against the floor. We waited, breaths held, the microwave's fan the only sound in the room, and then the crack of thunder slammed into the building. The tables emptied immediately, leaving me alone with Annabel. The microwave beeped, and I retrieved my lunch.

“You're not worried about your kids becoming lightning rods?” Annabel asked, yanking the second skewer from its contents.

“We're doing the old key-on-the-kite-string experiment this afternoon,” I said. “It's good practice for them.” I usually managed to be slightly more witty than normal when I was around Annabel—or maybe she just felt she had to humor me until she got settled in. “What about you?” I said.

“I teach kindergarten, remember?” she said. “My kids are sitting on their mommies' laps with cocoa and cookies right now.” She took my place in front of the microwave and slid her food into the hot lasagna-scented interior. “When yours get out of the burn ward later this week, you should come over,” she said. “We'll have a New Year's thing.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Friday?”

“It's a date,” she said. She looked over my head toward the window and the blackening sky beyond. “I should put my schefflera outside,” she said. “It loves rainwater.”

***

It didn't rain, though, not yet. Lightning continued to fracture the sky and thunder buffeted the hill but the ground was still dry by the time I closed up my room. As I walked back home, the air was as heavy as a pendulum. I stopped at the edge of Ike's puddle and looked down. The phantom hat was back on my head, but I only had a second to consider my reflection before a great fat drop of water crashed into the surface and scattered the image. Another fell, and then another. Within seconds, the puddle was roiling. I continued home without hurrying.

My one-bedroom apartment was on the top floor of a five-story building near the bottom of the hill. I'd lucked into it nearly ten years ago, and I had never wanted to live anywhere else. It was a beautiful building—a lobby with forest green walls, dark wood and brass trim, double-decker rows of bronze mailboxes. The elevator smelled like wood polish. Even the stairwell was carpeted. The color of my walls were cream at midday, and took on the color of sand on sunny late afternoons, so I didn't mess them up by hanging art. The floor plan was simple: a living room ran through the middle to a sliding glass door and a small balcony. On one side of the room a wide arched doorway led to the kitchen, which was full of windows that looked back up the hill. On the other side a short hallway led to the bedroom, bathroom, and a big closet I would never fill. I had a bed and a pair of nightstands (one of which I used and the other of which I didn't), and a dresser with a small TV on it. In the living room was a couch and a bookcase that held a slightly larger TV, novels and biographies, a few old college textbooks, and some framed pictures: my sister and me in the snow; my mom and the two of us in the wooded mountains near her place; an old one of all four of us when Lucy and I were still kids. By the balcony door sat a small round table with wooden grinders for pepper and rock salt. My desk was in the corner.

My last girlfriend, a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, told me that my apartment reminded her of a fancy hotel suite. “Like for a banker,” she had said. Her name was Joy, which even she found ironic.

“That doesn't sound so bad,” I said.

“It's the worst thing possible,” she said.

“This is how I like it,” I said.

“No,” she said.

A few days later she brought me a half-dozen paintings and prints, of various sizes and subjects.

“I'll put them up for you,” she said.

“I'll do it later,” I said. After a week or two I hung them all above my headboard, so I wouldn't have to see them while I was lying there. Joy saw them, looked around at all the other empty walls, and put her hand over her mouth. She dumped me a few days later. We had the big talk at her loft, after a tense lunch of pho and spring rolls. Collage was her medium—she built reproductions of corporate logos out of combat photographs. A Chevron logo made of mass gravesites loomed on the wall above us as we sat on her couch; across the room, the golden arches comprised assault rifles. It was the standard break-up conversation until she told me that she really liked the concept of me, but she had misgivings about the execution. At that point I knew it wouldn't be too hard to get over her. She collected the paintings and prints and I puttied and painted over the holes they'd left in my wall, and went back to being content.