Departures (30 page)

Well, “soon” is tomorrow now. But their ship is armed. They said so. I wonder what happens when they realize we
can’t
.

Like I said, I’m a little worried.

What could be more important for any society than making its next generation better and smarter people than the current one? Yet to whom do we entrust so much of the task of raising our children? All too often, to day-care workers who can’t find work much above the minimum wage and to teachers who majored in education because it was easy. We get what we pay for, though, here as anywhere else. The probability of “Gladly Wolde He Lerne” reflecting reality is effectively zero. Too bad.

ONLY THE COLD, GREEN-BLUE GLOW OF
mercury vapor lamps lit the campus lot when Ted Collins pulled in. He had to park a long way from the lecture hall. He hauled his attaché case off the front passenger seat and locked the car. Then, already weary from a full day’s work, he trudged over the asphalt toward the hall.

It was more than half full when he came in. Even so, it was quiet; the rest of the educators there were as worn as he was. Some of the superintendents, administrators, program specialists, and supervisors looked fresh out of college. Others, like him, were a few years older, already experienced in managing school district affairs.

Whatever their backgrounds—Collins himself was an assistant superintendent for education planning and research—they all had one thing in common. They were all ambitious enough to go to night school to learn what they needed to know to advance in the educational bureaucracy.

Professor Vance walked in. She strode briskly to the podium and tapped at the microphone to make sure it worked. Collins took out his notebook and a pen. He’d heard from people who had been through this course that Vance didn’t believe in wasting time.

She didn’t. As soon as she found the mike was live, she plunged straight into her lecture: “Anyone can be a success at the district level. Policies are blurred there, responsibilities vague; very often you never see the actual clients who depend
on you for educational services. If you hope to go farther in education, you’ll have to lose that pervasive vagueness. You got by with it at the university, you can get by with it at district offices, but it’s a fatal handicap in an actual school setting. Here’s what I mean.…”

By the time that first lecture was done, Collins wondered what had possessed him to want to become a principal in the first place. He thought about dropping the class and staying comfortably in his present job. He shook his head. When he started something, he wasn’t the sort to back away from it.

He ended up acing Vance’s course. He took the others he needed, one or two a semester, always at night, as he could fit them into the rest of his life. He went through an internship program at an actual junior high school campus. He took the state-required examination for certification. Before long, he got an interview. The committee let him hang for two weeks before they let him know he’d been accepted. Kranz Elementary School had itself a new principal.

When Collins got the news, he threw the biggest party he’d ever given—and ended up with the biggest hangover he’d ever had. The hangover eventually went away. As for the size of the party—well, what the hell? With the raise he’d get from his promotion, he could afford it and then some.

He started his new job in the fall. It was as challenging as he’d hoped it would be. Budgeting for a single school was a much more complicated—and, as Professor Vance had warned so long ago, a much more precise—business than planning for districtwide programs, where you could always shuffle money between dozens of different accounts.

Human relations counted for more at the school-site level, too. Little by little, he learned how to build rapport with the faculty. As principal, he also came into contact with pupils, something he’d never done back in the district office. Dealing with them made the problem of handling a staff look simple. But again, he learned.

He got on with the rest of his life, too. He married a curriculum specialist from the district office where he’d worked before. He took up golf. After a while, he was shooting in the mideighties. He grew a mustache. After a while, it turned salt-and-pepper.

Satisfying as his principal’s assignment had been, he slowly decided it didn’t give him everything he needed. He hated the idea of being in a rut for the rest of his life. He talked things
over with his wife. “Go for it,” she said. “I know it’ll be tough. Even if you don’t make it—and so many people don’t—you’ll be better for the experience. But I think you will. I think you can do it.”

“You’re wonderful,” he said, and kissed her. The very next day, he enrolled in night school again.

The moment he walked into his first class, he saw most of his fellow students were folks a lot like him: solid men and women who’d already built up solid careers but wanted something more. Oh, there were a couple of people in their early thirties, but only a couple. He knew they were the ones he’d have to watch out for, the whiz kids, the ones on the fast track to the top. He was no whiz kid. He was a grinder. That had always worked till now. He had to hope it would keep on working.

“Congratulations,” Dr. de la Vega said as he walked to the front of the classroom and sat down on the table by the podium. “Congratulations just for being here, and for wanting to be the best.” His mild smile turned savage. “Now we’ll see how many of you I can run out of the program over the next twenty weeks.”

He meant it, too. Nothing was watered down here, nothing simplified to let the slower people keep up. If you couldn’t keep up, too bad. Grimly, Collins buckled down to do the work. He ended up with a high B in the course, and felt prouder of it than of most A’s he’d earned.

Every course in the whole program turned out to be like that. Collins learned to live on coffee and four hours of sleep a night. At a physical, his doctor warned him all that coffee could bring on an ulcer. He kept drinking it. Without it, he would have had to quit, and he’d come too far to do that.

As time went on, he became ever more conscious of the responsibility that came with jobs at the top of the hierarchy. He had to look hard at himself to find out whether he truly wanted it. Without false modesty, he decided he did.

Before he was even allowed to take the exams at the end of the program, he had to convince an interview board he was worthy. The exams themselves made the ones he’d taken to qualify for principal look like a pop quiz. When he learned he’d passed, everybody at his school gave him a party. He got his picture in the local paper, along with half a dozen other tired-looking people.

More interviews—now he could pick and choose, because there were always more jobs than people qualified to fill them.
He finally settled on one not far from where he lived, in a top-notch school. “We’re delighted to have you,” the principal there said, shaking his hand.

Once his exams were over, Collins had cut way back on his caffeine intake. Even so, he hardly slept the night before his first day on the new job. “Am I really good enough?” he asked his wife as he picked at breakfast that morning.

“You bet you are,” she said. “Now, go get ’em.”

For all her encouragement, he needed a deep breath to still the fear inside him as he walked up to the enameled door with the tarnished brass 7 on it. He opened the door. He went inside.

“Good morning, class,” he said, forcing his voice to steadiness.

“Good morning, teacher,” the children chorused.

Teacher. He felt ready to burst with pride. After so long, after so much hard work, at last he’d reached the pinnacle of his profession.

Part of this one comes from driving over forty miles each way back and forth to work for seven years. Part of it comes from having an unusual last name myself. And part of it is just pure silliness. When I sit down to write, I usually have an ending firmly in mind. This time I just had an opening scene and let things roll from there. The results are intended to amuse; if any deep profundity lurks herein, I certainly haven’t found it.

T.G. KAHN LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW AT THE
traffic going by on Imperial Highway. He wished he were under the warm Los Angeles summer sunshine, instead of sitting here cooped up in an office trying to put a newsletter together.

He sighed. He had gone through some impressive finagling just to get an office he could see out of. Until a few weeks ago, he had worked in an enormous interior room, the kind where you needed to leave a trail of bread crumbs to find your way through the maze of partitions. “Cubicle, sweet cubicle,” one typist’s sampler read, which perfectly summed up the place.

The newsletter he was writing bored even him. He sighed again. “It beats sleeping on a park bench, I suppose,” he said out loud, and mounted another dispirited attack on his word processor.

The phone rang, its chime booming like Big Ben over the soft, incessant Muzak. Kahn’s fingers jerked. A rash of consonants broke out on the screen. He stared at them reproachfully as he picked up the receiver. “T.G. Kahn.”

“Someone here to see you, Mr. Kahn.”

“Thank you, Doris.” His secretary still worked across the corridor in the huge office from which he had recently escaped. “Send him in.”

“Yes, sir,” Doris said, and giggled. Kahn wondered if his ears were playing tricks on him. Doris hadn’t even cracked a smile for the limerick about the crypt at St. Giles, whereupon he had given her up as a hopeless case.

The door to his office came open. So did his mouth. The door closed. His mouth stayed open.

The man who walked into his office was in his late twenties, a few years younger than Kahn, and looked vaguely Semitic. He had a thick Fu Manchu mustache and the strangest hairdo Kahn had ever seen—and, living in Los Angeles, Kahn had seen some lulus. The top of the man’s head was shaved. So was a strip that ran from ear to ear through the bare spot on top, and an inch or so on the forehead. The rest grew long, in greasy braids.

The man wore a heavy for coat over leather trousers and boots. He must have been dying out there in the heat, Kahn thought. Two scabbards hung at the fellow’s belt, one holding a knife, the other a curved sword. He smelled of sweat and rancid butter. The worst thing was that Kahn recognized the costume, though not the person in it.

He rose from his chair, feeling hot blood rush to his face. He had not been in a fight since the sixth grade, but he wanted to punch this fellow’s lights out. “If you’re not a singing telegram, pal, you’re in big trouble,” he said between clenched teeth.

The man did not burst into song. Kahn, who tended to think too much for his own good, took another look at the cutlery the fellow was carrying and decided that trying to kill him might not be such a good idea after all.

He stood irresolutely, and the moment passed. His shoulders sagged. “Very goddamn funny,” he said bitterly, hearing the weakness in his own voice and hating it. “I presume you know my father.”

To his amazement, the man in front of him went down on his knees, then thumped his forehead on the cheap indoor-outdoor office carpet. The door clicked shut at the same time. That made the stale, greasy stench worse, but it also kept anybody walking down the hall from seeing what was going on inside.

Fat lot of good that would do, Kahn realized. He clapped a hand to his forehead in horrified dismay. Doris, damn her blabbing soul, would spread this all over the office, and so would everyone else who had spotted this kowtowing weirdo. How would he ever be able to look people in the face again?

He had to drag his attention back to the fellow, who, his face still against the nubby knit nylon, had started to talk. “No,
Excellency,” he was saying in a voice Kahn seemed to hear between his ears rather than with them, “never did I have the privilege of meeting that great hero Yesugei. I—”

“Say, you
are
good,” Kahn said with grudging admiration. Not one in a million knew who Yesugei was or cared. He wished—oh, how he wished!—he didn’t himself. “What are you, one of dad’s grad students? If you wanted to get hold of me, why didn’t you just call?”

The man lifted his head from the rug, and looked at Kahn with as much perplexity as Kahn was giving him. “I had not thought to find the phrase ‘grad student’ on your lips, mighty lord.”

Kahn’s head was starting to spin. The most likely idea he’d had—and it wasn’t very—was that the maniac who would not get off the rug was some Syrian or Egyptian studying with his dad who wanted a favor from him. That would explain the flowery speech, at least. Why the fellow had to get into costume for that, though, was beyond him.

“Look, tell me what you want and take off, okay?” he said.

The stranger’s head went thump on the carpet again. “Merely the boon of observing you for a brief while, mighty lord.”

That was so far from anything Kahn had expected that he blurted, “Who the devil do you think I am, anyway?”

“Surely your Excellency can be no one else but Temujin, Genghis Khan—”

“Yes, thanks to my old man, I
am
Temujin Genghis Kahn,” Kahn said, wishing for the nine millionth time that his father had dug ditches for a living instead of being a professor of Mongol history. It had made him the only first-grader at Oakdale Elementary School ever to be called exclusively by his initials.

The fellow on the floor went on as if he had not spoken: “—unifier of the Mongols, conqueror of north China, subduer of the Khwarizm Shah, ravager of Russia, builder of the hugest empire the world has ever seen—”

“—tech writer, in debt, divorced, driving an old Toyota,” Kahn finished the litany. He looked down at the stranger groveling before him. “You’re carrying on as if I were the real one, or something.”

That hangdog, puzzled look was back on the man’s face. “Again you use strange terms, O Khan. Assure me, I pray, the pangloss properly renders my words into the Mongol speech.”