Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel (2 page)

Of course, the novel does much more than castigate. It is, after all, a work of literature, and provides a more classical catharsis than might be expected from a novel with considerable experimental qualities. Despite his oddness, we like Pete. In this altered world, he is our only guide. You can’t help wishing that Meredith would come back to him. You hope things go well for him on the first day of school. When they don’t, and when Pete’s true character is revealed, the reader experiences emotions every bit as intense and purgative as Aristotelian poetics stipulate: terror at what Pete does and pity for his victim, poor “little auburn-haired Sarah Miller.” You finish this book hollowed out, stunned by the lengths to which Antrim has gone to make real and palpable, in a piece of unrealistic fiction, the nature of evil. In addition, the reader’s sympathy with Pete, won little by little throughout the course of the book in such a light-fingered fashion that you might not even notice it, serves as a form of self-incrimination. Pete’s unawareness of the dark forces inside him has the effect of making the reader wonder how much this might be true of everyone. Finishing the book, therefore, you feel terror at, and pity for, your own self.

Despite its lugubrious subject matter and its acerbic estimate of human nature, this novel is the opposite of destructive, however. In its humor and deep sadness, and especially in the rigor of its prose and the intelligent flow of Pete’s thoughts, however loopy,
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World
delights as well as lacerates. With genuine artfulness Donald Antrim enacts something of the resurgence that Pete hopes to do by burying Jim Kunkel’s foot. “Indeed,” Pete writes, “it was as if it were not Jim Kunkel’s foot being buried, not Jim’s foot at all, but a flesh-and-blood vessel containing the Hopes of Men—Jim, me, anybody and everybody—for a better, wiser world that might spring from soil made fertile by blood and bone.” Despite the arch tone of that sentence, it nicely describes both Antrim’s intention and achievement. This necrotic book buries itself deep in your brain, and despite its purulent content, gives life.

SEE A TOWN
stucco-pink, fishbelly-white, done up in wisteria and swaying palms and smelling of rotted fruits broken beneath trees: mango, papaya, delicious tangerine; imagine this town rising from coral shoals bleached and cutting upward through bathwater seas: the sunken world of fish. That’s what my wife, Meredith, calls the ocean. Her father was an oysterman. Of course, that trade’s dead now, like so many that once sustained this paradise. Looking from my storm window, I can see Meredith’s people scavenging the shoreline. Down they bend, troweling wet dunes with plastic toy shovels: yellow, red, blue. The yellow one, I know, belongs to Meredith’s mother. I want to call to Helen, to wave and exchange greetings, but I know she’ll never acknowledge me after the awful things that happened to little auburn-haired Sarah Miller, early last week, down in my basement.

Tragic.

The diggers make their shabby way up the coastline. Who would’ve imagined a subsistence industry erected around the magical properties of dead sea creatures? But it’s true. Look inland. There’s the converted elementary school with wall clocks endlessly proclaiming three o’clock. It’s a factory now. They’re in there, day and night, making starfish fetishes and totems of cowry, sea cucumber, washed-up wood. I can hear crunching routers shaping precious black coral into the rings and charms everyone around here wears, and I hear the lawn-mower growl of a dozen diesels parked outside the school and giving extra electricity through high-voltage cables blackly snaked beneath the jungle gym, across the basketball blacktop, around the chain-link fence wrapping the tennis courts.

At center court, a woman wearing whites lofts a ball; it captures day’s brilliant light glancing off the hurricane flood-control canals along South Main—the intercoastal grid: deep, long arms of gator-plagued water crisscrossing landfill. The woman’s racket cannonades the ball into the opposing court. It sails, bounces. There’s no one there, just balls. The woman owns a children’s clothing store on Pettigrew. I hoist my binoculars and close-focus on grit streaking her mirror-tinted sunglasses, on clay dust rising in explosive mushrooms around her shuffling feet. And there are gray smudges on her box-pleated tennis skirt, clay scuffed from the playing surface by impacting tennis balls, sweatily transferred to her hand, wiped absently, wetly away in the radiant summer heat ushering ozone’s traces sweetly beneath advancing clouds.

Afternoon rain, here it comes out of the west. The woman serves, the rain approaches; and now the school cafeteria door—newly painted a rich midnight blue, which may or may not be significant—opens; a man peers up and out at the coming wall of water. I can see his heavy face. He’s Ray Conover, whose wife, Miriam, died so horribly when Jim Kunkel made that sorry, stupid show of indiscriminately lobbing Stinger missiles into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool. Many picnickers died that day. I recall Ray walking up Main, oblivious to traffic, blood-soaked and carrying his wife’s corpse.

This was at summer’s end, only a short while ago, right around the time school should’ve begun but didn’t because, of course, we lost the schools when the taxpayers elected to defund the system.

It was a black hour. We got together—the board members and teaching faculty still on payroll and fit to head class—and decided to hold school out of our own pockets if necessary, but were subsequently unable to settle on a suitable physical plant for pre-, lower-, and middle-school sections. It wasn’t that we needed lots of space. We didn’t. We had only a handful of kids, and could reasonably have adopted a Little Red Schoolhouse approach. But all of us, Meredith, myself, Doug, Marty, Allan, Simone, everybody—we all believed in the compartmentalization of study topics and the enhancement of student self-esteem through upward, graded progression. Bio one year, chem the next. We didn’t want to let go of that. So we insisted on grade-designated classrooms with separate sections for electives, even though we knew certain courses would have only two or three enrollees, or one, or none.

We were afraid. We were overwrought.

Today, sitting here in my padlocked attic, with a heap of class notes to prepare and these “Extra Wide Angle” precision-optical field glasses to spy around with—today I’m not sure I’d favor drawing and quartering an ex-mayor and Chamber of Commerce volunteer. That’s what we did to Jim Kunkel after the Stinger incident. For my part, let me say, right here and now, I’m sorry for the role I played in the kangaroo court that assembled outside Jim’s Dune Road condominium.

Then again, what could I do? The demands of civic discourse are difficult. Cooperation and conviviality are rewarded in many ways. I wanted a schoolhouse. I was thinking of the kids when Jerry Henderson and Bill Nixon and some other Rotary guys greeted me beneath the streetlamps. They well knew my journeyman-historian’s acquaintance with the rack, the wheel, the iron maiden, and so forth. I’d given a talk, only days before, on an array of such devices, at a Rotary lunch. My intention was to draw parallels between ancient and modern concepts of punishment and guilt, and to demonstrate a few of the ways contemporary society has internalized, even subtly institutionalized “The Barbarity of the Past,” which was the title of my talk.

I was hoping to say something about the way we live. It was clear to me, though, during the question-and-answer period, that the real effect of my lecture had been pernicious. Should I have seen it coming, that starry night outside Jim’s Dune Road home, when Jerry and Bill and those bully boys clapped their hands on my back and said, grinning, “Hey, it’s Mr. Executioner”?

Likewise, how much responsibility must I bear for what eventually, inevitably occurred, simply because I suggested using some Toyotas and Subarus parked nearby, in lieu of horses?

Better, perhaps, not to ask. Anyway, I have lecture notes to prepare. It’s what I’m supposed to be doing, it’s work God gave me to do, instead of gazing out my window at the clothing store owner’s radiant brown body. How morbid, this voyeurism of mine. It’s a sickness: low-grade agoraphobia merged with a troubling fixation on rain running from tile roofs into curbside gutters clogged with rotting vegetation.

They back up, the gutters, choking muck. The skies blacken, moisture descends, canals rise, lawns puddle, the unswept streets slowly fill. Everything, houses and stores, gas stations and banks, all the landmarks of my happy life in this place I love—everything seems to be sinking. How sad things seem then. I half expect to see reptiles emerging openmouthed from bay windows, snakes dripping from aluminum mailboxes and low gratings overhanging two-car garages. It’s a scene from dreams, a watery place familiar but not familiar, home but not home, dredged from within and carrying up intimations of loss, of desire, of my increasingly intense premonition of death by drowning.

It remains to be seen if today’s showers will fall hard enough, or last long enough, to have this effect of transforming the world.

Here’s something to indicate a grim forecast: Ray Conover, slouching among the diesels ganged and snarling outside the ex-school—
my
ex-school—walls, shutting down motors, making the day quiet enough to hear a distant bell buoy irregularly pealing from seas that are surely rising. And from closer, the echoes of tennis balls solidly struck. I’d not, until now, noticed the sound of these collisions. The woman’s racket arcs upward toward a furry ball traveling its vertical course to the apex of stillness. The hit is made, the ball rockets. An incalculable instant later, I hear
whomp.

Does she realize she’s on the verge of getting drenched? Maybe from behind her silver, locust-eye lenses, the world looks weatherless.

Ray fiddles with a diesel machine. He doesn’t look well to me. His trousers are too short and his shirt is torn. Rangy beard creeps down his neck. He might be an overweight, sunburned wino, loafing away the day. Ray Conover, however, is no bum; he’s a widely published statistical oceanographer specializing in subtropical coastal ecosystems. I assume he’s at the old school in a consulting capacity and that he’s only out in the yard performing menial engine-maintenance tasks as a favor to someone inside. Or as an excuse to escape the relentless crunching and grinding going on in there. It must hurt him to watch his beloved reef get pounded to trinkets.

I have a trinket from the reef. It’s a ring of polished black coral, nice-looking actually, clean and simple and altogether elegant, though sizes too large for any of my fingers. It’s a gift from Meredith—otherwise I’d probably’ve jettisoned it by now. I don’t believe in talismans, and frankly I find the water and fish cults growing up around here more than a little irksome. For example? When I jokingly remarked to Meredith that the ring might serve as a sexual device, she said, “Please don’t blaspheme, okay?”

We’d just finished dinner. It was a weeknight. It seemed tiresome to point out the fact that blasphemy implies faith. At any rate, my wife’s gift, in its miniature custom box lined in indigo velvet and lidded in coarse plasticine material resembling a horseshoe crab’s exoskeleton, came as a surprise. She said, “You don’t have to be sarcastic, Pete. It’s just a little present. That’s all it is.”

“Thank you, hon.”

“It’s black coral.”

“Really?”

“It’ll protect you.”

I replaced it in its case, then cleared the dinner dishes, making sure to empty the fish bones into the disposal, where Meredith couldn’t get at them in order to self-induce another of her ichthyomorphic trances.

But back to the Kunkel business. I can’t get it out of my mind. I keep seeing Jim’s face, lit red by taillights, in the long moments before the lines snapped taut, while Bill Nixon tried and retried to start his fume-spewing, out-of-tune Celica. It was all so profoundly uncomfortable; there was nothing to do but toe the grass and stare up at the stars in the sky, and listen to that revving and choking, and, of course, to Jim Kunkel, trussed, bound, spread out and spread-eagle on his belly, weeping. Heavy nylon test, the kind sport fishermen around here use to haul in tarpon, radiated from Jim’s wrists and ankles, ran across grass and Jim’s beautiful Japanese rock garden to the back bumpers of cars poised to travel different directions. I wanted to tell Jim it would be over quickly, that it wouldn’t hurt. In fact I suspected otherwise. I was particularly concerned over the use of fishing line for a heavy-stress operation like this. Leaders might hold, or snap, in any of a wide range of infuriating combinations. Success depended on a clean, even pull, with no lurching—just like hauling aboard a big fish.

After a while it became clear that Nixon’s engine was flooding; and, as well, the battery was at risk, grinding down, so Jerry Henderson wisely suggested, “Bill, give it a rest.” The other guys turned off their motors too. It was agreed to wait five minutes, then try again. By the shrubs, in the driveway, at road’s edge, men huddled: Jerry and Bill, Dick Morton, Abraham de Leon, Tom Thompson, Terry Heinemann, Robert Isaac. Did they hear Jim’s sobbing? It occurred to me to go to Jim and rest my hand on his shoulder, to hold him or wipe his forehead, possibly scratch an itch if he felt one. That seemed right. Yes. And to apologize: for the sentence, for the delay in carrying it out, for whatever.

“Pete,” Jim whispered, as if prescient.

“Jim?” I glanced around at the other men. Had they heard Jim call my name? Would talking to the condemned man affect my status among them? But no. No one seemed to notice me edging discreetly toward the ex-mayor. No one seemed to see my body haloed in dim light spilling yellowly from Jim’s bug-deterrent porch bulb.

“An angel, I’m in heaven,” Jim said.

“It’s me, Jim. Pete.” I came close to him. I could’ve reached down and touched him.

“My friend,” he said, shaking his outstretched hands to indicate the lines knotted there. “They’re cutting me.”

What use describing the necessity of secure bonds, the mechanics of tugging as opposed to jerking? “Sorry,” I told him. I noticed a growing crowd murmuring beyond the lawn perimeter. Spectators. Jim said, “You know, Pete, I was on the hiring committee that reviewed your application to teach third grade. How long ago was that?”