The Crazy School (4 page)

Wiesner looked stricken.

“I think about
that
when I’m on the FDR Drive. And I think about the people killed in London when the buildings were destroyed in the fi rst place. Thirty-two thousand civilians.

Families. Little kids,” I said.

“How many people altogether?” asked Sitzman. “The whole war?”

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“There’s probably a table in here.” I picked up the textbook. “Page two-thirty-six: sixty-two million, fi ve hundred thirty-seven thousand, eight hundred deaths total, military and civilian.”

Sitzman looked at the page. “Which includes fi ve million, seven hundred fi fty-four thousand Jewish holocaust deaths.”

“Three million in Poland alone,” I said.

They were quiet.

I heard footsteps in the hallway.

“How could they
do
that? Sixty-two and a half million people,” said Sitzman.

The footsteps slowed and then stopped just shy of the classroom door.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“And we
keep
doing it, over and over,” said LeChance.

“But people try to make it stop,” I said. “Like, even though there was the League of Nations after the First World War—

which, you might recall, didn’t accomplish crap to prevent the Second World War—these guys were ready to try again. Roos-evelt and Stalin and Churchill, in Yalta. They invited forty-six countries to San Francisco. The Germans hadn’t even surren-dered yet.”

“Why San Francisco?” asked Wiesner.

“I always fi gured it was because people think of California as a frontier—new. The place to go when they want a fresh start, want to dump bad history. The gold rush . . . the sixties . . .”

My parents . . .

“Grateful Dead and all that, right?” asked LeChance, grinning.

“Sure,” I said. “All that. Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love and
Go Ask Alice.
Pilgrims and dreamers. Peace marches.

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Pretty much the start of the history I was actually around for, as a kid.”

“Tell us about that,” LeChance said.

“Sure,” I said, “when we get to Vietnam.”

Whoever was out in the hallway started walking back in the other direction, no doubt relieved to discover I wasn’t advocat-ing global genocide.

I looked at the clock. “Five minutes, guys. How ’bout I give you a head start on fi nishing the chapter. Maybe we can get through the rest of this war tomorrow. Start talking about Korea and Levittown and McCarthy . . . the whole fi fties trip.”

When the bell was about to go off, I told them that anyone willing to help me get the damn map rolled up would get extra credit.

Sitzman took me up on it. For a second I thought LeChance would too, but Fay Perry peeked around the doorway at him, all sylphy and golden, with those enormous gray eyes.

She touched the crescent charm that hung at her neck on a silver chain—his gift, a moon from Mooney—and the boy was gone.

It was getting colder out. I walked back over to close the window.

There were some guys with a truck across the lawn, unloading lumber and bags of concrete.

“Sitzman, you hear anything about them doing construction?” I said.

He looked up, wistful. “Santangelo’s buying a helicopter. He needs a pad to land it on.”

“Nice for him,” I said.

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5

“That was cool today, what you talked about,” said Sitzman.

I’d fi nished the daily behavior marks and shoved them in my desk. Now we were up on chairs, on either side of the wall map. The thing was still jammed, and we hadn’t made any headway.

“Thanks,” I said. “I like history.”

“Me too. I think about the same kind of stuff you do, a lot.

Sometimes even . . .” He stopped, embarrassed.

“Sometimes even what?” I asked.

“Well, sometimes too much.”

We listened to the construction guys banging together a frame so they could pour Santangelo’s helipad concrete.

I pulled my end of the map off the holder. “How do you mean?”

“It’s a schizophrenia thing—all these weird connections.

Like, well, tell me a random word. Anything.”

“Um . . . Germany.”

He considered that for a second.

“Okay, so before,” he said, “I would have thought right away 2 9

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you meant all this deep stuff. Layers and layers, like you said.

My family is German. We’re Jewish. They all tried to come over here, but not everyone made it. I would’ve thought you were warning me about the Nazis coming back.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Before, though, it was always way beyond worry for me. I could hear something on the radio, some song when I got in a taxi—it would seem
important
. Like code. Messages.”

“Before here?”

He nodded.

“So, Sitzman, stuff like that, does this place help?” I asked.

“My fi rst month here, I ran away. I spent three days sneaking around the woods in my pajamas with no food. All I’d brought with me was my electric razor.”

“To shave?”

He shook his head. “To keep in radio contact with the FBI.”

“No shit.”

“None. And it rained the whole damn time. I’m just lucky it wasn’t snowing. I probably would’ve died.”

I turned to look at him. “Dude, I’m really glad you’re all right.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Do you like it here?”

“I miss fl ying,” he said. “My dad used to take me up in his plane. Twin turboprop—Beech Super King Air 200. I almost had my license.”

He toyed with the roller mechanism, then pulled the map down slowly, to see if it would roll back up.

First time didn’t work. Second time he made it zip home-ward like a champ.

“Sitzman, you rock,” I said.

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He blushed a little. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Fire away,” I said, crossing my fi ngers that it wouldn’t be whether I liked younger guys or what have you.

“Did you ever work in a hospital? Like Lake Haven?”

A lot of kids here came from Lake Haven. The equivalent of a feeder school. I shook my head and climbed down off the chair.

Sitzman followed. “It’s just that when I mentioned the razor and everything, you didn’t seem surprised.”

I dragged my chair back in place and leaned against it.

“Most people would be,” he said, perching on the edge of my desk, “even here.”

“It sounded like my dad.”

“No shit.”

“Well, except he’s more into the KGB.”

“Oh, sure,” Sitzman said. “Lot of that going around.”

That made me smile. “He was in the Marine Corps. A John Bircher and everything. No warnings from the radio, though.

Or at least he hasn’t talked about it.”

“He’s probably just a delusional paranoid, then. With full-blown schizophrenia, you’re all about the messages.”

“Dad does occasionally get into sending me
Wall Street Journal
clippings.”

With circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one,
explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence against us.

“Such as?”

“Oh, like he decided the Vatican Bank had assassinated John Paul I to cover up how the amount of money they ‘couldn’t locate’ exactly matched the miraculously repaid national debt of Argentina or Venezuela or wherever.”

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Sitzman crossed his arms. “Sounds like they could get his meds dialed in a little better.”

“Dad is not a meds kind of guy. Except for smoking dope.”

“What is he, nuts?”

I sighed.

“Joke,” he said. “But I mean, that’s what this place did for me—got the dosage right. I’m relieved to fi nally discover that sometimes a razor is only a razor.”

“Must be exhausting the other way,” I said.

He nodded, thoughtful. “Have you ever talked to your dad about getting some help?”

I shrugged. Toyed with some papers on my desk.

“Even therapy,” he said. “Just, you know, for a start.”

“The thing is, Sitzman, he’s got a perfect genius of a disease. It protects itself. Plus, the onset timing was particularly shitty.”

“How do you mean?”

“It nailed him in the early seventies, which sucked in two ways. First, all the grown-ups were acting like lunatics generally, so he had a lot of camoufl age. Second, he got into primal therapy.”

“Don’t know that one,” he said.

“This guy Janov started it. He claims that if you’re told to tough it out when something crappy happens to you as a kid, any emotions you repress end up rattling around in your body forever.”

Sitzman looked at me, perplexed.

“Janov took it further. He said that all illness—cancer, head colds, psychosis, you name it—is caused by repression. He had this whole thing about how Western medicine only treats the symptoms, because the true cause of disease is repression. And 3 2

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so everybody’s doomed to walk around poisoned half to death unless they ‘have their feelings’ about whatever happened when they were kids. But once you do, you won’t need any other kind of doctor.”

“People fell for this?”

“In droves,” I said. “He set up these centers where the paying customers could work on dredging up childhood bummers, so they could cure themselves by weeping and strangling pillows and yelling their heads off in soundproof rooms. Like, I dunno, self-exorcism.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Sitzman, they ate it up with ginormous spoons, cross my heart and hope to die. Dad and the rest of them.”

“That’s just absurd,” he said.

I shrugged. “It was the seventies—a decade during which you could count on one hand the entire gamut of things that
weren’t
absurd.”

“And your dad drank the Kool-Aid.”

“Dad paid extra for the Big Gulp,” I said. “Besides which, they didn’t drink Kool-Aid in Jonestown. It was this cheap knockoff crap called Flavor Aid.”

“Teacher-nerd trivia.”

Someone rapped twice on the door behind me.

“Might show up on your midterm,” I said, and turned to see who it was.

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6

Dhumavati smiled from the doorway.

She was Santangelo’s dean of students—tall and rangy, with a thick silver braid down the middle of her back.

I rather liked her, had since she’d interviewed me for the job.

“So your name, is that Dhumavati as in the Mahavidya?” I’d asked.

“You’re familiar with Hindu cosmology, then,” she’d replied, pleased.

“I grew up in California. Kind of comes with the territory, you know?”

She laughed again. “A guru picked it for me. I’d been through a bad time, and he told me I didn’t have to be that woman anymore.”

Interesting choice: the mother goddess at the time of the deluge, also known as “the eternal widow,” a deity invariably depicted as ugly and fearsome.

“Not sure how I’d feel about being named for ‘the one who is without radiance,’ ” I said. “Doesn’t suit you.”

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Dhumavati grinned—radiant indeed when she smiled, which was most of the time. “Beats the hell out of Gloria. What I started out with.”

“Still, I’d have held out for Kamala. Tara.”

And here she was, smiling anew from the threshold. “I thought you might like a little support with remembering that Teacher Refl ection starts an hour early today, Madeline. Sookie mentioned you’re still having some issues around the schedul-ing piece.”

I was about to thank her for the heads-up when an explosive scherzo of shattering glass resounded down the hallway—fi st vs. window.

Dhumavati bolted toward the source, with me and Sitzman close behind.

A small crowd of kids had gathered. We shoved through them to fi nd Mooney LeChance standing pale and wide-eyed, right hand curled against his increasingly blood-soaked sweater, the window next to him all glittering spikes and daggers around a foot-wide hole.

Dhumavati hugged him from behind and got him to sit down. I squatted to raise his slashed hand in the air, wrapping my fi ngers hard around his wrist to staunch the bleeding.

Lulu came through the double doors at the lobby end of the hallway, saw the blood, and yanked off the sweatshirt tied around her waist.

“Pressure with that,” she said, tossing it to me and taking off towards the lobby. “I’ll call 911.”

Dhumavati put her hands on Mooney’s shoulders. “You’ll stay right here with Madeline, won’t you? Don’t try to get up.”

Then she stood and walked over to Fay Perry, who was shivering and slumped against the wall.

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Sitzman brought a chair from the nearest classroom. Dhumavati eased Fay down into it, then wrapped her own coat around the girl’s slender shoulders.

Fay didn’t say a word, just kept looking at Mooney, her pupils so dilated with shock you couldn’t see iris.

When she realized I was watching, she dropped her eyes to the fl oor and just rocked slowly back and forth from the waist.

“Is Fay all right?” Mooney whispered. “Make sure she’s all right. I didn’t mean to scare her. It was just—”

He tried squirming around to see her.

I pressed a knee down against his thigh to pin him.

“Dhumavati knows what to do,” I said. “Don’t worry.

The ambulance will be here soon, okay? Keep your hand up for me.”

Blood seeped through Lulu’s sweatshirt. My hands got hot and sticky with it. I clenched Mooney’s wrist harder.

We waited, everyone quiet but for Dhumavati’s murmured reassurances to Fay.

“They’re going to send me to the Farm, aren’t they?” asked Mooney.