The Year of the Gadfly (7 page)

So now I just sat beside my chattering tablemates, staring at my plate, waiting for the end-of-lunch bell to ring. Every few minutes I glanced at the large clock that eyed us from above the refectory doors. The clock was enormous, like the trophy kill of a Cyclops hunter. It seemed to me the minute hand was barely moving. Only then, at ten to one, something happened.

“Attention, please! Attention!” The announcement boomed down from the PA system. “Attention!” The voice was jovial and energetic, like it was about to explain how to locate the emergency exits. It continued, “The following is an assessment of the Mariana community's collective conscience.” There was a loud static crackle, and then: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree.”

This was a different voice from the previous one. Female, with pitch-perfect diction. “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree.”

Nobody spoke. And then all of a sudden a couple of table leaders at the far side of the refectory stood up. “Under the spreading chestnut tree . . .” Their voices were hesitant at first, but they seemed to draw strength from one another, and soon their words rebounded across the room. “Under the spreading chestnut tree!” More students followed their leaders and stood up beside their plates until nearly half the room had joined in. “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we . . .”

The chant picked up intensity and speed as the voice from the loudspeaker championed it on. And then the table leaders left their chairs and began to walk, still reciting, coalescing around a table in the center of the room. I jumped down from my bench and hurried through the throng, pushing my way toward that middle table. I managed to stake out a spot between two students who were standing on a bench. Peering between their legs, I saw that the entire table was up except for one student: a fair-haired boy cowering in the middle of the bench. He looked around anxiously, a red flush spreading up his neck and across his face. Meanwhile, his tablemates pummeled him with their words, speaking each phrase like a curse, their faces twisted with disgust.

“What are you doing? What did I do?” The boy's panic was sweaty and thick. “Stop it! Stop it!”

“Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree. Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree!” The voices chanted in lockstep with the intercom, and the words flew down over the poor, frightened student. He gave up protesting or trying to make sense of the situation and covered his head with his arms. It occurred to me that most students in the refectory couldn't see the boy; they were shouting because the ones in front of them were shouting.
Murrow,
I thought anxiously,
I have to help him!
But I was stuck in the crush and couldn't move.

“
UNDER THE SPREADING CHESTNUT TREE, I SOLD YOU AND YOU SOLD ME. THERE THEY LIE AND HERE LIE WE, UNDER THE SPREADING CHESTNUT TREE.”

And then suddenly there was a tremendous record-like scratch, and the intercom voice went silent. The room fell silent too. The boy at the table kept his head buried, his shoulders quivering.

“Today's flash mob was brought to you by Prisom's Party,” the original intercom voice declared. “Our diagnostic assessment of the school's collective conscience has determined that you will harass a blameless student simply because the Community Council asks you to. The instructional email many of you received this morning did not come from the Council. It came from us. Prisom's Party declares the collective conscience poor.”

At that exact moment, the bell rang to signal the end of lunch. Everybody started talking at once and pushing toward the refectory doors. Meanwhile, the embattled boy had raised his head and was looking around dazed, as though he'd woken from a nightmare.

Holy breaking news!
I thought, and rushed off to find Katie Milford.

These extremophiles thrive in darkness, feeding on poisonous methane and sulfur gases. The renowned molecular philosopher Lucinda Starburst has written that “intraterrestrials grow strong on substances utterly destructive to human life, and yet they shape our lives at the most fundamental level. They force us to reexamine what it means to create and destroy, to benefit and harm.”

—Marvelous Species: Investigating Earth's Mysterious Biology

UNTIL I STARTED
teaching, I never knew how much faculty and students have in common. For one thing, we're as territorial as our charges. The science teachers, for example, keep mainly to the department office. It's where we grade papers, take coffee breaks, and complain about making so much less than our public school counterparts.

I store my lunch in the departmental mini-fridge, a dirty box packed with miscellaneous containers of Chinese food (circa who knows when), mushy fruit, Red Bulls, and half-eaten yogurts. That—and a whole lot of loose paper—is what you get when seven science nerds share a tiny office. But I like to eat in less cluttered accommodations. The teachers' lounge is spacious and newly renovated, albeit in a manner meant to preserve Mariana's “aesthetic integrity.” That just means it has Gothic windows, heavy furniture, and dim lighting. The second week of school, somebody stuck a sign on the door that said,
Ye Olde Teachers' Lounge.
(Probably a science teacher; we're the only department with a sense of humor. At a recent science department trivia night, we decided to dub ourselves the Left Brains—the Bloods of the prep school faculty set. Pasternak put a stop to the game, because he didn't want the students to think we were encouraging cliques.)

Anyway, I walked into Ye Olde Lounge (reeking of ye olde coffee) and found half the English department settled around the oak table talking shop. I chose a high-backed leather chair and sat down with my tuna sandwich to listen in unobserved. As a student of animal behavior once told me, the trick to studying creatures in their natural habitat is to let them forget you're there.

If you were ever a fruit fly on the science department wall during one of our staff meetings, you'd hear an in-depth discussion of SimCity High, the online multiplayer video game where social cliques maneuver for power like feuding countries and Queen Bees can be dethroned and put on trial for rogue activity. We never talk pedagogy. But the English teachers are obsessed with all brands of academic quackery.

“You clearly haven't read
Blake's Apocalypse
!” a gruff voice spat as I removed the foil from my tuna. This was Mark Haloran, seventy-four years old and arthritic. A person could easily date this group of pseudo-scholars by their hair (gray), their foreheads (veiny), and their attitudes (self-righteous). At least two were PhDs who'd slunk back to these minor leagues after they failed to receive tenure.

“I can't take any more Harold Bloom today,” said Diana Trop, English department head. “Listen, I have invented a new procedure to help students with textual analysis. It's called the Motif Number System. You give your class a list of motifs, say from
Catcher in the Rye,
numbered in order of importance. Innocence is one, experience two, herd mentality three, et cetera. And every time a motif appears in the book, the class writes the corresponding number in the margin. You repeat for each book. So in the
Odyssey,
Odysseus's guile is ranked one, the guest/host relationship two, and—”

“I was never very good with numbers,” Haloran muttered.

I wasn't at all sure about the Motif Number System. Undoubtedly there'd be some kid attempting to turn it into real math.
Mr. Kaplan! I just proved that the square root of Odysseus's guile is equal to Holden Caulfield's hat. I totally deserve extra credit!

The fact is, English class was always abhorrent to me. I've never forgiven my high school Epic Literature and Film seminar for destroying my love of
Star Wars.
I still can't watch those movies without thinking about the myth of the hero, the etymology of Yoda's name (the Sanskrit for warrior is
yoddha
), and, worst of all, how Obi-Wan Kenobi is a stand-in for Jesus. Have you ever noticed the ubiquity of Jesus in literature discussions? Think about it. A character is compassionate? He's like Jesus. He's got long hair? Jesus. He builds something out of wood? Definitely Jesus.

My brother loved excavating texts, and at times he seemed to want to physically merge with the pages and ink. I once caught him with his nose shoved into a copy of
War and Peace.
I accused him of jerking off to it, but Justin wasn't amused. Books deserved to be honored and cherished, he said. I replied that a book was inanimate and thus deserved nothing. But if he persisted in believing a lot of spiritual hoopla, at least he should consider the importance of the book in question. In the grand scheme of things, Tolstoy wasn't exactly the Talmud.

Looking back, I realize that this brief exchange over book sniffing encapsulated our entire relationship. Physically, Justin may have been larger and stronger than me, but emotionally, he was a weakling. He was obsessed with ideas—and, worse, with ideals. He not only believed in true love and pined after lost causes, but he let us all know exactly what he was feeling. Still, as much as I hated him for his vulnerability, I loved him for that vulnerability, too. He was my brother—my twin. What else could I feel for him but a combination of hatred and love?

Our friend Hazel once told me that these emotions were the antipodes of our existence. She loved to recite this Catullus poem:
I hate and I love. Why does this happen to me? I don't have a clue,
but
it hurts like hell.
Justin was my twin. When he hurt, I hurt. And he hurt all the time. His instability threatened my carefully calibrated emotional equilibrium. I had to fix him for my own sake. Besides, the idea that I could help him made me feel strong. It compensated for the seventy-pound, six-inch discrepancy between us. So I set about teaching Justin that cynicism was an invaluable buffer between a person's heart and the outside world. Again and again I told him to forget the books, the ideals. And when telling didn't work, I went further. I took extreme measures to show Justin that we lived in a world of hard evidence, of fact. If only he'd listened.

***

I finished my sandwich and headed to chemistry before the bell. Ever since yesterday's flash mob, the halls had echoed with menace. It was only 1 p.m. and already the afternoon had descended into a minor key. The English teachers in the lounge were willfully ignoring the ominous feeling that pervaded, consumed as they were by their Harold Bloom, and I envied their selfish persistence.

“Jonah!”

I'd just entered the main stairwell and looked up to see the exophthalmic orbs that were Pasternak's eyes. He was rippling the tips of his fingers—index, middle, ring, pinkie—at nervous speed. He looked like a fly preening. “Can you come up here?” his voice boomed down from on high. An interrogation was at hand.

When I finally reached Pasternak's landing, he glanced around. Down, up, left, right. We were alone in the cold, cylindrical space. It resembled a belfry, but instead of bells overhead there was only a dirty skylight.

“If you'd been in the refectory yesterday . . . I arrived just before the mob ended.” Pasternak looked at me like he expected me to say something about this. Like I knew something about it. “You've read
Nineteen Eighty-four,
right?” He scratched his thinning hair with a jaundiced finger. “Of course you have. It's been on the eighth-grade English curriculum for two decades.”

What did he want me to say? Yes, kids played pranks, but there were more than a few who yearned to be the heroes of their own epic story, who turned their books into bibles and worshiped them with religious zeal.

“Jonah—” Pasternak pursed his lips, looked past me down the stairs. “Do you know how that recording made its way onto the intercom?”

Why was he asking me this question? I shook my head.

“You don't?” His bug eyes seemed to pop inches from his face. He nodded absently. “Well, do you know how Prisom's Party managed to hack into the Community Council's email?”

“Are you insinuating something about my involvement in all this?” As obsequious as Pasternak had been since my arrival, it was difficult to shake the old indignities. Sometimes he still seemed to consider me a kind of antimatter in the school, unpredictable and destructive.

“Insinuating? Jonah, I'm asking for you to—”

“I'm sorry,” I interrupted. “But I have students to teach.” And I left him there in the stairwell.

I COULDN'T GET
a meeting with Katie Milford for a full twenty-four hours after the flash mob, and when I finally snagged five minutes with her, she rejected my proposed investigation of the event outright.

“Do I need to break down for you what happened, Iris?” she said, shoving a stack of edited news copy off a chair and pointing at me to sit down.

“No,” I mumbled, and sat.

“For starters,” Katie said, pacing in front of my chair, “Prisom's Party hacked into the Community Council's email account and sent out instructions for a flash mob. They then asked the student body to verbally attack a weak underclassman, Marvin Breckinridge, whose sister Mary happened to be a huge liar but who himself never hurt anybody. And, finally, this action ‘proved' that the school is full of mindless robots. Now you're telling me you want to smear this iniquity across the front page? Do you know what will happen then, Iris? Colleges will hear about it, and the school will lose esteem in the eyes of the admissions officers. And then people like me—the seniors, who've been working insanely hard for years—will be screwed.”