Edge (4 page)

I tugged the earphones out from under the bed, a feat of great skill for someone as sleep-sodden as I was, The Human Jellyfish Grows Fingers. I listened to a CD Bea had loaned me, by a blind man who had been dead sixty years. Bea likes this, tapes of early Hawaiian folk music, Cajun yodel-masters, the bagpipes of the Isle of Skye. I had the feeling Bea could teach me a lot about music. The guitarist was pictured on the cover of the CD. One of the guitar strings had broken and hung like a long silver hair off the neck of the instrument. His lips were parted in song, and his eyes had that empty gaze of blind people, eyes like fingertips.

When I woke again I was late.

Her briefcase was spread all over the dining-room table, folders and multiple listing books, little photos of houses for sale, her business cards,
FLORENCE MADISON
, with a tiny photo of her smiling face before she let her hair grow long. Her maiden name had been Gant, but she was convinced Dad's last name sounded better. Escrow folders had spilled onto the floor, confidential financial reports, loan applications, credit ratings. My mother could find out who owned any property in Alameda County by tapping her Social Security number plus a three-digit code into the computer in her home office, a cluttered hideaway just off the dining room.

I didn't bother being extra quiet; I had no time for that. An empty bottle of Bacardi rum glittered beside the toaster. I shook up a plastic bottle of fresh-squeezed orange juice, mostly pulp after a week in the fridge. I thought I heard Mom call my name, but when I paused, toothbrush stuffed into my mouth, all I heard was a neighbor kid yelling at another neighbor kid somewhere in the distance.

Laney College is an orderly assembly of buildings beside an estuary of ducks and a few spindly reeds. There is almost always a hot-dog stand—a cart on wheels and a man who will nab a wiener off a rotating grill with a pair of pincers. You can wander around the campus and never get the idea it is a school. The office windows have been treated with a gray tint so when you peer in to see what is going on inside, you see yourself hunching in to take a look. Even when you see something, it's a box of paper clips or a computer and an empty desk. You never see anyone reading or punching away at a keyboard.

This morning the campus was vacant, entirely, like during a bomb threat. The hot-dog stand was double-chained to a lamppost, padlocked shut. The GED exam was scheduled to be held in the cafeteria. I was there five minutes early, but the room was empty, vending machines of canned fruit juice and sandwiches against a far wall, tables ready for people, folding chairs ready, but no one around. The clock on the wall was the same size as a clock in a much smaller room, an ordinary black-and-white classroom clock looking tiny over the
EXIT
.

The chalkboard, one of those brown boards in a wooden frame on wheels, had printed on it, neatly and so small it was hard to read: G
ED TEST IN ROOM 111
.
BRING PHOTO ID
.

I ran upstairs, passing door after door with no number, Computer Room, Counseling Department, Financial Assistance. This was a nightmare campus, ready for business, but all the human beings gone. I stood outside a door marked
SECURITY
and jiggled the doorknob. I thought I heard noises from within, but they were sleepy noises, someone rousing, stretching, wondering if that pounding was coming from the door.

“Room one-one-one,” said a campus cop when the door finally opened up. I had asked for room one-eleven, but the cop made it a little game, saying the three ones again. “You have to be in one-one-one in two minutes,” he said.

“I'm afraid I got a little lost,” I said.

He took me by the arm and stretched out a hand, a crooked finger pointing.

“But,” he said, “you better move.” He said
move
in a way that stretched out the word and indicated how impossible it was.

I made it to the room just as a box of exams was being opened, shipping tape torn off a box stamped
CALIF. STATE DEPT. OF ED
. I handed over my driver's license, out of breath. I counted out the money I had kept in a special compartment of my wallet.

People lounged, chewing gum or fingernails. Someone read a sports section, someone plucked at a tangle of earphone wires, in no hurry, the knot a kind of hobby. My dad had called up and made the arrangements, letting me take the test with a group of people who were older than I was, a couple of them much older, heavy, gray-haired men. The myth about the GED test was that convicts took it in prison, and ex-cons, trying to get jobs in barber college and bartender school. The room was mostly men, picking pimples, sucking hangnails.

It was a little like the time I was arrested and watched my fingers being rolled on the black gooey ink and rolled again over the space on a white card, each fingerprint spread out wide and flat. The room had that same stillness, another planet, a system that felt no love.

I sat in the front, far from the door, where I could stare into a corner. A little empty bracket gleamed at one edge of the chalkboard, where an American flag was supposed to be.

“I am your test administrator for today,” said a tall woman with a gold jacket and gold pants, round hoop earrings. She had dark hair pulled back in a frilly little bun and caramel colored skin, hot pink lipstick like a road flare. She said she would like to welcome each one of us and wish us a very good morning. She acted like someone who had been flown in from some more stylish city to watch us all fail.

We took a few moments to squint at the pencil points or straighten the test sheet on the desk, like putting a place mat out for dinner. “You may begin when I say, ‘Start,'” said the woman in gold. I caught her eye and she gave me a smile. People can be nice at the strangest times, giving someone about to be booked for assault a paper towel so he can wipe the ink off his fingers.

The volume of a cylinder equals the square of the radius times pi times height. The volume of a cone equals one-third the square of the radius of the base times pi times height. Take any number away and you have that other number that is always there, waiting, the blank eye that never closes, zero.

When I was in third grade, I told my fellow students that the woman who invented math had been killed in a fire. It was a good thing, I said, because she was putting the finishing touches on something even worse than math, something the schools were aching to get their hands on.

In the exam I was taking that morning, silos had to be filled with rice. Rocket fuel had been depleted by so much per minute over so many kilometers per hour. Gravel had been delivered by the cubic meter to be distributed over a parking lot that was so many square meters, over so wide a distance that I skipped the problem intending to go back to it later. Rivers flowed so much per second over dams, the basic rules of math right there for me to show off my knowledge, number added to an unknown, an unknown in a fraction, numbers with exponents. A, b, c, d. Or none of the above.

The written part of the exam was on a lined sheet. At the top of the sheet was a blank for my Social Security number.
Write an essay of two hundred words
. The back of the sheet was labeled, down at the bottom, under For Official Use Only: Reader Number One, Reader Number Two, with spaces for the readers to score the paper.

Various people have a strong influence, positive or negative, on our development. Describe such a person and explain how this person had an influence on your life
.

Who makes up these tests?

S
IX

It took fifteen minutes from the campus to my job, a brisk half-sprint across railroad tracks, past warehouses, trucks reversing up to shipping bays, air brakes gasping.

When I saw Chief he was throwing a tarp over the back of his truck. The gray canvas was navy surplus,
ALAMEDA NAVAL SHIPYARD
in faded black stenciling. The new yellow nylon rope squeaked as he tugged it through the grommets, green brass holes along the border of the stiff cloth.

Chief gave me a look of exaggerated surprise. “The crowd goes wild,” he said in a sports-announcer voice.

I gave a little wave to the invisible crowd, a superstar too cool to show any feeling.

“You're early,” he said, dropping his voice, implying something, not wanting to come out and say it.

I stepped in beside him and tied an ordinary slipknot. This new yellow rope was slick, like lizard skin; it was hard to get a grip. The loading dock of Outlet Spa was empty, a wooden shelf like a theater stage. The shipping area was crushed white rock, like the gravel in the exam. Morning clouds were burning off, leaving the air silver and hot.

“You should use all the time they give you,” he said.

Outlet Spa is in the warehouse district, several blocks west of Laney College, but another world, brick buildings with trucks backed up to the empty shipping bays, cranes and shipping containers, wooden shipping stacked among weeds. Chief swung up into the cab. He slammed the door of the GM truck and a little more paint sifted down from the rust scrape in the side.

He found the ignition without looking. “Since you're here,” he said. Despite his casual manner, he had deliveries in far flung reaches of Northern California for the next week, and I knew if I didn't show up, Chief would hire someone else.

“I have to punch in,” I said.

“I'll sign you in tonight,” he said. “I'm hungry.”

I walked into the office just to prove something, and then I couldn't find my time card in the slot with all the Ms, hardly anyone else working on Saturday. The office was empty, desks overflowing, a computer left on, bright blues and greens, amount payable blinking in the lower right. I leaned over to one of the bookkeeping department's phones. I called my dad's number and I got his machine, his wife sounding breathless and sexy, sorry they weren't in.

It was noon. The traffic was light. Chief shifted gear with difficulty up the on-ramp, the clutch having one of its bad days. The cab smelled of old iron and crankcase oil, the black vinyl seats crisscrossed with silvery duct tape. We both stared ahead through the bug-dotted windshield, a ghost-gray cabbage butterfly, what was left of him, fluttering under a windshield wiper. The rest was grasshoppers, order Orthoptera, undifferentiated wreckage, except for a tiny scrap of Painted Lady, a pretty variety of butterfly, one of my favorites, next to his AAA sticker.

“I bet you didn't double-check your answers,” he said.

Chief's real first name was Bernard, and I had assumed his nickname had been awarded him because of the independent bounce in his stride, a tribe of one. He had tried to tear down my image of him, told me his name had been a family joke because he was “the chief complainer” when any rule was invoked, bedtime, bath time, time to go to church.

He had nagged at me, telling me how he regretted dropping out of school in San Diego, thinking he was going to be a roadie for rock groups, the Ice Capades, because he had a friend who did the lights for Disney on Ice. He had been driving a truck of one sort or another for fifteen years. His encouragement regarding the GED test was generally indirect, challenging: “I bet you'll get diarrhea that morning, not even show up.”

“This is a rich family,” I said. “The family we're delivering to.” He took the clipboard from between us, the bill of lading addressed to a site in Napa.

“You aren't going to tell me how you studied all night, making sure you knew the U.S. presidents backwards.”

“A Saturday delivery, the 9910 Turbo.” That was the top of the line, coral pink, seating twelve people, three-speed jet action to ease pain in the lower back. “They'll give us a tip.”

Chief was bouncing around behind the steering wheel, a short man, having trouble sometimes manhandling the truck despite his experience. He was used to me, and he knew I didn't like to tell everything right away.

We chose a booth, red vinyl seats you slid across all the way to vinyl padding on the wall. Except the seats weren't red anymore, dark around the edges. The surface of each table was designed to look like marble, shadowy veins, all the tables identical.

I asked Chief if he had watched the news last night.

“Harriet won't let me watch the news,” he said, yanking paper napkins out of the dispenser. I didn't know if his remark meant that Chief and his wife had a sizzling sex life, or whether she just hated television. He rarely mentioned his wife, preferring to talk about his days playing softball, the time he drove a truck for a skateboard company, how he got a commission because he always sold extra boards.

“There was some trouble with those kids from Hercules. The ones who cruise the lake, looking for a fight.” I said this with my voice rising at the end of each sentence, like a question, encouraging him to ask. Maybe I wanted to brag a little, how we had protected the pride of Oakland.

He gave me a look, a little ribbon of lettuce on his chin, full of some kind of good feeling that had nothing to do with me. In a previous life he must have been a very eager dog, or an otter, always at play. But his smile faded. “You walked out of that test, didn't you?” he said.

“I think you wish I did, so you can needle me.”

“It's not funny.”

Even when I had stood there in the bookkeeping office, my lips parted to leave a message for my dad, I just couldn't do it; I couldn't talk. Sometimes I can't shut up.

Chief had ordered both of us liverwurst on wheat berry, no onions. I paid attention to what I was eating for a second, liver-flavored glue.

“At least,” I said, “I don't walk around with a dog-sex tattoo on my arm.”

This was maybe going too far. Chief kept his sleeves rolled down over that fading artwork on his arm, even on a warm day. He gave me a wink—score one for me—but I could tell I had hurt his pride. Even his glasses had a knocked-together quality, the frame held together with black electricians' tape. The adhesive tape was fraying, getting hairy along the edges.