Everything Happens Today (3 page)

He'd gone about his morning tasks on Friday with the usual bustle. He'd had an argument with his best friend James the day before about the percentage of water in the human body. James had said it was ninety percent, Wes had argued that it was much lower. He'd forgotten about it until that morning, when it took less than fifteen seconds on Google to prove Wes right: sixty percent, give or take. It was not much of a victory, but it had set the right tone for the day. On his crosstown walk to the subway at Union Square, he'd rewarded himself by listening to Belle & Sebastian's “If You're Feeling Sinister” on the iPhone. It wasn't new but it was his favorite album of the moment, and he rationed his listening so as not to wear out its pleasures too quickly.

By the time he reached school he'd all but forgotten to wonder why Mrs. Fielding had asked him in early. Wes was quite fond of Mrs. Fielding, but he was generally fond of all his teachers, having found that the unpleasant but necessary parts of school, such as science classes, were far easier to get through if you thought with pity and compassion of those teachers whom you might otherwise dislike. Wes had figured out long before that people who were mean or impatient were almost always unhappy, maybe even in direct proportion to their meanness, and he had trained himself to feel sorry for the teachers who liked him less because he was not good at the subject they taught. That was true for all the sciences and math, and increasingly so for soccer. It was not, however, even remotely true for English, a subject in which he knew himself to be widely acknowledged as one of the best in school, although Wes himself did not feel that way. He was a lover of books, certainly, and knew himself to be a charming, fluid writer, occasionally glib. The piece he had composed for Mrs. Fielding was definitely in that mold—he'd written the entire thing in bed, in one sitting. But he also knew something about himself that his facility generally concealed from all but the most astute teacher—that he was a lazy and undisciplined thinker who too often relied on the shining surface of words to mask his disdain for academic pieties. Mrs. Fielding had been showing signs of late that she was on to him. It was unlikely that she'd called him in to heap praise on his latest effort.

On Friday morning, she had been waiting for him behind her desk in room 405. She had a kindly face framed in pale blond bangs that the mean girls in class insisted was the handiwork of a superior and very expensive colorist. Wes didn't know anything about that and didn't care. As far as he was concerned, remarks about a teacher's personal appearance were simply attempts to dehumanize a person who did a very difficult job for not much money, and usually—at least at Dalton—did it very well. Wes
appreciated
his teachers, even when they didn't get it, but he was also aware of the difference between not deliberately giving someone a hard time and fawning. Wes thought he was reasonably adept at treading that line. Students who pandered were viewed with distaste by their peers and faculty alike, and generally received no reward for their efforts. But this situation with Mrs. Fielding had been unknown territory. Wes was not used to causing or getting in trouble at school, and wasn't quite sure about the protocol. Mrs. Fielding had smiled at him, openly enough; there had been a smear of pink lipstick on her front tooth and Wes had immediately looked away, only to find his eyes alight on another pink, lip-shaped stain on the rim of her coffee cup, cerulean blue with white Hellenic motifs. The paper he had handed in two days earlier sat on the desktop beside the cup, and it was ominously free of red ink. When he raised his eyes again, Mrs. Fielding had stopped smiling, though in all fairness she could hardly have been said to be frowning, either.

“Good morning, Wes,” she had said, motioning to the chair across from her. “Thanks for coming in early.”

Wes had sat down beside her, not certain where to rest his gaze.

Mrs. Fielding had seemed to be waiting for him to say something—he always had something to say—but when he remained silent she had reached across the desk for his paper and placed it delicately in the space between them.

“I imagine you already know why I asked you to come talk to me.”

“Is there something wrong with my essay?”

Mrs. Fielding had snorted, delicately, then perhaps sensing that it was a disproportionate response, she had sighed.

“Not really, no,” she had begun tentatively. “It's well-written, dili­gently proofread, properly formatted, thoughtful and provoca­tive in places. But it's not the assignment, and you know it.”

Again, Wes had found himself at a loss for words.

“Will you read the assignment topic for me please, Wes?”

Wes had pulled the paper forward and leaned into it, as if by earnestly focusing on the immediate task he could prove the sincerity of his intentions and thereby mitigate his sin. He had cleared his throat and in a soft, serious tone read out the assignment at the top of the first page.

“‘The authors of
Candide
,
Pride and Prejudice
and
The Nose
all emphasize their social and psychological themes as much through the use of language and narrative trope as they do through plot and characterization. Discuss, using any work of literature of your choice and all the critical tools at your disposal.'”

There had been a long pause, apparently not at all uncomfortable to Mrs. Fielding.

“Get it now?”

Wes had got it—he'd gotten it, of course, before he'd sat down to write the paper, but had assumed he would get away with it—yet for form's sake he'd felt he ought to put up some semblance of defense.

“It says ‘any work,'” he'd muttered lamely.

“‘Any work of
literature
,' Wes. This is a class of
literature
.”

Wes had chosen deliberately to misunderstand her. “I know it's not European, but . . . ”

“I don't care if it's European or not. If I'd cared I'd have said ‘any work of European literature of your choice.' But I did say ‘literature,' and you did not choose to write about a work of literature. Therefore you have not fulfilled the assignment.”

“I'd say it's a work of literature.”

Mrs. Fielding had smacked the edge of the desk with the tips of all ten fingers, as Wes had seen her do a thousand times when a student failed to see the obvious. “Come on, Wes. How many classes have you and I had together over the years? Conflict, resolution, growth, self-understanding, hubris, submission,
Iliad
,
Romeo and Juliet
,
The Quiet American
. You know me better than that.
You
know better than that.”

“I thought . . . a break with convention . . . ”

“No, you were being smug and clever and lazy. You thought I'd be so dazzled by your iconoclasm and wit that I wouldn't notice that you'd barely gotten out of bed to write this. And that's why I'm making you write the paper again. Not because the US Army's M16 Operator's Manual is an unfit subject for an honor's class in European literature, although it is, but because you tried to get away with something that is unworthy of you.”

“Okay.”

“Stretch, Wes.
Stretch
. You're too young and too smart to take the easy way out. If you sit on your laurels now, at your age, you may never get up.”

“Thanks, Mrs. F. I appreciate it. I really do. When do you need this by?”

She had turned to him in mock, wide-eyed astonishment and held out her hands, palms upward in the universal expression of powerlessness. Wes had thought, rather, that the palms, angled both towards each other and towards him, were reflecting mirrors, or the dishes of a radio telescope, concentrating upon him beams of energy summoned from across the universe. With her neatly plucked eyebrows raised, and her mouth open in a cannon's pucker, she'd been sending him some alien message across the generations. It was ostensibly couched in a language he understood, spoken by an intergalactic traveler who appears in human form so as not to cause panic. “I can't believe that's all you have to say to me after all this,” he was supposed to read the message as saying. In fact, Wes had known that she was actually saying “Please be a good person, be as kind as you can possibly be, because I will be dead so soon, so soon.” Wes had heard the message loud and clear, and had instantly regretted that his reaction to Mrs. Fielding's critique had been less than generous and grateful. Message relayed, she had lowered her eyebrows, closed her mouth and turned away.

“Monday morning will be fine, Wes.”

And now it was Saturday morning, and despite the fact that the entire world had changed in the intervening twenty-four hours, Wes still had a whole paper to write from scratch. Not entirely from scratch, as he already had copious notes for
War and Peace
, but still. It wasn't precisely that Wes felt himself ill used, or that Mrs. Fielding had been unfair in her judgment of his efforts, but it now seemed kind of dismal and petty in the light of events, this quibbling over intent and mere words. If she only knew how damaged and debased Wes was feeling at the moment, he was convinced that Mrs. F. could muster the compassion and empathy to let him off the hook. But no one would ever know, or care. If only they knew the love and generosity, the open-heartedness and pity, with which he thought of them, they would consider him the greatest person in the world. But it's not something you can tell people.

Wes rolled over and retrieved his backpack from beneath the bed. From among the dog-eared sheaves of paper, heavy textbooks and loose implements he pulled the offending manual, which he had taken to carrying with him as incidental reading at moments of leisure. Wes had found the
Manual
online, following a link from the Wikipedia entry on the M16, which he'd stumbled upon at the end of a string of links that had begun with a query about the breakup of the B-52's, following a drunken boast by Wes's father that he had danced all night to “Rock Lobster” and “Private Idaho” when he was in college. It was a simple PDF file available for download and evidently photocopied directly from a yellowing copy of the 1985 edition, including a worn and fraying spine. The original had been slim and palm-sized, presumably to fit into a soldier's breast or back pocket, but Wes's printout of the file ran to almost 150 pages and was quite substantial. Wes wistfully riffled through the pages, many marked up with yellow highlighter, as if through a sheaf of old love letters or college rejections, artifacts of some earlier, more innocent interval in a life gone bitterly wrong. He stopped at his favorite passages, knowing that he was probably reading them for the last time.

The first dozen pages or so were devoted to addenda and corrigenda to earlier editions, then came a radiation hazard warning about the tritium gas sealed into the front sight post. The M16A1 weighed six and a half pounds, was 39 inches long. The only difference between the M16 and the M16A1 was that the A1 was equipped with a forward assist assembly. The manual described it as “lightweight, air cooled, gas operated, magazine fed and shoulder fired,” a classic rock-and-roll song about a favorite car. Its purpose was “to provide personnel an offensive/defensive capability to engage targets in the field.” Wes read it as if it were poetry—what mysterious mind had had the courage to jump the ontological chasm between “shooting at strangers” to “engaging targets in the field?” Wes felt an almost ecstatic intellectual communion with his fellow writer, very probably dead now since the M16 had entered into service in the 1960s. Even though Wes suspected that, in fact, there had never been any such person, the
Manual
having surely been written by committee, in his paper he had speculated about him at length, as one might about the writer of some ancient epic, the Bible or
Gilgamesh
, inventing a self-conscious mind behind a text accreted over centuries of oral precedent. And in creating a writer for the
Manual
, Wes had grown to love him for his lonely struggle with a resistant, intransigent vocabulary. All this he had expatiated upon at length, in keeping with the theme of language and narrative trope. He'd thought, he was sure, that he was passionate and sincere about his subject.

“When round reaches approximate end of barrel, expanding gases from burning propellant pass out through gas port and into gas tube. Gas goes into bolt carrier assembly, ejects old cartridge, and chambers a new round.” “One click of elevation of windage is equal to one block change in elevation or windage.” “Throw away the white gloves for rifle inspections.” “Overnight while the Teflon has been forming a film for lubrication, the cleaning solvents in the CLP have been at work in the nooks and crannies (actually in the pores of the metal) seeking out carbon and firing residue.” The language, Wes could not help feeling, was pure and musical, a triumph of minimalist compression on a par with anything from Carver or Beckett. Just look at the ambiguity in the use of the word “actually.” It could simply mean “to be precise,” as if the writer were saying under his breath: “The M16A1 is not an English muffin; it does not in fact have nooks and crannies, but microscopic pores that can be clogged with dirt and oil.” Or it could be an expression of suppressed excitement, as if to suggest that an exhausted soldier could expect his dreams to be suffused with awe and wonder at the tireless industry of the lubricant that actively seeks out and never sleeps. Of course, a correct and sensitive parsing of the sentence would allow for both interpretations simultaneously, because that is what gives the sentence its resonance, as the author surely intended. Wes worshipped him for that, and the
Manual
was inseminated with such gems. In its way, the prose of the operator's manual was perfect and irresistible, and had the distinct advantage over
War and Peace
of being profusely illustrated. If the author of the operator's manual and Tolstoy were locked in a room together, and ordered to exchange writing philosophies, Wes doubted that the latter would have much to teach the former, except perhaps in the use of serial commas and in beginning sentences with conjunctions. Wes felt like a scholar who had stumbled upon a lost masterpiece and whose task was to reintroduce it to the world—gently, persuasively, lest its power be put to the wrong use or devastate precisely those whom it might, judiciously wielded, most benefit.