The Dark Path (15 page)

FIVE DAYS LATER I
am standing in a classroom at Tapwood Academy, wearing a bright yellow mask. Standing beside me is Alex Bergeron, a pudgy, gray-haired man who will spend the next two weeks teaching me how to teach high school English before I'm trusted with my own students.

Alex is wearing a mask too, a black one. Both of our masks are the ornate kind that cover only the eyes, the sort that Shakespeare characters wear to balls. We each hold a xeroxed copy of the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Cask of Amontillado.” We are “performing” the story for the ten senior students before us.

It's my first day of teaching. I walked into this room minutes ago and Alex, already in his mask, introduced himself to me—in front of the students—by putting the yellow mask over my eyes as he chuckled. He handed me the story and whispered, “You're Fortunato!”

“I don't understand.”

He tapped the story in my hands. I glanced at the title.

“I don't know this story.”

“Sure you do,” Alex whispered. “Sorry that I don't have the cap and bells, but you look like a jester. All right, let's do this.”

Then in a booming voice Alex began reading the story aloud, complete with cackles and aggrieved harrumphs, like a Central Casting madman. He's been pointing to me each time it is my—Fortunato's—turn to speak.

He is pointing at me now.

I look at the next line of text. “‘Amontillado,'” I read.

Alex puts his hands on his hips, vamping. “‘I have my doubts.'”

“‘Amontillado!'” I declare.

Alex rubs his chin demonstratively. “‘And I must satisfy them.'”

I say, “‘Amontillado.'”

The students are staring at us with a look I know well. It's the same look that my neighbor Mike Langini wore for years while he stared at our nun teachers back in grade school. It is a look that says,
What the fuck is happening? Why are adults such tards?

I don't know what's happening either. I've only become more disoriented and panicky since arriving in Tapwood. When I got here five nights ago Clement and Daphne helped me move into an off-campus apartment attached to an Academy art teacher's house. Each day since, I've walked around this hilltop town of seven thousand people, trying to get my bearings. There's a grist mill, and postcard foliage on the trees, and one quaint bookstore and one quaint newspaper, but I can't grasp any of it. I'm so scared now that I'm stupid. I keep blanking out. The quicksand is in my brain, pulling under even simple things. Each morning I stare at spoonfuls of Special K, wondering why they're headed toward my face, guided by my hand.

“The next line is yours,” a gray-haired man whispers to me.

I look at him. I think his name is Amontillado. I can't breathe.

“Turn the page,” the man encourages me. “Hey, stop clenching your fists. Jesus, are you crying?”

“No,” I lie. I lift my jester's mask and wipe my eyes.

•   •   •

MY APARTMENT
is on Mulligan Street, a mile from the Academy. Daphne lives just four doors down in a house with her husband, Andrew Preevy, and his daughter from a former marriage. Daphne and Andrew both teach English at the Academy. They have me over for dinner one night, after which Daphne walks me home.

“Have you called Mara?”

“It hasn't been two weeks yet.”

“Call her tonight.”

We walk along. Daphne bumps my shoulder with hers. Her husband is a kind, spooky man who doesn't like me much because he stared into my soul the second I met him and saw how sexy I find his wife.

We reach my apartment. The house it's attached to, the home of art teacher Ed Neville and family, is a clean, well-lighted place. On the lawn in front of my apartment there used to be a tree, but when it got large enough to threaten the house, Ed had most of it cut down. He kept the six-foot-tall stump and had some woodworker carve the stump into a statue of his hero, Knute Rockne.

I look at Knute, stalwart and huge on the lawn, a man famous for being one excellent thing.

Daphne hugs me.

“Go in and call her,” she says.

I go in and call Mara. She answers on the third ring.

“About time you called.” She laughs her murmuring laugh. I hear a voice in the background that I recognize.

“Ellen's over,” says Mara. “I'm helping her with a history paper. What do you know about fossil fuels?”

“We're running out of them,” I say. In my head I replay her words,
About time you called. About time you called
.

I try to say funny, attractive things. I tell her about Fortunato and the masks. The phone cord is hangman tight around my fingers.

After a few minutes, Mara sends Ellen into the other room.

“I miss you,” she tells me.

I tell her about the Billy Bragg ballad. I tell her that even though she's not a brunette, she's the girl in the song and I'm the guy.

She says, “I'm thinking of you every day. My boyfriend's coming into town again next weekend, and we're supposed to go on a trip, but I don't know . . .”

I wait, knowing that she's thinking, that her eyebrows are pinched together, making a skin ridge of worry between them. When we first dated, if her face screwed up like that, I'd press my thumb to that ridge and bulldoze it for her.

“David, I . . . I have to talk to him. Please . . . I just need some time. I'll be in touch soon, all right?”

We hang up.

In the coming days my hip pain returns. As I limp around the Academy halls, something deep in my right hip socket clicks loudly—and hurts sharply—with about every fifth step I take.

I call Matt Argento and tell him about the clicks, the pain.

“That fuckin' piriformis.” He sounds solemn, like he's speaking of an old enemy. “Minghia! It's a tricky muscle, David, the piriformis, and once you fuck it up, it's hard to heal it for good. Also, if you're under stress, that might slow the healing. You dealing with some fuckin' stress?”

I don't feel like going into it, so I make an excuse to get off the phone.

I am now teaching on my own. I've taken over Alex Bergeron's class of ten seniors, and I also teach two sophomore classes. The Academy is unusual since two-thirds of the kids are local day students—many from somewhat poor local families—while the other third are students in the expensive boarding program.

Academy English classes are basic, standard, or accelerated. My sophomores are accelerated, and my seniors are standard.

My seniors don't like me, and, maybe because I'm young, they interrogate me daily. The most vocal ones are Paul and Max, both beefy football jocks; JoBeth, a seventeen-year-old with an infant son at home; and Kira, a bright Swedish girl who feels insulted to be in a standard class.

On my third solo teaching day I sit among them, trying to lead a discussion of
Lord of the Flies
. They were supposed to have read the novel for Mr. Bergeron. I think half of them have opened it.

I ask, “Why does Piggy die, do you think?”

Paul, sitting beside me, nudges my arm. “Hey, Flatlander . . . how come your hip clicks?”

The local kids call me Flatlander. It's a Vermont term for outsiders, for people not from the mountains.

“I know, right?” JoBeth is looking at my hip. Her face is squinched, like she's smelling something off-putting. “I heard it do that, too. It's weird.”

“Piggy dies,” says Max, “because a rock crushes his head.”

I think,
Lucky Piggy
. I think,
I have no business being here, pretending to know more than they do.

“Yes,” I say, “but do you sympathize with him? Does he deserve to die? How do you feel about Roger, the boy who kills Piggy?”

Kira taps her book urgently. “This book is about American exceptionalism.”

“Piggy's a pain.” Max always sits the farthest from me. He has ever since I wore the Fortunato mask. “They kill him because he's a wuss. Maybe he doesn't deserve it, but that's what happens to wusses.”

Kira sighs. “There are no girls in this book.”

JoBeth says, “I know, right?”

Out of nowhere my chest fills with panic. I feel all the blood and competence drain from my head.

“Mr. Schickler?” someone says.

“Excuse me.” I hobble out into the hall, shutting the door behind me. I rest my cheek against the cool hallway wall, trying to calm my nausea.

I'm holding on to what Mara said.
About time you called
, she said.

•   •   •

MOST NIGHTS I
go to Clement Lowell's house for a couple of hours. One of the few times that the quicksand stops pulling at me is when I sit on one end of Clement's couch while he sits on the other end. He watches TV in silence, in the dark. I close my eyes and just sort of feel Clement watching a show or movie. Somehow this helps me, maybe because he's at peace with his life. I never fall asleep, I just sit there with my eyes closed and listen to Clement breathing and to the TV dialogue and music, and sometimes I hear the Lowells' dog wander in and out. Clement acts like what I'm doing is normal.

“This film is garbage,” he says one night, “but now I'm committed.”

I don't open my eyes. “I shouldn't be teaching. I blow. The kids hate me.”

“I have to see how this ends,” says Clement.

Around ten Clement heads to bed and I leave. I've had insomnia since arriving, but lying in bed or sitting alone in my apartment is unbearable, so each night I drive. I head north through the autumn night on two-lane rural roads while my hip spasms and twinges. I keep the windows open, needing the frigid air. The cold is one of the few things I have in common with Tapwood natives. Because I grew up in upstate New York, I have the cold in me like everyone here does. It's like an instinct in my skin, the cold is, a slapping awake of the senses. It doesn't need to be thought about, only accepted.

One midnight, driving up close to the Canadian border, I find a lake. It is set deep among the surrounding mountains. It has no cottages on its shores, just fir trees on the slopes that wall it in. There's a rock pebble beach on the north shore and I park and hobble out to it and sit. I can see no other cars, buildings, or people. There are clouds blocking the stars and a massive darkness over the black water. I stare at this darkness. If it had substance, I'd kick it, but I can feel nothing in it now, no Person or presence. Thoughts gather and shove in me like prisoners rioting, desperate to break out.

Lord
, I think toward the darkness,
You are utter bullshit. Do You know what You are, actually? You're a complete Lack of You. You're a Lack-of-God.

And don't think that I feel this way just because things suck right now, just because of this awful pain in my leg that's back again. I know life can't be perfect. It wasn't perfect back when Tommy Marzipretta punched me in the stomach at Olympic Roller Rink, and it wasn't perfect when I had mono, and it wasn't perfect when Mara fucked Akoni. But during those times I had You. I had the dark, close sureness of You, and now I have the Lack of You, and it's miserable, okay? And You're a coward for deciding not to exist right when I realize that I can't be a priest, that I can never live for You alone.

I try to calm my thoughts. In the dark silence, I'm shredding my cuticles again. I look at my car. It's a red Chevy Beretta, the first car that I've owned. I bought it right before moving here. I try to be grateful for it, to accept that it's good and mine. I try to do this because talking to Nothing is crazy. But my thoughts won't stop.

Here's what else is bullshit, Lack-of-God. It's bullshit that priests always told me that celibate priesthood is Something Higher. Even Saint Paul said it: he said he wished we could all be like him, “unencumbered,” set aside for the work of the Spirit. So, what, that means that the rest of us who aren't called to priesthood, we're called to Something Lower? We're encumbered? Saint Paul said if we aren't strong enough for celibacy, we should marry. He said, “There is no sin in it.” Well, whoop-de-fucking-doo. What an exciting reason to be with someone forever, because “there's no sin in it.” Is that supposed to make me want to be a married deacon for You? Is that the big selling point, that getting hitched and fucking my wife and loving and honoring her won't send me straight to hell?

Are you getting this, Lack-of-God? Are you getting why my heart and mind and body and soul are exhausted from running through this again and again? If Saint Paul is right, and the solitary, unencumbered path is the most blessed one, then the system is rigged. Either I'm strong and celibate and I devote my life to You as a priest, and I go where the wind of the Spirit pushes me in service of You, and I get the power to turn bread into You, and I live as Saint Paul “wishes” me to . . . or else I'm weak and I succumb to the callings of the flesh and choose married life, but, oh, at least “there's no sin it.”

That is a bullshit ultimatum. That's a loaded coin flip where only one side of the coin looks shiny. How can that be the whole story? I've read Your book. I know how Your greatest Priest ever made fishermen's nets strain with their catch, I know how He healed the suffering. I wanted to be part of that power. Why does Your book wax so poetic about the magic of priests and of solitary, miracle-working prophets and leave out so much about the magic of men and women together? Where in Your book is a man like my father, giving out groans while he hugs his wife? Where in Your book is a girl like Mara, scarred and gorgeous, her eyes filling with secret green fire when she comes? Where in Your book is “Greetings to the New Brunette,” a love song from the gutter? Where are those details?

Don't tell me the Song of Songs. That's like twenty pages, that's all the lovers get, a footnote. The rest of Your book, the stuff about priests and prophets doing lonely male work, is thousands of pages.