“What do you think he’s thinking about?” the guard asks.
“Probably his father,” I say. “He was formerly a professor here.”
“A professor, huh?” the guard says. “What’s his name?” I tell him. “Never heard of the guy,” the guard says. “I’ve been here eleven years. I thought I knew everyone who teaches here.”
I am about to respond to this when I notice M. is now walking toward the door. His eyes are still closed, and while they are still closed I consider fleeing. But then he opens them and sees me; the panic in his eyes must resemble the panic in mine. They dart here and there, as if looking for escape, but there is no place else to go. His feet must realize that, because they continue walking toward me.
“Good luck, Doc,” the security guard says, and walks away from me, from us. I turn back to the door. M. is standing in front of it. He looks minuscule, standing so close to the door; his head barely reaches the top of the window. I open the door for him, the way I’ve imagined opening the door for his mother at the NCMHP gala the day after tomorrow.
“What are you doing here?” M. asks, and before I can answer, he also asks: “How long have you been standing there?”
“Just a second or two,” I assure him. “I wanted to ‘watch you in action,’ but alas, it looks like I’m too late. How was class?” It doesn’t occur to me to speak like Dr. Pahnee, and evidently it doesn’t occur to M., either. He shrugs. “It was OK,” he says. “I let them go early. But before that, I read to them.”
“From what text?” I ask. M. raises his eyebrows, as though to say, What text do you think? I’m becoming quite adept at “reading” him, the way M.’s father (and M. himself?) are so good at reading the aforehinted text. “Do you think your father would want you to teach A Fan’s Notes?” I ask, and M. shrugs. “After all,” I say, “he asked you not to read the book.” “And I didn’t,” M. says, “until two days ago.” Then, before I can say anything, he shrugs yet again. Oh, those shrugs! Those damnable shrugs! Sometimes I wonder: Is this really why I became a mental health professional? To be shrugged at by children? In the same vein, sometimes I wonder why people have children at all. Their parents, of course, must wonder the same thing. Although I cannot imagine M.’s lovely, loving mother wondering that. I cannot say the same thing about M.’s father, on the other hand. I tell M., “I have to say — have to say and, indeed, must say—that I wish I knew your father better.”
“What do you want to know?” M. wants to know.
“About K., for instance,” I say. M. glances over his shoulder at the classroom, then down at his feet. “Your father’s student,” I add.
“She’s my student now,” he says, looking up at me. M.’s eyes dare me to tell him that K. isn’t his student. But a good mental health professional never accepts a patient’s dare, which is fortunate, since I never dared to accept a dare before I was a mental health professional, either.
“I know she is,” I say. “But how did you know K. was your father’s student?”
“What do you mean?” M. says, and then before I can tell him what I mean, he says, “I’m teaching my father’s class. She was in the class when I started teaching it.”
Yes, and how did you come to teach your father’s class in the first place? I think but do not say. Instead, I ask, “Did your father ever mention K. before he went to Iraq? Did he ever talk about her around you or your mother?”
“No,” M. says quickly, much too quickly, and so I know the answer is yes. How to prove what I know, however, is a more difficult matter.
“Are you still journaling?” I ask M.
“Am I what?”
“Journaling,” I repeat. This is another way I am certain that M. is not really teaching his father’s class. If he were truly an English professor, then he would know what it means to journal. Because I know from an article in one of the mental health profession’s leading periodicals that English professors no longer have their students write essays on literary matters — literary matters and, indeed, literature — and instead have their students journal, a process which privileges feeling and emotion and devalues such less essential matters as form and style. The point of the article was that English professors, like the rest of society, are better off rejecting their former standards and practices and embracing the standards and practices of mental health professionals like myself. “Are you still writing down everything that’s happening to you?”
“Pretty much,” M. says, and then twists his face into a question mark. “Why?”
“Just curious,” I say, and then attempt to flatten my face into an answer.
A Moronic Device
It was seven o’clock when I got home that night, the time I usually got home on Tuesdays. Mother’s car was in the driveway. The garage floodlight was on, but the rest of the house was dark. I put down my kickstand and parked my bike in the driveway, walked inside, turned on the kitchen and living room lights, and yelled out, “Hello, I’m home!” but no one answered. This wasn’t a big deal. I figured Mother was next door talking to the neighbors or something. To kill time, I went to my dad’s study, took out my “journal,” and wrote down everything that had happened to me that day so far. When I was done, I put the “journal” back in the window seat, walked outside, crossed my arms, and leaned against Mother’s car. As I did, I caught a whiff of myself. I smelled like K. The smell made me feel sad and lonely. But the air smelled cold and clean. I tugged on the front of my coat to make it like a tent and then started flapping it, right there in the driveway. I did this for a while, until the horn in Mother’s car honked. Twice.
“What the.?” I said. I jumped up away from the car and bumped into my bike. It fell and made a soft crushing sound as it landed on the crushed stones in the driveway. My heart fluttered; I could actually feel wings beating in my chest. I was standing next to the back passenger door, and I leaned down a little and looked through the window toward the front seat. Mother was sitting in the driver’s seat. Her arm was hooked over the back of the seat. Her body was half turned toward me, and she was grinning.
This reminded me of a nice thing that happened. I was in kindergarten. Mother and my dad picked me up from school. I don’t remember why or where we went afterward. I got in the backseat. Mother was driving. My dad was in the front passenger seat. We hadn’t gone anywhere yet. We were just sitting there, parked on the street outside Knickerbocker Elementary. My dad turned around in his seat and asked me, “What’d you learn today, bud?” He asked the same question every day, and so I knew to have an answer.
“I learned the planets,” I said, and then recited them in order, Mercury through Pluto.
“Jesus H. Keeriiisst,” my dad said. He was smiling at me. He stuck his hand over the seat, and I slapped it. Mother was nodding at me in the rearview mirror in an impressed way. “How’d you remember that? I always get Uranus and Neptune confused.”
“What do you mean?” Mother said. “They’re totally different planets.”
“I know that,” my dad said. “But I can never remember which one is next to Pluto.”
“Ms. O. taught me how,” I said. Ms. O. was my teacher. I recited what she’d taught me. “‘My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.’ That’s how you remember.”