I was about to apologize, but Floyd, satisfied C-Hall was still empty, picked up where he’d left off. “If I went to school here?” he said. “I’d make you eat shit, huh? Me and all my friends would. We would find some shit and make you eat it. In front of everyone. We’d take you out to the playground and feed you shit and when you passed out from humiliation, we’d piss in your eyes. For the rest of your life, you’d be the little bitch who ate shit and got pissed on. It’d help to solve the problems of the world. All you little smartasses who look at us like you know something we don’t. All you little know-it-all parasites with your comments and your sportscasts trying to make us feel bad about who we are, trying to make us feel bad for doing what we gotta do to make our way through this world that’s only fucked up because of guys like you, behind the scenes, whispering your poison into the air and meanwhile without us you’d be nothing? Without us you’d have nothing to feed on? If we made you eat shit and pissed on you, you wouldn’t have nothing to say to us. You wouldn’t have nothing to think about us except, ‘I am an abnormal piece of shit who clogs up the plumbing that’s the society these good men who pissed on me and made me eat shit are trying to make the world a good place with.’ Your mouth’s wide open, now, huh? You got something to say me?”
I did have something to say to him, or at least I should have had — it felt like something needed to be said by Gurion — but I didn’t know what. I just kept thinking: Why don’t You punish men for the wrongs they would do?
Floyd lowered his cone, leaned at me.
I thought: Because You don’t know what they’ll do. Not for sure. You don’t know what they’ll do for sure, and You believe their thoughts can change their course in the world — the course You’ve set them on, the future You know — yet You can’t read their thoughts any better than You can read mine. Our thoughts to You are what You are to us. Noisy, but hidden. Endless, but unseen. Even if You can read our faces, You can only do so in the way we read Your scripture. Our faces may potentially tell You everything that we think, but often You misread them, often enough that, out of fairness — because You are good — You will not act according only to what You’ve read.
I closed my gaping mouth and lowered my eyes, saw globs of saliva dripping from the bell of Floyd’s cone, pooling between the toes of our shoes. In case he’d start talking again, I took two steps back to get out of spraying range. Floyd understood it as a retreat, understood retreat as a show of weakness — maybe it was; I was rarely speechless — and liked it. It puffed him up, cued him to continue. The cone stayed down.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If I was in the junior-high school again, I’d do it better. All we ever did to guys like you was beat your asses til you hid in the corners, reading, jerking off, whatever you did. And you had years to tell yourselves that all it was was you were weaker, smaller, one against many. You made a hero-story out of it. You thought you were like Jesus. So many little Christs, suffering because you were the only good one in the world — thousands of you thinking that across the country. And my friends and me, while you were hiding in those corners, we had no idea — we thought you’d learned your lesson. Once in a while you’d come out and show yourself, and we’d beat your ass again, to teach you again, but we were decent, not like you, and innocent, not like you, and as soon as you hid again, we let you be. Every single time, we were sure we’d finally taught you. But you always came out of the corner eventually. You never learned your lesson, never learned to keep your head down or your mouth shut. We thought that while you hid you were getting decent, but all that time, all’s you were doing was rubbing your grimy palms together and plotting revenge. And eventually you grew up, all of us grew up, and you were out of our reach. You were safe. Protected. We were working, being productive Americans, we didn’t think about you, and if we did we still thought we’d crushed the evil right out of you, but then suddenly you’d pop up, you’d make even more wisecracks, you’d look at us even squintier than before. You would fuck with us, out of vengeance. Instead of learning the lesson we taught you and being grateful, you’d do vengeance from behind your desks, from behind your fucken glasses, behind your fucken telephones. And it’s our fault, partly. It’s our fault for being decent human beings, for believing in the good of man, believing a beating was all it would take to teach you humility. What we shoulda done is force-fed you shit. Pissed in your squinty little fucken eyes. God knows we wanted to. God knows the only thing kept us from it was respect for the idea of humanity and decency. Too much respect. We shoulda made you eat shit and pissed all over you. Dragged you out to the playground and did it, in the middle of recess, so everyone would see, so everyone would remember, so everyone would remind you what you are even when you forgot. You mighta learned something then. If I was in junior high school again, I swear to God, I’d save the world. And if I was in this junior high school? I’d start with you.”
Midway through Floyd’s monologue, the switch had come, and he’d lowered his voice accordingly. Seventh- and eighth-graders were shoving past us now, on their way from recess to the cafeteria while fifth- and sixth-graders headed in the opposite direction.
I was thinking: You can’t punish men for their potential wrongdoings, or else You would. You cannot fix Your own damage.
I thought: It is good I am not You.
“I’d start with you,” Floyd repeated, louder than the first time, in case I hadn’t heard him over the crowd noise. “You hear that, fuck?” he said. “I’d start with you.”
I said, You’re the one who’s like Jesus, Floyd.
“You don’t know anything about Jesus,” Floyd said.
I said, I know that by the time he’d gotten himself all covered in spit, he wasn’t able to do much more than talk.
Floyd shook like the Electric Chair, aching to hit me. Aching.
I held out my pass, said, This is my sheep’s blood.
I passed.
Stealth in a crowded hallway works the opposite of stealth in an empty one. You have to walk forward with your shoulders high and stare at the heads of the people you’re walking toward. They will sense you coming, even if their backs are turned to you, and they’ll move out of your way without ever looking at your face to see who you are. All you have to do is see them first. People feel when they’re being seen and it moves them.
I was not being stealth on the way to Nurse Clyde’s, and got bumped a few times. I was looking all around me, trying to spot June. The looking strained my neck and I got vertigo watching the faces turn.