While he jogged, I kept thinking: Eliyahu is damaged. It got me even more sad. I didn’t want to be sad, so I tried to fight it. I tried to think this: He wouldn’t be the same if he wasn’t damaged; you might not even like an undamaged Eliyahu.
But I knew that wasn’t true. I’d have liked him either way. Maybe not as much, but then also maybe more. Eliyahu was a scholar. Everyone I liked who wasn’t damaged was a scholar. Rather, everyone I liked who wasn’t a scholar was damaged. Or maybe the first way. The stress kept shifting.
A door squeaked behind me, and then there were footsteps.
Swinging an empty two-gallon milk jug, the perennially dry-mouthed Mister Todd Frazier—teacher of drama, Malkevichian inflector — came out of his classroom and headed for the fountain.
It’s broken, I told him.
He tried the button anyway. “It’s broken,” he said. “I am thirsty,” he said. “Let me see your pass.”
He wasn’t that bad. It was just the way he talked. I showed him my pass.
“Do not dawdle.”
He walked me the twenty-odd steps to the Cage, watched me ring the bell, and wouldn’t quit his hovering til after the monitor appeared in the doorway.
All schoolday long, the floor-to-ceiling gate made of chain-link fencing that blocked off the doorway of the Cage was locked. So was the door behind it. Students couldn’t leave the Cage unless they were going to Gym, Nurse Clyde, their therapist, the Office, or Lunch-Recess if they had cafeteria privilege. And if you wanted to come inside between 9:10 and 3:30, there was a protococlass="underline"
You’d ring the doorbell on the outer wall of the doorway.
The monitor would unlock the door of the Cage and step into the doorway, where he’d look at you through the diamond-shaped spaces of the gate.
You’d hand your pass to the monitor, and if the pass was acceptable, the monitor would open the gate and let you in.
or
If you didn’t have a pass or if your pass was unacceptable, then the monitor would write you a pass to go to the Office and get a new pass, and when you’d done that, you’d come back to the Cage and start over at 1.
There were only a few situations in which the entrance protocol didn’t apply. One was if you were coming back from Gym on time: there’d be a group of you, and after one of you rang the bell, the monitor would stand behind the gate and let the group in, single-file, checking each kid off on his clipboard as they passed him. Another situation was if you were coming back from Lunch-Recess. If you came back from Lunch-Recess at the end of Lunch-Recess, it worked just like coming back from Gym on time, except the group of you would be much larger since Lunch-Recess period was the same for everyone at Aptakisic (between periods 4 and 5). If you came back from Lunch-Recess within the first ten minutes of Lunch-Recess — in which case you’d be taking advantage of what the Cage Manual called “The Hot Lunch Caveat”***—you’d usually be alone, and your tray of hot lunch would, itself, be your pass. The only other situation where the entrance protocol didn’t apply was when you were coming back from your therapist’s — you didn’t need a pass then, either. You’d knock on the door that connected Call-Me-Sandy’s and Bonnie Wilkes PsyD’s office to the Cage, and Botha would unlock it, let you in, and that would be that.
Even though all but a very senior few teachers were regularly rotated into the Cage for two periods per week each, none of them had keys to get in, and, like the students, every one of them had to ring the bell and wait at the gate for the monitor to open it. There were, in all of Aptakisic, only five people who had keys to the Cage: Brodsky, Floyd, Jerry, Hector the janitor, and Victor Botha.
Victor Botha was the monitor. His righthand was just an opposable thumb, which is something certain monkeys don’t have. The hand had been chopped by a crop-grinder on the island of Australia when Botha was small. It was probably a tragedy when it happened, but it was hard to tell so many years later because he became an adult who deserved a chopped hand. Botha always went beyond the entrance protocol.
That morning proved no exception. As I’d approached the gate, Mr. Frazier in tow, I’d done 1: I rang the bell and waited.
And Botha’d done 2: He came out and looked at me through the chain-link gate.
Seeing Botha, Mr. Frazier took off, and that’s when I’d executed my part of 3: I pushed my pass through a diamond-shaped space of the gate.
But then instead of doing his part of 3—checking to see if the pass was acceptable — Botha caulked a trickle. He didn’t even take the pass out of my fingers. He said, “Show me your pass.” He said the same thing every time. I had been at the gate at least a hundred times, and he knew I knew the protocol. Him saying “Show me your pass” was like a mugger holding a gun in your mouth and saying, “You better do what I say because I have a gun in your mouth.” Or if a man behind the counter of a hot-dog stand who just passed you a hot dog said, “Now pay me the money you owe me for that hot dog.” It makes it seem like if you do what the man says, you’ll be doing it because he says to, when that’s not true. When you do what the mugger says, you do it because he has a gun. When you pay the hot-dog guy, it’s because you owe money for the hot dog. If the mugger didn’t have a gun, you would not do what he said. If you didn’t owe money for the hot dog, you wouldn’t pay the hot-dog guy. If Botha wasn’t the monitor, or if we weren’t at school, I wouldn’t give him my pass.
When Adonai told Moses to bring water from the rock in the Sinai by speaking to the rock, Moses not only struck the rock instead of talking to it, but he said to the Israelites who were gathered for the miracle, “Listen now, O rebels, shall we bring forth water for you from this rock?” like it was him, Moses, who would bring forth the water, when it was God who would bring it forth. Even though these were the only wrong actions Moses took in all his life, and even though Moses was understandably upset — he had just come down the mountain only to discover his brothers engaged in acts of idolatry — it was for his having taken these two wrong actions that God never let him inside of Israel.