When Ronrico and the Janitor returned from the Office, we all revolved at the gong of the doorbell.
Benji pointed to Ronrico and then to the Janitor and then he did the shrug/lip-curling very frantically at me = “That’s who I was making confusing gestures about before.”
I showed him the power-fist. = They’re friends now.
He waved me off with two hands and looked sad doing it.
Ronrico took a look around the Cage. “Who died?” he said.
“Wolf,” said Main Man.
“The Boy Who Cried Wa-Wa?” the Janitor said.
“The Boy Who Went Wee-Wee,” said Forrest Kennilworth.
I was across the room before I knew I’d left my chair, across it so quick Botha hadn’t finished chuckling yet. Nakamook already had Kennilworth’s wrist bent. Kids crowded fast and thickly behind us, shoving close together to get a better vista, their jammed-together bodies blocking all Botha’s sightlines.
“Entertain the monitor,” Benji said to Forrest. “Make him laugh again.”
Kids were saying, “Hurt him.” Kids were saying, “Break it.” By “kids,” I mean all of them but Jelly, Eliyahu, Main Man, and me.
Botha was shouting, trying to clear his way, shouting for the teachers to help him clear the way.
“He should get more than a wrist-twist,” Vincie told Benji.
“Please,” Forrest said. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just fucked up. I was making a joke. It’s just fucked up.”
Main Man said, “Nakamook, Forrest is sorry. He was making a joke and it’s just effed up.”
“He’s crying,” said Jelly. “He means it. He’s sorry.”
Benji let Forrest go as Botha got through, and we all dispersed. The teachers stood dumbly by their chairs at the cluster. Even though Vincie, retreating to his carrel, thumb-stabbed him stealth on the side of the neck, Forrest didn’t rat anyone.
Botha handed out steps for the following offenses: noise, talking, swears, standing.
The fly was on my desk, his hose in the candy dust. I cupped my hand and covered him, then brushed him past the edge to see where he’d go. He returned to the dust, as if I hadn’t just demonstrated that I could kill him, as if I hadn’t just shown him right there in the dust.
I snuck the hall-passes out of my bag and wrote the penumbra poem on the back of one. I held the bottle of Coke between my knees, under the desk, and binder-clipped the poem to the lip beneath the cap.
The fly sucked dust. The end-of-class tone sounded. Eliyahu went straight to the bathroom.
I secured June’s gift inside of my backpack and charged the locked door with everyone else.
6 DARK ENOUGH
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Interim — Detention
Principal Leonard Brodsky
Aptakisic Junior High School
9978 Rand Rd.
Deerbrook Park, IL 60090
September 1, 2006
Dear Leonard,
I want, first of all, to thank you for admitting Gurion Maccabee to Aptakisic, and secondly, to apologize for having had to cut short our conversation after services last week. I’m not sure if you saw her there or not, but my daughter Esther was sitting on the stair beneath the one on which we stood, and, being yet another great admirer of the boy in question (not to mention a habitual eavesdropper! — though this is no thing to complain about: after all, what better indication of a child’s love for you than her belief that what you have to say to others is actually interesting, baruch H-shem?), she became very sad at Gurion’s mention (she misses him at school), and she’d been tugging at the hem of my pant-leg and whispering, as if in prayer, “Please let’s go, please can we,” for all but the entire duration of our overly brief dialogue. So while I’m already at it here, with the gratitude and the apologies, I’ll use the occasion to address as best I can the concerns you expressed. I’ll begin with the issue of the weapons, as it seems to be — very understandably — your greatest source of unease.
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it, but over the summer months, the afternoons Gurion didn’t spend gallivanting in our backyard with Esther and her sisters, he spent in my study, reading Chumash and Talmud, so I’ve had a number of opportunities to discuss with him what he was thinking when he wrote and delivered those instructions of his last spring. Before we go into that, though, you must first understand that when I initially contacted you about Gurion, I was in no way exaggerating his peculiar intelligence, nor the promise it entails. It is my belief that, if given the proper chance, Gurion will become the foremost Jewish scholar of his generation, if not his epoch. I recognize that the magnitude of such a claim might seem, to someone who doesn’t know the boy, cartoonish — even reckless — but…an anecdote in its defense:
On Gurion’s first day at Solomon Schechter — he was a kinder-gartner, five years old, and without any capacity to read Hebrew — he approached me in the hallway and said, “Because you are the principal of Judaic Studies, I would like to ask you about the importance of truth.” He spoke that way when he was small, like a boy with maybe a governess, surely a summer villa somewhere coastal in western Europe. Now he speaks differently — with character.
In any case, “Truth is very important,” I told him.
He said, “I know. Except sometimes it is less important than it is at other times and this is what I want to ask you about. The matter, however, is a private one.”
“The matter!” I thought. “So that’s how it is!” Queen’s English or not, I was confident he would tell me about having stolen something, or hurt somebody, only to ask if he should be honest about it, and then I’d tell him yes, be honest.
That is not what happened.
In my office, he sat cross-legged in the chair on the other side of my desk and said, “My mother has a colleague with a baby named Isaac. We went there yesterday, to Isaac’s house, for a barbecue. We ate steak because I like steak and the steak that afternoon was delicious. After the steak, while our fathers smoked cigarettes, our mothers cleared the table and brought out bowls of ice cream. Isaac was laying on a blanket in the grass next to the table and, in the middle of my first bite of ice cream, a glinting in my eye came from his direction and I turned and saw that he held a steak knife. It must have fallen off the table when our moms cleared the dishes. It might have been my steak knife, it might have been anyone’s — I don’t think it matters. But I saw this baby, Isaac, holding this very sharp knife, playing with it. He was making the sun reflect itself onto his chest and his belly — he was wearing only a diaper — and it was very beautiful to Isaac, how the sun was being reflected, the way he could bend his wrist to push the sun around his body or turn it off or change the size of it and how it would multiply in number when he caught it on more than one tooth of the serration at once. And probably the knife felt to him differently than anything he’d ever held before because I know Isaac’s parents would never let him play with dangerous metal things, and so it was very sad to me that it was a knife since he could accidentally stab himself in the eye or cut himself on the hand or the belly or stab himself in any of those places with it, or cut his forehead, or even if he just pricked himself a little bit and then dropped the knife, or dropped the knife on himself, pricking himself, it would be harmful… I jumped off my bench and snatched the knife away. I did it very quickly. All those thoughts I said I was thinking about the reflections on his belly and how he could hurt himself, I remember thinking them, but it seems impossible because they take so much time to say, and it was really as soon as I saw the knife in his hands that I took it from him. Isaac has big eyes, even for a baby, and they became even bigger when I took the knife. And then he started crying. And I said to his dad — because it happened so fast that no one could make out what exactly the situation was and maybe it looked like I made him cry on purpose — I said, ‘He had a knife and I saved him,’ and then my father, who was sitting next to me, picked up his ice-cream teaspoon, reached around me, and handed it down to Isaac, who grabbed it and stopped crying immediately. Which is what I should have done — the teaspoon. My father is smart. He tricked the baby. The baby thought the spoon was the knife. The spoon was smooth and metal and it could reflect the sun onto his belly. And I know that was the right thing to do, to trick the baby.