“No go,” I said. “They won’t move.”
“Guess she’s just going to have to watch us,” said Bass. We didn’t laugh at this but the attempt at humor made this bearable.
No go, I thought, harkening back to the title of the extra credit essay on Lord of the Flies written for you, Mr. E. The words came to mind and got applied to the stiffened status of Mrs. Fleming’s eyelids. But there was more to those words; and the dark smiling teeth in my head—the ones spreading so wide within the mouth housing them that the glistening purple-black gums show too—and they say to me matter-of-factly: things are what they are. That quote, psionically-uttered by the head of a pig on a stick in the green island jungle as heard by the at-that-point disturbed character Simon—
Simon.
Christ.
Settle down, I thought. Lots of males named Simon in the world. You’re losing it again, seeing patterns and coincidences that aren’t there.
But Grandma Lucille said there were no coincidences.
Nausea flourished within and threatened to overtake me as I looked down at Mrs. Fleming. Her face seemed to say, too, that there weren’t any coincidences, and that chaos and chance, like institutionalized gods, were conveniences we the living made up.
Mrs. Fleming’s face saying: I knew, didn’t I? The reason. That it was close, close, close.
I even heard her voice saying it to me—her voice coming in that neighborly tone of hers. From across the street while putting away groceries, just as she had the other day when she called out to me about the Macy’s parade. That voice now reciting to me the exact epigraph to my essay in full, a quote culled from the heart of Golding’s noveclass="underline" You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?
I was nodding yes to her and she asked it again, louder. This time I saw her standing next to her politically stickered Subaru, hands on her hips, waving at me in a way eerily similar to the way of the bald man after the water rolled by his feet. You knew didn’t you? Incredulity in her voice, almost shock. Cerca, cerca, cerca.
She was yelling it at me now, the tone this third time flatly accusatory: You knew, didn’t you!? Her voice permeating the awful quiet, its waves funneling down into my mind’s maw.
That third time, in my vision, she slammed her Subaru door, stood and looked at me, shaking her head in disapproval, as if what has happened was my fault.
Mr. E had commented on it, writing in the margin: To choose this title for your essay and this quote to tie it together… Well done. You really saw what this book was about, didn’t you?
I damn near said yes out loud to her as if she had asked me, but kept it in. I was probably nodding yes. Bass asked if I was all right. I had stared at her face not believing, like the boy in the jungle had at the flyblown pig head with the lidded eyes of a Thai Buddha.
I was locked into her skyward gaze, thinking of the Simons, and the children staring at us with lapidary stillness so that we would go away, so that we wouldn’t see what was to occur atop Doug Sahm Hill.
The next comment Mr. English had made at the top of the page was: When are you going to let me submit that story of yours for you? And so here’s where it gets weird. It’s something I haven’t told you yet. I dunno, I just haven’t wanted to yet. Besides, this is the proper place in the story to do it.
So, the other thing Mr. English had said to me in his office when I went to pick up the essay, which was really a ruse to hang out because he could’ve just left it in my cubby—with the door closed, which he never did, this stricken, beset look on his face—was that these sorts of stories are popular right now. That’s not weird. What was weird was his tone which was low and careful like he was talking to a seething school-shooter holding Mommy’s M-16 Bushwacker.
He had continued, “People in general are fearful of what’s coming next. You can feel it in the air, Kevin. This apocalyptic vision of yours is not only well-written, sounding like something written by a seasoned writer, it’s something people are actually going to want to read, maybe even talk about.” A tight smile broke onto his face. “You could expand this and write a series of stories, which, if this quality were to be maintained… I wouldn’t be surprised if it saw a little serialization. They could even end up being fixed up into a novel.”
That’s not so weird either. What’s weird is the story’s existence in context. The short story which I called The Late Bloomers is a story about the end of the world. Three thousand words. Not so weird. But in it—here’s the thing—all the adults died leaving only the kids. What killed everyone was a virus like bird flu meets H1N1, and it took a while, more than a morning. But the story wasn’t about the virus and how it all went down or anything like that. The story was a snapshot of the aftermath, how the humans—a specific group of people I placed in Phoenix, who were eighteen, nineteen, who were adults but they weren’t—were dealing with it. The story ended elliptically but it seemed clear that the children and the late bloomers, the young adults who didn’t die because they still had kid in them, were going to rebuild the world together. The late bloomers would take the lead because the world needed the kid in us to remake the world.
I didn’t see it as good in the way Mr. English did. I mean, I was shooting for Carver realism and got this whacked-out end-of-days story. I guess that’s what happens when you uncork your mind and let the subconscious roam about.
It’s one story of several I’d shown him, but it was the one about which he gushed.
So, you get my queasiness now? I just wrote this story over the summer. I had given it to Mr. E in August. Right before my big pot bust was when he’d mentioned it to me. When I dropped by to pick up my No Go essay.
He was so keen on the story. The way he acted when talking to me about it, treating me like some sort of clairvoyant. He’d handed me the essay but held the story in his hands and he stabbed the paper with his index finger, saying, “There’s something here.” He gave me an accusatory look.
That’s when he’d moved past me to close the door. When it closed, the room got cottony quiet. I realized just how stuffed with books his office was.
He sat on the edge of his desk and looked down at me. His eyes said sit. I sat.
I set my backpack in my lap as a buffer between me and him.
I wouldn’t say he scared me then, but he wasn’t the flip and comely rake of a teacher with bedhead hair, chunky glasses, and a half-sleeve of tats I was used to. Here sat a man with curiosity, wonder, and, I detected, fear in his eyes. The look in one’s eyes you only see in dreams.
Like the one I’d had before I wrote that story. I popped up at 3:30 a.m. to write it.
I’d gotten to know Mr. English this fall, he being both my AP English teacher and my advisor. He’d requested that I be his advisee because he’d been on the Austin library’s poetry contest judging panel last April—National Poetry Month—and he’d read the poem I’d entered. The poems were submitted anonymously. I thought it was just this tiny contest. Well, mine, a not-half-bad free verse thing called My Unstrung Heart, Won’t You Please Be Still?, ended up winning in the high school category. It turned out to be not so tiny a contest. Mr. E read the poem aloud on the radio after Garrison Keillor had finished this especially glum delivery of a Galway Kinnell poem, The Silence of the World, concluding his radio segment The Writer’s Almanac.