Yet his fists still couldn’t seem to help themselves. They continued fighting a war that was over. An off-the-cuff remark, even in the most innocuous context, uttered sweetly even, were it to contain a certain key word—jerkoff, for instance, or faggot or sometimes the word daddy—and the fists would let fly. He was no longer in control of them. His body would leap out ahead of him to connect with that word, to beat it from existence. No matter the size or gender of the speaker. His fists were especially sensitive to the word morel, on whichever syllable the accent fell. All friendships in high school were tenuous, provisional — and as soon as they got a load of Will’s fists, bonds were severed for good. By junior year he’d been labeled by most as certifiably loco and given a wide berth.
Teachers, however, adored Will. Whereas other students sleepwalked through assignments — scrawled onto a sheet of loose-leaf paper in the hallway ten minutes before class — and bloated their essays to bursting with filler phrases, letting platitudes and clichés do their thinking for them, a generation of texters uninterested in the distinction between their and they’re, its and it’s, whose and who’s, Will was different. He was an earnest and thoughtful student. He was impressively well read — as a loner and an only child Will was an avid reader of books — and had a knack with words. Will’s homework assignments were little jewels laser printed on high-quality paper stock — focused, packed with vivid examples, little jolts of unusual vocabulary, fresh turns of phrase, language well-mastered. Other students spent their time before and after class begging for extensions on late work or arguing over a grade. Will did neither. Always on the day it was due, never a word of complaint. Other students, after glancing at the circled grade at the top of the page, tossed the returned assignments into the trash bin as they exited class; Will pored over his graded papers at his desk, carefully considering each red mark, frowning and nodding, the last to leave the room.
Women teachers were especially fond of Will. It was the black hair, the black eyes, and the way those eyes burned when he was called on to speak. The rough hands that turned in and accepted back assignments, the boxer’s broken nose, the broad shoulders hunched at his desk — a man already, at the age of sixteen. They knew who his father was, who he was. In break rooms, over burned coffee, they swooned over his furious soul, but to him they said nothing. They were the keepers of his talent. They shepherded him through the college application process, test preparations, and personal statements and transcripts and interviews. They celebrated those that accepted him and cursed those that didn’t. They hugged him tearfully at graduation and sent him on his way.
He wasn’t going far; in fact, he wasn’t even leaving the island of Manhattan. Will emerged from the Downtown Lexington Avenue local on Sixty-Eighth Street, passing that hulking black trapezoid, to enter the North Building of Hunter College on August 28, 2008, for his first day of class. That year he lived at home, commuting from their one bedroom in Washington Heights. The bedroom was Will’s; his mother had insisted on it. For the past four years she’d made hers the living room, sleeping on the foldout couch which she meticulously put away every morning before Will awoke, aware of his guilt at these sleeping arrangements. Sure that he’d have vacated to some midwestern state by now, she was thrilled to have him still here, at least for the time being, to have been granted a stay from the empty nest.
During his commutes, on the occasions when the subway’s gentle rocking set him to thinking back, age eleven, age twelve, he thought of the phrase scorched earth. In high school he had learned the term while studying the Vietnam conflict. The US military deployed a scorched earth policy there, sprayed millions of acres of cropland during Operation Trail Dust, its herbicidal warfare program, a strategy designed to expose enemy hideouts and deny food and shelter to the Vietcong. Which it did, though it also poisoned friendlies on the ground as well as the ones doing the spraying. It was this way with his father, too, with the war he fought within himself and the methods he deployed to fight that war. He might have destroyed whatever demons he’d been fighting, but he also poisoned those who stood beside him and, in the end, himself. That year, the year of the millennium, had been the year of scorched earth.
The firewall remained on, into his new adulthood. Back then it had been necessary, but now it served no purpose. He liked people, despite appearances to the contrary, and made friends easily here. He found he could have friends and still give away nothing of himself, as most other kids his age preferred to talk about themselves anyway. In college, he developed the art of listening. His friends talked; he listened. He found it was still possible to develop intimacy this way. He didn’t have to say a word. Girls for some reason enjoyed the way he demurred to their questions. They reveled in the vague answers he gave about his past. They itched to know more, to peel back the layers. But to girls, too, he gave nothing away.
His fists, for the most part, had given up the fight. He redirected their energy, putting them to work now defending friends at drunken bar brawls or getting himself out of the odd late-night scrape. He’d once even thwarted a rape-in-progress. The old triggers rarely sent them flying anymore. It had been during his senior year of high school when they last came out. For some reason, the turn of phrase sucking daddy’s dick was in fashion that year — as in “I’ve been popping ollies a long time, bro — longer than you been suckin’ on your daddy’s dick.” It was meant to be humorous, a play on mommy’s tit, but Will’s fists hadn’t found it funny. So, three years ago.
And then again last week.
Will had declared his major early, end of first year — history, with a minor in education. He spent most of those first two getting the tough pills down — broad surveys and pedagogical theory — but this semester, fall of the third year, he allowed himself an indulgence: Fundamentals of Imaginative Writing I. A clear cool lake of spring water in this desert of academia. They wrote poems and short prose pieces. His teacher was a man who seemed not much older than himself — energetic, filled with hope for all of them as future wordsmiths. He put up on the overhead a line, She wished this day had never come, and told them to take it from there. Or had them pair off on a sonnet, trading couplets. He passed around a photograph of a man looking pensively out a window and then pulled out a large green teddy bear and put it on the desk. “Connect these dots,” he said, and set them to work. He praised Will’s writing, often making an example of it, which delighted Will, but also embarrassed him. He gave Will a list of authors, none of whom had Will ever read: Auster, Banks, Johnson, Stone. Muscular names. He brought in handouts from his graduate seminar for Will and gave him the latest copy of the literary journal he edited, hot off the presses. They talked together long after class was dismissed, his teacher sitting on the corner of the desk, Will cradling his textbooks as he stood, until an evening instructor kicked them both out.