Demon's Door (14 page)

‘Well, maybe you're right,' Jim told him. ‘But I still think that something seriously weird is going on.'

‘Something seriously weird such as what?'

‘I'm not sure. But it's like the days aren't behaving themselves. Somebody or something is playing around with time, or playing around with our
perception
of time.'

‘Say,
what
?'

‘I can't explain it, Walter, not yet. But I do have an idea
what
and
who
is causing it, although I don't have the slightest idea
why
.'

‘White man speak in conundrums,' said Walter. ‘Listen – do you want this other sandwich, because I sure don't. I'd rather go to the commissary for meatloaf and green beans.'

‘You're kidding me. Do you have some kind of a death-wish?'

Jim took Walter's sandwich and went to sit on the patio outside. He saw three of his own students sitting on the grass nearby – Georgia and Judii and Grant. Georgia was staring at Grant wide-eyed, her lips parted, as if he had just arrived from heaven by way of Muscle Beach, while Judii was applying bright-red lip-gloss and pouting at herself in a hand mirror, which intermittently flashed as it reflected the sun.

A few yards further away, under the shade of the cedar tree, he saw Patsy-Jean and Billy sitting on the circular bench that surrounded its immense gnarled trunk, and Kim sitting on the ground in front of them, cross-legged, straight-backed. Whatever Kim was saying, he was using the same karate-style chopping gestures with his hands that he had been using when he was talking yesterday to Maria, and both Patsy-Jean and Billy were leaning forward and listening to him with rapt attention.

Jim watched them for a while, and then got up and walked up the slope toward them, eating the last of his sandwich as he did so. Actually, Walter was right. The pressed turkey filling was disgusting. He threw the crusts across the grass, and two quail immediately fluttered down and started pecking at them.

He approached Kim and Patsy-Jean and Billy and said, ‘How's it going, guys?'

Kim looked up at him, one eye closed against the sunlight. ‘Hello, Mr Rook. We talk about our future lives – which paths will unfold ahead of us.'

Patsy-Jean said, ‘Kim says that in Korea they actually have ways of seeing what's going to happen to you in maybe ten years' time.'

‘That's right,' said Jim. ‘I heard about that, too. Doors open and doors close, don't they, Kim? Or is it the other way around? Close, open – open, close. Whatever it is, you guys need to be cautious. It's tough enough, living your life one day at a time, without knowing what's going to happen before it's happened.'

‘Would you not like to see what
you
will be doing in ten years' time, Mr Rook?' Kim challenged him. ‘Or maybe thirty years' time? Or forty? Or fifty?'

By the way Kim was looking at him, even with one eye closed, Jim was sure that he knew exactly what he had experienced last night – how he had woken up to find himself old and arthritic and incontinent, and how he had been visited by that spooky woman in that smoky veil. Maybe Kim himself wasn't capable of manipulating time, shuffling the days like a deck of cards, but Jim was convinced that he was acting as an agent or a channel for some influence that was. Kwisin, perhaps, the fox-demon that had appeared in his bedroom, or some spirit even more terrifying.

He said, ‘As far as I'm concerned, Kim, ignorance is bliss. If I'm going to be healthy and rich in fifty years' time, that will be great. If I'm going to be sick and poverty-stricken, then I don't want to know about it, not yet. What's the point of worrying about something I can't change?'

‘There is always one way to change it, Mr Rook,' said Kim.

‘Oh, really? And what's that?'

‘Everybody has choice. Everybody has free will.'

‘How can you say that, when you believe that our lives have already happened, and that every day is simply waiting for us to come along and experience it?'

‘We all have the choice not to go further,' Kim replied. ‘To close one door, but not to open the next.'

The bell rang. Students reluctantly began to pick themselves up from the grass and amble back to their classes.

Jim said, ‘I don't understand what you're saying, Kim. What do you mean, “not to go further”?'

‘Simply that,' said Kim. ‘If you do not like what you see on the other side of the door, then you have the choice not to go through it. Not to go further. To stay forever in the same day.'

‘Are you saying what I think you're saying?'

Kim stood up. ‘I have to go to class, Mr Rook.'

Jim almost snapped at him not to be so goddamned impertinent. It was
his
class, after all. But he knew that he needed to stay in control, and not allow Kim to needle him.

‘Sure,' he said, checking his wristwatch. ‘You don't want your teacher giving you a hard time for turning up late, do you?'

That afternoon, he read out the essays that his new class had written on ‘What I Would Do If I Unexpectedly Inherited A Million Dollars.'

Jim called them ‘essays' even though most of them were only three lines long, and five of them were written in block capitals without any punctuation, while one of them had even been written in text-speak. ‘I wd pa drs 2 keep me 6Y 4eva. Life s Hrd n sux bt dth stinx.' (‘I would pay doctors to keep me sexy for ever. Life is hard and sucks but death stinks.')

Out of all of them, Leon had the most fluent handwriting, and it was joined-up, too. ‘I would take my whole family on a trip to Israel. When I got back I would buy my own apartment and invest in a half-share of my cousin Levi's comedy club.'

‘That's a very generous thought, taking your family to Israel,' said Jim.

‘Yeah, but I'd leave them there. They suck. All of them. Especially my grandparents.'

Billy wanted to move to Oregon and open his own riding stables ‘someplace near mountins with snow on the tops and fresh air.' Ella dreamed of buying ‘1000s & 1000s of dress's & julre & like that & do a tv show like Paris & be a *'

Janice Sticky, to Jim's surprise, had ambitions to open her own unisex grooming salon on Rodeo Drive, while Teddy planned to travel all over the world and write about ‘bizarre customs' such as Maasai wife-sharing rituals and ‘frogs blended in a Mixmaster with white beans and honey which Peruvians drink instead of Viagra.' Georgia would invest her inheritance in producing a movie, so that she could ‘get freinds with A-listers such as eg Brad and Aneglina and Matt Demon and be on the cover of OK magazine every week.'

Arthur wanted to run an exclusive VIP nightclub and own a gold Humvee, or maybe a pair of Humvees, one gold and one silver. T.D. had ambitions to start his own record label, Top Dime Disks. Maria said she would like to buy a beach-house somewhere in Baja, and two Afghan hounds, so that she could live in ‘idolic peace.'

When he came to Patsy-Jean's paper, however, and read what she had written, Jim glanced up at the clock and said, ‘Hey – we seem to be over-running our time here.'

‘Hey, sir, you didn't read mine yet,' Grant complained.

‘Yes, I know. I'm sorry. I'll have to finish discussing these some other time. Before we finish this afternoon, I want to read you a poem and I want you to come back tomorrow and tell me what you think about it.'

He went back to his desk, opened up his top drawer, and dropped their papers into it. Patsy-Jean's was on top. In thick black capitals, she had printed: IF I HAD $1 MILLION I WOULD PAY SOMEONE TO KILL ME.

He locked his drawer and picked up his poetry book. He found the poem that he wanted to read to them, and then he stood in front of Patsy-Jean's desk. He looked around. He could see that Special Class Two were growing restless. It was their first day back at college, and they were already tired and mentally ragged. It was always harder to teach them to concentrate than it was to teach them the rudiments of grammar.

‘OK,' he said. ‘This is a very short poem, but that doesn't mean it makes no demands on your brain. It's called “Beyond the Horizon,” and it was written by a young Russian poet called Kiril Vasiliev in 1957.

‘It's hard to believe it, but in the Soviet Union in those days, it was very risky to write a poem like this, because it didn't scan and it didn't rhyme and it wasn't all about Lenin, or tractors.'

Billy put up his hand. ‘Sir – what's “Lenin”?'

Teddy turned around in his seat with his nose wrinkled up in disgust. ‘Are you some kind of ignoramus, or what? Haven't you ever heard of the Lenin Tower of Pisa?'

Jim said, ‘Ignore him, Billy. Lenin's a
who
, not a what. Go home. Google him. This is English, not History. Now here's the poem.'

He read ‘Beyond The Horizon' directly to Patsy-Jean, looking into her eyes as he did so, searching for some clue to her state of mind. She didn't look in any way distressed, or desperate, but then Jim remembered what his own mother had been like, on the day that
she
had committed suicide. Two months after she had discovered that she had terminal ovarian cancer, she had taken thirty-five paracetamol and drunk a whole bottle of Smirnoff. But when Jim had talked to her at breakfast that morning, she had seemed so calm, so much at peace with herself.
Blissful
, even. It had been the calm of a woman who had made her choice; and had chosen to go no further. Jim read:

T.D. said, with exaggerated seriousness, ‘You know somethin', sir. There just ain't no answer to that.'

Jim closed the book. ‘Maybe it doesn't seem like it, not at first. But then maybe there is.'

‘Seems to me like there's two too many horizons,' put in Teddy.

‘That's a good point,' said Jim. ‘What Vasiliev is saying, in effect, is that we can never reach the horizon, no matter how far we travel. It's always beyond our reach. It's very short, this poem, and it's very simple, but it raises all kinds of fascinating questions about the way we see our lives unfolding, and the way we think of time passing us by, and the way we relate to other people.'

‘I think it's really sad,' said Janice.

‘Yes,' said Jim. ‘It's quite a lonely poem, isn't it? It has an overwhelming sense of loss. You feel that the love of Vasiliev's life has disappeared, and he's not at all sure that he's ever going to be able to find her again.'

The bell rang. Jim said, ‘OK . . . we'll talk about this some more tomorrow. Meanwhile, I want you to think about other things that affect us but we can't control. Like the weather, for instance.'

‘Or growing older,' said Kim.

‘Yes, Kim. Like growing older.'

He went into the Cat'n'Fiddle for a drink before he returned home. He sat up at the bar, loosened his necktie and ordered a bottle of Fat Tire. He was served by the same bartender who had served him yesterday evening, but then he wasn't at all sure that he had really been here yesterday evening. Even if he had, the barman seemed to have forgotten that he had stiffed him out of a tip, because he was friendly and chatty and pushed a large bowl of complimentary pretzels across the bar.

‘You teach, don't you?' asked the bartender.

‘That's right. English.'

‘English? Like Shakespeare, right?'

‘Sure. Some Shakespeare.'

‘I always wanted to be an actor, you know. I mean that's why I came out to Hollywood in the first place. I was an extra in
War Of The Worlds
, with Tom Cruise. I had to run down the street and get melted by the Martians. Then Portal Pictures were doing this remake of a Korean horror flick, and I got a walk-on part as a doorman. I even had a couple of lines of dialog.'

‘That's great,' said Jim. ‘That's very good. What were they?'

‘Excuse me? What were what?'

‘The lines. The lines you had in this Korean horror flick.'

‘Oh! I had to stop this woman going through this door and say, “You really don't want to go any further, ma'am. You don't want to go through this door, I promise you.”'

‘That was it?'

‘Yes. But I had to say them real meaningful. Like, I had to give the impression that if she decided to go through the door, she'd be in real serious shit, if you know what I mean.'

‘What was it called?' Jim asked him.

‘What was what called?'

‘The Korean horror flick. What was it called?'

The bartender shrugged. ‘I don't know. They never finished it. I think they ran out of money or the talent got sick or something. I never found out. The working title was
Demon's Door.
'

‘What was the storyline?'

The bartender slowly shook his head. ‘I'm not too sure. All I had to do was wear this green doorman's uniform and reach forward and take hold of this door handle and say, “You really don't want to go any further, ma'am. You don't want to go through this door, I promise you.” And the director told me that I had to sound – what was the word?
Portentous
. Would that be right? I mean, you're an English teacher.'