The Natural Order of Things (15 page)

At an oval table, under the glaring white light, the boys sit as if awaiting the Final Judgment and study a brigade of plastic infantrymen staged for a horrific siege. Dozens of small, green toy soldiers stand at the ready, bazookas on their shoulders, grenades in their hands. In a little game of war, the boys move the figurines around the perimeter of the table. Edmund Campion, never taking his eyes from the make-believe battlefield, slides away to observe the onslaught from a safe distance.

Is it bravery, he wonders, or insanity that inspires certain young men to join in the fray and face life’s brutalities and hardships? Whatever reasons they may give and whatever regrets they may have once the fighting begins, some of them learn the meaning of self-sacrifice, what the priests call
agape
, which is the highest form of love, and the lucky few who survive the terrible ordeal come away with compelling stories to tell.

Edmund is a coward; he’s willing to admit as much, and he’s beginning to worry that he may never have a story worth telling. As he gathers his equipment for the photo shoot, he remembers what the history books have taught him—that cowardice and the decadence of art will, sooner or later, lead a man to a grim and violent end.

As football season gets underway, Minotaur Mania infects the entire city. Hundreds of avid fans line up outside the doors of the school to buy season tickets. The cafeteria staff names a series of gruesome dishes after the beloved quarterback—Minotaur Meatball Subs and Minotaur Meat Pies. Edmund, obligated to photograph these steaming piles of inedible mush, holds the plates aloft to better attract flies that dive like fighter pilots and bounce off the grease-splattered glass partitions of the buffet.

On Friday afternoon, before the team begins its scrimmage, Edmund snaps several photos of a bare-chested Minotaur running laps and doing calisthenics. In the golden sunshine, the Minotaur’s grotesquely defined pecs and abs glisten with sweat, the fibrous muscle tissue rippling like chain mail under his taut skin, the great dome of his shaved head shining like a gazing ball. The pictures seem almost pornographic in nature, homoerotic even, and Edmund makes sure that the Minotaur poses in such a way that his fingers appear to be grasping the mighty shaft of the bell tower in the background.

“If things don’t work out with football,” says the Minotaur during the interview, “if the agents don’t come pounding on my door with endorsement deals, I’ll just become an English teacher. That way I can coach high school football. Big money these days in high school football. Look at Coach Kaliher. Guy’s gotta have, like, a hundred grand in the bank by now. Or I might study journalism, become a sports columnist. Like you, right? I can give readers an athlete’s perspective of the game. There’s money in that.”

Edmund smiles but doesn’t bother to explain that in the writing profession, if such a raffish activity can be considered a profession at all, money is nearly impossible to come by. Why
should
he explain any of this? What does the Minotaur know about the nuances of language? He has never read the great books, and while it is true that Edmund has never read most of them either, not from start to finish, he has made a concerted effort to
try
to read them—
Moby-Dick
,
Ulysses
,
Gravity’s Rainbow
—monumental works of the human imagination that demand a mediator stand between them and the common reader, a self-appointed priesthood charged with interpreting the avalanche of words that make as much sense as certain passages from the gospels, Gnostic or canonical.

The Jesuits do not consider reading an especially spiritual exercise. They are practical men who believe all intellectual endeavors should have practical applications. Only geniuses, schizophrenics, and schismatics experience the numinous and transcendent while reading books. Ah, but the thrill of witnessing physical punishment on the holy ground of a football field can send true believers into fits of ecstasy. For this reason, the principal frequently asks students to get down on their knees and pray on the Minotaur’s behalf.

Can the man be serious, Edmund wonders? Does he actually think the creator of the universe will answer such prayers? What the principal doesn’t seem to understand is that prayer, like reading and writing, is a solitary pursuit. In his feature column, Edmund includes a passage from scripture: “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

His pen drips with special contempt for the Minotaur, who as the Jesuits continually like to point out, “is blessed with supernatural talent and ability.” But herein lies a conundrum that Edmund is quick to expose. “Is talent really a
blessing
,” he asks his readers, “a
supernatural
phenomenon bestowed upon the pious, the humble, the meek, by a compassionate God? Or is it a purely
natural
phenomenon, inherited from selfish,
battle-hardened genes and exploited, often by the least worthy among us, to attain goals that are less than admirable? The Church seems to hold contradictory views on the subject.”

The Jesuits express their consternation with this pabulum, particularly the garrulous principal, who suggests that with a little more Christian servility Edmund might one day be blessed with a special gift of his own: “From piety comes wisdom and from wisdom comes greatness.”

Edmund bows his head and endures this tedious tongue-lashing, but he can detect a note of insincerity in the man’s voice. Though he never tires of saying that everyone is equal in the eyes of God, the principal clearly favors some boys over others. After all, the principal would never dream of interrupting class to ask his flock to hold an all-night vigil for an aspiring writer, especially one like Edmund Campion, a humble child of God quietly toiling away in the shadows, forging a dangerous work of art that will expose the hypocrisies of this school and its antiquated priesthood.

Like a monk charged with the illumination of a manuscript, Edmund spends many lonely afternoons sequestered in the library, but despite his hard work and dedication he makes very little progress on his short story for
The Millstone
’s fiction contest, and when the deadline finally arrives, he is left with a pile of hastily revised drafts, each one worse than the one before. In fact, he has revised “The Lady Who Loved Lightning” so many times, that it no longer makes much sense to him. Maybe like his vigorous jack-off sessions, it never made any sense to begin with, and yet a long time ago someone pondered the sad and ridiculous life of Onan and made even
that
a sin. Our most desperate attempts at distraction are said to be evil, and Edmund is surprised that the priests haven’t yet condemned creative writing as self-abuse, the spilling of intellectual seed, the murder of a million sacred ideas.

In frustration he signs the smudged and crinkled manuscripts with a series of preposterous non de plumes—Pink E. Vintage, Kit Van Peeking, Kate E. Kingpin—but he knows that a serious and discerning editor like Batya Pinter will see through the ruse and recognize his distinctive style.

Oppressive thoughts of failure begin to weigh heavily on him, but he persists with this hopeless enterprise until he has a neatly typed final draft free of spelling and grammatical errors. While the mechanics are flawless, the story itself is trash, there can be no denying this. The prose is mannered, the symbols obvious—white doves, red roses, gently ringing chimes. The plot concerns a 17-year-old boy, who over the course of the semester, becomes so infatuated with his teacher that he boldly makes a pass at her. She resists his advances, but the principal, who happens to be snooping outside the classroom, sees the clumsy kiss, misinterprets the situation, and has the woman sacked.

Edmund tries to conquer his self-doubt by imagining a luminary like Nabokov submitting one of his own stories to a silly contest. Had he been a young man today, Nabokov would probably need to enroll in a creative writing seminar, forced to listen to the inane comments of his fellow students, those sensitive and easily offended part-time scribblers who complain without end that they don’t
feel
the story, that it’s well written, yes, but that it’s still missing something, that it’s nasty, malicious, hurtful, all under the
direction of an indifferent instructor who pinches her chin and silently ponders her own successes and failures.

He wonders why any reasonable human being would want to write for a living, why anyone would do something so egregiously masochistic. He comes to the conclusion that, at least for those with an artistic temperament, life needs to be unnecessarily difficult and unpleasant; artists yearn for anguish, and when misery cannot be found, they simply invent anguish for themselves. It keeps things interesting. And that’s a writer’s main obligation to the reader, isn’t it? To keep things interesting?

When the library closes at six o’clock, Edmund gathers up the pages and tries to prepare himself for his fate, but before he makes the arduous climb up the stairs to
The Millstone
’s office, he must first visit the Bunker to retrieve his camera, lenses, and several rolls of film. Tomorrow is the Holy War, the most important football game of the entire season, and he is responsible for chronicling the team’s inevitable victory, a contest that will guarantee the Minotaur’s status as a legendary sports figure.

When he descends into the subbasement, Edmond is relieved to discover that his friends have already cleared out for the night, presumably gone to their various parties. It’s Halloween, he almost forgot, a night of mist and clouds, a night of black and gritty winds, a night when mischievous boys are transformed by the ripe breath of autumn into dumb, lumbering beasts, howling and leaping in anticipation of the moonrise. But Edmund, left alone in this dank, dripping pit to ponder his inferiority as a writer, feels that he has become a ghost—invisible, insubstantial, utterly insignificant.

The offices of
The Millstone
are a honeycomb of six interconnected rooms, each one guarded by a set of gargoyle bookends squatting on cluttered shelves, their unblinking eyes scanning the stairway for any unworthies who dare enter that sanctum sanctorum. They are the devourers of uninspired tales, shitting them out in hard little pellets on the windowsills and leaving them to freeze against the frosted panes of glass. Edmund imagines the gargoyles fluttering down from these shelves late at night, creeping through the crackling maple leaves to whisper their secrets in the ears of those who have the gift to decipher their cryptic tongue and to transcribe it for readers who will then tremble at the power of their singular vision.

Hoping to slip his manuscript under the door and hurry away, Edmund reaches the landing and is surprised to see the door wide open. The walls dance with dappled blue moonlight that seems to blur the edges of things. He pauses. Behind a massive oak desk cluttered with dog-eared manuscripts sits Batya Pinter, a dark presence extracted from a beautiful body. She drinks one cup of tea after another, shaking her head, snickering, scowling, murmuring unholy things under her breath. In her hand she holds a red pen the way a butcher holds a serrated knife before a steaming carcass on a slaughterhouse floor, and she uses it with skill and precision to slash sentences and to scribble hostile comments in the margins. She tears out entire pages and feeds them to a shredder, conveniently located next to her chair.

Edmund backs away from the office, cringing every time the floorboards creak and echo through the desolate archways. He decides to leave the building without submitting his story. He cannot face his teacher, cannot in good conscience show her this
insular schoolboy melodrama he has written, but when he hears the word “plagiarism” he is forced to stop and listen closely to the sibilant whispers inside. Batya Pinter, he realizes, is not alone. Beautiful women rarely are.

“There’s no work on your part,” she assures a figure standing just outside Edmund’s line of vision. “None whatsoever. Just relax. Relax and enjoy.”

“What if someone catches us?”

“No one visits this office. Least of all the Jesuits. It’s six flights up.”

“I don’t know …”

“Trust me. Here, let me help you with that.”

“I’m not so sure about this.”

“You want to pass my class, don’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Plagiarism is a serious offense, my boy, and you don’t really expect me to believe that you’ve written this essay all by yourself, do you?”

“Oh, hell.”

“Wait. Let me take it out. That’s no
petseleh
you have there,
gunsel
.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“This won’t take long, will it?”

“That’s all
up
to you.”

Batya Pinter laughs at her own pun, but she is so mesmerized by the monstrous thing pulsing before her that the laughter dies deep in her throat. She wheels her chair forward, positions her head, opens her mouth. The Minotaur steps forward, stamps his feet, grinds his pelvis against her puckered lips. His eyes roll back until they are white. He runs his fingers through her shining hair.

Shaking with outrage, feeling betrayed in a million different ways, Edmund gasps and staggers against the wall. His fingertips go numb, and he almost drops the pages of his manuscript to the floor. He forces himself to count backwards from ten, takes a deep breath. He can easily imagine the awful things the Minotaur will do to him if he is caught. He turns to leave but then has a sudden flash of inspiration, an idea so vulgar, salacious, and unambiguously American that it cannot but change the course of his life. Suppressing his misery and heartache, Edmund opens the camera case, carefully loads the film, and attaches the telephoto lens.

The Minotaur gasps. “What the hell was
that
?”

But Batya Pinter can only gurgle, and choke, and try to reassure him with her bulging blue eyes. Her head never stops bobbing.

Edmund focuses the camera as best he can. It’s a lowlight situation—the pictures will be a little grainy, that’s to be expected—but he has an unwavering faith in his abilities as a photojournalist. He may not be a great writer of fiction, but he can take a damn good picture, and he has just stumbled upon the story of the year, or at least the story of the week (stories rarely last much longer than that these days), a scene of complete and total depravity. It will almost certainly lead to an arrest, criminal charges, a drawn-out legal battle. The media jackals will salivate at this simple story of a scarlet woman who has robbed a vulnerable boy of his innocence and reduced a mighty empire to ashes.