The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (62 page)

I went back inside. Fed the cat, packed my briefcase for the teaching day ahead. On my way out, that word came to me: bifurcation. I checked my watch, looked over at the computer. The screen saver was on; I’d forgotten to close it down the night before. I sat. Googled
chaos theory bifurcation.

And son of a bitch, what was the first listing that rose up from cyberspace? An article by my airplane buddy, Mickey Schmidt. I’d called him, slurring drunk, at midnight on Y2K as the tectonic plates of time were shifting from the twentieth century to the twenty-first.
Sure you remember me,
I’d insisted.
You said you were writing a book
about gambling. You asked me to hold your hand during takeoff because you were afraid to fly.

And did you? No, you didn’t. You couldn’t do that one small thing….

Why don’t you ever hug me back?
she’d wanted to know—the mother who hadn’t really been my mother. The mother they’d passed off as mine….

“Emotional castrato,” Francesca had etched onto the face of my computer monitor the day she left me. Wife number two: she’d had the same complaint as wives number one and three. I saw Maureen, standing there in our Colorado living room, our signal, the lit candle, flickering between us.
Come upstairs. Love me. Be close to me.
But I’d withheld myself, as usual, and now withholding myself was one of the house rules: a quick embrace across the visiting room table, a peck on the cheek, no handholding. Guards and surveillance cameras were watching….

I clicked the mouse. Scrolled down. And there it was, in Mickey Schmidt’s own words: “Bifurcation occurs when the environment of a potentially chaotic system destabilizes due to stress over time, or to some inciting disturbance, explosive or catastrophic. When perturbation occurs, an attractor draws the trajectories of the disturbance and, at the point of transition, the system bifurcates and is propelled to a new order of self-organization, or else it disintegrates.”

I thought about all this on my drive over to Oceanside, where the lawn signs and bumper stickers I passed—”Let’s Support Our Troops,” “Sleep Well Tonight—Our Marine Has Your Back,” “There Were No WMDs—They LIED,” “Impeach Bush”—spoke of our deep division, our
bifurcation
since 9/11…. Whether it was “Bush and Cheney’s bullshit war” or “Mr. Lincoln’s fratricidal war” or the vengeful war against their own that Eric and Dylan had waged: war begat chaos and altered everything. I thought about Private First Class Kendricks in my Quest class: who had Kareem Kendricks been, I wondered, before he went over there to fight the insurgency and got his hand blown off? … Thought about how chaos had descended
on the Columbine families. They’d sent their kids off to school that morning, lulled by the assumption that school was safe…. Thought about Charlie and Lizzy—how the war had pretty much ended their marriage, how their children’s lives had bifurcated. Levi and Edmond had marched off to war to end slavery and had lost their lives to the cause. Their brother, my great-great-grandfather, had marched out onto a Broadway stage to reinforce all the ugly stereotypes and had been lauded and rewarded for it—at least until the night his benefactor went up in flames. But there was more to Willy’s story than that. There had to be. Because as Janis had put it, I was here, wasn’t I?

Perturbation, chaos, bifurcation: it was just as Mickey Schmidt had written: some explosion—as local as rifle fire, as worldwide as war—can set things reeling in a whole different direction, can cause a fork in the road. And one path may lead to disintegration, the other to a reordered world.

So maybe Janis had been right that day when we’d gone up to see the crumbling Memorial Arch that Lizzy and her granddaughter Lydia had seen unveiled and dedicated. Maybe my ancestors
could
teach me something….

And maybe I’d better put all of that aside for now, because my mission that day was to try and somehow convince seventeen skeptical community college students that the ancient myth of Theseus and the Minotaur could inform their lives. Well, good luck with that one, Quirk. Wishing you all the best with Mission: Impossible….

Order →Inciting disturbance →CHAOS →Order Restored

Recapping the felt pen I’d used to scrawl the myth’s equation, I turned from the whiteboard back to them. “So by the end of the story, Theseus has slain the Minotaur, sacrificed his kill to the gods, and escaped from the imprisoning maze. Athens has been restored to order, until the gods’ next intervention for good or ill. But let’s backtrack, okay? What would you identify as the ‘inciting disturbance’ of this story—the thing that called the Minotaur into existence in the first place?”

Hipólito’s leg pumped up and down with restless boredom. Devin dozed beneath the brim of his ball cap. Kahlúa miscalculated that her text-messaging would be undetectable from my vantage point. My eyes moved from her dancing fingers to Private First Class Kendricks. As always, he was dressed in sand-colored camouflage. As always, he was seated in back, apart from the others. His eyes shifted nervously. His hands rested against his desktop, the fingers of his good hand steepled with the metal fingers of his prosthesis.

“The inciting disturbance?” I asked again. “The thing that threw everything else out of kilter?”

I waited for them. They waited for me.

“Kahlúa? What do you think?” Busted, she dropped her cell phone into her oversized orange bag and shrugged guiltily.

“Someone else?”

No one else. Well, okay, they owned this uncomfortable silence. Let them live with it.

Marisol raised a tentative hand. Poor, sweet Mari: the student most willing to volunteer and least likely to have a correct response. “Was it when the monster ate all the human sacrifices?”

I scanned the others’ blank faces. “Mari proposes that the Minotaur’s periodic devouring of the seven youths and seven maidens is the inciting disturbance. Agree? Disagree?”

Ibrahim’s eyes bounced to the board and back. He shook his head.

“That’s a result, not the cause.”

“Yeah, man,” Manny agreed. “That’s like saying that the soldiers coming back in body bags caused the war in Iraq.”

Iraq: the word triggered my involuntary glance at Private First Class Kendricks back there. A few of the others looked back, too. Until then, Private Kendricks had been having one of his less kinetic mornings, but our glances set him in motion. It had begun three or four classes ago: Kareem Kendricks’s pacing and desk-switching back there. There’d been a complaint—a hushed after-class conversation with Daisy and Marisol. “He kinda freaks us out,” Marisol had said. “Makes it hard to concentrate.” Reluctantly, I’d promised to speak to him about it without mentioning them specifically.

And I had, too, in the hallway before the next class. PFC Kendricks had responded defensively. How did I think he’d survived numerous gun battles during three tours of duty? he asked. By making himself a hard target—
that
was how. I’d wanted to point out the obvious: that no one in class was shooting at him. Instead, I’d suggested that maybe we could take a few minutes at the beginning of class so that he could speak briefly about his experiences over there—that the others might better understand his restlessness if they had a context for it.
He’d shaken his head emphatically. Did I want him to drop the class? Was that what I was trying to say? No, no, I’d assured him; of course not. Instead, I’d dropped the issue, letting him wander at will, despite our collective discomfort. I mean, what did it matter if he moved around back there? Who did it hurt?

“Okay. Good point, guys,” I told Manny and Ibrahim. “But if we rule out the sacrificing of Athens’ youth to the voracious Minotaur, then what
was
the inciting disturbance?”

“When the queen did it with the white bull?” Hipólito asked.

“Eww,” Ashleigh said. “She had sex with a
bull?
”

“Yeah, like
you
read the assignment,” Ozzie noted.

“Shut up, Oswaldo. I had to work a double shift yesterday. Okay?”

“All right, let’s stay on course here,” I said. “Let’s go back to the beginning. King Minos asks the gods to give him a gift that will signify he’s a favored son. Poseidon obliges, and the spectacular white bull emerges from the sea. But as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. Minos’s queen becomes so enamored of the creature that she craves him sexually. Why??”

“Same reason the ladies can’t resist me,” Ozzie said. “Just too damn fine a specimen.”

“Pfft,” Ashleigh fired back. “Your mirror must be cracked.”

“Because Poseidon put a spell on her,” Daisy said. “So that whenever she looked at the white bull, she got …”

“Damp in her drawers,” Ozzie stage-whispered. The guys around him grinned. Devin came out from under his ball cap.

“Daisy’s right,” I said. “But
why
did Poseidon put a spell on her?”

“To embarrass her husband, King Midas or whatever,” Hip said.

“It’s Minos, not Midas—that’s a whole other myth. But yes. Poseidon wanted to humiliate Minos by having his wife cuckold him with the white bull. Why?”

“Whass ‘cuckold’?” Hipólito asked. At the back of the room, Private Kendricks chuckled at some private joke.

“When a wife cheats on her husband,” someone said.

I saw Paul Hay, up there on his roof. Saw the pipe wrench….

“Because after Poseidon sent him that bull, he was supposed to kill it,” Marisol said. “Sacrifice it or whatever.”

“Show Poseidon some props,” Hip concurred. “Only he didn’t do it.”

I nodded. “Why not?”

“The ‘inciting disturbance’ was Minos’s pridefulness. He failed to humble himself to his higher power.” At first I didn’t realize that it was Private Kendricks who had spoken. Then I saw him back there, bouncing up and down on his heels, hyper-engaged. We were three weeks past mid-semester. This was the first time he had volunteered in class.

“Mr. Kendricks is right!” I said, more enthusiastically than I’d meant to. “Minos was so proud of his prize bull that he couldn’t bring himself to slaughter it in gratitude. So Poseidon answers his arrogance by afflicting his queen with a sort of sexual madness. She commits bestiality and gives birth to a freak of nature—a dangerous half human half beast who must be imprisoned inside the labyrinth and who can only be appeased by the slaughter of innocents … by the slaughter of … and uh … and …”

They were there, at the rear of the classroom, instead of Kendricks. Eric and Dylan, geared up and smirking at me. A wave of nausea overtook me. I faltered, grabbed the edge of my desk. “Excuse me,” I said.

In the safety of the empty corridor, I squatted, bent my head, took some deep breaths. I broke out in a clammy sweat.

“You okay, Mr. Quirk?” I turned and faced Ibrahim’s dark worried eyes.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. Got a little dizzy for a second there, that’s all.” He followed me back in. “Okay,” I said. “Sorry about that. Where were we?” I sat behind my desk. Kept my hands in my lap so they wouldn’t see that they were shaking.

It was Manny who brought us back. “Mr. Quirk, ain’t pride one of
the whataya-call-its? Seven deadly sins? We were just talking about them in my ethics class.”

They were watching me, waiting, each face a study in innocence.

“Well, the uh … the seven deadly sins is a Christian concept. But certainly the ancient Greeks would have exerted an influence on the Christian value system. Their philosophers and storytellers …”

Were they gone now? Were we all safe again?

“Excuse me,” I said. “Lost my train of thought. Where was I?”

“The philosophers.”

“Oh, right. Well, I think … I think it’s fair to argue that the ancient Greek philosophers and storytellers laid down the cornerstone for the ethics of Western culture. Because what are all these age-old stories we’ve been studying, if not lessons about how to manage the human condition? How those of us in civilized society should and shouldn’t live our lives?”

Someone wanted to know what the other six deadly sins were.

“Being a glutton’s one, I remember,” Manny said. “And being lazy.”

Tunisia, the daughter of a minister, chimed in. “Greed. Anger. Lust.”

“Passing gas in public,” Ozzie quipped. “Talking on your cell phone while you’re driving.”

Everyone laughed except Private Kendricks, who volunteered for the
second
time that semester. “The seven deadly sins are pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust.” He’d begun pacing again, looking at nothing, at no one. “And the seven contrary virtues are humility, kindness, patience, diligence, generosity, abstinence, and chastity.”

“Chastity?” Ozzie said. “What fun is that, man?”

Private Kendricks stopped in his tracks and addressed him directly.

“This is a class, not a comedy club. Show a little respect.”

His reprimand triggered an uneasy silence. They lowered their
eyes, shifted in their seats. Chagrined, Ozzie retaliated. “Hey, G.I. Joe. Take a chill pill, man.”

“Man?” Kendricks shot back. “What do you know about being a man?”

Before I could summon the words to put out this little brush fire, Devin opened his mouth and fanned the flames. “Yo, Oz. He just got you bad, man.”

“Yeah, man,” Ozzie said. “Let’s all give G.I. Joe a hand. Cuz, you know, he could use one.”

All eyes—my own included, unfortunately—tracked Private Kendricks’s prosthesis. “Okay, knock it off!” I said, my voice raised. “This is a college class, remember? Save your trash-talking for the playground.”

Ozzie covered his smile with his hand. Kendricks crash-landed in a seat. He was breathing hard, nostrils flared.

Mercifully, it was almost time to wrap things up anyway. I reminded them to check the syllabus for Thursday’s assignment and told them they could go. “Come by my office if you have any questions about the paper that’s coming up.” Private Kendricks bolted out the door.

“That was a cheap shot,” I told Ozzie as he passed me on his way out.

“Whatever,” he said, neither facing me nor stopping.

“You make another remark like that, and I’ll toss you out of here.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he said again. His gait was a little cockier than usual, a little more face-savingly macho. In the corridor, his buddies welcomed him with hoots and high fives. Asshole, I mumbled. Assholes….

I stared past the empty desks to the back of the room—the spot where their ghosts had been. Why, out of nowhere, in the middle of a class … But hadn’t they threatened as much, in those basement videos they’d left behind? Hadn’t they warned us they were coming back to haunt us?

IN THE FACULTY LOUNGE AT
lunchtime, I tried my best to filter out the usual verbal spam: how Maggie Bass’s search for a mother-of-the-bride dress was going, how the planned relocation of the faculty parking lot from the east side of campus to the west was going to ruin everyone’s lives. In the four years I’d been teaching at Oceanside, I’d made no real friends. Once an adjunct, always an adjunct. Plus there was the notoriety factor, I figured: he’s the husband of that woman who … But truth be told, I hadn’t exactly extended myself to any of them either. So there was no one, really, to run things by after that unsettling class—no one to ask what I might do about Kendricks’s distracting behavior and the class’s intolerance of it. Unless I called Counseling Services. Maybe I could get someone there to call him in and talk to him. If it
was
PTSD, then Kendricks denied it at his peril. He needed treatment. Medication, maybe—something to calm his agitation…. But hey, was that
my
business? There were limits, lines not to overstep. I was only his lit teacher. And anyway, the semester would be over in another three weeks. I was the only one who had to face him when he was back there, doing his thing. If the others didn’t like it, they should just ignore it and face the front.

I finished my lunch in silence, give or take a few perfunctory pleasantries, then headed down to the copying room to run some stuff off. Wendy Woodka, two teachers ahead of me in line, had a whole
folder
of material she was running off, thirty copies at a clip. There was a paper jam, a toner cartridge replacement. What should have taken me five minutes took fifteen, which made me late for my office hours. Well, no big deal, I told myself. No one usually showed up anyway.

But someone had. Approaching my office from the other end of the corridor, I watched him in silhouette against the staircase window. He was pacing, checking his watch, his cell phone. “Kareem?”

He pivoted so abruptly that I reared back. Catching someone off guard like that in Iraq could probably get you killed, I thought.

“Sorry to keep you waiting.” I fumbled with my key ring. “Kind of a madhouse at the copying machine. You been here long?”

Instead of answering the question, he informed me that he had to be in New London for a four p.m. appointment. So what was the problem? I wondered. It was ten past one. New London was only twenty minutes away.

I swung the door open and gestured toward the swivel chair opposite my desk. “Have a seat,” I said. “You here to talk about the paper?”

He shook his head. He sat. I sat. He didn’t look at me. Didn’t speak.

“So I was glad to see you volunteer in class today,” I said. “I hope you’ll keep contributing like that. You have a lot to offer.” He nodded. Still no eye contact.

“And about that crack Ozzie made? I checked him on it after class. I suspect it was more face-saving than malicious. Try and let it go, okay?”

He smiled. Swiveled. “They’re all so young, aren’t they? Maturity-wise, I mean. Not age-wise. Ozzie and I went to the same high school. He’s actually a year older than me, believe it or not.”

“Well, I suspect Ozzie hasn’t seen as much of the world as you have. The army must grow you up pretty fast, I imagine. In wartime, especially.”

He spoke not to me but to the philodendron on my filing cabinet. “I drove down to Pittsburgh to visit my dad last weekend. Him and his ‘shack-up’—the woman he met online and left my mother for. He hadn’t bothered to come and see me when I was in Walter Reed, but he’d bought us tickets to the Steelers game on Sunday, and he thought that was gonna make everything all right again. I was supposed to stay the weekend and head back on Monday. But I took off early
Sunday morning, while they were still sleeping. I had to. I couldn’t take it.”