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space, void of people

I woke up when a hand was gently nudging my shoulder. My neck was stiff. I was still sitting in the library chair. Dr. Hausner was gone. “Miss, I am afraid we are closing.” A woman’s voice. I looked up. Ms. Clarice stood right next to my chair, smiling. All other visitors were gone. I got up drowsily and carefully checked the window reflections, too. All visitors were gone. “Are you alright?” Ms. Clarice inquired. I looked at her closely. Her small golden earrings reflected the fluorescent library lights, transforming the miniature reflections of the library on the convex mirror of the gleaming curves  into a warmer, more elegant version of the actual space. An alternate space more suitable for someone like Dr. Hausner than the mundane space of Summerville library.

“When did Dr. Hausner leave?” I asked. Ms. Clarice narrowed her eyes. She ignored my question.  “You must be very tired,” she replied, “go home and sleep.” “Did you see him?”, I insisted. “Go home and sleep, Miss, I have to switch off the lights now.” I wanted to protest but she anticipated my notion and gently shoved me along. “Come back tomorrow,” she repeated, not unfriendly. We walked down the staircase together.

There was nobody downstairs either. From the winding staircase I could see  the lower floor breathing calmly. The tessellation of the carpet tiles looked like the exposed skin of an ancient creature. An empty library is a marvelous space. Really any space empty of people holds some kind of promise that seems to disappear once it gets populated. When I slowed down to linger on the staircase, I felt Ms. Clarice’s warm hand on my shoulders again, encouraging me to continue down the last few steps. I sighed. “It’s beautiful, the library, “ I said apologetically, “at night, I mean. When all the visitors have left.” We reached the ground floor. I took care not to step on the lines of the irregular tile pattern. I have never been quite able to just move without paying attention to the rhythm of any kind of tile, responding to it in some way, and today was not the day to start with it. Ms. Clarice remained silent while I gingerly crossed the open space. I wondered if I ever would get used to people not answering. Strictly speaking, I had not asked a question though. Ms. Clarice looked the kind of woman who did not have an appreciation for idle conversation.

She waited patiently while I balanced over to the cubbies to pick up my bag. I pulled out my jacket first. A small piece of paper trundled to the floor like a feeble bird. Folded from yellow legal paper. I bent over and picked it up. Ms. Clarice was still waiting for me at the door, so I simply slid it into my pocket, shouldered my bag and walked over. She still smiled, never once complaining about the delay. “Good night now,” she said simply. I nodded. She locked the door right behind me. It was cold outside. When I turned around, the lights in the library had already been switched off. The building looked deserted. I started walking into the evening.

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coloring idaho

My mother was busy preparing dinner and answering questions my sister had while sitting at the big wooden table and doing her homework. This evening she was coloring and cutting out the states and gluing them in the right place on a map of the US. Both my sister and I hated coloring in worksheets and my mother had brought out her expensive Sennelier pastels to persuade my sister to employ some effort on the task. The map as far as it was completed looked like a beautiful velvet patchwork quilt. You can’t achieve that with your Crayolas. I wondered whether her teacher would be able to appreciate the difference.

Montana was already pasted in its proper place. It was colored in layers of gorgeous deep Indigo and now, with a vengeance, Phoebe was wasting pale Vermillion Orange on Idaho. I sat down at the table and watched her. There is something nice about a little kid coloring in even if she detests it. My mother walked past me and ruffled my hair in a distracted way. It was just as much part of her dinner routine as cleaning dishes right after using them. For a moment I was back in a comprehensible, friendly world. No opportunistic cannibalism, no aliens. Phoebe pasted Idaho on to her map and contemplated color choices for Washington State. “Why do they have to be different colors?” she complained but her heart wasn’t in it, you could see that she did enjoy choosing a new pastel stick. According to my mother you can never work with materials that are too good and you should always strive for beauty but I still felt a bit doubtful whether you actually needed art pastels to complete this kind of homework.

Phoebe still had the whole west coast and Alaska to color and paste and she grunted disapprovingly as she studied the worksheet after cutting out Washington State. Washington was going to be Cinnabar Green. I liked the way she held her tongue between her lips when she had to cut something out or color something in. She looked a lot like Plinius, our cat, after his dinner when he sits down on the table and probably contemplates dessert choices waiting outside in the dark beyond the kitchen door. Phoebe looked like that whenever she was focusing on something. Right now she smeared Cinnabar Green all over Washington. The pastel stick made a fat, smacking sound on the paper. At the kitchen bar behind us my mother cracked an egg. The splintering  was very clear and pleasing to me. I thought that recently I had been much more perceptive to small sounds. Only this morning on my way to school I had stopped to listen to the sparrows hopping over the path to the front door of our school, their tiny claws scratching the bricks. How much does a sparrow weigh? 35 g?

Phoebe looked up. “Mommy?” she asked. My mother looked up from her mixing bowl. “Which language do they speak in California?”

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Mobbing

Yesterday I learned about a child who just a few short weeks ago chose to take his own life to end the misery of being mobbed at school. I did not know this child but he was by no means separated from me by those famous six degrees. I can not let this day go by without saying this, stupid, pathetic, insufficient as it might be: I will do whatever I can perceive of doing to not leave a child in need. I will do, actively, what I can do in my own time, in the place that I find myself in, to reach out and make a difference, to change those circumstances that allow this to happen over and over again, laugh at me if you must. But I can’t think about this child without saying that – in the very least – I will try.

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controlling reality

School was almost normal. I focused on everything being just so and despite a rising headache towards later classes I succeeded. If there was any inventing of reality to do I was doing it in the most concentrated way.
The last class of the day, philosophy, a spirited, alas mediocre attempt to make philosophical thought palatable for the average Junior High School Student, started as uneventful as usual. Sometimes I actually had felt sorry for the teacher, Ms. Havenshire, who despite her dedication to teaching managed to neither teach those who were interested in philosophy (as she was slaughtering all logic by simplifying ideas to the point of merely being kitschy allegories) nor those to whom spending any energy on comprehending concepts beyond sports and dating seemed a severe waste. I still kind of admired Ms. Habvenshire as she managed to keep her enthusiasm for us and never really gave up on the class nor let herself be put out by Mark’s (the eighth grade nerd, another proud participant in Supergifted and Supertalented) sniding but acute remarks on her lack of logic nor by mechanical, accurate reproductions of an idea she just had introduced in a kindergarten like cheer.
What she was really aiming for was for us to fill all those beautiful metaphors with the stuff of our own lives. If she was aware – as she must have been – that her efforts were utterly unsuccessful she never let on. After ten minutes of her cheerful chattering I submitted to the chitter of her voice and allowed myself to do the very thing I had told myself I would not: I relaxed. I guess I was feeling safe for a moment, safe enough to allow things to unfold their own way.
Ms. Havenshire voice as a pleasurable background voice I started drifting. I spent the better part of the next fifteen minutes trying to figure out how many leaves there were left on the big chestnut tree facing the classroom window. Increasingly entranced by the precision with which I could see the leaves from where I sat as if someone had drawn them with an ultra-sharp pencil, I slowly grew aware that I had lost my focus on keeping reality in check. Ms. Havnshire’s voice had dropped its harmonious melody. I grew aware that it must have been quiet in the classroom for quite a while and with some effort abandoned my leaf counting quest and returned to the class room. The change in Ms. Havenshire demeanor was subtle but unmistakable.
Just as my fun and laid back mother suddenly appeared to be an edgy, uneasy person, Ms. Havenshire seem to have transformed into a colder and paler version of her former self. She studied the class with a distracted yet discontented look and flatly announced the page in the text book she wanted us to study, of all things Aristoteles’ cave metaphor. After a few short minutes reading time she started quizzing students, much to everyone’s bewilderment because barely any of them had used the five minutes study time to actually study. None of her usual sweet and cheerful forgiveness and patience as she corrected answers and scribbled grades in a small black notebook. She seemed nervous and kept checking the time on a small silver watch I had never seen her wearing before as if she couldn’t wait for class to be over (a sentiment that I shared) and finally she let herself be challenged to a pretty sardonic, almost threatening remark.
She had known Mark Haden all school year long to have a tendency to challenge her carefully prepared explanations in an almost insulting manner, a situation which in turn she, kindly disregarding his rudeness, would use as an educational diving board to engage the rest of the class in some reluctant discussion – but today she took his remarks eye-to-eye.
When asked to read the paragraph about Aristoteles’ cave out loud, Mark had one of his nerdy moments and established with grim determination that there was no way to prove that anything outside his perceived self was more than an illusion of his own brilliant, creative brain, and that he would therefore not be persuaded by a merely illusionary voice to take on any task. She went right over to his desk. It was dead quiet in class. For a moment, I swear, she looked at him like a snake might look at a rabbit before the kill. There was nothing of her usual shy smiling presence left as she hissed at him, eyes slanted: “Mark, believe me, I will establish reality for you in a most convincing way by simply letting you fail this class. Unless you are prepared to regard such an experience as the product of a your brilliant, yet masochistic mind, I suggest you participate in class as required.”
Mark looked genuinely impressed and scared. He stuttered a subdued response and started reading the paragraph out loud. Not much rebellious spirit there. I grinned.
One thing I knew. Ms. Havenshire would never, ever talk like this to any student, she’d rather leave the classroom to cry in the hallway, returning with red eyes, I was supremely sure of that. Whoever was stimulating or better manipulating my brain to recreate my school environment was getting out of their comfort zone. Though I did feel a bit freaked out for a moment when I saw Ms. Havenshire lick her lip with a slender, forked tongue.