IN THE LIGHT OF THE POLITICAL SITUATION OF OUR LATER ADOLESCENCE, ONE OF THE MOST TROUBLING AND MUCH DISCUSSED ASPECTS OF THE TRAUMA FOR THOSE OF US OF THE 4 WAS THAT MR. JOHNSON HAD NOT APPEARED TO CONFRONT, RESIST, OR THREATEN THE ARMED OFFICERS WHO CAME FORCIBLY INTO THE ROOM THROUGH BOTH THE DOOR AND THE EAST WALL’S WINDOWS, BUT MERELY CONTINUED TO WRITE KILL OVER AND OVER AGAIN ON THE CHALKBOARD, WHICH WAS NOW SO FILLED THAT HIS NEWER KILL, KILL THEM’S OVERLAY AND OFTEN OBSCURED HIS EARLIER EXHORTATIONS, FINALLY RESULTING IN LITTLE MORE THAN AN ABSTRACT MASH OF LETTERS ON THE BOARD. WHILE THE JAGGED LENGTH OF CHALK, THE BROAD ARM MOTIONS, AND THE PROXIMITY OF MR. JOHNSON’S BRIEFCASE ON THE DESK WERE CITED AS THE PERCEIVED THREAT TO HOSTAGE SAFETY THAT JUSTIFIED THE SHOOTING IN THE EYES OF THE C.P.D. BOARD OF INQUIRY, THE REAL TRUTH IS THAT IT WAS CLEARLY MR. JOHNSON’S FACIAL EXPRESSION AND SUSTAINED HIGH SOUND, AND HIS COMPLETE OBLIVIOUSNESS TO THE OFFICERS’ COMMANDS TO DROP THE CHALK AND STEP AWAY WITH BOTH HANDS IN FULL VIEW AS HE COPIED HIMSELF WITH EVER INCREASING INTENSITY ONTO THE BOARD’S VERBAL CHAOS, WHICH PROMPTED THEM TO OPEN FIRE. THIS WAS THE ONLY REAL TRUTH—THEY WERE AFRAID.
Of the so-called 4 Hostages, it was only Mandy Blemm and Frank Caldwell (who would later, at Fishinger Secondary, attend both Junior and Senior Prom as a couple, maintaining a steady dating relationship throughout those years in spite of Blemm’s reputation, after which Caldwell enlisted in the U.S. Navy, eventually also serving overseas) who were attentive and aware enough throughout the first part of the incident to recount for DeMatteis and I later how very long it was that Mr. Johnson remained facing and writing jaggedly on the chalkboard while emitting the high, atonal sound while the classroom behind him turned more and more into a bedlam of surreal and nightmarish terror, with some of the children crying and quite a few (Blemm later named them) reverting, under the strain, to early childhood coping mechanisms such as sucking their thumbs, wetting themselves, and rocking slightly in their seats humming disconnected bars of various lullabies to themselves, and Finkelpearl leaned forward over his desktop and threw up, which most of the pupils closest to him appeared to be too mesmerized with fear to even notice. It was in this interval that my own conscious awareness finally left the window’s mesh and returned to the Civics classroom, which to the best of my memory occurred right after the chalk in Mr. Johnson’s hand snapped with a loud sound and he stood rigid with both arms out and his head to the side, the sound he produced rising higher and higher in pitch as he turned around very slowly to face the class, his entire body trembling electrically and his face . . . Mr. Johnson’s face’s character and expression were indescribable. I will never forget it. This was the first part I fully saw of the incident the Dispatch first called Deranged Substitute’s Classroom Terror—Mentally Unbalanced Instructor Stricken at Blackboard, Appears ‘Possessed,’ Threatens Mass Murder, Several Pupils Hospitalized, Unit 4 Board Calls Emergency Session, Bainbridge Under Gun (at that time, Dr. Bainbridge was Superintendent of Schools for Unit 4). Philip Finkelpearl’s throwing up was also a factor. There is something about someone throwing up anywhere within a child’s earshot that serves to direct and concentrate his attention with an almost instant force, and even when my awareness returned in full to the classroom, it was Finkelpearl’s vomitus and the associated sounds and odors of it that I first can recall being struck by. The final frame I remember was when it was revealed in midair, during the ridicule, in a close-up, stop-action view as it rose end over end in the air and the wicked boy prepared to swing his cane, that the true subject of the clay statuette Ruth Simmons had fashioned was, in reality, a human being, who in her distraught distraction she had given four legs instead of two, despite the crude human features, creating a somewhat monstrous or unnatural image as in Greek myth or The Isle of Dr. Moreau. The import of this detail in the narrative I do not remember, though I recall the detail itself very clearly. Nor can I remember for just how long the Civics classroom remained like that, with Mr. Johnson in extremis with both arms extended outward at the chalkboard (when you’ve been intensely preoccupied, coming back to what is actually happening around you is somewhat like coming out of a movie theatre in the afternoon, when the sunlight and sensory press of the street’s activity nearly stun you), looking simultaneously electrocuted and demonically possessed (there is no other way to describe the way his upturned face was transformed, with its look of both suffering and ghastly exultation, or rather it may have been that the two different expressions alternated so rapidly on his uptilted face that in the mind’s perception they became conjoined), and making that sound, with what Ahearn and Ellsberg and others in the front row said looked like every single hair on Mr. Johnson’s head, neck, wrists, and hands standing straight up, and the children in the classroom sitting bolt upright with many of their eyes bulging out and rolling around and around in their heads like cartoon characters’ eyes, with sheer terror. It was in the midst of this scene that Chris DeMatteis awoke in the rear of his row with a small plaintive shout—which is how he sometimes woke up when he had fallen unconscious in school. In retrospect, my impression is that Chris’s absently panicked cry of awakening is what started the class’s other pupils openly screaming and rising from their desks to begin an hysterical mass exodus from the Civics classroom (rather the way one random infantryman’s firing his weapon will precipitate the start of a battle when, up to that point, it had been just two tense and ready armies facing each other with weapons drawn but not yet fired), and what wrested my attention from the sight of Philip Finkelpearl’s vomit hanging in strings and clots from the side of his bolted desktop was the sudden simultaneous mass movement of the class’s pupils as all of them except Chris DeMatteis, Frank Caldwell, Mandy Blemm, and I began running for the door of the classroom, which unfortunately was closed, and the mass of children behind Emily-Ann Barr and the fleet Raymond Gillies (a Negro) and the others who had reached the door first and were clawing hysterically at the knob of the door drove the first children physically into the door with such force that there was a gruesome sound of the impact of someone’s face or head against the thick, frosted glass of the door’s upper half; and, as the door (like all classroom doors of that era) opened inward and there was a rapidly growing mass of panicked children in the way, it seemed a very long time before the door was forced open by someone bulky enough—in hindsight I believe this to have been Gregory Oehmke, who at age ten was already well over 100 pounds and had a neck the same width as his shoulders, and who would also go on to serve overseas, though I base this belief not on directly seeing Oehmke do it but only from noting the brute savagery with which it was yanked open, hitting and scraping several children with the edge of the heavy door as it was forced open, and causing one of the tall Swearingen sisters in roughly the middle of the herd to lose her footing and disappear and presumably get badly trampled in the subsequent exodus, for when the noise of the screaming children receded north up the hallway and the door was slowly closing on its pneumatic hinge, and two unidentified sets of hands reached quickly in to grasp Jan Swearingen’s ankles and pull her from the Civics classroom, she did not move or in any way revive as she slid facedown on the checkered tile, leaving a lengthy smear of either her own blood or someone else’s that was already on the floor from some other mishap at the door, the long braids both Swearingen sisters tended to play with and even to chew on when distracted or tense trailing behind and missing by just inches getting trapped in the crack of the slowly closing door.
IN THESE LATER DISCUSSIONS, IT ALSO EMERGED THAT FRANKIE CALDWELL HAD HYPERVENTILATED FROM TERROR AND BRIEFLY LOST CONSCIOUSNESS DURING THE MASS EXODUS. OF THE 4 UNWITTING HOSTAGES, IT WAS ONLY WE OTHER THREE WHO WERE ACTUALLY CLASSIFIED BY THE SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION AS DEFICIENT OR SLOW. THAT FRANKIE NEVER PROTESTED AGAINST THE PRESS’S ERROR IS TESTIMONY TO THE DEEP EMBARRASSMENT THAT HE, TOO, MUST HAVE FELT AT BEING SO AFRAID.
For my own part, I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life as early as perhaps age seven. I knew, even then, that the dreams inv
olved my father’s life and job and the way he looked when he returned home from work at the end of the day. His arrival was always between 5:42 and 5:45, and it was usually I who was the first to see him come through the front door. What occurred was almost choreographic in its routine. He came in already turning in order to press the door closed behind him. He removed his hat and topcoat and hung the coat in the foyer closet; he clawed his necktie loose with two fingers, took the green rubber band off of the Dispatch, entered the living room, greeted my brother, and sat down with the newspaper to wait for my mother to bring him a highball. The nightmares themselves always opened with a wide angle view of a number of men at desks in rows in a large, brightly lit room or hall. The desks were arranged in precise rows and columns like the desks of an R. B. Hayes classroom, but these were all more like the large, grey steel desks that the teachers had at the front of the room, and there were many, many more of them, perhaps 100 or more, each occupied by a man in suit and tie. If there were windows, I do not remember noticing them. Some of the men were older than others, but they were all obviously adults—people who drove, and applied for insurance coverage, and had highballs while they read the paper before dinner. The nightmare’s room was at least the size of a soccer or flag football field; it was utterly silent and had a large clock on each wall. It was also very bright. In the foyer, turning from the front door while his left hand rose to remove his hat, my father’s eyes appeared lightless and dead, empty of everything we associated with his real persona. He was a kind, decent, ordinary looking man. His voice was deeply pitched but not resonant. Softspoken, he had a sense of humor that kept his natural reserve from seeming remote or aloof. Even when my brother and I were small, we were aware that he spent more time with us and took the trouble to show us that we were important to him a good deal more than most fathers of that era did. (It was many years before I had any real idea of how our mother felt about him.) The foyer was directly off of the living room, where the piano was, and at that time, I often read or played with my trucks outside of kicking range beneath the piano while my brother practiced his Hanons, and I was often the first to register the sound of my father’s key in the front door. It took only four steps and a brief sockslide into the foyer to be able to see him first as he entered on a wave of outside air. I remember the foyer as dim and cold and smelling of the coat closet, the bulk of which was filled with my mother’s different coats and matching gloves. The front door was heavy and difficult to open and close, as if the foyer were somehow pressurized. The door had a small, diamond-shaped window in the center, though we later moved before I was ever tall enough to see out of it. He had to put his side into the door somewhat in order to make it close all the way, and I would not see his face until he turned to remove his hat and coat, but I can recall that the angle of his shoulders as he leaned into the door had the same quality as his eyes. I could not convey this quality now and most assuredly couldn’t have then, but I know that it helped inform the nightmares. His face was not at all like this on weekends off. It is in hindsight that I believe the dreams to have been about adult life. At the time, I knew only their terror—much of the difficulty they complained of in getting me to lie down and go to sleep at night was due to these dreams. Nor could it always have been dusk at 5:42, though that is what I recall its being, and the inrush of outside air he brought with him as cold, and scented with burnt leaves and the sad way the street smelled at twilight, when all of the houses became the same color and all of their porch lights came on like bulwarks against something without name. His eyes when he turned from the door didn’t scare me, but the feeling was somehow related to being scared. Often I still had a truck in my hand. His hat went on the hatrack, his coat shouldered out of, then the coat was folded over his left arm, the closet opened with his right hand, the coat transferred to that hand while the third wooden coathanger from the left is removed with his left hand. There was something about this routine that cast shadows deep down in parts of me I could not access on my own. I knew something of boredom by then, of course, at Hayes, and Riverside, or on Sunday afternoons when there was nothing to do—the fidgety type of childhood boredom that is more like worry than despair. But I do not believe I consciously connected the way my father looked at night with the far different and deeper, soul-level boredom of his job, which I knew was actuarial because in 2nd grade everyone in Mrs. Claymore’s homeroom had had to give a short presentation on what our father’s profession was. I knew that insurance was protection that adults applied for in case of risk, and I knew that it had numbers in it because of the documents that were visible in his briefcase when I got to pop its latches and open it for him, and my brother and I had had the building that housed the insurance company’s HQ and my father’s tiny window in its face pointed out to us by our mother from the car, but the actual specifics of his job were always vague. And they remained so for many years. Looking back, I suspect that there was something of a cover-your-eyes and stop-your-ears quality to my lack of curiosity about just what my father had to do all day. I can remember certain exciting narrative tableaux based around the competitive, almost primitive connotations of the word breadwinner, which had been Mrs. Claymore’s blanket term for our fathers’ occupations. But I do not believe I knew or could even imagine, as a child, that for almost 30 years of 51 weeks a year my father sat all day at a metal desk in a silent, fluorescent lit room, reading forms and making calculations and filling out further forms on the results of those calculations, breaking only occasionally to answer his telephone or meet with other actuaries in other bright, quiet rooms. With only a small and sunless north window that looked out on other small office windows in other grey buildings. The nightmares were vivid and powerful, but they were not the kind from which you wake up crying out and then have to try to explain to your mother when she comes what the dream was about so that she could reassure you that there was nothing like what you just dreamed in the real world. I knew that he liked to have music or a lively radio program on and audible all of the time at home, or to hear my brother practicing while he read the Dispatch before dinner, but I am certain I did not then connect this with the overwhelming silence he sat in all day. I did not know that our mother’s making his lunch was one of the keystones of their marriage contract, or that in mild weather he took his lunch down in the elevator and ate it sitting on a backless stone bench that faced a small square of grass with two trees and an abstract public sculpture, and that on many mornings he steered by these 30 minutes outdoors the way mariners out of sight of land use stars. My father died of a coronary when I was sixteen, and I can acknowledge, despite the obvious shock and loss, that his passing was less hard to bear than much of what I learned about his life when he was gone. For instance, it was very important to my mother that my father’s burial plot be somewhere where there were at least a few trees in view; and given the logistics of the cemetery and the details of the mortuary contract he’d prepared for them both, this caused a great deal of trouble and expense at a difficult time, which neither my brother nor I saw the point of until years later when we learned about his weekdays and the bench where he liked to eat his lunch. At Miranda’s suggestion, I made a point, one spring, of visiting the site where his little square of grass and trees had been. The area had been refashioned into one of the small and largely unutilized downtown parks that were characteristic of the New Columbus renewal programs of the early ’80s, in which there were no longer grass or beech trees but a small, modern children’s play area, with wood chips instead of sand and a jungle gym made entirely of recycled tires. There is also a swingset, whose two empty swings moved back and forth at different rates in the wind the whole time I sat there. For a time in my early adulthood, I had periods of imagining my father sitting on the bench year after year, chewing, and looking at that carved out square of something green, always knowing exactly how much time was left for lunch without taking his watch out. Sadder still was trying to imagine what he thought about as he sat there, imagining
him perhaps thinking about us, our faces when he got home or the way we smelled at night after baths when he came in to kiss us on the top of the head—but the truth is that I have no idea what he thought about, what his internal life might have been like. And that were he alive I still would not know. Or trying (which Miranda feels was saddest of all) to imagine what words he might have used to describe his job and the square and two trees to my mother. I knew my father well enough to know it could not have been direct—I am certain he never sat down or lay beside her and spoke as such about lunch on the bench and the twin sickly trees that in the fall drew swarms of migrating starlings, appearing en masse more like bees than birds as they swarmed in and weighed down the elms’ or buckeyes’ limbs and filled the mind with sound before rising again in a great mass to spread and contract like a great flexing hand against the downtown sky. Trying thus to imagine remarks and attitudes and tiny half anecdotes that over time conveyed enough to her that she would go through hell and back to have his grave site moved to the premium areas nearer the front gate and its little stand of blue pines. It was not quite a nightmare proper, but neither was it a daydream or fancy. It came when I had been in bed for a time and was beginning to fall asleep but only partway there—the part of the featherfall into sleep in which whatever lines of thought you’ve been pursuing begin now to become surreal around the edges, and then at some point the thoughts themselves are replaced by images and concrete pictures and scenes. You move, gradually, from merely thinking about something to experiencing it as really there, unfolding, a story or world you are part of, although at the same time enough of you remains awake to be able to discern on some level that what you are experiencing does not quite make sense, that you are on some cusp or edge of true dreaming. Even now, as an adult, I still can consciously recognize that I am starting to fall asleep when my abstract thoughts turn into actual pictures and tiny films, ones whose logic and associations are ever so slightly off—and yet I am always aware of this, of the illogic and my reactions to it. The dream was of a large room full of men in suits and ties seated at rows of great grey desks, bent forward over the papers on their desks, motionless, silent, in a monochrome room or hall under long banks of high lumen fluorescents, the men’s faces puffy and seamed with adult tension and wear and appearing to hang slightly loose, the way someone’s face can go flaccid and loose when he seems to be staring at something without really seeing it. I acknowledge that I could never convey just what was so dreadful about this tableau of a bright, utterly silent room full of men immersed in rote work. It was the type of nightmare whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your lower chest about what you’re seeing. Some of the men wore glasses; there were a few small, neatly trimmed mustaches. Some had grey or thinning hair or the large, dark, complexly textured bags beneath their eyes that both our father and Uncle Gerald had. Some of the younger men had wider lapels; most did not. Part of the terror of the dream’s wide angle perspective was that the men in the room appeared as both individuals and a great anonymous mass. There were at least 20 or 30 rows of a dozen desks each, each with a blotter and desklamp and file folders with papers in them and a man in a straightback chair behind the desk, each man with a subtly different style or pattern of necktie and his own slightly distinctive way of sitting and positioning his arms and inclining his head, some feeling at their jaw or forehead or the crease of their tie, or biting dead skin from around their thumbnail, or tracing along their lower lip with their pencil’s eraser or pen’s metal cap. You could tell that the particular styles of sitting and the small, absent habits that individualized them had evolved over years or even decades of sitting like this over their job’s work every day, moving purposefully only once in a while to turn a stapled page, or to move a loose page from the left side of an open file folder to the right side, or to close one file folder and slide it a few inches away and then pull another file folder to themselves and open it, gazing down into it as if they were at some terrible height and the documents were the ground far below. If my brother dreamed, we certainly never heard about it. The men’s expressions were somehow at once stuporous and anxious, enervated and keyed up—not so much fighting the urge to fidget as appearing to have long ago surrendered whatever hope or expectation causes one to fidget. A few of the chairs’ seat portions had cushions made of corduroy or serge, one or two of them brightly colored and edged with fringe in such a way that you could tell they had been handmade by a loved one and given as a gift, perhaps for a birthday, and for some reason this detail was the worst of all. The dream’s bright room was death, I could feel it—but not in any way you could convey or explain to my mother if I cried out in fear and she hurried in. And the idea of ever trying to tell my father about the dream was—even later, after it had vanished as abruptly as the problem with reading—unthinkable. The feeling of telling him about it would have been like coming to our Aunt Tina, one of my mother’s sisters (who, among her other crosses to bear, had been born with a cleft palate that operations had not much been able to help, besides also having a congenital lung condition), and pointing out the cleft palate to Aunt Tina and asking her how she felt about it and how her life had been affected by it, at which even imagining the look that would come into her eyes was unthinkable. The overall feeling was that these colorless, empty-eyed, long suffering faces were the face of some death that awaited me long before I stopped walking around. Then, when real sleep descended, it becomes a real dream, and I lost the perspective of someone merely looking at the scene and am in it—the lens of perspective pulls suddenly back, and I am one of them, one part of the mass of grey faced men stifling coughs and feeling at their teeth with their tongues and folding the edges of papers down into complex accordion creases and then smoothing them carefully out once more before replacing them in their assigned file folders. And the dream’s perspective’s view slowly moves further and further in until it is primarily me in view, in close-up, with a handful of other desks’ men’s faces and upper bodies framing me, and the backs of a few photos’ frames and either an adding machine or a telephone at the edge of the desk (mine is also one of the chairs with a handmade cushion). As I can recall it now, in the dream I look neither like my father nor my real self. I have very little hair, and what I do have is wet combed carefully around the sides, and a small Vandyke or maybe goatee, and my face, which is angled downwards at the desktop in concentration, looks as if it has spent the last 20 years pressed hard against something unyielding. And at a certain point in the interval, in the middle of removing a paper clip or opening a desk drawer (there is no sound), I look up and into the lens of the dream’s perspective and stare back at myself, but without any sign of recognition on my face, nor of happiness or fright or despair or appeal—the eyes are flat and opaque, and only mine in the way that a very old album’s photo of you as a child in a setting you have no memory of is nevertheless you—and in the dream, as our eyes meet, it is impossible to know what the adult me is seeing or how I am reacting or if there is anything in there at all.