"They're pretty busy," Jake said.
Mr. Bissette nodded. "Well, I have enjoyed you. I just wanted to say so . . . and that I'm looking forward to having you back for French II next year."
"Thanks," Jake said, and wondered what Mr. Bissette would say if he added, But I don't think I'll be taking French II next year, unless I can get a correspondence course delivered to my postal box at good old Sunnyvale.
Joanne Franks, the school secretary, appeared in the doorway of the Common Room with her small silver-plated bell in her hand. At The Piper School, all bells were rung by hand. Jake supposed that if you were a parent, that was one of its charms. Memories of the Little Red Schoolhouse and all that. He hated it himself. The sound of that bell seemed to go right through his head--
I can't hold on much longer, he thought despairingly. I'm sorry, but I'm losing it. I'm really, really losing it.
Mr. Bissette had caught sight of Ms. Franks. He turned away, then turned back again. "Is everything all right, John? You've seemed preoccupied these last few weeks. Troubled. Is something on your mind?"
Jake was almost undone by the kindness in Mr. Bissette's voice, but then he imagined how Mr. Bissette would look if he said: Yes. Something is on my mind. One hell of a nasty little factoid. I died, you see, and I went into another world. And then I died again. You're going to say that stuff like that doesn't happen, and of course you're right, and part of my mind knows you're right, but most of my mind knows that you're wrong. It did happen. I did die.
If he said something like that, Mr. Bissette would be on the phone to Elmer Chambers at once, and Jake thought that Sunnyvale Sanitarium would probably look like a rest-cure after all the stuff his father would have to say on the subject of kids who started having crazy notions just before Finals Week. Kids who did things that couldn't be discussed over lunch or cocktails. Kids Who Let Down The Side.
Jake forced himself to smile at Mr. Bissette. "I'm a little worried about exams, that's all."
Mr. Bissette winked. "You'll do fine."
Ms. Franks began to ring the Assembly Bell. Each peal stabbed into Jake's ears and then seemed to flash across his brain like a small rocket.
"Come on," Mr. Bissette said. "We'll be late. Can't be late on the first day of Finals Week, can we?"
They went in past Ms. Franks and her clashing bell. Mr. Bissette headed toward the row of seats called Faculty Choir. There were lots of cute names like that at Piper School; the auditorium was the Common Room, lunch-hour was Outs, seventh-and eighth-graders were Upper Boys and Girls, and, of course, the folding chairs over by the piano (which Ms. Franks would soon begin to pound as mercilessly as she rang her silver bell) was Faculty Choir. All part of the tradition, Jake supposed. If you were a parent who knew your kid had Outs in the Common Room at noon instead of just slopping up Tuna Surprise in the caff, you relaxed into the assurance that everything was A-OK in the education department.
He slipped into a seat at the rear of the room and let the morning's announcements wash over him. The terror ran endlessly on in his mind, making him feel like a rat trapped on an exercise wheel. And when he tried to look ahead to some better, brighter time, he could see only darkness.
The ship was his sanity, and it was sinking.
Mr. Harley, the headmaster, approached the podium and imparted a brief exordium about the importance of Finals Week, and how the grades they received would constitute another step upon The Great Road of Life. He told them that the school was depending on them, he was depending on them, and their parents were depending on them. He did not tell them that the entire free world was depending on them, but he strongly implied that this might be so. He finished by telling them that bells would be suspended during Finals Week (the first and only piece of good news Jake had received that morning).
Ms. Franks, who had assumed her seat at the piano, struck an invocatory chord. The student body, seventy boys and fifty girls, each turned out in a neat and sober way that bespoke their parents' taste and financial stability, rose as one and began to sing the school song. Jake mouthed the words and thought about the place where he had awakened after dying. At first he had believed himself to be in hell . . . and when the man in the black hooded robe came along, he had been sure of it.
Then, of course, the other man had come along. A man Jake had almost come to love.
But he let me fall. He killed me.
He could feel prickly sweat breaking out on the back of his neck and between his shoulderblades.
"So we hail the halls of Piper,
Hold its banner high;
Hail to thee, our alma mater,
Piper, do or die!"
God, what a shitty song, Jake thought, and it suddenly occurred to him that his father would love it.
2
PERIOD ONE WAS ENGLISH Comp, the only class where there was no final. Their assignment had been to write a Final Essay at home. This was to be a typed document between fifteen hundred and four thousand words long. The subject Ms. Avery had assigned was My Understanding of Truth. The Final Essay would count as twenty-five per cent of their final grade for the semester.
Jake came in and took his seat in the third row. There were only eleven pupils in all. Jake remembered Orientation Day last September, when Mr. Harley had told them that Piper had The Highest Teacher To Student Ratio Of Any Fine Private Middle School In The East. He had popped his fist repeatedly on the lectern at the front of the Common Room to emphasize this point. Jake hadn't been terribly impressed, but he had passed the information along to his father. He thought his father would be impressed, and he had not been wrong.
He unzipped his bookbag and carefully removed the blue folder which contained his Final Essay. He laid it on his desk, meaning to give it a final look-over, when his eye was caught by the door at the left side of the room. It led, he knew, to the cloakroom, and it was closed today because it was seventy degrees in New York and no one had a coat which needed storage. Nothing back there except a lot of brass coathooks in a line on the wall and a long rubber mat on the floor for boots. A few boxes of school supplies--chalk, blue-books and such--were stored in the far corner.
No big deal.
All the same, Jake rose from his seat, leaving the folder unopened on the desk, and walked across to the door. He could hear his classmates murmuring quietly together, and the riffle of pages as they checked their own Final Essays for that crucial misplaced modifier or fuzzy phrase, but these sounds seemed far away.
It was the door which held his attention.
In the last ten days or so, as the voices in his head grew louder and louder, Jake had become more and more fascinated with doors--all kinds of doors. He must have opened the one between his bedroom and the upstairs hallway five hundred times in just the last week, and the one between his bedroom and the bathroom a thousand. Each time he did it, he felt a tight ball of hope and anticipation in his chest, as if the answer to all of his problems lay somewhere behind this door or that one and he would surely find it ... eventually. But each time it was only the hall, or the bathroom, or the front walk, or whatever.
Last Thursday he had come home from school, thrown himself on his bed, and had fallen asleep--sleep, it seemed, was the only refuge which remained to him. Except when he'd awakened forty-five minutes later, he had been standing in the bathroom doorway, peering dazedly in at nothing more exciting than the toilet and the basin. Luckily, no one had seen him.
Now, as he approached the cloakroom door, he felt that same dazzling burst of hope, a certainty that the door would not open on a shadowy closet containing only the persistent smells of winter--flannel, rubber, and wet wool--but on some other world where he could be whole again. Hot, dazzling light would fall across the classroom floor in a widening triangle, and he would see birds circling in a faded blue sky the color of
(his eyes)
old jeans. A desert wind would blow his hair back and dry the nervous sweat on his brow.
He would step through this door and be healed.
br /> Jake turned the knob and opened the door. Inside was only darkness and a row of gleaming brass hooks. One long-forgotten mitten lay near the stacked piles of blue-books in the corner.
His heart sank, and suddenly Jake felt like simply creeping into that dark room with its bitter smells of winter and chalkdust. He could move the mitten and sit in the corner under the coathooks. He could sit on the rubber mat where you were supposed to put your boots in the wintertime. He could sit there, put his thumb in his mouth, pull his knees tight against his chest, close his eyes, and . . . and . . .
And just give up.
This idea--the relief of this idea--was incredibly attractive. It would be an end to the terror and confusion and dislocation. That last was somehow the worst; that persistent feeling that his whole life had turned into a funhouse mirror-maze.
Yet there was deep steel in Jake Chambers as surely as there was deep steel in Eddie and Susannah. Now it flashed out its dour blue lighthouse gleam in the darkness. There would be no giving up. Whatever was loose inside him might tear his sanity away from him in the end, but he would give it no quarter in the meantime. Be damned if he would.
Never! he thought fiercely. Never! Nev--
"When you've finished your inventory of the school-supplies in the cloakroom, John, perhaps you'd care to join us," Ms. Avery said from behind him in her dry, cultured voice.
There was a small gust of giggles as Jake turned away from the cloakroom. Ms. Avery was standing behind her desk with her long fingers tented lightly on the blotter, looking at him out of her calm, intelligent face. She was wearing her blue suit today, and her hair was pulled back in its usual bun. Nathaniel Hawthorne looked over her shoulder, frowning at Jake from his place on the wall.
"Sorry," Jake muttered, and closed the door. He was immediately seized by a strong impulse to open it again, to double-check, to see if this time that other world, with its hot sun and desert vistas, was there.
Instead he walked back to his seat. Petra Jesserling looked at him with merry, dancing eyes. "Take me in there with you next time," she whispered. "Then you'll have something to look at."
Jake smiled in a distracted way and slipped into his seat.
"Thank you, John," Ms. Avery said in her endlessly calm voice. "Now, before you pass in your Final Essays--which I am sure will all be very fine, very neat, very specific--I should like to pass out the English Department's Short List of recommended summer reading. I will have a word to say about several of these excellent books--"
As she spoke she gave a small stack of mimeographed sheets to David Surrey. David began to hand them out, and Jake opened his folder to take a final look at what he had written on the topic My Understanding of Truth. He was genuinely interested in this, because he could no more remember writing his Final Essay, than he could remember studying for his French final.
He looked at the title page with puzzlement and growing unease. MY UNDERSTANDING OF TRUTH, By John Chambers, was neatly typed and centered on the sheet, and that was all right, but he had for some reason pasted two photographs below it. One was of a door--he thought it might be the one at Number 10, Downing Street, in London--and the other was of an Amtrak train. They were color shots, undoubtedly culled from some magazine.
Why did I do that? And when did I do it?
He turned the page and stared down at the first page of his Final Essay, unable to believe or understand what he was seeing. Then, as understanding began to trickle through his shock, he felt an escalating sense of horror. It had finally happened; he had finally lost enough of his mind so that other people would be able to tell.
3
MY UNDERSTANDING OF TRUTH By John Chambers
"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
--T. S. "BUTCH" ELIOT
"My first thought was, he lied in every word."
--ROBERT "SUNDANCE" BROWNING
The gunslinger is the truth.
Roland is the truth.
The Prisoner is the truth.
The Lady of Shadows is the truth.
The Prisoner and the Lady are married. That is the truth.
The way station is the truth.
The Speaking Demon is the truth.
We went under the mountains and that is the truth.
There were monsters under the mountain. That is the truth.
One of them had an Amoco gas pump between his legs and was pretending it was his penis. That is the truth.
Roland let me die. That is the truth.
I still love him.
That is the truth.
"And it is so very important that you all read The Lord of the Flies," Ms. Avery was saying in her clear but somehow pale voice. "And when you do, you must ask yourselves certain questions. A good novel is often like a series of riddles within riddles, and this is a very good novel--one of the best written in the second half of the twentieth century. So ask yourselves first what the symbolic significance of the conch shell might be. Second--"
Far away. Far, far away. Jake turned to the second page of his Final Essay with a trembling hand, leaving a dark smear of sweat on the first page.
When is a door not a door? When it's a jar, and that is the truth.
Blaine is the truth.
Blaine is the truth.
What has four wheels and flies? A garbage truck, and that is the truth.
Blaine is the truth.
You have to watch Blaine all the time, Blaine is a pain, and that is the truth.
I'm pretty sure that Blaine is dangerous, and that is the truth.
What is black and white and red all over? A blushing zebra, and that is the truth.
Blaine is the truth.
I want to go back and that is the truth.
I have to go back and that is the truth.
I'll go crazy if I don't go back and that is the truth.
I can't go home again unless I find a stone a rose a door and that is the truth.
Choo-choo, and that is the truth.
Choo-choo. Choo-choo.
Choo-choo. Choo-choo. Choo-choo.
Choo-choo. Choo-choo. Choo-choo. Choo-choo.
I am afraid. That is the truth.
Choo-choo.
Jake looked, up slowly. His heart was beating so hard that he saw a bright light like the afterimage of a flashbulb dancing in front of his eyes, a light that pulsed in and out with each titanic thud of his heart.
He saw Ms. Avery handing his Final Essay to his mother and father. Mr. Bissette was standing beside Ms. Avery, looking grave. He heard Ms. Avery say in her clear, pale voice: Your son is seriously ill. If you need proof, just look at this Final Essay.
John hasn't been himself for the last three weeks or so, Mr. Bissette added. He seems frightened some of the time and dazed all of the time . . . not quite there, if you see what I mean. Je pense que John est fou . . . comprenez-vous?
Ms. Avery again: Do you perhaps keep certain mood-altering prescription drugs in the house where John might have access to them?
Jake didn't know about mood-altering drugs, but he knew his father kept several grams of cocaine in the bottom drawer of his study desk. His father would undoubtedly think he had been into it.
"Now let me say a word about Catch-22," Ms. Avery said from the front of the room. "This is a very challenging book for sixth-and seventh-grade students, but you will nonetheless find it entirely enchanting, if you open your minds to its special charm. You may think of this novel, if you like, as a comedy of the surreal."
I don't need to read something like that, Jake thought. I'm living something like that, and it's no comedy.
He turned over to the last page of his Final Essay. There were no words on it. Instead he had pasted another picture to the paper. It was a photograph of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He had used a crayon to scribble it black. The dark, waxy lines looped and swooped in lunatic coils.
He could remember doing none of this.
Absolutely none of it.
Now he heard hi
s father saying to Mr. Bissette: Fou. Yes, he's definitely fou. A kid who'd fuck up his chance at a school like Piper HAS to be fou, wouldn't you say? Well. . . I can handle this. Handling things is my job. Sunnyvale's the answer. He needs to spend some time in Sunnyvale, making baskets and getting his shit back together. Don't you worry about our kid, folks; he can run . . . but he can't hide.
Would they actually send him away to the nuthatch if it started to seem that his elevator no longer went all the way to the top floor? Jake thought the answer to that was a big you bet. No way his father was going to put up with a loony around the house. The name of the place they put him in might not be Sunnyvale, but there would be bars on the windows and there would be young men in white coats and crepe-soled shoes prowling the halls. The young men would have big muscles and watchful eyes and access to hypodermic needles full of artificial sleep.
They'll tell everybody I went away, Jake thought. The arguing voices in his head were temporarily stilled by a rising tide of panic. They'll say I'm spending the year with my aunt and uncle in Modesto . . . or in Sweden as an exchange student . . . or repairing satellites in outer space. My mother won't like it . . . she'll cry . . . but she'll go along. She has her boyfriends, and besides, she always goes along with what he decides. She . . . they . . . me . . .
He felt a shriek welling up his throat and pressed his lips tightly together to hold it in. He looked down again at the wild black scribbles snarled across the photograph of the Leaning Tower and thought: I have to get out of here. I have to get out right now.
He raised his hand.
"Yes, John, what is it?" Ms. Avery was looking at him with the expression of mild exasperation she reserved for students who interrupted her in mid-lecture.
"I'd like to step out for a moment, if I may," Jake said.
This was another example of Piper-speak. Piper students did not ever have to "take a leak" or "tap a kidney" or, God forbid, "drop a load." The unspoken assumption was that Piper students were too perfect to create waste byproducts in their tastefully silent glides through life. Once in a while someone requested permission to "step out for a moment," and that was all.
Ms. Avery sighed. "Must you, John?"
"Yes, ma'am."