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, kindnes
s, 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.”
“Couldn’t take what?” I asked him.
“Well, for one thing, I don’t condone adultery. And okay, those weeks that I was at Walter Reed, he says he could get off of work—and I accept that, I understand it. But he could have called me every once in a while, instead of me always calling him? But you know what was really messing me up when I got down there to Pittsburgh? Was how young he seemed. He kept asking me things like, what did I think of Kanye West’s music, and did I think he should hold on to Kevin Garnett in this fantasy basketball league he was in or trade him. And how he wasn’t just in this league; he was commissioner of it. Like that was some big mark of distinction: commissioner of make-believe. And I wanted to slam him, one-handed, against the wall, the way he used to do to me, and scream in his face, ‘Stop it! Act your age!’…I didn’t do it, though. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. ‘Honor thy father,’ you know what I’m saying? So instead, I grabbed my car keys, got out of there, and took off. It was messing with my head, you know? You get out of there alive, more or less, wait for your father to come see you at the hospital you’re stuck at, and when you finally go to see him, he’s younger than you are.”
My mind searched for something useful to say, but all I could come up with was something to ask. “How long were you over there?”
“Thirty-six months total. Got home for Christmas in oh-five. An eight-week furlough, it was supposed to be, but they pulled us back twelve days early. Rumsfeld’s orders. ‘Rummie’s dummies,’ we used to call ourselves.”
“So every time you turn on the TV, someone who’s never been over there the way you have is giving an opinion on Operation Iraqi Freedom. Pull out. Stay the course. I’m curious, Kareem. What are your politics?”
“My politics?” He shot me a quick glance, then looked away again. “I voted for W, if that’s what you mean. Both times. No way I was voting for Kerry.”
“You think it’s worth it? That we’re over there for the right reasons?”
He shrugged. “Politics is a luxury you can’t necessarily afford when you’re over there. You just get up, do your job, and embrace the suck.”
He raised his prosthetic hand and made the wrist rotate. A soft mechanical whirring accom
panied the back and forth motion. “I was a ‘single-digit midget’ when this happened. That’s what they call you when you got less than ten days left before you get out. Only had seventy-two hours to go when we got waxed. Me and my buddy Kelsey, this guy from North Carolina.”
I asked him what happened.
“We were on patrol together in a Humvee, Kelsey and me. And Kelse goes, ‘What’s that up yonder?’ and I go, ‘What do you mean? Those trunk monkeys on the bridge?’ And Kelsey goes, ‘No, no, not them, that black thing.’ And I go, ‘What black thing?’ because I didn’t see any black thing, okay? And that’s all I remember.
“They said that, after the explosion, I was wandering around in a daze, gushing like Old Faithful, and trying to pick up pieces of my buddy with a hand that wasn’t there anymore. I took some sniper fire, they said—couple of Ali Babas shooting at me from a rooftop. Trying to finish the job, I guess. The trunk monkeys who were covering us got one of ’em, they said, but the other one got away. I don’t happen to remember any of it.
“They medevaced me to a hospital north of Baghdad. Stabilized me and sent me on to Germany. I was there for ten days. Then they flew me back stateside. I was stuck in Walter Reed for six weeks. My wife and my mother came to see me a couple of times. And Kelsey’s family—his mom and dad and his sister. Which was pretty decent of them, I thought, because, you know. Lose your son like that, your brother, and then you drive all those miles to give comfort to the guy who was sitting right there next to him and survived it?”
I asked him when he’d finally gotten back home to his family.
“In May. End of May. They had a party for me—my mother’s people. It was at my aunt and uncle’s. You know those yard signs—‘Let’s Support Our Troops’? They’d stuck them up, all over their lawn, signs and balloons. And there were maybe sixty, seventy people at that party. Friends, relatives, some cousins from Florida that I hadn’t seen in years. My aunt had gotten this sheet cake made and, I don’t know how they did it, but there was this big picture of me on it. This picture of me in my dress uniform. But it was edible, you know? And my daughter? Keesha? When they cut the cake? She was sitting on my lap, eating her piece, and she says, ‘Look, Daddy, I’m eating your face.’ And everybody thought that was so funny, you know what I’m saying? Everybody in that crowded room was laughing but me. Because Kelsey? When his family came to see me at Walter Reed? His father told me, when it was just me and him in the room, that that bomb had blown Kelsey’s face off. So I didn’t think it was funny what Keesha said. And I got so mad that I shoved her onto the floor. Hard, they said. She fell facedown, dropped her cake, started crying. And it was bad, you know? Me, losing it like that with my daughter? With my family watching?…The thing is, you get into these situations over there. Exchange gunfire with four or five hajis, maybe, and when you pursue them, they duck into private homes, apartment buildings. And there’s kids living in these places. But it’s self-defense, you know? You see someone rearing back to lob a grenade at you, you got to shoot whether there’s kids caught in the crossfire or not.”