I soothed her as best I could, speaking softly to distract her, speaking nonsense really—all that matters in such circumstances is the intonation. I murmured. The sea murmured along the shore. As delicately as I could, I held her miniature heel in my hand, took hold of the slick black fragment with the grip of my forceps and pulled it cleanly from the flesh, and I have to tell you, that little girl shrieked till the very glass in the windows rattled, shrieked as if there were no other pain in the world.
BULLETPROOF
The Sticker
I don’t have any children—I’m not even married, not anymore—but last month, though I was fried from my commute and looking forward to nothing more complicated than the bar, the TV and the microwave dinner, in that order, I made a point of attending the Thursday-evening meeting of the Smithstown School Board. On an empty stomach. Sans alcohol. Why? Because of Melanie Albert’s ninth-grade biology textbook—or, actually, the sticker affixed to the cover of it. This is the book with the close-up of the swallowtail butterfly against a field of pure environmental green, standard issue, used in ten thousand schools across the land, and it came to my attention when her father, Dave, and I were unwinding after work at the Granite Grill a week earlier.
The Granite is our local watering hole, and it doesn’t have much to recommend it, beyond the fact that it’s there. Its virtues reside mainly in what it doesn’t offer, I suppose—no waiters wrestling with their consciences, no chef striving to demonstrate his ability to fuse the Ethiopian and Korean culinary traditions, no music other than the hits of the eighties, piped in through a service that plumbs the deep cuts so that you get to hear The Clash doing “Wrong ’Em Boyo” and David Byrne’s “Swamp,” from his days with Talking Heads, instead of the same unvarying eternal crap you get on the radio. And it’s dimly lighted. Very dimly lighted. All you see, really, beyond the shifting colors of the TV, is the soft backlit glow of the bottles on display behind the bar dissolving into a hundred soothing glints of gold and copper. It’s relaxing—so relaxing I’ve found myself drifting off to dreamland right there in the grip of my barstool, one hand clenched round the stem of the glass, the other bracing up a chin as heavy as all the slag heaps of the earth combined. You could say it’s my second home. Or maybe my first.
We’d just settled into our stools, my right hand going instinctively to the bowl of artificial bar snacks while the Mets careened round the bases on the wide-screen TV and Rick, the bartender, stirred and strained my first Sidecar of the evening, when I became aware of Dave, off to my left, digging something out of his briefcase. There was a thump beside me and I turned my head. “What’s that?” I said. The title, in fluorescent orange, leapt out at me: An Introduction to Biology. “A little light reading?”
Dave—he was my age, forty-three, and he didn’t bother to dye his hair or counteract the wrinkles eroding his forehead and chewing away at the corners of his eyes because he accepted who he was and he had no qualms about letting the world in on it—just stared at me. He’d given up tennis. Given up poker. And when I called him on a Saturday morning to go out for a hike or a spin up the river in my speedboat with the twin Merc 575s that’ll shear the hair right off your head, he was always busy.
“What?” I said.
He tapped the cover of the book. “Don’t you notice anything?”
My drink had come, iced, sugared, as necessary as oxygen. The Mets scored again. I took a sip.
“The sticker,” he said. “Don’t you see the sticker?”
Prodded, I took notice of it, a lemon-yellow circle the size of a silver dollar, inside of which was a disclaimer printed in sober black letters. The theory of evolution as put forth in this text,it read, is just that, a theory, and should not be confused with fact. “Yeah,” I said. “So?”
He clenched his jaw. Gave me a long hard look. “Don’t you know what this means?”
I thought about that a moment, turning the book over in one hand before setting it back down on the bar. I worked at the sticker with my thumbnail. It was immovable, as if it had been fused to the cover using a revolutionary new process. “Sucker’s really on there,” I said. I gave him a grin. “You wouldn’t happen to have any sandpaper on you, would you?”
“It’s not fucking funny, Cal. You can laugh—you haven’t got a kid in school. But if you believe in anything, if you believe in what’s happening to this country, what’s happening right here in our own community—” He broke off, so wrought up he couldn’t go on. His face was flushed. He picked up his beer and set it down again.
“You’re talking about the fact that we’re living in a theocracy now, right? A theocracy at war with another theocracy?”
“Why do you always have to make a joke out of everything?”
“Bible-thumpers,” I said, but without conviction. I was in a bar. It had been a long day. I wanted to talk about nothing, sports, women, the subtle manipulations of the commercials for beer, cars, Palm Pilots. I didn’t want to delve beneath the surface. It was too cold down there, too dark and claustrophobic. “You can’t be serious,” I said finally, giving ground. “Here? Thirty-five miles up the river from Manhattan?”
He was nodding, his eyes fixed on mine. “I don’t pay that much attention, I guess,” he said finally. “Or Katie either. I don’t even think we voted in the last school board election . . . I mean, it’s our own fault. It was just a slate of names, you know. Like the judges. Does anybody ever know the slightest thing about any of the judges on the ballot that comes round every November? Or the town supervisors? Shit. You’d have to devote your life to it, know what I’m saying?”
Feelings were stirring in me—anger, resentment, helplessness. My drink had gone warm. I said the only thing I could think to say: “So what are you going to do?”
Jesus, and Where He Resides
It was raining that Thursday night, though the air was warm still, a last breath of summer before September gave way to October and the days began to wind down till the leaves littered the streets and the boat would have to come out of the water. I had a little trouble finding the place where they were holding the meeting—they’ve built a whole city’s worth of new buildings since I went to school, the population ratcheting up relentlessly even around here where there are zero jobs to be had and all everybody talks about is preserving the semi-rural feel, as if we were all dipping our own candles and greasing the wheels of our buggies. Which is another reason why I couldn’t find the place. It’s dark. The streetlights give out within a block of the junction of the state road and Main Street, and the big old black-barked oaks and elms everybody seems to love soak up the light till the roads might as well be tunnels in a coal mine. And I admit it: my eyes aren’t what they used to be. I’ve put off getting glasses because of the kind of statement they make—weakness, that is—and I’ve heard that once you begin to rely on them you can never go back to the naked eye, that’s it, and here’s your crutch forever. The next thing is reading glasses, and then you’re pottering around with those pathetic lanyards looped round your neck, murmuring, Has anybodyseen my glasses?
Anyway, it was the cars that clued me. There must have been a hundred or more of them jamming every space in the parking lot behind the new elementary school, with the overflow parked on a lawn that was just a wet black void sucked out of the shadows. I pulled up within inches of the last car squeezed in on the grass—a cobalt-blue Suburban, humped and mountainous—and felt the wheels give ever so slightly before I shut down the ignition, figuring I’d worry about it later. I pulled up the collar of my coat and hurried along the walk toward the lights glowing in the distance.
The auditorium was packed, standing room only, and everybody looked angry—from the six school board members seated behind a collapsible table up onstage to the reporter from the local paper and the concerned parents and students warming the chairs and lining the walls like extras on a movie set. I caught a nostalgic whiff of floor wax, finger paint and formaldehyde, but it was short-lived, overwhelmed by
the working odor of all that crush of humanity. The fact that everybody was wet to one degree or another didn’t help matters, the women’s hair hanging limp, the men’s jackets clinging at the shoulders and under the arms, umbrellas drooling, smears of wet black mud striping the linoleum underfoot. I could smell myself—what I was adding to the mix—in the bad cheese of my underarms and the sweet reek of mango-pineapple rising from the dissolved gel in my hair. It was very hot.
The door closed softly behind me and I found myself squeezed in between a gaunt leathery woman with a starburst of shellacked hair and a pock-faced man who looked as if he’d had a very bad day made worse by the dawning awareness that he was going to have to stand here amidst all these people, in this stink and this heat, till the last word was spoken and the doors opened to deliver him back out into the rain. I hunched my shoulders to make room and let my eyes roam over the crowd in the hope of spotting Dave and his wife. Not that it would matter—even if they’d saved a seat for me I couldn’t have got to them. But still, it gave me the smallest uptick of satisfaction to see them sitting there in the third row left, Katie’s head shrouded in a black scarf, as if she were attending a funeral, and Dave’s bald spot glowing like a poached egg in the graying nest of his hair.
What can I say? This was the most normal scene in the world, a scene replicated through the generations and across the continent, the flag drooping to one side of the podium, red velvet curtains disclosing the stage beyond, student art buckling away from the freshly painted walls while parents, teachers and students gathered in a civic forum to weigh all the pedagogical nuances of the curriculum. Standing there, the fluorescent lights glaring in my eyes and the steam of my fellow humans rising round me, I was plunged into a deep pool of nostalgia, thinking of my own parents, now dead, my own teachers, mostly dead, and myself, very much alive and well though in need of a drink. On some level it was strangely moving. I shifted my feet. Looked to the tiles of the ceiling as a way of neutering my emotions. It was then that I felt the door open behind me—a cold draft, the sizzle of rain—as a newcomer even tardier than I slipped in to join the gathering. A female. Young, pretty, with an overload of perfume. I gave her a glance as she edged in beside me. “Sorry,” she whispered. “No problem,” I said under my breath, and because I felt awkward and didn’t want to stare, I turned my attention back to the stage.
There was a general coughing and rustling, and then one of the school board members—a sour-looking woman with reading glasses dangling from her throat—leaned forward and reached for the microphone perched at the edge of the table. There was a thump followed by the hiss of static as she wrestled the thing away from its stand, and then her amplified voice came at us as if it had been there all along, just under the surface: “And since that concludes the formal business for the evening, we’re prepared to take your questions and comments at this point. One person at a time, please, and please come to the center aisle and use the microphone there so everybody can hear.”
The first speaker—a man in his thirties, narrow eyes, narrow shoulders, a cheap sportcoat and a turquoise bola tie he must have worn in the hope somebody would think him hip—rose to a spatter of applause and a cascade of hoots from the students against the wall. “Ba-oom!” they chanted. “Ba-oom!” In an instant the mood had been transformed from nervous anticipation to a kind of ecstasy. “Ba-oom!”
He took hold of the microphone, glanced over his shoulder at the students behind him and snapped, “That’ll be enough now, and I mean it,” until the chant died away. Then he half-turned to the audience—and this was awkward because he was addressing the board up onstage as well—and began by introducing himself. “My name is Robert Tannenbaum”—a burst of Ba-oom, Ba-oom!—“and as many of you know, I teach ninth-grade biology at Smithstown High. And I have a statement here, signed not only by the entire science department—with one notable exception—but the majority of the rest of the faculty as well.”
It was just a paragraph or so—he knew to keep it short—and as he read I couldn’t help watching the faces of the board members. They were four men and two women, with the usual hairstyles and appurtenances, dressed in shades of brown and gray. They held themselves so stiffly their bones might have been fused, and they gazed out over the crowd while the teacher read his statement, their eyes barely registering him. The statement said simply that the faculty rejected the warning label the board had imposed on An Introduction to Biology as a violation of the Constitution’s separation of church and state. “No reputable scientist anywhere in the world,” the teacher went on, lifting his head to stare directly at the woman with the microphone, “subscribes to the notion of Intelligent Design—or let’s call it by its real name, Creationism—as a viable scientific theory.” And now he swung round on the crowd and spread his arms wide: “Get real, people. There’s no debate here—just science and anti-science.”
A few members of the audience began stamping their feet. The man beside me pulled his lips back and hissed.
“And that’s the key phrase here, scientific theory—that is, testable, subject to peer review—and not a theological one, because that’s exactly what this is, trying to force religion into the classroom—”
“Atheist!” a woman cried out, but the teacher waved her off. “No theory is bulletproof,” he said, raising his voice now, “and we in the scientific community welcome debate—legitimate, scientific debate—and certainly theories mutate and evolve just like life on this planet, but—”
“Ba-oom, Ba-oom!”
There was a building ferment, a muted undercurrent of dissent and anger, the students chanting, people shouting out, until the sour-looking woman—the chairwoman, or was she the superintendent?—slammed the flat of her hand down on the table. “You’ll all get your chance,” she said, pinching her voice so that it shot splinters of steel through the microphone and out into the audience on a blast of feedback, “because everybody’s got the right to an opinion.” She glared down at the teacher, then lifted the reading glasses to the bridge of her nose and squinted at a sheet of paper she held up before her in an attempt to catch the light. “Thank you, Mr. Tannenbaum,” she said. “We’ll hear now from the Reverend Doctor Micah Stiller, of the First Baptist Church. Reverend Stiller?”
I was transfixed. I’d had no idea. Here I’d taken the train into the city every day and slogged on back every night, lingered at the Granite, hiked the trails and rocketed my way up the river to feel the wind in my face and impress whatever woman I’d managed to cajole along with me, and all the while this Manichean struggle had been going on right up the street. The reverend (beard, off-the-rack suit, big black shoes the size of andirons) invoked God, Jesus and the Bible as the ultimate authorities on matters of creation, and then a whole snaking line of people trooped up to the microphone one after another to voice their opinions on everything from the Great Flood to the age of the earth (Ten thousand years! Are you out of your mind? the biology teacher shouted as he slammed out the side exit to a contrapuntal chorus of cheers and jeers), to recent advancements in space travel and the unraveling of the human genome and how close it was to the chimpanzee’s. And the garden slug’s.
At one point, Dave even got into the act. He stood abruptly, his face frozen in outrage, stalked up to the microphone and blurted, “If there’s no evolution, how come we all have to get a new flu shot each year?” Before anyone could answer him he was back in his seat and the chairwoman was clapping her hands for order. How much time had gone by I couldn’t say—an hour, an hour at least. My left leg seemed to have gone dead at the hip. I breathed perfume. Stole a look at the woman beside me and saw that she had beautiful hands and feet and a smile that sought out my own. She was thirty-five or so, blond, no hat, no coat, in a blue flocked dress cut just above her knees, and we were complicit. Or so I thought.
Finally, when things seemed to be winding down, a girl dressed in a white sweater and plaid skirt, with her hair cut close and her arms folded palm to elbow, came down
the aisle as if she were walking a bed of hot coals and took hold of the microphone. Her hands trembled as she tried to adjust it to her height, but she couldn’t seem to loosen the catch. She stood there a moment, working at it, and when she saw that no one was going to help her, she went up on her tiptoes. “I just wanted to say,” she breathed, clutching the mike as if it were a wall she was trying to climb, “that my name is Mary-Louise Mohler and I’m a freshman at Smithstown High—”
Hoots, catcalls, two raw-faced kids in baseball hats leering from the far side of the auditorium, adult faces swiveling angrily, the clatter of the rain beyond the windows.
She stood there patiently till the noise died down and the sour-faced woman, attempting a smile, gestured for her to go ahead. “I want everyone to know that the theory of evolution is only a theory, just like the sticker says—”
“What about Intelligent Design?” someone called out, and I was startled to see that it was Dave, half-risen from his seat. “I suppose that’s fact?” I couldn’t help laughing, but softly, softly, and turned to the woman beside me—the blonde. “To all the Jesus freaks, maybe,” I whispered, and gave her an unequivocal grin. Which she ignored. Her gaze was fixed on the girl. The auditorium had grown quiet. I raised my hand to my mouth to suppress an imaginary cough, shifted my weight and looked back down the aisle.
“It is,” the girl said quietly, dropping her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look Dave in the face. “It is fact and I’m the one to know it.” She clenched her hands in front of her, rocked back on her heels and then rose up once more on point to let her soft feathery voice inhabit the microphone: “I know it because Jesus lives in my heart.”
The Weak
I was the first one out the door. The rain had let up, nothing more than a persistent drizzle now, the shrubs along the walk black with moisture and the air dense with the smell of it—the smell of nature, that is, wet, fungal, chaotic. And sweet. Infinitely sweet after the reek of that auditorium. I hurried down the walk and across the lot, thinking to get out ahead of the traffic. I was meeting Dave and Katie at the Granite for burgers and a drink or two and I could hardly wait for the postmortem, because I’d wanted to flag my hand and put a question to the girl in the plaid skirt, wanted to ask her just how provable her contention was. Could we thread one of those surgical mini-cameras up through the vein in her thigh and into her left ventricle just to see if we could find the Redeemer there? And what would He be doing? Sitting down to dinner? Frying up fish in a pan? At least Jonah had some elbow room. But then I guessed Jesus was capable of making himself very, very small—sub-microscopic even.