“What you did was so minor . . .”
“If it was so minor, why are you here asking for my help now? And why would you imagine for half a second I’d give it to you?” She stared at me, calculating. I stared back coolly. Paula wasn’t used to me cool. I’d always been the excitable one. Excitable, flighty, unstable—that’s what she told Zweigler. A security risk.
Timmy fussed in his portacrib. I stood up, still nursing Lori, and scooped him up with my free arm. Back on the steps, I juggled Timmy to lie across Lori on my lap, pulled back my blouse, and gave him the other breast. This time Paula didn’t permit herself a grimace.
She said, “Karen, what I did was wrong. I know that now. But for the sake of the project, not for me, you have to . . .”
“You are the project. You have been from the first moment you grabbed the headlines away from Zweigler and the others who gave their life to that work. ‘Lovely Young Scientist Injects Self With Perfect-Cell Drug!’ ‘No Sacrifice Too Great To Circumvent FDA Shortsightedness, Heroic Researcher Declares.’”
Paula said flatly, “You’re jealous. You’re obscure and I’m famous. You’re a mess and I’m beautiful. You’re . . .”
“A milk cow? While you’re a brilliant researcher? Then solve your own research problems.”
“This was your area . . .”
“Oh, Paula, they were all my areas. I did more of the basic research than you did, and you know it. But you knew how to position yourself with Zweigler, to present key findings at key moments, to cultivate the right connections. And, of course, I was still under the delusion we were partners. I just didn’t realize it was a barracuda partnering a goldfish.”
From the wading pool Lollie watched us with big eyes. “Mommy . . .”
“It’s okay, honey. Mommy’s not mad at you. Look, better catch your frog-he’s hopping away.”
She shrieked happily and dove for the frog. Paula said softly, “I had no idea you were so angry after all this time. You’ve changed, Karen.”
“But I’m not angry. Not any more. And you never knew what I was like before. You never bothered to know.”
“I knew you never wanted a scientific life. Not the way I did. You always wanted kids. Wanted . . . this.” She waved her arm around the shabby yard. David left eighteen months ago. He sends money. It’s never enough.
“I wanted a scientific establishment that would let me have both. And I wanted credit for my work. I wanted what was mine. How did you do it, Paula—end up with what was yours and what was mine, too?”
“Because you were distracted by baby shit and frogs!” Paula yelled, and I saw how scared she really was. Paula didn’t make admissions like that. A tactical error. I watched her stab desperately for a way to retain the advantage. A way to seize the offensive. I seized it first. “You should have left David alone. You already had Zweigler; you should have left me David. Our marriage was never the same after that.”
She said, “I’m dying, Karen.”
I turned my head from the nursing babies to look at her.
“It’s true. My cellular machinery is running wild. The nanoassemblers are creating weird structures, destructive enzymes. For five years they replicated perfectly and now. . . . For five years it all performed exactly as it was programmed to. . .”
I said, “It still does.”
Paula sat very still. Lori had fallen asleep. I juggled her into the portacrib and nestled Timmy more comfortably on my lap. Lollie chased her frog around the wading pool. I squinted to see if Lollie’s lips were blue!
Paula choked out, “You programmed the assembler machinery in the ovaries to . . .”
“Nobody, much cares about women’s ovaries. Only fourteen per : cent of college-educated women want to muck up their lives with kids. Recent survey result. Less than one percent margin of error.”
“. . . you actually sabotaged . . . hundreds of women have been injected by now, maybe thousands . . .”
“Oh, there’s a reverser enzyme,” I said. “Completely effective if you take it before the twelfth-generation replication. You’re the only person that’s been injected that long. I just discovered the reverser a few months ago, tinkering with my old notes for something to do in what your friends probably call my idle domestic prison. That’s provable, incidentally. All my notes are computer-dated.”
Paula whispered, “Scientists don’t do this . . .”
“Too bad you wouldn’t let me be one.”
“Karen . . .”
“Don’t you want to know what the reverser is, Paula? It’s engineered from human chorionic gonadotropin. The pregnancy hormone. Too bad you never wanted a baby.”
She went on staring at me. Lollie shrieked and splashed with her frog. Her lips were turning blue. I stood up, laid Timmy next to Lori in the portacrib, and buttoned my blouse.
“You made an experimental error twenty-five years ago,” I said to Paula. “Too small a sample population. Sometimes a frog jumps out.”
I went to lift my daughter from the wading pool.
FAULT LINES
In the fall of 1994 I sublet an apartment in New York. That was the season I became fascinated by New York City cops.
There was no reason for this. Writers take such fits, and the best thing to do is go along and see if the fit leads anywhere. So for a month I eavesdropped on cops, visited precinct stations, went to lectures by police officers, searched out newspaper stories on the NYPD. I discovered how cops referred to a precinct (“the Four-six”), what percentage of New York cops are female (fourteen), the amount of paperwork required to document one arrest (incredible), and what a “public service homicide” is (the Mob murder of a criminal that, in the opinion of police, the city would be better off without anyway). In the newspapers I followed the struggle between Mayor Giuliani and the police commissioner, between Internal Affairs and the Thirtieth Precinct, between drug pushers and drug busters, who sometimes turned out to be the same people. I don’t read many detective novels; for me, this was new territory. I was completely absorbed.
When the fit passed, as eventually such fits do, I was left with a black leather NYPD jacket without the insignia, and this story.
—Immanuel Kant
THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, WE HAD ASSUALT-WITH-INTENT IN Ms. Kelly’s room.
I was in my room next door, 136, laying down the law to 7C math. The usual first-day bullshit: turn in homework every day, take your assigned seat as soon as you walk in, don’t bring a weapon or an abusive attitude into my classroom or you’ll wish you’d never been born. The kids would ignore the first, do the others—for me anyway. Apparently not for Jenny Kelly.
“Mr. Shaunessy! Mr. Shaunessy! Come quick, they throwing chairs next door! The new teacher crying!” A pretty, tiny girl I recognized from last year: Lateesha Jefferson. Her round face glowed with excitement and satisfaction. A riot! Already! On the very first day!
I looked over my class slowly, penetratingly, letting my gaze linger on each upturned face. I took my time about it. Most kids dropped their eyes. Next door, something heavy hit the wall. I lowered my voice, so everybody had to strain to hear me.
“Nobody move while I’m gone. You all got that?”
Some heads nodded. Some kids stared back, uncertain but cool. A few boys smirked and I brought my unsmiling gaze to their faces until they stopped. Shouts filtered through the wall.
“Okay, Lateesha, tell Ms. Kelly I’m coming.” She took off like a shot, grinning, Paul Revere in purple leggings and silver shoes.
I limped to the door and turned for a last look. My students all sat quietly, watching me. I saw Pedro Valesquez and Steven Cheung surreptiously scanning my jacket for the bulge of a service revolver that of course wasn’t there. My reputation had become so inflated it rivaled the NYC budget. In the hall Lateesha screamed in a voice that could have deafened rock stars, “Mr. Shaunessy coming! You hos better stop!”
In 134, two eighth-grade girls grappled in the middle of the floor. For a wonder, neit
her seemed to be armed, not even with keys. One girl’s nose streamed blood. The other’s blouse was torn. Both screamed incoherently, nonstop, like stuck sirens. Kids raced around the room. A chair had apparently been hurled at the chalkboard, or at somebody once standing in front of the chalkboard; chair and board had both cracked. Jenny Kelly yelled and waved her arms. Lateesha was wrong; Ms. Kelly wasn’t crying. But neither was she helping things a hell of a lot. A few kids on the perimeter of the chaos saw me and fell silent, curious to see what came next.
And then I saw Jeff Connors, leaning against the window wall, arms folded across his chest, and his expression as he watched the fighting girls told me everything I needed to know.
I took a huge breath, letting it fill my lungs. I bellowed at top volume, and with no facial expression whatsoever, “Freeze! Now!”
And everybody did.
The kids who didn’t know me looked instantly for the gun and the backup. The kids who did know me grinned, stifled it, and nodded slightly. The two girls stopped pounding each other to twist toward the noise—my bellow had shivered the hanging fluorescents—which was time enough for me to limp across the floor, grab the girl on top, and haul her to her feet. She twisted to swing on me, thought better of it, and stood there, panting.
The girl on the floor whooped, leaped up, and tensed to slug the girl I held. But then she stopped. She didn’t know me, but the scene had alerted her: nobody yelling anymore, the other wildcat quiet in my grip, nobody racing around the room. She glanced around, puzzled.
Jeff still leaned against the wall.
They expected me to say something. I said nothing, just stood there, impassive. Seconds dragged by. Fifteen, thirty, forty-five. To adults, that’s a long time. To kids, it’s forever. The adrenaline ebbs away.
A girl in the back row sat down at her desk.
Another followed.
Pretty soon they were all sitting down, quiet, not exactly intimidated but interested. This was different, and different was cool. Only the two girls were left, and Jeff Connors leaning on the window, and a small Chinese kid whose chair was probably the one hurled at the chalkboard. I saw that the crack ran right through words printed neatly in green marker:
Ms. Kelly English 8E
After a minute, the Chinese kid without a chair sat on his desk.
Still I said nothing. Another minute dragged past. The kids were uneasy now. Lateesha said helpfully, “Them girls supposed to go to the nurse, Mr. Shaunessy. Each one by they own self.”
I kept my grip on the girl with the torn blouse. The other girl, her nose gushing blood, suddenly started to cry. She jammed her fist against her mouth and ran out of the room.
I looked at each face, one at a time.
Eventually I released my grip on the second girl and nodded at Lateesha. “You go with her to the nurse.”
Lateesha jumped up eagerly, a girl with a mission, the only one I’d spoken to. “You come on, honey,” she said, and led away the second girl, clucking at her under her breath.
Now they were all eager for the limelight. Rosaria said quickly, “They fighting over Jeff, Mr. Shaunessy.”
“No they ain’t,” said a big, muscled boy in the second row. He was scowling. “They fighting cause Jonelle, she dissed Lisa.”
“No, they—”
Everybody had a version. They all jumped in, intellectuals with theories, arguing with each other until they saw I wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t trying to sort through it, wasn’t going to participate. One by one, they fell silent again, curious.
Finally Jeff himself spoke. He looked at me with his absolutely open, earnest, guileless expression and said, “It was them suicides, Mr. Shaunessy.”
The rest of the class looked slightly confused, but willing to go along with this. They knew Jeff. But now Ms. Kelly, excluded for five full minutes from her own classroom, jumped in. She was angry. “What suicides? What are you talking about, uh . . .?”
Jeff didn’t deign to supply his name. She was supposed to know it. He spoke directly to me. “Them old people. The ones who killed theirselves in that hospital this morning. And last week. In the newspaper.” I didn’t react. Just waited.
“You know, Mr. Shaunessy,” Jeff went on, in that same open, confiding tone. “Them old people shooting and hanging and pushing theirselves out of windows. At their age. In their sixties and seventies and eighties.” He shook his head regretfully.
The other kids were nodding now, although I’d bet my pension none of them ever read anything in any newspaper.
“It just ain’t no example to us,” Jeff said regretfully. “If even the people who are getting three good meals a day and got people waiting on them and don’t have to work or struggle no more with the man—if they give up, how we supposed to think there’s anything in this here life for us?”
He leaned back against the window and grinned at me: triumphant, regretful, pleading, an inheritor of a world he hadn’t made. His classmates glanced at each other sideways, glanced at me, and stopped grinning.
“A tragedy, that’s what it is,” Jeff said, shaking his head. “A tragedy. All them old people, deciding a whole life just don’t make it worth it to stick to the rules. How we supposed to learn to behave?”
“You have to get control of Jeff Connors,” I told Jenny Kelly at lunch in the faculty room. This was an exposed-pipes, flaking-plaster oasis in the basement of Benjamin Franklin Junior High. Teachers sat jammed together on folding metal chairs around brown Formica tables, drinking coffee and eating out of paper bags. Ms. Kelly had plopped down next to me and practically demanded advice. “That’s actually not as hard as it might look. Jeff’s a hustler, an operator, and the others follow him. But he’s not uncontrollable.”
“Easy for you to say,” she retorted, surprising me. “They look at you and see the macho ex-cop who weighs what? Two-thirty? Who took out three criminals before you got shot, and has strong juice at Juvenile Hall. They look at me and see a five-foot-three, one-hundred-twenty-pound nobody they can all push around. Including Jeff.”
“So don’t let him,” I said, wondering how she’d heard all the stories about me so fast. She’d only moved into the district four days ago.
She took a healthy bite of her cheese sandwich. Although she’d spent the first half of the lunch period in the ladies’ room, I didn’t see any tear marks. Maybe she fixed her makeup to cover tear stains. Margie used to do that. Up close Jenny Kelly looked older than I’d thought at first: twenty-eight, maybe thirty. Her looks weren’t going to make it any easier to control a roomful of thirteen-year-old boys. She pushed her short blonde hair off her face and looked directly at me.
“Do you really carry a gun?”
“Of course not. Board of Education regs forbid any weapons by anybody on school property. You know that.”
“The kids think you carry.”
I shrugged.
“And you don’t tell them otherwise.”
I shrugged again.
“Okay, I can’t do that either,” she said. “But I’m not going to fail at this, Gene. I’m just not. You’re a big success here, everybody says so. So tell me what I can do to keep enough control of my classes that I have a remote chance of actually teaching anybody anything.”
I studied her, and revised my first opinion, which was that she’d be gone by the end of September. No tear stains, not fresh out of college, able to keep eating under stress. The verbal determination I discounted; I’d heard a lot of verbal determination from rookies when I was on the Force, and most of it melted away three months out of Police Academy. Even sooner in the City School District.
“You need to do two things,” I said. “First, recognize that these kids can’t do without connection to other human beings. Not for five minutes, not for one minute. They’re starved for it. And to most of them, ‘connection’ means arguing, fighting, struggling, even abuse. It’s what they’re used to, and it’s what they’ll naturally create, because it feels better to them than ex
isting alone in a social vacuum for even a minute. To compete with that, to get them to disengage from each other long enough to listen to you, you have to give them an equally strong connection to you. It doesn’t have to be intimidation, or some bullshit fantasy about going up against the law. You can find your own way. But unless you’re a strong presence—very strong, very distinctive—of one kind or another, they’re going to ignore you and go back to connecting with each other.”
“Connection,” she said, thinking about it. “What about connecting to the material? English literature has some pretty exciting stuff in it, you know.”
“I’ll take your word for it. But no books are exciting to most of these kids. Not initially. They can only connect to the material through a person. They’re that starved.”
She took another bite of sandwich. “And the second thing?”
“I already told you. Get control of Jeff Connors. Immediately.”
“Who is he? And what was all that bullshit about old people killing themselves?”
I said, “Didn’t you see it on the news?”
“Of course I did. The police are investigating, aren’t they? But what did it have to do with my classroom?”
“Nothing. It was a diversionary tactic. A cover-up.”
“Of what?”
“Could be a lot of things. Jeff will use whatever he hears to confuse and mislead, and he hears everything. He’s bright, unmotivated, a natural leader, and—unbelievably—not a gang member. You saw him— no big gold, no beeper. His police record is clean. So far, anyway.” Jenny said, “You worked with him a little last year.”
“No, I didn’t work with him. I controlled him in class, was all.” She’d been asking about me.
“So if you didn’t really connect with him, how do I?”
“I can’t tell you that,” I said, and we ate in silence for a few minutes. It didn’t feel strained. She looked thoughtful, turning over what I’d told her. I wondered suddenly whether she’d have made a good cop. Her ears were small, I noticed, and pink, with tiny gold earrings in the shape of little shells.