“Nice day for this, isn’t it?” offered William.
Jonas jumped, and said nothing.
At the first rest stop, William gathered the class and recited some Edward Abbey and Thoreau from memory. He didn’t need the earphone to prompt him on this, but he felt programmed just the same. Behind him, he knew, sunlight danced in the canyon, and his students were reacting to the real-lesson by contrasting it to the v-lessons. Later, they’d all ooh and ah about how much more profound their moment with nature had been compared to the vids from their DTs. This was experiential knowledge and fit exactly into each of their DT driven I.E.P.s.
But he didn’t feel as if he were learning anything. Not only did he feel that he was indistinguishable from any prerecorded presentation, but the canyon itself felt virtual. He saw what the park determined he should see. He heard what the park determined he should hear. The tour controlled all of it, and he felt no hint of exploration any more, no hope for discovery.
As he reached the end of the Thoreau piece, and their attentive faces were focussed on him, he noticed Jonas at the back of the class, looking down at his shoes, scuffing some sand on the trail back and forth, and he felt exactly the same feeling about Jonas that he felt about the park. Where’s my chance to teach him? he thought. What can I do that the charts and diagnostics haven’t already told me? I am, he thought, predigested. My path has been determined.
The class applauded when he reached the end with Thoreau’s words, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” But William mouthed the words emptily, and realized that like v-Bill, he too was all form and no content.
His earphone pinged, and the park program urged them to proceed down the trail into the canyon. There, it said, they could see the “sands of time cut away” and that they’d “pass through million of millions of years with each downward step.”
His class turned away obediently and filed onto the narrow stairway with its protective handrails. William watched them leave. I can give you nothing, he thought. He knew that for the next twenty minutes, their earphones would direct their attention to the rock formations, to the pinion pine that clung precariously to tiny outcroppings, to the vistas beyond, and when they reached the next rest stop, where he was supposed to speak again, that the DT would recognize he was not there and fill in with something appropriate. The class wouldn’t know that he was supposed to accompany them the whole way. They’d never miss him.
Jonas, the last student, vanished down the trail, and William remained, leaning against the cool sandstone rock he’d lectured to them from. Within a minute, he heard the footsteps of the next group coming down the path, so he climbed over the low restraining fence and hurried out of sight up the canyon rim.
Within fifty yards of where he’d left the path, his earphone chirped, and an official sounding voice warned him that he was violating park rules and must return to the marked trail. William pulled the earphone out and placed it on top of his DT. His hand seemed strangely empty without it; a breath of air cooled the sweat in his ear. Then he continued walking the rim.
He thought about Leslie Franklin. They’d talked every morning for the last forty-four years, but they’d never met. She’d married twice during the years. He’d attended the ceremonies electronically. He’d consoled her when the first marriage fell apart, and then when her second husband passed away. They exchanged gifts on Christmas and birthdays. They’d co-authored papers together. He wondered what she smelled like. He wondered what it would have been like to have touched her hair.
In places, the rock slope fell gradually down in a confusion of crevices and boulders. He could see the deep fall in the gaps between them. In other places, long tables of rock, broken sharply away told him where the edge was. Further up canyon, some of them protruded beyond the cliff wall, so if he stood at the precipice, he might actually be dozens of feet over the drop already, with nothing between him and a thousand foot plummet except the lip of stone that supported him. He walked as close to the edge as he could; at times letting the edge of his shoe overlap, not really paying attention, feeling no vertigo, but his right hand waved airily over the nothingness beyond.
He blinked slowly, still walking, so for two or three steps at a time, he couldn’t see where he was going, but the breeze brushed his face, and he felt an almost bat-like sense of where he was, as if he was flying on the edge, not walking. Sand scrunched. Branches creaked. Leaves rustled. Real air! Real sand! Contact! he thought, and he pictured a stride into wind, into real stone.
William stopped and faced the canyon. He closed his eyes. Sunlight pressed warmly on his face. Stone rested solidly beneath his heels, and he could feel the naked pull of the canyon in his chest. He let the breeze sway him back and forth. This is good, he thought. This is real and proper. Tears rolled off his cheeks, but he didn’t feel sad right now, he felt better than he’d been all day.
After a while, feeling very centered, a long, long reach away from his class and the DTs and forty-four years of teaching, he looked where he faced. A dozen feet away, balanced on an updraft and as still as the rocks around him, a raven floated in the air. William stared back. Nothing moved, and for a spooky, surreal second, William thought that he’d slipped out of time; the world had stopped and he was the ghost in the eternal and unchanging now. Then the raven cocked its head from one side to the other seeming to examine him with shiny, black glass eyes.
Then it dropped a wing and glided swiftly away.
Leslie had said that she didn’t want to learn anything that she couldn’t learn by being there. And he wondered if she had meant by that that she wanted to learn the things that couldn’t be tested, measured or described. How do you evaluate seeing the raven? How do you teach it?
The tears began to dry on his cheeks, pulling at the skin, and he realized where he stood, toes suspended over the rocks far below. He stepped back.
“You’re not supposed to be there, are you?” a voice asked.
William didn’t turn immediately. He tried to hold onto the feeling that possessed him, but the immediacy of the question drove it back. Not completely. He could still sense it, a tinge of connection. Real world. Real lessons. Real learning.
He turned. Jonas stood beside a clump of sage, his serious face inscrutable. “This is off limits,” he said.
William sighed and pressed his hands into the small of his back. The muscles there ached suddenly, and it took a concentrated effort to make them relax.
“You’re not supposed to be here either,” said William.
“I know. What were you doing?”
In the canyon, William saw the raven, now just a black dot sliding along a cliff wall. “Well,” he said, “I’m not sure.” He thought about all the things he could say to the boy, all the things the DT had told him about learning style and modes of instruction, and he decided just to answer the question. “I think I was thinking about who I am.”
“Really?” said Jonas. He approached the edge and sat down, his feet dangling over the precipice. “What did you learn?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Jonas seemed to absorb that for a moment. The floor of the canyon spread out beneath their feet. William let his heels bounce off the unyeilding wall. In DT conferences, William always answered questions quickly, or formulated advice for his students even as the student spoke so there would be no wasted time, but here, with Jonas on the edge of a cliff, he didn’t want to speak. He had nothing to say.