Then she’s gone again.
“Dr. P.!” Brandon comes over, all smiles. He was one of the few kids who said almost nothing in class all semester, but here he seems relaxed and magnanimous. If I were his age, I’d want to be his friend. “We’re glad you came.” He clicks his plastic cup against mine, and the beer is cold and watery and wonderful. I haven’t had anything to drink since those two margaritas several weeks back, and the first sip of beer slides down my throat and shoots out to every part of my body.
Gina reenters the room with three more of my students. Nearly the whole class is here now in this small bedroom. I’m touched. Wendy, not the best writer but a serious, earnest student with perfect mechanics, emerges from the hall bathroom. She totters — clearly drunk — into the bedroom behind the other students. She grins. “Hi, Dr. P.” The cup of beer is to my lips when I notice the gauze on her hand. It’s dark, blood-soaked. In her other hand she holds a large ball of tissues.
“Wendy—” I begin, but she cuts me off.
“It hurts,” she says, “but not as much as you want.” Another grin. “Are you going to do it tonight too?”
Gina shuts the bedroom door, dampening the music, and I whirl around to face my class.
“You’re a really good teacher, Dr. P.,” Brandon says. “You got us thinking.” The others nod. “Don’t you think it’s your turn now?”
Gina steps over to the closet and reaches up to the top shelf. She pulls down a large black trash bag, from which she removes a stack of gauze, a roll of tape, a tube of antibiotic cream, and a branch lopper — same brand I use to prune the crape myrtles in my front yard.
“The semester’s almost over,” she says, and smiles warmly. She returns to the closet, pushes aside some dresses and pants on hangers, and carefully drags out something heavy. It’s one of those capped glass urns you use to make sun tea. The urn is full of what looks like a streaming red ocean populated with little submarines.
I turn and catch Britney’s dazzling blue gaze. Her blond hair is salon-perfect. She sits on the bed, legs crossed at the ankles. She’s wearing an off-the-shoulder black sweater and dark blue jeans with pink high heels. Her toenails are the same color as her shoes. Her hands rest on her lap. She has three fingers on her left hand and two on her right. “Just think of it as your final exam,” she says, smiling.
The beer feels heavy and sour in my stomach. “You don’t understand,” I tell everyone. “I don’t need this.”
“You mean because you once went to England? Because you have tattoos?” Britney shakes her head. “Come on, Dr. P. — you need it more than anyone.”
“No, that isn’t—” My class is watching me, rapt. I try to put words together as beer sloshes over the edge of my cup, soaking my wrist. “It’s just... I have everything already.”
A few of them are smiling the way you smile at an elderly relative who says the most darling things. Britney takes my beer cup from me and sets it gently on the bedside table.
“Sure you do, Dr. P.,” she says.
The edges of my vision start to darken and my legs go weak beneath me, so I sit down on the bed beside Britney and look up at the ceiling, which has little glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the paint in various constellations.
I stay there for maybe a dozen seconds, not looking at a single one of my students, refusing to be seduced into acquiescence or numbness or acceptance. “Dr. P.?” a couple of them say, but I focus on taking breaths and letting them out. When I think my legs will support me again, I stand up, and then I leave the bedroom, still avoiding their faces, which will hold only disappointment, and I’m out of the apartment and hurrying home to my family, to my life of confident narratives and lucid exposition, my life of the mind and of ten fingers and of the next semester, and the next, and the next.
Part III
Bloodlines
Moonface
by Andrew Paul
Thief
When I was young I didn’t know real hurt, but was still somehow capable of inflicting real hurt on those around me. It’s cruel how often that sort of thing happens, but it happens, and I was one of hurt’s propagators, a child thirteen years vicious. And I think it was this viciousness, in part, that killed Yitzhak Cohen.
It’s important to know that he wasn’t Yitzhak to us then, he was Moonface. Moonface got his name from his scars — great, circular layers of pink and violet tissue covering his entire body. Not so much a disfigurement as it was an extra layer splashed across him.
After the Six Million, some of the more unfortunate Jews gave up on their European ruins and crossed over to America, trickling down as far south as Thief, Mississippi. Some of them started businesses, worked in the First National Bank of Thief, but many simply made ends meet at the edge of town near the river, quarantined from any sense of the real world. This is where Yitzhak, where Moonface, wound up with a handful of others.
Moonface worked in the Jefferson Davis District School cafeteria, ladling out gruel to the pubescent. The first day on the job, Moonface wore a greasy T-shirt and slacks under his standard-issue apron, but we didn’t gawk at his scars. Instead, we stood on our toes over the glass buffet barrier to see the tattoo. Most of us had never even seen ink in person yet, thinking it was reserved for gangs and brawlers and other lowlife idols.
“What’re those numbers for?” my buddy John asked Moonface.
“Keep track of all women I stuck it in,” Moonface said in broken English, handing John a tray of beef stroganoff. “Now go fuck you.”
Their interchange spread through lunch before the next bell, and as we left for geometry, we saw Principal James careen out of his office toward the kitchens. Moonface wore sleeves from there on out, and kept mostly quiet, but the number was already etched into our memory as clearly as it was on his forearm.
“Nobody could fuck that many girls,” John reassured himself later that day on our walk home after school. “Their pecker would fall off.”
As the fall semester dragged on, our theories on Moonface became more and more elaborate, increasingly grisly in their details. We became obsessed with the camps and their industrial murder. I suggested that he survived the worst Nazi death internments.
“It was a secret pit that JFK still won’t even talk about because it’s so shocking. The place where only the really threatening Jews were sent. Like Asswitz times one thousand,” I whispered to John over our pizza.
“They only fed them slimy pizza once a week, but served on those crackers they like so much just to taunt them,” John added.
“Why would they serve them on something they actually liked, dipshit?” I asked.
“Psychological warfare,” he replied knowingly. “The worst of tortures.”
“Do you know why he only works up front here?” I asked, my voice dropping even softer than before.
“Why?” John said, suppressing his metallic, wiry grin.
“’Cause of the ovens. How do you think Moonface got those scars? He was too mean for gas chambers, so they decided to throw him in a furnace, but the furnace just spit him right out.”
We stopped talking, feeling we were approaching a truth we hadn’t meant to near. Behind the serving line, Moonface looked toward us from across the room. Even then I knew it was too loud in the cafeteria for him to hear anything I said, but I worried he felt us encroaching on that same truth. We were quiet the rest of lunch.
There was a girl in all this, of course. Nicole. Four years our senior, and pretty much what you’d expect. Cheerleader. Straight-A student. Gold irises, I swear. Beautiful and sad and tired of all the rest of us, and with good reason. Her suitors were a series of rotten, pawing Goliaths, the last of whom roughed her up enough to get himself sent to a cellblock for a few months. Her mother was gone. Her father, Richmond, was a leering mess of a patriarch for the remaining household. I never heard stories about beatings or late-night sessions, but I was as much out of the loop then as I am now, so who knows.