I had my slips of paper and worked alone. In a second-floor hallway, at knee level between two lockers, was an intriguing little hole with a hinged metal cap. The hole led back into obscure scholastic recesses. Manley and I had often passed idle minutes speaking into it and listening for answers.
In my laboratory at home, I’d rolled up one of my slips of paper tightly, sealed it inside a segment of glass tubing with a Bunsen flame, and tied and taped a piece of string around the tube. This ampule I now lowered through the little rabbit hole until it dropped out of sight. Then I tied the string to the hinge and shut the metal cap. On the slip of paper was a quatrain of doggereclass="underline"
The base of a venetian blind
Contains another clue.
Look in the conference room that’s off
The library. (What’s new?)
In the venetian blind was more doggerel that I’d planted during school hours:
There is a clue behind the plate
That’s on the western side
Of those large wooden fire doors
Near room three sixty-five.
I went now and unscrewed the push plate from the fire door and taped another slip to the wood underneath:
And last, another bookish clue
Before the glorious find.
The Little Book of Bells’ the one;
Its code is seven eight nine.
There were further quatrains hidden on an emergency-lighting fixture, rolled up inside a projection screen, and stuck in a library book called Your School Clubs. Some of the quatrains could have used a rewrite, but nobody thought they were a piece of shit. My idea was to enchant the school for Mr. Knight, to render the building momentarily strange and full of possibility, as a gift to him; and I was in the midst of discovering that writing was a way to do this.
During the previous two months, students from the five high-school physics classes had written and produced a farce about Isaac Newton, The Fig Connection. I had co-chaired the writing committee with a pretty senior girl, Siebert, toward whom I’d quickly developed strong feelings of stagnation. Siebert was a tomboy who wore bib overalls and knew how to camp, but she was also an artist who drew and wrote effortlessly and had charcoal stains and acrylic smudges on her hands, and she was also a fetching girly-girl who every so often let her hair down and wore high-waisted skirts. I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her. Our play was so warmly received that one of the English teachers suggested that Siebert and I try to publish it. As everything had gone wrong for me in junior high, suddenly everything was going right.
Toward three o’clock, DIOTI reconvened on the roof with booty: twenty-five clappers and five metal dishes, the latter daringly unbolted from the bigger bells that were mounted on high walls. We tied the clappers together with pink ribbon, filled the largest dish with plastic hay and Easter candy, nestled the clappers and the smaller dishes in the hay, and stashed the whole thing in the crawl space. Returning home then, Peppel and Schroer had the worst of it, pushing Peppel’s car back up a hill and into his driveway. I crept back into my house less cautiously than usual. I hardly cared if I was Caught; for once, I had something they couldn’t take away from me.
And to go back to school four hours later and see the place so peopled after seeing it so empty: here was a fore-taste of seeing clothed in the daylight the first person you’d spent a night with naked.
And the silence then, at eight-fifteen, when the bells should have rung but didn’t: this quiet transformation of the ordinary, this sound of one hand clapping, this beautiful absence, was like the poetry I wanted to learn to write.
At the end of first period, a teacher’s voice came over the classroom speakers to announce that the bells were out of order. Later in the morning, the teacher began to announce not only the time but also, oddly, the temperature. Summer heat poured through the open windows, and without the usual prison-yard clanging the crowds in hallways seemed deregimented, the boundaries of the hours blurred.
Manley at lunchtime brought happy news: the reason that Mr. Knight wasn’t making the announcements himself was that he was following the clues. Manley had spied him on the second floor, peering down into the rabbit hole. Despite the familiar tone we took with him, few members of DIOTI, certainly not I, had ever exchanged two words with Mr. Knight. He was the ideal, distant, benign, absurd Authority, and until now the notion that he might come out to play with us had been purely hypothetical.
The only shadow on the day was that a Device of mine again failed to work. Davis called me after school to report that Mr. Knight had lost the glass ampule down the rabbit hole. A canny English teacher, the same one who thought our play should be published, had promised Davis anonymity in exchange for the lost clue. I recited it over the phone, and the next morning the bells were working again. Kortenhof, who had had two hundred DIOTI bumper stickers printed up, went outside with Schroer in broad daylight and applied them to every rear bumper in the faculty parking lot.
THAT SUMMER MY cousin Gail, my aunt and uncle’s only child, was killed at the wheel of her car in West Virginia. My mother’s mother was dying of liver disease in Minneapolis, and I became morbidly aware that there were fifty thousand nuclear warheads on the planet, several dozen of them targeting St. Louis. My wet dreams felt apocalyptic, like a ripping of vital organs. One night I was awakened by a violent clap of thunder and was convinced that the world was over.
It was the sweetest summer of my life. “One continuous round of pleasure,” my father kept saying. I fell under the spell of Robert Pirsig and Wallace Stevens and began to write poetry. During the day, Siebert and I shot and edited a Super-8 costume drama with Davis and Lunte, and at night we painted a Rousseauian jungle mural on a wall at the high school. We were still just friends, but every evening that I spent with her was an evening that she didn’t spend with other boys. On her birthday, in July, as she was leaving her house, three of us jumped her from behind, blindfolded her, tied her wrists, and put her in the back of Lunte’s car. We had a surprise party waiting on a riverbank beneath an interstate overpass, and to Siebert’s increasingly plaintive questions—“Jon? Chris? Guys? Is that you?”—we said nothing until Lunte did 43 in a 30 zone. The cop who pulled us over made us unblind her. When he asked her if she knew us, you could see her considering her options before she said yes.
In August, Siebert went away to college, which allowed me to idealize her from a distance, communicate mainly in writing, put energy into new theatrical projects, and casually date someone else. Late in the fall, a publisher bought The Fig Connection for one hundred dollars, and I told my parents I was going to be a writer. They weren’t happy to hear it.
I had started keeping a journal, and I was discovering that I didn’t need school in order to experience the misery of appearances. I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment in the privacy of my bedroom, simply by reading what I’d written in the journal the day before. Its pages faithfully mirrored my fraudulence and pomposity and immaturity. Reading it made me desperate to change myself, to sound less idiotic. As George Benson had stressed in Then Joy Breaks Through, the experiences of growth and self-realization, even of ecstatic joy, were natural processes available to believers and nonbelievers alike. And so I declared private war on stagnation and committed myself privately to personal growth. The Authentic Relationship I wanted now was with the written page.