The computer room had cost over five hundred thousand dollars. On Thursday evening there’d been an unveiling for parents and faculty, and on Friday the day’s schedule had been reorganized to allow every student in the school a chance to sit at the helm of one of these machines. Now, in one Saturday afternoon, the teachers were expected to learn how to integrate them into their curricula.
For two years, the administration had been aggressively brainwashing the school community, producing pamphlets with titles like “The Modern Miracle in Education” and “Learning Finally Becomes Fun!” The need was so great, they said, and money so scarce, that faculty members were being asked to give a portion of their salaries each month to the cause. Vida had heard that some of the younger teachers, in fear of not getting their contracts renewed, had actually agreed to the tithing, poor suckers.
Now they were all suckers, crammed in this room on a Saturday. There were not, thank God, enough computers to go around, so the overflow sat on metal chairs at the back. Vida took a seat next to Cheryl Perry, who smelled like cheese and handed her a few mimeographs, general instructions for the IBM System 370.
Mark Stratton, the computer guru, and Brick Howells stood practically hand in hand at the front of the room. Brick declared, in a voice far too loud for the size of the room, that what they were about to witness was nothing short of a revolution. And that no other school in the area, not even Hunt, Fayer’s wealthier rival, had implemented this kind of technology.
To Vida’s astonishment, her colleagues clapped. Then Mark asked everyone seated at a computer to turn it on by pushing the large rectangular button on the left. He said something else but his voice was drowned out by the sudden snap and whir of the machines. Vida waited for the noise to die down. It didn’t. A smell like burnt hair filled the room.
Then they were asked to divide up into their departments. The math, science, and history departments should all take seats at the computers; the arts and languages should find their own classrooms in order to brainstorm ways in which they could use their weekly lab time. This transition was as difficult and bitter as if they had all been third graders. Jose Costa refused to give up his seat: he’d been the first to arrive. And Leon, the frail Latin teacher, put up an equally impressive fight on the other side of the room. The art teachers seemed to have a difficult time simply identifying each other. When she and the rest of her department finally settled around the thick walnut table in the conference room, Vida added nothing to the list her colleagues chirped out, as she had absolutely no plans to ever bring her students into that awful place.
When her department was called back to the smelly, roaring room, Mark assigned them a computer and asked them to simply type onto the screen a paragraph. “You could begin a letter, a short story, or,” he said looking specifically at Vida, Lydia, and Liz, the three women in the English department, “a recipe. Anything. Then we’ll go from there.”
The first thing that came to her mind was Shakespeare. Even though it had been several years since she’d pulled her college typewriter out of the closet, her hands knew the keys immediately.
If it were now to die
’Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute,
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.
How ludicrous to see poor Othello in fluorescent yellow on a little TV screen in front of her. After a few minutes, Mark explained how to check the paragraph for mistakes. Vida’s computer bleeped seven times. It had opinions about not only spelling, but grammar and syntax as well.
Mark Stratton moved quickly toward her and nestled his upper body on top of her monitor. “Stumped already?”
“Mr. Computer’s style is pretty rigid.”
“It will only accept the best configuration.”
“You can’t expect a machine to have a sensitivity to the rhythms and nuances of the English language. Sometimes the least grammatically correct sentence is the best choice. I don’t want a computer holding back my students’ creativity.”
Mark laughed. “In fifty years, these babies are going to be writing better books than anything you’ve ever taught them.”
“You can’t believe that.”
“I don’t have to believe it. I know it, my friend.”
Before the creation of this room. Mark had been a part-time geography teacher. Vida watched him now, pacing the length of his royal-blue carpet, gazing with possessive pleasure at his hot droning monsters. She thought of the threshing machine, Hardy’s symbol for the Industrial Age, that despotic contraption that forced an inhuman pace on fieldworkers, separating their souls from the land forever. Her chest tightened. She felt it, right here, right now, what Hardy had felt, the ache of modernism.
They had left it that Tom would make dinner, but when Vida got home just before six, the house was empty. She called out into the darkness. Only Walt came, slowly, his back legs reluctant to separate after hours of napping. He sniffed her pants, then snorted out the smell, as if he, too, were disgusted by Mark Stratton and his machines. She called out again. Nothing.
She’d never been in this house alone. She tossed her shoes down the hall toward her room and sat in one of the wing chairs facing the sofa. When she shut her eyes, the head and neck of a computer monitor lunged at her. Brick had drained the scholarship fund to pay for the lab. The board of trustees had just stood back and let him do it. And now she was expected to take each of her classes down there once a week. They wanted her to become the engine man, the half-human, coal-grimed creature who kept the threshing machine running. The undersides of her arms burned with anger. It was time for a drink. But she could wait a little longer, wait until everybody got home.
The mud-gray screen of the TV gaped at her. Had she ever been in this room when it was not on, when it was not blaring its garbage? The hostages. The hostages. How much more could we take of the hostages? Every now and then a few were trotted out onto the embassy steps, a tattered white rag tied tight around each face, beards growing in clumps like bad grass on their necks. Every day the newscasters seemed shocked anew that it was still going on. It irked her how they had begun to count, numbering the days since the takeover and her wedding. Today was Day 33. She didn’t even know how she knew. They had programmed her, like a computer. These babies are going to be writing better books than anything you’ve ever taught them. What kind of viper would want to believe that? And where was everybody? Fran and Caleb, she remembered now, were at friends’ houses for the night, but Peter, Tom, and Stuart? It was too dark to see out to the driveway now. Should she start making something? The thought of making another damn dinner pinned her to her seat. She hadn’t realized how good she’d had it on campus. Every meal had been made for them. Except for the first and last weeks of summer and a fortnight at Christmas, she’d never had to cook. And when she did, Peter had expected so little — a bowl of soup, scrambled eggs, he didn’t care. But the Belous were different. They asked at breakfast what she’d be making that night. They came in while dinner was cooking to lift up the lids and smell. They had begun to make suggestions, one at a time, choreographed hints about what to cook and how to cook it. They liked to set the table. They enjoyed, in fact, all rituals. They were like some prehistoric tribe, the way they found meaning in the repetition of acts. Once Vida had read “Annabel Lee” to Caleb before bed and now he wanted a poem read to him every night. She had driven Fran to the mall last Friday afternoon and now the girl wanted to go shopping on the first Friday afternoon of every month. Stuart still wanted nothing to do with her, but even that had its own pattern. He always sat in the chair farthest from her, and was sure to be out of the house on Saturday mornings and Sunday evenings when she did her grading in the kitchen. She felt grateful to Stuart for one reason: his presence in Peter’s bedroom. If she had that dream, he’d be there — and most likely awake — to stop her from hurting Peter.