2
PERIOD ONE WAS ENGLISH Comp, the only class where there was no final. Their assignment had been to write a Final Essay at home. This was to be a typed document between fifteen hundred and four thousand words long. The subject Ms. Avery had assigned was My Understanding of Truth. The Final Essay would count as twenty-five per cent of their final grade for the semester.
Jake came in and took his seat in the third row. There were only eleven pupils in all. Jake remembered Orientation Day last September, when Mr. Harley had told them that Piper had The Highest Teacher To Student Ratio Of Any Fine Private Middle School In The East. He had popped his fist repeatedly on the lectern at the front of the Common Room to emphasize this point. Jake hadn’t been terribly impressed, but he had passed the information along to his lather. He thought his father would be impressed, and he had not been wrong.
He unzipped his bookbag and carefully removed the blue folder which contained his Final Essay. He laid it on his desk, meaning to give it a final look-over, when his eye was caught by the door at the left side of the room. It led, he knew, to the cloakroom, and it was closed today because it was seventy degrees in New York and no one had a coat which needed storage. Nothing back there except a lot of brass coathooks in a line on the wall and a long rubber mat on the floor for boots. A few boxes of school supplies-chalk, blue-books and such-were stored in the far corner.
No big deal.
All the same, Jake rose from his seat, leaving the folder unopened on the desk, and walked across to the door. He could hear his classmates murmuring quietly together, and the riffle of pages as they checked their own Final Essays for that crucial misplaced modifier or fuzzy phrase, but these sounds seemed far away.
It was the door which held his attention.
In the last ten days or so, as the voices in his head grew louder and louder, Jake had become more and more fascinated with doors-all kinds of doors. He must have opened the one between his bedroom and the upstairs hallway five hundred times in just the last week, and the one between his bedroom and the bathroom a thousand. Each time he did it, he felt a tight ball of hope and anticipation in his chest, as if the answer to all of his problems lay somewhere behind this door or that one and he would surely find it… eventually. But each time it was only the hall, or the bathroom, or the front walk, or whatever.
Last Thursday he had come home from school, thrown himself on his bed, and had fallen asleep-sleep, it seemed, was the only refuge which remained to him. Except when he’d awakened forty-five minutes later, he had been standing in the bathroom doorway, peering dazedly in at nothing more exciting than the toilet and the basin. Luckily, no one had seen him.
Now, as he approached the cloakroom door, he felt that same dazzling burst of hope, a certainty that the door would not open on a shadowy closet containing only the persistent smells of winter-flannel, rubber, and wet wool-but on some other world where he could be whale again. Hot, dazzling light would fall across the classroom floor in a widening triangle, and he would see birds circling in a faded blue sky the color of
(his eyes)
old jeans. A desert wind would blow his hair back and dry the nervous sweat on his brow.
He would step through this door and be healed.
Jake turned the knob and opened the door. Inside was only darkness and a row of gleaming brass hooks. One long-forgotten mitten lay near the stacked piles of blue-books in the corner.
His heart sank, and suddenly Jake felt like simply creeping into that dark room with its bitter smells of winter and chalkdust. He could move the mitten and sit in the corner under the coathooks. He could sit on the rubber mat where you were supposed to put your boots in the wintertime. He could sit there, put his thumb in his mouth, pull his knees tight against his chest, close his eyes, and… and…
And just give up.
This idea-the relief of this idea-was incredibly attractive. It would be an end to the terror and confusion and dislocation. That last was somehow the worst; that persistent feeling that his whole life had turned into a funhouse mirror-maze.
Yet there was deep steel in Jake Chambers as surely as there was deep steel in Eddie and Susannah. Now it flashed out its dour blue lighthouse gleam in the darkness. There would be no giving up. Whatever was loose inside him might tear his sanity away from him in the end, but he would give it no quarter in the meantime. Be damned if he would.
Never! he thought fiercely. Never! Nev-
“When you’ve finished your inventory of the school-supplies in the cloakroom, John, perhaps you’d care to join us,” Ms. Avery said from behind him in her dry, cultured voice.
There was a small gust of giggles as Jake turned away from the cloakroom. Ms. Avery was standing behind her desk with her long fingers tented lightly on the blotter, looking at him out of her calm, intelligent face. She was wearing her blue suit today, and her hair was pulled back in its usual bun. Nathaniel Hawthorne looked over her shoulder, frowning at Jake from his place on the wall.
“Sorry,” Jake muttered, and closed the door. He was immediately seized by a strong impulse to open it again, to double-check, to see if this time that other world, with its hot sun and desert vistas, was there.
Instead he walked back to his seat. Petra Jesserling looked at him with merry, dancing eyes. “Take me in there with you next time,” she whispered. “Then you’ll have something to look at.”
Jake smiled in a distracted way and slipped into his seat.
“Thank you, John,” Ms. Avery said in her endlessly calm voice. “Now, before you pass in your Final Essays-which I am sure will all be very fine, very neat, very specific-I should like to pass out the English Department’s Short List of recommended summer reading. I will have a word to say about several of these excellent books-”
As she spoke she gave a small stack of mimeographed sheets to David Surrey. David began to hand them out, and Jake opened his folder to take a final look at what he had written on the topic My Understanding of Truth. He was genuinely interested in this, because he could no more remember writing his Final Essay, than he could remember studying for his French final.
He looked at the title page with puzzlement and growing unease. MY UNDERSTANDING OF TRUTH, By John Chambers, was neatly typed and centered on the sheet, and that was all right, but he had for some reason pasted two photographs below it. One was of a door-he thought it might be the one at Number 10, Downing Street, in London-and the other was of an Amtrak train. They were color shots, undoubtedly culled from some magazine.
Why did I do that? And when did I do it?
He turned the page and stared down at the first page of his Final Essay, unable to believe or understand what he was seeing. Then, as understanding began to trickle through his shock, he felt an escalating sense of horror. It had finally happened; he had finally lost enough of his mind so that other people would be able to tell.
3
By John Chambers
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
-T. S. “BUTCH” ELIOT
“My first thought was, he lied in every word."
-ROBERT “SUNDANCE” BROWNING
The gunslinger is the truth.
Roland is the truth.
The Prisoner is the truth.
The Lady of Shadows is the truth.
The Prisoner and the Lady are married. That is the truth.
The way station is the truth.
The Speaking Demon is the truth.
We went under the mountains and that is the truth.
There were monsters under the mountain. That is the truth. One of them had an Amoco gas pump between his legs and was pretending it was his penis. That is the truth.
Roland let me die. That is the truth. I still love him. That is the truth.
“And it is so very important that you all read The Lord of the Flies,” Ms. Avery was saying in her clear but somehow pale voice. “And when you do, you must ask yourselves certain questions. A good novel is often like a series of riddles within riddles, and this is a very good novel-one of the best written in the second half of the twentieth century. So ask yourselves first what the symbolic significance of the conch shell might be. Second-”