Act
II, Scene II
Thomas
McGrew III and IV have each moved further down the slide Thomas McGrew III is now several feet from
the stage-left proscenium, sitting on a small wooden stool, a wooden cane
resting over his knees. Thomas McGrew IV stands near center-stage, naked,
hairless, staring down the slide. His scalp is smeared with dried blood.
TMG
III: Maybe some cake. (He holds up a small, pink cake). Such
a pretty little cake.
He
places the small, pink cake in tiny pastry box. He is in some pain as he
rises to standing, leaning heavily on the cane. Then he kneels down, and
uses both hands to push the pastry box up the slide. Thomas McGrew IV
does not look down when it hits his foot.
He continues staring past Thomas McGrew III, down the slide. Thomas McGrew III catches the cake as it
slides back down.
TMG
III (Still kneeling: opening the box to smell): I bet it’s tasty.
Mmm, strawberries. No? Don’t want to try it?
No
response. Thomas McGrew III rummages
under the stool and pulls out a wind-up toy.
TMG
III: Oh now look, a train.
Still
crouching, he holds one hand out, runs the train over it, back and forth.
TMG
III: Nothing like the roar of a train to bring some cheer to a dull dark
day. Ker-chug, ker-chug, it goes.
He
sends the train rolling upwards on its little wheels. It only makes it
halfway towards Thomas McGrew IV before it loses momentum and rolls back down
to Thomas McGrew III.
TMGIII:
Ah, you see. This train needs a bit more steam.
He
sends it up again, with more force. It flies past Thomas McGrew IV,
disappearing behind the stage-right proscenium.
TMGIV:
Catch it, son! Catch it on its way down! Wee bitty little train. You have to turn around to catch it!
After
a moment, it reappears, sliding downwards from stage right. Thomas McGrew
IV faces away from it, towards stage left.
TMGIII:
Here it comes! The train! Turn and catch…
Thomas
McGrew IV takes no notice of the train as it rolls past him. Thomas McGrew III does
not look at it either. Still crouching,
he looks up the slide at Thomas McGrew IV, as the train slides by. After a
moment it disappears stage left.
Thomas
McGrew III uses his cane to pull himself to standing. He leans on the cane and startes at his
naked, blood-stained son for several minutes. As he stares, the hope on
his face slowly crumbles into abject horror.
* * *
Gavin
was sitting at the office computer, clicking between his personal email, his
New Buffalo email, and some random blog about how to raise chickens in your
yard. He was pretty sure no one was going to show up for today’s office
hour. They only came the day before an essay was due, and then they all
came and made a giant line down the hall.
He
didn’t remember exactly how he got to the chicken blog, but he had started out
looking up some Irish farming terminology from No No Not Now. One link,
another link, and the next thing you know, chicken
rearing. Which had nothing to do
with Stump but was evidently all the rage in Brooklyn and Austin, Texas.
He didn’t have a yard, currently, not even a balcony, so it probably wasn’t too
relevant for him, but he couldn’t get himself to close the window and get back
to work.
Two
and a half days since he woke up in Rona’s dorm room, and already everything
was completely weird. Mostly Rona. Rona
was being completely normal, which was totally weird. In class yesterday,
despite the sleep deprivation and the black eye, she was annoyingly on-task.
Still
drawing the trees in her notebook, but she was back to answering questions,
speaking up when they did small-group work, finding exactly the right passages
from Time Slide to illustrate Kristeva’s ideas about abjection.
It
was just like she had said: If we just did it, it would be over with and I
could focus better. Did that mean it was over with? Because
man, was she focused. She was as focused and involved as she had been
during the fist weeks of the term. It was Gavin whose concentration had turned
to complete shit.
“I
think the most abject thing is the pauses,” she had said during discussion. “It’s
like the characters kind of fall apart in there, like they stop existing. You
know, it’s like how Kristeva says, um.” Thumbing through her coursepack, all
creased and annotated. “Here it is: ‘Consciousness has not assumed its rights
and transformed into signifiers those fluid demarcations of yet unstable
territories where an ‘I’ that is taking shape is cease-lessly straying.’ It’s
like Thomas McGrew three and four have fallen into this space where they don’t
have an identity for a while.”
They
had never talked about this idea; she had come up with it all on her own. Just
a passing thought in some class she was taking, to be forgotten in a few weeks
or hours. An idea that just happened to be the major premise of Gavin’s
MLA talk on abjection in Time Slide, one of the most important arguments
in his dissertation. So yeah, she had recreated his life’s work, created
and abandoned, over the course of a one-hour-fifteen-minute comp class. Whatever, fine, no big deal.
Newspaper
will not make suitable bedding as it is not very absorbent. Pine shavings
will keep
your
coop dry and comfortable.
Mmm,
a bed of pine shavings. That sounded nice. The clean, woody scent,
how it would tickle your nose and make you want to sneeze. The cooing of birds,
tiny white feathers floating in the air. Eggs frying in a pan, giant
orange farm-fresh yolks, white edges bubbling and curling up brown.
The
grumbling in his stomach was loud enough to hear. He looked at the clock. Four
forty. Only twenty minutes more, and then he could stop at the Drunken
Buffalo for some wings and a beer on his way home.
If
you want to purchase eggs rather than newly hatched chicks, you’ll need an
incubator.
Maybe
next year, wherever he ended up, he’d have a backyard. Then he could have a little garden, grow his
own tomatoes and zucchinis and stuff. And strawberries. Chickens wouldn’t
even be out of the question, or maybe honey bees would be interesting.
He
could be like one of those people who spends a year raising all their own food.
Not like he knew how to cook, but he could learn. That would be a good way to
use his time in a new place. He’d be writing a book of course, for his tenure
process, but you couldn’t write all day long. And he remembered from his first
year at New Buffalo: when you move to a new town where you didn’t know anybody,
you have a lot of time on your hands.
All
that cooking and gardening sounded kind of exhausting, though. Maybe he just needed a hobby. He typed
in the search bar on the top of the computer screen: How do I learn to play
an instrument?
Someone
was knocking on the door. Gavin looked up at the little door-window, pretty
much expecting another instructor looking to borrow a stapler or
something. But no, it was the black guy from English 1A.
De…um…Jose? No, Juan. DeJuan. He was out there fiddling
with the locked door handle, like everyone always did.
Gavin
let him in and pulled a chair out from one of the empty desks without
computers. DeJuan’s walked over to it, a slow, uneven shuffle. He was wearing shorts, which it was still a
little cold for, but they were long, past his knees. He didn’t have a
backpack or anything.
“What’s
up?” Gavin asked.
“Not
too much.”
DeJuan
stared down one yellow basketball shoe, turning his foot back and forth at slow
right angles. Gavin wondered if maybe he had misunderstood the purpose of
office hours and just come to hang out. That had happened before a few
times: lonely students who just wanted to sit in his office for company.
Usually it annoyed him. Didn’t they think he had anything better to do
than shoot the shit with some eighteen-year-old?
He
wasn’t annoyed now, though. Maybe even glad to have a project. DeJuan!
Stop falling through the cracks! I’m here to save you!
Today,
he would do that thing he wasn’t supposed to do: get involved with his
undergrads. Fuck, he was already involved. Involved dick-deep,
elbow-deep, over his head. When you’re drowning already, a couple extra
inches don’t make things any worse.
“You
seem kind of down.”
DeJuan
didn’t say anything, just kept staring at his feet, or maybe just past them at
that brown stain on the red-brown carpet. He started massaging his right leg
really hard with the heal of his hand.
After
probably thirty seconds of floor-staring and leg-massaging, he spoke, kind of a
mumble.
“Your
class is all right.”
So
that was a start. Gavin waited for the but. DeJuan was turning his
foot again. No but.
“Thank
you,” Gavin said.
Some
intense staring at the leg. Massage, massage. The giant muscles
in DeJuan’s shoulder were rippling and bulging under his sleeve. Then he
looked up at Gavin, investigating, like he was making sure it was okay to talk.
“I’m
quitting school.”
Oh,
no. Bad. Sure, DeJuan’s attendance was pretty spotty, but
he had turned in all his papers, and they weren’t awful. He had at least
a solid C in the class.
“You
don’t need to drop. You’re passing the
class.”
“I
guess I miss Philly.” He bent his leg a little, stretched it straight, bent it
again. “You know how it is.”
“Philly?”
Gavin didn’t know how Philadelphia was at all, except maybe from movies.
“Nah,
missing home. Like I’m saying, at least you got those Chinese kids.
I got no one here.”
Those
Chinese kids? Was
that what this was about? He kind of wanted to argue. Those students
aren’t like my instant best friends just because they’re Asian. But
he wasn’t here to debate the nature of racial identity. He was here to be
supportive and helpful.
“You
don’t need to be the same, you know, ethnicity, to make a connection. You
might have a lot in common with somebody just based on your interests.
Like, don’t you have friends on the football team?”
“Yeah,
but since I messed up my knee I can’t play.” He propped his hand on his leg,
his cheek in his hand, like he was getting tired of holding his head upright.
“I mean I still go to practice and stuff, and sit.”
Well,
that explained the limping, anyway.
“You
shouldn’t leave school,” Gavin tried. It was kind of an experiment.
Past Gavin would just let the guy drop. Not my job to keep every
flaky student enrolled, and one less student meant one less final essay to
grade. But the new, involved Gavin was going to interfere. Or at
least not let the guy go without a few words of encouragement.
“You’re
doing some good work in the class. You should stay.”
DeJuan
looked up, his face still resting heavy in his hand, and gave Gavin a sorry
smile.
“Nah,
I’m going. My counselor already set it up for me to drop all my
classes. I got a bus ticket for tomorrow. I just kinda wanted to tell
you, you know. I really liked those books we read.”
Gavin
didn’t laugh out loud, but he wanted to.
Nobody
likes those books. Besides
Rona Gomez, who was a complete weirdo, no student had ever indicated any
fondness for the works of Liam Stump. You’re not in college to read
things you like, Gavin always said. There’s a place to read books you
enjoy and it’s called the library.
“The
Divine Sharpness one especially.” DeJuan looked a little perkier,
his face finally out of his hand. “You know, that whole part about the
mind and the body fighting?”
He
waited, so Gavin nodded. Yeah, I believe I’m familiar with that part.
“It’s
really like that.” DeJuan was sitting up straight now, not slouching or
playing with his leg. “I mean it’s like, my mind and my body are fighting all
the time. It’s like all they wanna do is fight. I’m like, you guys
gotta get this thing worked out! Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny
somebody wrote a whole book about that.”
He
was smiling, lights in his eyes. And he was right. It was funny to
write a play about a body fighting with a mind. It was totally
funny. Gavin smiled, too.
“Hey.”
DeJuan pointed at the computer. “You getting chickens?”
Crap. He had forgotten to
change the computer screen. Embarrassing. Although, really,
there was no reason to be embarrassed. It’s not like there was anything
wrong with learning about something, even something that had nothing to do with
Irish Modernist theater.
“I
don’t know. Maybe.”
“My
grandma got chickens. She down in Georgia. She got a whole little farm
down there.”
“Sounds
nice.”
“Yeah,
it is.” He stood up, went over to the door. “Anyway, see ya.
Or I guess I won’t, so. Bye.”
He
stood, which looked kind of difficult with the knee problem, and walked
crookedly to the door.
“Okay,
yeah, bye,” Gavin said, watching the broad back disappearing into the hall.
Everything was so weird today, like he wasn’t really awake. It was probably just the lack of sleep over
the weekend. He wasn’t eighteen years
old, not like some people, and he
couldn’t just shake off a rough weekend
Wait!
Fuck. What are you doing? He had just let DeJuan walk out the door? “Bye”?
What the fuck was his problem? Run after him! Try harder!
Gavin
stood up from his chair. DeJuan wouldn’t have reached the stairs yet, not
walking all messed up like that. How weird would it be to follow him, beg
him one last time not to give up on school? Would that be good
teacher-involvement or was it more like stalking?
Gavin’s
phone rang on the desk. West Kansas Agricultural University.
Fuck.
He sat back down and stared at it, shaking and ringing. Right before he knew it would go to
voicemail, he tapped the screen to answer.
“Hello?”
“Is
this Gavin Cheng-Johnson?” the voice said. A man, young-sounding, kind of
New-Yorky. “Sorry for the late notice. We’ve had some candidates withdraw
their applications. We’d like you to come for a campus visit—I know it’s
soon—Monday.”
Gavin
stared out at the empty hallway. He heard some noises, voices from
another office, the door to the stairwell slamming closed.
“Sure.”
He ran the cursor across the chicken-rearing page, looking for something to
click on. “Yeah, sure. Monday's
fine.”
No comments:
Post a Comment