Exley, p.8
Exley, page 8
“You didn’t,” Mrs. T. said. It wasn’t a question. Her voice was so flat you could have slept on it.
“Because you don’t even need rain,” Harold said. “I went to Niagara Falls this summer. There was a rainbow, but no rain. Only water. It should be called a waterbow. That’s what I feel.”
“So whatever,” L. said. “I thought it was pretty great. Especially during the battle and the nasty hand-to-hand stuff.” L. was talking about the part before the part Mrs. T. had read, when some of the soldiers ran out of ammunition and so had to try to stab one another with their bayonets. L. was a brown belt and loved anything to do with hand-to-hand combat. He turned back a page and read: “‘The boy raised his bayonet, and for a moment it glistened in the silvermoonlight like some message from God, and then the boy thrust it through the chest of a boy not much older than he and then withdrew the bayonet, which made a terrible sucking sound as it left the other boy’s body, and then the other boy fell to the ground and did not move and would never move.’ Awesome,” L. said.
“By ‘awesome,’ you mean ‘terrible,’” Mrs. T. said.
“Well, yeah,” L. said.
“But why is the horse white?” P. asked. “Why’d the writer have to make that horse be a white horse?”
“Good point, P.,” Mrs. T. said. “It’s problematic.” They had this sort of conversation all the time: P. always asked Mrs. T. why something had to be either black or white, and Mrs. T. always answered him carefully, like she was trying hard to give the answer P. wanted so that they could talk about something else, anything else. “Why did the author have to make the horse white? Exactly.”
“But then again,” P. said, “it had to suck being that white horse, being sat on all the time by that bloody, gross white boy. White boy sitting on white horse. It’s like sitting on yourself or something.” P. paused for a second, trying to work all this out in his head. “It’s like everything white is his own worst enemy. Maybe that’s what the writer was trying to say.”
Mrs. T. nodded and wagged her finger at P. in an excited yes-I-think-you’ve-hit-the-nail-right-on-the-head sort of way. “Exactly,” she said, and then she turned to J. and asked, “What about you, J.? What do you think?”
Everyone looked at J. She was fingering her scar, and I could tell she was trying not to cry. J.’s father was in Iraq. Everyone’s father or mother, it seemed, was in Iraq. But J. was the only one trying not to cry about it. I wondered if that meant something had happened to her father the way something had happened to mine. Everyone but me looked away from her; even Mrs. T. pretended to be very interested in something underneath one of her fingernails. “I think it’s bullcrap,” J. finally whispered, so softly that you could pretend you didn’t hear it, which is exactly what
Mrs. T. did.
“And you, Miller?” Mrs. T. said. I knew that Mrs. T. didn’t like me. All my other English teachers had liked me, but not Mrs. T. Maybe because on the first day of class, when she’d asked what I’d read over the summer, I’d told her I’d read sixty-three books. She’d put her hands on her hips and pinched her lips and looked at me like I had done something wrong. I had been about to explain that some of those books were pretty short, which wasn’t even true. But L. didn’t give me the chance.
“So,” L. had said, “I find when it comes to reading, quality is more important than quantity.”
“Very good, L.,” Mrs. T. had said. “That’s using your mine-duh.”
Anyway, Mrs. T. was waiting for me to say what I felt about the America on the Same Page book. What I felt when I was reading it was what I felt now: I wanted it to be over so I could read something else. I mean, it was fine. It was a book, and so it couldn’t be that bad. But it wasn’t as good as it could have been. At one point in the book, the boy realized that “the world was killing and death.” Really? I wondered when I read that. Is that all the world is? And if that’s all the world is, then can’t books be about something else? Anything else? Exley’s book had been written during the Vietnam War, and it was about the war a little, but mostly it was about a bunch of other things. I wondered if this war would have to be over before A Fan’s Notes could be chosen as an America on the Same Page book. Except the way things were going, it seemed like the war would never be over. And if the war were never over, then we’d keep reading books about war, and A Fan’s Notes would never be an America on the Same Page book. That seemed terrible to me, more terrible than any of the terrible things that happened in the America on the Same Page book; I couldn’t stand for it to be true. I wondered if my dad couldn’t stand for it to be true, either, and if this was why he joined the army and went to Iraq in the first place: to help the war end so that people could stop reading the books they were reading or start reading A Fan’s Notes. That made some sense, but not enough sense. Because my dad loved A Fan’s Notes so much that he basically didn’t do anything the book didn’t tell him to, and there was nothing in the book that said he or anyone else should go to war or do anything else, really, except drink beer and sit on the davenport and read. But my dad went to Iraq anyway. Did that mean he’d decided that the boy in the America on the Same Page book was right, that the world was nothing but killing and death, and that if that were true, then he’d better stop reading A Fan’s Notes and get off the davenport and join the rest of the world? That seemed more terrible than anything else; I couldn’t stand for it to be true, either, just like I couldn’t stand to just sit around and watch my dad in his hospital bed. This was why, of course, I had to find Exley. And this was also why, during this entire time, I was writing a list of Exley’s favorite sayings and expressions. I figured it’d be easier to recognize him if I knew the way he talked by heart. I was so into writing the list that I didn’t notice that Mrs. T. had walked up to my desk until she reached down and snatched up the piece of paper. She read it, her face getting redder and redder; I could feel my face getting redder and redder, too, especially when Mrs. T. handed me back the piece of paper and asked me to please stand up and read what I’d written out loud. I really didn’t want to do it. But when Mrs. T. was asking me to do it, she was really telling me. When a teacher tells you to do something, you have to do it, especially if you don’t want to. This is what it means to be educated.
Anyway, here’s what I read:
EXLEY’S FAVORITE WORDS AND SAYINGS
Jesus H. Keeriiisst.
For Christ’s sake.
The trip began on a depressing note.
I had incapacitated myself.
Cha (you).
You’re a goddamn drunken Irish poet!
C’mon, friend.
How does one get into this business?
Oh, Jesus, Frank!
Oh, Frank, baby!
Aw, c’mon, you goofies!
It is very wearying to be honest.
Nobody, but nobody.
I’ve got human life — do you understand that? Human life! — in my hands.
Literary idolaters fell somewhere between blubbering ninnies and acutely frustrated maidens.
It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan.
Life isn’t all a goddamn football game!
I wanted to risk great happiness but I never got the chance.
There are certain appeals that quite startle and benumb the heart.
Fuck you.
After I finished, Harold clapped, like he always did for me when I read something aloud in class. J. gave me a little smile, like she didn’t know exactly what I was talking about but wanted me to keep talking anyway. But no one else clapped or smiled at me or even looked in my direction. They were all looking at one another as though someone — me, or them — had totally misunderstood the assignment.
“So whatever that means,” L. finally said.
“That was completely inappropriate, Miller,” Mrs. T. said. She had gone back to her desk and was holding her grade book in one hand, her red pen in the other. We got either a minus or a check for our “freewrite.” I guess that was true for this assignment, too. I could tell by the way Mrs. T.’s pen moved that I got a minus. I don’t know about you, but bad grades make me feel like I have to go to the bathroom. They make me feel anxious, and when I get anxious, I’ll say things I shouldn’t.
“All that was from this great book called A Fan’s Notes,” I said. “written by Frederick Exley.” By the way Mrs. T. reacted, I was pretty sure she’d never heard of the book or the guy who wrote it. She put on her glasses, then cocked her head and looked at me warily, like she knew I was about to say something objectionable. “I was thinking maybe we could read and talk about that book after we’re done talking about this one?”
Mrs. T. opened her mouth, but before any sound came out, J. said, “Maybe we should.”
Mrs. T. closed her mouth. But like every teacher, she had someone to speak for her when she didn’t feel like speaking for herself. “So why would we want to do that?” L. asked. He picked up the America on the Same Page book and read aloud from the back cover, which, like all America on the Same Page books, said, “This America on the Same Page book reminds us what it is to be an American and to live in difficult times.” “So I don’t know how his book” — and here L. pointed at me — “reminds us of that.”
J. squinted at L. and said, “Thanks, but I don’t think I need to be reminded.” Then she stood up, shouldered her backpack, and stomped out of the room, leaving behind her copy of the book. Once the door slammed behind J., the room was absolutely quiet — there’s no room as quiet as the classroom a kid has just walked out of without the teacher’s permission — until finally Mrs. T. cleared her throat, so that we looked at her instead of looking at the door. Her pen was in her hand, and she was looking at me over her glasses, like what had happened was my fault and not J.’s or L.’s or hers.
“Next time, Miller,” she said, making another minus mark in her book, “use your mine-duh.”
Doctor’s Notes (Entry 13)
After breakfast (grapefruit, brown sugar) I locate the Veterans Affairs hospital: it is exactly where M. described it and as M. described it. The automatic doors open as he said they would. The female receptionist is seated behind the desk; she is physically as M. described her. I approach her desk and wait for her to recognize my presence; she does not. The swinging doors behind her open and several men rush through them pushing another man on a gurney. The man on the gurney is moaning piteously. But I labor to ignore him. As any mental health professional will tell you, sometimes you have to ignore human suffering — or even make it worse — in order to heal human suffering. It is my understanding that the branches of our armed forces operate under a similar assumption. Which is yet another example of how the mental health profession has a great deal in common with other of our most significant professions.
Regardless, I continue to wait to be acknowledged by the receptionist. She stares at her computer screen for several long moments, then types furiously, then stops again and stares at the screen, fingers poised over the keyboard. I stand there, waiting for her to look up and say “Hello” or some such conventional greeting, but she does not. I think of how useful M. would be at this moment. Perhaps M. could teach her how to speak and when, the way he has taught me.
Finally, I clear my throat. “Ahem,” I say. She looks up at me; her fingers rise from the keyboard, and with both hands she grips the desk, tightly, as though she might flip it over. Her eyes are buglike, although I don’t think thyroidal: I believe she makes them buglike. She is distinctly unfriendly — unfriendly and, indeed, hostile. I take a step back, and that seems to mollify her somewhat: her eyes recede a little back into their sockets.
“Yes?” she inquires.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m looking for one of your patients.”
“And who are you?” she asks, as though I’d told her I was looking for myself. This takes me by surprise — by surprise and, indeed, unawares — which is why I sputter a bit before telling her my name, then repeating my name and putting my title — Doctor—in front of it. This perhaps makes things worse: when she hears I am a doctor, the receptionist bulges her eyes again. “What kind of doctor?”
“I’m a mental health professional,” I say.
“A psychiatrist?” she asks.
“Just as I said,” I say. The title psychiatrist has sundry unfortunate associations and attendant nicknames — shrink, headshrinker, and the like — and it is my learned opinion that if we call ourselves mental health professionals, then those associations and nicknames will disappear and we will no longer be thought of as lab-coat-wearing goons who wield long, dripping needles, or who strap patients onto the electroshock table, or who scalpel out the offending part of the frontal lobe. This is why I have for several years lobbied my professional association to change their name from the North Country Psychiatric Association to the North Country Mental Health Professionals. So far, they have not done so, but I’ve begun calling them, and us, by that name anyway, hopefully to facilitate the change. “I’m here to see T.L.R.”
“Is he your patient?” the receptionist asks, still looking at me and not at her computer screen, where presumably M.’s father’s name could be found or not.
“Well, not exactly,” I admit.
“Not exactly?”
“He’s the father of one of my patients,” I say. Her eyes advance further toward me and away from her face; I can tell this is starting to go badly. “A boy. Nine years old. Dirty blond hair cut into a bowl shape. Tiny teeth. He says he’s been here to see his father. He even mentioned you.”
The receptionist raises her eyebrows, then once again begins staring at her computer screen. I think perhaps she is looking up the name T.L.R. after all. But after a minute she says, still staring at the screen, “Only immediate family members are allowed to visit the patients.”
“But . . . ,” I begin to argue, when the phone at the front desk rings. To answer it, the receptionist swivels in her chair, so that her back is to me. In front of me is a pair of swinging doors. According to M., his father is in room D-1, just past those doors. I sneak another look at the receptionist; she is still talking on the phone and her back is still to me. I wipe my perspiring hands on my dungarees. You must not, I say to myself. Yes, you must, Dr. Pahnee says back. And then before I can talk myself out of it, I run through the doors, past the usual hospital apparatuses — vending machines, X-ray machines, and the like — until I come to room D-1. I push the door open and walk inside. The room is curtained and gloomy; the only light (dim) emanates from a wall fixture above the patient’s bed. Yes: there is a bed, and there is a patient in it. I walk closer. He is as M. has described him: pale, clean shaven, with a crew cut. He is, as M. claimed, hooked up to a number of machines, and they are all connected to one another and to the patient in mysterious ways. Before I became a mental health professional, I briefly considered becoming a physician. But the sick body requires too many complicated machines to heal it. Besides, the machine of the juvenile mind is complicated enough. I take another step forward. I am on the patient’s right side. His right wrist is bare and resting on top of his left hand, both of his hands resting on top of his stomach. I can see a white bracelet on the patient’s left wrist, a bracelet on which, no doubt, is information pertaining to the patient’s identity — his identity and, indeed, information that will help me identify him. I am reaching over to lift his right wrist off his left when someone yells, “What do you think you’re doing?” I turn my head and see two men in green military uniforms. I almost revert to myself, grovel, offer my apologies, beg their forgiveness, and slink out of the room. But being Dr. Pahnee has gotten me this far . . . which is why I exclaim what M. has instructed me to exclaim at the end of each session: “ ‘I’ve got human life — do you understand that? Human life! —in my hands!’ ”
My words sound impressive to my own ears, but they seem to have the opposite effect on the guards. They step forward, each grab me by the elbow, drag me out of the patient’s room, back through the swinging doors, past the receptionist, through the automatic door, and then deposit — deposit and, indeed, dump — me on the sidewalk outside.
Outside the Crystal
After advanced reading I had study hall, math, and social studies (I was an advanced eighth-grade reader, but a normal eighth grader in every other subject). Then it was lunch. I got in line in the cafeteria with my tray. I got my little carton of milk, my thing of pears swimming in syrup, my two slices of white bread with gravy and chunks of meat on top. I pushed my tray on the metal track toward the cashier. As I did, I looked to the right, toward the cafeteria tables, and saw Harold. He was sitting by himself. There were plenty of reasons why. Harold whinnied instead of laughing, and always at things that weren’t funny. He had never made it even halfway up the rope in gym class. He had a long, skinny neck, and that long, skinny neck housed a huge Adam’s apple. Probably the biggest ever. Probably even bigger than Adam’s, whose apple must have been really big, since it was named after him. And Harold had terrible raisin allergies. He might have been the only person in the world allergic to raisins. I don’t know what else I can say about him except that I was the only person who ever sat with him at lunch. But I just didn’t want to be that person right then. Not when my dad was in the hospital, waiting for me to bring Exley to him. So I left my tray there on the track and walked in the other direction. “Hey, you can’t do that,” the cashier said. But I did. I left the tray there and ran: away from Harold, the cafeteria, the school, until I was running down Washington Street, toward the Crystal.
Washington Street looked completely different than it had the day before. The buildings and the people were still there. But after reading A Fan’s Notes, Washington Street was a different Washington Street. Exley described driving down Washington Street on the way to the hospital when he thought he was having a heart attack. In the chapter, the leaves were turning color and falling, and Exley said that “Washington Street was as lovely as I had ever seen it” and that it “looked like some dream of a place.” He also said he hated the place, but the writing itself said he didn’t. Sometimes how you say things matters more than what you say. And now that I’d read Exley, I could see how pretty Washington Street really was. The leaves had already fallen and had been raked into neat piles along the side of the street. Most of the snow from the night before had melted, but there was a little bit left on top of the piles. It looked like frosting. The trees were bare, their branches waving happily in the wind. I had never seen the sky so deep blue. The sun was so bright that it was everywhere; it seemed to be bouncing back and forth from one hospital’s windows to the others’. But I wouldn’t have noticed all this without Exley’s book. As I walked by the VA hospital, I remembered the time when me and my dad and Mother drove down Washington Street. It was fall then, too. The cigarette smokers were outside the YMCA, the fat women were in a slightly shorter line outside the welfare office, the soldiers were on their cell phones. The trees were bare. The sky was blue then, too, but Mother didn’t seem to notice it. All she noticed was some guy walking around and around the Public Square. We were stopped at a red light. The guy was wearing sweatpants with one sweatpant leg pushed up to the knee, and old cracked leather basketball sneakers without any laces. He walked bent over at the waist, looking at the ground, like he was going to get sick. But he didn’t get sick. He just kept walking like that, around and around the Square. I don’t know where he thought he was walking. It didn’t look like he was out there for the exercise.
