The Open Curtain (5 page)

Common sector,
he heard in his head, the speech in the room and the laughter coming to him as though swaddled in cotton.
Common sector.
This coldness was, he felt he knew somehow, the way that Lael must feel all the time. He felt that if he had been before a mirror he would see not his own face but the face of his half-brother. He tried to catch his reflection in Mrs. Madison’s glasses, but she was too far away. And almost immediately the vibratory moment passed.

There were strange spattered moments like that, where he felt he had understood something about his half-brother, something he could never quite verify and which he could hardly ask Lael about. As if the weekly proximity to Lael had weakened his skin and let his brother leak in. As he rode on the back of the scooter, his face pressed against Lael’s back, he felt that even once he was separated from him he would be joined to him still.

Lael did not seem to feel this. It was as if Lael remained always unscathed, self-contained. Lael could leak into him but not he into Lael. What he felt only rarely and infrequently—the cold remove—seemed to him, at least as far as he could tell, Lael’s dominant state. For if Lael felt anything, he rarely expressed it, and anything Lael did express toward Rudd felt pasted on, not so much an actual feeling as a kind of taunt or dare.

Yet perhaps he had gotten his half-brother all wrong.

Rudd stared at a blank sheet of paper. He was asked to write down
ideas.

“Ideas for what?” he said.

“For the research topic, stupid,” Steve Kilpatrick told him.

On the blackboard, overlaying a haze of chalk dust, had been written:

He did not have any heros, he told himself. None at all. In Sunday school when he was twelve they had asked him the same question, some
strategy for an object lesson, and he sat there holding his pencil trying to come up with something. When they went around the circle giving their responses he hadn’t known what to say, so remained silent until they passed him by.
Jesus,
the others had said, except for one who said
Rush Limbaugh.

He copied the questions off the blackboard and onto his paper, leaving four blank lines between each.

Where would you like to live?

Springville,
he wrote, then crossed it out and wrote,
Anywhere but here.
But on reflection it seemed like the sort of response likely to get him into trouble. Debbie White, seated next to him, had written California. He knew that he wanted to be as far from Debbie White as possible. He crossed his phrase out and wrote,
New York.

What is your heritage?

He did not know what to say. His father was dead and his mother, he felt, had reduced him in memory to a nonspecific and general figure of good, a sort of vague and lifeless avatar of Mormon ideals. Yet his father, he knew, had slept with Anne Korth—had perhaps even been secretly and polygamously married to her or perhaps simply had no qualms, despite being an avatar of Mormonism, about committing adultery. But for the purpose of a school assignment, he would give both his father and mother the benefit of the doubt.

Mormonism,
he wrote.
In the classical sense.

What decade fascinates you?

What was this about? What did Mrs. Madison want to hear? He looked up and judged her hairstyle, the cut of her white dress, then wrote,
1900s.

Mrs. Madison was in the front of the class, hands behind her back, stepping tentatively from one end of the blackboard to the other. When he capped his pen, she hurried to his desk.

“Finished?” she asked. “May I?”

She took the sheet of paper off his desk, read through it quickly.

“Surely you have a hero.”

“Not really.”

“It doesn’t have to be someone famous, Rudd,” she said. “It can be anyone. Your father, say.”

“My father’s dead,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and pretended to be reading the list again.

He died in the
common sector,
Rudd thought to himself, though he knew this was not precisely true.

“So what do we have?” she said. “New York, Mormonism, 1900s. What’s at the intersection of those words?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Now, Rudd,” she said, pursing her lips. “If you start with that attitude you’re already beaten. Is your glass half-empty or half-f?”

I don’t have a fucking glass,
Rudd thought, then thought,
That’s Lael thinking.
“Half-f,” he said. And then added, “Maybe even three-fourths full.”

“That’s the spirit,” she said. “Now you’re talking.” Holding his paper in her hand, she walked to the front of the class, began to speak about what they should do next. He noticed as she spoke that people all around him were crossing out what they had written, quickly creating better combinations.

“We will be going to the university library,” he heard Mrs. Madison tell the class. “I’ve made the arrangements. There, you will find a newspaper or magazine of national repute and look through it to find a news item that combines as many of your four answers as possible. So, for instance …” she said.

And then she held up Rudd’s paper. He tried to look nonchalant, but he could feel his ears start to burn and he knew they had gone red at the tips.

Fuck them,
thought Rudd.
Fuck all.

But he knew he didn’t mean it.

At least the field trip to the university library meant a few missed classes. She stood them all outside the doors, beside the frieze—a Utah artisan’s approximation of Mayan culture. He could also see, from where he stood, the dark bronze figure of an eight-foot Indian.
What tribe?
he wondered.

They were to stay in the periodicals/microfilm area. They were not, under any circumstances, to leave the periodicals/microfilm area. A field trip of this sort was a
privilege.
If they needed something that was not in the periodicals/microfilm area they must request the “library pass.” He watched Mrs. Madison hold up the hall pass she had brought with her from school.

They were herded through the doors and then through clicking dull green turnstiles. He stared at Ellen Barlow’s bare neck, just inches away, shuffling his feet so as not to step on her heels. Directly behind him, someone was popping gum.

They went through and he looked behind him. Mark Pollard was the one with the gum. He blew another bubble as Rudd watched, popped it sharply.

“What?” asked Mark.

“Nothing,” said Rudd and turned back around. He could feel Mark’s hand even before it was on his shoulder, tugging at him, pulling him around. He felt himself growing distant.

“Why did you look at me like that?” Mark asked.

“Like what?”

“You know what,” said Mark. “Want to fight or something?”

Rudd shook his head no, then, as Mark started to look away, slung his forehead down hard into Mark’s mouth and nose. It hurt like hell. When he brought his face away he could feel the gum sticky and webbed all through his bangs. Mark was gasping, covering his mouth.

Immediately there was a hand pinching his neck from behind, hard, a second hand on Mark’s neck.

“Rudd,” Mrs. Madison said. “Suppose you tell me what’s going on here.”

“I don’t exactly know,” he said. “I have his gum in my hair.”

“And why exactly is his gum in your hair? And why is his nose bleeding?”

He looked at her in a way he hoped was innocent. “We must have collided?”

She looked at Mark who, blood dripping down his chin, just nodded. Mrs. Madison took her hands off their necks. “Go wash up,” she said. “I know you’re both lying, but at the moment I’m too busy to care. Once more and I’ll see you both suspended.”

He splashed water through his hair, trying to rake the gum out with his fingers. It came out first in bits, then stopped coming out at all, tightening into clumps.

“You’re going to have to cut it out,” Mark said, patting his face and nose with a tan, coarse paper towel.

He nodded. He looked around for something to cut it with. There was nothing, unless he wanted to try sawing it off with the triangular teeth of the paper towel dispenser. He heard a click and when he turned, Mark held a pearl-handled stiletto in his hand. The blade was dull and oily, longer than his middle finger, twice as thick.

“Why did you do it?” Mark asked.

Rudd looked at the knife, shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. He really did not know, he realized. He had still been shaking his head no, he didn’t
want to fight, when his head had struck forward and through Mark’s face of its own accord. It had surprised him almost as much as it had Mark. “Why do you have a knife?” he asked.

“Don’t you like me?” asked Mark.

Rudd shrugged again. “I never thought about it much,” he said. “I like you good enough.”

Mark made a slow and awkward pass with the knife, forcing Rudd back a step. He smiled. “Just kidding,” he said, and handed the knife, haft first, to Rudd.

Rudd took the knife and held it, the light winking off the blade’s edge and into his eye. Lael, he knew, in his place, would probably stab Mark.
I am different from my half-brother. I am my own person.
He lifted the knife, began to hack off clumps of his own hair.

1903 sounded like a slow news year. The 1903
New York Times
came month by month in a faded yellow box on an open-centered spool, just like every other year, but he couldn’t remember having heard the year mentioned in Ms. Stahl’s The American Tradition class. Perhaps the paper would be stretching for stories and would report on minor human interest sorts of things, something that would come at least marginally close to the parameters forced upon him.

He put the microfilm in wrong and everything was sideways and backwards, the letters turned inside out. The spindle had not gone through the center hole, and the spool inscribed an oval as it turned. The harried reference librarian fixed it for him quickly, casting looks of hatred all the while at Mrs. Madison, who either remained oblivious or was exceptionally skilled at appearing so.

He began to crank the reel forward. When he got to the first page on the first day of January, everything was still sideways and it took him some time to figure out how to rotate the projecting apparatus to get the text to project correctly. Even then it was still in indifferent focus, strands of the page sharp, the remainder slightly fuzzy and blotted.

He started scanning titles.
Girl Met Polite Burglar,
something about iron and steel. Polite? he wondered.
Taylor to Be Hanged,
but no relation to Former Mormon Church President John Taylor as far as he could tell, then a flash of black and January 2 where
Boy Accidentally Kills His Brother With Rifle.
Directly below,
Ball Given in Barn.
The boy’s murder in the present tense, the ball in the past, though both had already
occured. Some significance there, he was willing to bet, but not enough to keep him from cranking through advertisements and on to the next day.
Horses Tortured in Trench
and
Got Carving Knife By Mail. French Painters Here.
He began cranking faster, flashed past an ad for muslin underclothing.
Sultan Rewards Spies
(perhaps by giving them muslim underclothing?),
Congo Raiding to Be Stopped, Activity in Billiards.
Does the
New York Times
still list billiard activity? he wondered.
French in an Amiable Mood
(perhaps because their painters are out of the country), and a few columns later,
French Murderer Not to Die
(just one more reason for the French amiability). More billiards,
Moving Day for Jesuits, Brought Dead Dog to Life,
“survived with adrenalin injections ten hours without a head.”
Holy Hell.

He wound the reel back up and took it off, packing it into its box, then went to retrieve the February reel from the pull-out cabinets.

He got the reel on and threaded right.
Typhoid Spreads at Ithaca, The Cake Walk in Vienna, Mr. Morgan Burlesqued, A New Kind of Orchid. Horse Kicked and Many Died. MERIT is what sells, OLD CROW RYE. It is a straight whiskey and cannot be equalled.
Just below,
The Frisky Mrs. Johnson. Large Oysters Scarce This Year.
Uncle Sam holding up some men and rockets wrapped in tape—a political cartoon that made no sense to him.
Rev. Robert Street Burned to Death.
“Daughter only injured, she will survive.” At least this one’s related to religion, he thought. He could ask Mrs. Madison if, since he couldn’t find anything Mormon, Rev. Robert was close enough. He knew she would acquiesce, but would also tell him he needed in future to persist, because
Good Things Come to Those Who Wait.
She was always saying crap like that, and pronouncing it like a headline.
The Plague in Mexico. Body Discovered by Divers.

He came to February third.
Billiard Championship.
He could ask to change his topic to billiards, list his hero as “a billiard player.”
Anthracite at Retail
right next to
Easy Divorce. Men’s $5 shoes for $3.50,
then, turning to February fourth,
Men’s Shoes for $2.25. Match Caused Explosion, Shot Woman and Self. Important to Every Home
—
Silks. Billiard Champion Lost. Chorus Favorite Dead.

He read about
Her 102d Anniversary,
flashed past the article just below it, registered it only a few pages later. He wheeled back:

Hooper Young’s Trial To-Day