The Crazy School Read online

  I got up to crack a window while considering my answer. “I think it’s hard to know what will matter, Wiesner.” The window crank didn’t want to budge. I tried hitting it a couple of times with the side of my fist to loosen it up.

  “Stuff like this,” I said, “it’s all layers and layers, and most of it you’ll forget, but maybe down the line you’ll find what matters to you. Probably not Yalta specifically, just some wayward little snack-o’-trivia you won’t even remember having filed away.”

  The crank gave suddenly, pinching my knuckles against the window’s metal frame hard enough that I wanted to stick them in my mouth to quiet the sting.

  The fresh air was worth it. Crisp, even bracing.

  I looked over at Wiesner. “Dude, I don’t have a damn clue what the Taft-Hartley Act was about anymore, or which numbers match most of the amendments to the Constitution.”

  “So can’t we blow that stuff off?” he asked. “The teacher-geek trivia?”

  “But you never know what won’t matter.” I flopped into my chair. “Like, here’s the kind of thing I remember if someone talks about the UN: It’s on top of the FDR Drive, on the East River.”

  “By my family’s apartment,” said Sitzman.

  “Lucky ducky,” I said. “Anyone know what’s under the FDR Drive?”

  No takers.

  “Rubble from London,” I said. “Chunks of all those buildings the Germans bombed to shit in the war—”

  “Heinkels and Junkers and Messerschmitts,” said Sitzman, suddenly looking all blissed out and dreamy.

  “Rubble that was dumped into the holds of U.S. Navy ships for ballast on the way home,” I continued.

  I looked at Wiesner. “Why did they need ballast?”

  He shrugged, but he wanted to know.

  “Because those ships were emptied out,” I said. “All the tanks and planes and jeeps they’d brought over that weren’t blown up got left there, in case Stalin tried taking over Europe after the war. A lot of bodies got left there, too. Two hundred ninety-five thousand Americans didn’t come home—guys no older than all of you.”

  Wiesner looked stricken.

  “I think about that,” I said, “when I’m on the FDR Drive. And I think about the people killed in London when the buildings were destroyed in the first place. Thirty-two thousand civilians. Families. Little kids.”

  “How many people altogether?” asked Sitzman. “The whole war?”

  “There’s probably a table in here.” I picked up the textbook. “Page two-thirty-six: sixty-two million, five hundred thirty-seven thousand, eight hundred deaths total, military and civilian.”

  Sitzman looked at the page. “Which includes five million, seven hundred fifty-four thousand Jewish holocaust deaths.”

  “Three million in Poland alone,” I said.

  They were quiet.

  I heard footsteps in the hallway.

  Sitzman said, “How could they do that? Sixty-two and a half million people.”

  The footsteps slowed and then stopped just shy of the classroom door.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  LeChance said, “And we keep doing it, over and over.”

  “But people try to make it stop,” I said. “Like, even though there was the League of Nations after the First World War—which, you might recall, didn’t accomplish crap to prevent the Second World War—these guys were ready to try again. Roosevelt and Stalin and Churchill, in Yalta. They invited forty-six countries to San Francisco. The Germans hadn’t even surrendered yet.”

  “Why San Francisco?” asked Wiesner.

  “I always figured it was because people think of California as a frontier—new. The place to go when they want a fresh start, want to dump bad history. The gold rush . . . the sixties . . .”

  My parents . . .

  “Grateful Dead and all that, right?” asked LeChance, grinning.

  “Sure,” I said. “All that. Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love and Go Ask Alice. Pilgrims and dreamers. Peace marches. Pretty much the start of the history I was actually around for, as a kid.”

  “Tell us about that,” LeChance said.

  “Sure,” I said, “when we get to Vietnam.”

  Whoever was out in the hallway started walking back in the other direction, no doubt relieved to discover I wasn’t advocating global genocide.

  I looked at the clock. “Five minutes, guys. How ’bout I give you a head start on finishing the chapter. Maybe we can get through the rest of this war tomorrow. Start talking about Korea and Levittown and McCarthy . . . the whole fifties trip.”

  When the bell was about to go off, I told them that anyone willing to help me get the damn map rolled up would get extra credit.

  Sitzman took me up on it. For a second I thought LeChance would, too, but Fay Perry peeked around the doorway at him, all sylphy and golden, with those enormous gray eyes.

  She touched the crescent charm that hung at her neck on a silver chain—his gift, a moon from Mooney—and the boy was gone.

  It was getting colder out. I walked back over to close the window.

  There were some guys with a truck across the lawn, unloading lumber and bags of concrete.

  “Sitzman,” I said, “you hear anything about them doing construction?”

  He looked up, wistful. “Santangelo’s buying a helicopter. He needs a pad to land it on.”

  “Nice for him,” I said.

  5

  That was cool today, what you talked about,” said Sitzman.

  I’d finished the daily behavior marks and shoved them in my desk. Now we were up on chairs, on either side of the wall map. The thing was still jammed, and we hadn’t made any headway.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I like history.”

  “Me too. I think about the same kind of stuff you do, a lot. Sometimes even . . .” He stopped, embarrassed.

  “Sometimes even what?” I asked.

  “Well, sometimes too much.”

  We listened to the construction guys banging together a frame so they could pour Santangelo’s helipad concrete.

  I pulled my end of the map off the holder. “How do you mean?”

  “It’s a schizophrenia thing—all these weird connections. Like, well, tell me a random word. Anything.”

  “Um . . . Germany.”

  He considered that for a second.

  “Okay, so before,” he said, “I would have thought right away you meant all this deep stuff. Layers and layers, like you said. My family is German. We’re Jewish. They all tried to come over here, but not everyone made it. I would’ve thought you were warning me about the Nazis coming back.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Before, though, it was always way beyond worry for me. I could hear something on the radio, some song when I got in a taxi—it would seem important. Like code. Messages.”

  “Before here?”

  He nodded.

  “So, Sitzman, stuff like that,” I said, “does this place help?”

  “My first month here, I ran away. I spent three days sneaking around the woods in my pajamas with no food. All I’d brought with me was my electric razor.”

  “To shave?”

  He shook his head. “To keep in radio contact with the FBI.”

  “No shit.”

  “None. And it rained the whole damn time. I’m just lucky it wasn’t snowing. I probably would’ve died.”

  I turned to look at him. “Dude, I’m really glad you’re all right.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Do you like it here?”

  “I miss flying,” he said. “My dad used to take me up in his plane. Twin turboprop—Beech Super King Air 200. I almost had my license.”

  He toyed with the roller mechanism, then pulled the map down slowly, to see if it would roll back up.

  First time didn’t work. Second time he made it zip homeward like a champ.

  “Sitzman, you rock,” I said.

  He blushed a little. “Can I as
k you a question?”

  “Fire away.” I crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t be whether I liked younger guys or what have you.

  “Did you ever work in a hospital? Like Lake Haven?”

  A lot of kids here came from Lake Haven. The equivalent of a feeder school. I shook my head and climbed down off the chair.

  Sitzman followed. “It’s just that when I mentioned the razor and everything, you didn’t seem surprised.”

  I dragged my chair back in place and leaned against it.

  “Most people would be,” he said, perching on the edge of my desk, “even here.”

  “It sounded like my dad.”

  “No shit.”

  “Well, except he’s more into the KGB.”

  “Oh, sure,” Sitzman said. “Lot of that going around.”

  That made me smile. “He was in the Marine Corps. A John Bircher and everything. No warnings from the radio, though. Or at least he hasn’t talked about it.”

  “He’s probably just a delusional paranoid, then. With full-blown schizophrenia, you’re all about the messages.”

  “Dad does occasionally get into sending me Wall Street Journal clippings.”

  With circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence against us.

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, like he decided the Vatican Bank had assassinated John Paul I to cover up how the amount of money they ‘couldn’t locate’ exactly matched the miraculously repaid national debt of Argentina or Venezuela or wherever.”

  Sitzman crossed his arms. “Sounds like they could get his meds dialed in a little better.”

  “Dad is not a meds kind of guy. Except for smoking dope.”

  “What is he, nuts?”

  I sighed.

  “Joke,” he said. “But I mean, that’s what this place did for me—got the dosage right. I’m relieved to finally discover that sometimes a razor is only a razor.”

  “Must be exhausting the other way,” I said.

  He nodded, thoughtful. “Have you ever talked to your dad about getting some help?”

  I shrugged. Toyed with some papers on my desk.

  “Even therapy,” he said. “Just, you know, for a start.”

  “The thing is, Sitzman, he’s got a perfect genius of a disease. It protects itself. Plus, the onset timing was particularly shitty.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It nailed him in the early seventies, which sucked in two ways. First, all the grown-ups were acting like lunatics generally, so he had a lot of camouflage. Second, he got into primal therapy.”

  “Don’t know that one,” he said.

  “This guy Janov started it. He claims that if you’re told to tough it out when something crappy happens to you as a kid, any emotions you repress end up rattling around in your body forever.”

  Sitzman shot me a smirk. “That’s like saying ‘The sky is blue and water is wet.’ Big whoop.”

  “Janov took it further. He said that all illness is caused by repression—cancer, head colds, psychosis, you name it. He had this whole thing about how Western medicine only treats the symptoms, because the true cause of disease is repression. And so everybody’s doomed to walk around poisoned half to death unless they ‘have their feelings’ about whatever happened when they were kids. But once you do, you won’t need any other kind of doctor.”

  “People fell for this?”

  “In droves,” I said. “He set up these centers where the paying customers could work on dredging up childhood bummers, so they could cure themselves by weeping and strangling pillows and yelling their heads off in soundproof rooms. Like, I dunno, self-exorcism.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Sitzman, they ate it up with ginormous spoons, cross my heart and hope to die. Dad and the rest of them.”

  “That’s just absurd,” he said.

  I shrugged. “It was the seventies—a decade during which you could count on one hand the entire gamut of things that weren’t absurd.”

  “And your dad drank the Kool-Aid.”

  “Dad paid extra for the Big Gulp,” I said. “Besides which, they didn’t drink Kool-Aid in Jonestown. It was this cheap knockoff crap called Flavor Aid.”

  “Teacher-nerd trivia.”

  Someone rapped twice on the door behind me.

  “Might show up on your midterm,” I said, and turned to see who it was.

  6

  Dhumavati smiled from the doorway.

  She was Santangelo’s dean of students—tall and rangy, with a thick silver braid down the middle of her back.

  I rather liked her, not least because she’d encouraged me to get barefoot when we’d first met, while shaking my hand before she started my interview.

  “How many jobs encourage you to take your shoes off?” she’d asked, wiggling her toes.

  “Not nearly enough,” I replied. “Especially before you’re hired.”

  “My thought exactly,” she said, laughing.

  “So your name, is that Dhumavati as in the Mahavidya?” I asked.

  “You’re familiar with Hindu cosmology, then,” she said, pleased.

  “I grew up in California. Kind of comes with the territory, you know?”

  She laughed again. “A guru picked it for me. I’d been through a bad time, and he told me I didn’t have to be that woman anymore.”

  Interesting choice: the mother goddess at the time of the deluge, also known as “the eternal widow,” a deity invariably depicted as ugly and fearsome.

  “Not sure how I’d feel about being named for ‘the one who is without radiance,’” I said. “Doesn’t suit you.”

  Dhumavati grinned—radiant indeed when she smiled, which was most of the time. “Beats the hell out of Gloria. What I started out with.”

  “Still, I’d have held out for Kamala. Tara.”

  And here she was, smiling anew from the threshold. “I thought you might like a little support with remembering that Teacher Reflection starts an hour early today, Madeline. Sookie mentioned you’re still having some issues around the scheduling piece.”

  I was about to thank her for the heads-up when an explosive scherzo of shattering glass resounded down the hallway—fist vs. window.

  Dhumavati bolted toward the source, with me and Sitzman close behind.

  A small crowd of kids had gathered. We shoved through them to find Mooney LeChance standing pale and wide-eyed, right hand curled against his increasingly blood-soaked sweater, the window next to him all glittering spikes and daggers around a foot-wide hole.

  Dhumavati hugged him from behind and got him to sit down. I squatted to raise his slashed hand in the air, wrapping my fingers hard around his wrist to stanch the bleeding.

  Lulu came through the double doors at the lobby end of the hallway, saw the blood, and yanked off the sweatshirt tied around her waist.

  “Pressure with that,” she said, tossing it to me. “I’ll call 911.”

  She took off toward the lobby.

  Dhumavati put her hands on Mooney’s shoulders. “You’ll stay right here with Madeline, won’t you? Don’t try to get up.”

  Then she stood, walking over to Fay Perry, who was shivering and slumped against the wall.

  Sitzman brought a chair from the nearest classroom. Dhumavati eased Fay down into it, then wrapped her own coat around the girl’s slender shoulders.

  Fay didn’t say a word. She kept sneaking besotted glances at Mooney, her pupils so dilated with shock you couldn’t see iris.

  When she realized I was watching, she dropped her eyes to the floor and just rocked slowly back and forth from the waist.

  “Is Fay all right?” Mooney whispered. “Make sure she’s all right. I didn’t mean to scare her. It was just—”

  He tried squirming around to see her.

  I pressed a knee down against his thigh to pin him.

  “Dhumavati knows what to do,” I said. “Don’t worry. The ambulance w
ill be here soon, okay? Keep your hand up for me.”

  Blood seeped through Lulu’s sweatshirt. My hands got hot and sticky with it. I clenched Mooney’s wrist harder.

  We waited, everyone quiet but for Dhumavati’s murmured reassurances to Fay.

  “They’re going to send me to the Farm, aren’t they?” asked Mooney.

  The Farm was the punishment dorm. Off in the woods. It always made me think of Steve McQueen’s “Cooler” in The Great Escape, only here they all got put on work detail instead of locked down with a baseball and mitt—plus which their parents were charged double tuition for the privilege.

  Kids on the Farm weren’t allowed out for classes. They didn’t get mail or phone calls. The closest thing to leisure time was a study period at night.

  “I’ll make sure you get your assignments, okay?” I said. “You won’t be able to do any writing for a bit. This’ll need stitches. But you’ll be good as new in a flash.”

  The other kids were drifting toward the exit, watching for the ambulance.

  Sitzman asked me if we needed anything.

  Mooney was sweaty, but his teeth were chattering.

  “Get me his coat?” I asked. “It’s on that bench.”

  Sitzman brought it over and put it on Mooney’s shoulders, trying to keep it clear of the blood. It was one of those letterman jackets, dark blue wool with white leather sleeves, the fuzzy first initial of some other school stitched over the left breast.

  I nodded at Sitzman, and he backed away.

  Mooney looked up at me.

  “I’m going to move around a little,” I said. “My leg’s asleep.”

  I twisted to wedge myself against the wall. “Lean on me if you’re dizzy.”

  “I might throw up,” said Mooney. He was whispering, embarrassed.

  “No biggie. I never liked this sweater.”

  He slumped against my shoulder. “So tired.”

  “Put your head down in my lap if you want.”

  “Yeah.”

  I helped him, keeping his arm up. “This is good,” I said. “You’re not really bleeding so much.”

  Mooney asked me under his breath, “Hey, so how come you always wear such big sweaters? You should get shirts that, you know, fit. We all think so.”

  “I figure you guys don’t need any further distractions.”