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Spiral Bound Brother

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

CHAPTER 1

I hadn't been to a doctor in six years. I'd hit an age where I preferred a series of arcana, to let it be a surprise, whatever foul thing was growing inside me. Sitting in Earhart High School's charmingly round library, reading Prufrock as if listening to a song that began anew immediately after fading out, I mashed my hair down with my hand. Finding it moist, of course, and stuck to my scalp like I'd applied rubber cement, I found reason to read the poem for the fortieth consecutive time.

"I'm not insane."

My delusion must have been audible, because Mike Dunham, a senior now (I taught him as a freshman), stopped me with a gentle hand on my shoulder. All-star second baseman, great glove man, Mike Dunham, B+ on every paper, every test, for participation, every quiz, B+. It was astounding consistency. I once gave him a D+ on a paper, which was actually very solid if not exactly powerful, just to see what he'd do. I wrote the same kind of notes I always write in the margins of his essays:

- Good start identifying Poe's theme of Unity, but go further here. You're cowering from the fire-breathing dragon!

- Keen Observation! Bravo! You're almost faculty!

- Missing a quote! Looks like someone was watching ESPN while they wrote this part of the essay.

- This quote reveals much more about the narrator than you're illuminating! Illuminate, Mike! Poe wants you to shine a light.

- Mike, A very solid and convincing argument concerning the narrator's unavoidable path to meet all aspects of himself in death. Everything you point out is on target throughout. But try to identify more of the jaw-dropping choices Poe makes in his description, in mood—in other words, make an incision and look inside! Go past the skin!

Then: D+

He approached me after class with the essay between his thumb and index finger, just cocked his head ever so slightly and walked away. I'd meant it as raillery, no harm to his semester grade, but then again I was consciously ignoring what I knew about Mike Dunham. He always seemed poised to explode. He was friable despite his steady glove-work up the middle, the reliably straightforward analyses in class. He made every play he was supposed to, and the hard shots, too, the tough hops, made something like two errors his entire senior season, and at least one of those was due to the Earhart High scorekeeper guarding his own son's earned-run average. But he rarely seemed to come up with the incredible catch, and never did I see him celebrate with the lowest octane of high-fives after turning the double play, still somewhat rare in high school, or at least for Earhart teams. He just didn't dance with it.

I called Mike in during his period in Flyer, our school newspaper. Chuck Loder taught journalism, a lovely guy and one of my two friends on campus. Bitter as Job and unafraid to make the administration squirm. They would have fired him years ago, but those Famous Barr Clearance Suits that made up the Earhart administration didn't have one body part heaving with life, not a one between them.

"Mike, I'm very sorry about that D+. I meant to write B+."

"I know what you did, Mr. Craft."

"Oh?"

"You wanted to see if you could rattle me. Like I'm some kind of robot. I get it. But let me tell you, okay, I have some very serious crap going on at home right now, and I don't think it's funny at all."

"Mike, you have me all wrong. I was only trying to light a fire."

Mike's cheek muscles dropped, and his eyes welled up, not with tears, but pity, for me, the liar.

"I thought you were the kind of teacher who would own up to it, Mr. Craft."

I wanted to pull him to my chest and hold him there a moment, but you can't do that sort of thing anymore.

"I'm not familiar to myself, Mike, and I don't get much pleasure from life. Do you understand?"

"Yeah."

"I used to be different—that's not true, exactly. I used to honor the idea that the future was important. That's it."

"Yeah. My sister loved you."

"Really? She hardly said a word in class."

"She's like, a real good listener. So, anyway, I gotta go."

"Okay, Mike. I'm sorry. If you need someone to talk to—"

"No, thanks."

Three years after our little talk that day, there he was again. I was set to implode at the library study table, with the delusional and masochistic notion that I could tangle with this death-panic episode, whatever it was, armed only with T.S. Eliot. The man had a soft spot for dictators (my former colleague, John Marauder, who actually now lives in a shack in Hawaii, wrote a brilliant, if a bit overreaching, paper on Eliot's Nazi imagery in Burnt Norton). And Mike, emitting the same nervous calm for which I'd known him, a senior now, an impressively full beard, his hand resting there on my shoulder, watched me read Prufrock for the forty-first time:

Like a patient etherised on a table ...
I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows ...
And in short, I was afraid.

I looked peripherally at Mike, and I thought of my mother, how she'd always envisioned me to be a bold child, and how I'd disappointed her, slowly, until we only feigned closeness and true care, warmth. Thinking of how she toiled the beauty right out of herself, and hunched herself over, dazed from life's invisible blows to the head.

Would the same blows overtake me? My sanity hung there, under attack, in the occupation of saints and idiots, as my department chair and old friend called our line of work. Via the cover of ninth-grade English, I managed to avoid anything that truly matters, presupposing that anything truly matters. I'd become, or more likely, I discovered I'd always been a tragic, grotesque creature, filled with beautiful memories that only made things sickeningly more difficult.

I closed my eyes and Prufrock echoed in my head, narrated by my mother's voice, morphing into Eliot's, then mine, then mine as a child, at which point I must have begun vocalizing, some kind of guttural sound usually associated with anguish.

"Ahhkahh," I said.

"Mr. Craft ... Mr. Craft ... Mr. Craft ... Mr. Craft."

"Mike. Hello. Ahhkahh!"

The slippages were beyond my control, a kind of possession.

"Mr. Craft, you haven't turned the page since I've been here. And I've been here for a while. Like an hour and a half."

"I'm reading, Mike. Ahhkahh!"

"Are you okay? What's that sound you're making—like, where's it coming from?"

"I'm thinking of teaching this poem—Ahhkahh—class next year. I was just going over it."

"You're not taking any notes or anything."

"Mike, you know, you're observant to a point—Ahhkahh—and honest, but there's a reason you got B+s, and not As in my class. Ahhkahh!"

"You shouldn't equate life with grades, Mr. Craft. That's so like, teacher, like, stupid."

"Mmm. But you should realize that with literature, it's up to the reader to decide!"

"That's doesn't make sense," he said.

"That's what makes it powerful. Ahhkahh! When you've spent an hour with one page, pouring over the tiny explosions of language, really seeing—Ahhkahh—the ... the maelstrom of the human mind, talk to me!"

"Okay."

"Ahhkahh! Things of beauty shouldn't be given up so easily!" I sent my face plunging onto the table, unconscious. Some of the faculty, when alerted to the situation, thought of driving me to the ER, but they were all far behind schedule in their grading. Essays really do take forever, if you do it right. Chuck Loder told me I was comatose for about an hour and a half, but they were diligent about putting a pocket mirror under my nose every fifteen minutes or so, presumably the time it takes to grade one essay and drink a small Styrofoam cup of Folgers Crystals. The next day I figured I ought to at least check in with my old, senile medicine man, Dr. Paul Trisk.

"There's no good reason," he said, "for you to have your pants down right now. Pull them up."

"The nurse told—"

"Damn the nurse."

Trisk, an authentic asshole of the first order, wearing the inscrutable beard of a debilitating hand condition, was my first doctor out of college, so I stayed with him, to limit my already gargantuan dose of paperwork in my life. It would have come as no surprise to me if he told me I had a few months to live. Instead he just scowled.

"Breathe. No. Breathe," he said.

He touched me on the abdomen, roughly. I cringed.

"You're fine. Stop smoking or nobody will care when you die. That's how it works. I've seen it."

"What if I pass out like that again, out of nowhere?"

"It's harmless probably. Anxiety. You seeing any women?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"None will see me. No, that's not true. I stopped trying. "

"Start getting intercourse regularly again and I won't see you for another six years. You're going to live to be a hundred if you quit cigarettes. Longevity curse. And better yours than mine, believe me, Craft."

CHAPTER 2

I stood up there every day, submerged in a windowless hole in the southwest suburbs of St. Louis, my place of origin, performing maniacally (they say) in front of the eager achieving, ruddy faces (a few brown ones mixed in), for twenty-five years. T-w-e-n-t-y-F-i-v-e. I taught a section of the slower kids, of course. All the honors teachers had to take our share, "What can you do?!" we used to chortle, all the young teachers, in the spirit of post(post)Woodstockian revival camaraderie, "The fucking war!" You actually have to love some aspect of being in a trench with no way out, or the children eat your spleen. Can anyone outside of the classroom appreciate, truly, how teaching high school whittles portions of a person away, regardless of gender, genetic make-up, experience, patience, accomplishment—irrelevant—it squelches, if not your electricity, then at least the ability to feel your own broken glass heart. And, all right, it replenishes, but only the moment before you dissolve.

My favorite book to teach though, by far, was the first book of the year—Call of the Wild. It lights an animal fire in the children's minds, as if the class is on ice skates, gliding, falling down, racing, and suddenly their whole little pond is ablaze. It brought me great joy for years, watching their faces, listening to their sobs as Buck gallops into Alaska's infinite expanse. You could feel the wind. The children with loving mothers and fathers, and more so the ones who courageously managed, somehow, to make it through alone, thought the ending affirming of that essential, unnamable sensation in their intestines that felt like untamed joy. London gave them answers to their questions about freedom and nature—what are they, really, freedom, nature—in a time that dragged those words behind the donkey to the point that they'd become scavenged corpses.

And there were children who drowned in it, the grinding truth of it, and so denied themselves. London's husky transcends the story of Christ in terms of answering the summons. This, the children who read it understood. They added something of value to themselves, something substantial to pull from in the face of a world of decay, hollow hearts, and prostitution. It never got easy to stomach the shallow end's whining, though, the pleading with me—give a goddamn test and be done, can't you see, Craft, we're finished with you and your affected voice, the death, Craft, your perverted leers, your creepy side-part-comb-over, swooped like that, and the boys, you like boys, Craft, we know, don't think you're putting anything past us, we see you, Craft. We're done with this sled-dog shit, we can't hear it, can't see it, don't want to, and we're more than done with your rat face.

Thesis-Contrary idea-Lead in-Quote-Lead out-Intensification-Provide evidence-Discovery of irony-The absurd-The transcendent-Devices-Thesis expanded-Conclusion. The kids loved it some and hated me, maybe loved me some and hated it. Then one day it was simply over.

The events that seem to be few dominoes that knocked over the rest, thus handing me this life, are intricately connected to a student I'd taught seven years before. Lila Bell. She was captain of the Earhart Hockey Cheerleaders, a notoriously bawdy group, but Lila was an earnest girl, plugged into a socket, always conscious of her words, an advanced writer at fourteen. Subtle-subtle-subtle then pow! Well, one evening not long ago, my home phone rang, a true rarity. She'd returned home from Prestige Small New England Liberal Arts College, just before winter break of her senior year. There were a few wealthy families at Earhart (we prided ourselves on being better than the private schools), but not one had money like the Bells. Her greatgreat-great-great grandfather started the first law firm in St.

Louis, which evolved into one of the largest and most respected law firms in certainly the Midwest, if not the entire country, Bell, Higley, & Williams.

Lila had aged to twenty-one when I heard her say my name again, Hiya Craft. I was forty-seven years old, divorced, clearly, and had just, days before, lost consciousness in the library, on the verge, I suspected, of unraveling once and for all, despite what old Dr. Trisk said. Lila suggested we meet for coffee down the street from my apartment.

An English major, because of me, she said, the way I didn't fuck with the stories, she said, but gave them some overdue fucking glory, she said (somehow she managed another fuck with no context I could discern). I'll never forget an early discussion in class on "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Her voice—not her voice, exactly—her method of utterance caused me to flip a few ounces of coffee onto my nipple and my already barely usable copy of Frost's collected work.

"Joan of Arc!" I shouted into my scalded chest. And the children laughed, of course.

"Shut up!" she scolded them. "Are you all right, Craft?" Lila asked. When she participated, it was always as if she and I were alone.

"Go on, go on, you were saying something marvelous about the horse, about loving that the man considers his horse's feelings. That's called pathos by the way."

"Yeah, but then the woods become death suddenly! And it's like he likes it, looking at death, and he just goes home because he made some stupid promise. And now it's too late because you like him, so you care. And death is what he really wants. This is not a 'nice pretty, like really nice poem' or whatever the hell Julie said. I stop listening when she starts speaking. No offense, Julie," she said, raising a hand in Julie's direction.

"Is it possible he views death as something good?" I said.

"Only if he hates being alive, I guess. The guy is ill. He's going to do it, probably with a shotgun, you know, out in the woods."

I scanned the class and found furrowed brows from corner to corner. They always became contemptuous when someone had something to say. But this was an assault. I went through the stop sign anyway.

"Lila, do you think it's possible that a person could reach a point in life where those woods might say something reassuring about eternity, for lack of a better term?" "I don't know anyone like that."

"No, I don't either," I said, realizing how conspicuous my present state of mind had become.

"Except like hardcore Christians, I guess, but they'll believe just about anything they're told to," Lila added.

If I didn't take a hard turn, the class was going to fold in on itself, and, because I didn't care, I pressed on.

"So are you concluding that the speaker, and that Frost by extension, is offering us a load of manure. To feel tempted by the woods is just fantasizing about death and to think that way is a capitulation to real life."

"What does that mean?"

"To give up," I said.

"Yeah, pretty much. This is the saddest thing I've ever read, 'cause it's all in his head."

"Yes, that's precisely where it is," I said, noting that most of the class had placed their heads upon their desks or created hand pillows.

Thankfully, the bell rang, resetting them for biology, geometry, gym, the day's class forgotten, except by Lila.

At the café all these years later, as I spoke about my threadbare life and my fainting spell, she looked at me and laughed, an extended warm laugh that ended with her forehead in her hand, a little snorting at the end. I could see in the mirror on the wall behind her head that I didn't have anything smeared on my face, so I knew it was, at least in part, my utter ridiculousness, and her familiarity with me, the man, the fool.

"I've missed you so much, Craft."

The corkscrew curl of hair on her forehead was long enough to submerge itself in her coffee. That she never noticed, and dunked it again and again, well, that finished me off.

"It feels good to be here. It's not weird at all, you know?" she said, holding my eyes in hers.

"Thanks for the coffee. It's delicious," I said.

"You suggested this place," she said, "so you shouldn't be surprised."

"Mmm. Yes."

"Craft."

"Yes, Lila."

"Okay, listen. I've made some stupid choices with boys at school. Nothing horrible, I wasn't raped, thank God, a friend of mine was, right outside a Bank of America."
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Spiral Bound Brother by Ryan Elliot Wilson. Copyright © 2012 Ryan Elliot Wilson. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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