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epitome of incomprehensibility
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We returned to our eighth grade stomping grounds, specifically ground zero point eight two, for the test.
The principal drew a line in the sand and said, "Whoever crosses this will experience a finite fear of the infinite."
I raised my hand and felt a breezy sensation around my fingers. I looked up to see the tips disintegrating and blowing away.
My classmates seemed unperturbed. Steve remained a glued-together cutout of all the Steves I'd known, with some wrinkles; Peter had horns in place of his eyes, since I would read Revelation at my desk sometimes instead of working; Becky kept catching footballs of various sorts (play, regulation, irrigation) though no one visible was throwing them. And Adam was trying to sell us gift certificates on which the words "Answers in Genesis" were scrawled in fading red marker.
I wanted to tell him the marker was running out, but the words stuck like peanut butter to my throat. If the marker was going dry, so were my historical linguistics, each one of them. I hadn't watered them in more than a week, and they were looking shriveled in their identical over-lacquered black pots, which as if they should contain terra cotta armies in their depths, or something stereotypically East Asian, like glasses with built-in raisins (they made jokes about that in grade seven, so of course we were beyond that).
Eventually I stepped across the line and my fingers reappeared, though they seemed now to be stitched together with red laser thread.
My teacher nodded, though she was dead and underglued (Steve seemed substantial next to her). "If you want to relive this memory, you'll have to pay the phantom tollbooth a crescent-shaped coin. Oh, sorry, you haven't read that yet."
But I was reading her words as they emerged from her mouth, frosty from the grave and etched in gossamer-studded wallpaper. I liked the textured effect and told her so, adding incidentally that my mom had started getting into scrapbooking before depression robbed her of the will to put pieces of paper together.
"Isn't that capitalism?" Steve scoffed. "Money," he explained to Adam, who was looking doubtfully at his gift certificates - not doubting their validity, of course, but wondering if he should object.
"In a field with all possible worlds," said Adam at last, "you have two trolleys. One of them is going towards the line. The other one is going away from it. How much time before they meet?"
"Time from when?" Becky raised her eyes disinterestedly, an effect that made her fleetingly resemble Karla Homolka, who'd changed her name to get into a Christian homeschooling cooperative for brunette ex-murderers (her original hair was judged as light as her sentence).
"I learned about dependent and independent clauses here," I told everyone, mournfully. "It's too bad that the original towers died in the fire."
We were standing in a fine layer of ashes, which I'd mistaken for sand.
"Nonsense, the church still survives," reproved the teacher. "The part of it that was a school is now a support group for evangelicals targeted by the new Don't Ask, Don't Carry laws."
"You keep thinking you're in America," muttered Peter in his South African accent. He was looking down, or so it seemed from his horns.
"WE'RE ALL LIVING IN AMERICA" simultaneously screamed the living members of Rammstein. They then vanished in a puff of stage fire before the teacher could admonish them concerning the overuse of present progressive (one, two, left, left; you are what du hast).
But we were in purgatory and we had to relive the year: and so I watched as through a veil: of: colons: as the projector showed:
-the new students arriving and looking at their desks
-an arrangement of doves, scattering
-a war of terror newsreel, the airplanes into the towers (inside the TV screen of the library room)
-my hand hitting the teacher's face, resulting in her swatting me with a rolled-up workbook
-another flight of doves
-the old Presbyterian College library, before Joseph McLelland's ascension as namesake; my suspended self was sitting there daydreaming, my feet not quite touching the ground
-my grandfather's hospitalization, narrated in serif script
-I came back to school for the Christmas party, rebellious in a jean dress (the teacher's dress code was anti-jeans) that ended (gasp!) above my knees
-the Dec. 19, 2001 release of The Fellowship of the Ring, and our family's not-quite-then viewing of it, my hand hiding my eyes from the Minas Tirith bridge collapse that inadvertently reminded me of the World Trade Centre's (bridges are Never Forget)
-no one remembers Christmas except for the doves
-New Year's: my mom said I was a woman due to my vagina dripping inconvenient blood, but her tone was ironic; we laughed, which humanizes us both
-little did she know I was already a woman; I started using semicolons at age 11
-Dad was hospitalized
-Dad had his gall bladder removed
-Dad was high on meds and stereotypically pondered the back of his hand (he did this! "look at the veins")
-Grandpa died of too many things at once
-something about doves
-I was walking through the grocery store with a parent and the cake decorations section didn't seem quite real
-I remember a serious conversation about Future Goals with a cousin-by-marriage-once-removed at the funeral; my younger cousin remembers sneaking into the kitchen to steal candy with my brother and I, but she was the only one who got away with it
-Did my teacher really make me write six drafts of a book report so it met her exacting standards, or were those standards mine? Or my mother's?
-I am a woman; semicolons; doves
-Spaghetti dinner for students' parents, so I stayed at school late; I didn't play Risk with Peter, Adam, and one other classmate when invited, instead preferring to cut snowflake "doilies" for the table, which the teacher praised
"I found a regret," I told those assembled. "I should've played Risk with you when I had the chance."
The teacher started to sob, saying she'd liked the doilies. Bits of paper fell down her cheeks and chin, some of them staying - like Lady Lazarus, but a tad less suicidal.
(I didn't mention my crush on the girl two years my elder, but that's for a different documentary, called something about winter.)
But I have turned you all to paper, torn and glued-up palimpsests at that. For this you have my forgiveness.
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