IN CHILDHOOD, I HAD NO INSIGHT WHATSOEVER INTO MY FATHER’S CONSCIOUSNESS, NOR ANY AWARENESS OF WHAT IT MIGHT HAVE FELT LIKE, INSIDE, TO DO WHAT HE HAD TO SIT THERE AT HIS DESK AND DO EVERY DAY. IN THIS RESPECT, IT WAS NOT UNTIL MANY YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH THAT I FELT I TRULY KNEW HIM.
In terms of the precise order of events in the Civics classroom, something was now evidently wrong with Mr. Johnson’s face and its expression as the lesson moved on to Amendment XIII. In this same interval, in a series of panels several rows down, the large, orange, gas-powered Snow Boy device, which removed snow from driveways by means of a system of rotary blades that chopped the snow into fine particles and then a powerful blower that enhanced the vacuum of the blades’ rotation to throw the snow five, eight, or twelve feet in a high arc to the side of the man operating the machine (the distance of the arc could be controlled by adjusting the angle of the chute by means of three pre-installed pins and holes, not unlike the Howitzer Mark IV artillery used in Korea and elsewhere), stalled. The blizzard’s snow was evidently so heavy and wet that it had clogged the rotating system of eight razor sharp blades, and the Snow Boy’s self-protective choke had stalled the engine (whose turbine was also the blades’ rotor) instead of allowing the engine’s cylinders to overheat and melt the pistons, which would ruin the expensive machine. The Snow Boy was, in this respect, little more than a modified power lawnmower, which our neighbor Mr. Snead was proudly the first on our street to get one of, and had turned it over for the neighborhood children’s inspection after disabling the spark plugs—he emphasized several times that one must disable the lawnmower’s spark plugs if you were going to place any part of your hands near the blades, which he said rotated at over 360 rpm of torque and could slice a man’s hand off before he even knew what was happening—and the window’s side panel’s schematic view of the Snow Boy’s moving parts was based closely on Mr. Snead’s explanation of how his power lawnmower was put together to mow his grass with only a featherlight touch on the controls. (Mr. Snead always wore a tan cardigan sweater, and beneath his surface bonhomie seemed palpably sad, and our mother said that the reason he was so friendly to the neighborhood children and even gave each of us a Christmas present for several years was because he and Mrs. Snead couldn’t have any children of their own, which was sad, and which my brother said privately was due to Mrs. Snead’s back alley abortion as a roundheel teen, which at the time I don’t believe I understood enough to feel anything other than sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Snead, both of whom I liked.) As I recall it now, the Sneads’ lawnmower had been orange as well, and much larger than its modern descendants. I did not, though, initially recall the window’s narrative including any explanation of what fate befell the smaller, subordinate feral dog, with the sore, whose name was Scraps, and had run away from home because of the way its owner mistreated it when the tedium and despair of his lower level administrative job made him come home empty-eyed and angry and drink several highballs without any ice or even a lime, and later always found some excuse to be cruel to Scraps, who had waited alone at home all day and only wanted some petting or affection or to play tug of war with a rag or dog toy in order to take its mind off of its own bored loneliness, and whose life had been so awful that the backstory cut off abruptly after the second time the man kicked Scraps in the stomach so hard that Scraps couldn’t stop coughing and yet still tried to lick the man’s hand when he picked Scraps up and threw him in the cold garage and locked him in there all night, where Scraps lay alone in a tight ball on the cement floor coughing as quietly as he could. Meanwhile, in the main narrative row, his mind distracted by concern over his blind daughter’s sadness and the hope that his wife, Marjorie, was OK driving in the blizzard to look for Cuffie, Mr. Simmons, using his blue collar strength to easily turn the stalled Snow Boy device over onto its side, reached into the system of blades and the intake chute in order to clear them of the wet, packed snow that had gotten compressed in there and jammed the blade. Normally a careful worker who paid good attention and followed directions, this time he was so distracted that he forgot to disable the Snow Boy’s spark plugs before reaching in, as the schematic panel with an arrow and dotted line at the intact spark plugs showed. Thus, when enough of the packed snow had been removed to allow the rotor to turn freely, the Snow Boy sprang into life on its side while Ruth Simmons’ father had his hand deep inside the intake chute, severing not only Mr. Simmons’ hand but much of his forearm, and badly splintering his forearm’s bone all the way down to the bone marrow, with a horrifying full color spray of red snow and human matter jetting at full force straight up into the air (the Snow Boy being on its side, its chute was now facing straight upwards) and completely blinding Mr. Simmons, whose face was right over the chute. My shock and alarm over what was happening to Ruth Simmons’ father, whom I liked, and felt for, created a sense of shock and numbness that distanced me from the panels’ scene somewhat, and I remember being distanced enough to be able to be on some level aware that the Civics classroom seemed unusually quiet, with not even the little sounds of whispering or coughing that usually made up the room’s ambient noise when the teacher was writing on the chalkboard. The only sound, except for Chris DeMatteis clicking and grinding his rear molars in his sleep, being that of Richard A. Johnson writing on the chalkboard, ostensibly about the XIIIth Amendment’s abolition of Negro slavery, except instead it turned out that he was really writing KILL THEM KILL THEM ALL over and over again on the chalkboard (as my own eyes would register just moments later) in capital letters that got bigger and bigger with every letter, and the handwriting less and less like the sub’s customary fluid script and more and more frightening and ultimately not even human looking, and not seeming to realize what he was doing or stopping to give any kind of explanation but only cocking his already oddly cocked head further and further over to the side, like somebody struggling might and main against some terrible type of evil or alien force that had ahold of him at the chalkboard and was compelling his hand to write things against his will, and making (I was not conscious of hearing this at the time) a strange, highpitched vocal noise that was something like a scream or moan of effort, except that it was evidently just one note or pitch maintained throughout, and stayed that way, with the sound coming out for much longer than anyone can normally even hold their breath, while he remained facing the chalkboard so that no one yet could see what his expression looked like, and writing KILL KILL KILL THEM ALL KILL THEM DO IT NOW KILL THEM over and over again, the chalkboard’s handwriting getting more and more jagged and gigantic and spiky, with one part of the board already completely filled with the repetitive phrase. What most credible witnesses seemed to recall most vividly at this point was the classroom’s resultant confusion and fear—Emily-Ann Barr and Elizabeth Frazier were both crying out and holding on to each other, and Danny Ellsberg, Raymond Gillies, Yolanda Maldonado, Jan and Erin Swearingen, and several other pupils were whipping themselves back and forth in their bolted seats, and Philip Finkelpearl was preparing to throw up (which was, in those years, his response to any strong stimuli), and Terence Velan was calling for his Stepmutti, and Mandy Blemm was sitting up very rigid and straight and staring with an intently concentrated expression at the back of Mr. Johnson’s head as it cocked further and further to the side until it was evidently almost touching his shoulder, with his left arm now straight out to the side and his hand forming a kind of almost claw. And while I was not conscious or attentive to any of this directly—except perhaps that the back of Unterbrunner’s freckled neck in the seat ahead of me at the left periphery of my vision had gone very white and bloodless and her large head was totally rigid and still—in retrospect, I believe that the atmosphere of the classroom may have subconsciously influenced the unhappy events of the period’s window’s mesh’s narrative fantasy, which was now more like a nightmare, and was now proceeding radially along several rows and diagonals of panels at once, which required tremendous energy and concentration to sustain. Both the Art class’s de
af children and the other blind children (the latter of whom could not see the statuette, but whose sense of touch was very acute, and could, in a manner of speaking, see with their hands, and had passed the malformed statuette hand to hand) were ridiculing the statuette of Cuffie and laughing at Ruth Simmons, the cruel blind students laughing in a normal way, while the cruel deaf students’ laughter was either an apish hooting (those deaf people who are not mute tend to produce a hooting sound—I do not know why this is, but when I was very small, one of the boys who lived on our street had been deaf, and had played with and sometimes gotten into terrible fistfights with my older brother, until eventually their home caught fire in the middle of the night, and several of the family suffered minor burns and smoke inhalation, and they moved away even though their insurance had covered all expenses and repairs, and this boy had often made the characteristic hooting noises) or the mute and uncanny mime of normal laughter’s gestures and expressions, while the school’s Art teacher, who was both deaf and blind, smiled idiotically from her desk at the front of the classroom, unaware that Ruth Simmons was at the weeping center of a laughing, mocking, hooting, cane-waving circle of deaf and blind children, one of whom was tossing Ruth’s figurine up into the air and swinging his slender white cane at it like an American Legion coach hitting fungoes for outfield practice (though with considerably less success); while, in another series of panels further down, Mrs. Marge Simmons’ idling car was now just a large, throbbing, and only vaguely car shaped mound of snow with a peculiar greyish cast to it, as a result of the snowstorm’s piling snow having clogged the worn old car’s exhaust outlet and diverted the exhaust to the car’s interior, where, in an interior view, sat the late Marjorie Simmons, still behind the steering wheel, with her mouth and chin smeared all red as she had been applying Avon Acapulco Sunset lipstick when the carbon monoxide of the vent began to attack, forcing her hand into the shape of a claw that smeared lipstick all over her lower face as she gasped and clawed at herself for air, sitting rigidly upright and blue and staring sightlessly into the auto’s rearview mirror while, outside the idling mound, women so bundled up that they could hardly bend over began shoveling easements for their returning husbands into their driveways, and distant sounds of emergency sirens and ambulances began to approach the scene. At the same time, a single, traumatically abrupt panel appeared to depict Scraps, the subordinate, piebald feral dog with the sore, being attacked in the industrial tunnel by swarms of what were either small, tailless rats or gigantic, atomically mutated cockroaches as Cuffie, nearby, stands frozen with his paws over his eyes in instinctual shock and terror, until the tougher, more experienced and dominant feral rottweiler mix saves Cuffie’s life by dragging him by the scruff of the neck into a smaller side tunnel that serves as an escape hatch and led more towards the area of R. B. Hayes Primary and the Fairhaven Knolls golf course that lay just beyond the copse of trees at the window’s rear right horizon. The tableau, complete with the unfortunate piebald dog’s mouth open in agony and a rat or mutated roach abdomen protruding from his eyesocket as the predator’s anterior half consumed his eye and inner brain, was so traumatic that this narrative line was immediately stopped and replaced with a neutral view of the pipe’s exterior. As a result, the lone, nightmarish panel appeared in the window as just a momentary peripheral snapshot or flash of a horrifying scene, much the way such single, horrible flashes often appear in bad dreams—somehow the speed with which they appear and disappear, and the lack of any time to get any perspective or digest what you are seeing or fit it into the narrative of the dream as a whole, makes it even worse, and often a rapid, peripheral flash of something contextless and awful could be the single worst part of a nightmare, and the part that stayed with you the most vividly and kept popping into your mind’s eye at odd moments while brushing your teeth or getting a box of cereal down out of the cereal cabinet for a snack, and unsettling you all over again, perhaps because its very instantaneousness in the dream meant that your mind had to keep subconsciously returning to it in order to work it out or incorporate it. As if the fragment were not done with you yet, in much the same way that now, so very much later, the most persistent memories of early childhood consist of these flashes, peripheral tableaux—my father slowly shaving as I pass my parents’ bathroom on the way downstairs, our mother on her knees in a kerchief and gloves by a rosebush out the kitchen’s east window as I fill a water glass, my brother breaking his wrist in a fall off of the jungle gym and the far-off sound of his cries as I drew in the sand with a stick. The piano’s casters in their small protective sleeves; his face in the foyer coming home. Later, when I was in my 20s and courting my wife, the traumatic film The Exorcist came out, a controversial film that both of us found disturbing—and not disturbing in an artistic or thought-provoking way, but simply offensive—and walked out of together at just the point where the little girl was mutilating her private areas with a crucifix similar in size and design to the one that Miranda’s parents had on the wall of their front sitting room. In fact, the first moment of what I would consider true affinity and concord that Miranda and I experienced was, as I recall it, in the car on the way home from walking out of this film, which we had done mutually, with one quick glance between us in the theatre confirming that our distaste and rejection of the film were in perfect concordance, with an odd thrill in that moment of mutuality that was itself not wholly unsexual, although in the context of the film’s themes the sexuality of the response was both disturbing and unforgettable. Suffice to say we have not seen it since. And yet the lone moment of The Exorcist that has stayed so emphatically with me over the years consisted only of a few frames, and had precisely this rapid, peripheral quality, and has obtruded at odd moments into my mind’s eye ever since. In the film, Father Karras’ mother has died, and he has drunk a bit too much out of grief and guilt (‘I should have been there, I should have been there,’ is his refrain to the other Jesuit, Father Dyer, who is removing his shoes and helping him into bed), and has a bad dream, which the film’s director depicts with frightening intensity and skill. It was one of our first unaccompanied dates, not long after I had started at the firm where I still work—and yet, even now, the interval of this dream sequence remains vivid to me in nearly every detail. Father Karras’ mother, pale and dressed in funereal black, ascends from an urban subway stop while Father Karras waves desperately at her from across the street, trying to get her attention, but she does not see or acknowledge him and instead turns—moving with the terrible, implacable quality that other people in dreams often have—and descends back down the subway station’s stairway, sinking implacably from view. There is no sound, despite its being a busy street, and the absence of sound is both frightening and realistic—many people’s recollected nightmares are often soundless, with suggestions of thick glass or deep water and these media’s effect on sound. Father Karras is an actor seen in no other film of the time, so far as I know, with a brooding, Mediterranean cast to his features, whom another character in the film compares to Sal Mineo. The dream sequence also includes a lengthy, slow motion view of a Roman Catholic medal falling through the air, as if from a great height, with its thin silver chain undulating in complex shapes as the coin rotates as it slowly falls. The iconography of the falling coin is not complicated, as Miranda pointed out when we discussed the film and our reasons for leaving before the exorcism proper. It symbolizes Father Karras’ feelings of impotence and guilt at his mother’s death (she had died alone in her apartment, and it had been three days before someone found her; this type of scenario would make anyone feel guilty), and the blow to Father Karras’ faith in himself as a son and a priest, a blow to his vocation, which must be rooted not only in faith in a god but a belief that the person with the vocation could make some kind of difference and help alleviate suffering and human loneliness, which now, in this case, he has blatantly failed to do with his own mother. Not to mention the classic problem of how a supposedly loving god could permit this terrible outcom
e, a problem that always arises when people to whom we are connected suffer or die (as well as the secondary backlash of guilt over the buried hostility we often feel towards the memory of parents who have died—an interval of backstory had shown Father Karras’ mother forcing some kind of unpleasant medicine down his throat with a steel spoon as a child, as well as berating him in Italian for causing her to worry, and once walking silently past the window when he had fallen on rollerskates and skinned his knees and was crying out for her to come out to the sidewalk and help him). Such reactions are common to the point of being nearly universal, and all of this is symbolized by the dream’s slowly falling medallion, which at the sequence’s end lands upon a flat stone in either a cemetery or untended garden, full of moss and spiky undergrowth. Despite the bucolic setting, the air through which the coin falls has been airless and black, the extreme black of nothingness, even as the medallion and chain come to rest on the stone; just as there is no sound, there is no background. But spliced very quickly into the sequence is a brief flash of Father Karras’ face, terribly transformed. The face’s white, reptilian eyes and extrudent cheekbones and root-white pallor are plainly demonic—it is the face of evil. This flash of face is extremely brief, probably just enough frames to register on the human eye, and devoid of sound or background, and is gone again and immediately replaced with the Catholic medal’s continued fall. Its very brevity serves to stamp it on the viewer’s consciousness. My wife, it turned out, did not even see the rapid splice of the face—she may have sneezed, or looked away from the screen for a moment. Her interpretation was that even if the rapid, peripheral image truly had been in the film and not my imagination, it too could be readily interpreted as a symbol of Father Karras subconsciously seeing himself as evil or bad for having allowed his mother to (as he saw it) die alone. I have never forgotten these frames, though—and yet, although I privately disagreed with Miranda’s quick dismissal, I am still far from being certain of what the rapid flash of the Father’s transfigured face was meant to mean, nor why it remains so vivid in my memory of our courtship. I think it can only be the incongruous, near instantaneous quality of its appearance, the utter peripheralness of it. For it is true that the most vivid and enduring occurrences in our lives are often those that occur at the periphery of our awareness. Its significance for the story of how those of us who did not flee the Civics classroom in panic became known as the 4 Unwitting Hostages is fairly obvious. In testing, many schoolchildren labeled as hyperactive or deficient in attention are observed to be not so much unable to pay attention as to have difficulty exercising control or choice over what it is they pay attention to. And yet much the same thing happens in adult life—as we age, many people notice a shift in the objects of their memories. We often can remember the details and subjective associations far more vividly than the event itself. This explains the frequent tip-of-the-tongue feeling when trying to convey what is important about some memory or occurrence. Similarly, it is often what makes it so difficult to communicate meaningfully with others in later life. Often, the most vividly felt and remembered elements will appear at best tangential to someone else—the scent of Velan’s leather shorts as he ran up the aisle, or the very precise double fold at the top of my father’s brown bag lunch, for instance, or even the peripheral tableaux of little Ruth Simmons gazing blindly upwards while a circle of peers castigates her for the Plato figurine and—contiguously in the window but elsewhere in the actual narrative—in the woods along the driveway of the estate of the wealthy manufacturer, of Mr. Simmons, her father, staggering blindly in and out of view while holding the stump of his severed hand, groaning for help as he runs in his vivid snowsuit, and all too often running blindly into the forest’s trees due to his own hurled blood and particulate matter’s having rendered him blind, and the whole highspeed tableau is grainy and imperfectly seen because of all of the trees and spiky undergrowth and the driving blizzard and huge drifts of wind driven snow, which Mr. Simmons finally bounces headfirst off of a tree and falls headlong into one of, a massive snowdrift, and disappears all the way up to his boots, one of which is moving spasmodically as he tries to struggle for stable footing, unaware in his shock, pain, loss of blood, and blindness that he is even upside down, while, meanwhile, diagonally down and across, a C.P.D. technician is kneeling on the dilapidated front seat of the Simmons family’s car, drawing a body outline around the place behind the wheel where the rescue team had found the bright blue body of Marjorie Simmons, whose frustrations and disappointments were now all over, and whose body—still holding its lipstick, which made a small, sharp looking lump in the white blanket that covered it—was being loaded in the blizzard onto a large ambulance stretcher by two orderlies in white gowns while a C.P.D. detective with snow on his hat talked to the heavily bundled housewives who had been shoveling out their driveways and were now all leaning tiredly on their snowshovels talking to the detective, who was taking notes in a small notebook with a very dull pencil, and whose own fingernails were slightly blue in the cold, and the driving snow made everyone’s eyelashes white, and the two Columbus Public Works workers in large yellow boots who had shoveled Mrs. Simmons’ car out of the igloo-sized mound stood together next to a towtruck, blowing into their cupped hands and hopping slightly up and down, the way people who are both cold and bored often do, facing away from the street and the blanket with the lump over the stretcher with just two small boots with fake fur fringe at the ankles poking out, and the house that the two bored C.P.W. workers (one of whom has a red and silver Ohio State U. ski cap on with a buckeye fluffball at the top) are facing without even really seeing it is one of the houses whose backyards (this one’s has a swingset whose swings each have a large, brick-shaped block of snow on them, that has accumulated) abut the copse of elm and fir trees at the edge of Fairhaven Knolls that separates the neighborhood homes from the R. B. Hayes school ballfield in which even now the dominant rottweiler is again trying to mount the Simmons’ lost dog, in the actual field through the classroom window, miming the position and expressions of mating, exhorting the defenseless, long suffering whelp to sit still and endure it or else something really terrible would happen.