The Problem of Evil in Hauberk,Missouri

Miss Tomoike can’t pronounce the German for money. The problem is, neither can I.

I am in love with Miss Tomoike.

I say, Ich habe kein Geld. I have no money. And the class responds, Wir haben kein Geld. We have no money. In my world, the world of German 2A, no one ever has any money. But I am still in love with Miss Tomoike.

Problems.

She is sixteen years old. I am thirty-one. It is a clichéd, old story—probably as clichéd and old as having no money. Miss Tomoike’s d’s sound like t’s. If I’m not careful, mine do too: “Wir haben kein Gelt.”

Nein.

Nein, nein, nein.

I dance around the room for no reason at all and the class snickers. Geld: gay-aey-elle-day. The class repeats. They are patient, indulgent. They see my lighthearted antics and raise me my lack of correct pronunciation despite the fact that every day, at 9:10 AM in room 22, I am barely in the game.

My feelings for Miss Tomoike endure. They torment me from her wonderfully messy homework, the lopsided A’s, the undotted i‘s. I’ve bought a pack of the pens she uses: Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball, blue (extra fine). Sometimes I copy her signature over and over. I am a sad, sad man.

Jeremy Hoff raises his hand. Both of his parents are from Augsburg, directly from Augsburg. He could teach my class, and he makes sure I know this every day. Jeremy Hoff is the worst thing in my life.

He reminds me: “We did this yesterday.”

“Yes,” I say, “yes,” and retreat to the table at the front of the room where the teacher’s answer book is open to the lesson I almost understand.

Jeremy laces his fingers behind his head and leans back in his desk. He’s wearing western boots. He crosses his legs straight out at the ankles and the boots make a thok-thok on the hardwood. “What did you do before you were a teacher?” he asks.

I tell them to open their books.

He says something in a complex Bavarian slang I don’t understand, and the class snickers again. I ignore him. Miss Tomoike has beautiful eyes. Her short black hair is meticulously clean. She smiles up at me and I move on to verbs. Verbs are good. One can depend on verbs. I say, “sprechen,” and try not to stare as she conjugates.

I took it as the innate goodness and simplicity of small town folk that Claire Dunlop, the principal of Alexander Weiskopf H. S., offered to rent me a room until I could find a place of my own. Now we have a different principal and Claire Dunlop is gone. Two years have passed, but I am a hundred years older and I think back to my arrival as if it happened in a different era. I was in the last group of teachers to live in her house on Main Street, equidistant from the gas station and the school.

Hired by Claire right out of college, I moved from California so I could teach English and wouldn’t have to be a jeweler like every other member of my family. I would have gone just about anywhere. And Hauberk, Missouri, seemed okay even though tornados ripped across the state every year and the Hauberkians didn’t appear to care as long as their own, personal houses still had roofs when they got home from work. Sometimes entire barns were razed, animals carried for miles, tumbleweeds, bushes, and dirt pulverized into clumps by the road or rising out of the blasted cornfields in lopsided columns—messages in the great symbolic language of creation: DON’T STAY HERE. I didn’t listen.

Claire sent the algebra teacher, Henry Barber, to pick me up at the Greyhound one county over. He was a thin-lipped man, completely bald, with high cheekbones and a heaviness around him as if he traveled in his own pocket of dense air. He drove an old mint Packard in mint condition, which made me want to like him. But neither of us spoke much on the drive back to Hauberk.

Henry. What is there to say about him? He had the stick-to-itiveness of Midwestern farm culture all over him, the implicit understanding that anything worth being done was worth the time necessary to do it. Consequently, he didn’t drive over forty m.p.h. and I spent most of the trip doing what I’d been doing on the bus. I watched the geometry of the fields, haystacks, distant crows fluttering up in bursts, how the sky bent into the earth at the edge of sight and seemed to get darker there, as if an end really did exist beyond which all Missouri would disappear. Winter was coming. Later that day, I’d see blue run into gray, clouds like dead chunks, clotted and falling. I’d get used to seeing the sky as a dour, unfriendly predictor: tinged green for tornados, red for heavy wind, blue for dense humidity, gray for everything else. And, like the Midwestern sky, Henry Barber’s face was bland and serious, both long and compressed at the same time with a set expression and flat hazel eyes that seemed to be looking at the horizon even when they were looking at you.

“Yep, here we are, I guess,” he said. His voice startled me after the long silence.

There were only eight streets in Hauberk, and I hadn’t noticed that we’d come in. Though we were supposedly in the heart of the “downtown” area, it seemed like we’d entered a slightly more versatile truck stop. We got out and Henry put some quarters in an ancient parking meter.

It was the biggest house in this part of the world. If Claire Dunlop hadn’t been waiting at the top of her front steps, I would have thought we’d stopped at the county courthouse. As it turned out, the courthouse was one block away on the other side of the street. And it was smaller. Henry leaned against the car and sighed. Claire was looking down from the porch, raising her arms like Christ over Rio, embracing us, the town, the sacred perfection of everything that led up to her door.

Her T-shirt is tight and pink, says Love Kitten over a gray cartoon cat with hearts for eyes. She hands me her Midterm Progress Report and smiles. Ice glittering on the frosted window makes a pinwheel of light on her neck. I look at it and smile back, feeling just like that gray love kitten curled up in the sun. The students press out of my classroom—all but Jeremy Hoff glaring from the door.

There are only a few reports left for me to sign. In the totalitarian world of high school, a report of “Not Satisfactory” results in the victim being sent to the school psychologist and an emergency conference with parents and teachers. A “Poor” means regular therapy, tutoring every day, and a grand jury investigation. Probably electro-shock. There are no “Poor” students at Alexander Weiskopf High School.

“How are you?” asks Miss Tomoike, still smiling, beaming out ten-thousand gigavolts of Love Kitten all over me.

I grin like a boy and mark the “Very Good” box.

“Okay,” she says. “Thank you. Have a good day.” A few more bonus volts before the smile disappears and she’s out the door with Jeremy, who’s been having a desperate power shortage—blackouts, failures, exploding circuits. He hates me, yes, but that’s nothing compared to how much I hate him. I step into the hall, hands clasped behind my back, and watch them go to her locker.

Miss Tomoike’s American name is Lydia. And, of all the Lydias I’ve known, she is the most un-Lydia, which makes me love her even more. Her real name is Aniko, but everyone must call her Lydia, the name of three of my ex-girlfriends. I am cursed by that name.

First there was Lydia MacLeod: tall, redhead, hated father, abortion at fifteen, moved to Canada then hated Canada, made me bleach my hair, left me for a bouncer.

Then there was Lydia Horton: med student, chess and bowling, eating disorder, hated father, moved to Sri Lanka to build huts for the blind.

And Lydia Ründegaard: married to textile magnate, bisexual, abstract photographer, chain smoker, hated father, broke my television.

Now I no longer own a television and Miss Tomoike doesn’t bowl. She is an exchange student. Her parents live in Tokyo—bankers, businessmen, important people of commerce. I imagine sitting down with them. She’ll bring me home to meet them. Finally, yes, things will work out. An unconventional match? Of course, but aren’t all the great ones unconventional? I’ll sit down over awabi and twig tea with eight-thousand-year-old grandfather, exchanging deep existential truths in the form of short poems that seem like politeness. I’m preparing for it. I’ve learned three expressions from my Japanese On One Word-a-Day: Gaido-san desu-ka? Are you a guide? Saiko sokudo hyaku kiro. Maximum speed one-hundred kilometers. Iro, iro domo arigato. Thank you for everything.

When Henry and I drove up, she emerged in state. There was James Reid, music teacher, to her left, and coach Spinadella on her right. She’d wrapped herself in gauzy yellow cotton, something between Cleopatra and Glenda the Good Witch of the North. And she seemed to radiate, if not beauty, then a certain conviction of her own seductiveness, trying to flow down her whitewashed steps but having to go very deliberately so as not to trip on the hem of her dress. This was a different Claire Dunlop than the person I’d met at the interview, sitting in the Oleander Room at the Day’s Inn outside Saint Louis, where she was all polyester angles and sobriety, black coffee and the students and educational theory and what we expect. Henry, I noticed, had already become steam, blowing away so quietly I hadn’t had time to thank him for the ride. So I left my bags in the Packard and met Claire’s hand half-way up the steps. Everyone tried to smile.

“Would you?” she said. It was a question, but the flick of her hand toward my bags said Go and Spinadella went. That was the beginning. A more intelligent person would have seen past, present, and future all phenotyped at once in that gesture. A more intelligent person would have jumped back in the Packard, punched it, shot the covered wood bridge over the dry creek outside of town and been down the I-44 before any of them had a chance to say what. But I wasn’t that smart and Packards don’t go very fast and I was constrained by all the usual human courtesies.

It might have been the awe I felt at Spinadella’s thirteen-inch biceps that made me go along. His blond hair was so clean it gleamed: the first Italian Viking. We watched him open the Packard, scoop up my suitcase and backpack in one gesture, and lumber up into the house without a word.

“We’re so very, very happy you’re here,” said Claire, putting her arm around my shoulders and leading me up the steps, while James Reid smiled behind us like someone in her livery waiting for an order or maybe just waiting to catch her if she tripped and fell backwards.

I was amazed at the house. Safavid rugs, crystal chandeliers, authentic Victorian chic right down to cloth tubes over the chair legs. It was in the National Register of Historic Places. An ante-bellum plantation two-story, replete with Corinthian columns, domed pergola in the back yard, and two-hundred years of whitewash—one of the few buildings left from Missouri’s time as a slave state. The whole town took a certain pride in it. Carolers began there every Christmas. The Lutheran youth group whitewashed it once a year. People got married on its wide front lawn.

“We have no electricity here.” She smiled with an air of confidence and secrecy that told me she could see I was down for whatever. “We preserve our traditions here just as they have always been preserved, meaning a respect for the past.”

I nodded. Of course.

Claire was no stranger to history. She taught the European variety to juniors every semester. And, though she’d never been outside Missouri, her subject and her position as principal made her the local sage. In the deep, violating humidity of the Missouri summer, the mayor could often be seen conferring with her in the shade of the pergola, sipping fortified punch and hiding from the brutal realities of the political life.

She took me up the grand staircase into my room at the top. It was small and the ceiling was low, but it was very clean and white. Spinadella had left my bags on the bed. There was a wash-basin and a bureau with a small round mirror, a free-standing oak closet, throw-rug alongside the bed, writing table with a candelabra, and an oversized crucifix on the wall above it. Jesus’ wounds were bright and dripping. Dinner was at five. The housekeeper’s name was Pattie.

After class, I go to the cafeteria for coffee and a pudding. Jorge Rodriguez-Jackson is there sucking on a toothpick, plotting, squinting into the suspect distance. He looks me over and nods. I nod back and focus on the pudding. Pudding might be one of the last good things in life. Pudding is innocent, beyond reproach. Pudding would never get you accused of making someone disappear. Nor would eating it make you want to disappear anyone. If I were Jorge Rodriguez-Jackson staring at me eating pudding, I’d know right away that I was not a disappearer. But he is not so perceptive. He blames me for Claire Dunlop’s untimely vanishing act two years ago.

Jorge and his wife are from Kansas City. He teaches health and English lit., has always taught health and English lit., will always teach health and English lit. I was supposed to have been hired to replace him. If anyone should be suspect for her disappearance, it should be him. Still, he blames me. He is a Marxist.

He has a Marxist righteousness, a Marxist nose for sniffing out iniquity. He has channeled Karl Marx for so long that he has come to look like him: the jowly frown, the intensity in the eyes. At the first faculty party, I wandered into his study—a veritable Marxist bacchanalia—three complete editions of Kapital in different leathers, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts leaning provocatively against a marble book-end, Grundrisse, A Critique of Political Economy, the whole sticky tangle in both German and English. A framed picture of Marx over the writing table. There was a Marxist tinge to everything in the house, a certain alien consciousness at work, even in his wife, who’d arch her eyebrows as if all the things she’d heard about me were coming true in front of her.

He twirls the toothpick in the corner of his mouth and looks away a split-second before I look at him. Feeling him about to turn his head, I glance up at the water stain shaped like a coffee ring on the ceiling. I know he’s scanning my face. The three girls at the table behind me hiss angrily about hair. The janitor over in the corner stares into his chicken soup as if it were saying something remarkable. Jorge, no doubt, is recording everything, memorizing it for some future testimony.

When I asked other faculty about his politics, they looked like I’d said something dirty. Decent folk don’t bring up things like that. So okay. So Jorge Rodriguez-Jackson and his squinting and his contempt. He’ll never stop hunting me for crimes against humanity. And if I breathe the smallest sigh for Miss Tomoike, if the smallest, helpless human emotion slips out, he’ll be on me—chains and culpability, scandal, perversion. I can see myself behind bars. I can see myself lynched in a field. Missouri: where the great Confederate rebels went criminal, knocking over banks, Jesse James, heads blown off, segregation, Indian slaughter. It’s in the people’s blood. You can see it bubbling under their skin when the proletarian in the truck next to you looks at you like you just felt up his mother. Missouri’s angry. Missouri wants revenge for whatever you’re about to do, and Jorge Rodriguez-Jackson’s watching. I can’t let myself even think of Miss Tomoike when he’s around. He can sense a certain furtiveness in me. He’d like to put me under a harsh smoking light, ask me angry questions, write my name on the floor in chalk. He knows dirty when he sees it.

I get up to leave and he makes an inquisitive face, “Finished so soon?”

“Uh, yes, pudding, you know.”

“Oh?”

“It’s easy to eat.”

“Is that right. Easy to eat.”

I move toward the cafeteria’s double-doors, slowly, casually.

Days and dinners came and went, and everyone was polite. Barber, Spinadella, Reid, and I shared the bathroom at the end of the hall with absolute maturity. We passed the salt down the table when someone wanted it and stayed off the third floor, which was Claire’s.

If she was in a good mood, she’d be vampy, fluttering and quick and trying to flirt with sudden meaningful looks designed to smolder. If she was in a bad mood, the looks grew heavy, the dark around her eyes got that way without makeup, and a pall hung over dinner. Barber would do his steam routine. And coach Spinadella wasn’t very articulate in the first place—whether from that last stubborn Viking chromosome or from the horse-juice he’d probably done as a bodybuilder. He was Claire’s barometer. If she was in a funk, then so was Spinadella. He’d beam ultra-hostile glances at everyone, like he was about to chop the table in half, then eat another spoon of peas.

Only Reid kept a cheerful face no matter what. Claire would have a mausoleum death-spell hanging over the table, and Reid would be shoveling food into his mouth as if he’d just been paroled, saying, “Hey, anybody watching the Chiefs tonight?”

Nobody was even if they were.

At first, I took it as passive resistance, aggressive cheerfulness. Then it seemed that Reid was inherently happy—one of those rare individuals at peace with himself and his life. But, ultimately, I understood that he was just plain insensitive. He didn’t focus on anything beyond himself and so was completely content. James Reid remains for me, at least in this sense, one of history’s unacknowledged geniuses.

School started and I began to teach freshmen and sophomore English under the supervision of Jorge Rodriguez-Jackson, who sat at the back of my room every day to make sure I was using his lesson plans. Assignments full of nutritious Marxism that I, with my degraded bourgeois ideology . . .

Question: How does Kent’s vehemence towards Oswald in Act II, Scene ii, help portray Oswald as a capitalist prototype? (Skipped in favor of What kind of a guy do you think Lear is?)

Question: How does personification of The Red Death symbolize the embodiment of false consciousness and the effects of aristocratic exclusivity? (Skipped in favor of Describe the big moment in the story.)

Question: How does the willingness of the indigenous Africans to be exploited by Kurtz reflect the function(s) of an internalized ideological state apparatus? (Skipped in favor of Did you like Heart of Darkness?)

The revolution was put down in all of my classes. Satanic capitalist ideology prevailed despite baleful looks from the political officer at the back of the room. I imagined Jorge Rodriguez-Jackson’s Health 2 students marching through the quad in olive uniforms, his AP English politburo lecturing their parents after grace about the opiate of the masses.

Still, at first, things seemed okay, seemed doable until the heavens opened up on my head. I was two weeks into my first semester at Alexander Weiskopf when it hit. It came on like one of the local twisters I’d heard about, the kind where you’re supposed to jump in the bathtub and hold a mattress over your head while cows from the next county are hurdling through the air. A death in the faculty. No one to teach German. Horror. And I was the only one who could fix it. Could I substitute maybe? Could I teach a few lessons until they found someone else? It wouldn’t be hard. I’d had a few years as an undergraduate. Sure, of course, I wanted to get along. Old Mr. Jürgen—who lived with his mother thirty miles outside town and only spoke Hochdeutsch, who’d been learning English his whole life and never quite got it down so that it pained him to speak it—had choked on phlegm and left me alone with his Kulturspiegel, his Arbeitsplan, and his fifty students, each secretly suspecting what I knew to be true: I was planlos, without plan. I was cluelos.

Later, I’d come to believe Claire had hired me just for this, that she’d foreseen it. There was no bathtub to shield me from the twister. There was no mattress. The winds had picked me up with the livestock and dropped me in Germany. And everything took on sinister proportions. The vicious underbelly of Claire’s flirtiness: was I expected to flirt back? If I did, would she let me return to just teaching English? I had one-hundred and fifteen dollars in the bank, enough for a one-way ticket to nowhere. My family back in Los Angeles had disowned me: two generations of angry jewelers with no faith in education. Grandpa Gordon had been an anarchist. Dad left when I was twelve. Draft-dodgers. Vehement, non-conforming Welshmen with an uncle still doing time in Mount Joy for polygamy. They’d laugh me into the street. I had nothing to go back to.

“What do you mean by ‘big moment’?” asked one of my brighter sophomores.

The problem with Pandora wasn’t her curiosity as most people think. It was that Zeus gave her the box in the first place. Come on, people, let’s have a little sensitivity for the Pandoras of the world. I’m thinking this—meditating on it, sympathizing with all the misunderstood little destroyers of creation—on the corner of Main and Shelly, staring into the Main Street Diner, while beside me James Reid squeaks bad saxophone at the falling snow. Reid was originally a drummer not a sax player. And, even though he teaches everything from horns to strings, drums are the only things he can play correctly.

My feet are damp. Reid has enough air in his lungs to kill everything within a six-block radius. And I’ll count myself lucky if the next time he squeaks up that b-flat it’ll disconnect my heart, blast me to a pile of dust, scatter my molecules into gray gutter snow. Make it quick and make it final. But that would be too easy. Tonight, my very own Pandora is on a dream date with Jeremy Hoff, and I’m destined to watch.

Yeah. Didn’t Norman Rockwell paint something like this? Johnny and Jenny sharing a malt in a brightly lit diner while fluffy snowflakes glide down outside and God is in his heaven and all is right with the world? Norman never painted me. I’m freezing and I still can’t figure out how Reid can play in these conditions.

He stops for a blessed moment to say, “Hey there, are you asleep?” And then his Chic Corea version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen starts up again like large pieces of metal crumpling into each other. Jazz, dig?

It’s my job to scoop snow out of the taupe fedora on the sidewalk in front of us. James does this two nights a month for pocket money, but this is the first time I’ve helped him. Usually, it’s his sister scooping snow out of the fedora, but she has pneumonia. He’s in his forties but looks about seventy-eight—stooped, wrinkled, completely gray. It’s a Friday night. Our students walk by, bored in Hauberk’s tiny downtown, on their way no doubt to drunken naked pleasures neither James Reid nor I will ever know. They drop a few pity-dollars in the hat when they pass, faces blank, embarrassed for us.

Dreamy: let’s have a cultural exchange. Jeremy Hoff can be second-generation German-American corn-fed Romeo from the heart of the heart of the country. And Miss Tomoike can be happy optimistic Asian beauty, who cares about the environment and wants everyone to live well. Together, they’ll be a force so powerful it will blow the glass of the diner into the street, rip the space-time continuum, end reality as we know it—true enlightenment, no more pain and suffering, human evolution advanced to the next stage because of this most sacred and perfect union, Amen.

Only that’s not happening, is it?

Jeremy Hoff’s putting his high school moves on her as only an adolescent lizard like he can. Pure reptile: the sort of seduction that makes young girls think it’s true love forever. It’ll never be true love. Lizards don’t fall in love. It’s a constitutional fact. And it’s never been Pandora’s fault. All Zeus: the prototype, the lying, cheating, seducing sky-lizard.

Maybe Jeremy got “hurt” a little in the past. He looks down, smiles. He’s shy but he might let his “true feelings” show through his “confidence” because Miss Tomoike and he “really click” and they’ve got, like, “something special.” I realize I’ve walked forward and am standing in the middle of Main, staring at them in their window seat. Ah, acid jealousy, burn, work your evil.

Reid stops playing. “What are you doing? My hat’s full of snow.”

Of course, there’s a job to be done. When I clean the hat out, there’s a dollar-fifty in it. I slip the money into his trench coat and walk up the street towards my car.

“Hey,” he yells. “Wait. Where you goin’?”

Good question.

My bad situation couldn’t have been more perfect for Claire, who drifted through the rooms at night like a wraith. She could be as eccentric as she wanted in the House for Orphaned Teachers. Claire never slept and neither did I, hours of stay-ahead German in my brain like a nightly violation. I’d be heating a pan of water in the kitchen for my midnight don’t-worry-everything’s-going-to-be-okay tea and see her drift soundlessly through the next room, stopping briefly to touch something on an end-table or run her fingers along the curtains.

I’d ask myself whether she meant for me to see her. Was it all part of some preternatural courting ritual for high school faculty? Was Reid involved? Spinadella? Barber? Was I paranoid or had the deciding factor in hiring me been that I’d have nowhere to run? Today, German. Tomorrow, physics, calculus, organic chemistry. I could see my future forming in all its nasty glory. She could make me do anything. And what would I be able to do about it? Just nod and start reading the textbooks. After the rent deduction, there was no way for me to afford utilities and pay Claire for my portion of the dinner budget. I already owed her. If I ran, I knew she’d send Spinadella to collect.

He was the perfect leg-breaker. Spinadella and his linemen regularly growled at the top of their lungs in the tiny weight room attached to the gym. They’d scream out blood-death calls in some language invented by the Frankensteins, Albertus Magnuses, Doctor Moreaus of the world—mastermind handlers who knew how to control the beasts. But now the creatures were loose and in high school, free to shave their heads and pump as much iron as they wanted, free to flex their way through any class—untouchable, terrifying, and hog-dumb. They stood at least a foot taller than the other students and had the same slow contempt for other life forms that one has for ants trying desperately to avoid the shoe.

Their shrieks and grunts played out in echoes over the quad, knocking between the buildings as if the linebackers had mated, multiplied, and had finally broken their cage locks. Free at last. Fresh meat. Like their coach, they always seemed to be wavering on the edge of a steroid berserk. Teachers passed them partly out of pressure to keep the football team intact, partly out of self-preservation. Françoise, the bulimic French instructor from Lyons, would run to the bathroom and vomit after first period—not for her usual bulimic reasons but because she was shaking from fear. Unnamed persons had once held her upside down and pinched her nose shut while she counted backwards from cent.

I should have felt lucky not to have gotten any of them in German. But I would have gladly vomited every day in exchange for not having to live with Spinadella, who’d openly stare at me like he wanted to kill me. On the surface, he respected my personal space, a clear-cut DMZ that he wouldn’t violate. But there were stray shots: the hard looks, the collision in the hall that left a baseball-sized bruise above my bottom rib. I didn’t know what he had against me. I went over everything, searching for a slight, a stupid joke, an off-color word skewed to an insult when I wasn’t looking. But, of course, I had no idea. I avoided him in the cafeteria, made no eye contact at dinner, kept to myself, afraid for my life.

Borges’ parable: Dante, exiled in Ravenna, dreams of a tiger dreaming in a cage below the Coliseum and then realizes that he is dreaming about himself. He is the tiger; Ravenna is the cage. He and the tiger share a blessed unity in the dream-state. I wonder why I haven’t had a similar dream. All the greats had a guiding star—Constantine’s floating cross, Hemingway’s bull fights, Blake’s demons giggling in his shop. I have nothing but Miss Tomoike.

Looking through black branches at her studying on her bed, I realize that this parable stinks: alone in the darkness under a dead maple tree, the pathetic exile nurses a broken heart without the luxury of tigers. And in the end—every parable needs a twist—is he redeemed? Is he relieved? Or does he wake up in Ravenna?

She’s not looking out the window. And, if she did, what would she expect to see? Twenty squares of beveled darkness. People don’t bother curtaining their windows because Hauberk has never had a peeper. Not until now. I walk up and press my palms against the warm glass. My breath makes crystals on the pane before interior heat turns them to droplets that freeze half-way down.

A strand of her hair is caught in the corner of her mouth. She’s wearing black overalls and a T-shirt. I can’t tell what she’s reading. It’s not German. Good for her. Miss Tomoike’s English is so good that she can take German in America; she’s brilliant. The glass is warm, comforting in the cold like touching a living thing.

How could someone so beautiful and intelligent fall in love with a kid like Jeremy Hoff? It’s the question I’d really like to ask. If I were her father, I’d ask it. If I were her friend. Anyone but me. Nothing to do but spread my palms on the glass and ask myself: how could she?

I walk away slowly, pulling a branch off the maple tree with a hard crack. I don’t care if she looks out. Let her see me swinging gashes in the snow, splintering the branch against a wooden post. My hands are cold and I don’t feel the splinters, cutting diagonally across a hard-packed snowfield, hitting any lump or post until I’m holding a wooden fragment. I’ll bet Miss Tomoike didn’t even get up. If she did, she didn’t think of me. She saw part of a handprint, the residue of breath, and thought of Jeremy Hoff or maybe thought of nothing, not so brilliant after all.

The sight of a distant car, however, gives me pause. It’s Jorge Rodriguez-Jackson’s brown Škoda. How many other people in Hauberk drive a brown Škoda? I walk straight towards it, but it takes off before I can make out who the driver is through the new snowfall. I tell myself I am not an offender. I repeat.

Claire had been leaning in the doorway to my room, staring at me. I was studying. The German had blunted my senses and I’d forgotten the door ajar.

“Yes?” I cleared my throat and made an unintimidated face.

Her eyes flicked to the cross-shaped bright spot on the wall above my desk where the crucifix was supposed to be. Every night, I took it down and hid it because Jesus’ gaze would follow me in the flickering candlelight. Every day, the housekeeper would find it and put it back. In the interview, Claire had asked if I was a Lutheran. I told her I’d been a devout Lutheran my whole life, making a mental note to learn what that was. And now she’d caught me, but Claire only smiled. She was in her nightgown.

“Just looking at you.” Her voice was even-toned, but I could see a distant, glazed look in her eyes. Had she just taken her medication or did she need some? The door closed. The nightgown came off. Claire’s body was shaped like a large white thumb. She walked to the bed and looked at me.

“Get over here,” she said.

I closed my notebook and quietly laid my pen down on the desk. I felt detached; the sight of Claire’s body had shocked me into some basic motor-survival mode. I thought I might go downstairs and take a walk. The fact that I was in my pajamas and slippers did not occur to me. When I opened the door, Spinadella glared at me from the end of the hall, all bulging six-three, two-hundred and fifty pounds of him.

I thought of my job and of how the one-hundred and fifteen dollars I had wouldn’t cover a new set of teeth. Claire was waiting behind me, hands on hips, mouth in a tight knowing smile. She grabbed my crotch and backed me onto the bed.

“Tell me you love me,” she said.

The word for the day is Gewissensbisse. The phrase for the day is Gewissensbisse haben: remorse, to have remorse, to feel remorseful.

Here’s Miss Tomoike with her big brown eyes.

Her midterm looks like an execution. I emptied the red pen. Invented new criticisms on the spot. Large heaps of teacherly lash. And for what? Vengeance. If I could have nailed Jeremy Hoff, I would have, but his work is untouchably good. Deep, in the inner darkness of my being, I have sometimes prayed for him to fail an assignment. Yes, a cardinal sin—paradise lost, lake of fire, burning, gnashing of teeth, no teacher heaven when I die.

She’s the last student left in the room. She’s trying not to break down. I half-sit on the table up front, just like an adult, waiting, as if to say, That’s life, honey. And the sad thing is I’m right. There are a lot of pathetic, vindictive, lonely people out there, Miss Tomoike (can I call you Lydia?), and you just got yourself one.

“I tried . . . hard.” Pristine, angelic teardrop down cheek.

“I know,” I say. “I understand.”

Now she’s weeping. She’s letting it all out. Sobs. Even a few wails, moans. Miss Tomoike looks down at her paper as if she still can’t believe it. Actually, it’s not that bad. I don’t tell her that after seeing her on a date with Jeremy Hoff my standards for her work went up five-hundred percent. And the part of me that wants to burn down the children’s hospital, spray the petting zoo with toxic waste, see all privileged sniffling little flowers broken under boots—that part is completely satisfied. That’s right: suffer, suffer, suffer.

“Am I going to fail? Is there anything I can do?” The skin under her eyes is extra red where she’s viciously attacked her tears with the sleeve of her sweater. Miss Tomoike hates her tears. She sits very straight in her desk.

“Of course, there’s always something you can do. Failure is pretty far off, I think, if you want to put out some extra effort.”

“Yes.” Smiling, nodding, wiping her eyes.

“Why don’t you meet me here after school tomorrow and we’ll go through your paper, maybe talk about re-writing it.” That’s reasonable, isn’t it? She thinks so. I picture what she’ll be wearing tomorrow after school and smile benevolently.

Miss Tomoike is now incredibly happy: good people do exist, forgiveness is a beautiful thing. Teacher wants you to learn. He’ll correct your faults. She thanks me profusely, but I wave it off. “Don’t mention it,” I say and watch Love Kitten No. 1 walk out of my room.

I tried to laugh it off, but I didn’t have any more energy. I’d been too accommodating. I’d hesitated, there, in the kitchen, watching her drift through the rooms. Was it the hesitation? How does a man put this into words? We have no language for it.

After a while, Claire no longer needed the threat of Spinadella to force me into it. She had her own key and entered at night. We never talked. Her nightgown came off and my body did what it did while my mind was on a beach in California, contemplating the waves or how wind takes root in the palms and seems to live there for a time. In the morning, I’d stare at the dark ceiling over my bed and think: why did I have to wake up? I’d think: there must be a logic to this. I’ve always believed there’s a logic to everything.

Tired. Days muted to their lowest setting. I’d walk through the halls and look at the students as if they were fish in an aquarium. When had all adolescents begun to look exactly the same—drifting down the halls in groups, quietly glassed-off from existence, unaware of anything beyond themselves? Had they always been like this? And my life too: a different kind of fish but equally distant or maybe just an empty tank thrown open to the sun—yellow-green depth, sediment lit from above, where you might stop to wait for a fish and, when it didn’t appear, feel ridiculous for staring into empty water.

Claire owned me. What objection could I make that anyone would take seriously? What hold did she have on Spinadella, on Reid and Barber? No one talked about it. There was no resistance, no underground railroad, no solidarity. I looked for a sign, a bent word, a wink, any kind of acknowledgement, code tapped on the pipes at night. But nothing. Dinner remained dinner, light pitter-patter, long protracted silences. Claire would be having an up day or a down day. Reid would be gently oblivious, Barber impersonating a distant cloud formation, and Spinadella beaming out hostility like hell’s only lighthouse. With my inner volume turned down, I had nothing to say. I was the Quiet One. It was all I could do to keep the candelabra lit on my study-desk at night after hiding the crucifix someplace new.

I never heard steps on the thick rugs, but her weight made the floorboards creak. In the middle of the night, I’d listen to Claire pace and stop, pace and stop for hours, and sometimes, a much heavier person—Spinadella—faint dancehall music from the thirties filtering down through the wood. The thought of them dancing above me seemed terrifying and obtuse the way the reenactment of a battle leaves corpses in the landscape that aren’t dead. Undead. One word and the corpses stand up grinning, a pantomime of life.

Love maketh men do strange things, Horatio.

The day is all anticipation. Am I too pale? Is the gut showing? Is my hair out of whack? It feels like prom. I never went to prom, spending the night instead on the roof of the Imperial Toy Company in downtown L.A., reading Camus, hoping that the girl I’d casually mentioned it to would find me mysterious enough to follow. She never showed up. I went home when it started to rain.

But Miss Tomoike, she’ll be here. Seduction of the innocent. The predator doesn’t worry about the baby giraffe. If he did, how would he eat? There’s no blame in nature, no blame when you’re starving for some giraffe. Come not betwixt the dragon and his wrath, says Lear. That’s right. Come not. And if you do come, well, that’s fate isn’t it.

I go to the men’s room between classes and stare at my face in the mirror. I don’t look like the dragon and his wrath. More like the baby giraffe. Not even that good. Sallow. Sunken eyes. Wrinkles around the mouth. More like the aging Komodo dragon. At thirty-one, I’m already a half-gray, wrinkled, German-teaching Komodo. It’s ridiculous to think I could seduce her. But here I am.

Miss Tomoike’s class is its old ugly self. Twenty-five separate shades of contempt looking back at me. Jeremy Hoff’s work, no doubt. The phrase list we’re on deals with a trip to the dentist. I say X and the students answer Y. It’s not supposed to be hard.

Ist es ein Abszeß? Is it an abscess? I manage to pronounce the sentence pretty well, I think, but a wave of sniggering goes around the room.

Ja, they answer, es ist ein Absezß.

Jeremy Hoff is participating today, still riding the glory of having thrown the winning pass against Rigg County last night. He and Miss Tomoike exchange glances when they think I’m not looking.

Können Sie mir eine Spritze geben? Can you give me anesthetic?

Nein, they say, nein, wir haben keine Spritze. We have no anesthetic.

Ich kann nicht schlafen. I can’t sleep.

Ja, they answer. No more sniggering.

Ich kann nicht essen. I can’t eat.

Ja. Some of the students nod or look away.

Ich habe Schmerzen. I’m in pain.

No one says anything. Maybe it’s my tone.

“Come on.” I grip the edges of the table, lean towards them. Wiederholen Sie. Repeat.

The clock’s broken hands spasm and click. Wir haben Schmerzen, Jeremy says.

We look at each other.

Outside, the sophomore girls are shrieking by their lockers. A boy is laughing the long, high, mean-spirited laugh of the adolescent. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. The kind of laugh that comes with pointing, that’s serrated, that leaves one bleeding, with an Abszeß, in need of immediate attention. Someone at the back of the room coughs. I look down at the last phrase on the list.

Wieviel bin ich Ihnen schuldig? I ask. How much do I owe?

Claire’s sudden disappearance, when it came, had far less tragedy for those of us who lived with her every day than for greater Hauberk, suddenly buzzing with the hint of scandal. I wasn’t going to miss her.

They found her clothes laid out on a chair. Everything up on the third floor was as it had always been, Victorian tea furniture unbroken, crystal figurines of ballet dancers perfectly arranged in their wall case, her gigantic lace doilies unrumpled, no psychopathic messages in lipstick on her gilded bathroom mirror, no bloody prints in the porcelain tub. Nothing. Just poof and gone. Claire’s British history class had been the last to see her. According to them, there had been nothing exceptional in her behavior that day. God save the Queen.

Dinner on that first Clairless night had been extra awkward. Very little was said. We were stunned. It was the first dinner Claire had ever missed. And, for many dinners after, we would still be unsure what to say to each other. We’d become like medieval prisoners blinking suddenly into daylight, our new liberty glaring and unwieldy.

The sheriff came sniffing around as sheriffs are supposed to, but he didn’t sniff too vigorously. The farmland outside Hauberk was searched. The house’s basement was dug up and found to be no dirtier than dirt. There were no newly cultivated mounds in the backyard. No telling piles of ash and fillings in the snowfield behind the graveyard. In short, she’d left the earth without a trace. And I felt like dancing a moonlight samba. I felt like having cases of burgundy delivered to all inbred schizophrenic killers hiding in barn lofts for a hundred miles. At night, I heard the patter of little feet—my own. I was even dancing in my sleep.

Of course, there was Jorge Rodriguez-Jackson: all suspicion, that toothpick in the corner of his mouth. But the life of Hauberk, Missouri, continued. People got tired of speculating, inventing theories. The paper stopped running her picture. A tornado had taken out a village to the east. Drought was expected that summer. A graduate student at the University of Missouri had committed suicide. These things were news, not Claire’s disappearance, which became uninteresting and thus faded out of the collective consciousness as if it had never happened.

Hulking Spinadella, at least for me, was the prime suspect. But he went crazy on one of his halfbacks during a scrimmage and crippled the boy with his fists. He’s still in jail. Reid moved in with his sister and I found my cottage outside town. Only Barber remained. Claire had willed the house to the mayor, who became the new landlord, and the space suited Henry just fine. I dropped by to visit him a few months later, but he didn’t ask me in. We stood on the porch and stared into the darkened Jiffy Lube across the street. He kept his hands in his pockets, and I could see that the solitude had not made him any more pleasant.

“Well,” he said, “I guess she’s gone.”

“Guess so.”

“I guess you’ll miss her.”

I looked at him, but he was staring into Jiffy Lube like he might learn something important if only he didn’t blink. We listened to the night. Crickets were chirping somewhere far away, somewhere I wanted to be.

“Henry?”

“Yeah?”

“Fuck off, okay?”

If there’s a time I can meet with you off-campus, maybe, with just a little more help, instruction, tutoring, supervision thinks the old Komodo. But her midterm sits on the table between us like a chessboard, and what was so simple in my fantasies seems Byzantinely complex now. Checkmate in three? I don’t think so. Miss Tomoike’s arms are crossed. She’s looking down, her aura dark. What did I expect? She’s assimilating. Ten minutes ago, like a loose American girl, she was kissing Jeremy Hoff by his locker and then they walked, hand-in-hand, toward my room—slowly, as if one of them were about to be executed. “I’ll be right outside,” he said too loudly. Her protector.

We sit in silence for a few moments, both of us staring at her exam. I imagine Jeremy in the hall listening, his ear to my door. In a samurai film, I would hear his heartbeat, firing arrow suddenly through paper partition into chest of interloping spy. Just so. Impudent Romeo dispatched with alacrity by old arrow-shooting Komodo.

She uncrosses her arms and I notice her fingers are stained with ink. She’s been writing: love notes to Jeremy, letters of discontent to Tokyo. Japanese in ballpoint, such a waste. One requires a brush, a straight back, high virgin-white vellum that takes the ink like a momentous event. The paper loses a certain innocence but gains the character of the writing, bringing the female-yin-black letters together with the male-yang-white sheet—the unification of all duality. That’s the sort of writing instruction I’ve had in mind for Miss Tomoike (segue to Confucius: “It furthers one to undertake an affair with an older man. No blame.”). More likely: Mother, Father, the teachers here are horrible. There is this one monster in particular. He looks like a lizard.

“I’m sorry, but could you tell me how this is wrong?” Tentative, polite, sincerely worried, but with an undercurrent. Resentment? No. Coaching. I can hear Jeremy telling her to question me, telling her I don’t know what I’m talking about. The truth is that her answers are fine. The questions were short-answer, interpretive. I look at my red Xs, where I pressed so hard the pen left furrows in the page, and feel ridiculous.

“Well,” I say, “the questions were pretty open-ended.”

She nods, her expression blank.

“And there’s a certain degree of subjectivity . . .”

“I don’t understand.” More forcefully now. Jeremy Hoff in ballpoint all over her. All she’s missing is his regulation sneer. The truth is that her answers are probably better than what I might have written. The truth is that I’m an apprentice molester and Confucius was Chinese.

Bright hot reality: Miss Tomoike is a child. Love Kitten doesn’t even factor in. I’m horrified at the sudden clear vision of myself as Claire. I hear Jeremy clear his throat loudly outside my door.

“The truth is, Miss Tomoike, I’ve called you here to tell you that I’ve re-evaluated your work. I’m changing your grade.”

A thousand thank-yous. She doesn’t ask why. And she’s out the door before I can find the inner pulleys that make my face smile. The Christmas cologne I never wear sickens me. I go to the window and stare out over a runny snowfield at my home—the worthless, never-ending latitude of Missouri.

All this happens. The snow has melted and the news says there’s a tornado coming. But I don’t know. There’s always a tornado coming. Shadows are indistinct. The day begins dark and never truly gets light, while the ghost of old Mr. Jürgen wanders the state, trying to explain itself in correct English. I laugh, but who can say why a tornado takes one house and leaves another. Just get in the bathtub. Maybe Claire Dunlop is living a quiet life on the Santa Monica strand with a husband and a tight pink T-shirt that reads Love Kitten. Maybe Jorge Rodriguez-Jackson has a file on me waiting for the FBI. Maybe right now Miss Aniko Lydia Tomoike is breaking all available speed laws, jumping snow banks in a Husq Varna Motorized 2023 Ice Sled, headed here with apologies, justifications, words of love and eternity. It wouldn’t surprise me. Odds are garbage. Opinions are meaningless. Everything happens. It’s all here.