2 Chapter 2: The Teacher

I work with twenty kids in total. Nineteen, to be more exact, because Melinda is almost always sick and I think I've only seen her once since I started teaching here. Or five, if I have to be even more exact, because the other fourteen could easily audition for a George Romero 'Day of The Living Dead' film. Runny noses and brown spots around their eyes that seem to have sunk into the back of their heads, and totally living in their minds. Some of them even have a sort of sway of their heads when they drift away, dreaming and looking out of the window, with mouths open and bodily fluids dropping from their nose into their mouths, completely oblivious and uninterested in my equations about the sum of natural numbers. I thought a change of strategy was required, so, yesterday, I asked them to make an object using pullies to demonstrate how the laws of physics function when there's action and reaction. It could be anything, made out of any material they want and they had one day to make it. I have to say that ninety-percent of them were completely useless and didn't work, even though some asked their fathers for help, and almost all apologized: 'but it worked at home, when daddy did it!...' One of them , Tippy Michaels, even accused me of breaking his home project, although all I did was to see if the pulley worked. Of those which worked, I liked Melinda's best. Today was only the second day I had seen her and she brought a wonderful system made of rocks, twigs, rope and some planks she'd found in her shed. I asked her who had helped her and she jumped quickly to say it was all of her own doing. The whole thing was in perfect balance, like Fouccault's pendulum, and I was particularly interested in a beautiful rock she had incorporated into the mechanism, which had an unusual steely shine to it, and of which she said she had liked because it had the color of Morgan's feathers. 'Who is Morgan?', I enquired. 'Our chicken', came the reply as she twirled two intersecting twigs to which the ropes were attached. She went on to explain how she had done the whole thing this afternoon, after the morning classes, when she went out in the open orchard in front of her house and found all the materials she needed there. It was only one of the few moments in the entire day when I was able to stop thinking about Audrey and her whereabouts. As if to support one of Murphy's law, a short text message from her popped up on my phone right in the middle of Melinda's presentation and, to my shame, I went to check right that very instance and switched off so I can't tell you exactly what the other children were saying about the mechanism other than there were plenty of questions which were totally weird like: 'if I threw a stone at it, would it still work?' or 'can you use it as a catapult, to throw other rocks?'

'What are you doing?' was the text Audrey had sent. I fucking hate this question. 'Terrible' is the honest answer but then she'll go on to ask : 'why, what happened?', to which I would have to look weak, vulnerable and needy and say 'I miss you. I want to be with you'. And she would think: 'Man, this guy has no life. We're not even in a relationship'. So I just said: 'Good. Teaching.' And then went to tell about some stupid thing that happened today, on my way to school, about old Tim Fowley walking out of the local bar, totally drunk, and which I exaggerated to make it funnier than it was because I haven't laughed in ages so I don't know what's funny anymore. She replied 'Haha' and then vanished. I followed after with an 'You ok?' but no reply came, so I got worried and annoyed and decided not to insist.

And so tonight was like every other night for the last two months since I returned home. A long walk home from school, on a poorly-lit street, feeling lonely, angry and a total loser. The only I comfort I take is that I have to do the walk on my own and don't have to smile, teach or engage in small conversations which never interest me about what I've been doing the last seven years and why I haven't come to visit my family once. I keep checking the phone every other minute and it's become such a custom that I'm not even aware I mechanically take it out of my pockets. Nothing - not one message since the one I had received in the afternoon. I know she's suffering in some corner of her room, because that's what she does, or at least what I hope she does - not that she is suffering, but that she is alone and not with some guy (a quick fix) or an old boyfriend she'd called to see again. She is by herself because that's what she tells me she does, and I don't find any reason not to trust her. I see that in her eyes, just liike--- (I'll have to leave the word 'liike' as I wrote it; it took me over five minutes, going back and forth, deleting an 'i' and then adding it again but my OCD kicked in and it's too strong to fight it) just liike I did when I first saw her, and looked into her big green eyes and felt we had been together in some previous life - in a different time and space, maybe as old as the Babylon or Atlantis - where she was either a Cleopatra or a mad Cassandra and I was a minstrel, priest or apostle; for that's what I imagine to be.

I live with my father. It's a place that was never home for me. My pops sold our childhood home when mom died. I have never lived here and, add to that the thought that every night I have to hide my failures from him, and it's not really what one would call home or comfort. You might think a researcher in New York, even one who worked as an assistant to The Department of Theoretical Physics, would be able to afford their own place, but the truth is that I was completely broke after my relationship with Ella had ended. It was hard making ends meet back in the city, with years of agonizing struggle to step into the Courant College, but, after investing so much energy and effort to save our relationship, I found myself financially dependent on Ella, who was making much more money than I was.

Every time I open the front door to my father's house, I'm taken back by the state of neglect this household finds itself in. My dad, who was once an energetic man and used to say 'he could move mountains, if it was necessary', was now disinterested in all types of affair. I often find myself looking up at the cracks in the ceilings and encourage the thought that I should do something about it but don't find the energy to move beyond these initial remarks. Maybe it's contagious and I was struck by the same numbness which has struck this entire town and doesn't seem to let go.

I didn't have to engage in any type of small chit-chat tonight. I found my dad collapsed on his couch, in deep sleep, his arm propped against the back of his head, while some old lady was reading out loud the monthly horoscope on some weird channel my father had spent months installing via a satellite dish he had borrowed from old Fowley. She was saying Capricorns should take it easy this month and avoid all stress, which seemed to be advice my dad, a Capricorn, took to his heart, for he has spent the entire month drinking himself to sleep, every night.

I should stop here for now. My back is starting to hurt for sitting too long in a chair, crouched over a desk too high and too heavy to move around. I should learn to write while lying in bed or some comfy chair, but the only proper armchair we have in the house is covered with wooden boxes and old clothes that my dad promised, a month ago, would store in the attic.

No news from Audrey.