The Meridians(42)

On rare occasions a student would come to visit him during that first hour, clutching a hall pass and with special permission from the principal to come and see Scott on some emergency or other. When that happened, Scott was invariably cranky and snappish, as though he resented the students' intrusions into his time of remembering, his sanctuary of memory. He knew it was happening, knew he was angry and acting out against the student, but was helpless to stop it. After all, who else could he act out against? God? God, he had decided, was either a myth or a petty creature so small that he was determined to make the world an uglier place by stealing people of beauty and life like his family. So all that was left was to take solace in his memories, and that meant that when his memories were interrupted, he could only respond angrily at the person who had interrupted them, even if the person was otherwise innocent.

It was unfair, Scott knew, but he was also powerless to stop it from happening. The students learned within a year or two of his arrival that bothering Mr. Cowley during his free period was not a good idea, so now, eight years after his arrival at the school, Scott had one full hour each day where he was able to think of his family, was able to revel in their memory, was able to bathe himself in the purity of his past.

Only he knew it was a lie.

Because each year the memories grew more ephemeral, less grounded in reality. Each year, his son's smile widened in his mind, his wife's laugh became ever brighter and happier. Soon, he knew he was no longer even remembering his family, but was instead remembering crude caricatures of them, "perfect" versions of the flawed, imperfect beings he had lived with in happiness for so long. And the perfect versions were not nearly as satisfying. Part of what had made his marriage great, he came to realize, was not the absence of fights with Amy, but rather the fact that each fight ended in making up. It was not that his son listened to him and did everything right the first time out of the gate, but rather the fact that Scott had to work to help him to learn and grow. His life with Amy and Chad had consisted not merely of "good" moments, but of harder times that served to illuminate the good times by giving them a point of comparison.

But more and more in his memory, he was remembering the good and forgetting the bad. In his mind he never fought with his wife, never had a disagreement with his son. In his mind dinner was always ready on time, and rooms were always clean, and teeth were brushed at bedtime and no one fussed when the time came to put away toys. In his mind, the languid disease of perfection stole from him the reality of the hard-earned victories and the lovingly won triumphs. He was no longer living in a past that was real, but only a flawed version of it, only a version where everything was perfect, and so nothing had any real value at all.

But in spite of this, in spite of the fact that he knew his memories resembled the realities they were modeled on a little less each day, Scott could not help but spend time staring blankly at the wall during that terrible first period, sinking deeper and deeper into remembrances of a past that never really happened, because the past that had occurred - the real past, the flawed, imperfect, difficult, wonderful past - was far too complex and wondrous to be encompassed by anything as frail as human memory.

So he hated first period. Because he both felt himself passing into a falsehood of perfection...and still couldn't help drinking it in, like a thirsty man drinking seawater, all the while knowing that it would just make him thirstier and sick, but unable to stop nonetheless.

Today was no exception to that rule, either. He came in early, passing through the main office as he always did, gathering the day's announcements and various other items from his mail cubby. He did this as quickly as possible, hoping against hope to get in and out of the office undetected, but as usual he failed in this mission.

"Hi, stranger!" said a high, chirping voice.

Scott pasted a smile on his face as he turned to face the source of the voice, but inwardly he cringed. Cheryl Armstrong, the school's new secretary, was standing behind him, her perfume wafting about her in an almost visible cloud. She had started work at Meridian High School a few months before, when the school's previous secretary left to have a baby and had decided not to return to her job in favor of remaining a full-time mother, and had immediately decided that she was either in love with Scott or that he would make a great fixer-upper project. Scott wasn't sure which it was, and wasn't sure if there was even a difference in Cheryl's eyes.

Either way, she seemed to be at his elbow at every turn, as though she were some kind of a strangely smiling spirit determined to haunt him out of his misery.

"Hi, Cheryl," he answered, then fell silent. Part of the problem with Cheryl was that she was clearly interested in him, and he didn't know how to react to that. He knew that Amy was gone, had no illusions about that, and also knew that most of his friends in Meridian were of the opinion that he had "suffered enough" and should "move on." Whatever that meant. As though there was some quota of suffering that, once filled, entitled a person to live their lives worry free from that point on.

But Scott knew that was not the case. The one constant in life was suffering. And no amount of it could ever satisfy the cruelties of a universe that demanded happiness like a tribute; that demanded blood like a tyrannical ruler determined to prove his worth by sacrificing any who dared to find joy under his reign.

Cheryl, in fact, proved that fact, because almost nothing made Scott suffer more than having to brave the morning ritual that had come to define his relationship with Cheryl.