We Are Not Ourselves(202)

Toward the end of class, he realized he’d forgotten what they were discussing, what point he was about to make, even what book they were talking about. He turned to the blackboard for help, but found no clue there, save for a single word, “Empathy,” scrawled and underlined, apparently by him. He looked to one of the desks in front. The Metamorphosis. He began to panic. His first thought was Alzheimer’s, and terror moved through him. He was only thirty-four.

He took a deep, deliberate breath. He simply had to relax. He knew The Metamorphosis. He knew these kids too: there was Nick Indelicato and Tommy Daulton; there was Marvin Neri; there was Brendan King; there, asleep—he slapped his hand on the desk and the boy jerked up violently—was Carmine Priore.

As for him, he was Connell Leary, Con-Man to his friends, Mr. Leary to his students. He would be Mr. Leary to them when they were forty and had kids of their own.

He tried to shake it off, but the waterlogged, blank feeling persisted in his head. Terror welled up in him. It was no dream. His room, an ordinary classroom that he shared with a colleague in the history department, was appointed with maps of the ancient and modern world, a poster of Shakespeare, another of Thomas Jefferson, a framed reproduction of David’s Death of Socrates. The faces of the boys flashed with delight as the electric silence deepened. They looked at each other and began to murmur.

“Quiet!” he shouted. “Quiet this instant!” He heard his own voice and thought he sounded not like himself but like one of those teachers in the movies, impossibly stuffy. He needed to act quickly if he wanted to maintain authority. “I will wait here all day until you gentlemen are ready to learn,” he said, walking over to his father’s desk. “And you can wait with me.” He paused, long and fruitlessly. “We’re going to do something important. We’re going to take control of our educations. You gentlemen are going to own this material. You’re going to teach it to me as if I don’t know it. One of you is going to come up here and be the teacher.” They emitted a collective theatrical groan. “Or else we can have a surprise quiz,” he said, to louder protests. He settled on Justin Nix in the back row—Justin of the kind, broad face and the nearly perfect indifference to the grammatical conventions of standard written English. Justin pointed to his chest and mimed looking behind him for another student as the kids laughed.

“Okay, Mr. Leary,” Justin said, rising and high-stepping toward the front of the room. “Here I come. I’m going to be Mr. Leary, guys.”

He handed Justin a piece of chalk. “Go to work,” he said. “What do we know? What do we need to know?”

He fell into his chair, overwhelmed by the hothouse smell of teenage boys baking in the heat. He heard Justin at half volume, as though from the bottom of a pool. Justin wasn’t teaching The Metamorphosis. He was doing an impression of the way Mr. Leary stood at the board, the way he rubbed the top of his head and pushed his glasses up. Justin had his gestures down cold. A minute into this pantomime, Connell felt the air come back into his lungs. The kids were watching for his reaction. “You’ve really helped,” he said, trying to sound calm, sarcastic. He didn’t want them to know he meant it. “I think we’ve all benefited enormously from this little display. Give him a hand.”

They burst into exaggerated applause, ironic hoots, and arm pumps—a release of pent-up energy. He brought another kid up, and a third; they said some things about the book. Then he rose from his chair, willing himself to feel refreshed and in possession of all his powers.

“What I want you to consider,” he began, “is that as soon as the door is opened and Gregor’s parents see the enormous bug for the first time, they immediately know it’s their son. Did this strike any of you as strange? Why didn’t they rush to check for Gregor in the closet? Why didn’t they go to the window to make sure he didn’t break his leg jumping out? Why do they instantly assume their son has been transformed into a—what is he again, Trevor?”

“A cockroach,” Trevor said.

“We’ve gone over this. What Kafka called him in the original German can be translated as something more like vermin. We also know that toward the end of the story Kafka has the cleaning lady describe him as a certain kind of insect. Justin, since you’ve done such a good job already?”

“A dung beetle,” Justin said.

“Great! A dung beetle. Which eats, as we’ve discussed, feces.”

They groaned in unison. He felt himself in something like a fugue state. He knew he’d be able to finish what he’d started. He’d stood before a class and guided it through a text often enough to do it now without falling apart, without even an apparent hitch in his delivery. Inside, though, he was boiling with fear.

“Just for that extra bit of humiliation for Gregor. Anyway, how do we explain his parents’ instantly knowing that that dung beetle is their son? Maybe it’s not a stretch for them to see their son as a vermin. Maybe they’ve been seeing him as less than human all along. He’s been serving their needs, propping them up. Maybe his spirit, as they see it, has finally found the body it deserves.”

The bell rang. He reminded them to do the reading and gathered his things. He kept his head down. He could sense a couple of them assembling at his desk. Danny Burbano was there, as well as Justin. Danny was always there. Danny was embarrassed to speak in front of the others, but he liked to talk about the books they read. Connell usually indulged him.