Baroque-A-Nova

CHAPTER ONE MONDAY Helena St. Pierre died one Monday. She was my estranged mother, a long-ago radio siren. I was eighteen, slack-jawed and gangly in army-surplus apparel, with narrow, miserly eyes and greasy hair falling in them, heavy and frizzy like wet yarn. I dressed like a badass, a surly malcontent: I wore sixteen-holed combat boots, dark jeans, and a dull green button-up shirt, a tiny East German flag patched to its right upper sleeve. Yet I couldn't grow a mustache if the fate of nations rested upon it. I was counting away the seconds of my last year of high school, of my last month, and while I didn't learn about it until later, I was at school, in class, staring at a ruler and sizing myself in millimeters, when she killed herself fifteen time zones away. I was cranky. I came from a family of cranks; that was how I was made. I was the only native kid in school, half-blooded or otherwise, the only kid whose father had long hair and didn't hold a regular job, whose mother had run out under mysterious circumstances. We lived in a semirural area; this was not even a real suburb. I was used to getting the crap kicked out of me. It was right before lunch and I felt, then and there, an overwhelming sense of structure. Theories had arisen to explain my apathy. My best friend, Navi, a young revolutionary, suspected I had fallen victim to the alienating effects of a market economy. My father would speak up from his recliner and say I was lazy. My stepmother would eye me nervously from the kitchen sink, thinking I might have a learning disability. My friend Rose said I was nihilistic. For a term in her AP lit class, she had read Russian novels: she quoted Maxim Gorky, who wrote in one of his suicide notes of a toothache in his heart. They were all wrong. All I knew was that I felt adrift in longing, marshy and ungratified, in the smell of suntan lotion on freckled female shoulders. I felt dizzy with desire. I was sad to the point of distraction. Mr. Henry, our English teacher, had gone without coffee all day. He took stubby strides into class, and stifled a yawn as he wheeled a television and VCR to the front of the classroom, beside the yellowing poster of Knut Hamsun and a jade plant potted in a blue glazed vase. I was in English 12, where we were to be discussing a book I hadn't read because reading left so little time for important thoughts and activities. I had also lost my copy. "Are we watching a movie?" I asked. "Yes, Saul." "I don't see any point." "What are you getting at?" "How does this film stimulate our critical-thinking abilities?" "Right, I know how much you care about critical thinking." Mr. Henry stepped back and looked at me, his chin swallowed by doughy flesh. He was in his forties, a not-so-tall round man with a mustache. He chewed toothpicks while marking papers and decorated his desk with model airplanes. I couldn't tell whether Mr. Henry loathed me or liked me. He dealt with every student in the same offhand manner, with condescension and slight disapproval. And when he was bored with certain assigned texts, at certain times in the school year, he would allow certain loudmouth students to fill the class hour. I always stepped up, prompted by the very same tedium. The class was silent; they waited for Mr. Henry to explode. The copies of our book, lugged here for no apparent reason, sat on their desks, their glossy paperback covers reflecting against fluorescent classroom lights. A book-banning felt so small-town, so feeble-minded, and it was only appropriate that my own school would so quickly pull it from our shelves, because no one wanted the trouble. I felt indignation welling inside me, struggling against my own natural apathy. Now I wished I had read the book, if only for the outrage it would have entitled me to. "Have you given up on us already?" I asked. "Some of you." &lChong, Kevin is the author of 'Baroque-A-Nova' with ISBN 9780399148255 and ISBN 0399148256.