My Ishmael Read online

  I scurried across the hall and put my back against the freight-elevator door.

  Another minute passed. Then the man said, “Okay,” and opened the door.

  He stepped out into the hall, saw me, and froze for a second as if I was a cobra poised to strike. Then he decided to pretend I wasn’t there. He closed the door behind him and started to walk away.

  I said, “Are you the teacher?”

  From the way he frowned at me, you would’ve thought this was a real hard question. Finally he got his wits together and figured out what he wanted to say. He drew himself up and said … no.

  Obviously he wanted to say a lot more—maybe thousands of words more. But that was all he could manage at the moment: no.

  I said, very politely, “Thank you.”

  He frowned some more, turned away, and stomped off.

  At school any guy you don’t like is a dork, but dork isn’t a word I use all that much. I guess I like to save it up for special people, like this guy. This guy was a dork. I took an instant dislike to him, I don’t know why. About my mother’s age, dressed cheap and ugly. One of those dark, intense types, if you know what I mean. I swear I never knew what a bad haircut looked like till I saw his. He had “intellectual—keep your distance” written all over him.

  I gave my attention to the door in front of me. I couldn’t think of anything that needed thinking about, so I just went through it.

  Nothing had changed, but it was all different now, because I understood what the deal was. What I’d heard through the door was a conversation between the dork and the ape. Naturally I only heard the dork’s side, because the ape wasn’t talking out loud.

  The dork wasn’t the teacher. Therefore the ape was the teacher.

  There was one thing more. The dork wasn’t afraid. This was important. It meant the ape wasn’t dangerous. If a dork didn’t have to be afraid, I didn’t have to be afraid.

  Now that I knew he was there, it was easy to spot the “gurilla behind the glass. He was right where I’d left him.

  I said to him, “I came because of the ad.”

  Silence.

  I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me. I moved up to the chair and said it again.

  The ape stared at me in silence.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “You talked to me before.”

  He closed his eyes, very, very slowly. It’s not easy to close your eyes that slowly. I thought maybe he was falling asleep or something.

  “What’s the matter?” I said again.

  The ape sighed. I don’t know how to describe a sigh like that. I expected to see the walls bending under the weight of that sigh. I waited. I figured he was getting ready to speak. But after a full minute he was still just sitting there.

  I said, “Didn’t you put the ad in the paper?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut as if to blot out all this unpleasantness. All the same, he finally opened his eyes and spoke. As before, I heard it in my head, not in my ears.

  “I put the ad in the paper,” he admitted. “But not for you.”

  “What do you mean, not for me? I didn’t see anything there that said, ‘This ad is for everyone but Julie Gerchak.’ ”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should say I didn’t put the ad in the paper for children.”

  “Children!” This really made me mad. “You call me children? I’m twelve years old. I’m old enough to steal cars. I’m old enough to have an abortion. I’m old enough to deal crack.”

  This great huge fat ape began to writhe, I swear to God. Wow, I was really getting off on this. I was beating up on a thousand-pound gorilla.

  He writhed for a while. Then he began to get a new grip on things. He calmed down and started talking.

  “I’m sorry I tried to dismiss you so easily,” he said. “Clearly you’re not a dismissible person. However, the fact that you’re old enough to steal cars is not relevant here.”

  “Go on,” I told him.

  “I’m a teacher,” he said.

  “I know that.”

  “As a teacher, I’m able to help certain kinds of pupils. Not every kind. I can’t help someone with chemistry or algebra or French or geology.”

  “I didn’t come here for anything like that.”

  “These are examples only. What I mean is that I can offer only a certain kind of teaching.”

  “So what are you saying? Are you saying I don’t want that ‘certain kind of teaching’?”

  He nodded. “That’s what I’m saying. The teaching I’m able to offer isn’t a kind that will be helpful to you … just yet.

  In a split second my eyes were burning with tears, but I certainly wasn’t going to let him see them.

  “You’re just like everyone else,” I told him. “You’re a liar.”

  That made his eyebrows shoot up. “A liar?”

  “Yes. Why don’t you tell the truth? Why don’t you say, ‘You’re just a kid—no use to anybody. Come back in ten years. Then maybe you’ll be worth my time.’ Say that, and you won’t hear another word out of me. Say that, and I’ll turn around and go home.”

  He sighed again, even deeper than before. Then he nodded, just once.

  “You’re perfectly correct,” he said. “I was telling a lie. And I was expecting you not to see through it. Please accept my apology.”

  I nodded back.

  “But the truth may not please you much either,” he went on.

  “What is the truth?”

  “We’ll have to see. Your name is Julie?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you don’t like being treated like a child.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then sit down and I’ll question you as if you were an adult.”

  I sat down.

  “What brought you here, Julie? And please don’t tell me my ad brought you. We’re past that. What do you want? What are you doing here?”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing flew out, not a single syllable. I sat there gaping for half a minute or so. Then I said, “What about the guy who was just here? Did you ask him what he wanted? Did you ask him what he was doing here?”

  The gorilla did the strangest thing then. He took his right hand and put it straight across his eyes. It looked like he was going to start counting for a game of hide-and-seek. The funny thing was, he wasn’t actually touching his face. He was just holding his hand one inch from his nose, as if reading some tiny message written in his palm.

  I waited.

  After about two minutes he lowered his hand and said, “No, I did not ask him these things.”

  I just sat there batting my eyelashes at him.

  The gorilla licked his lips—nervously, it seemed to me. “I think we can safely say that I’m not prepared to deal with the needs of a person your age. I think that can be safely said. Yes.”

  “You mean you give up. Is that what you’re telling me? You want me to go away because you give up.”

  The gorilla stared at me. I couldn’t tell whether he was staring hopefully or angrily or what.

  I said, “Don’t you think a twelve-year-old girl can have an earnest desire to save the world?”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said, though it sounded like the words were pretty hard to get out.

  “Then why won’t you talk to me? Your ad in the paper said you need a pupil. Isn’t that what it said?”

  “That’s what it said.”

  “Well, you’ve got one. Here I am.”

  We Lurch To The Starting Line

  A long moment passed. I read that in a book once: A long moment passed. But this was a really long moment. Finally the gorilla spoke again. “Very well,” he said with a nod. “We’ll begin and see where it takes us. My name is Ishmael.”

  He seemed to expect a reaction of some kind, but to me this was just a noise. It would have been the same if he’d said his name was whizbang. He already knew my name, so I just waited. Finally he went on again.

  “Referring to the
young man who was just here—his name is Alan Lomax, by the way—I said I didn’t ask what he wanted. But I did ask him to tell a story that would explain why he was here.”

  “A story?”

  “Yes. I asked for his story. Now I ask for yours.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by a story.”

  Ishmael frowned as if he suspected I might be playing dumb. Maybe I was, a little.

  He went on: “Your classmates are doing something else this afternoon, aren’t they? Whatever they’re doing, you’re not doing it.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “So. Explain to me why you’re not doing what your classmates are doing. How does your story differ from theirs that it brings you to this room on a Saturday afternoon?”

  Now I knew what he meant, but it didn’t help. What story was he talking about? Did he want to hear about my folks’ divorce? About my mom’s adventures in boozing? About the problems I was having with Mrs. Monstro at school? About my former boyfriend Donnie, the famous Guy Who Wasn’t?

  “I want to understand what you’re looking for,” he said, answering these questions as if I’d spoken them aloud.

  “I don’t get it,” I told him. “The teachers I’m used to don’t ask what you’re looking for. They just teach what they teach.”

  “And is that what you were hoping to find here? A teacher like the ones you’re used to?”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Then you’re in luck, Julie, because I’m not like them. I’m what is called a maieutic teacher. A maieutic teacher is one who acts as a midwife to his pupils—or, of course, her pupils. Do you know what a midwife is?”

  “A midwife is … someone who helps at childbirth. Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right. A midwife helps bring into the light an infant that has been growing inside its mother. A maieutic teacher helps bring into the light ideas that have been growing inside his pupils.” The gorilla stared at me intently while I thought about this. At last he went on. “Do you think there are any ideas growing inside of you?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. It was the truth.

  “Do you think something is growing inside of you?”

  I looked at him as blankly as I could. He was beginning to frighten me.

  “Tell me this, Julie. Would you have come here two years ago if you’d seen my advertisement?”

  That was easy. I told him no.

  “So something has changed,” he went on. “Something inside of you. This is what I want to know about. I must understand what brought you here.”

  I stared at him for a while, then I said, “Do you know what I say to myself all the time? I mean all the time—twenty times a day. I say to myself, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ ”

  Ishmael frowned, puzzling over this.

  “I’ll be taking a shower or washing the dishes or waiting for the bus, and that’s what’ll pop into my head: “I’ve got to get out of here.’ ”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He grunted. “Of course you know.”

  “It means … Run for your life.”

  “Is your life in danger?”

  “Yes.”

  “From what?”

  “From everything. From people walking into school-rooms with machine guns. From people bombing airplanes and hospitals. From people pumping nerve gas into subways. From people dumping poison in the water we drink. From people cutting down the forests. From people destroying the ozone layer. I don’t really know all this stuff, because I don’t want to listen. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I mean, do you think I know what an ozone layer is? I don’t. But they say we’re poking holes in it, and if the holes get big enough, we’re going to start dying like flies. They say the rain forests are like the planet’s lungs, and if we cut them down, we’ll suffocate. Do you think I know if this is right? I don’t. One of my teachers said that as many as two hundred species of plants and animals go extinct every day because of what we’re doing to this planet. I remembered that—I’ve got a good memory for stuff like that—but do you think I know if it’s true? I don’t, but I believe it. This same teacher says we’re adding fifteen million tons of carbon dioxide to the air every day. Do you think I know what this means? I don’t. All I know is that carbon dioxide is a poison. I don’t know where I saw it or heard it, but the suicide rate among teenagers has tripled in the last forty years. Do you think I go looking for this stuff? I don’t. But it jumps out at me anyway. People are eating the world alive.”

  Ishmael nodded. “So you’ve got to get out of here.”

  “That’s right.”

  Ishmael gave me a few seconds to think about that, then he said, “But this doesn’t explain why you’ve come to see me.

  My ad doesn’t say anything about getting out of here.”

  “Yeah, I know. It sounds like I’m not making any sense.”

  Ishmael cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “I’ve got to think about this,” I told him.

  I got up and turned away to face the rest of the room. There wasn’t much scope for sightseeing. Just those high, dusty windows, those pus-colored walls, and that tired-looking little bookcase at the other end. I headed for the bookcase. I could have saved myself the trip. There were a bunch of books on evolution, a bunch on history and prehistory, and a bunch on primitive peoples. There was a book on chimpanzee culture that looked interesting—but nothing on gorillas. There were a couple of archaeological atlases. There was a book with the longest title I’d ever seen, something like Man’s Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Aboriginal Peoples of the New World from Prehistoric Times to the Coming of the Industrial State. There were three translations of the Bible, which seemed excessive, for an ape. There was nothing I could curl up with in front of the fireplace, even if I had a fireplace. I poked around for as long as I could then went back and sat down.

  “You wanted me to tell you a story. I don’t have a story to tell, but I’ve got a daydream.”

  “A daydream?” Ishmael said, half a question.

  I nodded, and he said a daydream would do very well.

  “Okay. This is what I was daydreaming about this morning. I was thinking, wouldn’t it be great if I got down to Room 105 of the Fairfield Building, and I went in and there was this woman at the reception desk, and she looked at me and—”

  “Wait,” Ishmael said. “Excuse me for interrupting.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re … plunging.”

  “Plunging?”

  “Hurtling. Charging ahead, rushing.”

  “You mean I’m going too fast?”

  “Yes, much too fast. We’re not working under a deadline here, Julie. If you intend to share this story with me, then please let it unfold leisurely—as leisurely as it unfolded in your head this morning.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I see what you mean. You want me to start over?”

  “Yes, please. But no plunging this time. Take a moment to gather your thoughts. Relax, and let it come back to you. Don’t summarize it for me. Tell it as it happened.”

  Take a moment? Relax? Let it come back to me? He didn’t seem to realize what he was asking for. I was sitting down, sure, but I couldn’t sit back and be comfortable, be cause if I did that, my feet would dangle over the edge and I’d feel like a six-year-old. I had to have my feet on the floor, because I had to be ready to get out of there in half a second—and if you think you wouldn’t feel that way, I suggest you sit down toe-to-toe with a full-grown gorilla and try it. The only way for me to relax and let the daydream come back was to curl up in a corner of the chair and close my eyes—and I just wasn’t quite ready to do that in the presence of a thousand-pound ape.

  I gave Ishmael a sort of snooty, impatient scowl intended to convey all that. He took it in, mulled it over for a bit, and then did something that almost made me laugh out loud.

  He used
two fingers to do a little swish over his heart and then solemnly held them up for my inspection, just like a Boy Scout: Cross my heart and hope to die.

  What the hell, I did laugh out loud.

  The Daydream

  In my daydream I didn’t dress carefully for my visit to the Fairfield Building—any more than I did when I went there in real life. That would have been uncool. It would have been equally uncool to dress in my grubbiest, so I just split the difference. There are plenty of girls prettier than me, uglier than me, taller than me, shorter than me, fatter than me, thinner than me—and maybe it makes sense for them to knock themselves out over what they wear, but not me.

  The Fairfield Building of my daydream was spruced up a bit and no longer the near slum of real life. And, in my daydream, Room 105 wasn’t on the ground floor beside a loading dock, it was an elevator ride up from the lobby (and someone had taken a good stiff brush to the elevator as well, uncovering some handsome brass metalwork).

  The door to Room 105 said … nothing. I worked on that some. I wanted it to bear some intriguing legend like GLOBAL POSSIBILITIES OR COSMIC VENTURES, but no, it remained stubbornly blank. I went in. A young woman looked up from a desk in the front. Not a receptionist. She wasn’t wearing secretary clothes but rather something more casual and chic. And she wasn’t sitting at the desk, she was bending over it, packing a box.

  She glanced up curiously, as if strangers seldom came through that door, and asked if she could help me.

  “I’m here about the ad,” I told her.

  “The ad,” she said, straightening up to give me a more serious inspection. “I didn’t realize the ad was still running.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I just stood there.

  “Wait a second,” she said, and disappeared down a hall. She returned a minute later in the company of a man the same age as her, twenty or twenty-five. He was dressed the same way, not in a suit but casually—more a hiker than a businessman. They stared at me blankly till I began to feel like a piece of furniture that had been delivered on approval.

  At last the man said, “You came because of the ad?”

  “That’s right.”