Listen Ruben Fontanez (5 page)

There is laughter and my eyes shift to the door. Other eyes look back at me through the window, then are gone. Hector Cruz giggles. Maria Sanabria makes noises in her mouth. I pull the door open, but the corridor is empty. I place the knuckles of my right hand on Hector's head. The class is still. I think of Menachem Schiffenbauer, the Rebbe's son, at work on a new translation of the
Zohar
, from Spanish to Hebrew. William Wright, one of my Negro students, presses a hand on his mouth to stifle a giggle. I could clamp my fingers on the nerves at the back of his neck, but I leave him alone. It is best if I save my energy. At three-thirty I will need it.

I step into the corridor and walk to the boys' bathroom. A frail misshapen monkey scurries by me. It is Manuel Alvarez, from the C.R.M.D. class. Above the urinals obscene drawings and swastikas mingle with warnings, in Spanish, of the girls who have the sickness. I wander past Manuel's room, where the students are already at work, shining teacher's shoes, playing knock-hockey, watching their television shows. Manuel crouches in a corner of the room, a pygmy of a monkey. His eyelids droop, his mouth hangs open, but I wonder. There is something about him that makes me think he is more than a child with retarded mental development. It is a thought I do not dwell upon. I return to my own room and close the door behind me.

You must understand something: I was not always like this. When the monkeys first began trickling into the school, Harry Meyers tried to be kind to them. Perhaps it was Sarah's influence. They are a strange people in a strange land, she said. She spoke to me of the war which had just passed, and I was not without feeling. Give them time, Harry. Give them time, she said. So I tried. Believe me. I helped them, I tutored, I was easy in discipline, I brought them home for warm dinners. It got me nowhere. They exhausted me. They did to me what they do to the others. And so I began to find weapons.

I did so out of necessity, I assure you, though not without some pleasure. When I squeezed a monkey on the muscle of his arm, I discovered that he would listen to me. I found other spots: the back of the neck, the shoulder muscles, the ears. The correct pressure wrought wonders. Sarah reminded me that half of them did not know their rightful fathers, that they would wait turns in the winter to use the shoes which allowed them to play outside: but the conditions of their life were nothing to me. Around the school I became known as Mad-Man Meyers. My reputation grew. Sarah never knew and that is just as well. The Jewish students, the Negroes, the Italians—if you laid a hand on them you would have rabbis and mothers and priests counseling with the principal. Monkeys told no tales. Your ghost has haunted me from time to time, Sarah. I admit it. But I have stayed alive. It is no small thing.

At the buzzer, I give the order and my students line up at the side of the room. I open the door and they march in pairs down the corridor. Danny would be proud, I think, if he knew of my methods, my reputation.

My students, of course, know of Danny. A glass – enclosed bulletin board on the second floor tells them the story. The articles and pictures have been there for more than twelve years and have played no small part in maintaining my reputation. I admit it. My first class of the day files into the room and I tell them to take out their books and begin the exercises in their workbooks, at the back of chapter six:
Jacob and Leah on the Kibbutz
. I walk the aisles and examine their work. I will tell you something: they are not idiots. Monkeys who have studied with Harry Meyers can recite the
Aleph-Bes
and translate from the Hebrew language. In my classes students learn a subject. I am not in the business of vocational training.

I bend over, aware of how the points of Gladys Yambo's lavender sweater hypnotize the boys who sit around her. She writes her answers in Hebrew and I correct her lettering. I glare at the others and they are quick to fix their eyes on their own work. “You are improving, Gladys,” I say, and walk on. It will be a long day, and though I still take some small pleasure in the fact that I teach something, the joy which once accompanied my exercise of authority, I know, has long since disappeared. There is no danger in my actions, no cleverness in their resistance.

Only Ruben Fontanez threatens to change things. Ah, Ruben, Ruben. We do not fool one another, do we. The first time I saw you, less than eight weeks ago, when the school clerk brought you to me to enroll you in my official class, I knew you meant trouble in my life. But that is all right also. I am ready.

I sit in front of the room and call the students to me, one at a time, to check their homework. I think of Ruben Fontanez. He seemed, at first glance, to be like the others, an ordinary monkey. He was a little shorter than most, perhaps a little uglier. A bump rose from the left side of his forehead. His mouth, his nose, and his eyes were pinched together in the center of his face. His face was the face of a monkey, it is true, but his eyes, you see, his eyes were the eyes of a cowboy.

There is nothing to do but wait. I grade my students' homework and wonder why they should fear Harry Meyers. I was not so different, my brothers. Sarah understood what it meant to be the last of seven boys. I was not born to change anything. It is enough for the youngest to survive. I look into my students' faces and, where the empty seat is, I can see Ruben, his neck craned forward, his lopsided head lowered toward his desk, his eyes upon me. Lately, when he is present, the others are bolder. They laugh when my back is turned, they answer questions without raising their hands. Ruben says nothing. Before and after class I see them cluster around him. With him, my threats and weapons are useless. Harry, Harry, you are an old man. Hurry from the school.

Soon, I reply. Soon. But where, I wonder, is my wild-eyed monkey. Despite his absence from official class this morning, I am certain he is in the building. I feel his eyes. He knows, you see. I have seen him between classes, next to the biology laboratory, his eyes poring over the bulletin board that I myself have lingered over more often than I care to admit. Not the one that secures my reputation, but another. One time I pressed my fingers into the muscle that joins his shoulder to his neck, forcing him to move on, but he seemed to feel no pain. “I seen you too,” he said, and smiled. They are the only words I have ever heard from him.

Still, there should be nothing strange here. Millions of Americans, I am certain, have read the same magazine articles. It is natural for a young boy to be fascinated by the future. I have seen other students in front of the board, taking notes, astounded by the miracles of coming decades, by spare parts and transplants and organ banks, by fetal surgery and cold storage embryos.

On the Frontiers of Medicine: Control of Life
. When the buzzer sounds, I send José Colon back to his seat. I collect the work they have done this period. The halls swell with noise. In my room new monkeys replace the ones who have left. In my thoughts, Ruben remains. I cannot fool myself. He has seen the full-color picture of a completely rebuilt person, made solely of synthetic and transplanted parts, of Dacron arteries and silicone rubber lungs. The captions are irrelevant. Ruben knows. It is only a question of time.

The day passes. Outside, the snow ceases to drop from the sky and the sun appears. In the street below, the old men sit on the stoops, waiting for the dismissal bell. Then they will get a chance to observe the young Spanish girls. The ice turns to water, the snow to slush. I pull down the shades to keep the sun out. At lunchtime I buy a cheese sandwich in the teachers' cafeteria and retire to the teachers' lounge. Mr. Greenfeld, the C.R.M.D. teacher, is asleep on the couch. At night he moonlights as a bartender. He places the bets on football and basketball games for the other teachers. His class goes unattended. His weapons are equal to mine. On the first day of the semester he informs his class that he is a former marine. He locks the door, pulls the shades, and beats up the strongest boy in his class. If he has trouble the second day, he orders the strongest boy to beat up the troublemaker. By the third day of each semester his job is secure.

Across the street, in a third-story window, a Puerto Rican woman suckles her child. A substitute teacher stares at her. She laughs and blows him a kiss. He looks at me. I do not respond. He turns and leaves the room, flustered. It is too late, I think. Nothing that
Life
magazine predicts will come to pass for Harry Meyers. This body will leave the way it came. There is little danger for anyone. There will be no superior race bred in test tubes, no facsimiles of great men reproduced from single cell tissue-cultures. I have nothing to fear, I remind myself. I wonder, though, if I am the only one who sees it. Perhaps Ruben is already plotting with the cowboys. When the first silicone hearts are ready and the pumps are primed, you see, when they have put the first brains into cold storage, then the monkeys will invade. They are waiting.

The thought amuses me. Ruben and his monkeys will storm the walls of the hospitals and the laboratories and the organ banks. The cowboys and the colored will ride with him. The police will be powerless. Some things people will accept, but no man will ever carry a new heart while others are asked to wait. Of this I am certain.

I put the crusts of rye bread into the cellophane sandwich bag and drop it in the wastebasket. You are playing games, Harry Meyers, I tell myself. Enough. Mr. Greenfeld turns in his sleep and begins to snore. I sip my tea. Perhaps Morris is right. The cowboys will drive me mad. Perhaps Ruben knows nothing. He is only a boy, after all.

I am feeling better. Some of the aching has left my body. I think of the story in the article, of the dead man's family who donated his kidney so that another man might live. I can see the pictures of the doctors rushing the dead man's kidney to the hospital in a bucket, grafting it into the waiting patient.
Gift Of Life From The Dead
. The living man's excretory functions were restored. I see him and his wife as they smile at me. I wonder if they get together for dinner with the family of the man whose kidney they use.

Mr. Greenfeld rubs his eyes. The steam pipe in the corner of the room knocks. I am warm. I close my eyes. Why should I fear Ruben when there are phone calls and cowboys to worry about. I will be retired before Jackson is released. That is something. My brother Simon can rest in peace then. It was a sin against God that Harry Meyers should be a teacher of His language. All my other transgressions he forgave.

May you rest in peace, Simon, wherever you are. If you hold a grudge, I do not blame you. The room is too warm. “You are the only one left, Harry. Answer me the truth: will you pray for me? I have no sons left. All our brothers are gone.” I hear his voice. I am in the hospital room and it smells of ammonia. I stand by the bed, petrified by the face before me, freshly shaven, soft and pink. I looked more like Simon than any of the others, people said. He was second youngest. You could tell we were brothers. The blood leaks down from its perch beside his bed, the tubes run from his nose, the other relatives shake their heads. This body once pounded my body, I remember, when it caught me raiding the icebox on Yom Kippur. Simon Meyers, good enough, some said, to be a champion like Benny Leonard. Eighteen hours of fasting had only made him stronger. Did you hate me all those years, Simon? Our lives went their separate ways, we were brothers at weddings and funerals only. When our father died I went to the synagogue every morning for a year. You knew.

“One year is enough, Simon. I am sorry.”

There was no need for that, Harry. He had wanted you to lie to him. He would not have questioned you if you had said yes. That was foolish. He had seen his own two sons in the grave before him. Simon, Simon. It seems impossible to me that you were only sixteen years old when you caught me. You won the middleweight tournament at the Educational Alliance. People had plans for you. You were only four years older than me. This spring you would be sixty-nine. You were no champion. Less than two years ago I covered you with dirt. You spent your life like our father and our brothers, candling eggs in the semi-darkness behind a drawn curtain. In the old warehouse near the 18th Street pier:
Meyers Butter & Eggs
. I could have said yes, I suppose, since you were the last. I wonder: do you remember that night you chased me around the house and I hid from you under the tablecloth? It was Friday night. We had returned from synagogue and the candles were lit on the table. I escaped between the slick mahogany legs and our chase resumed through the bedrooms. Our father cuffed you on the ear for running and I laughed. I was seven or eight then. You were closest to me in years. We must have loved one another in those dark rooms on Howard Street, Simon. People said we looked like brothers. When I saw you in the hospital, though, you could not have pounded my body with your fists. You could not even bind your arms every morning with your beloved black straps. Still, one year was enough, Simon. I am sorry.

I smile and open my eyes. The door moves. Perhaps, I think, perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it pleased him to have me tell the truth. He left me as he knew me. Would I have been Harry Meyers if I had said yes? Simon, Simon. You wanted to be pinched, didn't you, to make sure you had not yet left this world. Well. Your brother did not let you down. Miss Teitlebaum's head is in the doorway.

“What—?” I ask.

Miss Teitlebaum smiles and apologizes for disturbing me, but the substitute teacher in social studies is having trouble with my official class. Mr. Vance, the Assistant Principal, asked if I would look in. Her breasts move into the room. She closes the door behind her. I cough and bring up phlegm.

“If you'd like me to try—”

I swallow. “I'll go, I'll go.”

Mr. Greenfeld's eyes open. Miss Teitlebaum smiles at him. Her chest rises. I lift my glasses and rub my eyes, at the corners.

“Do you want me to come along?”

“No, no. I will handle them. What room?”