SHARDS
Eddie was there the first day. He sat in the back row, his dirty nylon parka zipped to the chin, seeming to ignore the worksheet, both intense and distracted, a strange combination. The young teacher, new at his job this first day of the semester, tried his best to follow the pre-digested lesson plan to the letter. The class looked blankly back at him, lost but not benign. Across their faces stretched the bright glare of the afternoon light, cut into a matrix by the grid of panes stacked up in rows in the postwar school house windows.
He had passed out the work sheets just like the lesson plan directed him to. A touch of anxiety stretched into the shadows that lay quiet, like his fear, at the far end of the room. A trace of resentment seemed present on their blank faces, all the faces except Eddie’s. Only Eddie hated him. Only Eddie was so obviously angry. The rest had all been here before, with a new teacher, who they would soon chase away with their resentment and their poverty.
The teacher wanted to inspire them. He was young, smart and knew he had presence, knew he had command. He could talk to them and make it work, like he had done before, like he had made words work for him before, to untwist the twisted and undo the done.
The lesson had gotten awkward. The kids didn’t know what to do. The preprinted, predigested lesson plan had no explanation for where they were, how they got lost or where to go from here. The kids couldn’t figure out how to ask what to do. Nor did they understand why it should be done. They looked blankly at the lesson, oblivious to the paper covered with words written in someone else’s language, words written in a language of white suburban optimism, hope and ambition. At the end of the minutes, when he picked up the lesson sheets, he saw no resentment, just the chicken scratches of desperation, and hopelessness. Merely decorations on their despair.
The teacher used his hopeful, skillful command of words to reshape the lesson to best suit his conflicted audience, trying to reach them all, some the children of affluent ranchers, others the children of migrant workers, some day workers at menial tasks, some the victims of dark circumstances the teacher knew all too well and didn’t want to reveal. He did his best but would eventually learn he never ignited the spirit of learning. He earned their friendship and their respect but never lit the fuse of curiosity. He never sparked in them the burning desire for some kind of enlightenment, great or small, that sent him searching for meaning beyond the despair of his own impoverished childhood, the search that stopped his running, that stopped his racing heart as he stood facing the facets of himself he saw in their eyes in the afternoon light. The facets changed perspective as he tried to share their narrow horizon, a view he had witnessed but couldn’t comprehend. He knew of their lives in a way they couldn’t deny and they respected that but he later found that they thought it funny of him to expect the same ambition out of them.
When he picked up the lesson worksheets, he saw no resentment on the papers, no obscenities for the teacher, just the irregular attempts at logic and communication you would expect from seventh graders of such circumstances. Except for Eddie.
On Eddie’s worksheet, instead of the answers or an attempt at the answers, was scrawled “blah…blah…blah…” all over the page, on both sides. There was no regard for the fill-in-the-blanks regimen of the lesson. He stood looking at Eddie’s paper, getting dizzy for a moment.
He stood, waiting for the dizziness to pass. As he filed the paper amongst the rest, he saw the chorus of words on the back, all chanting the same silent, scribbled, raucous message, “blah... blah... blah,” in a dense jagged pattern, a pattern of furious scribbles, the lines of chaotic calligraphy jumping across the page like white noise, uniform static from a station that only Eddie was tuned into. Powerful static.
All the proper channels said Eddie was hopeless, out of touch, couldn’t be reached. The weeks moved on and Eddie never ventured another response. Eddie sat without causing trouble, never offering more than, “blah… blah… blah.” Eddie was a placeholder here and this school was a placeholder for Eddie. No more than that.
His rigid body was strong, filled out well beyond its thirteenteen years. The pressure from new muscles sending the veins in his neck to the surface, where they throbbed as he clenched his fist around a broken pencil, struggling to deal with something that had nothing to do with the classroom.
The teacher didn’t intervene. He had no quarrel with Eddie and the powers that be had already decided to let it be. They didn’t want to poke the hornet’s nest. They wanted no part of a war with Eddie. So, there was no war but there was no peace. Within Eddie, the battle raged, as anyone could plainly see but he had no more to say about it than, “blah… blah… blah.”
Beyond that, Eddie sat silent day after day.
Soon, Eddie would leave, without warning, without rationale. The day before Eddie’s departure the teacher saw him in the hall, well after school had ended, thin clouds scattering the orange light of a warm, autumn sunset. Eddie stood there in the walkway, nose to nose with the phys ed teacher. Quiet, intense and angry, Eddie was saying little of anything. His fists clenched, a small trickle of blood dripped from one tightened hand. The phys ed teacher talked softly, a reassuring but slightly artificial smile on his face.
From his classroom doorway, the teacher watched the tightly wound drama continue between the two, the short, stocky phys ed teacher and granite faced Eddie. The moments turned into minutes and the small trickle of blood made a small, dark puddle alongside Eddie’s worn loafers. It didn’t take much insight to feel the crisis tighten, the unseen ripples of tension filling the empty walkway. As he approached the two, he did it with caution, knowing the thinness of the connection he had with Eddie and the risk of an explosive confrontation. There they stood, the three of them, for what seemed like a half hour, the two teachers, with their “blah… blah… blah…” and Eddie, with blood dripping from his clenched fist.
As Eddie clenched and unclenched his fist, a green triangle of glass was visible, a shard of green glass from somewhere. With each clench of his fist, the glass cut further into Eddie’s palm. Eddie stood there, his young muscles strong, the sinews in his neck stretched taught, shoving the shard of glass in his hand, mute, intense, remote.
“Just give me the piece of glass Eddie. I promise I won’t make you go anywhere or see anybody. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” the phys ed teacher said, “Just stop cutting yourself with the glass. Take the glass out of your hand and give it to me, please.”
“No doctors,” said Eddie, in a brief moment of verbosity.
Soon, the phys ed teacher left with his trophy, the piece of broken bottle that Eddie tortured himself with. Afterwards, Eddie sat on an outdoor lunch table, staring at the school ground, pushing the thumb of his opposite hand against the wound as thin threads of blood ran down his forearm. The orange afternoon turned into the gray of dusk. There he sat… Eddie, a young man who had already committed himself to the other side, gone and not willing to come back across the divide.
The teacher went back to his classroom, planning lessons he hoped would go better and grading papers, getting up to check on Eddie a few more times until Eddie was gone. Getting up to leave, he saw stars and the glow of a rising moon over the fields of the farm town, through vast wall of window panes. Room keys in his hand, he switched off the classroom lights and stood in the shadow of the door, a few tears dropping slowly like the trickle of blood from Eddie’s wounded hand. The teacher remembered a morning of his own, not all that long ago, standing on the shards of a broken mirror, him a small boy with wet diapers, his image and head shattered by the drunken attack.
He looked through his shoes and imagined he could still see the scars on his feet and feel the wounds in his heart. He could only wonder what terrible secrets Eddie held locked within his intractability, his mouth sewn shut by some obscure silent command. What message was cut so deep in Eddie’s soul that his young spirit was already beyond reach?
The next day, Eddie didn’t come to school, nor did he ever again. The young teacher would hear Eddie’s silence forever, “blah…. blah… blah.”