Man of the Hour Read online

  “Fine.” Youssef picked up the book bag and set it on Nasser’s lap. “Then you know what to do. When the alarm clock completes its circuit, the hadduta will go off. Don’t jostle it around too much and don’t stop to talk to anyone you know. Trust in God and think like a gun.”

  He reached across Nasser and pushed the door open onto the clear blue afternoon.

  Up on the fourth floor, David Fitzgerald emerged from the bathroom, still feeling hungover and sick to his stomach. He’d stayed up late the night before, drinking and worrying—as he’d been doing pretty steadily since last week when Renee told him she was considering following Anton to the West Coast. This morning his guts had finally given up on him. He came back into the classroom after a good twenty minutes away and found his students acting like subjects of some highly irresponsible hormone experiment. Kids were screaming at one another, climbing over desks, throwing wads of paper, doing strange things to one another’s hair, and, most irritatingly, using some kind of orange-and-black Halloween clicker, which made a terrible racket to go with the constant hammering outside.

  “Thanks for warming them up for me.” David grimaced at his best friend, Henry Rosenthal, who was supposed to be watching the class and chumming him on today’s afterschool field trip to the Metropolitan Museum.

  “It was nothing,” said Henry. “Just remember: Hendrix once opened for the Monkees.”

  Henry, with his long gray hair and black radical-chic turtleneck, was not into crowd control. He’d been involved with the Free Speech movement and alternative education programs of the sixties, but not too involved, you understand. He preferred talking fine wine to politics.

  “All right, everyone, settle down and put the clickers away.” David stepped past him. “And the rest of you. If you’re not going to let me talk, can you at least keep your voices down so I can sleep up here?”

  The day had already been a blizzard of demands and responsibilities. Parents showing up unannounced, wanting to know why their kids were doing so badly; papers for his second-period freshmen needing to be graded; Xerox machines breaking down; Shooteema Edwards, in tenth grade, finding out her mother had inoperable brain cancer. And of course, it didn’t help that there was a TV news crew outside, doing a segment about the school’s deplorable condition.

  From out of the rabble, Seniqua Rollins raised her hand. A big, tough girl with cornrowed hair and tight jeans, who’d been suspended last year for smashing another girl’s head into a locker, she was rumored to be the main squeeze of a jailed gang leader called King Shit, or something like that, and today she was sporting a tight pink T-shirt that said I’M UP AND DRESSED, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME? and a navy Tommy Hilfiger jacket.

  “Yo, yo, yo, Mr. Fitz, what da dilly?” she said in a voice louder than the subway. “I got a question for y’all.”

  “What is it?”

  “Why you wasting our time taking us on a field trip anyhow? It’s late, man. You supposed to let us out.”

  A little ripple of laughter went through the class, the kids titillated by the way she was challenging him. David slapped his attendance book against the side of his leg.

  “I mean, you’re always saying we shouldn’t just accept things,” Seniqua went on, getting high on the attention. “So what’s up with that shit? I rather just like go home, chill, and read my girl Alice Walker.”

  Several rebel clickers seconded her dissent.

  “Well,” said David, taking a deep breath and trying to pull himself together for the occasion. “Number one, it’s the only time we could fit it in. And number two, we’re going to be studying the roots of our subject. Egyptians. Sumerians. Even our buddies, the Greeks. Check it out. Achilles, the first great hero of Western literature, refused to leave his tent to fight in the Trojan War because his general stole his mistress. Spitefulness, pride, jealousy. Can you relate?”

  “No,” said Seniqua, authoritative and boisterous.

  “Really?”

  David noticed she was sitting unusually close to Amal Lincoln, a backup forward on the basketball team and reputedly the worst amateur rapper in Brooklyn. What would King Shit make of that little alliance if he ever got out? He’d probably fly into an Achillean rage, tie Amal’s skinny ass to the rear bumper of a LeBaron, and drag him around the walls of the school three times.

  “I ain’t with it,” said Seniqua, wrestling with Amal for a clicker. “It all just seems so … white.”

  Ah, the old racial correctness bugaboo. David tried to swiftly parry her thrust. “Well, the Egyptians and the Sumerians, they’re not exactly the Osmond Family, are they?” Immediately, he realized he’d slipped and fallen behind the popular culture curve again.

  “Yeeeeeahhh, whatevah!” Seniqua dismissed him with a flat-handed homegirl swipe. “I’m just tired, that’s all. I wanna go home!”

  “Word!” Stray voices and clickers backed her up. What was wrong here? David wondered. It wasn’t just him being hungover and worrying about Renee and Arthur. The whole rhythm of the day kept falling on the off beat. He looked around and noticed that more than a third of the class was absent—even Elizabeth Hamdy, who usually helped focus the group in her quiet way. Et tu, Elizabeth? Maybe that was the problem. Classes developed their own kind of chemistry over the course of a term. If you removed just one crucial element, the whole thing could collapse or combust.

  “Anyway, we’re running kind of late, so we ought to get going,” he said, rubbing his temples and checking his watch. The hammering outside and the stray clicking in class seemed to italicize his headache. “Are there any other questions?”

  “Yeah.” Seniqua Rollins glared back at him. “What were y’all doing in the bathroom for so long?”

  Trust in God and think like a gun.

  Nasser kept repeating the words to himself as he drew closer to the school and the sound of the carpenters’ hammering grew louder.

  The sun was at his back and the book bag holding the hadduta was in his left hand. He wasn’t sure if he could do this. He was sure he could do this. His attitude changed from second to second.

  He was some one hundred yards from the school now, the weight of the bag and his own caution making him list to the left a little as he walked.

  Up ahead, he saw students starting to come down the front steps of the school, ready to disperse to the various hot dog stands and clam houses along the boardwalk for a late lunch, rejecting the cafeteria food. He remembered this part of the routine from when he was a student here four years back. There’d been times when he’d wished they would ask him to join them. But then again, he was sure he would say no if they did.

  Boom. He flashed on the image of them falling under the avalanche of bricks. The boys crushed and bloody. The girls crying inconsolably. Sirens screaming everywhere. Yes, this would be horrifying, but he wouldn’t allow himself to feel anything about it. He’d seen many things just as horrifying back in Bethlehem. The rain of stones. The burning tires and the tear gas. The soldiers firing rubber bullets. The children lying in the streets and the mothers crying. They were inconsolable too.

  He was within thirty yards. He could see the carpenters working on the stage raising their hammers and slamming them down, but the sound took a second to reach his ears. A flock of boys came flying past him, and one of them, an abbed, a black one in a yellow Polo Sport shirt and street-sweeper jeans, made a point of plowing into him, shoulder first.

  Caught off guard, Nasser stumbled, twisted an ankle, and started to fall over onto his book bag. The hadduta. He reeled back and just barely managed to steady himself as the abbed kept walking, smirking over his shoulder. With no idea of how close he’d come to blowing both of them up. The black ones. They were supposed to be brothers, Nasser thought. But he’d always been a little afraid of them at school.

  He straightened up and began walking faster, knowing he had little more than eight minutes to leave the hadduta. The rhythm of the hammering seemed to quicken. There were red-white-and-blue banners ha
nging from the scaffolding over the school entrance. More and more students surged past him on the front steps; it was like a dam breaking. So free and easy with the way they moved, swinging their arms and shoulders. As if they were born to rule the wide open spaces. He could never be like that. His steps were small and careful. He’d known confinement for too long. Even today, he felt his collar choking him. But the more he tried to relax, the more he found his legs locking.

  Don’t feel anything.

  He tucked the bag under his arm as he walked by a band of laughing, singing girls in matching blue Nautica jackets and entered the lobby. He saw the blue plaster walls and the Celebrate Diversity Week posters. That familiar awful ammonia smell hit him. Trust in God and think like a gun. This would be the hardest part, getting through the metal detector. He turned, expecting to see the guard who’d let him in without a pass last week, a sluggish, sleepy-eyed Puerto Rican guy named Miguel who’d actually been in his class a few years back. But today, there was someone new; an alert-looking fiftyish black man wearing a blue blazer and gray slacks with sharp creases, carefully checking student ID cards. Nasser looked at those sharp creases and felt his heart jam.

  Merciful God! This hadn’t been anticipated, though it should have been. Unlike Miguel, this guard would surely check his ID and make him write his name down on the visitor’s sheet, leaving a direct trail of evidence for the police. They’d find him right away and drag him off to jail with all the abeeds and the Spanish criminals.

  All at once, the lobby didn’t seem as vast as it once had. It felt as cramped and claustrophobic as a phone booth. His breath stopped in his throat and his intestines seized in torment. He had to get out. Without thinking, he turned toward the big square of sunlight pouring in through the front entrance and walked out. The steps down to the street seemed to go on for miles and miles, like the slope of a mountain.

  He imagined he could hear the clock ticking in his bag, while down below the crowd on the sidewalk had thickened, with hundreds of kids leaving. For the first time, he noticed a burly man with a video camera and a slender, blue-suited lady with a microphone talking to a group of students over by a wrought-iron fence twenty feet away. Other kids were behind the woman, pushing one another out of the way trying to be photographed, grinning stupidly and waving. A television program. Somebody had actually come here to make a television program, perhaps because the governor was visiting. There was a chance they’d already taken his picture. Nasser looked at his watch again and saw he had a little over six minutes. His heart throbbed in time with the jerky quartz movement of the second hand. That was not scared, what he was before. This was scared.

  He turned and started to walk around the side of the school, heading for the back entrance. He remembered there was a hatch for an old coal chute near the doors. But as he came around the side, he saw dozens of students lounging on the back steps, smoking, drinking from brown paper bags, kissing each other blatantly. No, this was no good either. Now that he finally wanted to be invisible among the kids, everyone was looking at him. Maybe he’d never been invisible after all.

  He ran back around to the front of the school, knowing he probably had less than five minutes. Panicking. He was absolutely panicking. The hadduta would blow up in his hands. The camera man and the lady with the microphone were setting up on the front steps of the school, in order to interview students with the amusement park skyline in the background. The carpenters were still banging away at the wooden stage nearby, leaving no opportunity to slip the bag under the slats without anyone noticing. And just to complete the nightmare, here was Mr. Fitzgerald, his former teacher, coming out through the front entrance, trailed by that Jew, Mr. Rosenthal, and two dozen ill-behaved students from his sister’s class.

  This was the greatest mistake of all. They were supposed to be gone by now. If he stayed where he was, one of his sister’s friends would certainly recognize him and ask Elizabeth what he was doing hanging around school on a day she was absent. What if Mr. Fitzgerald saw him? But returning to the car with the hadduta was out of the question. The shame of facing Youssef would have been killing enough. But he wasn’t even sure if he would make it anyway. There might not be enough time to defuse the device. The throb of his heartbeat came up between his ears. He considered just dropping the bag on the sidewalk and running. But with the way this day was unfolding, someone would pick it up and run after him, shouting: “Hey, asshole, you forgot something! Hey, sand nigger, this is yours!”

  The hammering was so loud now it was as if the carpenters were inside his head. He found he could not move. Indecision had frozen him. Was this his destiny? To blow himself up in front of his old high school? Was this what God wanted?

  He saw himself, as if from far away. A lonely Arab boy in a crowd, holding a thunderbolt.

  But then salvation came. It literally pulled up right in front of him. A yellow school bus stopping by the curb and opening its doors.

  The path was clear. It was obvious what he had to do. Nasser waited for another wave of at least thirty students to come down the front steps, and then he joined them as they crossed the sidewalk and passed in front of the bus. Lowering the bag and carefully shoving it under the front wheels next to an empty Snapple bottle took less than a second. In the midst of the crowd, no one noticed. They were too busy shoving, giggling, touching each other within their little cloud.

  Nasser moved past the bus, broke off from the group, and ran across the street without so much as a glance over his shoulder. Yes, he’d never gotten along with Mr. Fitzgerald. Perhaps this was God’s will, after all.

  “Come on, you guys! Let’s keep it together.”

  As the school bus pulled up to the curb, David, sweating out vodka and lugging his Jansport bag, full of library books for Arthur, called to his class to line up on the sidewalk, but it was like yelling into the surf.

  Three girls he thought of as the hip-hop sisters were on the front steps, doing a hip-swinging, booty-waggling dance for the TV news crew. Ray-Za, whose hair today was shaped like an English tea service, chanted the words to the latest rap hit, which seemed to be a kind of Sears catalog of bitch names: “Horny bitch, nasty bitch, crazy bitch, bitchy bitch, female bitch …” And the rest of them just dissed each other. Even the Chinese kids dissed the Korean kids about their mothers’ hairy backs and loose ways. This was the style now: I dis, therefore I am. “All right, party people,” he said. “I’ll wait.” This should have been one of those soaring anything-is-possible days. He loved getting the kids outside the school, opening new vistas to them. But something kept casting a shadow over his brain. What was wrong? It was something bigger than his divorce. A feeling that he was barely keeping a hold on things. There was too much pulling the kids away. Corrupt administrators, outdated textbooks, electronic billboards, HDTV, computerized banking, CD-ROMs, beepers and cell phones, eight-year-olds with handguns, teen pregnancy, indeterminate sentencing, Prozac, New Age philosophy, crumbling and overcrowded classrooms, incurable viruses, and broken homes. Most days it didn’t bother him, the Great Divide. But today he felt rubbed raw. He just wanted to tell everyone to stop and listen for a second.

  “Yo, yo, yo, Mr. Fitzgerald.” Seniqua Rollins was tugging on his sleeve. “I wanna ask you something.”

  “What?”

  She moved closer to his side, and he noticed she was wearing patchouli today. “I want to know if I can get on the bus first.”

  “Why do you want to do that?” He was a little sore and suspicious from the way she’d been acting up in class.

  She lowered her voice. “I’m five months’ pregnant. I like to sit at the front near a window so I don’t get sick.”

  “For real?” David gave her the famous Fitzgerald hairy eyeball.

  “Oh yeah, it’s for real,” she sighed, rolling her eyes and blowing out two big cheekfuls of air. “Didn’t you notice I put on weight?”

  Actually, she’d always been built like a water tank, but no matter. David regarded her wit
h a mixture of tenderness and exasperation. He wondered if the father was Amal or King Shit in jail, and then decided he didn’t want to know the answer. “You going to be all right?”

  “Yeah, just gimme some space to breathe.”

  “We should talk later.” David gestured for the bus driver, Sam Hall, to open the yellow doors. “Hey, Sam,” he called out. “You don’t mind if this young lady sits by you, do you?”

  “I appreciate all the company I can get.” Sam, a courtly man in his early sixties with a face like old mahogany and beautiful long tapered fingers, waved for both of them to get on board.

  David followed Seniqua up the stairs and set his heavy book bag down next to Sam. It was the New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology weighing him down, he realized. The thing had to weigh ten pounds all by itself.

  “How you doing?” he asked Sam.

  He hadn’t seen the driver the last few field trips, and he remembered hearing that Sam had been operated on for prostate cancer last spring.

  “Just keeping on keeping on,” Sam said with an easy smile and only a slight tensing of the jaw. All the gangsta rappers in the world put together could never be so cool.

  Most of the kids didn’t know that Sam had been a singer in the late fifties. He’d even had a number three hit on the R ’n’ B charts, a haunting echoey ballad called “The Loneliest Man in the World.” But that was a long time ago and hence not worth much in the up-to-the-minute culture of Game Boy and Home Shopping Network.

  “Hey, Sam, you mind if I leave my bag a second?” asked David. “I don’t want to drag it around.”

  “Be my guest.”

  David started back down the stairs, still feeling as if he was coming at life from an odd angle. Everything he did and said seemed too slow and lugubrious for the world at large. The rest of the class, seeing Seniqua was already on board the bus, started to rush past him.

  “Hey, not so fast, crew.” He blocked them with his big leaden body and started pushing the group back toward the steps. “I want to do a final head count. Make sure we didn’t lose anybody.”