BOUNDARIES: A Louisiana Love Story (Post 15)

Chapter 7: John

All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.

Ecclesiastes 3:20

Dr. Piner stands perfectly still as the last couple of students file into the stark classroom. There are no cell phones, iPods, or laptops; we lack alternative methods for communication, expression, and information gathering. Nobody misses them but I need them. 
      At precisely the moment when the last talkative girl closes her glossy mouth and plops into her seat, our odd professor dramatically swings his arm out, fingers flared, as if to motion the class to stop. He stares mysteriously at his outstretched hand as he turns it from side to side. The room falls silent.
     I watch intently, wondering what bizarre thing he’ll do next. When it’s apparent that all eyes are on him, he slowly closes his hand into the number one gesture. His long forefinger points toward the ceiling. Some of the students look up. I study his face. The tip of his finger begins to curve down and the students who are looking up, look down. Just as his fingertip makes contact with the hand from which it grows, his back hunches and he shoves the extended knuckle into his left nostril and twists.   The class lets out a communal groan.
     Dr. Piner smiles and I look away pretending it hasn’t happened. Thinking about the assigned reading, I whisper to the guy sitting next to me. “I’d hate to be cremated.”
     The eccentric professor is observant. “Do you wish to say something to the class, Miss Bound?” he asks, wiping his finger back and forth across his jeans like a kid. The moaning continues.
     “I was just tellin’ John that I don’t wanna be cremated,” I say, wondering why Dr. Piner always singles me out. He’s done it three times since the spring semester began the week before.
     “I see you’ve read ahead like a good little student.” He walks over to my desk and picks up the small book Matt loaned me. “So what disturbs you so much about cremation?” he asks. “Don’t tell me it bothers you to think of having your pretty little face melted.”
     “It’s just kinda gross,” I say. Several classmates shake their heads in agreement.
     “What’s the difference?” He drops the book. As it hits my desk, the students jump to attention. “You’ll be dead. Has anyone here ever seen flesh burn? Interesting smell.” He looks into the distance as if reliving some horrific memory. “Cremation conserves resources. It’s an important decision people face as they approach death,” his eyes widen, “as is the possibility of hospice care for those who have the reaper riding their backs.” He walks back to the front of the classroom. “And if you don’t think you’re approaching the reaper, believe me, he’s approaching you faster than you think. Burning flesh and death hotels,” he pauses and slowly peers around the room to see which of us is rattled by his morbid lecture, “are the primary topics in our next unit, Death and Dying. Did everyone bring the supplemental book?”
     We all shuffle to get the small book about death, and John whispers, “Peyton, how did you do on the chem test? You made a hundred, right?” He’s always staring at me.
     My face feels hot. “I studied a lot.” I’m modest about my emerging academic reputation.
     “This is medical sociology, not a religion class.” Dr. Piner’s voice shakes me to attention. “However, whatever spiritual existence you believe in, you have to accept that it is, by definition, spiritual.”
     “Isn’t your boyfriend in med school?” John whispers. “Does he help you study?”
     “… You don’t need a body if you exist in a strictly spiritual realm …”
     “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
     “… Perhaps those who don’t believe in a spiritual afterlife, but would like to believe, have a particular aversion to cremation?” Dr. Piner stares at me with cynical eyes and I shift in my seat. “If you don’t believe in life after death--if you believe your body returns to the dust it came from--you shouldn’t care what happens to it when you die.”
     John scratches at a small raised spot on his desk. I try not to look at him but his fidgeting distracts me. He catches my eye and blurts out, “You’ve been datin’ that bald guy since the beginnin’ of last semester and I …”
     “Cremate it!” Dr. Piner yells, rescuing me from the impending question, “Will you go out with me?” I wonder how I always know what’s coming when I’m not particularly interested. Dr. Piner glows and I wonder if his main goal in life is to elicit an emotional response. I admit that he’s good at it. “Now that I have your attention,” he smirks, “conservation of all our resources is gonna become a hot topic over the next twenty or thirty years. Remember, it's 1985 and you heard it here first.”
     John is staring at me again, looking as if he’s gearing up to ask the question. I look him straight in the eye and say, “I really don’t mean to be mean, but I’m tryin’ to listen.”
     His face pinches and he begins furiously taking notes. After a couple of minutes he says, “Are you goin’ out with him tonight?”
     The guy is driving me crazy. “He’s not bald. His name’s Peter and, yes, I am.”

“Close your eyes and don’t peek,” Peter says, fumbling with the car stereo. B.B. King is singing the blues.
     “Where are you takin’ me?”
     “Don’t worry. Just close your eyes and listen to the music.” Peter loves the blues.
     I try not to peek as we drive for what seems hours. When he finally tells me to look, I open my eyes and a warm deja vu feeling envelopes me. The pine smell of the night air, the sudden clearness of my mind, and the sight of the big, solid building planted in the center of a never-ending field of memories are like relatives returning from a long pilgrimage. But the pilgrims have changed. They greet me with much more than what they took. I get out of the car and jog toward the playground, stop, smile at the sky, and then walk back to Peter. His thoughtfulness overwhelms me. “I cain’t believe you brought me here. I told you about the playground so long ago. I cain’t believe you remembered.”
     “And I brought a radio and a blanket,” he says, lifting a knotted, brown blanket from the back of his El Camino. “We’ve got all the right gear for stargazin’.”
     Winter is over; it blew through, swift as usual.
     I feel a tinge of guilt as I follow Peter onto the wide, lonely playground where I once played and dreamed. I’m not sure if he's noticed my car at Matt’s house on nearly all the nights I'm not with him, and sometimes on the nights I am with him—just later. All he has to do was walk two or three steps away from his door; turn his head to look down the street; and focus on what is clearly in his view.
     All he has to do is look.
     “Why did you bring me here?” I ask as he spreads the blanket over the cool dirt. I can’t remember a time when that part of the playground had grass. The short shock of our winters always weakened it, and then the trampling of children’s feet tore at the roots. Whatever blades remained seemed so out of place that the children who rarely ran, sat and pulled them out one by one.
     “I want you to understand that this is who you are.” We lie down on the blanket side by side and he holds my hand. “Actually, I want to watch you look up into the sky. I think you see somethin’ up there that I cain’t.”
     “I don’t know about that,” I say, my eyes fixating on a particularly brilliant star. I wonder when it will fall.
     “I don’t have the scope,” he says.
     “Scope?”
     “You’re creative and I’m not.” His recognition of my core nature propels me toward the stars. He holds my hand tight, perhaps hoping to ride along. “You’re always thinking about all kinds of thing and writing. My mind doesn’t work that way.”
     “How does yours work?” I turn my head away from him and look out at the expansive playground. My eyes fall like colored marbles onto the dirt. They sit, waiting for someone to align them. The brown of Peter’s blanket merges into the dirt that spreads out as far as I can see into the distance.
     “Some thangs just make common sense to me. Maybe the thangs that don’t make sense just filter out. I don’t worry about ‘em.” Peter doesn’t see any marbles.
     “But what about something like my friend, Anne, dyin’? That doesn’t make sense, but I don’t think you could filter it out.” The stars creep closer but the darkness between us remains dense. We’re sandwiched between the dark, broken slabs of night and the dirt beneath us. The peanut butter brown blanket keeps us clean. I can almost smell it.
     “I haven’t had that experience," he says. "Nobody I know has died. Actually, my grandfather died and I was sorry, but he was 97 so it made sense.”
     “When I found out she died I didn’t cry, but I couldn’t stop cryin’ at her funeral. The strange thang is that I wasn’t cryin’ because she died. It was the funeral. It was so plain and motionless and blah. Everybody sat there like zombies, staring straight ahead. Lifeless. I kept thinkin’, ‘What are they all lookin’ at?’ They seemed more dead than she did.”
     “That’s what I mean. You saw somethin’ that didn’t make sense. See, I wouldn’t have noticed.”
     “When Anne was growin’ up she was kind of sickly. I never understood why she was so confident. Now, I think maybe her mom gave it to her.”
     We're both on our backs, staring up. He says, “You don’t have to be healthy to have confidence.”
     “Her mom gave her these great slumber parties every year, but nobody wanted to go. I always went. I really did like her. I liked her mom, too.” I try not to cry. “At her funeral I kept thinking that it didn’t seem right that someone like her should die, and someone like me should just sit there, staring at nothin’. She died and they killed her all over again at her funeral. I cried so loud that I had to leave. I couldn’t even walk down the aisle and tell her good-bye.”
     “It’s not your fault that she died.”
     “I know, but at some point--maybe around ninth grade--I stopped bein’ her friend.”
     The cool March wind drifts over us, and a bell sounds in my head. It’s the sound of the chimes my grandfather often made with his own hands. I remember lying in bed at my grandparents’ house, listening while my mother cried to herself next to me. For a moment, I hear those chimes, loud and clear, and find the child inside of me. She half opens her eyes, looks around in a daze, and then gently drifts back into the coma. I wipe away a tear with the back of my hand.
     I suddenly crank up the radio and run from the blanket. “You’re it!” I yell, racing wildly through the playground. B.B. King’s voice rises and falls. I run in wide figure eights and crazy winding trails. Peter’s compact body follows behind me, sifting through the deafening blues, mirroring my every move. I run past the brick walls of my old classrooms. Looking through the windows, I marvel at how small it all seems. Miniature chairs, water fountains, and lockers that were once perfectly sensible parts of my world become surrealistic as I struggle to run past them.
     Gasping for breath, I yell, “The monkey bars are safe!” Once I make it there, I throw my long legs up and over a tall, freestanding bar. Balancing on the cold steel, I stare down at Peter. “You thought you could outrun me, didn’t you?” I say.
     He smiles and says, “Somethin’ tells me you’ll always be ahead.”
     I let my body fall forward. My windbreaker and shirt fall down around my head exposing my bare chest. Peter boldly cups my small breasts. They fit perfectly into his rough, compact hands. It feels nice but suddenly I’m cold.
     I wish I could love him the way I love Matt.
     Jumping down, I head back to the blanket. Peter follows without a word. A part of me wishes he’d stay where he is and order me back to the monkey bars. They’re safe. I want him to demand that I forget about Matt. He’s Matt’s best friend and that gives him a certain power. Instead, he simply lies down beside me and seeps into the tiny spaces between the blanket’s knots.
     “I think stargazin’ is somethin’ you have to do alone,” I finally say, feeling like a jerk.
     “Maybe you’re right,” he says. I feel the distinct wobble of jelly.
     “I hate Matt.”
     “You don’t have to say that.”
     “I just want you to know.”
     “Well, now that he lives next door, you’ll probably run into him. So I guess you’ll have to get past that.”
     “I didn’t know he moved,” I say calmly.
     “About two days ago. I think he worked somethin’ out with the manager. What I can’t figure out is why he’d go to all that trouble just to move down the street.”
     “I don’t know. What do you think?” I ask, suspecting he knows more than he’s telling me.
     “I have a feeling he actually has good reasons for the thangs he does, but I just don’t get it. Like I said, I don’t have the scope.”
     “So you think Matt is creative?”
     “I think his mind’s twisted in a way few people understand including me.”
     I understand it. “Do you think mine’s twisted?”
     “I think his is twisted in one direction and yours is twisted in the other, and never the twain shall meet.”
     “Do you think that’s why he hates me so much?”
     “He never said he hates you, and I never said a twisted mind is bad.”
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More of Chapter 7 coming this week.

To find out what BOUNDARIES is about and start reading at the beginning. go here.

BOUNDARIES is Penelope Przekop's first novel. It's a work of fiction based on true events. Since writing BOUNDARIES, she has completed two other novels. ABERRATIONS was published by Greenleaf Book Group in 2008. CENTERPIECES is currently being considered by several publishers. Penelope is working on her fourth novel, DUST.