A Place so Foreign, Cory Doctorow [famous ebook reader .TXT] 📗

he paused, waited until I met his gaze. His eyebrows were at rest. "I'm sorry about your father. I'd met him several times. He was a good man."

"Thank you, sir," I said, unable to look away from his stare.

#

The first half of the day passed with incredible sloth, as I copied down problems to my slate and pretended to puzzle over them before writing down the answer I'd known the minute I saw the question.

At lunch I found a seat at the base of the big willow out front of the school and unwrapped the waxed paper from the thick ham sandwich Mama had fixed me. I munched it and conjugated Latin verbs in my head, trying to make the day pass. Oly and the fellows were roughhousing in the yard, playing follow-the-leader with Amos Gundersen out front, showing off by walking on his hands and then springing upright. Amos' mother came from circus people in Russia, and all the kids in his family wanted to be acrobats when they grew up.

I tried not to watch them.

I was engrossed in a caterpillar that was crawling up my pants-leg when Mr Adelson cleared his throat behind me. I started, and the caterpillar tumbled to the ground, and then Mr Adelson was squatting on his long haunches at my side.

"How are you liking your first day, James?" he asked, in his raspy voice.

"It's fine, sir."

"And the work? You're able to keep up with the class?"

"It's not a problem for me. We studied this when I was away."

"Are you bored? Do you need more of a challenge?"

"It's fine, sir." Unless you want to assign me some large-prime factoring problems.

"Right, then. Don't hesitate to call on me if things are moving too slowly or too quickly. I mean that."

I snuck another look at him. He seemed sincere.

"Why aren't you playing with your chums?"

"I don't feel like it."

"You just wanted to think?"

"I guess so." Why wouldn't he just leave me alone?

"It's hard to come home, isn't it?"

I stared at my shoes. What did he know about it?

"I've been around the world, you know that? I sailed with a tramp steamer, the Slippery Trick. I saw the naked savages of Polynesia, and the voodoo witches that the freed slaves of the Caribbean worship, and the coolies pulling rickshaws in Peking. It was so hard to come home to Frisco, after five years at sea."

To my surprise, he sat down next to me, in the dirt and roots at the base of the tree. "You know, aboard the Trick, they called me Runnyguts — I threw up every hour for my first month. I was more reliable than the Watch! But they didn't mean anything by it. When you live with a crew for years, you become a different person. We'd be out at sea, nothing but water as far as the eye could see, and we'd be playing cards on-deck. We'd told each other every joke we knew already, and every story about home, and we knew that deck of cards so well, which one had salt-water stains on the back and which one turned up at corner and which one had been torn, and we'd just scream at the sun, so bored! But then we'd put in to port at some foreign city, and we'd come down the plank in our best clothes, twenty men who knew each other better than brothers, hard and brown from months at sea, and it felt like whatever happened in that strange port-of-call, we'd come out on top."

"And then I came back to the Frisco, and the Captain shook my hand and gave me a sack of gold and saw me off, and I'd never felt so alone, and I'd never seen a place so foreign.

"I went back to my old haunts, the saloons where I'd gone for a beer after a day's work at the docks, and the dance-halls, and the theatres, and I saw my old chums. That was hard, James."

He stopped then. I found myself saying, "How was it hard, Mr Adelson?"

He looked surprised, like he'd forgotten that he was talking to me. "Well, James, it's like this: when you're away that long, you get to invent yourself all over again. Of course, everyone invents themselves as they grow up. Your chums there —" he gestured at the boys, who were now trying, with varying success, to turn somersaults, dirtying their school clothes "— they're inventing themselves right now, whether they know it or not. The smart one, the strong one, the brave one, the sad one. It's going on while we watch!

"But when you go away, nobody knows you, and you can be whoever you want. You can shed your old skin and grow a new one. When we put out to sea, I was just a youngster, eighteen years old and fresh from my Pa's house. He was a cablecar engineer, and wanted me to follow in his shoes, get an apprenticeship and join him there under the hills, oiling the giant pulleys. But no, not me! I wanted to put out to sea and see the world. I'd never been out of the city, can you believe that? The first port where I took shore leave was in Haiti, and when I stepped onto the dock, it was like my life was starting all over again. I got a tattoo, and I drank hard liquor, and gambled in the saloons, and did all the things that a man did, as far as I was concerned." He had a faraway look now, staring at the boys' game without seeing it. "And when I got back on-board, sick and tired and broke, there was a new kid there, a negro from Port-Au-Prince who'd signed on to be a cabin boy. His name was Jean-Paul, and he didn't speak a word of English and I didn't speak a word of French. But I took him under my wing, James, and acted like I'd been at sea all my life, and showed him the ropes, and taught him to play cards, and bossed him around, and taught him English, one word at a time.

"And that became the new me. Every time a new hand signed on, I would be his teacher, his mentor, his guide.

"And then I came home.

"As far as the folks back home were concerned, I was the kid they'd said good-bye to five years before. My father thought I was still a kid, even though I'd fought pirates and weathered storms. My chums wanted me to be the kid I'd been, and do all the boring, kid things we'd done before I left — riding the trolleys, watching the vaudeville shows, fishing off the docks.

"Even though that stuff was still fun, it wasn't me, not anymore. I missed the old me, and felt him slipping away. So, you know what I did?"

"You moved to New Jerusalem?"

"I moved to New Jerusalem. Well, to Salt Lake City, first. I studied with the Jesuits, to be a teacher, then I saw an ad for a teacher in the paper, and I packed my bag and caught the next train. And here I am, not the me that came home from sea, and not the me who I was before I went to sea, but someone in between, a new me — teaching, but on dry land, and not chasing dangerous adventures, but still reading my old log-book and smiling."

We sat for a moment, in companionable silence. Then, abruptly, he checked his pocket watch and yelped. "Damn! Lunch was over twenty minutes ago!" He leapt to his feet, as smoothly as a boy, and ran into the schoolhouse to ring the bell.

I folded up the waxed-paper, and thought about this adult who talked to me like an adult, who didn't worry about swearing, or telling me about his adventures, and I made my way back to class.

It went better, the rest of that day.

#

In 75, Pa had almost never been home, but his presence was always around us.

I'd call the robutler out of its closet and have it affix its electrode fingertips to my temples and juice my endorphins after a hard day at school, and when I was done, the faint smell of Pa's hair-oil, picked up from the 'trodes and impossible to be rid of, would cling to me. Or I'd sit down on the oubliette and find one of Pa's journals from back home, well-thumbed and open to an article on mental telepathy. We did ESP in school, and it was all about a race of alien traders who communicated in geometric thought pictures that took forever to translate. We'd never learned about Magnetism and Astral Projection and all the other things Pa's journals were full of.

And while I never doubted the things in Pa's journals, I never brought them up in class, neither. There were lots of different kinds of truth.

"James?"

"Yes, Mama?" I said, on my way out to chop kindling.

"Did you finish your homework?"

"Yes, Mama."

"Good boy."

Homework had been some math, and some biology, and some geology. I'd done it before I left school.

#

The report cards came out in the middle of December. Mr Adelson sealed them with wax in thick brown envelopes and handed them out at the end of the day. Sealing them was a dirty trick — it mean a boy would have to go home not knowing whether to expect a whipping or an extra slice of pie, and the fellows were as nervous as long-tailed cats in a rocking-chair factory when class let out. For once, there was no horseplay afterwards.

I came home and tossed the envelope on the kitchen table without a moment's worry. I'd aced every test, I'd done every take-home assignment, I'd led the class, in a bored, sleepy way, regurgitating the things they'd stuck in my brain in 1975.

I went up to the attic and started reading one of Pa's adventure stories, Tarzan of the Apes, by the Frenchman, Jules Verne. Pa had all of Verne's books, each of them crisply autographed on the inside cover. He'd met Verne on one of his diplomatic missions, and the two had been like two peas in a pod, to hear him tell of it — they both subscribed to all the same crazy journals.

I was reading my favorite part, where Tarzan meets the man in the balloon, when Mama's voice called from downstairs. "James Arthur Nicholson! Get your behind down here now!"

I jumped like I was stung and rattled down the attic stairs so fast I nearly broke my neck and then down into the parlour, where Mama was holding my report card and looking fit to bust.

"Yes, Mama?" I said. "What is it?"

She handed me the report card and folded her arms over her chest. "Explain that, mister. Make it good."

I read the card and my eyes nearly jumped out of my head. The rotten so-and-so had given me F's all the way down, in every subject. Below, in his seaman's hand, he'd written, "James' performance this semester has disappointed me gravely. I would like it very much if I could meet with you and he, Mrs Nicholson, at your earliest convenience, to discuss his future at the Academy. Signed, Rbt. Adelson."

Mama grabbed my ear and twisted. I howled and dropped the card. Before I knew what was happening, she had me over her knee and was paddling my bottom with her open hand, hard.

"I don't" — whack — "know what" — whack — "you think" — whack — "you're doing, James." — whack — "If your father" — whack, whack — "were here," — whack — "he'd switch you" — whack — "within an inch of your life." And she gave me a load more whacks.

I was too stunned even to cry or howl. Pa had only beat me twice in all the time I'd known him. Mama had never beat me. My bottom ached distantly, and I felt tears come to my eyes.

"Well, what do you have to say for yourself?"

"Mama, it's a mistake —" I began.

"You're durn right!" she said.

"No, really! I did all my homework! I passed all the exams! I showed 'em to you! You saw 'em!" The unfairness of it made my heart hammer in time to the throbbing of