In those days I was convinced that I was surrounded by opportunities for doing the wrong thing, and I knew from experience that I usually didn’t even notice I’d seized one of these opportunities until it was too late. The difference between the right thing and any of a million wrong things often seemed so tiny as to be nearly invisible. Anything might trip you up, and it was more likely to be a pebble than a boulder. I haven’t had much reason to alter this conviction in all the years since then.
The general science book was thick and heavy, packed with small print in two columns. I expected that the knowledge in so forbidding a book must be thick and dense itself—arcane, mystifying, thrilling, troublesome stuff, the very kind of thing Miss Rheingold’s questions demanded—but actually the textbook wasn’t any help at all. For all its bulk and density, what it held seemed to be much the same as what I had learned in just-plain-science year after year: quite a lot about tadpoles and frogs, but nothing at all about the edges of the universe, or me.
I went to the school library. It wasn’t open on the weekend, of course; I slipped in through a window that wasn’t properly secured. After all, since I had devoted a good part of my summer to discovering unauthorized means of entry, it seemed a shame that the opening of school should render so much knowledge worthless, and I welcomed this opportunity to restore its former value. Besides, sneaking in gave my research the thrill of the forbidden, providing almost as good a kick as I would have gotten if the subject of the research itself had been forbidden, providing something like the researcher’s thrill I got when I poked through my parents’ dressers or the stack of letters and bills they kept in a kitchen drawer.
The questions racing through my mind then seem still to be dashing about in there, bumping into one another like baffled students changing classes on the first day of seventh grade, just as chaotically mixed, the separations and boundaries between ideas just as hard to describe as the location of last period’s science class after it has dispersed in the corridor: Where do I stop? Where did those dark kids come from? Why hadn’t I ever seen them before? Where do I stop? Where are they now, those dark kids? Is that Miss Rheingold’s perfume I smell? How did it get all the way up here to the second floor and into the library? Where do I stop? Is there some part of Babbington that isn’t on my map, the part where the dark kids live? Where do I stop? What’s my first class Monday morning? Do I have gym on Monday? Where do I stop? When are Raskol and I going to change the combinations of the locks?
[to be continued]
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🎧 587: In those days . . .