The World Doesn't Require You Read online

  We sat in silence, me contemplating my next words. They would need to be important words. They needed to come out just right.

  Look, Chambers. (It was imperative that I sounded stern here.) He raised his chin and watched me. It’s important you listen to what I’m about to say. I paused. You’re fucked. When an administrator of Dean Greene’s stature sets her sights on you, there is no return, no future for you at this institution.

  Chambers moaned and grasped his stomach as if a disease had eaten away at his bowels.

  This is not a reason for whining or complaint, I continued. It’s good news, actually. All it means is that you’re free.

  Free?

  I whispered: As a naked jaybird’s dangling balls.

  I paused and let the silence hang. Let me ask you something, Chambers. What would you do, what would you teach, if you didn’t have to do all this dumb shit?

  He watched me for a while and then looked away, staring at the wall. And when he spoke it was as quiet and as gentle as I’ve ever heard anyone speak.

  Loneliness, Reece. Loneliness. It’s the core problem of this life. Of what it means to be human. I’d write and teach and think around that.

  Then do it, Chambers. What the hell do you have to lose? Teach what you want to teach. Write the essay you want to write. Don’t worry that Mean Dean Jean Greene has it in for you. She is going to do what she is going to do regardless. She’ll either be successful or she won’t, but no one can put your brain to work the way you can. That’s priceless. It goes beyond all this red tape and bureaucracy. It goes beyond hatemyprofessor. You’re here on this earth to use your brainpower, your considerable fucking brainpower, not for all the rest of this nonsense, all this dancing-with-bureaucrats-and-administrators shit.

  I sucked my teeth and waved my hand. He kept shaking his head. I realized our nonverbal tics were having a conversation of their own.

  After our body language had its say, Chambers and I sat in silence watching each other. I was determined to let it hang, because those who can’t live with silence will always end the stillness by speaking quiet words of desperation, and I needed to hear Chambers’s despair.

  He sighed. What you’re telling me to do is impossible, Reece. It’s too late to submit a themed course to the Scholarly Honors & Independent Themes committee—

  Dammit Chambers, I screamed, standing up. That’s the old Dr. Chambers. The new Chambers moves boldly. Come January you will be teaching whatever the hell you want, and no one will be able to stop you. Write your essay any damn way you please. Throw it up in the dean’s face. Doesn’t at all matter what happens next. You win by standing up like a goddamn man.

  He sat placidly with his hands to his face, but I could feel the fury of the righteous indignation working in him. I stood dramatically and walked to the door.

  Well, if you’re not going to act, then I have nothing else to—

  No, he said reaching out to me. No, Reece. You’re right. There’s much work to be done—the loneliness class; a better, more real essay—there is some stuff from my draft I can salvage. It has to start now. You’re right. Thank you for your insights.

  I left Chambers’s office that day proud of myself. The exam period rolled in and we prepared final grades, students left the campus to celebrate Christmas with their families, and the quiet turned me inward and contemplative. I sat in silence in my morgue home for hours on end. In my isolation, I felt my mind turning on itself, attacking me with memories and shame. Winter and its cold rolled in with streams of bluish gray and white steam rising everywhere, but it seemed the fall, for Dr. Chambers, wasn’t finished. He was that leaf turning a warped deathly brown yet still clinging to the tree, defying all winds and all reason.

  * Ha! My God! What a glorious typo! I think I’ll leave it.

  † He damn well did have to explain.

  II.

  Winter Break

  1. WINTER BREAK, 2017–2018

  In the weeks after the fall semester ends, campus turns barren and desolate. It’s like nuclear winter has finally come. I rise from my hole or I peek out from the morgue and usually I am the only living thing for miles. I could walk the campus naked if I wanted. Too cold for that, though.

  The only person I see around is Chet the dimwit. He brings me fruit and hot tea in the morning if I don’t make it to the caf. At noon we sit and talk and lunch out in the open.

  One day during lunch after a silent moment, the dimwit leaned his simple head back, pointed his determined chin toward me, and said: So what’s the end game, huh, Reece?

  I chuckled a bit and shoved the rice around my plate. I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, I said.

  Come on, man. Don’t be coy. One of the most brilliant minds in Cross River is living in an old morgue—the place I identified my daddy’s remains at after he got killed.

  I have plans to topple this temple of brain rot, plans I doubt you can understand.

  Maybe so, jack. If I could afford it, I would have been a student here. I wonder, though, if I get more from reading all these books I read—I don’t know—but if I had all your education I damn sure wouldn’t be living in no hole.

  It’s overrated outside the hole, Chet. Idra’s outside the hole. Joshua. Mary. Grace. Imani. You ever been married, Chet? Had kids?

  Yep, they send me here to this damn caf every day.

  I was married to two of those names, the rest are my kids—teenagers now, really—and they’re all outside the hole, watching for me. Waiting, probably. When I taught here—you know, on the payroll and shit—I figured that one day Imani and Josh and Grace would attend this brain-rot temple for free. They’re watching for me, umm-hmm, but I’m not coming back until I do something. Until I topple intellectual Sodom and then I move on to intellectual Gomorrah.

  I have no idea what you’re talking about, Dr. Reece. Want another piece of cornbread?

  Of course you don’t, Chet. And of course I want another piece of cornbread. What do you do to make it turn out so fluffy, sweet, and light, huh? Yellow cake of the gods, I tell you. Yellow cake of the gods.

  2.

  On Christmas Eve, in the cold of the morgue, sitting before my old boxy laptop, drinking hot chocolate stolen from the Journalism Department’s faculty lounge, I decided to send Dr. Chambers a gift: a new Milo Sequoia fable I’d recently discovered.

  This one had been in my head for a long time, since I’d met Dr. Chambers, in fact, and it evolved as I grew to understand him.

  Putting pen to paper—or rather, fingertip to keyboard key, as it were—would take the edge from my waking fever dream, I figured. I imagined that when he heard the ping of the email hitting his box and he sat down to read, my words would fire him up to finish his essay and plan his unauthorized class and thus march himself right into oblivion.

  So I wrote:

  • • •

  The Tragedy of Jardin the Axe-Wielder*

  Sometimes the trees speak these words, but most of the time they don’t speak. It is said that they only speak when there is a breeze, but I know that to be untrue because I hear them most often when the air is still and sad. This is the story the trees told me on a warm day in which the air sat atop us unmoving.

  The older trees of the Wildlands spoke of Jardin the Axe-Wielder† because they knew him and loved him. They knew the Others as well, and they also loved them, but not as they loved Jardin. They knew him as a baby back when his hands were too small and undisciplined to wield axes.

  The trees only knew the Others after they had become adults and had felled enemies with knives; with fire; with muskets; with hammers; with poison; with hoes; with pitchforks that once baled plantation hay; with flat, heavy chunks of wood run through with nails; with bare hands weaponized and remorseless. The Others laughed sometimes and even spoke and moved with joy. But the trees could divine sadness beneath those smiles. The Others climbed the trees and sat for long stretches, armed and often alone, looking out on Cross River, watching fo
r signs of trouble from the white aggressives who lived beyond their borders. Bddddaaaa! they’d bellow as a war cry, or they’d roll their tongues in their mouths as idle conversation, and this was their true language. Not far from any joy they had was the horrors they once lived with as a part of the mundanity of life, and not far from those horrors were other horrors, the horrors they had to commit to become free.

  The Council of Three spoke just before Jardin’s birth back when Cross River was a newborn thing, still covered in the blood and afterbirth of insurrection. They said: We are the blood-drenched, but our children don’t have to be.

  The Council of Three is no more, murdered by men whose souls will forever burn in various eternal fires, but when they lived, these murderous ill-intentioned men, their souls remained soaked in rivers and rivers of red, more blood than anyone will ever need. The same could be said for the Council as well, and also for so many of Cross River. After the Council, there were four men who led. The four bastards. The Board. The Rule. The Federal. And the General.‡ They ruled as tyrants, together and then sometimes at odds, sometimes at war, until the day they lost their heads.

  We can leave those tyrants for another time, however. This is not about them. This story is about some who followed. And it is about Jardin. And it is about how followers of the four tyrants twisted the first child of Cross River into a monster—how they washed his pristine soul in blood rivers until it became stained a dark crimson.

  It’s never the tyrant, not really. It’s always those who follow the tyrant. It’s they who are the true fist of tyranny. It’s they who make this life intolerable.

  Jardin was the firstborn child of Cross River.§ He was conceived in captivity, and his mother told him his father died fighting in the Great Insurrection. That’s true enough. His mother slit the throat of her rapist even as her belly hung low and heavy with the restless, kicking Jardin twisting about inside her. She was determined to take that walk from Port Yooga to the freeland before giving birth.¶ My baby will not be born on no slave earth, she said. And the midwives delivered Jardin on Cross Riverian soil, right near the roughest waters. It never occurred to Jardin that his father owned his mother and hundreds of others; he grew up imagining his father a tall, handsome, light-skinned man, holding a sword and chopping the heads of those who had enslaved him. His mother did nothing to dissuade his fantasy and when she died of a burning fever near Jardin’s ninth birthday, the Others stepped in to raise him. They taught him to sit in the trees and to talk to the bark of the massive flora and to listen when the trees talked back and to look out on the land and to watch for anything strange. And he looked out and stood guard with the Others, and nothing else made any sense. Still, one day, the weight of his mother no longer holding his hand became a weight too heavy to balance. As he sat in the trees in that special way the Others taught, tears leaked from Jardin’s eyes and turned his world into a watery blur. Riz, a leader among the Others, put his arm around Jardin, placed a hatchet in his palm, and said, What you crying for? You crying like you don’t got no parents. Jardin tightened his hand around the hatchet and dried his eyes with his sleeve and he didn’t cry anymore after that.#

  Riz and the Others taught Jardin the best arcs to swing his hatchet into the face of an oncoming enemy. They built targets for him and clapped every time Jardin tossed his weapon close to the center. No one’s ever swung that hatchet more naturally, Riz said. We’ll call you the axe-wielder, boy. But you’re not proven a man, an Other, a true Other, until you swing that thing in battle. Between you and me, son, I hope you never get a chance to prove yourself.

  Jardin nodded, but Riz’s words had offended him. What does this man want? Jardin thought. For me to forever remain a child? What if I ride into Port Yooga on a horse and chopped the arm of the first white man I see? I could build a whole new world with these hatchets of mine. Jardin spent many days in the trees dreaming of this. At times some of the Others would disappear—attending to business, they called it. Jardin would sit in the trees with a book. Still a boy. And daily he’d ask for a chance to prove himself, and Riz would counter, No. Simply no and nothing else, as if not talking to a fellow Other, but a child.

  One day, Jardin sat daydreaming somewhere near the base of a tree when he heard, Bdddda! Bdddat! Bdddat! Bdddddddddda! It was unmistakable. Cross River was under attack. Jardin went for his hatchets, two, one for each hand, and started off with the Others. Riz stood with his leader, Thorns, readying their weapons. Riz had a rifle slung across his back and a cutlass in his hand. Thorns quickly painted the ghost-blue spirit of death across his face.

  Axe-wielder! Thorns** called. The trees!

  But—

  This is no time to talk back, Riz said.

  Bddddaaaa, bap ba bap Bddddat? Jardin asked.

  He speak the rolling tongue better than he do the River’s English, Riz thought. Riz turned to Jardin and said sharply, Bdddaaaa bddddaaaaa bddddddaaaaa! At this there could be no argument. Jardin holstered his weapons and climbed into the arms of his favorite tree. It looked from above as if ghosts were moving through the forest. Some wore animal horns and fur. Some wore blackface. And some wore blue or white hoods. The Ku Kluxers were too much for the Others. The ghosts ran them through with knives and shot them down. Riz had told Jardin not to leave the trees for any reason. Call the shots from high above. It’s the most important job there is. You hear me?

  Bo! Bddddaa! Jardin called, but no one listened to the voice of the child from the trees.

  The speed of the fighting overwhelmed Jardin. The Others were old, he realized. The fight was not gone from them, exactly, but the Great Insurrection, the early fights of Cross River, they were so long ago, just a little over the entirety of Jardin’s sixteen years on this earth. Jardin left the trees and when Riz looked up, he thought the boy he took in and raised like a son had turned into a coward, abandoning his comrades to run. That was Riz’s last thought as a bullet to the shoulder crashed him to the earth. Riz bawled in pain, crawling to his cutlass as the Ku Kluxer who felled him readied a blade to jam through Riz’s heart. As the Klan member charged, a flying hatchet lodged itself in the side of his skull.

  It’s said that a brown flash passed over the white-sheeted Klan member’s body as Jardin retrieved his hatchet and moved on to another enemy. And it’s said that that night Jardin killed twenty men. And it’s said that he killed thirty. And it’s said that he killed fifty-three. No one knows the true number, except Jardin knew, and unlike the rest of the town, he didn’t celebrate what he’d done. It had to be done, and he got what he wanted, the manhood, the full Otherdom, but now he knew what it meant to be blood-drenched.

  It became clear to the Others that they needed more youth, so the Board decreed that every Cross Riverian male age thirteen must pledge to be trained as an Other. Riz and Thorns tasked Jardin with training the next generation, but his heart no longer cried for blood. Did not the Council say their children need not be blood-drenched? Jardin asked Riz one day when they were alone in the trees. The Council was some fools, Riz replied. And don’t be going quoting the Council out in public. Get yourself killed.

  Jardin nodded. He shrugged. Then he pulled away from his mentor and found another. Went down to the little schoolhouse that stood right where Freedman’s University now stands and became an apprentice teacher under Ms. Carmichaels. She taught six-year-olds their letters and their numbers. From time to time Jardin would help the Others train the thirteen-year-old boys; he’d show them how to sit in the trees, but he made sure to show them things in books too. Between the schoolhouse and the books he pushed onto the young Others, Jardin imagined himself building a shadow world of peace that would one day replace the hatchets and the knives, the guns and the spilled blood.†† In the weeks and months that passed, he spent more time at the schoolhouse and less time in the trees. He became a blankness to the Others.

  The Others noticed Jardin’s absence and they talked. The new recruits looked sickly. They were weak. Didn’t at all
know how to hold their weapons. Some fell from the trees because they refused to learn to sit. And worst of all, they didn’t listen. Here was their natural teacher off reading to children instead of seeing to the well-being of the town. A rumor spread that he began and ended each class by quoting the long-deceased Council of Three, telling the children they didn’t have to be blood-drenched just because their parents and grandparents were. That was a step or two too far. If the children of Cross River were made doughy and soft, how then could the future protect itself? The Others talked.

  Bddddddaaaaa! Ba ba bdaa bdaa.

  Bop ba de. Ddddddd. Daddddaa da da dat.

  Scabadddda ddddddd dddddddaaaa. Tadddaa.

  Bdddddaaaa! Bdddddaaaa! Bdddddaaaa!

  Bdddddaaaa! Bdddddaaaa! Bdddddaaaa!

  Bdddddaaaa! Bdddddaaaa! Bdddddaaaa!‡‡

  And like that a decision was made. It wasn’t an easy decision. It went right up to the General and, of course, the Board—he always had the final say. One day when the Others knew Jardin wouldn’t be there, some of them donned white sheets and white gloves and floated into the little schoolhouse. They chopped Ms. Carmichaels first and they ended by butchering the littlest boy whose pleading paused Riz’s hatchet—really Jardin’s hatchet—just a half second.