#
I went straight home, pelting down the road as fast as I could, not even looking
where I was going. I let the door slam behind me and took the stairs two at a
time up to the attic ladder, then bolted the trap-door shut behind me and sat in
the dark, with my knees in my chest.
Down below, Mama let out a half-hearted, "James? Is that you?" like she always
did since I came back home. I ignored her, like always, and she stopped worrying
about it, like always.
Pa's last trip had been to the Dalai Lama's court in 1975. The man from the
embassy said that he was going to talk with the monks about a "white-paper that
the two embassies were jointly presenting on the effect of mimetic
ambassadorships on the reincarnated soul." It was all nonsense to me. He'd never
arrived. The teleporter said that it had put him down gentle as you like on the
floor of the Lama's floating castle over the Caspian Sea, but the monks never
saw him.
And that was that.
It had been a month since our return. I'd ventured out into town and looked up
my chums, and found them so full of gossip that didn't mean anything to me; so
absorbed with games that seemed childish to me; so strange, that I'd retreated
home. I'd prowled around our house like a burglar at first, and when I came back
to the attic, all the numbness that had enveloped me since the man from the
State Department had teleported into our apt melted away and I started bawling.
The attic had always been Pa's domain. He'd come up here with whatever crackpot
invention he'd ordered this month out of a catalog or one of the expensive,
foreign journals he subscribed to, and tinker and swear and hit his thumbnail
and tear his pants on a stray dingus and smoke his cheroots and have a heck of a
time.
The muffled tread of his feet and the distant cursing while I sat in the parlour
downstairs had been the homiest sound I knew. Mama and I would lock eyes every
time a particularly forceful round of hollers shook down, and Mama would get a
little smile and her eyes would crinkle, and I felt like we were sharing a
secret.
Now, the attic was my private domain: there was the elixir shelf, full of patent
medicines, hair-tonics, and soothing syrups. There was the bookcase full of wild
theories and fantastic adventure stories. There were the crates full of
dangerous, coal-fired machines -- an automatic clothes-washing-machine, a
cherry-pitter, and other devices whose nature I couldn't even guess at. None of
them had ever worked, but I liked to run my hands over them, feel the smooth
steel of their parts, disassemble and reassemble them. Back in 75, I'd once
tried to take the robutler apart, just to get a look at how it was all put
together, but it was a lost cause -- I couldn't even figure out how to get the
cover off.
I walked through the cool dark, the only light coming from the grimy attic
window, and fondled each piece. I picked up an oilcan and started oiling the
joints and bearings and axles of each machine in turn. Pa would have wanted to
know that everything was in good working order.
#
"I think you should be going to school, James," Mama said, at breakfast. I'd
already done my morning chores, bringing in the coal, chopping kindling, taking
care of the milch-cows and making my bed.
I took another forkful of sausage, and a spoonful of mush, chewed, and looked at
my plate.
"It's time, it's time. You can't spend the rest of your life sulking around
here. Your father would have wanted us to get on with our lives."
Even though I wasn't looking at her when she said this, I knew that her eyes
were bright with tears, the way they always got when she mentioned Pa. His chair
sat, empty, at the head of the table. I had another bite of sausage.
"James Arthur Nicholson! Look at me when I speak to you!"
I looked up, reflexively, as I always did when she used my full name. My eyes
slid over her face, then focused on a point over her left shoulder.
"Yes'm."
"You're going to school. Today. And I expect to get a good report from Mr
Adelson."
"Yes'm."
#
We have two schools in New Jerusalem: the elementary school that was built
twenty years before, when they put in the wooden sidewalks and the town hall;
and the non-denominational Academy that was built just before I left for 1975.
Miss Tannenbaum, a spinster lady with a moustache and a bristling German accent
terrorised the little kids in the elementary school -- I'd been stuck in her
class for five long years. Mr Adelson, who was raised in San Francisco and who
had worked as a roustabout, a telegraph operator and a merchant seaman taught
the Academy, and his wild stories were all Oly could talk about.
He raised one eyebrow quizzically when I came through the door at 8:00 that
morning. He was tall, like my Pa, but Pa had been as big as an ox, and Mr
Adelson was thin and wiry. He wore rumpled pants and a shirt with a wilted
celluloid collar. He had a skinny little beard that made him look like a
gentleman pirate, and used some shiny pomade to grease his hair straight back
from his high forehead. I caught him reading, thumbing the hand-written pages of
a leatherbound volume.
"Mr Adelson?"
"Why, James Nicholson! What can I do for you, sonny?" New Jerusalem only had but
2,000 citizens, and only a hundred or so in town proper, so of course he knew
who I was, but it surprised me to hear him pronounce my name in his creaky,
weatherbeaten voice.
"My mother says I have to go to the Academy."
"She does, hey? How do you feel about that?"
I snuck a look at his face to see if he was putting me on, but I couldn't tell
-- he'd raised up his other eyebrow now, and was looking hard at me. There might
have been the beginning of a smile on his face, but it was hard to tell with the
beard. "I guess it don't matter how I feel."
"Oh, I don't know about that. This is a school, not a prison, after all. How old
are you?"
"Fourteen. Sir."
"That would put you in with the seniors. Do you think you can handle their
course of study? It's half-way through the semester now, and I don't know how
much they taught you when you were over in," he swallowed, "France."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I just stared at my hard, uncomfortable
shoes.
"How are your maths? Have you studied geometry? Basic algebra?"
"Yes, sir. They taught us all that." And lots more besides. I had the feeling of
icebergs of knowledge floating in my brain, ready to crest the waves and crash
against the walls of my skull.
"Very good. We will be studying maths today in the seniors' class. We'll see how
you do. Is that all right?"