Dominion over Every Erring Thing

I am teaching my fifth graders to add fractions when the body falls. Only one of the students looks up. I have placed Kendrick next to the window at a desk by himself, away from the table clusters because the previous Friday, as I walked by his desk, he said, audibly enough so that José, sitting closest to him, snickered: “I smell white pussy.”

Today he is ignoring his paper, purposely avoiding drawing in the bars that measure 1/5 and those that measure 2/5. I see the body fall out of the corner of my eye, and Kendrick stands up and shoves his head so far forward that I hear it hit the glass just after the body thumps to the ground.

“Oh my God,” I say. I go over to the window, and through the soiled glass I can see the body, toes up and eerily straight, in the dirt of the playground. In the background, two planes land and take off from the airport in symmetry.

“What?” Tisha wants to know.

“Nothing,” I say, and I hurriedly close the blinds. “It’s nothing.”

‘Just another body,” Kendrick says.

“Kendrick,” I warn him.

There is a bored sigh, and then the class settles back into its worksheets. I stick my head out the door and ask the floater to watch the class. “Come on.” I put my hand behind Kendrick’s head to steer him downstairs.

“What, what’d I do?”

“Nothing,” I say. “We’re just going to see Ms. Sabarowski.”

“Awwww,” Kendrick says. “Why? I didn’t do nothing.”

Ms. S is the guidance counselor. Her office is next to the overworked principal’s, and she has become the disciplinarian. Inside, Ms. S is standing at the window, watching the paramedics drive over the dirt field to the body, her hands on her broad hips.

“Another one,” Ms. S says without turning around.

“He fell feet first,” Kendrick says. “And no blood.”

Confused, I strafe my gaze from Kendrick to Ms. S and back again. I feel like there is a joke that I’m not getting.

“They probably didn’t tell you,” Ms. S says. “About the bodies. They climb up in the landing gears of the planes and then freeze in the air. When the landing gears get lowered, the bodies fall.”

It has taken me a full two months to get used to the roar of planes taking off and landing at the airport nearby. Now I have almost come to appreciate it, the rhythm they give the class. Three seconds every minute to catch my breath, to pause and let the lesson sink in. It is almost like a disco light, where every movement seems clearer because of the darkness between images. It reduces every lesson to its essentials.

“Who?” I ask, stupidly.

“Guatemalans, mostly. Some Cubans, El Salvadorians.”

“It ain’t no thing, Miss Gold,” Kendrick says. He says it almost kindly, and I wait for him to add an insulting epithet, which he doesn’t.

“Can you go sit outside, Kendrick?” I ask.

When he leaves, I ask Ms. S how she could let the students in the school think that bodies falling out of airplanes “ain’t no thing”?

“It just is,” Ms. S says. She looks down at her clean desk as though there is a paper requiring her urgent attention. She sticks out two swollen fingers and rearranges some pencils. Her nails are long and manicured; the thumb has a rhinestone embedded in the tip. “How am I supposed to explain a thing like that? Bodies get shot sitting on their front porches, bodies overdose on drugs, bodies die from trying to get a free ride to America. They’ve seen it. They’re okay.” Ms. S pauses. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

That night I tell my fiancé what happened at school.

“Yeah,” he says. “I read about that.”

Jake does market analysis and consulting for a hedge fund. I have absolutely no idea what this is, though he has explained it to me a few thousand times, and I...