The Twittering Machine

In Donald Barthelme's "The School," you end up in a classroom where everything dies. The orange trees, the snakes, the tropical fish, the salamanders, the puppy, the Korean orphan, the grandparents, the parents, even some of the students. In just two pages, the story has the momentum of a howitzer, piling the bodies up in an inverted pyramid of importance. The teacher tells the story and he does it with the boozy intimacy of last call. The children in the story get disillusioned by the incongruity of their position: all this death and they were stuck in school. The children ask the teacher to make love to his assistant, so they can have, in their words, "an assertion of value." The teacher protests, then acquiesces, he and the assistant kiss, there's a knock at the door, a gerbil walks in, the children go wild with happiness.

I taught this story to a class of rising sixth-graders last summer. As a teacher, I have a bad habit of only wanting to talk about what I am currently excited about, a strategy guaranteed to teach my students nothing but how to have a conversation with a vaguely unhinged personality manically obsessed with a topic. It's problematic, but I have no alternative other than actually preparing a lesson plan, and that isn't going to happen any time soon.

If you want to examine emotional scarring, talk with a class of sixth-graders about death and suffering. They're geniuses on the subject. Each of my students had a story, of a relative, pet, or classmate, who died suddenly. They all knew they had been lied to about the deaths. Pria wanted to know how, on the drive home from the vet's after the family dog was put down, her mother was able to laugh and cry at the same time. Everyone was confused and scared, and it was beautiful. We all looked suffering and death in the face and none of us had any answers. I told them that it was hard and it got harder and then it gets easier, but I lacked the language to tell them why. Then, instead of a gerbil walking into the classroom, we went to recess.

It had pretty much the same effect. We escaped the classroom, which felt pressurized by our conversation, and immersed ourselves in the syrupy heat of a Houston summer and the constant conversation of our peers. The twittering machine of wild happiness that is fifteen minutes on the playground.

I got in trouble, of course. Not because of the disturbing conversation about the nature of death. But because of the three lines in the story about "making love." I was counseled to teach age-appropriate material.

I run nearly every day. My other hobby is aging, which I am also committed to doing every day. Each day, I try to be a little bit older than the day before. My two hobbies intersect in weird ways: I try to run faster on a body that's older, and currently the lower half of my body wants me to choose between my hobbies. I end up thinking about death a lot when I run. I think about my heart, distended from bourbon and marbled with tobacco tar, exploding. I think about my knees disassembling, and as I crash onto the gravel path, I imagine my body shattering like a champagne flute. I think about my lungs escaping through my mouth and hiding in the trees like helium balloons.

I try to keep my running habit a secret. Having spent my teen years in the early nihilist nineties, I am hardwired to distrust anyone who has a work ethic. I run at night on a path mostly populated by muggers and this one gorgeous transsexual who walks her giant gray camel of a dog slowly around the park. She has magnificent fur-covered boots that shiver with each of her steps. I run slowly and I run ugly. I have sweat glands embedded in sweat glands and I become slick as a dolphin within minutes of a...