A Paper Son Read online

  A PAPER SON

  JASON BUCHHOLZ

  Dedicated to Rose Lee, Alyce Hanly, and Harry Hong.

  ONE

  First I saw him in a teacup.

  ***

  It was the day before the storm hit, the storm we’d been watching on newscast Doppler as it approached from Alaska, devouring the coast like a carnivorous planet made of teeth and ice and smoke. The weatherpersons pointed to it, their expressions mixes of glee and trepidation, their predictions heavy with superlatives, italics, underlining. The storm had formed in the Arctic over Siberia and had lurched eastward, devastating docks, leveling marinas, sending grapefruit-sized hailstones through windshields. Bering Sea waves had knocked some of the lesser islands in the Aleutian archipelago from their moorings and sent them tumbling southeast through sea foam, piling their igneous ruins on the British Columbian coast along with uprooted trees, demolished fishing boats, polar bear carcasses. This same fury would soon be upon us—blotting out the sun, stealing whole chunks of the peninsula out from under us—but not yet. That day, the first day back in school after the winter break, it was still clear. An unbroken blue stretch of sky filled my classroom windows; the only indications of the coming maelstrom were the taut, horizontal flags over the skyscrapers downtown.

  My third graders were hard at work, their pencils scratching unevenly across their papers. They were writing about all the things they hadn’t done during their vacations. I’d introduced the assignment the previous year, after nine years of reading the same excruciating paragraphs about Santa preparations and skiing in Tahoe and trips to Disneyland. Today I had received the usual panel of puzzled stares when I’d written the topic on the whiteboard.

  “Can you provide an example?” Eliza Low asked, looking bemused.

  “Did you get eaten by a lion over the break?” I asked her.

  Eliza was destined for a station in life where she would have people twice as smart as I am working so far under her she’d never even know their names, and from the look she gave me then I could tell she was a little impatient for that day to arrive. “Actually I did,” she said. “We kids heal up fast.”

  “Well, then you’ll have to write about something else,” I said.

  Kevin Hammerschmidt raised his hand. “I didn’t get eaten by a lion, Mr. Long,” he said, and flashed me a grin short on teeth.

  “You could have written about that, then,” I said, “but now you have to come up with something else, because that was my idea. Fifteen minutes. Go.”

  This was not the first time I’d augmented the common core curriculum. I teach my kids cooking and bicycle repair. In P.E. they like to play dodge ball, but every now and then I make them do tai chi. I tell them it will make them better ball dodgers. In my English lessons I charge them with the guardianship of the language. I have them identify and revise poor writing from the adult world. Despite the school’s ban on handing out refined sugars, I distribute Hershey’s Kisses to anybody who brings in a newspaper or magazine article with grammatical errors. I teach them words they’ll appreciate, like “brachiate.” They love the monkey bars, after all. “To brachiate,” I tell my class each year, “means to propel oneself by swinging from arm to arm, like a monkey.” Shortly after this year’s lesson I heard Amanda Martin say, “Nice brachiating!” to her friend Savannah Steward as Savannah dismounted, and I was again reminded why I love my job. I also teach them to be better storytellers. Problems are the main ingredient, I tell them. At the beginning of each term I tell them to create a character, and then give him five problems in one page.

  Just before the first recess bell rang I collected their papers and encouraged them to go outside and play at triple their normal intensity. “When this storm hits,” I told them, “it’s going to be the end of everything we know and love.” This was a game we played. I’d make a dubious proclamation and their job was to show some skepticism. To investigate. To question adults, especially their teachers. We all glanced out the window, as if the sky might tell us how much time we had left. Several gulls wheeled over the playground, anticipating the spillage of raisins and graham crackers.

  “My birthday party?” someone asked, after a time, without turning from the window. “Will it be the end of my birthday party?”

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “Golden Gate Park.”

  “Ask for waterproof presents,” I said.

  “Barney?” Kevin asked. “Will it be the end of Barney?”

  Kevin’s mythical dog Barney was a frequent topic. He was an ingenious creation, standing in for actual beings when our classroom conversations had to touch upon the personal, the uncomfortable. He also garnered Kevin the laughs he felt he needed each day. But this time there wasn’t much laughter, and I knew some of them were worried about actual pets. “Barney will be fine,” I said, “but you may want to keep him inside.”

  Beyond the playground lay the broad grassy field, and at its far edge stood the sports shed and the tall chain-link fence that kept balls, flying backpacks, and wayward children from tumbling over the top of the high retaining wall and down the cliff. In the distance stood the skyline of downtown San Francisco, quiet and still but for the trembling of its flags. I figured by then the storm must have crossed through Vancouver and made its way into the lower forty-eight. It wouldn’t be long now. And here we all sat, energetic and innocent and helpless like teenagers in a horror movie forest cabin. The bell rang and my kids scrambled for the door. “Get out there and make it count,” I said.

  I kept to my room through the recess break, and through lunch and the second recess as well, declining the first-day-back-after-break faculty reunion in the lounge. I tended to avoid the place on days like this—it was always too busy, too full of energy, too noisy with accounts of exotic vacations. For a bunch of public servants, my fellow teachers managed to do a lot of island hopping and helicopter skiing. Four of them—three women and Mr. Benson, who taught first grade—were married to investment bankers. I did have quite a bit of work to do in my room as well—lesson plans, and organization for the Chinese New Year/Valentine’s Day phase of the teaching calendar. But my primary goal was the avoidance of all that collegial exuberance. It wears me out.

  Henry made his teacup appearance just before the final bell. A single cloud had breached the frame of my windows—small and compact, with a faint dark core. A warning shot, I thought. I had poured myself a half-cup from my teapot and I was working at my desk when I felt something along the edge of my vision. When I looked up, the steam from my tea had ceased rising; it stood motionless, three or four inches of linked spirals, loops, whorls, all as still as if photographed. Without thinking (what would there be to think?), I reached for it. I was barely able to stifle a gasp when it collapsed back into the mug, sucked in with a force that made me think something huge at the bottom of the mug had taken a great sharp inhalation. I leaned over and looked inside, and there they were, the four of them, standing at a railing. I suppose I would have blinked, or rubbed my eyes, or looked around the room in a weak attempt to make sense of it. I don’t remember. Somehow the room vanished from around me, the chair from beneath me. Even the sense of strangeness I should have been feeling did not quite materialize in the presence of this image, which now filled the copper disk of my tea’s surface. It was actually Henry’s mother that struck me most, at the time. She stood over her children, her arms around their shoulders like the eaves of a home, sheltering them from whatever loomed before them. Henry peered out from just below the top railing; his sister peered just over it. They were all looking off to the side. Only after I’d taken the three of them in did I see their father, standing just behind his wife, his hands planted on his hips and his chest out, a smile on his face. They were Chinese, like me. Like
half of me, anyway. From the way they were dressed and the way their hair and clothing shifted in the wind, I thought they must have been on the deck of a steamship. I pulled the mug toward me and the vision dissipated. The tea settled but the family did not return; instead the reflection of my classroom’s fluorescents made their more conventional appearance. Steam spun back out. I dipped my head, sniffed. It smelled like rain.

  “Mr. Long, is there something in your cup?” whispered Eliza Low, from her seat in the front row.

  “Yes,” I whispered back, trying to recover. “Tea.”

  She wrinkled her brow and studied me before returning her attention to her math sheet. I glanced back into the cup, but the family hadn’t returned. I told myself it had to have been a trick of light, a shifting projection, the reflection of a photograph I knew did not exist.

  ***

  I scrambled down the hill for the refuge of my apartment, trying to figure out how I was going to explain my afternoon tea to myself. Just beyond my conscious thoughts a headful of difficult theories lurked, like party crashers waiting for the right moment to leap in through a window. I wouldn’t be able to keep them out, I knew, but my hope was that I could get home—and into the bottle of Scotch I kept around for emergencies—before I had to confront them. To recalibrate my senses I focused on the immediate as I walked: leafless sidewalk trees trembling in their square patches of dirt; the hum of mid-afternoon traffic; exhaust; the solidity of the concrete beneath my feet. A fist-sized knot in my stomach. I reached my street and trotted across it. As always, there was a puddle in the gutter in front of Ike’s corner store, the remnant of his afternoon sidewalk hosing. I stepped over it and onto the curb, and again there was that sense on the edge of my vision that colors and shapes were not in their right places. I turned and leaned over the puddle. My reflection looked up at me. It was wearing a hat. My hands shot up and felt my bare head. I whirled and checked my reflection in the store’s windows. No hat. I held my breath and looked into the puddle again. It was unmistakable: a short-brimmed, dark blue hat, pulled down to just above my ears. Everything else on the puddle’s surface looked normal—the bare branches of a nearby tree and the tops of buildings reached down to an underlying sky. A woman in a long coat approached. She slowed, looked down into the puddle, looked at me, continued on her way. A gust of wind blew a paper cup into the water and the image splashed apart.

  I took the stairs two at a time, threw my bag onto my couch, pulled down the Scotch, and poured two fingers. I took a bracing slug and headed to my desk, where sometimes I could think. Figure this out, I told myself. In a college psychology class I’d learned that schizophrenia usually started with auditory hallucinations and showed up during the teen years, which I’d been clear of for fifteen years. It was reassuring, I supposed, that my new visitors hadn’t called me Jesus. But I couldn’t rule that theory out. I moved on to my genetic heritage. My mom was above suspicion. The example she set for us—utterly practical, unfailingly even-keeled—was so strong that I still had trouble accepting the relative flightiness of the rest of humanity. My father, however, had been a bona fide eccentric, of the reclusive software genius variety. He might have been completely insane, for all we knew. He never interacted with anything organic long enough for anyone to get a good read on him. My sister Lucy was three years older than I was. She lacked what some people might call direction, but I understood her in a different way. She did what she wanted from year to year, and things seemed to work out for her. From what I could tell she didn’t give a shit what anybody thought. She orbited in and out of California every so often. Right now she was out—in New York City. She was brash, but probably more sane than the rest of us.

  I swallowed another slug and continued to further theories as the Scotch emanated its heat and calm. There had been no blunt force traumas to the head, no volunteering for any weird government experiments. I had only dropped acid twice, and not since I was an undergrad. No inexplicable memory losses, no alien abductions. I finished the glass, stood and made for the kitchen for more, and then I remembered the doves. I had been seven, one of twenty-some second-grade students assigned to the young but embittered Ms. Ferguson, whose failing vision had cut short her bid at a career in ornithology. At least once a week she made it clear to us that she would have much preferred to be out bird watching than stuck inside with us. Even my name—Peregrine—earned me no favor. Sometimes it even seemed to work against me, as if it disgusted her that something as graceless and earthbound as a seven-year-old boy would dare share a name with one of her beloved.

  The disdain was mutual. Though we were early in our school careers we all knew the difference between adults who liked kids and adults who were forced, for one reason or another, to tolerate them. At recess we often discussed the many careers we felt Ms. Ferguson was better suited for—dog-catcher, garbage collector, bridge toll-taker. The two-way antagonism abated for a few minutes each day, however, when she talked to us about birds. In the final minutes before lunchtime she would introduce us to the Bird of the Day (the “Daily Aves,” she called them), and for that short time we struck an unofficial truce—she forgot she was our teacher, and we forgot we were Plan B. Her voice would soften as she described the traits and range of a cedar waxwing, a condor, an emu. Her gestures would become graceful and her eyes would shine behind her thick glasses. She would almost become pretty.

  Once the Bird of the Day had been the mourning dove. My upper-middle-class classmates lived lives of blithe contentment, and even I was still a few years from learning what it meant to mourn, so we all assumed that this dove had been so named because of its preference for conducting business before lunchtime. In the way of playground rumors this one captured our attention and grew until it was widely held that all mourning doves had to vanish at noon—where they went, or what would happen to them if they stayed around, were the subjects of wide speculation. They slept in trees because they awoke early, and grew tired; they hid in underground burrows because the sun got too hot for them. A couple of days later I was sitting alone in my backyard after school, watching the trees move in the breeze, when a mourning dove landed on the fence. I recognized it immediately from the whistle its wings made as it landed, which Ms. Ferguson had imitated perfectly for us. It looked right at me for several seconds before it took flight, accompanied again by those staccato whistles. For a long time I wondered whether I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to see, or if I’d been singled out by the birds to receive the message of their true and secretive nature. Either way, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t tell anybody.

  Back in the kitchen I capped the bottle of Scotch and brewed a cup of tea. I set it on my desk, angling myself so that I could see the reflection of my overhead light fixture in its surface, and I stared into it. Shades of meaning flipped back and forth in my head—what separated a hallucination from a vision? A schizophrenic from a seer? My tea revealed nothing. No steamship appeared. The steam rose and spread.

  That night as I lay in bed I thought about the woman at the railing, her husband and children, the looks on their faces. I tried to see into their futures. I tried to see where the ship was going, but there was only mist.

  ***

  The next morning it was still not raining. After a night of sound, Scotch-assisted sleep, a square breakfast, and two cups of coffee which remained only coffee, I nearly managed to convince myself that nothing amiss had happened the day before. Ike’s daily puddle had yet to collect, but when I reached the corner I felt my head anyway. No hat. In my classroom I inspected my tea-making paraphernalia—electric kettle, pot, mug, tin of leaves—as though seeing them for the first time. I turned on the faucet and filled my kettle. Yesterday it had been water but now it was a confluence of molecules, the simultaneous arrival of billions of atoms, each of which had traced its own pathways around and over the planet, through rivers and rains, glaciers and clouds, down throats and through cell walls, each through countless years. When I thought of it this way, all t
hose long journeys collecting in my teacup, it seemed strange that there would only be one ship in there. I poured the water over a tea bag and sat down at my desk, feeling a little trepidation. The water settled, and there it was. Now I could see beyond the ship’s prow. I could see what the family was seeing. It was a vast, dark city, with columns of smoke rising into a late afternoon sky.

  “My mom says some people can tell fortunes from tea leaves,” a voice said. It was Eliza Low, her toes parked exactly at my door’s threshold, in accordance with my pre-bell rules. “Are you one of those people?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said. I looked back at the family and the dark city before them. “Do you want to see them?” I asked. Eliza nodded and I beckoned her in. She approached my desk and stood just opposite me. The ship remained where it was, bearing toward the city’s port. I didn’t know if I wanted her to see it or not. Eliza leaned over and peered into the cup. The steam rose as if from the ship itself and parted around the contours of her forehead.

  “She says fortune-tellers look at the way the leaves land on the bottom of the cup, and the pattern tells the future. But I think that’s ridiculous.”

  “People certainly have a wide variety of beliefs,” I said.

  She didn’t bother to suppress a flash of annoyance. “Yes,” she said. She stared back into the water. “I only see little wet leaves,” she said.

  I lifted my cup, shaking the image free, wondering how I was going to get through my teaching day with phantoms floating through my beverages. I took a sip and imagined the smells of cooking fires, of fish and oceans, hiding within the layers of my jasmine green. “There are people who tell us the future, actually,” I said to her, working to keep my voice steady. “The weathermen. And they say this is your last chance to play tetherball.” I pointed at the clock. “So I’ll see you back here in seven minutes.”