Christopher Conlon - Savaging the Dark

Again and again when I feel this despair, this panic, I find myself thinking of Connor Blue. Most of my students are blurs to me when I’m not standing before them, looking directly at them: I can’t remember their faces, not really. A smile maybe, a pretty set of eyes, but not the actual face, not the person. But as autumn drains into winter I notice Connor Blue appearing in my mind increasingly often, increasingly vividly. I can picture him quite well when he’s not around, even disturbingly well. I can’t remember ever having this feeling about a student, though it’s not really a feeling, it’s more a sensation. I simply don’t forget him as I forget the others. I can be making a snack for Gracie at the kitchen counter or vacuuming the living room carpet or driving to the supermarket or brushing my teeth and suddenly he’ll be there in my mind, as vivid as the kind of religious vision reported by the old prophets. The blonde, nearly white hair, the way it sticks up in back and falls down in front, covering his left eye so that he has to brush it back with his hand. His green eyes, their steady expectant gaze, the long black lashes over them. The cute little nose, oddly small for his face and flat. The little-boy freckles splashed over his pink cheeks. And the smile, maybe the smile most of all, his thin cherry lips, his front teeth very slightly protruding—he’ll probably end up with braces in a year or two—but very white, very even, very, yes, pretty. That’s the word for Connor Blue: Pretty. In a couple of years he won’t be. No boy is. He’ll get his growth spurt—right now Connor is barely five feet tall—and his features will begin to change, elongate, harden. His voice will start to creak and crack and suddenly one day it will be deeper, harsher, no longer a boy’s, high and fluty and insubstantial, but a man’s instead. The clarity of his youthful gaze will vanish to be replaced by a more reserved, knowing, suspicious look. The quick innocent smile will disappear into adolescent lassitude and cynicism. It’s a tragedy, really. It makes me understand why centuries ago the Italians favored castrati in their operas: to hold a boy just there, to not let him be corrupted by time or experience. Yes. And yet that would fail too: only their voices would remain pure, after all. The rest of them would still become men, inexorably, irretrievably.

The winter shadows deepen until it’s hardly light at all when I gather Gracie up to head to her pre-school in the mornings, hardly light at all by the time I finish with the after-school study group in the afternoons and go home. In fact it’s almost full dark. I see little light during my waking hours. Just little rectangles of it now and then during class, when I have a moment to look out. The way the buildings are situated much of the light is blocked, leaving me with the sense that the darkness is encroaching on me— into me—all the time. I function well enough. I teach perfectly adequately. I laugh with my students, I make jokes, I play around. I go where I’m supposed to go during the day, pick up Gracie when I need to, shop for dinner, greet Bill cordially, I’m agreeable to whatever sexual activity he suggests before sleep, say nothing about how distasteful I’ve begun to find his big, hairy body, his stubbly cheeks, his eternal coffee breath. The darkness is growing, inside me and outside. Inside like a cancer, outside like a truck grill slamming into me over and over again. I need light, purity, clarity, anything but this blooming winter darkness that seems to stifle and choke me.

Through all of this is Connor Blue and his sunshine smile and his old movies and his appreciation for anything I do for him no matter how small.

It occurs to me more than once that I have developed an unhealthy preoccupation with this boy, but I can’t think what to do except to try to forget it. I’ve been a model teacher for Connor these past months. I’ve helped him learn sentence structure and spelling. I’ve tutored him in his other subjects, especially math, where his grades are slowly improving. I’ve been a support system for Connor, a cheerleader, just as a good teacher should be. I have nothing to be embarrassed about or ashamed of regarding Connor Blue.

And yet I’ve begun to feel that I’m hiding something from people, that behind the smiling Mona Straw they know is a subterranean other, a strange girl-woman whose mind is filled with smoke and shadows and darkness. This alternate Mona, this private soul, begins to alarm me. She’s not unfamiliar—I’ve known her since I was a child—but something about her is becoming increasingly insistent, as if she were literally inside my body struggling to get out, to burst through my belly or climb up through my throat and take over my life, my family, me. For some time I don’t know what to do about it. I wake in the middle of the night from sweat-drenched dreams, I turn away from my husband, my body goes haywire with menstrual blood and diarrhea and vomit. I miss days of work due to illness, something Ms. Straw never does. Lying in bed the entire day, all alone—Bill gone, having taken Gracie to school himself—weird visions seem to play in my mind and along the walls of the bedroom as I fade in and out of wakefulness. I hear voices, male voices, some consoling, some accusing, none speaking words but rather just sounds, guttural dark man-sounds. Except Connor’s voice, which comes clear and sharp: You okay, Ms. Straw?

Ms. Straw is not okay. Ms. Straw gets over her bout of what she has decided to call the flu and returns to her routines, to her existence as wife and mother and teacher, but something seems wrong now, some aspect of the perspective she has on life has inexplicably shifted, tilted, changed. When she talks to her husband or daughter it’s as if she is a clever impostor, someone with Mona Straw’s exact face and body and voice but somehow not her. Some kind of unreality seems to come between Mona Straw and what other people think of as the world. Even at school, during class, she has this odd sense of otherness, a notion that she isn’t herself anymore, that something has happened.

I try to talk to another teacher about it, an older woman named Estelle Higgins. We’ve always had friendly relations and I think she might be willing to listen. But as I try to talk about it I see the expression on Estelle’s pudgy face begin to alter. I’m unaware of what I’ve said to her, actually. I’d begun with Estelle, I have such strange feelings lately, I’m not sure what’s going on with me but then must have gone somewhere very different because she’s scowling in a perplexed way, a confused way, she’s murmuring about how she has to get to class and how she hopes I feel better. Was I raving? I don’t know what I was doing. Someone else seems to have been doing it. I wonder if the other, darker Mona, the one hidden away inside me, has come out, has climbed up through my throat and pulled her way into my mouth and opened my jaws and slipped out into the world, my world.

I find myself thinking less and less of Bill or Gracie. One afternoon I forget to pick my daughter up at school and I’ve been home half an hour when the phone rings, Ms. Straw, where are you? Is everything okay? I curse myself, rush out the door, make it back to the pre-school quickly enough. No harm done. Anyone can forget something. But there are other things. One afternoon when I pick her up she’s crying. What happened? When she’d opened her Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunchbox at noon today she’d discovered only the detritus from yesterday in it, a sandwich wrapper, an empty plastic bag containing Oreo crumbs, a crumpled juice box leaking drops of orange all over everything. I’ve completely forgotten to pack a lunch for her, simply handed her the lunchbox as she’d brought it home yesterday. A trip to McDonald’s assuages her, and things are all right again, aren’t they? Aren’t they really? As I sit there with my coffee in front of me watching Gracie consume her Happy Meal I suddenly realize that I’m crying. I have no idea why.