Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Howl, howl, howl, howl! he whispered. O, you are men of stones:

Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so

That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever!

I know when one is dead, and when one lives;

She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;

If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

Why, then she lives.

Silence. No scoffing. The boys were still.

An unknown room in Lotto illuminated. Here, the answer to everything. You could leave yourself behind, transform into someone you weren’t. You could strike the most frightening thing in the world — a roomful of boys — silent. Lotto had gone vague since his father died. In this moment, his sharpness snapped back.

The man heaved a sigh and became himself again. “Your teacher has been stricken with some disease. Pleurisy. Dropsy? I shall be taking his place. I am Denton Thrasher. Now,” he said, “tell me, striplings, what are you reading?”

“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Arnold Cabot whispered.

“Lord save us,” Denton Thrasher said, and took the wastebasket and swept up and down the rows, tossing the boys’ paperbacks in. “One mustn’t concern oneself with lesser mortals when one has barely breached the Bard. Before I am through with you, you will be sweating Shakespeare. And they call this a fine education. The Japanese will be our imperial masters in twenty years.” He sat on the edge of the desk, buttressing himself before the groin with his arms. “Firstly,” he said, “tell me the difference between tragedy and comedy.”

Francisco Rodríguez said, “Solemnity versus humor. Gravity versus lightness.”

“False,” Denton Thrasher said. “A trick. There’s no difference. It’s a question of perspective. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing. Look here,” he said, and made his hands into a box, which he moved across the room until it settled on Jelly Roll, the sad boy whose neck gooped out over his collar. Denton swallowed what he was about to say, moved the box of his hands on to Samuel Harris, a quick, popular, brown boy, the cox of Lotto’s boat, and said, “Tragedy.” The boys laughed, Samuel loudest of all; his confidence was a wall of wind. Denton Thrasher moved the frame until it alighted with Lotto’s face, and Lotto could see the man’s beady eyes on him. “Comedy,” he said. Lotto laughed with the others, not because he was a punch line, but because he was grateful to Denton Thrasher for revealing theater to him. The one way, Lotto had finally found, that he could live in this world.

—

HE WAS FALSTAFF IN THE SPRING PLAY; but out of makeup, his own miserable self slid back into him. “Bravo!” said Denton Thrasher in class when Lotto delivered a monologue from Othello , but Lotto only gave a half smile, returned to his seat. In rowing, his novice eight beat the varsity in practice and he was promoted to stroke, setting the rhythm. Still, all was drear, even when the buds tipped the trees and the birds returned.

In April, Sallie called, weeping. Lotto couldn’t come home for the summer. “There are… dangers,” she said, and he knew she meant his friends were still hanging around. He imagined Sallie seeing them walking up the highway, her hands of their own accord veering the car to smush them. Oh, he longed to hold his sister; she was growing, she wouldn’t remember him. To taste Sallie’s food. To smell his mother’s perfume, to let her tell him in her dreamy voice about Moses or Job as if they were people she’d known. Please, please, he wouldn’t even leave the house, he whispered, and Sallie had said, in consolation, that the three of them would come visit and they would all go to Boston in the summer. Florida had gone sun-bright in his mind. He felt he might go blind if he looked directly at it. His childhood was obscured in the blaze, impossible to see.

He hung up the phone, hopeless. Friendless. Abandoned. Hysterical with self-pity.

A plan solidified at dinner, after a food fight with mint brownies.

When it was dark, flowers on the trees like pale moths, Lotto went out.

The administrative building held the dean’s office; the office held the drawer that held the gun. He pictured the dean opening the door in the morning to find the splatter, his shuddering backward step.

Sallie and his mother would explode from grief. Good! He wanted them to cry for the rest of their lives. He wanted them to die crying for what they’d done to him. He felt wobbly only when he thought of his sister. Oh, but she was so little. She wouldn’t know what she’d lost.

The building was a lightless chunk. He felt for the door — unlocked — it slid open under his hand. Luck was on his side. [Someone was.] He couldn’t risk turning on the lights. He felt along the wall: bulletin board, coat rack, bulletin board, door, wall, door, corner. The edge of a great black space that was the enormous hall. He saw it in his mind’s eye as if it were daylit: double curved staircase at the far end. Second-floor catwalk lined with oils of fleshy white men. Antique boat hanging from the rafters. During the day, high clerestory windows shifted light one to the next. Tonight they were pits of dark.

He closed his eyes. He would walk bravely toward the end. He took one step, another. Loving the swishy feel of the carpet, the giddy blankness before him, he took three joyous running steps.

He was smacked in the face.

He’d fallen to his knees, was scrabbling on the carpet. Hit him again in the nose. He reached up but nothing was there; no, here it was again, and he fell back, felt the thing graze over him. His hands flailed, touched cloth. Cloth over wood, no, not wood, foam with a steel core, no, not foam, pudding with a tough skin? Felt down. Felt leather. Laces? Shoe? He was dabbed in the teeth.

He crabwalked backward, a high-pitched keening noise coming from somewhere, and moved wildly down the walls, and after an eternity found the light switch, and in the horrible bright found himself looking at the boat suspended from the ceiling, tipped down on one side, dangling the worst Christmas ornament ever. A boy. Dead boy. Blue-faced. Tongue out. Glasses cocked. In a moment came the recognition: oh, poor Jelly Roll, hanging from the bow ball of a sweep eight. He’d climbed up, tied the noose. Leapt. Mint brownie from dinner all over his shirt. The sound died out of Lotto’s chest. He ran.

—

AFTER THE POLICE, the ambulance, came the dean. He brought Lotto doughnuts and a cup of cocoa. His eyebrows danced all over his face, chewing on lawsuits, copycat suicides, leaks to newspapers. He dropped Lotto at his dorm, but when the taillights winked away, Lotto came out again. He couldn’t be near all the other boys, who were, just then, dreaming innocent anxiety dreams of girl bits and summer internships.

He found himself sitting in the auditorium on the stage when the chapel bell chimed three AM.

The long sweep of seats held the memory of bodies. He pulled out the joint he’d been intending to smoke just before he touched the barrel to his teeth.

Nothing made sense. There was an airy whistling off stage right. Denton Thrasher, sans glasses and in frayed plaid pajamas, crossed the stage, dopp kit in hand.

“Denton?” Lotto said.

The man peered into the shadows, clutching the bag to his chest. “Who’s there?” he said.

“Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself,” Lotto said.

Denton padded upstage. “Oh, Lancelot. You startled the sap out of me.” He gave a cough and said, “Do I scent the sultry waft of cannabis?”

Lotto put the joint into his outstretched fingers, and Denton took a drag.