Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

On Swamplandia! the crickets sang to announce the day’s transition to evening, the flash of pink to black time that meant: deep summer. Vernal currents, an air as lushly populated as seawater, deer flies and damselflies, a whole cosmos of mosquitoes: all this iridescent life rose out of the solution holes at dusk. Seths bellowing in gravelly eruptions, launching that strange sound at the sky until you braced yourself for an astral landslide. Crickets meant that the moon was up, that a tide was rising, that his mother or the Chief would soon be calling for them across the mudflats …

“Oh fuck,” Vijay muttered. “Traffic.”

The Volvo was trapped inside a tunnel, sedans and a crocus-blue delivery van and one snouty limousine beeping all around them. Kiwi felt his lungs fanning open and shut, the first white tinge of panic. He shut his eyes and pictured the ocean. Vijay was twisting the knob of the radio, and Kiwi heard the “cricket bits” song fly past on three different stations. He heard the jingle for the World of Darkness: “Jo-nah survived the Le-vi-a-than …” Finally the cars began to move. When he opened his eyes, Kiwi saw a slab of blue night up ahead — and then the stars began to fly. The Volvo jumped forward. A rain-soaked banner sagging from the roof of a two-story building read LOOMIS COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE.

“Have a good first day at school, son,” Vijay giggled.

“Okay!” Kiwi waved Vijay off the premises. “Thank you! I can take it from here.”

Night school was held in a chilly top-floor room of the community college, now dark and humming, the moon floating like a buoy just outside the window. Kiwi opened door after door onto empty classrooms. “Hello …? Uh, is this … school?”

Kiwi had purchased all these rainbow multiclip folders, which he carried fanned against his chest, like a float in search of a parade. The floors squeaked under his sneakers. The same moon greeted him in all the empty rooms. Kiwi wondered if he’d messed up the time and date.

“Are you looking for Miss Arenas’s class?” snapped a janitor. “You’re on the wrong floor.”

“Cool. Thank you.” Kiwi could feel the janitor’s hatred rising out of the darkness like heat from a vent; this was another new mainland experience for Kiwi: to feel immediately hated, to be anonymous and hated. “Wow, those are some quality gloves, sir. I work at the World of Darkness and the management is really parsimonious about our supplies …”

The janitor, a whiskery man with blue exhausted eyes, gaped up at him.

From the stairwell, Kiwi heard the always-intimidating squeal of mainland girls’ laughter — a wolf pack howling for blood on an open glacier would have been less terrifying, the bellow of a thousand Seths would be a lullaby — and he followed their voices to a crack of light below the stairwell. When he touched the knob the door swung back.

“No, I don’t want to hear excuses. You’re late. I was about to lock up.”

Had he missed the class? The teacher was a tall, unsmiling woman in high-waisted pants with a nickel-bright Afro. Her body had a switchblade beauty that Kiwi was not encouraged to continue appreciating by her face.

“You just going to stand there? Shut your mouth, find a desk. One warning. You can’t get here on time, don’t bother coming.”

She wrote her name on the board and underlined it with a defiant little flourish: VOILA ARENAS. “I will be your instructor,” Voila Arenas said, chalking urgently, as if human life were an equation they were going to solve together in the next hour and twenty-two minutes. Facts screamed at meteoric speeds across the board.

“We’re all adults here, so you can call me Voila.”

Somebody in the back left corner made a crack about a magician’s hat and a vagina and the room roared.

“Excuse me? My parents were first-generation immigrants.” Voila locked black eyes with Kiwi as if she suspected him of being the joker. “It’s a beautiful word.”

“My name is Kiwi,” Kiwi offered.

Everybody had to introduce themselves and say something about why they had chosen to enroll in Voila Arenas’s GED class. When it was Kiwi’s turn, he told the truth: “I am a Bigtree alligator wrestler. I’m here because my dad put us under a mountain of debt, and I need to make money, and to do that I need to get my high school equivalency.” He paused. “I aspire to get a scholarship to a four-year university.”

“I ass-pire to fuck a bitch with great ass cheeks!” The kid behind him giggled.

“White boy’s here to tutor us,” said another white boy, a corncob-haired Midwestern-looking kid. “Community service! White boy trying to …” Kiwi heard sniggers and a few affirmative grunts. The insult drifted into something unintelligible. It took a beat to realize that he was the joke here, the punch line — he didn’t think it came naturally, to see yourself as an object. It was like conjugating your own name in a foreign tongue. So: in Loomis County he was a “white boy,” apparently. This was news. Well, it’s not like I can disagree —Kiwi stared at his skin in the pencil’s aluminum rim. He wished he could explain the island to these city kids, though. Could tell them about Chief Bigtree’s “Indian” lineage; how as a kid they’d put makeup and beads on him, festooned him with spoonbill feathers and reptilian claws; how at fourteen he’d declared: “I’m a Not-Bigtree. A Not-Indian. A Not-Seminole. A Not-Miccosukee.” This category “white” gave him a whistling fear, a feeling not unlike agoraphobia. “White” made Kiwi Bigtree picture a vast Arctic plain, a word in which one single person could never survive. Whitey, white boy —Kiwi didn’t like getting snowballed into a color. But maybe everybody felt that way about their adjectives, Kiwi thought. He remembered the feeling of coming down the Loomis ferry dock with his battered Swamplandia! duffel into a wilderness of faces.

Kiwi wondered if Miss Voila Arenas always began the class with this question. Several female students in the class had gotten pregnant and had to drop out of regular school; one slight young man had escaped a horrific home life, alluded to by the student in monotone; several admitted to having fallen into Loomis solution holes of drug use or unintelligent, repetitive crimes and crawled back out again; or they were ESL, new arrivals from Ecuador and Pakistan and Cuba. There were many older folks, too, older women especially. The oldest student, a woman with sparkling, hooded eyes, was wearing a bomber jacket worn to peach fuzz at the elbows and had brought a stack of old textbooks with her from her high school in Havana. She’d covered them in plastic. Kiwi disliked her immediately. How stupid could you get, carting all your Communist books to Loomis County? It wouldn’t occur to him until their fifth class together that his classmate’s stack was perhaps not so dissimilar from his own Field Notes and the soggy 1962 encyclopedias shelved in his bedroom at Swamplandia!

That first night Voila passed around a sheet. Diagnostic Test. Kiwi’s neck ached. He could hear the clock tick and the distancing breaths of the other thinkers, the way their cognition seemed to be happening down long, echoey corridors, somewhere impossibly remote. Words he hadn’t understood in the questions appeared again, in new orders, in the choice of answers. It was like an evil game of musical chairs. Names crowded into his brain, a drunken stadium of names, refusing to get quiet and organized.

Part I: True/False/Uncertain

“The fact that total revenue rose when half the crop was destroyed indicates that demand for coffee is inelastic … ”

“Substituting in the information about price and utility, we get …”

“Cross-multiplying for x , we get …”