William Gaddis - J R

— And sixty-three cents, Mrs Joubert finished, a gentle bulge rippling from her knee as she shifted her weight in departure to disappear in the swirl of her skirt as the quarter bounding from the billowing trouser cuff drew Bast in a headlong lunge after the exhaust of Whiteback’s car shearing from the curb, rounding the corner into Burgoyne Street to course through the shrieks of saws and limbs dangling in unanesthetized aerial surgery, turning at last into the faculty parking lot and into Gibbs’ limited vista from a second floor classroom window watching Mrs Joubert alight and come toward the portal beneath him, knuckles gone white where he grasped the cold radiator staring down into the loose fullness of her approach till it was gone beneath the sill, and he turned back to the darkened classroom to face the talking face in flattened animation on the screen itself until the tension of watching without listening broke the surface in a slight twitch of his own lip and turned him back to the window looking down, now into the wide eye of a camera aimed up at himself and the frieze of teachers similarly abandoned in windows surmounting the dedication of the school hewn over the entrance.

— EBΦM ΣAOH AΘΘΦBP…

— Oh, can you read it? asked the young man with the camera, lowering it to join the congregation of cameras, meters, and accessories strung from what convenient protrusions his lank figure afforded.

— Not exactly read it, said his companion, a scrap of paper spread on the back of a heavy book in the crook of his arm. — But I thought I’d copy it down, it might make a good epigraph for the book when I find out what it means. And get some of those blank faces. There, the one at that window having a smoke in the boys’ washroom while his class is being taught by television, speaking of technological unemployment.

— I don’t think that’s a point the Foundation wants you to stress, particularly. But it’s your book.

— But you’re paying for it.

The camera snapped and joined the others, swinging to their stride as they passed in beneath the sill and out of the view of Mister Gibbs, molested from behind by words,

— Energy may be changed but not destroyed…

From a basement door Mister Leroy rose into the sunlight bearing a pail and his smile, intimate even at the distance turned directly up to Gibbs before there was chance to evade it, as he glided over the gravel in the silence of the boxing shoes laced tightly to the image of nonviolence his passage insisted everywhere he went.

— Scientists believe that the total amount of energy in the world today is the same as it was at the beginning of time…

— Turn that off…

— But wait Mister Gibbs it’s not over, that’s our studio lesson we’ll be tested on…

— All right let’s have order here, order…! he’d reached the set himself and snapped it into darkness. — Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

— But we didn’t have any of this, you…

— That’s why you’re having it now! Just once, if you could, if somebody in this class could stop fighting off the idea of trying to think. All right, it all comes back to this question of energy doesn’t it, a concept that can’t be understood without a grasp of the second law of, yes? Can’t you hear me in the back there?

— This wasn’t in the reading assignment and that…

— And that… he paused to align pencils on his desk all pointing in the same direction before he looked up to her far in the back bunched high and girlish by a princess waist, bangs shading the face pancaked into concert with her classmates in the shadowless vacancy of youth, — that is why I am telling it to you now. Now, the concept we were discussing yesterday, first a definition…?

— The tendency of a body which when it is at rest to…

— Never mind, next…?

— And which when it is in motion to re…

— I said never mind! No one…? Does anyone dare try to spell it then…? He turned reaching high enough on the board to pull up his jacket for a glimpse of blue drawers through a hole in the trouser seat, wrote e and waited.

— E?

— Yes e, obviously. What comes next.

— N?

Gibbs repeated — n, and wrote it.

— D? as the bell rang.

— Correct, t, r, o, p, y, he finished the word and broke the chalk in emphatic underline, turning past the toss of blonde hair repeated in the thighs as she stood up and joined the surge of disorder at his back, his lower lip now caught between his teeth in a way that seemed to dam his spirit as he regained the window and the open parking lot below where now, all continent and unaware of fragmentation in another mind’s eye, Mister diCephalis came carrying a child’s umbrella in the congruous fashion it feigned here in the small, rolled, black, its handle a curve of simulated birch hooked on his wrist as he passed under the inscribed lintel and pushed at the glass door that never yet had opened in and did not now, stopped to unlimber the umbrella, pulled the door open, and moved at home through crowd and noise toward a door of wood and thick as his wrist which swung lightly closed behind him, not for being well hung but because its hollow core reduced it to a swinging sign for the word Principal and a sounding board diffusing the racket in the hall into the presence of moderation and benign achievement themselves diffused, along with the Horatio Alger award and fifty-six honorary degrees when hung, high in the confines of a single face framed cheaply on the wall in witness “that confidence, a belief in ourselves, individually and collectively, is a very important feature in the degree of activity you normally anticipate in our economy,” resolve that “if we have the courage, if we have got, you might say, the widely held determination to move courageously, there is no question in my mind but that it would be helpful,” only the eyes tinged with alert vexation over “whether or not a campaign for bringing about this kind of confidence is the best thing, I haven’t thought of that as a public relations problem that has yet come to me…”

— The fear psychology, the drills, all that stuff and junk, came the voice of Miss Flesch hacking through the diffusion that bore him on toward the inner office, eyes lowered from initial confrontation where she’d look at him, at anyone, her own eyes wide and wild as though she’d been touched privately or slapped. — It’s not the kids, they think the drills are a game, crawling under their desks and everything, they have a ball. It’s the parents that make the trouble, she concluded through bread, the gone bite in her seed roll smeared with lipstick like the coffee cup at her knee on the desk, and the cigarette, raised quivering now her contact lenses were in focus and she looked at him with neither that precipitate outrage nor, in fact, much interest at all, as he surreptitiously rid himself of the umbrella, hooked it on the rim of a metal school wastebasket, before advancing to shake hands.

— Dan? Mister Hyde, on our new school board. This is Dan diCephalis, Mister…

— Major Hyde, Dan. Good meeting you… loomed worsted with a bluish tinge in arbitrary sway over the pastel arrangement behind the desk, cordially drawing Mister diCephalis half out of a sleeve of knife edge pressed nondescript. — We all know Dan here from the school television. Driver training, right Dan?