ANEW: Manchild at Yale: A Novel -- Chapter 12 (working title)
Episode #12 -- Formerly B.C.Y.: A Novel (working title)
We sang it before, and we’ll sing it again, like Jim Morrison: “This is the end. My only friend. The end.” We are at the end of Manchild at Yale: A Novel. I certainly hope you enjoyed it. I hope you stuck with it. I even hope you told your friends and other reading buddies about it. This should be the time to thank people, and remind you that this is a work of fiction, even if some names and events are not made up.
The original working title of this novel was B.C.Y.: A Novel. The B.C.Y. stood for “Bright College Years,” which is the name of Yale’s Alma Mater, but that somehow did not seem appropriate, too ironic, and too on the nose. Plus, someone else wrote that book. We have left the Alma Mater for the end of football games and sing-alongs at reunions.
Manchild at Yale: A Novel, or rather Schaeffer, is certainly a lot like me, but he isn’t me. He’s much more in touch with his feelings than I ever was at that age. He’s impressive by that standard, but so stunted at the same time. It doesn’t matter. Art seeks to make you think. I hope Manchild did just that.
The idea for what’s next is to revise it where it does not quite work and see if it wants to live a life all of its own. To get off of his father’s dime, as it were. Only time will tell. If you think it deserves a larger audience and more room to roam, let me know, and I will see what I can do. If you don’t, thank you anyway! I appreciate that you have come this far.
Truly, I can’t wait to see what Schaeffer does in the world all by himself, and what it is when Manchild at Yale: A Novel is finally in its fully published book, e-book, and audiobook forms. I especially like the idea of giving it the Anna Deavere Smith and Spalding Gray treatment. I’m curious to see how Schaeffer wants to show up in the world and in the lives of people he doesn’t yet know.
Buckle up!
Preface: This is a serialization of Manchild at Yale: A Novel (working title). Remember, you can always jump in wherever you are. If you missed the earlier Chapters, you can find them here: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, and Chapter 11.
Chapter 12
The final weeks of school were so much of a blur. I could not fathom that any of this would end well. I saw Hellé at work once, but I decided to take the entire rest of the month of April and May off to get through the end of school – reading week, finals, and senior week. When I saw Hellé, she purposefully and conveniently looked the other way each time I glanced in her direction.
I couldn't care less. She was fooling around now with an old boyfriend – some famous architect’s kid – that she dumped to be with me. He was pathetic, I thought. Then, I realized I was pathetic for getting embroiled with a woman ten years older than I was and towards the end of my academic career, which could have derailed my desire for “COMPLETION.” Some of the sign that I made had finally dropped behind and under my bed in a very forlorn state, mocking my efforts. Now missing were the “C-O-M” and the hand-scrawled “I-O,” making “P-L-E-T” and “N” all that remained. When I said it fast to myself, I thought “play to win,” or worst yet, “play on, negro.” So, I did.
I wrote for three weeks straight, ‘round the clock, forgoing caffeine to not repeat the past, as I finished up paper after paper for my various classes. Playing it as it lays. Thank you for the inspiration and for mocking my life, Joan Didion. One paper I wrote was on “Ode to a Nightingale,” which I did pretty much a literal translation of – from English to English. No one in their right mind would give me a passing grade on that. Yet, they did. Funny that!
I also took a seminar course in Calhoun College that I loved from one of the filmmakers of Victory at Sea. I didn’t realize how inspired I was by World War II, or at least how inspired I was about the propaganda storytelling of World War II. I was wondering aloud towards the end of the term why I couldn’t have just concentrated on wars, any wars really, as opposed to reading and writing about teachers navigating the freed men and women of the Civil War. It was so arcane. It made no sense this idea of original research and trying to come up with unique ideas when I could barely think straight because I was so damned tired all the time, and my head was throbbing from all of the material I was having to absorb and analyze.
I met the dawn five times in my dorm room in the span of eight days that early May before reading week. Headache aside, I was wrapping things up, but I couldn’t think about being done for nearly two weeks. I could hear Ethan’s sonorous and musical snoring in the next room. He, too, had to buckle down and was finishing up his essay on some economic theory or other that he was working through with his advisor, Charles Essex Carruthers. How he got that dude on his side was beyond me, but there it was. I rubbed my eyes and felt the strangest thing; my fingers were like jello.
Then it hit. I began to feel oddly out of my own body. I had to think fast. What did I eat? Did I have anything to eat today? Yesterday? I was going a hundred miles an hour, but I wasn’t getting sleep. I got about six hours two nights ago. Or, was it six hours over three days? I couldn’t remember. Six hours of sleep was a luxury, which was more than I was used to since Hellé slammed the door in my face. I also felt oddly like my throat was tightening up, like there were hands around my throat. Not like I was having an allergy attack, but like someone was choking me. I was losing consciousness. I couldn’t think. What was it? What was it? What was it?
I was once again on the train platform at an elevated station not on the Illinois Central. We never went on the ‘L,’ at least not since Mylie and I were little, little boys. Actually, I don’t believe that Mylie was ever a little boy.
Over in the distance, down the middle platform, I saw this small man in a fedora. From a distance, he looked like a White man, but when I went up closer, I could see that maybe it was someone I knew. Just then, from either direction, two trains arrived at the station at the same time.
I thought of that math problem that I remembered as a kid, “If a train left Poughkeepsie and New Rochelle at the same time, one was traveling at….one was traveling at…”
I looked up, and the man turned around as the doors of the ‘L’ opened. It was him. It was him! I called out, “Dad. Dad. Dad-dy. Dad!!”
As I ran down the north end of the platform, the doors to the train closed. They closed before I got there, and the train began to move again, slowly at first, then picking up speed.
I ran in the opposite direction, shouting, screaming, until I ran out of room. The last thing I yelled was the last thing I could think of before the train went into a tunnel:
“Little Man!”
With that, he turned around – away from my direction – and was gone.
I woke up in the hospital. When I came to, I was surrounded by my family, and everybody was crying.
“I was intubated, but all I could think was, “Uh oh, somebody must have died.”
Then blackness.
Suddenly, we are back.
The giant screen flickers, and the cage’s lock that is somewhere down in the recesses of the ship unhitches.
KAAA - LACK.
I note that I can’t feel my legs. I cannot feel anything underneath me, and even my fingers, hands, and arms feel weak and atrophied. I have been in for so long. A hand extends out through the opening where the bars used to be, which contains this poor figure of a human. I stand, weakly, haltingly.
The body is mine. The outstretched arms are…
“Vivi-…”.
“Here. Come here,” she says.
And I do. She lifts me up – max assist –and I embrace this contemporaneous version of my long-gone friend. She smells of jasmine and a hint of honeyed-vanilla, wearing a summer version of that white jacket to match her dress. A lab coat, but not a lab coat. Silk? Satin?
“Viv…Vivi-…Viv…” I can’t get all the words out.
“Not Viv. Vivian. It’s Vivian, remember.”
“I thought you had…”
“What? Left for good?” She laughs that soft, sweet September laugh that I knew. “No. You are silly. So silly.”
The light is blinding. I have been in and out of it for so long, and I cannot see anything as my legs and the rest of my extremities move. Some reaching, but not actions of my own making. My legs, not my legs, move ever forward into it. Into that light.
“Careful,” she reaches back to keep me steady on my legs that don’t quite work. Fingers and hands, not working either. Legs are like a Slinky. Oddly robotic. She steadies me and keeps me from collapsing or… “You’ll fall off the stage,” she warns, and I stop.
“What?!” I look down and there, about two feet in front of me, is the slightest three-inch lip above the stage’s apron right before the orchestra pit, and well before the aisle in front of the first row, there is a drop of about eighteen feet. A chasm. I can see the drop and some of the people beyond the separator between the pit, the aisle, and the front row. There are people. People in the first three rows – and beyond. “This…”
“That’s right,” she encourages, urging me to continue with her eyes.
“This…” I say haltingly again. I can’t quite think of what comes next.
“This Is Your Death.” She blurts. And the crowd erupts, like a good studio audience does.
I cower at this – hunched again – because this is not what I want. This is no celebration. This is no fancy ending for a man who isn’t. A man? Something else?
“I don’t want…”
“Thiiiiss,” She exclaims. “IS. YOUR. DEATH.” Vivian is both the host and unseen announcer.
I can now see deep into the cavern of the theater. My eyes adjusting to the darkness, to the faint light of the exit signs. It’s the movie theater again aboard the massive ship that is filled with Seabees. They are everywhere, and they are cheering. Going crazy like a 1950s game show ought to do.
“Let’s bring on our first guest. Schaeffer.” With that, Vivian, not-Viv, has morphed into our host for the evening, complete with a pencil mustache, thin dark grey suit, and skinny tie, scorchingly washed-out from the urgent and bright klieg-lights that whip around at grand openings but suddenly get trained directly on us. Howitzers. They are electric!
“All the way from Freshmen year, it’s Abner!”
“Daaaa-da-da-don-DAAAAAAAAAAA” The music’s anthem swells even as it mocks.
“Hey, Schaeff! Or, should I say, ‘Shaver!’”
Abner is playing to the crowd of sailors who are laughing even as I bend in pleading for it to stop. What kind of mockumentary is this that I can’t make it…
“You never could set your priorities all that straight, Li’l Man’s Little Man!” As he points at my hair, where my little round hat should have been.
Laughter again, from the crowd. Subtle this time and not mocking with a few subtle chortles like on a broadcast of “Hazel” or “I Love Lucy.”
“How does that feel in your body?”
“It feels like…” I start to say.
She turns to the crowd abruptly and says, “Unfortunately, Abner can’t stay, and we don’t have time for you to reply,” opines Vivian, the Talk Show Host. “We have so many people to get through for this to end.”
A loud “Oooooooooo…” as if there was going to be a fight.
“Can I say something?” I ask.
The audience erupts in fantastic guffaws again. This time, as if they saw a cute puppy given to the Beaver; they just keep laughing..
“I guess that’s a no, Schaeffer. You know the drill, right?”
I shut up. Tight. Because I do. I have, too.
Over the course of the program. Everyone I ever knew, seems-like, during the four years at Yale, come out on stage with a funny anecdote. To remember. To declaim. To make fun of or mock. But not really. On me, it would have been self-deprecating. Ethan. Ari. Mr. & Mrs. Master. Cheever. Cleaver. Brook. Lydia. Hellé. Mrs. Kendricks. Cedric. Mylie. Mama. Mymama. Everyone. The final guest is L’il Man.
“I’m right here.” My Dad ends the final segment of the show by repeating, “I’m right, right HERE.”
“How does that feel in your body?” Vivian’s tagline is hurled at me until people start to say it in the audience, laughing.
“I’m…”
“Good!” Vivian points to the back of the theater, and we are suddenly there, together.
I grip the railing so tight, my legs still wobbling, like I have been knocked down and out in a boxing match and am just coming to, to my senses. Awakening.
Both Vivian and I climb the winding spiral staircase slowly, haltingly, so so slowly into soothing natural light, knees knocking, as the men and everyone else hustle on deck up other stairs to take their attention for the grand finale in two long rows, twenty feet apart atop the ship’s deck. Vivian has turned back into her old self by being in the sunlight up top. My eyes adjust accordingly and gradually to the light, to Vivian’s presence, white coat gone now, dress immaculate, breeze-flapped, hair flying, and no longer the host of a game show.
“This was it?” I ask. “Are you really here? Is this really you? Was that Abner? My Dad? L’il…” I hope I will see them again. Maybe they have taken their places at the long end of the line, receiving me back to myself, I wonder.
“Don’t you understand now? Don’t you get it?”
“I-I-I…” My face scrinching up in trying hard to understand.
“You don’t, do you? Or, do you?”
Overhead, an X-15 flies so close that I can see the control tower high above our heads quake. Men, mostly, stand at attention – no applause, no sounds, no salutes – waiting for me, at last, to get steady to my feet. I can see from their eagerness and expectations from their standing stock-still and at attention that they are the same Seabees who were down below with me. Who watched the movie with me. Who battled right alongside me. Who now are at this quasi-graduation exercise of my leaving. It’s always about leaving, isn’t it? My guests are all gone, though.
“Vivian, where have you been? And, if this is not you, where are you now?”
“Does it really matter? You refused to do the little things. Alone? You were always alone, but never alone. Free but not free. Is that what you really want? Who you really are? Your part?” She turns towards where the jet is now making its way back to us in its boomeranged flight path. Before we realize it, the deafening noise of the jet breaking the sound barrier reverberates all around us as we cover our ears. Again.
When I came to again, I felt a kind of peace and calm that I had never felt before. Like all of the pressure of the world was relieved from me.
The tube was out of my mouth, but I couldn’t talk. I just stared up at the ceiling. It was dark, and the beeps and blinks from the machines next to me told me that something had happened to me. I was the one who had died—or almost.
Then blackness came again.
The next time I remember awakening, I was surrounded by my family again. This time, they were peaceful. They seemed to be at peace. I remembered as a kid, me saying to people, “I’m not going to live to see twenty-one. I’ll be dead by the time I’m twenty-one.”
It was clear that I wasn’t dead. It was clear that I had survived something that probably tried to kill me or something that wanted me dead. But I wasn’t dead.
My voice came back slowly. None of my friends came to see me. Where were my friends? I remembered at that point that I didn’t have many friends in college, as I looked down, I saw a scalding sun-drenched hallway bank of windows in a golden ochre light.
I turned to the physical therapist who was teaching me to walk. I thought that was strange that I had to learn to walk again.
“”Uhhccc, whaa...” I couldn’t get it out. I wanted to just say, but I couldn’t think of the words. I wanted to say, “What happened to me?!”
All I got back was, “Shhhhh…save your voice. It’s hard, I know, but save it.”
What I came to realize is that I had died. I had coded twice, and they brought me back twice. I had really and truly died. I passed away.
How bittersweet to have gone to so much damned trouble to get to the finish line and to not have made it across.
I felt a wave of sadness and futility all at once. No one could understand how small I felt, to have traveled all of this way to be forsaken.
I felt like that image that I had in my last dream, where everyone is at attention but me as I walk the walk, that I am alone, utterly and hopelessly.
I wept then and there. I cried like I had never cried before. My throat felt raw with underuse, and tubes, and crying. I wanted to scream, but all I could muster was a hoarse croak.
Is this it? I thought. Is this all there is?
In that dim light in the corridor down some hallway, my family waited for me. They waited patiently for me.
Today, for the first time, I understood something that I had never understood before. I was not meant to crawl. I was not meant to hide. I was not in some dark hold underneath, riding underneath, like baggage.
We trundled down the hallway past all of the sweet light and into an open doorway, past my sleeping roommate – not Ethan – with his own set of misery, behind a curtain that separated my half from his.
Was that my bed? It was where I lay, I thought. Next to my bed. My bed? Mixed next to the mess of hospital sheets and covers, alongside the tray of food, what was the name of the metal thing atop the tray, I thought? Like the trays I delivered, where was that? Under the cup with the bent straw, next to the rolled up colorful comics from the newspaper, and a quarter-eaten apple. But what about above the bed? Above it all, I wondered, what was that? Something framed. A document. Landscaped. Those words. I know I could not read them. So much goobledy-goop, I huffed in astonishment. Was that Latin? My name was not in Latin. My name. But as clear as day, I saw my name in the center of the document. What did it say? What could it mean?
I thought that I would continue to learn again. That I was meant to run. Someday I would run again, but right now, right at that very moment, I had to learn to do what I had always done, again.
I would learn again. I would play my part. I would learn once more, even if it killed me.
[This was the final chapter of Manchild at Yale: A Novel (working title), Chapter 12. Manchild at Yale: A Novel is a serialized book from ANEW. Spread the word and (re-)read from the beginning: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, and Chapter 11. Tell a friend. Drink some water. Take your meds. Pet a dog. See you soon.]