HE ALWAYS SAT IN the back row, as far away as he could get: long skinny body and long face, thin curly hair, dark mustache. Sometimes his bony shoulders were hunched as he peered down at his notebook lying open on that bizarre prehensile arm that grows out of college classroom chairs. Or else he leaned way back, the lopsided chair balanced on two legs and propped against the rear wall, his chest appearing slightly concave beneath his white shirt, and one narrow leg, in jeans, elegantly stretched out to rest on a nearby empty chair.
Casual but tense, rather like a male fashion model. Volatile beneath the calm: someone you would not want to meet on a dark street. His face was severely impassive in a way that suggested arrogance and scorn.
He must have been about twenty-seven years old, an extremely thin young man—ascetic, stripped down to the essentials. His body looked so brittle and so electrically charged that I almost expected crackling noises when he moved, but in fact he slipped in and out silently, in the wink of an eye. His whole lanky, scrutinizing demeanor was intimidating. He would have no patience with anything phony, I imagined; would not suffer fools gladly.
About every fourth or fifth class he was absent, common enough for evening-session students who had jobs, families, grown-up lives and responsibilities. I was a trifle relieved at his absences—I could relax—yet I missed him, too. His presence made a definite and compelling statement, but in an unintelligible language. I couldn’t interpret him as readily as I could the books on the reading list.
I was hired in the spring of 1970. It was wartime. Students were enraged. When I went for my interview at Hunter College I had to walk past pickets into a building where black flags hung from the windows. I would use the Socratic method, I earnestly told the interviewer, since I believed in the students’ innate intelligence. To myself, I vowed I would win their confidence. After all, I was scarcely older than they were and I shared their mood of protest. I would wear jeans to show I was one of them, and even though I had just passed thirty and was married and had two children, I would prove that I could be trusted. I was prepared—even eager—for youthful, strident, moral indignation.
Far from strident, he was totally silent, never speaking in class discussions, and I was reluctant to call on him. Since he had a Hispanic name, I wondered whether he might have trouble with English. Bureaucratic chaos was the order of the day, with the City University enacting in microcosm the confusion in the nation at large; it was not unusual for students barely speaking English to wind up in an Introduction to Literature class. His silence and his blank arrogant look could simply mean bewilderment. I ought to find out, but I waited.
His first paper was a shocker. I was surprised to receive it at all—I had him pegged as the sullen type who would give up at the first difficult assignment, then complain that college was irrelevant. On the contrary, the paper, formidably intelligent, jarred my view of the fitness of things. It didn’t seem possible—no, it didn’t seem right—that a person so sullen and mute should be so eloquent. Someone must have helped him. The truth would come out in impromptu class papers, and then I would confront him. I bided my time.
After the first exam he tossed his blue book onto my desk, not meeting my eyes, and, wary and feline, glided away, withdrawing into his body as if attempting a disappearing act. The topic he had chosen was the meaning of “the horror” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the novella we had spent the first few sessions on.
He compared it to Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. He wrote at length about racial hatred and war and their connection in the dark, unspeakable places in the soul from which both spring, without sentimentality but with a sort of matter-of-fact, old knowledge. He knew Faulkner better than I did; I had to go back and skim Intruder in the Dust to understand his exam. I do know that I had never before sat transfixed in disbelief over a student paper.
The next day I called him over after class and asked if he knew that he had an extraordinary mind. He said, yes, he did. Close up, there was nothing arrogant about him. A bit awkward and shy, yet gracious, with something antique and courtly in his manner.
Why did he never speak in class, I asked.
He didn’t like to speak in front of people. His voice and his eyes turned evasive, like an adolescent’s, as he told me this. Couldn’t, in fact. Couldn’t speak.
What do you mean, I said. You’re not a kid. You have a lot to say. You write like this and you sit in class like a statue? What’s it all about?
He was in the war, he said, and he finally looked at my face and spoke like the adult that he was. He was lost for a long time in the jungles of Vietnam, he explained patiently, as if I might not know what Vietnam was, or what a jungle was, or what it was to be lost. And after that, he said, he couldn’t. He just found it hard to be with people. To speak to people.
But you’re so smart. You could do so much.
I know. He shrugged: a rueful, devil-may-care, movie war-hero shrug. Can’t be helped.
Anything can be helped, I insisted.
No, he insisted back, quietly. Not after that jungle.
Hunter had a counseling service, free. Go, I urged.
He had already gone. They keep asking me questions about my childhood, he said, my relationship with my parents, my toilet training. He grinned quickly, turning it on and off. But it doesn’t help. It’s none of that. It’s from when I was lost in that jungle.
You must work, I said. Don’t you have to talk to people when you work?
No, he was a meter man.
A what?
He went around checking on cars, to see if they had overstayed their time at the parking meters.
You can’t do that forever, I said. With your brains?
Well, at least he didn’t have to talk to people, he said sweetly. For now. Maybe later on he would get braver.
And what would he do if I called on him in class? If I made him talk?
Oh no, don’t do that, he said, and flashed the wry grin again. If you did that I’d probably run out of the room.
I never called on him because I didn’t want to risk seeing him run out of the room. But at least we stopped being afraid of each other. He gave up his blank look, and occasionally I would glance at his face, to see if I was still making sense or drifting off into some seductive, academic cloud of words.
I’ve thought of him a lot over the past twenty-five years. I think of him every time I see young men entering an Army recruiting office. I think of him every time I hear presidents announce plans to send troops to some faraway jungle or desert, the prefab, endlessly recyclable phrases billowing from their lips: “solemnly pledging,” “protecting,” “upholding commitments,” “defending,” “taking every measure to ensure.” Not one yet has pledged himself to the defense of this country’s young men, “taking every measure necessary” to “ensure” that their genius does not turn mute and their lives become the spoils of war.