FIVE

Sleep hits me hard, a fact that embarrasses me sometimes. I sleep through operatic windstorms, hail, and even once when a neighbor was arrested one Fourth of July for firing clip after clip from his M-16.

I tugged the earphones out from under the bed, a feat of great skill for someone as sleep-sodden as I was, The Human Jellyfish Grows Fingers. I listened to a CD Bea had loaned me, by a blind man who had been dead sixty years. Bea likes this, tapes of early Hawaiian folk music, Cajun yodel-masters, the bagpipes of the Isle of Skye. I had the feeling Bea could teach me a lot about music. The guitarist was pictured on the cover of the CD. One of the guitar strings had broken and hung like a long silver hair off the neck of the instrument. His lips were parted in song, and his eyes had that empty gaze of blind people, eyes like fingertips.

When I woke again I was late.

Her briefcase was spread all over the dining-room table, folders and multiple listing books, little photos of houses for sale, her business cards, FLORENCE MADISON, with a tiny photo of her smiling face before she let her hair grow long. Her maiden name had been Gant, but she was convinced Dad’s last name sounded better. Escrow folders had spilled onto the floor, confidential financial reports, loan applications, credit ratings. My mother could find out who owned any property in Alameda County by tapping her Social Security number plus a three-digit code into the computer in her home office, a cluttered hideaway just off the dining room.

I didn’t bother being extra quiet; I had no time for that. An empty bottle of Bacardi rum glittered beside the toaster. I shook up a plastic bottle of fresh-squeezed orange juice, mostly pulp after a week in the fridge. I thought I heard Mom call my name, but when I paused, toothbrush stuffed into my mouth, all I heard was a neighbor kid yelling at another neighbor kid somewhere in the distance.

Laney College is an orderly assembly of buildings beside an estuary of ducks and a few spindly reeds. There is almost always a hot-dog stand—a cart on wheels and a man who will nab a wiener off a rotating grill with a pair of pincers. You can wander around the campus and never get the idea it is a school. The office windows have been treated with a gray tint so when you peer in to see what is going on inside, you see yourself hunching in to take a look. Even when you see something, it’s a box of paper clips or a computer and an empty desk. You never see anyone reading or punching away at a keyboard.

This morning the campus was vacant, entirely, like during a bomb threat. The hot-dog stand was double-chained to a lamppost, padlocked shut. The GED exam was scheduled to be held in the cafeteria. I was there five minutes early, but the room was empty, vending machines of canned fruit juice and sandwiches against a far wall, tables ready for people, folding chairs ready, but no one around. The clock on the wall was the same size as a clock in a much smaller room, an ordinary black-and-white classroom clock looking tiny over the EXIT.

The chalkboard, one of those brown boards in a wooden frame on wheels, had printed on it, neatly and so small it was hard to read: GED TEST IN ROOM 111. BRING PHOTO ID.

I ran upstairs, passing door after door with no number, Computer Room, Counseling Department, Financial Assistance. This was a nightmare campus, ready for business, but all the human beings gone. I stood outside a door marked SECURITY and jiggled the doorknob. I thought I heard noises from within, but they were sleepy noises, someone rousing, stretching, wondering if that pounding was coming from the door.

“Room one-one-one,” said a campus cop when the door finally opened up. I had asked for room one-eleven, but the cop made it a little game, saying the three ones again. “You have to be in one-one-one in two minutes,” he said.

“I’m afraid I got a little lost,” I said.

He took me by the arm and stretched out a hand, a crooked finger pointing.

“But,” he said, “you better move.” He said move in a way that stretched out the word and indicated how impossible it was.

I made it to the room just as a box of exams was being opened, shipping tape torn off a box stamped CALIF. STATE DEPT. OF ED. I handed over my driver’s license, out of breath. I counted out the money I had kept in a special compartment of my wallet.

People lounged, chewing gum or fingernails. Someone read a sports section, someone plucked at a tangle of earphone wires, in no hurry, the knot a kind of hobby. My dad had called up and made the arrangements, letting me take the test with a group of people who were older than I was, a couple of them much older, heavy, gray-haired men. The myth about the GED test was that convicts took it in prison, and ex-cons, trying to get jobs in barber college and bartender school. The room was mostly men, picking pimples, sucking hangnails.

It was a little like the time I was arrested and watched my fingers being rolled on the black gooey ink and rolled again over the space on a white card, each fingerprint spread out wide and flat. The room had that same stillness, another planet, a system that felt no love.

I sat in the front, far from the door, where I could stare into a corner. A little empty bracket gleamed at one edge of the chalkboard, where an American flag was supposed to be.

“I am your test administrator for today,” said a tall woman with a gold jacket and gold pants, round hoop earrings. She had dark hair pulled back in a frilly little bun and caramel colored skin, hot pink lipstick like a road flare. She said she would like to welcome each one of us and wish us a very good morning. She acted like someone who had been flown in from some more stylish city to watch us all fail.

We took a few moments to squint at the pencil points or straighten the test sheet on the desk, like putting a place mat out for dinner. “You may begin when I say, ‘Start,’” said the woman in gold. I caught her eye and she gave me a smile. People can be nice at the strangest times, giving someone about to be booked for assault a paper towel so he can wipe the ink off his fingers.

The volume of a cylinder equals the square of the radius times pi times height. The volume of a cone equals one-third the square of the radius of the base times pi times height. Take any number away and you have that other number that is always there, waiting, the blank eye that never closes, zero.

When I was in third grade, I told my fellow students that the woman who invented math had been killed in a fire. It was a good thing, I said, because she was putting the finishing touches on something even worse than math, something the schools were aching to get their hands on.

In the exam I was taking that morning, silos had to be filled with rice. Rocket fuel had been depleted by so much per minute over so many kilometers per hour. Gravel had been delivered by the cubic meter to be distributed over a parking lot that was so many square meters, over so wide a distance that I skipped the problem intending to go back to it later. Rivers flowed so much per second over dams, the basic rules of math right there for me to show off my knowledge, number added to an unknown, an unknown in a fraction, numbers with exponents. A, b, c, d. Or none of the above.

The written part of the exam was on a lined sheet. At the top of the sheet was a blank for my Social Security number. Write an essay of two hundred words. The back of the sheet was labeled, down at the bottom, under For Official Use Only: Reader Number One, Reader Number Two, with spaces for the readers to score the paper.

Various people have a strong influence, positive or negative, on our development. Describe such a person and explain how this person had an influence on your life.

Who makes up these tests?