-1-
The Jesuits place a high value on the written word, so much so that they hire an outsider to run the literary magazine. Under the direction of Batya Pinter, The Millstone garners recognition as one of the finest publications produced by any high school, private or public, in the United States, its stories and poems one step removed from the divine Logos, its contributors destined to achieve great things, heirs to the throne of Carver and Cheever, tutelary gods that guide the pens of these fledgling scribes and lead them toward the sweet promises of alcoholism and self-destruction.
With the release of each issue, agents and publishers scour the journal, hoping to discover and capitalize on the most original voice of a new generation, some enfant terrible who will gleefully stir up trouble on the literary scene, but The Millstone has, at least so far, produced only well-mannered boys who dwell on mainstream subjects that are almost hagiographic in their depictions of common people. According to these young writers, the world is populated not with millions of cynics and miscreants but with unrecognized saints who feed the poor, provide shelter for the homeless, and give hope to the hopeless. They do, however, recognize the sad fact that life is not without its tragedies and injustices, and occasionally they write about the unexpected loss of a loved one–an ailing grandmother, parish priest, family dog–as well as the conventional love story chronicling a forbidden liaison that, depending upon the temperament of its author, ends in either catastrophe or farce.
Despite the journal’s repetitive themes, Eddie Campbell invariably picks up the latest edition. Copies are scattered around campus like stale breadcrumbs left for the screeching grackles that swoop from their roosts high on the bell tower. With the magazine tucked under his arm he hurries to the library, glancing left and right to make sure no one sees him. Alone in a corner, sheltered from the ridicule of his friends by an endless maze of forgotten books, he strokes the glossy cover page and holds the magazine to his nose, takes in the heady perfume of glue and ink. For several hours he immerses himself in the stories, his eyes growing misty at the splendor of the imagery and the slightly discombobulating effect of the terse, parataxis style of the prose, the journal’s trademark.
As he finishes the last story he burns with envy, but no matter how much he wants to hate these elegiac tales, he cannot easily dismiss the fact that the budding writers who publish in The Millstone possess an uncommon ability to translate their experiences into words that mystify and evade him. How do they intimate suffering without sounding puerile and self-serving? How do they describe the mystical without sounding like lunatics and zealots?
Eddie, who is the sports photojournalist for the school newspaper, assures himself that he can rise above the mediocrity of journalism and write something subtle and profound, but whenever he stares into the formless void of a blank piece of paper he finds himself recoiling in dread, reeling from a lack of inspiration. He hopes the condition is temporary. The Millstone is holding its annual fiction contest, and the great Batya Pinter will personally judge the finalists and decide on a winner. Eddie decides that if he ever wants to make a name for himself he must learn the secrets of narrative, the techniques of plot and pacing, and somehow, someway he must get an acceptance letter from Batya Pinter before he graduates.
Normally competition is something Eddie abhors, but at this stage in the game he has few options. He’s a senior now, time is running out. Action must be taken. No sense dreaming about things. Sooner or later he must find out if he is to be one of the chosen, the anointed, or if he is to be dismissed, forgotten, tossed aside. Because the simple fact of the matter is that the school newspaper is a publication that appeals to the less promising students, the ones of middling intellect who have yet to prove themselves worthy of ascending the treacherous steps of the extracurricular hierarchy. Serious writers, those whose philosophical meditations and deft, ironic tales of middle class despair are featured in The Millstone, shun the newspaper for its sloppy reporting and the derisive, needling tone of its editorial columns, a critique that is not without justification.
Truly compelling stories are scarce at a boy’s prep school, so Eddie and his friends on the paper resort to writing cruel reviews–of the annual musical, of the band concert, of the garish décor at the homecoming dance, and especially of the foppish and effete authors who contribute to the literary magazine. Eddie frequently succumbs to the old temptation of sarcasm. Sarcasm is cheap and easy, an indispensable tool for a newspaperman with a limited palette of ideas and a deadline to meet, and as he walks into the newspaper office on Friday afternoon he recognizes this sneering tone in the voices of his fellow reporters. It’s shameful reminder of his own failures, his lack of creativity.
“Where have you been?” they ask. “Busy writing your masterpiece? Your great American novel? Your magnum opus?”
Once again Eddie has forgotten the time and arrives late to the editorial meeting held in a small windowless room located in the subbasement of the main building, a gloomy little space called the Bunker. Its dozen or so inhabitants sit at a rectangular table under a glaring white bulb as if awaiting the Final Judgment. On the portable stereo they blast Die Walkure, Siegfried, Gotterdammerung, death metal operas that thunder like a firestorm. The music drowns out the constant whistle of the radiator and loosens the cracked paint from the walls and ceiling. Stacked neatly on the wooden shelves are provisions to last them a year–pretzels and potato chips and packs of cigarettes that the boys distribute after the Jesuits leave the building for the day. On the table they set up dozens of small green soldiers, plastic figurines with bazookas on their shoulders and grenades in their hands. Mayhem lurks at the fringes of this reinforced concrete vault. There is much suspicion here, duplicity, paranoia.
“The deadline is tomorrow. Did you forget?”
As writers for the school newspaper, his friends are inquisitive by nature, Eddie must always keep this in mind, and no question they ask is ever an innocent one.
“No, I didn’t forget. I was busy.”
“Sure you were. Pulling your pud.”
“I was writing a term paper for you know who.”
Yes, they know who, but he hopes they don’t notice the way he shifts uneasily in his seat. They’re experts at detecting a lie and are always ready to exploit it to their advantage. If they ever uncover his secret desire to write for The Millstone they will torment him without mercy. Worse still, they’ll call him a traitor and ostracize him. Never again will he be allowed to step foot in the Bunker. He must watch his step. Without the newspaper he would have no social life at all.
-2-
Though they never tire of saying that everyone is equal in the eyes of God, the Jesuits clearly favor some boys over others and lavish undo praise on a dolt like the Minotaur, the starting quarterback and swaggering captain of the football team. Meanwhile they castigate their star reporter. Is it because that of the two boys the Minotaur has the more compelling personal narrative–an underprivileged kid from a rough and tumble neighborhood who has been given a rare opportunity to achieve fame and fortune? Eddie can’t compete with such a story. He’s a born subordinate destined to live out his best years in an office cubicle, editing copy for a community newspaper.
At the start of the season the priests insist that Eddie run a full-page feature on the Minotaur. He grudgingly accepts the assignment–what choice does he have?–and before the team begins a scrimmage on Friday afternoon he snaps several photos of a bare-chested Minotaur running laps and doing calisthenics. In the golden sunshine his pecs and abs glisten with sweat, the fibrous muscle tissue rippling like chain mail under his taught skin, the great dome of his shaved head shining like a gazing ball. The pictures seem pornographic in nature, homoerotic even, and Eddie, who is both clever and devious, makes sure the Minotaur poses in such a way that his fingers appear to be grasping the mighty shaft of the brick bell tower in the background.
During the interview, the Minotaur tries to dampen expectations and hints that he may not live up to all the hype. “If things don’t work out with football, if the agents don’t come pounding on my door with endorsement deals, I’ll just become an English teacher. That way I can coach high school football, see. Big money these days in high school football. Look at Coach Kaliher. Guy’s gotta have, like, a hundred grand in the bank by now. Or I might study journalism, become a sports columnist. Like you, right. But I can give readers an athlete’s perspective of the game. There’s money in that.”
Eddie smiles but doesn’t bother to explain that in the writing profession, if it can be called a profession at all, money is hard to come by. Why should he explain any of this? What does the Minotaur know about the subtle nuances of human language? Has he ever read the great books? Probably not. And while it’s true that Eddie has never read them either, not from start to finish, he has made a concerted effort to try to read them. Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, grandiose works of fiction that demand a mediator stand between them and the common reader, a new priesthood of self-appointed critics and college professors charged with interpreting the avalanche of words that make as much sense as certain passages from the gospels, Gnostic or canonical. Eddie is not troubled by his inability to comprehend the esotericism and obscurity of these books. One day he will conquer them. All it takes is a little perseverance. That and brains, something the Minotaur clearly lacks.
As the season gets underway Minotaur Mania infects the entire city. Hundreds of avid fans line up outside the doors of the school to buy season tickets. The cafeteria staff names a series of gruesome dishes after the beloved quarterback–Minotaur Meatball Subs and Minotaur Meat Pies. Eddie, obligated to photograph these steaming piles of inedible mush, holds the plates aloft to better attract the flies that dive like fighter pilots and bounce off the grease-speckled, glass partitions of the buffet. The principal even asks the students to get down on their knees and pray on the Minotaur’s behalf. Can the man be serious? Does he actually believe the creator of the universe will answer such prayers? The Jesuits would never dream of disrupting class to ask the entire student body to pray for an aspiring writer, to hold an all night vigil in the hopes that someone like Eddie Campbell will write a timeless work of fiction. What the priests don’t understand is that prayer, like writing, is a completely solitary pursuit. There is something secretive about it.
In his weekly column Eddie includes a passage from scripture: “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” His pen drips with special contempt for the Minotaur who, as the Jesuits like to say, “is blessed with talent and natural ability.” But herein lies the conundrum that Eddie is quick to expose.
“Is talent really a blessing,” he asks his readers, “a supernatural phenomenon bestowed by God upon the pious, the humble, the meek? Or is it a purely natural phenomenon inherited from selfish, battle-hardened genes and exploited, often by the least worthy among us, to attain goals that are less than admirable? The Church seems to hold contradictory views on the subject.”
The Jesuits express their consternation with this pabulum, particularly the principal, who suggests that maybe with a little more humility Eddie will one day be blessed with a special gift. “From piety comes wisdom and from wisdom comes greatness.” Eddie bows his head and patiently endures this minor tongue-lashing, but he can detect the insincerity in the principal’s voice and plans to one day write about it.
-3-
Eddie may not be a great prose stylist, but he does excel at writing papers for English class, what he thinks of as miniature masterpieces on Lord of the Flies and The Catcher in the Rye. The Minotaur, on the other hand, can write simple declarative sentences but only under great duress. Revision is a waste of time. Rather than correct the errors in his term papers he often inserts more of them. Eddie knows this because he has personally edited many of these papers (for a reasonable fee of course), a morally dubious enterprise but one he is able to justify since he uses the money to buy paperback editions of the classics he claims to admire, Joyce, Beckett, Borges, names he drops in class in a desperate attempt to impress his teacher. Unfortunately for Eddie, trivial knowledge of this sort bores her utterly. She doesn’t even try to disguise her yawn, doesn’t lift a hand to cover her mouth or apologize for her bad manners. Like the other instructors at the school, Batya Pinter has mastered the indispensable arts of insouciance and Schadenfreude and can wield them about with great cunning. Although he knows he is making a fool of himself, Eddie rambles on and on. He can’t help himself. He has a little crush on her.
The Minotaur laughs at him. “You actually get a hard-on for that crusty, old cougar?”
“Old?”
Eddie seems genuinely puzzled. It’s difficult to ascertain her age–forty? forty-five? Though she is rumored to both smoke and drink, she looks much younger and obviously spends as much time working on her appearance as she does on editing the award-winning journal. Her dark hair and eyes have a supernatural power that trumps that of the conjuring priests with their tiresome trick of transubstantiation. Seated behind a massive oak desk cluttered with dog-eared manuscripts, drinking one cup of coffee after another, shaking her head, snickering, scowling, murmuring strange and unholy things under her breath, Batya Pinter has, despite her small stature and her status as a lay person, an aura of inquisitorial wrath about her. In her hand she holds a red pen the way a butcher holds a serrated knife before a steaming carcass on a slaughterhouse floor, and she uses it with skill and precision to slash sentences and to scribble hostile comments in the margins. She tears out entire pages and feeds them to the shredder conveniently located next to her chair. It’s no secret that she finds most of the work she publishes contemptible.
“Insular melodramas,” she grumbles, “written by molly-coddled schoolboys incapable of examining the wider world around them.”
Her demeanor is more than merely serious, it’s severe, and when she begins her daily lecture, she paces up and down the rows and makes her students sit up straight and scribble in their notebooks as though taking dictation. Eddie finds it all very arousing and has to cross his legs to hide his erection. Only the Minotaur ignores her. Most days he falls asleep in the back of the classroom, his textbook propped open by one shaggy elbow, drool trickling from the corner of his mouth and forming deep pools around his chiseled jaw. He farts and belches and picks his nose. Sometimes Eddie feels like a primatologist studying the behavior of a snorting baboon in the wild, observing it scratch in the dirt with a pointed stick to capture termites. To his amazement Batya Pinter rarely reprimands the Minotaur for his crude behavior. In fact, she treats him like an adorable circus bear, gently taps his head, yearns to smooch his enormous muzzle, and invents ridiculous reasons to detain him after class.
Eddie is convinced that if Batya Pinter is smitten with the Minotaur it isn’t because of his imposing physique or his good looks, no, it’s because Eddie has composed so many insightful papers for him. It’s the writing that she truly loves about the Minotaur, it’s his mind, his intellect, and Eddie, delirious with desire for his teacher, has to continually resist the temptation to confess the truth to her.
-4-
It’s Halloween, a day of mist and clouds, a day of black and gritty winds, a day when the ripe breath of autumn has turned stale and rank, a day for mischievous school boys costumed in motley, in rags, in Venetian masks and flowing red robes, boys transformed by the distant smell of wood smoke and rotting apples into dumb lumbering beasts that howl and leap in anticipation of the moonrise; it’s also the last day to submit a story to The Millstone’s fiction contest, the final day for fate to intervene and rescue one gifted writer from the slush pile, but Eddie Campbell, sickened by the idea of having his story dissected by a critical reader and too unnerved to present his manuscript in person, signs each draft with a comic non de plume–Pink E. Vintage, Kit Van Peeking, Kate E. Kingpin. But who is he kidding? A serious editor like Batya Pinter will see through the ruse and recognize his style.
After the last bell of the day rings Eddie goes straight to the library. Sequestered in the shadows like a medieval monk hard at work on an illuminated manuscript, he labors over every word of a tale that he thinks might help him penetrate The Millstone’s inner circle. The plot concerns a seventeen-year old boy who over the course of the semester becomes so infatuated with his teacher that he boldly makes a pass at her. She resists his advances, but the principal, who happens to be passing through the hall, sees what’s happening, misinterprets the situation, and immediately has the woman sacked.
Eddie flips through the pages a final time. The manuscript is neatly typed and properly formatted, its grammar and mechanics flawless, but for all that the story is an absolute piece of garbage, there can be no denying this, and Eddie won’t attempt to do so now. The prose is mannered, the symbols obvious–white doves, candles, roses. He has revised the story so many times that it no longer makes any sense to him. Maybe like his vigorous jackoff sessions it never made sense to begin with, and yet a long time ago someone pondered the sad and ridiculous life of Onan and made even that a sin. The most pitiful attempts at distraction are said to be evil, and Eddie is surprised that the Jesuits haven’t yet condemned creative writing as the spilling of intellectual seed, the murder of a million sacred ideas.
With each passing hour frustration sets in and deepens, and as the five o‘clock deadline approaches thoughts of failure begin to rattle his nerves. He tries to rationalize his fear and self-doubt by imagining a luminary like Vladimir Nabokov submitting one of his own stories to a silly contest. Had he been a young man writing today, Nabokov would probably need to enroll in a creative writing seminar, forced to listen to the inane comments of his fellow students, those sensitive and easily offended poets who complain without end that they don’t feel the story, that it’s well written, yes, but that it’s still missing something, that it’s crude, nasty, hurtful, all under the aegis of an instructor who pinches her chin and silently ponders her own successes and failures.
He begins to wonder why any reasonable human being would want to write for a living, why anyone would do something so egregiously masochistic. He comes to the conclusion that for the true artist life needs to be unnecessarily difficult and unpleasant, that there must be a part of the psyche that yearns for anguish, and when misery cannot be found, writers simply invent anguish for themselves. It keeps things interesting. And that’s the main obligation writers have to their readers, isn’t it? To keep it interesting?
-5-
Eddie gathers up the pages of his manuscript, but before he climbs the stairs to slip the story under The Millstone’s office door he must first go the Bunker. Tomorrow night is the Holy War, the biggest game of the season, and Eddie is responsible for capturing the team’s legendary performance. He descends into the subbasement and is relieved to discover that the other staff members have already cleared out for the weekend. For close to an hour Eddie sits alone at the table and studies a brigade of plastic infantrymen staged for a horrific siege. He hums a march by Wagner, moves the soldiers around, and wonders if it’s bravery or insanity that inspires so many young men to go to war. Maybe it’s xenophobia, maybe immaturity. Whatever it is and whatever regrets they may have once the fighting begins, some of those boys, the fortunate ones, learn the meaning of self-sacrifice, what the priests call agape, which is the highest form of love, and return home with a compelling story to tell. Eddie, on the other hand, is a coward, he’s well aware of this, and will never have a story worth telling. He realizes this now. Best to stick to practical matters. After grabbing his camera, lenses and several rolls of film he turns out the lights, leaves the Bunker and plods up the stairs to the sixth floor.
The offices of The Millstone are a honeycomb of six interconnected rooms, each one guarded by a set of gargoyle bookends squatting on cluttered shelves, their unblinking eyes scanning the stairway for any unworthies who dare enter that sanctum sanctorum. They are the devourers of uninspired tales, shitting them out in hard little pellets and leaving them on the windowsills to freeze against the frosted panes of glass. Eddie imagines the gargoyles fluttering down from the shelves late at night, creeping through the crackling maple leaves to whisper their secrets in the ears of those who have the gift to decipher their cryptic tongue and to transcribe it for readers who will then tremble at the superiority of their vision.
Once he reaches the landing, however, he is surprised to see the door wide open and the room suffused with a muted gray light that blurs the edges of things. The editor sits at her desk, wearing a strange smile. She looks ghostly, phantom-like, a dark presence extracted from a beautiful body. Backing slowly away from the office, cringing every time the floorboards creak and echo through the desolate corridors and gothic archways, Eddie decides to leave the building without submitting his story. It’s the word “plagiarism” that convinces him to stop, to observe things from a distance, to listen closely to the sibilant whispers.
She is not alone, beautiful women rarely are. A silhouette looms over her desk.
“There’s no work on your part,” she assures the figure, “none whatsoever. Just relax. Relax and enjoy.”
“What if someone catches us?”
“No one visits this office. Least of all the Jesuits. It’s six flights up.”
“I don’t know.”
“Trust me. Here, let me help you with that.”
“I’m not so sure about this.”
“You want to pass my class, don’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“Plagiarism is a serious offense, my boy.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Wait. Let me take it out. There. That’s no petseleh you have there, gunsel.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
“This won’t take long, will it? There’s a party…”
“That’s all up to you.”
Batya Pinter laughs at her own pun, but she is so mesmerized by the monstrous thing pulsing before her that the laughter dies deep in her throat. She wheels her chair forward, positions her head, opens her mouth. Her eyes roll back until they are white. The Minotaur stamps his feet. He moans, runs his fingers through her shining hair.
Shaking with outrage, feeling betrayed in a million different ways, Eddie staggers against the wall. His fingertips go numb and he almost drops the pages of his manuscript to the floor. He tries to breathe, forces himself to count backwards from ten. There is no way he could ever outrun the Minotaur and can easily imagine the awful things he will do to him if he is caught.
“The hell was that?” the Minotaur whispers.
But Batya Pinter can only gurgle and choke and try to reassure him with her bulging eyes. She never stops bobbing.
Eddie has a sudden flash of inspiration, an idea so achingly beautiful, so vulgar and salacious and unambiguously American that it cannot fail but change the course of his life. Soon he will be the master, the person in control of the situation, and it is he who will dictate the terms. The sensation is so alien to him that for one terrible second he feels nauseous and fears he might vomit. He snaps open the camera case, carefully loads the film, attaches a telephoto lens. Focusing the camera as best he can, he snaps several pictures in quick succession, one after another. It’s a lowlight situation, the pictures will be a little grainy, that’s to be expected, but Eddie has faith in his abilities as a photojournalist.
He may not be a great writer of fiction, but he can take a damn good picture, and he has just stumbled upon the story of the year, or at least the story of the week (stories rarely last much longer than that these days), a scene of complete and utter depravity. It will lead to an arrest, criminal charges, a drawn out legal battle. The talking heads will salivate, the public will devour it, this simple story of a scarlet woman who has robbed a boy of his innocence and reduced a mighty empire to ashes.
-6-
The Jesuits have their spies everywhere, this is something every student understands, and when Eddie races from the main building he is hardly surprised to see a half dozen figures smoking cigarettes under a streetlamp like a cadre of secret police. In the dread silence they walk toward him, the entire staff of the school newspaper.
“Up in Batya’s belfry, Campbell?
“Tell us, has the bitch gone batty yet?”
“Were you drowning her in the roiling river of your powerful prose?”
“Were you seducing her, plundering the putrid pink petals of Pinter’s pussy?”
“Or is it purely platonic between you and the supreme priestess of poetry?”
As they unfurl their gaudy banners of alliteration his friends snicker, but beneath the rush of words there is real disgust and anger. They long to see him fail and have come here tonight to deliver an unequivocal message: that when the results of the fiction contest are announced and his name is not among the list of honorees they will be waiting for him in the Bunker, unforgiving tormentors eager to apply the screws to his inflated ego. They will publish the names of the finalists and make a special point of mentioning how Eddie Campbell submitted a story but failed to garner any recognition.
“We’ve been observing you.”
“You can’t hide from us. We’re the press, the paparazzi.”
“We know what you’ve been up to.”
“You lust for accolades and awards.”
“And the favors of the quintessential literary slut.”
Eddie turns from them and hurries away. He must escape this wicked labyrinth of hunger and ambition. As he passes the chapel he hears voices. The priests are holding their vigil for the football team. He wants to throw stones at the stained glass windows but doesn’t dare. If it’s true that god punishes talented people for their hubris, what does he do to the mediocrities of the world when they behave in the same way, how does he rectify their arrogance? But Eddie knows the answer to this, has always known. He panics, opens the carrying case slung over his shoulder and examines the camera.
“No,” he whispers, “no, no, no….”
“Why do you look so pale, Campbell?”
“Guilt is written all over your face!”
Suddenly he has the uncanny sensation that the whole universe is just a thin sheet of paper. At any moment it can be ripped apart and everything, every word, every letter, every trace of meaning, will spill off the page and plunge into the void. Things that now seem permanent and imperishable are no more concrete than a tale written in vanishing ink. Clutching his head, lurching along the slick cobblestones, he bemoans his nightmarish fate, that for the rest of his life his own unceasing stupidity will follow him around like a curse. He concedes defeat, and though his friends fail to understand the meaning of his words, he repeats them over and over again.
“The lens cap!” he cries. “The lens cap! It’s still on the camera!”
***
Connor Caddigan
Connor Caddigan’s essays and fiction have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Slow Trains, Exquisite Corpse, Subtle Tea, Cerebration, Fiction Warehouse, The Plum Ruby Review, Ascent Aspirations, Double Dare Press, Tattoo Highway and many others
