Foreword: The crime fiction you are reading has recently been censored and banned by Catholic authorities of Northeastern Wisconsin. To do this, they have manipulated their inappropriate and illegal channels of influence with local authorities legally bound by loyalty to American democracy, to remain neutral and separate in such matters. Which is to say that this is a work of fiction: events described herein are products of the Narrator’s—Speaker’s—Whatever’s—imagination. Any resemblance to factual incidents, places, or persons (real or deceased) is purely coincidental. Besides this, any relationships between consecutively narrated events is also purely coincidental. Causality, whether by natural or supernatural means, is neither expressed nor implied.
In the first place, Ms. Rilke taught at the Catholic High School. Her classroom was a large dull box-like one, in a large dull box-like wing of the building, where all the keyholes were the same, and all the learning posters were the same, and where all the laser printers made the same delayed whirrrrrrrr!-ing sound, and on still days — and nearly all the days were still — seemed to resound throughout the entire system of connected devices, from which an incriminating document got printed.
Nearby that part of the building, but on the second floor, was Mrs. Worden’s room.
It was part of the Science Row.
In Mrs. Worden’s room, there was a wall. On that wall was a leaf of paper. On that leaf of paper was writing, inscribed presumably by her own hand:
“Come to the edge,” said the teacher.
“But we are afraid,” said the students.
“Come to the edge,” said the teacher.
“But we might fall,” said the students.
“Come to the edge,” said the teacher. And the students came, and the teacher pushed them — and They Flew.
He never went in or out of that classroom during those years, without pausing to read that writing on the wall, and reflect on it. By the time he was halfway through his time at that curious institution, he had decided his troubles all arose because of it.
By then, he also could not help wondering, sitting on the risers during choir, if his troubles all arose ultimately because of trying to answer this question, underlying all the others floating through his mind like ghosts: Why was his choral director so obsessed with talking about method acting, instead of musicianship?
“What story is this song telling the listener?” Mrs. Wright would ask over and over again, rather than doing things like introducing the rudiments of written pitch and rhythm to the students, or even just dynamics and tempo marks. “Will the audience believe that you believe in the magic of this song’s story, as they watch you singing it for our concert??”
Curiously self-referential. As if by saying a false thing over and over and over again enough times, that was how you could make it into a true thing.
On one side of the school was the English wing. That’s where Ms. Rilke’s room was, set apart from the other rooms at a certain distance. On the building’s other side was the auditorium and adjoining music room, with risers for the choir, directed by Mrs. Wright, in cadences of quiet desperation. Somewhere between them on the first floor was the Journalism computer lab, producing the school newspaper. Its communications subtly reflected and influenced the ongoing hostilities between the Annual School Musical that went up each February, and the Drama Club, which produced non-musical stage plays in the autumn and spring months, the Musical’s off-season. Directly above the Journalism lab, on the second floor, was the Science Row of classrooms: Mrs. Worden’s domain. Somewhere between that central hub and the Auditorium stood the Main Office suites, on the first floor. These were the domain of the Head, Associate Head, and their secretarial pool. Right next to those suites stood the school cafeteria, with its vaulted cathedral ceiling, and folding round tables.
Each school day, the tables migrated from lining against the walls on the sides, to the floor’s central expanse where the students sat around them to eat. They returned again to the fringes by the end of the day when everybody had gone again. The sixteen panels making up the skylight that stretched over that central expanse reflected everything below, and refracted everything above.
There was, of course, the incident of the skylight.
It occurred on Monday, May 23, 2005. A day of import to the building’s indelible history. The seniors had graduated the previous weekend.
That morning, during the minutes leading up to the day’s first bell at 8:00 AM, the juniors and underclassmen walked into school, to a weird sight visible in the cafeteria, through the glass-paneled doors connecting it to the front atrium. The folded-up tables lined the cafeteria’s walls. A small group of students and teachers congregated in the central expanse. It got larger and larger and larger, as more and more and more people drew nearer and nearer and nearer, to find out the lofty recipient of the others’ attention, that had piqued their own.
They all stared upward.
The looks on people’s faces: you’d think the fucking Martian invasion was landing down on Earth, at last — and of all the places on earth they could have chosen to touch down on first, none other than that curious institution’s cafeteria skylight.
The crowd’s awe was palpable — electric, even.
Somebody had gotten onto the school roof overnight. It must have happened sometime between when the seniors graduated the previous Saturday in the gym, and when the underclassmen returned to school that fateful Monday morning. They had reached the outside of the skylight on the roof expanse that stretched over the dead center of the cafeteria floor. They had spray-painted one huge letter on each of the skylight’s sixteen glass panels, taking care to write backwards, with a thick enough spray-line, in legible enough manuscript, all so that later on, beyond the glass’s other side, far below, onlookers would regard the legible message:
DEBAUCH’S POOP-DICK
Mr. Debauch, if you are wondering, was the associate head of discipline and security at the Catholic high school, then reaching the end of his second year in the post. Charged with enforcing the school’s official disciplinary actions resulting from offenses to the conduct code, he and every other person occupying that post — stretching back to the school’s founding in 1990 — served as the traditionally reviled symbol of institutional authority, against which students directed their vitriol, when they perceived it as curtailing of their freedoms or (more likely) their pleasures.
Then everybody was in first period, because the bell had rung. The intercom crackled to life. Each morning began with a prayer over the intercom. At the moment the speaker in each room of the building began that prayer, everybody was required to stop and listen, no matter where they were, or who they were. This included tardy students scrambling to get to class, and teachers who might have forgotten they had a class to teach that period (which had happened at least once on record), and administrators who might have forgotten they had examples to set (which happened on a concerningly regular basis).
In the recent years leading up to the “incident” in question, there had been only two other interruptions to that unfailing routine: in 2002, students had been called immediately to an emergency assembly in the auditorium because Mr. Schechter, then the school head, had to inform everybody one of the senior boys had gotten himself killed the previous night, driving drunk at 65 miles per hour on the wrong side of the highway. The following year, 2003, there was another emergency assembly that came before morning prayer on the intercom. At that one, the president of the school board informed the student body that Mr. Schechter himself had resigned his post and fled the school.
And this morning, in May 2005, there was this unplanned delay to prayer: no worried-sounding instruction came over the intercom, for students to immediately report to the auditorium. Instead, the voice of Mr. Debauch himself resounded, electronically amplified, around the corners of the school.
“Ahem, I’d like to make this announcement about the graffiti on the cafeteria skylight,” he audibly struggled to maintain composure — that was how angry and humiliated the turn of events had made him, a military veteran and coach of the varsity lacrosse team. He probably wanted nothing more than to find the senior boys responsible — it had to be boys who did it, no self-respecting virtuous girl in the whole of that benighted establishment could have dreamed up such an omen, much less have executed its manifestation — and personally throttle them.
But the decorum of his position enjoined such a response.
Mr. Debauch was fit to be tied.
“I am letting everybody know that we are considering this an act of criminal vandalism, trespassing, and harassment. We have contacted the police, and will be working with them to find the perpetrators of this prank, and see that they face the appropriate consequences for what they have done.”
Despite the AH’s words, no culprit would be revealed. At least not to anybody not already involved with the “Poop-Dick Incident,” as the senior prank came to be known in the lore of the student body’s shared consciousness, over the days, and weeks, and years that followed. For those who knew, it went without saying.
For those who didn’t — well — if they had to ask, they probably didn’t want to know.