Disclaimer: 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.
We return to the third person omniscient perspective, to reflect on the precise circumstances under which Alexandra Worden approached the Narrator—Speaker— Whatever—to unleash a ringing testimony about the authorized, and unauthorized, uses of the spaces around Ms. Rilke’s classroom door, that were known to the teachers and, traditionally, to the sexually active demographics of the student body.
And also, even more traditionally, to anybody in the whole of that benighted establishment, who might have something to hide, and something to lose by having it suddenly found out—and who might therefore have become foolish or desperate enough to have made an unholy pact with the self-appointed proprietress of those remote and desolate spaces, to see that such unspeakable things remained hidden.
Rachel Rafaële Rilke’s realm was as full of secrets as a night sky is full of things both visible and invisible.
The greatest theme paper she ever assigned was convincing that curious institution that she did not exist.
And the way that we know this is true is because the fact also remains:
It is time now to reveal what he had found out about the school building, just before Mrs. Worden told him, without preamble, what she knew.
The fact is that the paper with the writing from Worden’s wall flew out in the darkness, the moment he remembered the time, years earlier, when Alexandra Worden forced Dory McDonald to furnish a handwritten apology to the entire show choir, for her abusive outbursts and interruptions during after-school rehearsals:
Numbered, Numbered, Weighed, Divided.
So read the writing on that piece of paper from Worden’s wall, magically transfigured.
Flying, it left a self-referential paper trail in this regard, to see to it that those things which should see the light of day will become ringing and incandescent, touched by the Grace of the Holy Spirit.
Perhaps it was just an odd coincidence that a moment later, in the carwash waiting area, he saw somebody across the room who at a certain distance looked very much like the selfsame Alex Worden of his recent daydream.
Sitting at a small round table, on a high stool, he did not get up to go say hi to her, or even just to see if the person who looked like it might be her, was in fact her.
By then, it had been years since she had taught him physics at the Catholic high school, and choreographed musicals that he acted in.
Instead, he said hello to Peter Marin, who was standing nearer to the small round table.
By another weird coincidence, he also happened to be waiting for his vehicle to pass through the water and suds works of that carwash, that windy Wisconsin evening.
The Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—and Peter fell to talking of this and that, reflecting on the past they had shared, at that curious institution.
As this occurred, the figure who looked like Mrs. Worden drifted, by chance it seemed, closer and closer and closer in their direction, at that small round table.
She seemed like she seemed like she seemed intently absorbed by the greeting card wracks right near them.
Right near them.
Right Near Them.
His conversation with Peter covered many scenes and characters from the past.
At length, Peter made mention of the precious key ring that came into his possession, during the internship summer he had with Mr. Kohl, the mysteriously-departed ex-head of Information Technology.
That precious ring.
It came to him.
Precious.
After Mr. Kohl left, replaced by Frida Genessee, in November 2004, the key ring remained in Peter’s possession.
Nobody whose opinion could be said to matter seemed to remember that Mr. Kohl had given Peter that ring—least of all, Mr. Kohl himself, whose concern the key could hardly be said to be, now that his employment at that curious institution had after all terminated.
But plenty of others seemed to remember that Peter had kept that key ring.
Perhaps that was why, several months later than many of those others would have liked, Genessee finally caught up with Peter Marin, now graduated.
With the most humorless austerity she could muster in email format, she demanded the return of the ring he had retained, on pain of legal intervention and worse.
She also left voice messages on his mother’s phone, despite that by that point Peter had not lived with his parents for several months.
Maybe the extraordinary measures that Genessee (such a cheerful willing little soul) took to reacquire the ring, were in fact her expression of desperation, because it contained every single key required to open every single door in the whole of that school building that had a lock. In the course of the internship Peter Marin had had under the soon-to-be-terminated authority of Mr. Kohl, he (i.e., Peter) acquired knowledge of the most jealously guarded passwords to the most compromising information about other members of the school: transcripts, disciplinary reports, employment reprimands, mental health histories (especially Ms. Rilke’s), skirmishes with public authorities, and that was just the beginning.
Peter had had it all quite literally at his fingertips.
Besides this—and perhaps more significant to the purposes of this brief, uneasy, biased mystery—he had had at his fingertips a ring of keys, the knowledge of whose contents eventually led to his memorization of the entire school’s layout, according to the precise locations of all its locked doors.
Musingly oblivious that a woman who very much resembled Alex Worden was at that very moment scrutinizing the greeting cards directly behind his back, Peter Marin leaned back in his seat, reflecting to the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever:
“I’m pretty sure I took weed-smoking breaks on the school roof with Mr. Alewife several times during those last few months, before graduating.”
And it was here—as the glance of the N/S/W darted ever so briefly in the direction of the person who looked like she might be Mrs. Worden behind Peter Marin’s back, long enough to register that it was indeed his former nemesis and choreographer Alexandra Susan Spektor Worden, none other—that exactly what he was thinking came out his lips and floated through the air as audible words:
“The school roof? You were…….. . . . . . . . on the school roof?”
And dawning awareness hovered in the air, before the soundwaves that comprised the next spoken words.
“Wait a minute, Peter. DEBAUCH’S POOP DICK. . . . . . . . …..…Was that you??”
And Peter, oblivious to the listening Mrs. Worden, rolled his eyes coyly like he was remembering a passionate love affair he had once had.
“I was not the person who actually got onto the roof and wrote the graffiti on the skylight—but I did furnish that person with the information of the little-known passageway, by which it was in fact possible to infiltrate the school roof from the ground floor of the Priory wing, without passing through a locked door.”
“Okay… and as long as the statute of criminal limitations has passed, do I dare ask how?”
“Remember that janitor’s closet that shared an inner wall with Mr. Hiller’s room?”
They both did.
It was next to the door to Mr. Hiller’s room.
The Writer’s Union meeting spot.
“If you could open the door to the closet,” Peter continued, “you were as good as on the roof. You just had to push through the piled up mops and equipment in the dark, to reach the opening at the back of the closet that led to the metal ladder that stretched upwards dizzyingly. The janitors have been using it since 1990, but for some reason the upper administration has succeeded in suppressing knowledge among most of the teachers and students, that it even exists.”
“Okay… and, well, Peter, if not you—then who??”
And Peter Marin rolled his eyes once again, remembering that long-ago affair, the unseen interrogating Alex Worden marking each syllable, as he intoned:
“Andrew LaBoone.”
Flashback to Peter’s Graduation in May 2005 (Junior Spring)
Peter Marin brought an inflatable beach ball to his own graduation. He hid it under his gown, and pulled it out to inflate only as Ms. Rilke, the Mistress of Ceremonies, began calling out the names of graduates, alphabetically by surname. Once inflated, he served the beach ball with as good of a punch as the volleyball coach could have wished for during a game, and his classmates (and, truth be told, one or two of the teachers sitting in the further rows) took care of the rest to keep that ball in the air.
Soon, many balls were in the air.
Besides this, Peter brought with him a rather loud bicycle horn that he utilized to dispel boredom while he waited his turn, among 147 graduates. The way he did this was by honking the horn loudly every time Ms. Rilke would call out the name of somebody that he had any kind of strong opinion about: friends he was fond of, and detractors he had scores to settle with, alike. Even people who he had never met personally, but who had done things he found memorable, for some strange reason.
It well may be that the boring invisible kids managed to evade the horn’s bombastic fanfare, and the obligation of bopping at the beach balls in the air.
Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
Maybe.
The way graduation happened each year was that graduates collected only the hollow tubes for the ceremonial performance of their graduation—the ritual that included proud parents, and photos for the newspaper and alumni magazine.
The actual diplomas got distributed afterwards, in the hallway, by Ms. Rilke the Mistress of Ceremonies herself, to grads who lined up and held out their symbolic tubes with the openings uncorked.
When Ms. Rilke came up to Peter in the lineup, she said—as if it was all a predictable fact of the proceedings—“Oh, there’s no diploma for Peter. Next up: Marvello, Matthews…”
And on she went like that, without a backward glance.
Peter approached Ms. Rilke awkwardly, after she had distributed all the diplomas, save for his own.
“Uh, Ms. Rilke?”
She turned in his direction with a smirk, and a spiraling silence.
Somewhere near those two, Brin Brown reveled in the glory of being congratulated by her many friends and admirers. Having done with that curious institution once and for all, she now experienced a rush of elation so thrilling that it in fact outstripped the curtain calls of her most glorious lead parts on the stage.
She could never have predicted this emotional catharsis, until it was manifest.
Somewhere else, but also nearby, Mrs. Worden stepped back from the bustle of the crowd, to regard the sight of Peter standing close by the Mistress of Ceremonies, with their heads inclined.
The percipient observer could only have known where Worden’s attention truly focused, if they were sharp enough to spot the beady tinge of the physics teacher’s daydreaming glance, just then.
Stillness enveloped the spaces around Alexandra Susan Spektor Worden, at that moment.
Hers was a listening, watching sort of stillness.
“What happened to, uh, my diploma? Was there some kind of mix-up?”
So Peter asked Ms. Rilke, in her shining robe of honor.
“No, no mix-up, Peter. None at all.”
She kept smirking. Was she going to act this vindictive about the balls in the air and the honking horn?
“Why don’t I have one?”
Nearly all the days were still.
“Peter, I’m afraid you still have not turned in your final research paper for me in Advanced Senior English. Because you never completed the credit for my class, I cannot in good faith give you the diploma that would prove you graduated, Peter. There are rules which must be respected. For me to disrespect them would be unfair and disloyal.”
It is only possible to betray where loyalty is due.
Her precise cadence intoning these words was consistent with her other public postures within sight and earshot of the school’s upper administration, and the Diocesan leadership: humorless as a convent abbess.
She was even at that moment wearing the black robe.
But then, shining in her robe of honor, Rachel Rafaële Rilke’s posture shifted ever so slightly, but in a manner unmistakable to both the eavesdropping Alexandra Susan Spektor Worden—who had worked at the school nearly as long—as well as those students who had had Ms. Rilke in the classroom: in her classroom, at the seam where the school’s Priory wing met its main structure, containing the gym, cafeteria, auditorium, and library.
Hers was a remote and mysterious realm, and she: the curiously exacting mistress of its symbols and rituals.
And so, at that moment, she adopted the tone more familiar to those students who had had her in her classroom, and who had been oriented in her unique confidences for not one, but two whole years.
Students, in other words, like Peter Marin and Andrew LaBoone.
“But for you Peter,” she continued, oozing closer, “I’ll make a special exception to the rules I am bound by honor to refrain from betraying, because you and I are friends. Our friendship means that we both know you’re too lazy to finish that research paper with MLA citations, even under the threat of not graduating because of it. So instead, Peter, just for you, I have a special limited time offer: why don’t you just write me an email about anything you like—anything at all. And I’ll count the text of that email for the credit you would have received had you turned in your final paper for my class. Sound like a plan?”
It was an offer that Peter Marin, for some strange reason, did not refuse.
“She reminded me of the fat girl who will do anything to get the cool kids to let her sit at their lunch table,” Mrs. Worden would later remark to Mrs. Wright, as the two teachers lunched on the school roof, passing a joint between them to take the edge off another day of Rilke-sized antics and mental instability, well known to be a common source of uneasiness among the rest of the teaching staff.
“And I mean anything,” continued Alex Worden, watching the smoke curls disappear into the air. “Use your imagination. Think of anything. She would do—THAT.”
Peter later received his diploma from Ms. Rilke in the mail, but not before writing her a paragraph-long email in which he briefly summarized that he was relieved to have avoided homelessness, sleeping as he was, on a friend’s couch back then, because his parents had quite recently thrown him out of their house. The reasons for this exile remain ambiguous to the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—but may or may not have been only too clear to Rachel Rafaële Rilke.
It is to be feared that the previous testimony has been related, by Peter Marin, at least three times that the N/S/W knows of over the successive years since that fateful ceremony. His testimony has been consistent over time, but also presumably abridged, for reasons that only the percipient reader can speculate upon.
Because the facts remain:
Less than thirty-six hours after that private conversation, resulting in that email, the text “DEBAUCH’S POOP-DICK” appeared in huge letters, on the cafeteria skylight. Courtesy, evidently, of Andrew LaBoone.
Within a year of that infamous incident, immortal among the shared consciousness of the students who witnessed it, Mr. Debauch would have resigned his Associate Head post at the Catholic high school, and transferred to working at one of the city’s godless ghetto public schools that the Diocese was so fond of trashing in their absolutely hellbent marketing scheme to get tax-paying rich people to opt for the “safe, wholesome, moral” education alternative in Northeastern Wisconsin. His public school job would prove easier, better-paying, unionized, and perhaps most importantly: Rachel-Rilke-free.
Her antics and mental instability were well known to be a common source of uneasiness among all the other grownups at that curious institution. Jack Debauch was only one among many.
Nothing beside remains.
But seriously folks. Let’s be honest here. For once. The possibilities are simply endless.
“Ask me a question,” Ms. Rilke would so often command in the classroom, to initiate a lively discussion of opposing viewpoints among students whose well-being and safety it was in fact her duty to uphold, despite that you could be forgiven for assuming, based on dispassionate scrutiny of her actions over time, that that simple fact never occurred to her.
Here’s my question, percipient reader, and I remind you you are under oath:
Does this incriminating document, or it does it not, have Peter Marin’s name written All Over It?
Which is a somewhat more bewitching way of saying:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Also, any relationships between consecutively narrated events are likewise purely coincidental; causality—either by natural or supernatural means—is in no way implied or intended to be construed by the percipient reader.
The greatest theme paper the Angel of Death ever assigned was convincing that curious institution that she did not exist.
And to conclude this brief, uneasy, biased mystery, in the matter of Global Humanity versus Rachel Rafaële Rilke, we now sentence the penitent with the Mystery of Reconciliation-by-Proxy:
I confess,
To Almighty God,
And you, my brothers and sisters,
That the aforementioned penitent from 2003 and in an ongoing capacity did intentionally engage in a course of conduct directed at a specific person (to wit: [name has been redacted from this incriminating document because that will save time. That, and because there were so many of us who suffered at her hands. So. Goddamn. Many.]) that caused that person and that would cause a reasonable person under the same circumstances to suffer serious emotional distress or to be placed in reasonable fear of bodily injury or death to either themselves or to a member of their family or household, and that the penitent knew or should have known that at least one of the acts that constituted the course of conduct did in fact cause them to suffer serious emotional distress, or placed them in reasonable fear of bodily injury or death to either themselves or a member of their family or household, and where the penitent’s acts caused them to suffer serious emotional distress or induced in them fear of bodily injury or death to their self or a member of their family or household, contrary to really basic standards of decency like say for example, oh I don’t know, the Golden Rule or some shit, and upon conviction to be consigned to a unique and appropriate consequence of a magnitude commensurate with the gravity of the sins delineated, and the rehabilitation needed.
Therefore,
I ask Blessed Mary,
Ever Virgin,
Our Lady,
Queen of Angels,
Gate of Heaven,
Mirror of Truth,
Throne of Wisdom,
Glory of Copacabana,
Splendor of the Church,
And all the angels and saints,
And you, my brothers and sisters,
To pray for the repentance and spiritual metanoia of Rachel Rafaële Rilke, to the Lord Our God.
Amen.
::eerie stillness: