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.
The Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—will shift to the first person perspective, for this pivotal segment of the eyewitness testimonies received.
It is time now to speak of the two long bare corridors that converged with the entrance to Ms. Rilke’s room. One of those corridors separated the Priory wing on the school’s north side, from its main structure that included the cafeteria, gym, and auditorium, and overlooked West Artisan Street; it stretched between the chapel on one end, and the door to Ms. Rilke’s room at the other, and included the entrance to the main hallway that ran the length of the first floor Priory. The other corridor that ended with Ms. Rilke’s room stretched as far as the school’s front atrium, and passed the large entrance to the library.
Across from the library doors was a row of wide bare windows that were never adorned, that ran the entire length of that corridor. And it was in eerily still moments of walking past those windows, from one end of that corridor to the other, that the school seemed most curious: haunted from within, it always seemed, by a contrast of creeping shadows and dazzling daylight, or during the long and fearsome Wisconsin winters, an ethereal gray northern light.
Nearly all the days were still.
There were no other classroom doors nearby Ms. Rilke’s room, through which any other teacher’s head could easily peep, as the daily bustle went on.
On one side of Ms. Rilke’s door were the emergency exit double doors that opened out onto the teacher parking lot. On its other side was a little-used stairwell that led from the first floor of the Priory wing, to the second floor where the Student Services offices adjoined the Science row. Like Ms. Rilke’s room in the frequent moments of her apparent absence, that stairwell was often closed and darkened.
Jake Kowalski and Shelli Riccardi were two classmates in my year at that school. Their romantic affair, embarked upon during our junior year, gained fame with the robust school rumor mill. This was primarily because of Kowalski’s prowess on the varsity football field, and because of his devilish temper, and his equally devilish smile, known as it was then, to set aflutter the hearts of many a girl and the odd closeted boy too, suffering from a bad case of the “bad boy” complex—worse than the measles or the mumps.
You think it, but I’ll say it: “Maybe my love will be strong enough to change his evil ways!!”
Shelli’s fame rested on her beauty, which had two institutionally recognized credentials, to prove its validity. The first was her membership on the Dance Team, which provided graceful poetry in motion, to the hottest bubble gum pop hits, for the interstitial portions of varsity football games. The second was her membership in the more rarefied “Big Ten” clique of rich pretty popular girls in our grade. I myself never knew directly about the “Big Ten” as such, until the ten girls in question had immortalized their clique for always and eternity, right after we graduated, by creating a members-only Facebook group that to this very day, includes only the ten of them, and nobody else.
If you look at the picture taken of our grade in our graduation gowns in spring 2006, sitting on the bleachers in the school gym—right down the middle of the middle row sat the ten girls who stood out from the mousy rest, for the bleachedness of their blond highlights; you could get a sunburn from sitting near those highlights, without first applying sunscreen. They were famous around the school—which is to say, held in great suspicion and not much liking—because of those highlights, and because of their fake bake tans, and the purported “generosity” of their affections that had often been vulgarly elegized, in the writing on the boys’ restroom walls.
Such writing on the walls returned again and again and again, like a haunting.
Shelli was one of that rarefied elite, that other girls at the school both resented, yet aspired to, because of the glory of her grace and beauty.
By a weird twist of the registrar’s scheduling algorithms, Kowalski and Riccardi both got placed with Rachel Rafaële Rilke for English, the year that we were juniors, although they were in different tracks, and different sections. Riccardi had Rilke for Honors English in first period, the advanced track; Kowalski, meanwhile, had Rilke for English A in fourth period, the bottom stream class, for washouts.
It was during that same year that Kowalski and Riccardi were together, to the obsessive fascination of the student body. Their relationship was “serious” as far as teen entanglements went. Which is to say, oblivious daydreamer though I was, unaware of the “Big Ten’s” existence until long after the fact, and removed from most of the currents of “drama” rippling through the student rumor mill at any given time that year, even I knew Kowalski and Riccardi were together, because they spent whatever time they had outside of class, glued to each other at the hip. Nobody could fail to notice.
The previous year, Kowalski had been in my first period section of Religion. First period always began with morning prayer over the intercom, as soon as the bell heralded the start of the day. That was exactly when students dawdling in the hallways had to stop wherever they were, to reflect on the Holy Presence of Our God, same as did teachers who might have forgotten they had classes to teach (which did in fact occur at least once that I definitely know of), as did administrators who might have forgotten they had examples to set (which occurred on a troublingly regular basis).
It was during these morning prayers, sophomore year, that I would always see Kowalski avidly caressing and pumping the shoulders of Dave Willis, the varsity soccer player who sat directly in front of him, in the class seating chart.
Once during that sophomore year, I also witnessed Kowalski physically threaten Tom Edelweiss, who sat to his left, in that same seating chart of that first period section. It was over something trivial, but that was all it took for Kowalski to begin thumping the other’s shoulder and back, and murmuring—quietly, so that the teacher on the other side of the room would not overhear or intervene —“I’m gonna fucking get you later, you faggot.”
Dave Willis also witnessed these threats, as did several other people directly around us. But nobody did anything, presumably because they couldn’t see anybody else doing anything.
The “bystander” effect does not bode well for the health of a democracy.
::Moaning Myrtle face::
More recently, in 2013, Kowalski was indicted on felonious charges in Madison Wisconsin, for strangling a young woman referred to by the alias “Blanche” in official court documents, until she literally lost consciousness.
“Blanche” later informed the police, and numerous third party witnesses corroborated her in this, that Kowalski had threatened to “kill” her on numerous previous occasions leading up to the incident for which he was ultimately convicted, and sentenced to probation.
He was a dangerous little shit.
Maybe it should not then surprise the percipient reader, to discover that the Kowalski / Riccardi Affair became famous in the student rumor mill, not just because they were one of the couples who had been spotted in varying throes of fiery passion, entwined in each other’s arms, in secret corners of the school building, at odd moments, which led to the running speculation that they did in fact rank among the sexually active hierarchies of the student body; oh, no.
There was also the fact that, during that same school year, Shelli Riccardi began showing up to Dance Team and Track practices with visible bruises on her face and arms, after spending her days attached at the hip to Kowalski—he of the famously devilish smile and temper. She might even have attempted to conceal a black eye, using heavy make-up, as was the custom.
“They’re always on top of each other,” other kids used to say, of the confirmed sightings of Kowalski/Riccardi PDAs, with a combination of righteous disgust, and voyeuristic envy.
“Maybe my love will be magical enough to change his evil ways, or at least his mentally maladjusted ones!!”
You think it, but I’ll say it:
Both halves of that “supercouple” had Ms. Rilke for English, that year they were together.
In Ms. Rilke’s classroom there was a wall.
On that wall, she had hung a few sparsely placed, precisely chosen prints of her own original black-and-white photographic studies.
One of those pictures was an ethereally lit profile of a handsome silvery-haired man. Because of first seeing that portrait, I soon learned that the pictured man was Jack Fredericksen, the married father of a girl who had been in Ms. Rilke’s Honors sections two years previously. Rilke had begun sleeping with him, while his wife, her student’s mother, was well-known to be dying of brain cancer. She had somehow kept her job at the school while doing so, despite that administrators in later years discharged a younger female teacher, discovered to have become pregnant out of wedlock. She had even kept her job, after successfully petitioning in the city’s public circuit court, for a restraining order against the dying woman whose husband she stole, while she should have been teaching that woman’s daughter English, and keeping her nose out of the family’s private devastation.
Another one of the pictures on Ms. Rilke’s wall was none other—than Jacob D. Kowalski. In it, he was smiling devilishly at Ms. Rilke’s camera lens, as ethereally as the older married man she was then sleeping with.
You may ask, as did I, what convergence of chaotic variables might have led to the taking of that picture of Kowalski, given all else?
The answer to that question is a labyrinth, out of which only the percipient reader can find, or make, their endless way.
More than one girl in my Seventh Period Honors section had commented on the handsomeness of Kowalski’s smile, in Ms. Rilke’s artsy print. From a purely aesthetic perspective, I confess I fail to see what some people found so enthralling. Kowalski was a closeted little fruitcake, if I’ve ever laid eyes on one. By now, thirteen years out, I have laid considerably more than eyes, on many a similar fruitcake, so believe me: I would know. He was not, in my estimation, one of the fruitcakes worth taking a little extra trouble for. I would not, given the choice, have “Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl”-ed it up for him, if you are wondering.
A lot of dangerous abusers tend to be gay or bi, in some iteration, and struggling with it. The male ones often seem to think that slapping around the women who serve as their “beards” proves their manhood or something.
All these weird little details might just seem like a coincidental confluence of causally unconnected correlations.
Except that…….. . . . . . . .
Years later, after I had graduated from a college in Western Massachusetts, and returned to Northeastern Wisconsin, I happened to cross paths with my old teacher, Mrs. Worden, at a carwash, one windy winter evening.
Alexandra Worden was the Physics instructor whose classroom occupied the Science row, on the second floor, right above the seam of the school building that separated its main structure from the northern Priory wing. This, if you are wondering, was right above the area that on the first floor included Ms. Rilke’s room, set apart from all the other classrooms, at a certain distance.
Mrs. Worden caught my eye, as I stared at the reflections of the suds-soaked window panels of that automated wash. We greeted each other, and began making small talk about the school I had graduated from, where she still taught. Among other things, she made a passing mention of how the hallway spaces right outside Ms. Rilke’s classroom were a favorite “makeout point,” known to the PDA-ing and sexually active couples in the student body.
The location was convenient because of its remoteness from the other parts of the school.
Ms. Rilke’s room was physically situated such that, if you stood right outside her door, any authority figure who caught sight of you was already plainly visible from a distance of about fifty feet, across the spans of both the wide bare corridors that converged with her room.
As such, a canoodling couple could easily spot an intruder approaching to hand out referral slips, and break apart with time to make a speedy getaway.
There were convenient escape routes on either side of Rilke’s classroom door: one was the emergency exit double doors that opened out onto the teacher parking lot, just to the left of her door; the other was the stairwell just to the right of it, which led right up to where the Student Services offices met the Science row, where Mrs. Worden taught Physics to Honors track freshmen, and regular stream seniors.
It is fair here to note that Ms. Rilke frequently made comments in her “digressional” tangents from the school’s approved curriculum—especially when she was regaling us students with stories of her own prank-like escapades, perpetrated in cahoots with popular varsity jocks, or better yet, varsity football coaches.
“You guys are teenagers; you need to kiss, you need to fool around with each other,” she had remarked to us, with her own slightly devilish smirk, during more than one of those digressions. Besides this, Cristina Rodriguez once credibly informed me that she and her friend Sonia Del Valle (who also took the Fourth Period Remedial English with Jake Kowalski) had exited the school building right before a mandatory pep rally in the gym, because Ms. Rilke had discreetly opened one of the side exit doors leading to Artisan Avenue. They were “her girls,” Cristina told me Ms. Rilke had said, when she did it.
But despite her apparent permissiveness towards teen concupiscence and truancy, Rachel Rafaële Rilke was notably territorial about her own classroom—nearly to the point of clinically verifiable paranoia.
“She seemed like she was hiding something,” more than one witness has observed to me, over the years that have elapsed since we had her for English, that junior year. Even people who remember almost nothing about what Ms. Rilke did, still invariably mention fear and secrecy, in some combination, when asked to summarize their perception of her personality in a few words.
“She was kind of creepy—everything became a sexual innuendo with her.”
“Interesting, but strange. Maybe strange because she was interesting.”
“Mysterious.”
“Unpredictable.”
“She was so extreme with her favoritism.”
“She seemed like she was hiding something.”
“There is very little I would not have believed.”
“The first word that comes to my mind is: wicked.”
“She might say yes or no, depending what day you ask her.”
“I was a little scared of her, but I had heard she could also be nice.”
“The kind of person who you probably didn’t want to get on her bad side.”
“What makes her doubly dangerous is the fact that she doesn’t look dangerous.”
“She reminded me of the plain girl who will do anything to get the cool kids to let her sit at their lunch table.”
“What a serpent.”
“If you can create something and make your self believe it—you can do anything.”
There were other teachers at the school, who had been there since its inception in 1990. They too had classrooms that were unofficially “theirs” in the shared perception of the school community. There were any number of reasons why a veteran teacher, Mrs. Worden for example, might leave “her” classroom: to go to lunch, or do prep, or to smoke a blunt on the school roof because of the stress and strain of telling off Peter Marin the 47th time in a row for riding a bicycle through the hallways, only to have him tap-dance (literally) his way out of a referral, banking on the likelihood that she would be so impressed as to be appeased.
In these instances, the door to the classroom almost always remained ajar, and the lights on. For every teacher, without exception.
Except: Ms. Rilke’s room was always locked and darkened, unless she herself was present to grant entry to whoever else, including teachers and administrators, might have fancied using it. For whatever purposes you could imagine.
Everything you can imagine is real.
Alex Worden mentioned that she needed to ask Ms. Rilke to be on the sharp lockout for teen couples outside her door, because she was the only authority figure near enough to that remote and mysterious corner of the school building, to catch them in flagrante delicto.
It is fair to note that I never figured out if Mrs. Worden was being ironic or not, when she mentioned this to me, in front of that carwash window, on that windy Wisconsin evening.
Because the fact remains: Rachel Rafaële Rilke was nothing if not a sharp lookout, when it came to the territories encompassed by her classroom.
Hers was a remote and mysterious realm, and she: the curiously exacting mistress of its symbols and rituals.
Nothing beside remains.
Because of this, even now that years have passed and things have changed, except maybe not the right things, I cannot help wondering what Ms. Rilke did know, and perhaps stockpile, of the various teen couples trysting, by coincidence, right around her room, at odd moments during the school day. This could have included couples whose relationships included abusive dynamics—as with Kowalski and his lovely damsel, who were both frequently seen going in and out of Ms. Rilke’s door the year they were together, because they both had her for English, in different sections and tracks. It also, perhaps more dangerously, could have included closeted same-sex couples among the students, or even inappropriate and possibly-illegal couplings between students and teachers or even administrators, going all the way back to the school’s inception in 1990. Ms. Rilke was not above wielding her knowledge of things others meant to keep secret, the better to control and manipulate others towards her own perhaps inscrutable ends.
What exactly did Ms. Rilke know about that “hot spot” known to the student body’s sexually active couples, from her own eavesdropping?
What exactly might she have enabled, perhaps passively, or even perhaps actively encouraged—and then weaponized as blackmailing ammo, together with her number one groupie, Miss Lotti, the closeted religion teacher who was invariably spotted right outside Ms. Rilke’s door within thirty seconds of the end of each school day, in that remote corner of the building?
The only foolproof way to answer these questions would be to ask Rachel Rafaële Rilke herself, and hope she tells the truth, which—truth be told—is not, and was never, one of her strong suits. She was the singular personality who might or might not answer an interrogating question, or if she did, might or might not do so truthfully, and the truth value of her statement might as easily depend on a completely arbitrary or mystical factor, like the lines of your left palm, or your Zodiac sign, as it might on the day of the week when you ask her, or the particular mood she happens to be in, when interrogated.
As Mrs. Gray and Brin Brown have both at different times, in their own uniquely endless ways, famously remarked.
The solutions to these riddles are labyrinths, from which only the percipient reader can find, or make, their endless way.