HAYNTA-5
Over the course of the next couple of months, as Nanatoi became Fildeweeray, which in its turn followed the white stag, as they say, to Runtani in the green plumage that took over the Nonagon, I got to know Nolk. A little bit. The next time he was working within “mutter-distance” of me, I commented on the nearby flirtation that a girl and a boy were devoting themselves to despite neither having any qualities that recommended one to the other besides complementary sexual organs. I named their coquetry the “the dance of the red jomir,” in reference, of course, to the exaggerated mating ritual of jomirs; and again, while keeping his face in the shadow of his hood, he smiled, a smile that reminded me of Mrs. Camden’s in the quiet sparkle of starlight it suggested.
And that is how our communication went for awhile: me making comments, him smiling; but at length I started addressing him directly.
The treatment he received from, or maybe I should say his relationship with, many of the other janitors was puzzling to me, in two ways. First of all, they tormented him. He would be toiling away like a farmer’s extra donkey, when for no apparent reason one of the other janitors, or sometimes two, would approach him and say, “Aren’t you done with that yet, Brother Nolk? or “Are you ever going to get something done, Brother Nolk?” or, more benignly, “Brother Nolk, I realize that you’re unused to hard labor, but you should be getting a little more durable by now.” Once, when his hood had fallen back while he was straining to move a very heavy potted plant, another janitor said to him, “Brother Nolk, why is your hood down?” to which he responded, as he pulled it back over his head, “Sorry, Brother Hals, I didn’t realize it had come down,” which still wasn’t good enough for this Hals, who said, “Master Osbald will be disappointed that you are ignoring his requests.”
In addition to these constant jibes, his supervisors, which included Hals, were always giving him the most unpleasant jobs to do: scrubbing the fountains and statues, for example, emptying the latrines, or removing wasp and hornet nests from the cracks and corners of the buildings; and then roasting him if he had any difficulty with the assignment: calling him a sissy if he was nursing a sting, for example, or a weakling if he was struggling to drag a large membrane of feces to the shit wagon that came every three days to haul the Institute’s waste away to, I don’t know, some central waste depository in the city, I suppose. Once, when he slipped on some wet grass as he lugged a statue of a bear from one decorative spot in the Nonagon to another, managing only with what seemed to me an incredible athletic twist of his body to keep the bear from crashing to the cobblestones, Hals, who with another janitor, Ulfus, had been watching him in a conspicuous break from his own work, enjoyed an uproarious belly laugh at him in a rare expression of mirth. Ulfus said something about how hard it was to get good help, to which Hals responded, “That boy doesn’t have the sense nature gave a mule,” which I thought a rather bizarre statement notwithstanding the ill spirit behind it, since as everyone knows, or as I thought everyone knew, mules are very sensible creatures.
This treatment was puzzling to me because Nolk seemed not only a tireless and hard-working servant, but as benign an individual as one could be. The older janitors did belittle the other young ones, too, but not to anywhere near the degree they did Nolk. And the others sometimes defended themselves; Nolk never did. Which was the other thing that was puzzling to me. He took their abuse without complaint, without even flinching, or even a pained or otherwise confused look behind their backs. If they criticized him, he’d just look down—he never met their eyes—and tell them he’d try to do better.
He had crossed the Norgold Mountains in winter! Well, not really, but one could see in the way he moved, and in his face, which to me held not only the experience of having endured something akin to crossing the Norgold Mountains, some abyss, but also in the smile that came so easy to his lips, and in his sparkling eyes that rollicked and frolicked in the moment of life, an overcoming of the darkness that such an experience would cast on the spirit; and yet he crawled before these petty little men, servile-like! The closest I ever saw him come to talking back to any of his tormenters occurred one day when Hals had told him to arrange some new plants in a certain array in the Nonagon, and while he was still in the process of doing that good ol’ Hals came by and told him that the latrine in Dorm Three needed emptied. “It’s not going to clean itself, you know!” he jibed. Nolk hesitated, and then asked, “Right now, or after this?” to which Hals snapped, “No, finish that first!” and muttered “Moron,” as he continued on his way. That’s as close as he ever came to talking back to any of those fools: to ask which one of the two tasks he’d been assigned he should do first.
This continual abuse that he endured without complaint was, in fact, the reason why I began to address him directly. Well, it was the trigger: the reason was, obviously, that I wanted to. I asked him one day, after he’d suffered another round of sarcastic belittlement from the mouth of a janitor named “Brother” Geln, “Why do they treat you like that?” He smiled in such a way that seemed to dismiss that they even mistreated him, or maybe that just rendered that treatment meaningless, and said, “Most people treat others very similarly to how they are treated.”
I’ve never much cared for platitudes, even from the mouths of boys I’m obsessed with, so I taunted him. “So, when you’re an old janitor, you’ll be treating the young janitors like ‘Brothers’ Geln and Hals treat you?”
“I won’t be an old janitor.” He spoke without rage or rancor, without even raising his voice above his usual murmur, yet with such a sure intensity that it carried the force of a sharp retort, or even a slap in the face.
Seeing that I was stunned, he added, with what seemed contrition, “I mean, I’m sure I’ll be fired long before I’m old.” I laughed, rather too loudly, I think, in release of the tension his intensity had generated, and he almost laughed, himself, I think both at himself and in surprise at the loudness of my laugh; but then, as if he’d been hiding in the nearby ferns, Hals appeared and said, “Are you talking to students, Brother Nolk?” and without waiting for Nolk to respond, added, “Master Osbald will be amazed to hear this.” Nolk, of course, offered no defense of his behavior, even to say, “Hey, I was just responding to the girl,” which would have been the truth. Instead, bending to his task, which in this case was cleaning out the cracks and holes in the brick walkway of the Nonagon, just said, “It won’t happen again, sir.”
I saw then that if he talked to me, he would get into trouble, but since I’d been talking to him for quite a number of days without any repercussion, and he seemed to enjoy it, or at least not mind it, the next opportunity I found to sit in his proximity while he worked, I told him, “Don’t talk,” and I did the talking. And that was the way of it for the next half-month or so.
At first I tried to be funny, since he seemed to appreciate my witticisms, but while it’s easy to be funny for a comment or two, keeping it up for an extended period of time is much more problematic, so I lapsed soon enough into, well, just gabbling, to be honest. I made random observations about our surroundings—“The mulbs [that was my name for the mulberry trees] are vibrant, this year,” for example—or described what was going on in the Nonagon, including informing him about which janitors were where, so that he would know how focused on his work he needed to appear. I told him about my classes, and my life, even, and at length just started reading out loud from the texts I’d brought to the Nonagon ostensibly to study. He seldom responded, but by the subtle tilts of his head, the looks in his hood-shadowed eyes, and the occasional smile that crossed his lips, I flattered myself that he enjoyed my flow of words, or at least didn’t mind my presence.
One bright warm day, oh, about mid-spring—there were just a couple of months to go before they sent us home for Sporch, Mowta-wan, and Hobwan—the next era of our relationship was ushered in by another offhand comment I made. As the thrushes booped at one another from various flowering bushes in the Nonagon, I paused the flow of words coming out of my mouth, my “mouthflow,” as I had begun to think of it, to joke that as much as I was reading my assignments out loud to him, I might actually catch up in my classes. Before Mrs. Camden had arrived, I had fallen behind in all my classes, and while caught up in hers now, I was still a bit behind in the others.
After glancing about (with movement only of his eyes, not his head), he asked, in the hoarse rasping whisper of someone whose voice mechanism is rusty from lack of use, “What are you studying?”
I answered, “You mean today, or in general?”
A subtle movement of his orange robe indicated a shrug.
I said, “Well, today in philosophy, it’s Infin, which I don’t get at all.”
Pulling his hood all the way forward, so that I couldn’t see his face at all, and without altering his steady brushwork upon a statue—of a gorilla, no less—he said, in a voice so low I could barely hear him, “Infin Gorilla?”
“Is there another Infin?”
“What don’t you get about him?”
“Everything is infinite because everything is finite? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Those aren’t his words; that’s the textbook writers trying to be cute. I think what he said was actually closer to everything is infinite because nothing exists.”
“Well, that doesn’t make sense, either!”
By the tilt of his head, I thought he smiled. “I think his basic idea was that there is only one thing—in all of existence. All the universe is only one thing, and therefore each separate thing in the universe doesn’t exist in and of itself but only as part of, and inseparable from, the universe. Inseparable from the universe, each separate thing is, thus, as vast as the universe.”
“But the thing itself is still finite!”
“He’s saying, though, that, for example, if you examine something in its entirety, any one thing, examine it thoroughly, everything about it, everything that it impacts, or that impacts it, which of course would include, then, everything that impacted or was impacted by those things, as well, you’d have to examine the whole universe to fully understand that one little thing.”
“Like everything that’s connected to it, and then everything that’s connected to those things, and so on, are all part it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I guess. I mean, I understand the concept. Thanks! But it still doesn’t make sense.”
And thus began the era of my study, or I should say, catching up on my studies. Every day that Nolk was working in the Nonagon and that I could manage to find a seat near him, we’d discuss some class or another. After I arrived, he would note among the other janitors nearby, where the ones such as Hals and Geln that he needed to be most concerned about were, and then pull his hood far enough forward to cloak his entire face, and, speaking in a voice so low that it was a wonder to me that he could enunciate words at that volume, he would either quiz me about some subject or other, or discuss the material I was studying, until soon enough, I was caught up in every class. His storehouse of knowledge was impressive, considering how young he was, and that he was among a class of workers, janitors, who were generally regarded as being somewhat uneducated.
I asked him once, “How do you know all this stuff?”
“The same way you do,” was all he said, “I studied it.”
“You mean you attended Clarks Hill?”
“Other places teach the same things.”
“Well, yeah,” I admitted, “I suppose so; but I’ll have forgotten all of this by next year.”
“You might remember more than you expect.”