HAYNTA-7
While to me the janitors’ treatment of Nolk was vile, the only indication that he felt persecuted was that for lunch, he escaped.
Specifically, he went “outside the wall,” to use the phrase common among students for leaving the Institute grounds. The janitors were allowed a short break for their mid-day meal, and at that time, it was Nolk’s habit to walk south from the Institute into a little residential area of little stone houses with little square glass windows that seemed to have been plopped down capriciously (and yet artistically) as if by some whimsical cyclopean child, in the figurative middle of square little lawns of wildflower checkered with square little vegetable gardens and square little storage sheds, this residential area, I had learned from some blabbermouths sitting near me at dinner one time, having arisen in the shadow of the great orange wall only in recent years. You can find out a lot of things by being quiet, as I had found out during a lifetime of shyness.
In random areas of this residential area, in the midst of the tiny homesteads, were a number of small groves of trees, mostly maples and walnuts (which was somewhat surprising, both of those species being uncommon in the Clarks Hill area) and a few untended fields of golden-brown weeds dotted by yellowbright and scarlet sage that were frequented by loose swarms of beetles and ladybugs.
Into one of these little wild areas, somebody, perhaps Nolk himself, had dragged a wide wooden bench with a backrest and attached platform, at which, during his break, Nolk sat in silence, nibbling on his food (a small bowl of nuts, most often, along with some cheese or meat), and communing with the ladybugs and of course the squirrels that were forever darting along the branches of the walnut trees.
I found this out one day when by chance, I was taking a little mid-day walk of my own in that nice little neighborhood, which I did maybe once every five or six days. Too shy to broach the subject, I had never asked teacher, administrator, janitor, or peer whether students were permitted to leave the Institute grounds, but nobody had ever stopped me from slinking away, so I just kept doing it, and had decided I would continue to do it until such time as I was commanded to stop. It was nice to get out of the bustle of the Institute for a little while, once in awhile.
It was my habit to walk towards the farms that lay east of the Institute, where the only gazes you were likely to attract were those of quiet cows, slackmouthed, stupid, and unthreatening; but on the day in question, I was jaunting along the crisscrossing cobbled roads of that nice southern neighborhood, when I saw him sitting in his place—the place I would soon come to think of as his, I should say.
As you can imagine, my heart leapt, both in surprise and eagerness at the sight of him—I had often wished that I could talk to him face to face, instead of in the secret, whispering way that we conversed—but, unprepared for his presence, I found that I was too shy to approach him. Luckily, since his back was to me, he didn’t see me. The next day, at approximately the same hour of the day, I checked to see if he had returned to his place, and he had, and the next day, same thing, and the day after that, same thing; but still I didn’t approach him. Even though I wanted to talk to him face to face, just the two of us, I’d never actually done so, and the prospect was daunting. I was afraid I’d be tongue-tied, and would make a fool of myself stuttering and stammering in response to the precise, eloquent elocutions that he would be sure to spin out. It had occurred to me, as well, that he might treasure his time of peace alone and consider my presence an intrusion.
After several days of cowardice, however, the desire to talk with him, to be with him, to look straight into his face while conversing (and this desire made more acute by his absence from the Nonagon the past few days, as he worked in one of the dormitories cleaning up a malfunctioning latrine) overcame my timidity, and with a pattering heart and a roar of blood in my brain and face, I went up to him—almost running, to keep myself from changing my mind—and sat down beside him.
I studied his reaction for any indication that he was bothered by my invasion of his lunch-time solitude. His hood was back; he was enjoying the warm spring air. He looked unsurprised by my arrival, and to my relief, unbothered by my presence, maybe even satisfied by it; but he didn’t say anything. He just sat there, regarding me, his dark, scarred face and his sparkling colorful eyes more appealing than ever in what seemed the “free” air of the outside. His short blue-black hair tipped with flecks of silver, as the boys of the now-defunct House of Salamander were described in the history books, added to what I considered his appeal.
I found that I was indeed tongue-tied, so we just sort of stared at each other for awhile, my heart racing, my face hot, my nose, idiotically, seeking (and not finding) the aroma of the nuts and fruits he was eating, until at last he offered his beautiful self-effacing smile and then presented me an algebraic equation, upon which breaking of the ice we fell into our usual routine, he quizzing me about my studies. And that’s sort of how we passed lunchtime whenever I joined him out there in his hideaway. I say, “sort of,” because in the freer atmosphere of the outside, where we didn’t have to conceal our discourse, his questioning was more likely to lead us on to other topics.
Most often, these topics were nothing little things: he had an inquisitive mind, and seemed not only to have a rich understanding of the ideas of all the philosophers we talked about, but to have a great depth to his being—that abyss and sparkle so evident (to me, at least) in his bearing. Yet, it wasn’t deep, or complex, topics that he preferred. Little meaningless things seemed to give him the most pleasure. For example, he noted one day after we had observed that a few walnuts were beginning to form on the trees under which we sat, that there were two types of walnuts: one, that after it had ripened, was very dark brown, almost purplish, and grooved, and another that was much lighter brown, with an undulating smoothness. “Nobody ever seems to distinguish between the two,” he said, “which is strange, because they’re very different.” We talked about walnuts for awhile that day. He loved looking at cloud formations, and birds and squirrels, too, taking delight in the variability of their calls, and the apparent randomness of their behavior.
He also took great pleasure in it when I noted some little thing, such as the “chain of green,” as I called it, in the spring, the weeds turning first, then the bushes, then the trees, which reminded me of Infin Gorilla’s everything is infinite because nothing exists comment. His appreciation of my perception of things, in turn, was pleasurable to me—more than pleasurable, since it was he who was doing the appreciating.
He had to know how I felt about him, but he wouldn’t address it. Maybe, I thought, he felt like he couldn’t, because it would be considered inappropriate for a janitor to dally with a student, or maybe he simply felt no attraction towards me whatsoever, and yet enjoyed and appreciated my presence and so didn’t want to just come out and say, “I can see that you’re attracted to me, so I should tell you that I’m not attracted to you, just so you know,” in fear that then I would stop keeping him company. If the first of these two possibilities was the case, I wanted to tell him, hey, it’s not as if you’re my teacher, and you’re only two or three years older than me, or so; but I thought the second possibility was most likely closer to the truth, so I said nothing, either, not wanting to know for sure that I was merely an agreeable diversion for him to help him pass the long tedious days of Clarks Hill janitordom.
Nevertheless, I would at times try to get him to say something, to hint at whether or not he might possibly think of me as, well, you know. For instance, one time as we were sitting in relative silence, nibbling on his nuts and berries and cheese (because he always shared his food with me), we saw a girl and a boy, whom I recognized as Jessup Canary and Tiller Ijor, walking, hand in hand, along the cobbled road that passed between the area where we always sat—the hideaway, or the weedfield, or the walnut grove, as I variously called it—and a cluster of homes west of us. I considered Tiller Ijor a decent fellow—he was one the boys in Mrs. Camden’s class who usually told a good story, or had a good question waiting for Mrs. Camden, and he seemed a thoughtful and amiable person, although I didn’t know him, personally. Conversely, Jessup Canary seemed like a vapid, self-centered preener of girl who had never had an original thought in her life—worse than Turta, by far, worse than Pindy if I had to judge. She was just pretty, beautiful even, but nothing else; and yet he had gone googly-eyes for her, so I said, “Good grief, he’s letting her lead him around by the nose!”
Watching them with, at most, mild curiosity, Nolk asked, “Do you have designs on him, then?”
“No!” I said, blushing, “I’m concerned for him, though.”
He said, “Oh,” but in such a way that it seemed like, “Why?”
“He’s an intelligent guy, you know, he tells a good story, too, and with her? She’s nothing but a pretty face.”
“You’re implying that she’s not very intelligent.”
“Yes! That’s what I’m implying!”
“If he’s as intelligent as he sounds, and she’s not, then what is the draw?
“She’s beautiful! Look at her.” I said “her” in such a way as to contrast it with “me.” I was, of course, attempting to get him to say, “Oh come now, you’re just as beautiful as her,” but he wouldn’t bite. He never bit.
As he watched them go, he seemed for awhile to forget I’d said anything, in fact to forget that I was even present, or that he was present. He was somewhere else, gazing, one could believe, into some Jumpere-postulated alter dimension. Then, coming back, he told a short, Mrs. Camden-esque story, as he often did in response to some observation I made (which was another quality about him that I liked).
“Two travelers met,” he began, “a man and a woman. He had traveled a long way, she had traveled a short way but had taken a long way getting there. They were resting together on a rocky overlook, looking down on a long lush gulch, full of oak and souse and elephant trees, and darting redbirds and swooping hawks, and a thick and rich and layered underbrush of deep greens and blue-greens, split by a wide sparkling lightning-bolt creek, and punctuated by an occasional crag of speckled red rock. He was tired, and injured; she was tired too, but tended to his wounds before sitting down beside him to behold the beauty before them.
“For that gulch was beautiful—to him, at least. Unfathomable. It’s beauty was unfathomable: His mind couldn’t grasp, couldn’t close around, couldn’t fathom the full extent of its beauty. Trying to was like clutching a handful of water. And looking at her, it was the same thing, as she rested there: she was beautiful, so beautiful that he couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe how beautiful she was, how beautiful existence, wrapped about her, and she about it, was. His mind, frustratingly, couldn’t quite complete the perception, the experience. For her, the experience was similar, but less cerebral. For her, the inability to perceive the totality of the beauty of existence didn’t take the form of an ache of incompleteness but of an emptiness within that she felt and knew and that she let existence surge through. Her name was Tahain.”
My mind reeled; I couldn’t think. I could only deny. “Tahain does sound like the name of a pretty girl, just like Haynta sounds like the name of a plain unattractive fat girl.” Nolk just looked at the table, at his last berries, and then popped them into his mouth, and changed the subject.
I was hurt, frustrated, not at him, but because the way he described the girl from the boy’s perspective was how I thought of him. I couldn’t quite fathom his beauty; just looking at him was a constant thrill, a wonderful mystery. Deep down, I knew that this would ultimately cause me great pain, because I knew, or thought I knew, that it wasn’t the same for him. He did like me in an intellectual sort of way, which would have been flattering if I’d been able to look at it objectively. He was as lonely as I was, and anything was a relief after how he was treated by the other janitors.
Still, I couldn’t keep myself from obsessing about him, and in the final reckoning, my preoccupation with him kept my mind off the misery of Clarks Hill, and got me caught up on my studies.
And, when the school year ended, I missed him—missed seeing him, missed watching him, missed talking with him—for the 70 days of Sporch, Mowta-Wan, and Hobwan that I spent at home listening to the chatter of my idiot siblings and the constant chiding of my father—and looked forward, more and more each day, of coming back to Clarks Hill. The irony of that, or whatever it was, maybe it wasn’t irony, I could never pin down the meaning of irony, wasn’t lost on me.
But now, the first day of my 3rd year at Clarks Hill, and my 17th leap day, I had, first thing after getting checked in and all that crap, scoured the grounds in an anxious search for Nolk. I had searched the Nonagon, I had gone into each separate building, I had circled the grounds inside the wall; and then I had done it all again, and Nolk was nowhere to be found. I spent another hour scanning all the nooks and crannies of the Nonagon and hurrying up and down the halls of the buildings I thought him most likely to be working in, and still not finding him, overcame my shyness and asked another janitor, a young one who I didn’t recognize, “Where’s Nolk?”
Stressed as I was, my voice came out hoarse and a little frantic, and the janitor just looked at me as if he thought I was afflicted with what the river folk call the brain poison. While seeking Nolk, I had seen another young janitor I recognized, named Luqno, who was the closest thing to a friend that Nolk had, and now I tracked him down in the cafeteria building, and asked him, “Have you seen Nolk?” Glancing at the nearby older janitor, who I recognized distantly as Hals, he just shook his head with what seemed like a finality. “No, he’s gone,” he seemed to be telling me.