works by w.pham

works by william pham, 2005-present

"Guinevere", Chapter 1: J. Tomson and the Nobility of Crocodiles

What you have to understand about back then is that we, none of us, were ready for what happened. There was never a moment when any of us could pause, tap a temple thoughtfully, and say out loud, "I feel big changes are coming." It was simply never like that. There was nothing in the wind, no weather forecast, no fortune-teller's prognosticating, no cheap prize from a carnival game – nothing to tell us, "Hey, look, get ready because something big is on its way and there's nothing you can do to stop it, so you might as well be prepared."

Not that that would've helped anyway, I suppose. The weather forecasters saw the warning signs for the hurricanes, the floods, the tidal waves, and yet the cities fell into the ocean's hungry mouth anyway. So it's kind of like that: we were just people wondering what to do, like those first people standing on the beaches, watching the massive walls of blue and white creep toward them. They said nothing to each other when the waves that were over a hundred feet tall came, as if the world had been turned on its side and all the water had nowhere to go but down, rushing down. Some of them held hands; they all waited together, calm like Buddhist monks doused in gasoline, as behind them the winds pulled trees from the ground and whipped them into the air, and smashed down billboards, and sent cars careening into other cars and abandoned buildings that once were homes.

I wonder: would anything have helped, once it all began?

Where did it all begin?

Of course. With J. and his girl.

---

J., like me, was a teacher at the new high school in my hometown. He taught History, with a capital H, and I taught English, with a capital E. How I got to be an English teacher was this: I graduated from a party school that was trying very hard to not be a party school with a degree in English and I asked myself, well, what next? My grades were only so-so, not enough to propel me to graduate school, nothing to brag about. But they weren't exactly terrible either. I was only on academic probation once, after all. So with my mediocre grades and my mediocre degree and some several thousand dollars' worth of student loans hanging over my head, I took the certification exams to become an English teacher.

My plan was to teach for a few years, pay off my debts, then move to a city, a real city, and write. I could do freelance work, as long as it was writing. Real writing, creative stuff – I'd tried journalism in college and discovered that we weren't meant for each other. My head was filled with notions of Fear and Loathing, Puerto Rican rum and little brown bottles of stuff harvested from human adrenal glands. I couldn’t reconcile that with the reality of sitting on a folding plastic chair, drinking bad coffee, and taking notes on fellow students trying to decide whether or not they should support the War. It was probably as far removed from "real" journalism as my imagined version was, but I couldn't stomach it. It was as if the princess kissed the frog and he didn't turn into Prince Charming, but just remained a normal, slimy, wart-covered frog. The genders are a little mixed up, but that's the gist of it. So: what did I want to write about, if not meetings and bad coffee? Honestly, I dreamed of writing the next Great American Novel, even if it did mean waiting until after I was dead to really become famous. You always have to be willing to make sacrifices to achieve your goals.

But as so often happens with plans, my plan didn’t quite go, well, according to plan.

First there was J. There was nothing else to call him, other than to use his last name, Tomson, which was far less catchy than just "J." So far as we knew, J. Tomson was what was written on his birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, health insurance card; it was what would be written on his tombstone. The name he was born with and the name he would die with: J. Tomson. Whenever anyone asked him where he was from, he would say America; whenever anyone asked him how old he was, he would say he was almost thirty. But he was definitely older than me, and I was twenty-five when it all started, so somewhere in that range: between twenty-five and thirty.

I met him on a strange day. It was the beginning of fall, the new school year. I'd only been teaching for two years at that point but I was comfortable with the job, the routine of it. Wake up early, drive to school, make some coffee in the dingy English staff room, double-check the notes for the day, then three classes in a row of high school English. I was lucky enough to be teaching the honors kids in the third year, so at least a few of them had some genuine interest in learning, which made my job a lot easier. There were a lot of uncomfortable silences at first. I would ask a question about the nature of faith in Crime and Punishment and instead would learn a lot about the nature of sweating profusely in front of thirty or so fifteen-year-olds; I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Well, maybe a few people. Kim Jong-il, for starters, could use an embarrassing situation in front of a few fifteen-year-olds. Take him down a couple notches.

J.'s first gesture toward me was to walk up next to me while I wasn't paying attention and clap me on the shoulder without saying anything. I was pouring fresh coffee into a styrofoam cup and spilled some on my hand. I grabbed my hand and winced, then turned around.

"English is one of the few noble subjects left, you know. I really admire what you're doing."

Those were the first words he said to me. I noticed first his stark blue eyes, then the paleness of his skin, then the paleness of his blonde hair, which was messily arranged on the top of his head and around his ears. I found a napkin and wiped off my hand so that I could shake his proffered hand.

"Thanks, I guess," I said.

"I'm J.," he said. "J. Tomson. But everyone calls me J." The way he said it, there was no mistaking it for "Jay" – it was simply one letter followed by a period.

"I'm Sender, Sender Nguyen," I said, separating the syllables of the last name into something like "new-win". I couldn't reproduce the proper tones of my Vietnamese surname, but the simplified pronunciation had always sufficed.

"Sender. That's an odd name. I wonder where it comes from?" Instantly his brow furrowed.

"Well –"

"Lost cause. Anyway I'm the new honors kids' History teacher. United States History, with a capital H. And you teach honors English, with a capital E. It's a pleasure to meet you. I'd like to explain more about what I meant with the whole 'nobility' thing, if that's all right with you."

I was curious, but it wasn't really all right, because my first class started in five minutes. I scratched the back of my head and started to speak, but he barreled on like his asking for permission to continue was merely a formality, like slowing down at a stop sign and rolling past it without ever coming to a complete stop.

"Every subject, every standard area of knowledge that is studied by high school students, has a past, a present, and a future. Rich traditions and progress – there's always progress. But you take English, and History, and progress is limited not by the ingenuity of their scholars, but by the ingenuity of those producing the knowledge that is studied. Do you follow?"

I didn't, really, but I nodded anyway.

"As mathematicians study, they discover new formulae, new answers, new solutions, new ways of thinking even, all while looking at the same old numbers that have existed since the beginning of the creation of the Arabic numeral system. Zero, one, two, three, four, five, all the way up to seven million and two point six eight and beyond. It's like wrestling with a real live crocodile, as opposed to looking at a crocodile through the glass of a zoo exhibit. The possibilities are infinite and the scholars are in the thick of it.

"But for History, and English, we look at the same old documents, the same old works, through that glass wall for hours and hours. So do you see what I'm saying?"

I sipped my coffee and spoke. "You're arguing that Math is somehow more alive than what we study and teach because it evolves more, evolves faster. But Math relies on the ideas of 'works' and 'tradition' just as much as we do. They can grapple with unsolved problems for years, maybe even centuries, while what we can even define as 'history' or 'literature' is constantly changing. And then there's the opposite: explosive scientific discoveries made one after the another, while old men debate the validity of a letter or the literary value of an 19th century novel. So we wrestle with crocodiles just as much as mathematicians do. Well, we, as high school teachers, wrestle with crocodiles just as much as other high school teachers do."

"Which is to say, not much at all." He sounded somewhat deflated. I was immediately sorry I'd said anything at all.

"Unless you count fifteen-year-olds as crocodiles," I said. J. grinned, and I went on. "You'll be fine here. Just don't expect every day to be like the storming of the Bastille."

"Are we the French nobility, or the revolutionaries?"

"A little bit of both, I guess. Help yourself to the coffee, I've got to get to class. It was good meeting you, Mr. Tomson."

"Please, call me J."