Several days after the assault—maybe four, maybe five—I began to feel properly ill. Feverish, achy, my neck wrapped in painful lumps that rose up under my ears. I welcomed such persistent, credible sensations of dis-ease. I would have to take care of myself.
There was pleasure in the untethered focus that proper flu demands. This did not mean slacking off my classwork, or failing to deliver assignments. It was more an unshackling from constant vigilance of my own performance. I did not care who was looking at me on the way to class—I had a fever, I was deep in a scarf. I did not care whether a missed hello was intentional—I was unwell, I might not have heard. Shivering suited me. There were things I was trying to shake off, after all, and I sat there quivering like a dog in my chapel seat, letting my eyes go soft over the rows of faces in the long pews across the way. Our chapel was among the oldest and largest examples of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture in the nation. It seated eight hundred and was nowhere near capacity even with all of us in our assigned spots, four mornings a week and occasional Sundays. Its majesty seemed always to contain some rebuke. We gathered, I felt, like pebbles at the bottom of a deep lake. You could never amass enough to reach the daylight.
In my line of sight was a stained-glass window with biblical script:
Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do
The knowledge of the secrets of the Kingdom of God has been given to you.
It scans well, and I tried to take in its almost-pragmatic message of encouragement. Walking the path to classes, I had its beat in my head: Now get up and go. Now get up and go. There was no city, but I substituted a hazy notion of future. I liked to think there was a direction for me, however much solitude it might demand, however much loneliness.
In the library one evening after Seated Meal I pulled out a Bible, alive with silverfish, and looked it up.
The lines, as it turns out, are a biblical mashup. The first, Now get up and go, is Acts 9: the voice Saul hears on the Road to Damascus when, thrown to the ground by the light of God, he looks up at the sky and asks, “Who are you, Lord?”
Jesus replies:
I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.
Saul becomes Paul—the apostle and great teacher of first-century Christianity, and not incidentally the patron saint of my boarding school.
In spite of my illness and sense of crisis in those days, I liked that there was a window telling the story of Saul’s transformation. We were all of us being exhorted to become somebody better, somebody new, at that school. It was nice to see a founding narrative quietly waiting to be discovered, to be reminded that we weren’t the only ones.
The second line in the window, about the knowledge of the secrets of God, is from Matthew. As Matthew tells it, Jesus has just finished teaching the parable of the sower, which is a challenging one. In the telling, seeds are scattered over paths and rocky places—shallow soil and soil choked with thorns—and nothing grows. Only the seeds that fall on rich land will produce. Presumably the Word of God, just so, will be wasted on improper hearts. I always wondered why God didn’t just help people understand. And anyway, is there not also a place for paths and rocky places and thorns? Is this not Creation too?
The disciples agreed with me. They ask Jesus why he teaches in tricky parables, and he replies, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.”
But not to them. They left that part off the bright glass.
Do you really need it?
This chapel window offered up the school’s soul: the commanding of a divine mission backed by an assurance of superior knowledge. The light fell through it and jeweled my entire row.
2Fall 1989, Fourth Form
Our first year at school, our fourth-form year, my urban friends, Washington and New York, shared a double room beneath the eaves of their dorm, with sharply slanted ceilings, and we used to sit on their sofa and talk about things boarding school could not deliver. Because of the alcove space, the room was long and dark. One high dormer window above the sofa opened over the roofs of other dorms and the crowns of the trees, so we could hear voices coming up from the quad but not see their owners.
What was grim about it made it fabulous. Lovely girls trapped in a tall tower—we could work with that. The girl from New York stroked her long hair with a Mason Pearson hairbrush (“You don’t have one? Don’t you know the others will break your hair?”) and the girl from D.C. practiced tying scarves to sit just so across her collarbone. They applied face creams. “Here, touch, see how soft,” said New York, presenting her face to me like a child. Her forehead was entirely smooth, where mine was stippled with acne. Had she noticed my skin? The way she presented herself, her surfaces, for my inspection and my touch, stunned and soothed me. She was not comparing us or judging me. We were always looking only at her.
She took me into the bathroom to teach me how to make myself throw up: “Just open up and
