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Like I’m still here.
“Leonard?” Herr Silverman says.
I’m sort of staring out across the river at the Philadelphia skyline in the distance. The lights of the skyscrapers shimmy across the water and dance with moonbeams.
I wonder if it’s anyone else’s birthday in Philadelphia.
How those other people are celebrating.
If any of them feel the way I do right now.
“Leonard, please. Just tell me where you are. I’ll come to you.”
I can’t believe how much I want to see Herr Silverman right now.
I don’t even really understand why.
I lower the P-38 and tell him where I am.
“Don’t move,” Herr Silverman says. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. And don’t hang up. I’m going to stay on the phone with you. I just have to tell my roommate where I’m going.”
I hear him talking to someone, but I don’t catch exactly what’s being said.
Another man says something in response—it sounds like they are arguing—then there’s a rustling noise, and Herr Silverman says, “You still there, Leonard?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m walking down the stairs in my apartment building, getting closer to you. Okay, now I’m on Walnut Street looking for a cab. Here’s one now. I’ve got my hand in the air. He sees me. He’s pulling over. I’m getting into the cab.” I hear him tell the driver where I am. “We’re driving now, headed for the bridge.”
Herr Silverman narrates his whole trip for me like that and I listen to the sound of his voice and think that his words are the only thing keeping me tethered to this world right now—that his words are literally keeping me alive—and if he hadn’t picked up I really might have blown my brains out.
I’m wondering again what might be under his shirtsleeves—if knowing will be worth sticking around.
Or will it be just another in a long list of disappointments?
You still have the gun. You can still check out if you need to, fall into the water, sink . . . sink . . . sink into oblivion, I tell myself, and that also helps, because it means I have options.
Options are important.
So is an exit plan.
“Okay,” Herr Silverman says, “I’m in New Jersey. About five minutes away from you now.”
The lights reflected on the river look so beautiful, I think. They almost make me want to go swimming.
“I can see the bridge now,” Herr Silverman says, and then I hear him ask the taxi driver to leave the meter running and wait for us.
The taxi driver says something and the tone of his voice makes me think he won’t wait.
“This is serious—an emergency,” Herr Silverman tells him. “I will tip you well. I promise.”
I realize that Herr Silverman is willing to spend his own money to save me[67] and my throat constricts as I hear the taxi come to a stop above me on the bridge.
“I’m leaving the taxi, Leonard. I’m here. I just have to find a way down to you.”
I want to tell him there’s a little dirt path worn into the hill by drunken high school students, but my mouth has jumped off my face again.
“Here’s a path,” Herr Silverman says, and then I hear rocks and loose dirt rolling down the hill.
“Leonard?” he says, only this time he’s not in my phone.
I hang up.
THIRTY-TWO
“Is that a gun in your hand, Leonard?” Herr Silverman says, and his voice sounds a little shakier than usual—like maybe he’s more freaked than he’s letting on.
“Nazi P-38,” I say, and my voice sounds hard.
“Your grandfather’s war trophy?”
I nod.
He’s still a few feet away from me, but I feel sort of boxed in a little, so I take a step back.
“You wanna give that to me?” he says, and takes a step toward me with his palm outstretched. I can tell he’s really freaked now, because his hand is shaking, although he’s trying hard to steady it.
“Did they teach you how to deal with an armed student when you attended teacher school?” I say, trying to lighten the mood. “Was there a class on this?”
“No, they certainly didn’t—and there definitely wasn’t,” he says. “Maybe there should have been. Is it loaded?”
“Yep. And the safety’s off,” I say, hearing the edge in my voice.
Herr Silverman lowers his hand and stiffens a bit.
I don’t really understand why I’m speaking to Herr Silverman this way.
I mean—he came to save me, right?
I called him on the phone because I wanted him to come.
But it’s like I can’t help myself.
It’s like I’m too fucked up to be nice and appreciative.
“Just give me the gun and everything will be okay.”
“No it won’t. That’s such a fucking lie! You don’t lie, Herr Silverman. You’re better than the rest. You’re the only adult I really trust and look up to. So tell me something else, okay? Try again.”
“Okay. Did you write the letters from the people in the future?” Herr Silverman asks.
His asking that kind of surprises me, and invokes all these intense feelings I don’t want to feel. “Yes. Yes, I did,” I say in this defiant, almost yelling voice.
“What did they tell you? What did they say?”
“They said a nuclear holocaust is coming. The future world is covered with water, like Al Gore predicted. People kill each other for the little land left. Millions die.”
“Interesting. But I’m sure they said other things too, because you’re not all gloom and doom, Leonard. I’ve seen the light in your eyes too many times. What else did they say?”
His saying that bit about there being light in my eyes makes my throat constrict even more and my eyes start to feel tight. “It doesn’t fucking matter, because those people don’t exist.”
“Yes, they do, Leonard,” he says, taking another cautious step toward me. “They really do. If you believe hard enough—and if you hold on. Okay—maybe you won’t find those exact people, but friends will arrive at some point. You’ll find others like you.”
“How do you know? How can you be so sure?”
“Because I used to write letters to myself from the future when I was your age and it helped me a great deal.”
“But did you meet the people you imagined in the future?”
“I did.”
I’m kind of caught off guard by this information, and suddenly I’m truly curious about Herr Silverman’s life.
Who are the people he wrote to?
“How did you find them?”
“Writing those letters helped me figure out who I was and what I wanted. Once I knew that, I could send out a clear message so that others could respond appropriately.”
I think about it and say, “In the future I man a lighthouse with my wife, daughter, and father-in-law. We send out a great beam of light every night even though no one ever sees it.”
“That’s beautiful,” he says. “You see?”
But I don’t see, so I say, “Writing those letters made me feel even more fucked up.”
“Why?”
“I got to thinking that I wanted to live in that fictional world now—that the better world in the letters made me want to exit this world. That’s probably what led to me being here with a gun in my hand.”
Herr Silverman winces almost unnoticeably, but I see it. Then he says, “You ever feel like you’re sending out a light but no one sees it?”
I look at the lights of the skyline reflected in the water and think about how they are always here—every night—whether people look or not.
And mostly, people don’t look.
It doesn’t matter what I do.
It really doesn’t.
Herr Silverman steps closer, and I don’t back away. He takes off his coat, puts it between his knees, and starts to roll up his right sleeve, which makes my heart pound again, because I’ve wanted to know what the hell is under his sleeves for so long now.
When he gets the cuff up around his elbow, he uses his cell phone to light his wrist. “Take a look.”
I don’t see scars or needle marks or an abundance of hair or an unsightly burn or anything like that.
It’s a tattoo of a pink triangle—what the Nazis used to label homosexuals in the concentration camps; I know because Herr Silverman taught us that.
“Who did that to you?” I ask, thinking that maybe he had his own version of Asher Beal.
“I did it to myself. Well, I hired a tattoo artist to do it.”
“Oh,” I say.
It takes a moment, but finally, I realize what he’s telling me.
“I don’t care that you’re gay. It doesn’t bother me,” I say, because I feel like I should.
I never really thought about Herr Silverman being gay before, but it sort of makes sense in retrospect. He never wore a wedding ring, nor did he ever talk about his wife—and he’s a good-looking, well-dressed, middle-aged, steadily employed man who would make someone a great husband.
He smiles at me. “Thanks.”
“Why did you tattoo your wrist like that?”
“I tried to be who I thought the world wanted me to be all through high school. Always trying to please everyone else—keeping my true self invisible. It took me nineteen years to figure out who I was and another twelve or so months to admit it. I didn’t want to ever forget again. I tattooed my wrist with a symbol. So the answer would always be there.”
“Why that symbol?” I say.
“I think you know why, Leonard. It’s probably the same reason you have a Nazi gun in your hand. I was trying to prove something to myself. I was trying to take control.”
“So why don’t you show your students your tattoo?”
“Because it might hinder my ability to get an important message to people who need it.”
“What’s the message?”
“It’s the message of my classes—especially my Holocaust class.”
“Yeah, but what is it?”
“What do you think it is?”
“That it’s okay to be different? We should be tolerant.”
“That’s part of it.”
“So why not be different and promote tolerance by showing everyone your pink triangle?”
“Because that might make it difficult for some of your classmates to take me and my message seriously. It’s sort of don’t ask, don’t tell for gay high school teachers—especially those of us who teach controversial Holocaust classes,” Herr Silverman says, and then starts rolling up his other sleeve almost all the way to his armpit. “Here—use my phone to read this.”
I transfer the P-38 to my left hand and take hold of his cell phone.
I run the light up the inside of his entire arm.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
The words are printed in navy blue—just simple block letters stacked in two rows. Nothing like the fancy-word tattoos you see sprawled in cursive or Old English across the chests of rappers and famous movie stars. I get the sense that this tattoo is more about the message than the image—the message to himself and no one else, which is probably one of the reasons he keeps it hidden under his shirtsleeve.
“It’s often attributed to Gandhi,” he says. “But I didn’t care who said it when I came across it. I only knew that it made me feel strong. Gave me hope. Kept me going.”
“But why did you tattoo that up your arm?”
“So I wouldn’t forget that I win in the end.”
“How do you know you win?”
“Because I keep fighting.”
I think about what he means, about the message he sends out every day in the classroom, why he’s telling me this, and say, “I’m not like you.”
“Why do you have to be like me? You should be like you.”
I raise the P-38 to my head and say, “This is me. Right here. Right now.”
“No, it’s not you at all.”
“How would you even know?”
“Because I’ve read your essays. And I’ve looked into your eyes when I lecture. I can tell you get it—you’re different. And I know how hard being different can be. But I also know how powerful a weapon being different can be. How the world needs such weapons. Gandhi was different. All great people are. And unique people such as you and me need to seek out other unique people who understand—so we don’t get too lonely and end up where you did tonight.”
“I’m not gay,” I say.
“You don’t have to be gay to be different. I never thought you were gay.”
“I’m really not gay.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not gay.”
“Fine.”
“I’m not gay.”
“Why are you saying that over and over?”
“Asher Beal is gay.”
“Why are you telling me that?”
“He’s not gay like you. He’s horrible.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Leonard?”
“I went to Asher Beal’s house tonight. I was going to kill him. I really was. I’ve wanted to kill him for a long time now.”[68]
Herr Silverman gets this horrible panicked look on his face. “But you didn’t kill him, right?”
“I walked up to his bedroom window with the gun in my hand. I raised the P-38 up to the window, aimed at his head—but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“I should have killed him.”
“What did he do to you?”
I don’t want to tell Herr Silverman, and so we stand there in silence for a long time.
But he’s patient—he just waits like he’s not going to move or talk for a million years if that’s how long it takes me to answer his question. I don’t know why, but his waiting like that makes me feel safe—like I can trust him, like maybe he really, truly believes I’m worth listening to, worth saving. Finally, my mouth rebels against my mind, and all the words come out in a rush—like I’m trying to purge. I tell him everything.
Every.Horrible.Stomach-wrenching.Detail.AndI’mfuckingcryingagainbecauseIjustcan’thelpit.
At some point, while I’m losing it, Herr Silverman puts his arm around me and starts to pat my back. He’s really careful about it—cautious—but I can tell that he’s only trying to comfort me. It feels right. Safe. And so I let him hug me, and it feels okay to be hugged, even though I don’t hug him back, which probably makes him feel awkward, and I feel sorry about that, but I’m just not a natural hugger when I get upset like this. He keeps whispering, “You’re okay,” and I simultaneously love him and hate him for saying that. I’m fucking not okay at all. And yet it’s exactly what I most want to be: okay. He can’t give that to me, but I love him for trying.
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