Fraud (14 page)

Apparently, all of this dubious evidence merely galvanized people to try to conclusively prove the existence of the monster. This quest, started just over thirty years ago, is spoken of as a kind of countercultural be-in, an alternative to protesting Nixon’s secret war in Cambodia. “The youth of the sixties took a stand against conventional science!”
(One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fuckin’ laws of thermodynamics!)

Through room after room, everything is succinctly, scientifically, and convincingly debunked. The sonar scanning of the floor of the Loch reveals nothing, not even enough fish to sustain such an animal, let alone two. There is no monster here. End of story. LN
2
K is a thoroughly entertaining, beautifully produced buzz kill. Still, for all its skepticism, the exit doors lead me straight out into the Nessie Shop.

Merely leading spectators out to a gift shop is a Reykjavíkian study in restraint compared with the situation at the Original Loch Ness Monster Museum, just up the road, where the exhibit is actually
inside
the gift shop. The carpet is a very bright plaid, all the better to offset the ear-splittingly loud bagpipe version of “Amazing Grace” that plays over the sound system. The museum itself is an area of makeshift plywood walls, enclosing a narrow hallway of bulletin boards behind glass, and a small interior room: the tiny theater where the filmed presentation will take place.

After paying my admission, I and the two other customers, a father and his teenage son, study the display. All the pictures of the monster in the world—every single one of which is displayed here—still don’t account for many linear feet of wall space. For the rest, there are dull photos of the construction of canals and public water maintenance projects in the area, a section devoted to the midcentury attempt to achieve the on-water speed record on the Loch (apparently a rather famous event; the driver did not survive and his body was never found, although the twisted wreckage of the supersonic vehicle is shown). In yet another display case, I learn that Aleister Crowley, noted enthusiast of the black arts, maintained a house from
1900
to
1918
on the Loch in the hamlet of Boleskine. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin owns it now. In an uncharacteristic moment of skeptical sobriety, the museum allows as how this might not really speak to the water’s darker powers, since “most records when played backwards sound like a Satanic chant.”

In the display devoted to cryptozoology—that highly disputed field of study of strange, extinct, and mythic creatures—the Original Museum becomes a nineteenth-century Bowery arcade of curiosities, everything but the monstrous two-headed baby in brine. The wall text is carnival barker sensational, while the photos show unusual but by no means extraordinary animals: a Giant Squid, “the animal mythicized [sic] by the Scandinavians as the Kraken.” The Megamouth, the Coelocanth, the Spindlehorn, the Komodo dragon, “Champ,” the legendary monster of Lake Champlain in upstate New York. There is the famous picture of the Japanese Carcase, which I’ve seen before, a rotting partial skeleton found by a Japanese fishing boat in
1977
. It really is huge and enough to make one truly believe in the continued existence of aquatic dinosaurs among us, except for the fact that it was found to contain elastin, a substance present only in sharks. The description of Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch and the Yeti, reads like a PSA for a persecuted minority. We are to think of them as a hapless giant race, now reduced to a tiny number owing to their lesser intelligence; a bony spur on the evolutionary continuum. “We must try to establish, and then ensure, their continued survival in a rapidly changing world.”

The museum desperately needs a proofreader; there are many typos, and the text describing the Bermuda Blob—a white starfish-shaped, coffee-table-size piece of undifferentiated biomass—just takes off somewhere else in the middle: “Some propose that they are the remains of giant octopuses In November
1746
, he died of fever, aged thirty-seven and was buried on a riverbank in Siberia unknown to science.”

The elderly woman tending the cash register, and presumably running the projector, pokes her head in and tells us to make our way into the theater for the film presentation. What is this feeling of déjà vu? I wonder, as I sit in the tiny auditorium with its faded red velvet movie seats and general air of grime and threadbare opulence, watching a film that is nothing more than a projected videotape. It then hits me with nostalgic clarity: This could be a pre-Giuliani porn theater.

It’s not an inapt parallel, actually. Just as no one truly believes that Adonis-like park rangers come upon priapic campers in need of “help,” here too it’s more about amusement and going with the flow than actual fact. “It’s just a cracker of a story, that’s all,” said a local standing at the bar the previous night.

It’s all in the name of fun, except perhaps here at the Original, where the film tips its hand immediately with its title:
We Believe in the Loch Ness Monster!
The narration, like the display outside, is slightly hysterical, whether speaking of the Loch’s human history—“If these stones could talk, they would talk of the clang of metal sword upon shield, of blood spilt between clan and clan”—or its geological origins: “The rocks are quiet now, although echoes of that primeval rape still ring.” There is something almost touching about seeing all of the same old photographs, convincingly debunked at the other museum not fifteen minutes prior, being presented here as hard evidence. But the movie’s title notwithstanding, I don’t get the sense that the folks here really believe in the monster, either. No one I talked to working at the hotel or the many gift shops seems to think about the creature at all.

The locals’ widespread pragmatism is odder than it sounds. It’s not like in Iceland, where the enchanted spots are so terribly unenchanting and the stories of people from another dimension able to inhabit solid rock so intrinsically farfetched. There have been some actual sightings here—albeit of sturgeons, otters, and large branches, but legitimately confusing facsimiles—and, given the imposing darkness and murk of the huge Loch, which fairly broadcasts mystery and concealment, I expected an entire battalion of the faithful. At the very least some of those Stonehenge-y, Wiccan, animist, pagan/
druidical crazies eating vegetarian, playing zithers, and giving each other STDs after worshiping the dawn on the rocky shore. But there are none. Not surprisingly, the main believer does turn out to be someone with an intimate and ongoing relationship with the Loch. Alex Campbell, the water bailiff—a job whose very title would have me hallucinating just to pass the time—boasts eighteen sightings in the film.

I emerge into the gift shop, as seems to be the curatorial practice in Drumnadrochit. (Truthfully, it’s the curatorial practice almost everywhere. One can scarcely walk five steps in the Metropolitan in New York without running into some makeshift kiosk hawking Monet coasters, Diego Rivera scarves, and those fucking Raphael cherubs!) I dispatch a number of pennies into one of those machines that flattens them into oval tokens incised with an image of Nessie. I adore these contraptions. I love the modesty of the objects they produce, the muscle of the heavy metal rollers, the whining creak of the gears as the stalwart copper is rendered liquid soft and ductile. I could stay at the penny machine all day, but there is more to see, or so I think. I follow a Japanese family out into the brilliant sunshine.

The
Nessie Hunter,
a small boat that fits about ten of us, is being guided over the waters of the Loch by the same man who drove us in the minivan down to the dock. The tour, even though an hour long, doesn’t even begin to cover a significant portion of the Loch given its twenty-plus-mile length. The day is perfect and blue and, in a further nod to
The Ten Commandments,
the sky positively biblical with Maxfield Parrish clouds. The green felt hills to the west are dotted with sheep, while the piney banks to the east are cast in shadow. The land falls almost vertically into the water to a depth of several hundred feet.

We begin the ride a bit shy and with one last shred of credulity, wondering, almost hoping for the boat to be overturned as the waters roil and part like the Red Sea in the cutting wake of the beast’s ridged and shining slate back. Out here on the Loch is the only time we feel that whatever creature might live here could be anything other than a cartoon Cecil, that cheerful, anthropomorphized playmate.

The thought lasts only moments, though. Even the chattering five-year-old boy has stopped scanning the surface. By the time the driver cuts the engine, we float peaceably, looking up at the steeply wooded slopes, taking each other’s pictures. We could be in northern Ontario for all the lack of supernatural menace. Tourists wave at us as they clamber up and down the ruined turrets of the medieval castle that looms above us. We idle back into Urquhart Bay and clamber back into the van.

The driver points out the small webcam perched atop the chimney pot of a small cottage. It takes regular pictures of the water and broadcasts them over the Internet, twenty-four hours a day. He stops the vehicle, and we get out. Perhaps it’s the central absence at the Loch, the materiality of the lack here, that makes us so still and quiet, but not one of us waves at the camera. We stand, unmoving, looking at an immobile camera recording an unchanging body of water.

It is a mystery to the Canadian backpacker and myself why we are almost unable to breathe as we sit on the low stone wall at the bus stop. We are outdoors, after all, a gentle breeze blows through the green bowl of Drumnadrochit’s sun-washed glen, and still the air is thick and noxious with the stench of decay. The plague of the murdered firstborn meted out while I was cruising the Loch, perhaps? Finally I turn around and see the suburban tract-home-size pile of sheep droppings—not the chocolate kind, unfortunately—in the field behind us. O, for a tiny lace smelly!

My initial plan had been to be in Drumnadrochit for two nights, exploring the town and getting to the bottom of the bitter disputes between believer and infidel. I had no indication from either the guidebooks or my first view of the town, situated at the base of these verdant hills with its two exhibitions, that it would be so, well, entertainment bereft. But, having seen both museums, walked the town from stem to sternum not twice, but thrice—and enduring the increasingly suspicious stares of the man in the small cottage with the even smaller garden that still manages to hold a profusion of plaster of Paris gnomes, a small iron cannon, and a four-foot-tall bronze David—and already returned from my cruise, I am dismayed to find that it is only one in the afternoon on Day the First of a proposed three-day stay.

I take the bus back to Inverness. As we pass the LN
2
K museum, the parking lot attendant/entertainment, a man in full Highland attire of kilt and bandoliers, waves us farewell. The day closes in on typical gray skies and drizzle, and I have hours before the next train back to London.

I board yet another bus for a tour out of the city to Culloden Moor, site of the last battle fought on British soil, between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians in
1742
. I am the only one on the double-decker with the driver. He is silent, so as not to interfere with the “tour guide,” a cunningly timed Scottish female recording that somehow knows exactly when we are passing points of local interest. On our way out of Inverness, we stop on a bridge over the river Ness to see if the city’s famous seals are making an appearance. They are not; we drive on. Farther out, by the Moray Firth, the inlet of the North Sea that boasts its very own population of bottle-nosed dolphins, the bus stops again for a photo opportunity so that we, or rather I, might take pictures of the creatures gamboling in the wind-tossed surf. But it is raining, and the dolphins, like the monster, the seals, and the tour guide, are a no-show. Besides, I have no camera. We drive on.

The battlefield itself is an inhumane, bracken-covered field, inhospitable and muddy, which makes the female guide’s bright-voiced account of the carnage all the stranger. “The Hanoverians marched out to bloody battle after a light breakfast and tots of brandy!” I decline the driver’s offer to disembark and walk by myself along the sodden ruts of the moor. We begin the drive back to town.

Talk of war now dispatched and with twenty minutes to go before the tour’s end, the disembodied guide now happily chatters on about matters generally Scottish: how many yards of cloth it takes to make a kilt (many, I forget exactly); repairing stone farm walls; and Scottish cuisine. She says: “One way that
I
like to prepare Scottish turnips is with a head of garlic and half a pound of butter. You should try it.” “But who
are
you?” I want to cry out. You cannot know until it happens to you, but there is almost nothing existentially bleaker than sitting alone on a bus in the rain with a driver who will not talk to you and being given a cooking tip by someone who does not exist.

Before settling in for the night in my inordinately cozy sleeper, I retire to the dining car. I sit, smoking and drinking a stunningly expensive beer across from a man who tucks in to his plate of haggis and peas. I smile at him in greeting. He does not know it, but this is our silent seder for two. I want to lean over to him, dip my pinkie in his red wine, and count out the plagues on the rim of his plate. We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.

I read my book and look out the window. This far north, the evening outside is still cigarette smoke blue, even though it is well past nine. We hurtle through the Highlands. I press my face up to the glass. All I can see are a few sheep, out well past their bedtimes, white spots in the gathering dark. As I have now come to expect, they are not moving.

WE CALL IT AUSTRALIA

It all begins with that extraordinary opening shot. The camera impossibly placed in the alpine ether, coming in ever closer to the mountaintop to finally focus and settle on the turning figure—her arms outstretched, face beaming, overwhelmed with joy and music: the young novitiate, fräulein Maria. Coming in late to vespers, her color high, strange grasses in her gamine, slightly flyaway hair. How
do
you solve a problem like her? Send her away, carpetbag and guitar in hand. Have her tutor aristocratically unloved children, eventually tossing aside the three Rs in favor of teaching them simple harmony and vocal counterpoint. Make matching clothes out of the family curtains. Marry the Baron. Take the act on the road. Defy the Nazis. Open an inn in Vermont.

These few linear feet of film are what I think of whenever I hear the words
Austrian Teacher,
admittedly not a term I use all that often in my life, although about to become a staple of my vocabulary for the next eight months, starting on this sweltering July morning on the deserted campus of City College in Harlem at seven-thirty
A
.
M
.

New York City has the nation’s largest public school system, with some
65
,
000
teachers serving
1
.
1
million students. There is a dearth of qualified math and science teachers here. Coincidentally, there is a surplus in Austria, with a years-long waiting list for positions. In what seemed like the perfect solution to both problems, the New York City Board of Education put up flyers at teachers colleges in Vienna. “If you can read this,” they said in English, “have we got a job for you!” Today is the first of a projected two days of interviews of about fifty candidates for public high school teaching jobs in New York’s five boroughs.

The interviews are being conducted in English via live video teleconferencing from Vienna. New York City public educators—high school superintendents, Board of Ed muck-a-mucks, and principals—have all gathered to ask the prospective teachers a series of qualifying questions.

New York’s unorthodox plan to look for teachers so far afield has attracted a great deal of attention. In addition to myself, there are reporters from the major dailies and, most glamorous of all, a TV crew and reporter from ABC News in Washington. Two young men are busily sticking up a purple “City College” banner with brown packing tape for the news cameras’ benefit.

Any job interview is an awkward affair. Any job interview with a panel of five interviewers even more so. Everyone is nervous on both sides of the ocean. Questions are repeated, slowed down. It makes for some halting progress and the occasional awkward moment of cultural preconception. When asked what previous knowledge they have of New York schools, for example, one woman answers that she heard “the kids were having guns and using drugs.”

But for the most part, the Austrian teachers are hoping to come to New York out of just such a sense of adventure; to experience another culture firsthand and to improve their English, although for the most part they speak quite well. One fellow openly hungers for New York’s legendary multiethnic society: “I want to see the blacks. Where I am from, there is only one black people a year,” he says.

“Oh,” one of the African American principals whispers. “Vermont.”

Three of the men, when asked why they became teachers, innocently and unabashedly answer, “Because I love children.” I don’t know that an American male would answer that question in that way, even if it were true.

They all seem generally competent and acceptable. But they are almost all completely stymied by the final question: “Can you tell us anything else about yourself that should make us want to select you as one of our teachers?” Answering this question is an acquired skill even for Americans; it takes at least three job interviews before one learns that maintaining unwavering eye contact and seeming hypomanically gung ho wasn’t just not weird and arrogant, it was required. For the Austrians, trained in a kind of courtly European reserve, being asked to assert their own sterling qualities in full voice seems truly baffling. A trick question straight out of
Alice in Wonderland.

The best answer comes from the undisputed star of the day, Andrea Unger. With her doctorate in genetics at age twenty-eight, perfect English, and blond movie star beauty, she has all of us, educators and reporters alike, immediately and profoundly enslaved. This being a high school world, I am hyperattuned to adolescent paradigms on this day, and she seems to be that rarest of legendary creatures: the popular girl beloved by students and faculty alike who, in addition to being pretty
and
smart, is also nice. She is being addressed as “Dr. Unger” scarcely four minutes into her interview. The borough superintendents are mouthing, “I want her!” out of camera range. When asked her final tell-us-why-you’re-the-best question, she answers, “I don’t know if I’m the very best, but I will do my best. And if that’s not enough, I will do much better.” We would follow her into the very mouth of hell, singing songs all the while.

“See you in September,” says one of the principals after she has left the room in Vienna.

The reasons why I am the perfect person for this story are also the reasons why I am the worst person for this story. As an adoptive New Yorker, I remember vividly how challenging and frequently lonely it can be to move here when one is as green as new bamboo. As a Canadian, I also understand the whole Austria-Germany conundrum and what it’s like to come from a small country, seemingly culturally indistinguishable from its dominating adjacent neighbor. But these factors are part and parcel of my unhealthy investment in, more than being opened up to, being liked by the teachers. It is why I am the world’s worst reporter. I am apt to try too hard to help rather than just document my subjects. It’s only amplified when I look into the innocent faces of these young foreigners.

An innocence amplified by my own ignorance. If, on the one hand, I see the meadow-sweet purity of
The Sound of Music,
on the other, I’m envisioning New York’s public high schools as a sinister world of metal detectors, baggy jeans, box cutters, and white flight—an underfunded, failed social exercise; the first stop in the revolving-door prison system.

I’m not the only reporter guilty of this misapprehension. Even after a school year where there seemed to be a weekly public school shoot-’em-up everywhere in the United States
but
New York, the city’s reputation as a blackboard jungle is a tenacious one. It is these exact stereotypes—the guileless, defenseless foreigners being used for target practice by young toughs—that have so piqued the interest of the national media. Certainly, it is more than the clever resourcefulness on the part of the Board of Education that has gotten us up here at seven-thirty in the morning, with the temperature outside already well above eighty degrees.

It’s also what gets me and thirteen other reporters and sound and camera people all the way out to Kennedy Airport one month later on an exceptionally muggy and toxic August Friday. We sit in the California Lounge at the Delta Terminal, falling in and out of conversation, and slumber as we wait for the Austrians to get through customs.

The posters on the walls are, paradoxically, of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Perhaps the only thing that seems authentically California to me about the California Lounge is how boring it is. Some of the reporters are talking about the official statement from the teachers union: “We’re pleased they’re here, but it’s regrettable that New York doesn’t pay its teachers more.” The starting salary for a teacher in New York City is just under $
30
,
000
, which sounds pretty good, and is even a living wage in New York, but it’s not Easy Street by any means. We are all briefly diverted when those same two young men from City College come with that same purple banner and try to tape it up on the wall. But the California Lounge will not stand for extra adornment. The banner keeps falling down, and they finally give up.

When eventually the teachers arrive, they seem tired and hot as they sit indulgently and somewhat dazed, listening to the official greetings from the Austrian consul general and people from City College and the Board of Ed. By contrast, I am energized, my heart racing a bit, as if I were in the presence of major celebrities. This is especially true when I see Andrea Unger.

Looking at them, I remember my own seventeen-year-old self, coming to New York for college. My introduction to the city was from the safe and privileged haven of a fairly cloistered campus, under the watchful eye of a well-paid, if not actually caring, administration. As public high school teachers, the Austrians will not be similarly coddled.

Andrea and three other teachers—Lutz Holzinger, Elke Rogl, and Nikolaus Ettel—are all assigned to teach at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Bensonhurst was the scene of some racist violence a few years back. I am, quite frankly, terrified at the thought of going to Bensonhurst. As far as I knew, if you weren’t white, Italian American, and straight, you stayed out of Bensonhurst.

It’s not just a fear of inner-city New York teenagers that fuels my trepidation for them; it’s teenagers in general, having been one myself. I remember the rumor and innuendo, the erroneous, slandering lives we constructed for our teachers. If any of it were to be believed, we were being taught by the most dangerous, antisocial dregs of society, a rogues’ gallery of the kind of misshapen, alcoholic, sexual deviants that you wouldn’t even let out into the general cell block population, let alone near a bunch of kids. I shudder when I think of what I and my cutthroat little pals could have done with the accents and strange surnames of the Austrians before me.

I can hardly keep the fear out of my voice when I speak to my Austrian Four. Andrea asks me if I’ve heard of FDR and whether it’s a nice school. My response is a poker-faced, “I think, uhm . . . I think the FDR High School is going to be a completely interesting experience for you.”
(You bought the old Lawson estate? Ain’t nobody lived there since that horrible murder twenty-five years ago. If you want my advice, you’ll turn around and leave this place!)

“Whatever it means, huh?” She is somewhat less than appreciative of my candor.

Nikolaus—Nikki—is a small, finely made man in his mid-twenties. He is, in a word, adorable, which to my mind also means, in a word, a goner.

“I’ve heard it’s a big school,” he says.

“It’s huge. It’s four thousand kids,” I say in a voice strangulated with panic.

“Four thousand?”

“I just found that out.”

Nikki attempts to maintain composure. “Okay. Really huge, and so I expect that it might be somehow anonymous. We will work it out very easily, I hope, and I’m glad I can come here.”

I’ve also found out that FDR’s four thousand kids are from seventy-two different countries representing thirty-two different language groups. One-third of them are identified as limited-English-speaking youngsters, meaning they’ve entered the United States within the last two or three years. Easily
60
percent of the entire student body was born outside the United States. This ethnic diversity is a bit of a surprise. Not exactly the bastion of xenophobic thuggery I’d envisioned. The Austrians will be right at home.

Still, I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them.

There are those who would say that my fear is an outdated remnant of a pre–Gilded Age New York, and perhaps it is. With the city now being overrun with packs of ravening Internet millionaires, it sometimes seems like the most frightening thing for many New Yorkers is getting to Citarella before they sell the last piece of sushi-grade tuna. Where once we scared people with oblique auguries of physical peril and tales of the ignored screams of a Kitty Genovese, we now resort to frightening strangers by talking about housing.

“So do you have a place to live yet?” I ask Nikki.

“We have a dorm for a week, and I have to look for an apartment. I want to live together with some Brooklyn teachers because of low cost.”

Unmollified by his positive attitude, I continue. “Yeah, it’s a particularly expensive time in New York City. Rents are kind of . . . well, you never know. I’ll see you.” Mission accomplished for now, I move through the crowd of new arrivals to do more damage.

Luckily enough for the Austrian teachers, their introduction to life in New York City and its public school system will not be left up to the paranoid, hysterical likes of me. They will, instead, sit through a series of days of orientation sessions at City College, where they will be turned into fully functional residents, with Social Security numbers. They will see Miss Licorice—her actual name!—the representative from the Chase Manhattan Bank, about opening accounts. They will be taught how to write checks and, worst of all, look for apartments.