The Subprimes (12 page)

“And,” Sargam said, “
you
are going to help me start a school.”

Bailey smiled. “You think we can do that?”

“I think we can do anything. That's what this is all about.”

Bailey looked around her tattered little house. “I got a lot of work to do. Vanessa, go out to the Flex and bring in all the bedding. I've got some twine rolled up beneath the backseat. See
about making a clothesline. Jeb, get that crowbar and rip up this filthy carpet. I'd rather sleep on wood.”

She looked for the boy, but he was gone, back to playing soccer with the other boys.

She shook her head, walked over, and hugged Sargam. “Thank you.”

FOR THE CHILDREN OF VALENCE,
the days were spent shirking work and running wild in the scrubby grassland around the subdivision. The roads had been built on spurs from main thoroughfares, ending in cul-de-sacs, so that when viewed from above, the community might look like the splayed stalks of a fern, stripped of leaves. Within days the boy joined with a gang who ranged through the hills around the subdivision, returning hourly because of the fierce thirst the sun and heat worked up in them. The heat was so intense the boy could actually feel the thirst starting, first as an extra swallow, then as a stickiness in the mouth, and finally a thick, gel-like texture at the back of his throat. In the final stages, he could develop a slight headache, but by then he was back at the pump, guzzling water from one of the plastic bottles that littered the area and were rinsed by the boys and refilled. They ran and they drank, that was the cycle of their days. They played war, capture the flag, ditch, cowboys and Indians, GIs and Vietcong, Navy SEALs and Al Qaeda. They played soccer and football and even a version of baseball with a bat and a tennis ball, which they fielded barehanded. There was always another game, always boys and girls willing to play. A whole desert stretched around them, dry as the inside of a sealed car, but all theirs, every sandy foot of it.

Few of the kids still had bikes, and even fewer skateboards—Tom was one of the lucky few who had managed to hold on to his
old deck—and they shared those, playing a game they made up called sweeper, sort of like kickball with bikes and skateboards. They spied on women getting dressed, stole corn from the community stores, caught lizards and garter snakes, and ran from rattlers. Within a week of arriving, the boy had a tarantula in a coffee can that he kept until his mother found it and had him release it far from the house.

He had friends within a day, and knew their names within two. Ted, Juaquin, Emmett, Yuri, Vito, Yoshi, and Juan were the boys; Emma, Nathalie, and Maya the girls, and soon it seemed he knew them better than he had ever known anyone. After a few weeks he even stopped worrying that his family would be moving on and that he would lose his new friends, because nobody was leaving, and in fact more kids kept coming.

He came home filthy every night, his mother ordering him to the pump with a bucket, and not to return until he had scrubbed himself, which he did in the encroaching darkness and the first chill of night air, shivering and not getting himself clean in the cracks and hard-to-reach spots and drying himself too fast and then running home because he did not want to miss supper or the campfire or the DJ parties on Friday nights.

Vanessa, now above these childish games, was only too aware of what she was missing. She had seen enough movies and read enough books to know that teenage life in America was supposed to involve cars and kik-toks from cute boys and dates and a prom. She should be shopping in malls and flirting with boys, but here she was, in this desert, with, like, nothing to do. She helped her mom, cleaning the bedding, airing out sleeping bags, and hauling water in buckets from the pump. Jeb had nailed the bottoms of coffee cans over the gaps in the floor, boarded up the windows, and duct-taped a seal where gaps had opened between the sill and the wall. The house was dark, but Jeb found a clear
plastic tarp that he laid over one window to let in some light. The nights were cold, but more comfortable than sleeping outside. Though the boy slept soundly, issuing occasional soft murmurs that sounded as if he were playing even in his dreams, Vanessa would lie awake, recalling boys she knew when she was last in school, and wistful for missed opportunities, such as a date with Manny Bramford, who had told her friend Tobin that he liked her, but then she and her family had moved away before they had even had a conversation.

Her mother showed her how to soak up her monthly blood with a rag when they ran out of tampons in Arizona. When they arrived in Valence, Sargam gave her mom a box of tampons for which Vanessa was grateful. But here she was, a woman in a place surrounded by wild boys and old men. What was there for her?

Part of her wanted to be running the hills with her brother and his friends, and another part wanted something brighter and more exciting. She had an idea in her head of sitting in a car, a boy in the backseat next to her, the weight of his body in motion. She remembered hiding beneath a mattress as a little girl, and the feeling of evenly applied pressure that left her with a novel wetness between her legs.

I DON'T LIKE TO REREAD
my old work, especially my first book, my only book that received some acclaim and notice, which, at that time anyway, made me feel as if I were making a difference. But I'm stoned and feeling nostalgic, so I take an old hardcover edition of
What You Wish For
from the bookcase in my office and I begin reading and I am taken by the energy, the anger, of the prose. This writer—was it really me?—is caring so deeply about the fate of the world, rooting so hard for our better natures
that he—I—told the story so that it reads like an instructional manual about how to live virtuously: We must care, it makes clear, about our neighbors. For our fates are inseparable.

But who was I to stand in the way of regress? I was just one man. What could I do? I still care, I really do, but my concerns are more parochial. I'm trying to hold my family together, or the rump version of if that remains, raise my kids to ride bikes, swim, read, all that old-fashioned stuff nobody does anymore. I see what we've become—I wish I could say I was blinkered—but I just don't know what to do about it. There's no one really standing up and saying, “What the fuck are we doing?” Give me something or someone to believe in, and, well, I don't know if I would actually believe, but I might write a hell of a story about it.

There is a knock on my office door. I put out my joint and wave an old tablet computer around to try to air out my office.

There's Ronin, on his way home from school and stopping by, presumably to get money for a snack.

I worry that my office reeks.

“Hey.” He tries to brush past me.

“Wait, wait.” I won't budge. “You hungry? Let's go eat.”

“With you?”

”Why not?”

He weighs the idea. How embarrassing is it to be seen with your father in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday?

“How about you just give me some money and I'll go to Panda and get some food and eat it here.”

I give him a twenty. This buys me time.

When he returns with his food, glutinous heaps of sugary, corn-starch-coated chicken and greasy noodles and a huge waxed cup of pink drink, he sits on my office sofa and begins chewing with his mouth open, chicken and noodle and pink drink sloshing around behind retainered teeth.

“How is school?”

“Sucks.”

“You dealing with Freaks?”

“Sucks.”

“Math?”

“Sucks.”

Ronin has cycled through various expensive tutoring programs in an attempt to boost his math scores, which persist in the range typical of underperforming Caucasians. Mathematics instruction, bewildering in the best of times for me, is the educational Mordor of my son's life. What his middle school is teaching, and how they are teaching it, does not resemble what went on in the classrooms of my youth. What stops me from outright rejecting these new methods is my own feckless academic record. Who am I to have deeply held opinions about what works or doesn't work in the classroom?

Still, what's happening in my son's middle school is a microcosm of our era's preferred method of fucking up. Three years ago, after a bitter court fight in which the teachers' union was stripped of collective bargaining rights, every math teacher in California was fired and public school math instruction throughout the state was privatized. Enhanced Quantitatives, or EQ, a division of a private equity firm that has contracts with numerous state boards of education, claimed to have cracked the code of Asian math dominance. EQ's software-based learning system was supposed to bring American seventh- and eighth-graders up to the level of their peers in Singapore and Shanghai. What this meant was hours of watching instructional videos and PowerPoint presentations by EQ specialists who were themselves barely numerically literate—and would have been earning minimum wage had that not been abolished. The students were ordered to memorize a host of materials that I had never
learned: perfect squares to 1,600, times tables to 40 x 40,
pi
to ten places. I had trouble seeing what purpose all this rote memory served, and for Ronin, who seemed to have not yet developed the part of his frontal cortex that dealt with retaining data beyond social network passwords and
Call of Duty
cheats, these strings of numbers might as well have been distant planets for all the likelihood he ever had of reaching the required goals. Even with EQ now designing the state exams, the students' scores had dropped, which the EQ specialists had blamed on our children failing to memorize what their peers in Singapore and Shanghai memorize by the time they are seven years old. The solution: sign our kids up for expensive EQ extra sessions, which are proving as fruitless as the actual classes themselves.

I went to school to meet one of these EQ specialists—Barry, who wore a microphone headset the whole time we spoke because every conversation he has with a parent is recorded by EQ.

I asked about Ronin, and why, after all these extra EQ sessions, he was still struggling in math. Barry answered, “The EQ learning experience has been assembled from thirty-six semantic differentials and cross-referenced with best-practices standards from the top-five-performing academic systems in the world. The EQ learning experience has been proven to increase test scores in simulated test takers by eleven percent per year of implementation.”

I realized he was repeating words that were being spoken into his earpiece.

“What about Ronin?”

“Of course, the performance of each individual EQ subclient may vary.”

“But Ronin—”

“The subclient, even after purchase of additional EQ products, may still deviate from the statistical norms—”

“Can we just talk about Ronin?”

He held up a finger to silence me.

“—may still deviate from the statistical norms and simulated test-taker results for a variety of non-EQ-related causes—”

“Stop talking.”

“—for a variety of non-EQ-related causes, including but not limited to non-EQ-controlled events. If, for example, the EQ subclient fails to process EQ-designed and -assigned units in the required time, then that subclient falls out of the EQ Learning Experience statistical normatives and cannot be included in any EQ Learning Experience assessments.”

“This is supposed to be a parent-teacher conference.”

“A parent-
specialist
conference,” he corrected me.

“About why Ronin is screwing up in math.”

“And I've explained, that if the subclient fails to process EQ-designed—”

“Could you just talk like a normal person?”

He listened to the voice in his earpiece. “As an EQ specialist, I am free to discuss the EQ Learning Experience and related products, and to direct you to our website, or smartphone app, or Kik-Tok, or, if you prefer, to provide you with a hard copy catalog, and there you will see the various EQ Learning Experience options that are available to you.”

“So the solution is to buy more crap from your company?”

And that was when I decided that if Ronin was ever going to learn basic algebra, I would have to teach him myself.

I'm an awful teacher. Yet I've always believed every father has three responsibilities: to teach his children to swim, ride a bicycle, and master the multiplication tables. (Though my own father failed at all three.) But somehow, through teary afternoons during which any witness would have called Child Protective Services for how I shouted at my children, they learned to ride
and swim. And Ronin, miraculously, had committed his multiplication tables to memory, up to 12 x 12. Maybe there was hope.

I look at Ronin. So fragile in his skinny jeans and high-top Converse and hoodie with a broken zipper. I want to give him a big hug and tell him, Fuck those people and their fucking lame math. He seems so vulnerable, a little kid, trying to act big and unafraid, and failing at both. He chomps his Chinese food and grins vacantly, confused by the awful education he is receiving and further embarrassed at being labeled a youthful sexual predator. I want to drive with him to a cabin somewhere—in one of the few national parks not yet ruined by shale oil extraction rigs—and just let him be a kid and screw up in all the ways that kids are supposed to screw up.

I get up and lumber toward him.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“I just want to give you a hug.”

“Um, weird,” he says. But he lets me engulf him.

Later, as we're walking up Bashford toward our house, the sidewalks empty and Ronin stomping alongside me in his impatient lope, he asks, “Why don't you drive, like normal people?”

It's not a question that merits answering, so I ignore it and we continue our trudge up the street.

We round the corner onto Iliff, and we can hear coyotes howling—the sun is nowhere near setting—but instead of frightening, it is somehow beautiful and we feel safe even if it's just the two of us against the dogs of the world.