The Math Notebook

BEFORE YOU READ: This story features magic realism, chronista style, abrupt narrative shifts, omission and strange emphasis, journalist style, misinformation and disagreements, apathetic response to magic realism, and time transcending narration. This is all deliberate... it's a style. I just hope you like it, not hate it!




On Friday the Thirteenth, 1999, Emma walked into the School. She described it to me as an overcast day, with the sun just peeking over the top of the clouds. Emma also remarked upon the odd purple hue that had ringed the sky just over the tangle of wild plants that twisted their way through the wire fence on the street bordering the pavement. The plants were harmless enough, an odd combination of bush and tree with seniority to the pathetic wire barrier and no intention of budging.

Everyone agreed that Emma had woken up that morning with an odd sense of foreboding. She apparently had that niggling feeling in the back of her mind that she had forgotten something she was supposed to do. But a quick dunking in the shower made her forget that she had half-forgotten what it was she originally forgot. Her mother, who did the dunking, ignored the girl’s pensive manner, putting it down to jitters. Mama was a great believer in jitters. She blamed them for her marriage, informing me that if she hadn’t got the jitters the third, or was it fourth time she’d walked down the aisle she’d have married that fellow and never have made it to her fifth fiancée. She also blamed the jitters for not having shown up at the fifth ceremony, but jitters are very hard to predict, and even harder to control. They have a way of popping up at inconvenient moments and sometimes refusing to appear when, in retrospect, they might have done some good.

Emma’s feelings might well have been jitters. Her brother thought they were. He still prides himself on never having the jitters, and acknowledged that, since he’d never had them, he was no expert in distinguishing between the jitters and real apprehension. James did however drive Emma to school that morning because it was raining. He recalled the weather perfectly because he technically shouldn’t have been driving on a suspended license and James testified repeatedly that he would never break the law without a good reason.

I might say that Emma had good reason to feel odd. Her School was, by all accounts, an odd place to be and any day had the promise of adventure and the possibility of the weird, the wild, and the absurd. Years later, she would remember it as being one of the more exciting times in her life. A few minutes after walking into the school, her friend Ayama remembered hailing her.

Ayama was the best athlete in the school, at that time. Later I believe they had an Olympic gold medallist, a rather squat but talented girl. Ayama had a great sports career ahead of her although when it came to the Olympics she ran into a brick wall, being unable to decide what country she should play for (with hefty sums of money on either side) until it was too late to enter and the red tape had become too thick to pass through. I still think that she could have been a great athlete; although when I finally met her she was well over eighty.

Emma went over to her friend and embraced her awkwardly. Ayama has always been enamored of embraces but the idea was still awkward to the shy girl. For a minute, Emma hoped that that had been the source of her general anxiety. In a corner, her bemused expression was noted in Johann’s journal, a rather unreadable document I later used as testimony to the day’s events. He wrote it down right next to his morning entry: “Was warm. Had fallen down. Didn’t put up.”

Johann considered Emma’s expression and wondered how to note it without pronouns. Johann didn’t believe in pronouns, and refused to use them until his death, some thirty years later as a war correspondent. He thought they were too ambiguous. He also didn’t believe in using names. Names were misleading. “Odd expression. Worried.” Johann put aside his journal and returned to his computer, which croaked pathetically “Go Reds! Communists!” at irregular intervals.

Emma did not notice Johann. In fact, she did not even remember Johann’s name when I interviewed her, although when I mentioned his computer she laughed aloud. Ayama confessed that she could not understand the computer’s raspy intonations, English was her second language, and so didn’t see the humor but she laughed all the same.

Darla joined the two as Johann finished his journal notation. The girls entered the math class together, with Johann’s computer, and Johann following behind. Darla and Emma remember that they sat on their desks, feet on the chairs. Ayama declared that she would never sit on a desk. The teacher didn’t notice. He went to the board and immediately began to write in red dry-erase marker and furiously erase what he’d written with his sleeve. I suggested to him, many years later, that he might have wanted to not use a red pen, because of the effeminate pink hue it made on his sleeve but the teacher shrugged and peeled back his sleeve to show the pink mark on his arm where the color had finally sunk into his withered skin. He smiled, happy, and returned to scribbling away on his hand with a blue pen and washing it off until the color seeped into his hands. I never did understand the man, but he seemed harmless enough to me.

Class had ended, although no one had noticed. Ayama was throwing a basketball, Darla was terrorizing a younger child, and Emma was drawing on her math notebook, which was filled with drawings but no math, much like her English, Science, German, and French notebooks. The drawing was of a monster like all of them from the previous week, and month, and year. When I heard her talk, many years later, she still had the bright eyes and vacant stare that characterizes the slightly insane, slightly psychic. That day the drawings wobbled on the page, more violently than ever before. They began to lurch and sway and the page ripped around them. Emma watched them calmly, but she did have the sense try to hide the notebook from anyone’s glance. As the drawings leapt off the page, Emma tried to catch them by the wrists, horns, hooves and beaks. Darla began to gather the escaping demons around her and pushed them towards her unfortunate victim. Monsters spilled out of the notebook in hoards, trampling each other to get out. Ayama continued to throw her football. Johann recorded them in his notebook, rather glad that his boycott of names gave him an excuse not to ask what he should call them. “Leapt out. On the loose.” He scrawled. His computer began to breathe heavily between “Red” and “Communist!” and its voice became raspier, and shaky.

Soon the paper demons had spilled out of the room and had overcome General Darla’s control. They fell into the hall and ran over each other as they escaped into other rooms and began to pull faces at the teachers and steal pencils, pens, rulers, tape and paper on which they drew crude copies of themselves as best they could with claws, tentacles, and hooves. They taped sheets of paper together to create monsters as tall as the sky and rolled them up, posted them through the window, and unleashed them on the world beyond. Teachers ignored their student’s protests, and muffled shrieks as the demons attacked. Soon the whole school was hostage, except for the teachers who continued to lecture to empty rooms, accustomed to never having the student’s attention and not minding the quieter environment. Some even remarked later that monsters should dispose of the children every day.

The paper demon menace was over too quickly for the teachers by far, they told me. The police were called and the fire department sprayed water all over the bullet-riddled demons, but, according to the official report, the wet paper merely stretched with the weight of the water and the proud horns and claws drooped. The monsters continued their rampage, now making characteristic slosh noises as they tried to slink up the stairs. Finally Emma bored of her monsters. She quickly drew a small mosquito filled with demon killing poison and unleashed it on the world. Soon the monsters were collapsing, howling in pain and indignation. The apathetic custodians cleaned up the lifeless sopping paper hours later, ignoring the few still flailing tentacles.

Emma failed Math because her monsters had torn her notebook to shreds and the teacher claimed that if she couldn’t show the subject respect she could be excused. Emma smiled and began to draw a monster to dry out all the red dry erase pens in the country. She later created a monster to get rid of the jitters and rented it for five cents an hour, which was how I came to hear the story of the paper monsters.