The Most Precious Substance on Earth Read online

  I’m a bad teacher. And not like in that movie Bad Teacher. I’m the kind of teacher who promises more diversity on the syllabus, and while it’s true that I don’t have total control over the curriculum, I fully intended to deliver—only to spend the winter break considering other career options, trying not to think about teaching.

  Nothing helps. I sit down on the rug. My thoughts are fragments, loud and rattling around, reminding me of the haunted radiator. Everything takes me back to that classroom.

  * * *

  Since I don’t have time for a real relationship, I’m casually seeing this guy, Travis, who also smokes too much weed. He has the worst taste in…everything. The movies he likes feature implausible car racing. The sneakers he wears are too big. His jeans are too long for a grown man and bunch below his knees. In 2006 he got a tattoo on his arm in Mandarin (he does not speak Mandarin). He only wants to eat McDonald’s burgers (I order the apple pie). He does not like podcasts or newspapers (“None of them?” I inquired), and when I asked what he thought of Train to Busan, he said, “It was okay, but it’s Korean, and their storytelling isn’t as good as ours.” Travis is an unemployed engineer who grumbles that there are no jobs out there for a white male. I’m not sure why he’s dating me. I’m only dating him because he has an orange-and-white beard that feels sublime when he kisses my neck and that reminds me of a cat I once knew.

  We’re at his place one evening after I’ve finished supervising the school arts magazine’s weekly meeting. The only furniture he owns is a black leather sofa in front of a giant TV on a stand piled with a dozen video-game controllers. He’s packing his bong with the weed I brought, and I’m complaining about my job—about the quiet class, not about the arts magazine kids, who are a bunch of sweethearts who love Studio Ghibli and wear giant glasses that hide their gorgeous eyes.

  “They just don’t say anything. And they’re all staring at me, but I have no idea what’s going on in their heads. It’s unnerving,” I tell him, not because he is the best confidant, but because it is my only available conversation topic. “You know, I think this might be it. I might be done with teaching.” Earlier, I googled I quit teaching and found 93,300,000 search results. “I thought I’d gotten better at public speaking after Toastmasters, but still…”

  “But your job isn’t public speaking, per se,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, most teachers spend hardly any time actually teaching. It’s just like worksheets and stuff most of the time.”

  “That’s not true. And who do you think makes the worksheets? And grades them? It’s a lot of work.”

  “But can’t they basically not fire you? You’d have to, like, molest a student.” He laughs. “I’m, like, so jealous of you sometimes.”

  He has said this before. He said it one day after I left work early to go to a dentist’s appointment, and another time when he was assuming my parents were rich (“Aren’t you an only child?”). And again when I mentioned that somebody had left donuts in the staff room. I searched our text conversations for the word jealous and found more than a dozen results.

  “Plus, you get the summers off. You barely work at all,” he says now. “Must be nice.” He gurgles loudly on his bong. I imagine grabbing it from him and smashing him over the head with it, like in a cartoon.

  He turns on his movie and reaches for me with his tattooed arm—they’re not-quite-black now, the squarish letters of the language he doesn’t speak—and pulls me onto his lap to face him. Then he presses his mouth and beard into my neck. He is frustratingly good at sex, sensitive to my reactions in a way that seems totally out of sync with the rest of his personality. He throws our clothes off in all directions and I anticipate feeling sheepish later when I have to search for them. We slip around on his leather couch, with the car crashes lighting up noisily behind me.

  “You like that, don’t you?” he says, pinching both of my nipples and watching me, smiling smugly the whole time, and I don’t know which one of us is using the other.

  * * *

  I start a list of potential future jobs:

  • Massage therapist—but I don’t like touching people.

  • Librarian—but how many jobs are there? Would I have to move to Truro?

  • X-ray technician—but how much radiation are you exposed to?

  • Vet technician—but could I put an animal to sleep? Is it more tolerable to teach a class or to watch an animal die?

  When I try to give up weed, I become an insomniac. I lie awake in bed, occasionally turning. After a couple of hours, I sit up and watch the opening credits of Dawson’s Creek on YouTube, where they have the original Paula Cole theme song. Played from low-quality speakers in my dark bedroom, its loveliness is astonishing. I let YouTube auto-play through clips of those late-nineties kids growing up by the water with their small dramas and too-big feelings and ordinary dreams, and I’m dropped right into the past, nostalgic for those years when life felt momentous and full of new, important lessons.

  All that remains from my high school experience is the palpable feeling of disillusionment. Not that it matters: now, everything you need to know you can learn on the internet. How to whistle. How to write a sonnet. How to calculate the invisible forces of temperature, wind resistance, gravity. How to roll a joint. How to teach a class.

  * * *

  By March my bed is a sprawl of dog-eared essays and unfolded laundry; highlighters and mechanical pencils that later stab me in my sleep. My dreams are as restless as kids without recess. I dream that I’m standing at the front of my class but the students are all facing in the other direction, and instead of English I’m teaching organic chemistry, and instead of my notes I’m holding a tray of cheddar and pineapple. I dream that I have class in fifteen minutes, but instead of my apartment I’m at Travis’s place, and I keep slipping back down onto that black couch, and then I slide in between the cushions like my childhood hamster that my dad accidentally sat on, and I hear Travis’s voice calling from a distance, “You like that, don’t you.” In another dream I’m on the way to my classroom, but instead of the high school hallways, I’m navigating a market somewhere in Asia. I smell sandalwood. An elephant is stamping its way towards me. There’s a rifle in my hands.

  * * *

  It’s mere weeks until the end of the semester, and in my quiet class, we’re discussing a student’s response to a travel essay. It’s styled like a brochure, with uncredited photos from the internet. In one of the photos, a woman in a bathing suit lounges on a beach, the sun falling across her body in a wide stripe. It isn’t clear where the beach is. Brazil, maybe? Spain? I have barely been anywhere.

  The second response we review is written as one long, unbroken paragraph, with no apostrophes at all. In the span of five hundred words, the student has written the phrase I thought to myself seven times.

  “Our thoughts are always to ourselves,” I tell them.

  Maybe I’m sleep-deprived, but nothing seems as it should. I have this headache that feels like I’m wearing a child’s-size headband. The radiator is radiating. One student is eating a Subway sandwich, though it’s morning, and can you even get a Subway sandwich in the morning? The classroom smells like bread and vinegar. The window faces the sun, which is beating down directly on my face, too hot and too bright, though it’s barely even spring.

  The third personal response is too personal. An essay with a brief mention of divorce has sparked a tangent about the student’s own parents’ divorce. She describes sitting on the staircase and listening to her parents fighting, which is a cliché of course, but is it a cliché if it happened to you? I’m wrestling with the decision of whether to say something empathetic or stay professional and address technical issues. Her response contains no analysis of the selected reading, nor does it use any quotes, both of which are required according to the assignment guidelines.

  The gir
l’s name is Emily. She sits with her arms folded, holding herself. Her eyes are two moons, gleaming with expectation. I don’t know anything about her, or how she might react. I don’t know anything about any of them. Will sympathy embarrass her, especially after hearing the impersonal tone of everyone else’s responses? Or is that what she is looking for? What if she begins to cry? What if she runs out of the room?

  There is nothing unusual about this moment. It’s nothing I haven’t faced before. But suddenly I’m sure that whatever I say will be the wrong thing. And will have consequences. “This must have been hard to write,” I say finally. My words sound canned, and have a weariness I’m unable to hide, though I mean them sincerely. It must have been hard to write.

  Out the window now, I see a pair of girls standing under a maple tree at the edge of school property. The girl with torn jeans and pale hair cropped close to her scalp removes a cigarette from between her lips and passes it to her friend. The other girl, unsmiling in plaid, takes a drag, then drops the cigarette and grinds it under the heel of her Converse shoe. They blow smoke in the same direction, facing the road. There’s no one around to tell them to get to class.

  “I’m leaving,” I say. “I bought an open-ended ticket to…Sri Lanka.” I don’t know if they noticed my pause. I don’t know why I said Sri Lanka. I was thinking, maybe, of the market in that dream I had. Of how the country was missing from my map of the world, and so visiting it would be like disappearing entirely. Sri Lanka feels so far away from here, I might as well have said Middle Earth.

  My class is alert now, for the first time all period. “You’re leaving…our school?” asks one student. “Like, permanently?” Is the tone hopeful? I don’t believe I’ve heard her speak before.

  “Why?” asks another student. She took Grade 9 English with me the previous year, but back then she was a participant, constantly leaning forward in her chair, her arm raised in response. This semester, she’s been part of the silence.

  “Why not?” I reply, but this sounds too flippant. You need a good reason to quit a job. “It’s time for a change,” I try again, quoting a song lyric from somewhere.

  The students talk over one another, animated and brimming with questions, forgetting their shyness. The Subway sandwich remains half-eaten.

  “Do you think you’ll come back?”

  “Are you staying till the end of the school year?”

  “What will you do in Sri Lanka?”

  I lie and tell them I chose that as my starting destination.

  “Was the ticket super expensive?” asks the writer of the travel brochure. She’s right to question this; an open-ended ticket would be a stupidly expensive choice.

  “I got a flight deal,” I say. Another lie. I should have said Beijing. Or Frankfurt.

  “Are you going to stay in a hostel?”

  “Have you ever stayed in a hostel before? They sound so awesome.” Everyone nods, agreeing that hostels sound awesome.

  “I wish I could go somewhere,” says Emily, wistfully.

  “I have a friend there I might be able to stay with,” I lie. And in response to their questions, I construct another dozen lies. It’s like writing fan fiction about my own life.

  Even before the day ends, the news that I’m leaving has spread around the school. The principal sends me an email to explain the proper procedures for resigning, politely suggesting I finish out the year to avoid complications.

  * * *

  Later, I phone my parents, and my dad answers. “Oh, hi there, El Niño. Haven’t talked to you in ages,” he says. We spoke yesterday.

  I confess to him quickly, like a telemarketer trying to get to the closing pitch before the listener hangs up. There’s a pause. I wait for the anecdote from his childhood and the paraphrasing of Deepak Chopra. The TV plays in the background—I hear an announcer’s voice and a dinging bell.

  “You left this job without having another position?”

  “Yeah.” I wait for him to tell me to beg for my job back.

  “I see,” he says.

  Then I hear my mom’s voice over the sound of the television and my dad’s silence. “Is that Nina?” she calls out. “Hi Nina! Haven’t talked to you in ages!”

  * * *

  When I tell Travis the story of my quitting, he slides his hands under my shirt and says, “That’s fucking pathological.”

  * * *

  I book a ticket to Sri Lanka, to turn a lie into the truth. This costs $1,900, more than I’ve ever spent on anything. I text Jules, who offers to loan me her guidebook. Then she phones me up and tells me anecdotes from her own solo trip to Asia. I add all of her recommendations to a spreadsheet.

  After the term is over, on my last day of teaching, Emily comes by my classroom to say thank you and goodbye. She unshoulders her backpack, then rests it on one of the student desks and opens it. “I have something for you.” She hands me the unwrapped gift: it’s a stuffed toy human. His face is serene, eyes forgiving below his high forehead. He sports purple velour, a frilly white collar, and glossy black boots. For a second, I wonder if it’s supposed to be Prince.

  “It’s Shakespeare!” she says.

  “Whoa, this is amazing! Thank you so much!” I pick up Shakespeare and give him a weird hug. “I’ll display him prominently in my next classroom.” I don’t know why I said that. I might never have another classroom.

  After I leave the school, I don’t want to go home yet, so I take a walk, Shakespeare peering out from my handbag like a fancy woman’s dog. I end up on Gottingen Street and wander into this artists’ co-op store that sells old records and Lolita dresses and monkeys’ paws. School is out, I think numbly, as I thumb through dusty game cartridges until I find Super Mario Bros. 3. I’ve never not been in school. I went straight from being in school to teaching at one. I sit myself down on the store’s caved-in velvet couch, where they have set up an original Nintendo. For a good two hours, until some teen boys kick me off the couch, I’m absorbed by watching the pixelated figures hop and die onscreen, in a landscape that never existed. My hands cling to the controller in that familiar pose, moving with muscle memory. Holding this controller keeps me tethered to something. The tinny, comforting music speeds and slows. Mario runs and leaps and flies past 2-D clouds, as though it’s he, and not I, who knows where the Warp Whistles are hidden.

  * * *

  There are markets and elephants in Sri Lanka, though neither is quite as I had pictured. The market has piles of bitter melon that resemble sleeping lizards. Fish are splayed cleanly on blue tarps, thin men folded over them. A man holds up a fish as I pass. “Best price,” he says, opening its mouth to show me its teeth, he and the fish smiling in unison.

  The trains brim with people. I hesitantly approach strangers to ask for directions. My voice is too quiet. They gesture for me to speak up. I muster up my Toastmasters persona, conscious of my aloneness. Because I haven’t yet purchased a SIM card, I have no phone or internet access. It’s raining, and my umbrella is already broken, and it’s hotter than it ever gets in Halifax, and the sun sets earlier than I expected.

  Before the trip I researched all the wrong things, and my overpacked itinerary is impossible to complete. Perhaps Sri Lanka was too ambitious for a first solo trip. I visit an elephant orphanage with a few Americans who are staying in the same guest house, but the elephants are smaller than I imagined and walk slowly, as if they know there is nowhere to go.

  With the Americans, I try white water rafting, but afterwards I’m so shaken I don’t want to do anything else. I just want to return to my room and watch Gilmore Girls, but I feel guilty watching Netflix when I should be having life-changing experiences. Anyway, the slow Wi-Fi makes streaming impractical. The Americans leave, and I’m alone again, once again wishing for companions.

  From Sri Lanka I fly to Nepal; from there to India. I eat dosas that lack the crispness of the ones from Sc
otia Square Mall. I send my mother a photo of them on WhatsApp. She messages back: Are you applying for jobs?

  Eventually, I take a flight back to Halifax. I retrieve my weed from the freezer, thaw it, and roll a joint while the flower is still damp. I go to my wall map, thinking I’ll label the cities I’ve travelled to, before remembering that Sri Lanka is missing. I place dot stickers across India and Nepal, and then Canada and the U.S. There’s so much empty map space. I change my mind and remove the stickers, but they don’t come off easily; my fingernail leaves scratch marks on places I’ve already started to forget.

  * * *

  I practise writing breakup texts to Travis. There’s a formula I find on the internet:

  Hey [so-and-so], I really enjoyed [doing such-and-such activities], but I don’t feel [such-and-such feelings]. Thanks for [whatever date items he may have paid for or recommendations he may have provided]. Good luck on your search!

  Hey Travis, I really enjoyed eating McDonald’s and fooling around on your couch, but I don’t feel like we’re in love. Thanks for recommending I not experience Korean narratives. Good luck on your search!

  * * *

  In the end, I don’t text Travis and he doesn’t text me.