The Misfit Confessions of Telegraph Hill: Part V, The Conclusion

Postmarked December 27, 1957

Delivered December 28, 1957

Composition #1 December 25, 1957

Quick. You witness a murder. What’s the first word that comes to mind? Fuck. I was crawling through the air conditioning duct when I saw it. The duct that runs right through the main hallway of our school. I’m sure you’re wondering what I was doing crawling through that thing. I suppose at this point, I may as well tell you that I found out that it’s missing one of it’s aluminum panels…the one in the back right hand corner of your classroom. It was 9:22 at night and the class nominated me (for obvious reasons and my petite size) to attempt to steal the test. Your test. I t was the night before and I know it was only technically a quiz, but as a class, we decided we couldn’t risk it this time. Not after you felt the need to question us about Edward Muybridge and his zoopraxiscope. That was profoundly unfair and frankly, it wasn’t even in our book. And when we asked you how it was fair that you put something on our test that was not in class and not in our materials, you said that you were tired of children thinking the last page of their textbook was their event horizon. I have to give credit where credit is due. This was a brilliant plan. It would be the first time in the history of our school that an entire class would get all the same, and all the correct answers on a test. And while we weren’t thinking of the consequences, Jake first came up with it. He thought it would be funny, that it would be a bit of a scholarly prank, and there was something about that that could be respected and worthy of attention in the school’s academic community. It was also just a way to fuck with you. Jake was my lookout, my watchman. He was supposed to make sure I was invisible. That was his job…and, once again, you stole that from him, too. I saw you. You were coming out of the bathroom and Jake was sitting on the floor in the hallway. You were sneaky because you watched him for a minute while he was reading CATCHER IN THE RYE. I was watching you. It looked like you were mad, mad that he was reading something outside your curriculum…but isn’t that what you wanted us to do? Didn’t you want us to explore other things? You waited until he shut the book for a second to walk up and say just the right thing. I thought maybe if he talked to you for a little while, maybe if he distracted you, I could do my job. I figured that since you were such a boring person, I had about three minutes to get in there, get the test, and climb back into the duct. It could definitely be done, but I had to be quiet and I had to be quick. I remember the first thing you said to him because it was clever and it was the only time I have ever found you to be clever. You said, “Ah, Holden Caulfield…the only literary character in modern times that all men pity, perhaps even loathe, but on some level, completely aspire to be.” And for that statement…for that statement only, you became a teacher. That was the only moment I ever respected you. You sat down next to Jake to tell him about all the literary giants that had become your friends, your companions, your only comrades, and I could only think of two things: (1) You never left this town to try and make any friends. (2) There’s never a better time to sneak by than when someone is lamenting about their own life. People like that, people like you, float to another planet for a few minutes. An atomic bomb could go off in the other room and it would fall short of getting your attention because you’d be staring at the monotonous set of lockers across from you and thinking about the time you were a child and how you sat on a porch and had your whole life in front of you. And then you tell Jake that now you sit on that same porch and ask yourself how you lost the time…how you aged and stayed in the same place, but never became anything different. I couldn’t listen to this…it was too sad and frankly I was scared of ending up like you. I moved quickly and opened the panel, sliding down just smoothly enough to have my hands holding on and my feet hit a desk…it was Robby Detrice’s desk and he was an asshole too…so I didn’t care about my mary janes scuffing it up. You didn’t even bother to hide the test in the drawer. Another brilliant move. It was in a manila folder with the others and I took it. I knew there were 24 copies. One for each of the 23 students and then one so you could look at it and then look at our struggling faces during the exam. You would read the questions off one by one and privately congratulate yourself on how you were smarter than all the kids. You did it because you knew they would never look up to you the way you wanted them to. You did it because you are a lonely person and lonely people take their greatest pride in condescension. Like clockwork. Like a law of human nature.

Back in the duct. You started crying a little bit and confessing to Jake all that had been lost in your life. Lost time. Lost potential. Lost loves. And now another. You said you needed her. That she had become your friend. You said that she made you forget your failures and the fiasco that is your life. She helped quell the malignant feeling of disappointment you had in yourself, the cancer that had pervaded your once hopeful mind and that had now saturated your soul. She was a treatment and you resented Jake for depriving you of that treatment. You were selfish. I saw you. I saw your naked fear in that one moment. I wanted to leave like I was supposed to, to get the hell out of there with the exam. Jake and I had done our part and your confessions were holding us up. Why wouldn’t you stop talking? For once, why couldn’t you just shut up and let someone walk away? I thought when you stopped for a second, to wipe away the tears streaming down your right cheek, that Jake might make his break. But that wasn’t like him. He was compassionate. He was empathetic and he pitied you. He looked at you and said, “There’s always new light, new light to shed on life. If you choose to see it, to really love it for its beauty, for its simplicity, and for the complexity of what it can do, one day that light will shine on you and all that you suppose.” A tear ran down my face as I watched the one on yours. You looked back at him, almost as if to say you were proud of what he had said, almost to say that it was so rare, if ever, that a student was able to teach you something. And then you stared at him. It wasn’t like other stares…other innocuous glances. Your eyes were glazed over and I thought you had drifted. You looked at him longingly, jealously, and for almost a minute. I could only hear the breathing, the loud kind that can only come in a respite during intense conversation, the kind that only exists when two people are playing verbal chicken. There’s a definitive moment when someone’s glaze becomes a gaze, when his look finds an intention. It took me a minute to find your intention, to catch up with that definition, and then it was too late. You were calculating. You were ruthless. You were Shakespearean in your stare. That was when I figured out what you were going to do. Just as I was about to yell to Jake, you pulled out a knife and stuck it through his spleen. At least I think it was his spleen. I’ll never forget this. I knew that watching you there would fuck me up in the head for the rest of my life. You turned the knife inside of him, making it impossible for him to take another breath, holding his shoulder as if to give him the hug of death. And then you leaned in and said, “So wise so young, they say do never live long.” You weren’t even original in your last words to him. I knew right then that I was going to have to do that back to you. To do an eye for an eye…because that’s what narrow-minded people like you deserved. That’s what thieves and murderers deserved.

Composition #2 December 26, 1957

I wondered how you could kill a child. I sat in my window and I wondered how anyone could ever really kill a child. But you, you do it everyday. You feel sorry for yourself, so you think of ways to slowly kill us all. You had already killed Jake long before you stabbed him. You killed his dreams, stole the love of his life. You should have taken the shovel and buried him yourself. It would have been appropriate. That’s the nightmare I have every night when I lay down. I should’ve handed you the shovel at the funeral and given you the theatrical stare. Then maybe you would have known what I knew all along. I wouldn’t have had to write these letters to you, you crazy fuck. You would have known what it felt like to get that look. You deserved that, you know. I wish I had done that. I wish nothing more. It’s not just that I can’t sleep because of it…that I wish I would have been clever and heartless enough to do it at the time. It’s that I didn’t think of it and I’ll always live with the recurring nightmare…not the image playing back in my head, but the nightmare that comes with breaking your own heart, as I have mine…the nightmare of regret. He was my best friend. He was the love of my life. And even though she was the love of his, you still took him away from me. That wasn’t your decision to make. I know you’ll say he wasn’t mine and I should have woken up sooner. I should’ve understood long ago that he would never be mine. But it didn’t matter. I knew there was no relationship with Jake, but that doesn’t change the fact that you took away the relationship I had worked so hard to keep. I had the great anonymous bond of the unrequited love affair. Sure, I never dated him. I never kissed him. I never made love to him. But I had a relationship with the idea of him and me. The idea of what it could’ve been. And to me that was better than having the real thing, because I had a dream. The real thing always dies out. The real thing never works out in the end, but the dream…the dream of me and Jake was interminable because all I needed was my imagination. You killed my imagination and in killing you I took it back. There, in room 18 at Clementine, I reclaimed my mind, my worth, my calling. As strange as it may sound, I think in killing you, I may have redefined my conscience, salvaged my humanity and my ability to dream. I felt that I had rescued Telegraph Hill from the likes of you…a coward…a wet blanket…an eternal pessimist. For that, I was better than you, and I always would be. If someone is reading this composition, and I know it isn’t my teacher…he’s dead now because he never bothered to read. If you’re reading it, you’re a member of the Telegraph Hill Sheriff’s Department and you’ll find the rest of what you’re looking for at that motel. Including the rest of my compositions. I’ve only sent you three…you don’t need the rest until you’ve seen my masterpiece and met my friend. Then, and only then, will you appreciate the good citizen’s work I have done.

Composition #3 December 27, 1957

I’ve given it a couple days now, and if you’ve made it this far into the compositions, you’ll leave to go clean up the mess. My hope is that you’ll see it and recognize what a great service I have done for you and Telegraph. When you go in, you’ll find the bastard on the bed…both eyes gone. He took them for granted, just like he took everything else in his life. You’ll thank me for killing the dream killer. Think of how many lives I will have saved. How many kids can take back their imagination. How many kids will become great things. It will be like when there is a plane crash and there is a sole survivor…and then there are data people that check over the years to see what that person has done with their life since the accident. That maybe one day they will find the cure for cancer. This will be like that. You’ll see. These kids will become great contributors. Great. They may be greatly misunderstood, but never detained as they once were. And that will be thanks to me. On the table you’ll see the rest of my compositions. You can’t say I didn’t tell him so. He had so many chances to be a teacher…and to think, just doing his job would have saved his life. You’ll find a photo of me and Leslie taking bows. And instead of a paperweight holding the photos down, it will be a glass jar with a familiar face. I’ll be sitting in my window nook, somewhere in a grand apartment, in an unknown metropolis that I arrived in via train. It will be impossible to ever find me, to ever really know where Leslie and I have gone. Our apartment, while fabulous and one of a kind on the inside, will just be another brownstone from a bird’s eye view. It could take you your whole life to find the likes of us. I’m hoping you’re not even considering it. I’ll be in my window nook, thinking of today, the day you’ll find my work, just like the day they unveiled “Persistence.” It will be cold and early in the morning. I’ll be looking at the sunrise, my sunrise, my solitary delight. And I will think of you…pullilng the curtain back. Make sure to open it and look through the window of room 18. To see it, to really catch it with the glare off the window and the music wafting through the doorway. I know you’ll think it to be sad, to be a sort of box of bloody murder, if you will. But it’s the dawn of new dream, new valor in the face of a town indifferent to its demise of innovation. You’ll look through the window and thank me. The sun rising over your back, just complimenting a little bulb on the table. Not a fallen bulb from the tree, but a consistent flash that occurs every couple seconds. You will look closer and see the flashing, as if it is reading the sun, as if it is dancing with the sun, as if it is smiling back at you. What remains of me in Telegraph Hill. My watchman. My partner. My clue. My friend for the day. 6:32AM.