to speak into the imaginary microphone for some reason.
“Well, I don’t know,” Ray said. He was still smiling, like we were going to have some kind of interesting fucking debate.
“This isn’t Fox & Friends,” I interrupted him. “I don’t care about your opinions, Mr. Lampert, because you are a cesspool of a human being with the moral compass of a gnat.” He was squinting at me through his busted, swollen eyes, trying to tell if I was joking, if this was some fun read, hashtag the library is open. Bunny had both hands clapped over her mouth, just watching. “You think this town loves you, but have you noticed you don’t have any friends? You’ve built a child’s idea of a rich man’s house and you live in it like you’re the king, but what are you king of? Money you don’t have? A daughter who doesn’t like you? No wonder your wife drove into traffic, you’re a fucking joke.”
And then I got up, and I left, and no one stopped me.
I do not know where, in a genetic sense, my intellectual bent came from, but I can remember exactly when school began to seem less useless to me. I had always been a reader, and novels provided me much company throughout my boyhood, but school itself held no appeal. The adults there were using the same bad scripts as social workers, like they were telemarketers cold-calling the youth. All the lining up, all the tiny, incremental punishments, pull a green card, then pull a yellow card, but if you pull the red card…Or later in high school the elaborate demerit system: five tardies equal one unexcused absence, and three unexcused absences equal one demerit, and three dicks sucked equal one I couldn’t care less about any of this. Even the schoolwork itself, the worksheets and Scantrons, textbooks instead of real books, it was all so meaningless and bizarre. Why were we all doing this together, and so obsessively?
But there was a day in early April of my junior year of high school when our biology teacher came into class on fire, so excited that he exploded at us, holding up a newspaper and stabbing at the text with his finger. What so excited him was a finger bone that had been found in the Altai Mountains in Siberia in 2008 had now been genetically analyzed and found to be neither Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens in origin. She, the study called her X-woman, was from a third hominid species, Denisovans, named after the cave in which the bone was found, who had diverged from our lineage about a million years ago, and her finger bone had been found in a cave where both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens remains had also been found, along with stone tools. More startling, while the modern Eurasian populations shared up to one percent genetic material with Denisovans, consistent with the theory that we shared a common ancestor, in Melanesian populations the figure rose to four percent, indicating more recent genetic exchange between Denisovans and Homo sapiens in that part of the world. In another study, bones found in Croatia indicated Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had interbred. The picture, hazy as it was, was that there had been many kinds of humans living, fucking, competing, and killing each other at the same time.
Our teacher, who was a young man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, and who had some kind of rockabilly undercut, much too stylish a haircut for a teacher, was in a kind of rapture about this, and he kept interrupting himself, trying to explain to us why this was exciting. “It’s such a deep assumption in our culture that there was this steady and inevitable march from ape to man, that it was this clear progression, but it was chaotic! I just think it says so much. And it really puts xenophobia in a different light, as some kind of possibly helpful mutation. I mean, we were in direct competition, but also interbreeding, with different species of humanoid animals. Doesn’t that just blow your mind?”
It did blow my mind. And I connected it, rightly or wrongly, with a sensation I had often had with my own father, when he was drunk enough, where I would stop recognizing him. His face, or his eyes, would become too strange, and suddenly he was no longer a man I loved but one I wanted urgently to murder. The idea that this was