HAPPY, UNHAPPY

It looked lovely. And it was big, and I was seeing it for the first time. I could see the soccer field from the spaces in between the heavy black gate. The words ‘Randara International School’ were pasted on a large building in a capital, bold font. I had seen advertisements about it being one of the top all-boys boarding schools in the country – although which ad doesn’t make that claim? I assumed the building would be the main academic block. We were checking in at the gate where two guards were sitting, one on a chair outside the building, who presently stood up as my father went over to him, and one inside the outpost sipping coffee. Or tea perhaps, who cares? Here’s the interesting bit: I was waiting in the car - waiting for my father to sign so that we could go in - and saw the one inside looking at me. No, grinning at me. I got irritated, so I tried my best impression of one of those models who show up on men’s magazines like the Playboy, and I bit my lower lip; plucked it slowly, sensually. Some of that liquid lapped his upper lip and washed that grin off his face; he almost rocked out of his chair. My father finished signing in, came back inside the car, and we drove in.

I cranked down my window and felt the breeze on my face. It was nice except my father was choking me with all that smoke coming out of his cigar. We reached my hostel: R-12. All the hostels had names with a ‘R’ followed by a number. I thought the ‘R’ stood for Randara, but I never found out if that was the case. My father had made all the arrangements before we came here, and all that was left was to dump me here, and head back home.

My room turned out to be on the third floor – the top floor – Room number: 366. We were supposed to be two in one room, and it looked like the other guy wasn’t here yet. The classes would not start for another week, so it made sense. We dumped my luggage - two suitcases, and one duffel – and went back downstairs.

“See ya,” said my father.

“Yes,” I said.

“Humph,” he weaseled out somehow, wiggled to his vehicle, slammed the door, and drove away. I was happy he was gone.

I went back upstairs, opened the windows, started unpacking my stuff. Our hostel was a quadrangle, all four sides of the lush courtyard were surrounded by the building. My room faced the inner side, and I could see that the courtyard was empty. I finished unpacking my things, then went out. Ate something, came back. No one was here yet, the halls, the rooms were empty that day. I slept early.

Over the next week, students started showing up. My roommate came on the 27^th of July, one day before registration.

“Hey man, how’s it goin’?” he said, when he first saw me. I must’ve responded with a washed, rung out answer to his washed, rung out question. We talked a bit; It went something like this:

“So, Norman, what’s your father do?”

“He’s an architect,” I replied.

“Architect, eh? Mine’s a broker, maybe they can work together you know?” he laughed at this.

“You don’t want that, my father’s an ass.”

Bradley started laughing really hard now, keeping one hand over his teeth – which I noticed were rabbit like – and the other on his stomach.

When he calmed down, he asked, “What do you do for fun?”, that quintessential question that kids ask each other to judge their compatibility.

“I masturbate four times a day, don’t have much left in the tank after that. You should try it,” I replied.  

He was taken aback at first, then remarked that my ding-dong will become shrivelled up, and that I would lose all my sperm by the time I grow up. He started laughing again. He had such a booming laugh; it was as though someone had exchanged his Adam’s apple for a mic. My laugh on the other hand – someone had told me once – sounded like someone was blowing air on a taut toffee wrapper. I whickered with him, then we went out to meet the other guys. Two doors to our right, Room 368, lived Chuck. Chuck was bent over his suitcase when we knocked, and I could see his ass line. I looked over at Bradley, but it seemed he hadn’t noticed it. Chuck turned around and came over, shook our hands. We talked a bit, and it turned out he had a single room. He was really fat, so I asked him if that was why they had given him a single room. He told me to sod off.

Classes began a day after registration. 

Within a week or so, Bradley, Chuck and I became good friends. We would play cards at night, and sometimes we would play monopoly with the other guys. Chuck and Bradley were a little closer than I was with either of them, but that was fine. That gave me more alone time in the room when Bradley and Chuck were out. I used to do what I liked to do for fun, then.

We had classes six days a week, and P.T. class in the morning. One of the instructors told us that it was going to whip us teenage whippersnappers into shape.

I remember one day, when we were around a month into my first semester there (two semesters made up a year), we were in one of these morning P.T. sessions. I was fairly tall and was standing third from the rear. Almost everyone used to be sleepy in the morning, and if not sleepy, certainly stiff. They would expect us to touch our toes at seven in the morning, when I could barely do that after a proper warmup. So, there I was half bent over trying to touch my toes, when I saw from the corner of my right eye, a mouse. No, two mice. Wait. In the soft sun rays that morning, my blood froze to chart out a perfectly frozen model of the human nervous system. The hair on my neck pricked like a thousand youthful boners. It was a goddamn hill of mice. There, across the grassy field, in the corner beyond yellow trestle barriers to separate the field from the unused land, were mice who had formed a…mice hill. There’s no other way to put it, just like ants make ant hills, they had formed a mice hill and they were so…still. Some of these mice stood on top of other mice, who were flopped over like a dead fish pile. They were looking in my direction (at me) and I was looking at them. I straightened up and looked around…but no one was paying any attention to them. Those mice had made a cairn out of their dead, and here no one was doing anything. I wanted to scream, I wanted to, so bad. But I couldn’t…I just couldn’t. The fear, the pressure of the entire class around me not caring at all was too much. My legs started shaking. No one around me had moved in the past minute. I was the only one standing straight up, but everyone around me was bent over, touching their toes…like they were bowing down to them. I looked ahead; the P.T. instructor was grinning at me.

He knows! He knows! Why won’t they do anything about the mice?    

He kept on looking at me, I heard some guys complaining about not changing the exercise. Then he blew his whistle, and everyone shifted to a backward bend. I was standing upright still, and the guy in front of me was now looking at me, with his head inverted. I could see the blood collecting in his head, the nerves in his temples were flaring angrily. He blew a flying kiss at me, and that’s all I remember, because I floated away then.

When I awoke, I was lying on the bed, and a tanned male nurse was looking at me.

“You’ve got to eat, you know. Even if you don’t like the food,” he said.

This guy thought that I avoided breakfast – which was subpar to say the least – and fainted. Great. Why am I here though?

Then, I remembered and almost lurched out of the bed. The mice! The poor dead mice, the malevolent master mice! What is going on? Didn’t anyone see them?

The nurse, a silver tag winked his name at me: Raymond, pushed my chest gently,

“Lie down, kid. It’s okay. I’ve been here for two years now, that’s twenty-four months for you and I’ve seen about as many kiddos faint, too. It’s no biggie. Don’t be embarrassed, just keep your health, and you’ll be good.”

I gave it up. Other than the fact that he called me kiddo, which irked me to no end, he was right. I couldn’t really do anything then. I’ll have to investigate this later, I thought. Then, I drifted away.

When I woke up Raymond wasn’t around, and I was feeling strong enough, so I went out of the office. I put on my shoes, and even though I shouldn’t have, I ran. I ran like a gazelle runs from a cheetah. Except I was the prey running towards my predator. Come eat me, devour me, make me a part of your majestic cairn.

I reached the field. I ran towards the spot where they…were. No, no…where are they?

The corner was barren. Just a sand heap. Not a mice hill, not an ant hill, just an inanimate sand hill. I started walking away, then looked back. Nothing. There never was.

I got back to R-12, 366, and found the room empty. Lights off, no Bradley, no Chuck. No anybody. I closed the door behind me, turned on the lights. The best thing about my new life was the privacy. Privacy from my dad. I decided to do something I had never done before. I decided to dance. It might be even more fun if I dance naked. I took off my t-shirt and walked to the wall mirror. I didn’t like my nipples. They were flat and big and flabby like soggy chocolate biscuits, so I touched them to perk them up. Then I started dancing in front of the mirror. The mice danced in my mind; I could see them looking at me from that far corner, I could see the P.T. instructor grinning at me, I could see him biting his lip, too. I had finally lost it. But I was loving it. I was away from him. My dad was a despot. He’d sent me over here for no reason at all. But I was glad he did. In front of that mirror I twirled, and I waved my hands, closed my eyes. I spun around and around till I was dizzy, and repeated that moment over and over in my head.

Panting, I had come back from the park by my house. I loved to run and had just completed an hour and a half session. I was soaking and I entered my house. Opposite the entry door, in one corner I saw a mouse. Squealing. The poor mouse was squealing so loud I thought it was going to die. I ran over there and took the mouse trap out of the house to release the little thing. My father saw me. He came from behind me, grabbed my sweaty collar, and dragged me inside the house, then took me, forced me into the attic. The sadistic fucker had wanted to kill the mouse. He took the mouse trap and put my lips in between the platform and hammer. Snap! Snap! Snap! He released it over my lips three times and left me in the attic with a moustache of blood. I cried the whole night; the pain was unbearable. At one point I found a fire extinguisher up there and thought about opening its nozzle in my mouth. But I wasn’t sure if that would kill me, so I thought better of it and stuck to plotting gruesome revengeful scenarios in my head.

Next thing I knew, I was sent to this school. For rescuing a damned mouse. And I was even happy about it. Happy that I was out of his reach. I wasn’t sure anymore. Obviously, the mice hill wasn’t real, which meant that he hadn’t lost his control over me. Then what was the difference? How do I get that bastard out of my head?

I didn’t notice when Bradley entered the room. In my dizziness I mustn’t have heard the key turn in the lock because he saw me dancing in my underwear. I looked at him for a second in the mirror, and he looked back. Then, the following happened:

He rushed at me, grabbed me, and threw me on the bed.

“Hold still,” Bradley whispered.

In a flash I understood why I thought Chuck and Bradley were closer to each other than to me. It’s because they were.

I pushed Bradley off me, he fell down hands first, and clutched his wrist,

“Aahhh! You CUNT, the hell are you doinggg?” he cried. It looked like I had broken his wrist.

“You asshole! What’s wrong with you?” I screamed.

While he probably didn’t understand what I was doing dancing like that – I didn’t know that, either - he understood what or who I wasn’t.

 There was nothing left to say. He tucked in his shirt, buttoned up the collar, which, wow, I didn’t even know when he opened it, and left. He didn’t come back that night.

The next morning was Sunday, 7^th of September 2005. A holiday. I knocked on Chuck’s door, because I figured that’s where Bradley would be. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I thought it would be better to talk about it as he would be my roommate for the foreseeable future. Chuck opened the door. He was wearing a faded blue vest which was drooping to one side. One look in his eyes and I understood Bradley had told him about last night.

“Hey, Chuck. Brad here? Look I wanted to-“

“He’s here. Come in.”

I went in. Bradley was sitting at the foot of the bed and looked up at me. Then he started laughing (that booming laugh). Well, what had happened was funny, and I started laughing (whickering), too. Chuck joined us.

***

In the corner beyond the yellow trestle barriers, a mouse scurried up the sand heap.