The Spot: Stories

None of the boys attended a church or had any formal religious education. All three devoted their spiritual energies to killing time, going up to the beach to smoke hash, or over to Detroit to smuggle beer across the bridge from Canada, loading it up by the case and transporting it past the lackadaisical border guards. Into the gap these facts formed, folks inserted wedges of philosophical thought and tried to avoid the possibility that the reenactment of a two-thousand-year-old event was pure senselessness on the part of teenagers who in no way meant to crack the universal fabric and urge a messianic event on the world. One commentator on a cable news channel argued that it was important to consider the possibility that these boys, in what was certainly a scattershot approach, were trying to find a way to grace. Good boys from good families had dragged the victim — there was a double-rut line of heel marks from the main road down into the gulch — to the spot under a clear, star-filled, late-fall sky, dug a hole with a fold-up entrenchment tool, and erected a cross, without really thinking. One professor at the University of Michigan made a connection between the trench shovel, the poetry of Wilfred Owen, and the Great War, and argued falsely that the soil in Michigan — glacial gravel in the gulch, with remnants of Lake Erie bed fossils — was close in consistency to the bottom of the trenches at Verdun. Another professor, hearing the story reported on the nightly news, brought forth Walter Benjamin’s theory of a messianic cessation of happening. He tried to draw (with shaky logic) a parallel between the mock event, the young ruffians (his words) putting their friend up on the cross, and Benjamin’s concept of a “revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.” The deep impulse these kids had was to begin a conversation with the knowable universe and the unknown, hidden part that can be seen only when you rend space-time, he said, throwing his arms wide open before the class and then, composing himself, laying his hands flat on the desk, staying like that for a moment until — as was his habit — he reached up to adjust the dimple of his tie, pulling it tight at his throat. The students, who were used to these sudden outbursts, sat back in their chairs and glanced at one another. They were close in age to the kids in the gulch and found it hard to imagine that these fuckups, probably stoned out of their minds on crystal meth, had anything grand in mind.

For her part, Emma Albee, an English teacher at Bay City High School, felt duty-bound to talk about the event in the gulch. (A team of trauma-control agents had been sent to help those students who were suffering changes in behavior due to the death of their friend — though in truth he had no friends, and was for the most part a loner who had, before his death, secured the wrath of most of his schoolmates.) She spoke carefully to the class, saying, yes, the action of the three boys was evil, in that they were free not to crucify their friend, just as you are free to do something or not to do something. Her students sat, for once, listening with rapt attention. You see, the tragedy of their action, she said, was in the fact that they made a gross error of judgment. We all think about doing things like this, don’t we? We all have these strange ideas, and sometimes we’re with our friends and we feel pressured to do them, but we do not because we are free, she said, looking for a segue into The Stranger by Albert Camus.

Several news accounts made a great deal of the fact that the dead boy’s face had been excised from several school yearbooks, cut out neatly with razor blades, removed from the grid. Even Detective Collard had smirked at the kid’s image: flyaway hair pasted to a pimply brow; a mouth locked into a grimace, caught off guard by the tired school photographer. (One professor noted a striking resemblance between the victim’s face and that of Edgar Allan Poe. The same lean jawbone, the same uncomfortable arrangement between his neck and his lower torso, a general disagreement therein, so that even though he was wearing a striped polo shirt, he still had the bearing of a man in a clerical collar.)