I.
“Write in past tense,” I tell students at the technical college where my English classes are populated by poor people, veterans, immigrants, and refugees. “What you’re talking about already happened.” Runs becomes ran. Points becomes pointed. Shoots becomes shot. Although we talk about verb tense all semester, their stories still gallop forward in real time.
When I close my eyes to sleep, the beat of hooves echoes in my mind. Everything that ever was still is.
II.
“It’s important to be specific,” I say to the class. “If you use a word like ‘they,’ be clear about who ‘they’ refers to. Who is ‘they’?”
Then they put me in a hole to be killed, a student, now dead, writes. He survives the hole; he survives the they, whoever they are, only to drown in the pool of an apartment complex. It was after the war broke out in Monrovia. I was trying to get across town to get my little sister from school when they question me and put me in the hole.
Upon learning of his death, I can’t stop thinking of him. I read a newspaper article about the accident. GIRL, 9, RESCUER DROWN IN PLYMOUTH, the headline reads. Mentioned just as “rescuer” in the title, the article states that “…the 26-year-old victim whom friends identified only as ‘Moses’ lived with his fiancée.”
I unfold Moses’s full name like a prayer; I remember his glasses and posture, the way he explained to me that, once, his life had been saved by sheer luck.
III.
“Can you give more details?” I ask. “It’s just me who is going to read it,” I say. “No one else.” Often the students don’t look at me when I ask this. They look at their laps. Their hands in their laps. They catalogue every millimeter of carpet around their feet.
The sound was like a fist punching a pillow, one of my students, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, writes in his revised draft. Then I saw my buddy fall down.
At night, I dream of Kandahar. I hear endless fists burying themselves in down.
IV.
I do not remember what I say to King about his essay.
He is an excellent writer, but more than that, he is kind. He begins to care for a fellow student who is severely autistic. Slowly he explains and reexplains directions to Levi. His voice assumes a higher pitch, and when Levi does something right, King praises him.
I do remember giving King’s essay a 95/100, an unusually high score for me.
At the beginning of the essay, King is a boy of 12, chosen to reside at the presidential palace in Liberia along with other boys like him, boys who are smart, boys who have potential. At the beginning of the essay, he is happy. But the story must take a turn, of course. Maybe in this class I gave my “Hell is story-friendly” spiel, lifted from Charles Baxter. Maybe this is why King unleashes demons onto the page.
The other government officials were taken out behind the palace, tied to poles, and shot, he writes. Just like that William Tolbert is ousted from power, and King’s life is irrevocably changed. He writes about lying in bed, a 12-year-old boy, feeling sick and depressed after having watched the executions of multiple people.
Does anyone help him? Does anyone talk to him about what he witnessed? Does he sleep at night? I should have asked him to add those details, but I never did, and that feedback no longer matters.
Soon after our class ends, King stabs his wife 63 times, breaking off the tip of a knife and leaving marks on her spinal column. For the rest of his life, he will live in jail.
For the rest of my life, I will be unable to reconcile the two Kings.
V.
Year after year, compositions replete with trauma crack open across my computer screen: abuse, alcoholism, assault, addiction, poverty, post-partum, PTSD, war, war, war, repeat. Outside of school, honor-bound, the grammar of these tragedies becomes my own, the stories forming patterns on spinning lamp. The lamp turns around, around, around, casting soundless light across the theater of my bedroom, and unable for the world to sleep, I watch the dramas play again, again, again.
