Self-Healing Mat
A short story with illustrations
It’s something I don’t remember until I do. And then it comes fast, all rapid-fire and vivid, and I can’t stop seeing or hearing it until the whole thing is done. Until the whole freaking sequence of events comes to completion and I’m sitting there like, “Oh yeah, that’s how it happened,” like I don’t even remember until it gets to the part that clearly was the end. I don’t remember that often. When I do though, I zonk out. And I’m sitting in the art room and I’m not remembering, it’s actually all there. The bowl of oranges on the old man’s desk, the metal stool at the light table, the musty smell of printing ink and pencil shavings. It’s all there and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, because it all happened, all of it.
The bell rings and before he can even start talking about the wonders of oil pastels, we’re asking Mr. Loring if he has ever wanted to do anything other than teach. He stares at us and peels an orange, looking like he doesn’t know what we’re talking about. We don’t say anything, just wait, like usual. Only when the whole orange is peeled does he turn his stare to this baseball player in the class, the sole athlete in the room, and ask him if he ever wanted to do something other than throw a baseball. The baseball player shakes his head and Mr. Loring nods and tells us to get back to work, which we do. We fan out across the musty room to our tables and we draw and we giggle and we listen to the music from the radio that’s always tuned to NPR.
We work on self-portraits while the old man eats his orange, nodding as he wanders around the room looking at our work. A citrus smell follows him around until the ink and shavings swallow it up. He asks us all to say one thing we like about our pieces, and when he gets to the table in the back, the one with the kids that never talk and just work all day, one girl bursts into tears. She runs out of the room and Mr. Loring stares at her empty chair like he doesn’t know what he did. He eventually takes an orange from the bowl on his desk and holds it out to the other kids from that table. A peace offering. They take it.
Before we leave he gives us all 100s for the day in the ledger on his desk. When class ends he waves and throws pieces of ripped up orange peel at our backpacks, a good-bye ritual. We smell citrus in the hallway for about ten steps before we pass the varsity locker rooms and the scent of Axe body spray mixed with practice-jersey-musk wafts out into the hall where it lingers. We breathe it in even though it smells hellacious because these are our high school experiences and we want them, we want to have stories for when we’re old or have our own children. What we want most is to have something to talk about.
Life goes on like this for most of the school year, and then the old man goes crazy. It happens like this before anyone even knows what to call it: Tuesday night the baseball team leaves the gate to the field unlocked and Mr. Loring breaks in and makes donuts in the dirt with his bike. The field looks like shit anyway, all dirt and no grass on account of a lack of funds in the athletic department. He’s careful to only ride in the baselines, the condition of the field notwithstanding, hand signaling as he rounds-off each base. On Wednesday morning, when the damage is discovered by a groundskeeper and the security footage is reviewed, Principal Gothard chuckles and shows it to the baseball team. The administration doesn’t care much since the baseball team doesn’t even hold fundraisers anymore to try to earn enough money for a single bag of grass seed. The dirt-field is already famous throughout the district, though, so no one is supposed to tell about the bike riding. That’s what Alex tells us, anyway, since he’s on the team.
Later, after the footage has been reviewed and no one cares, the old man locks himself in the main office and plays Leonard Bernstein orchestrations on the PA for just under an hour, which is how long it takes for the custodial staff to find a spare key. “It’s because they like him so much,” Alex says as we all sit on the floor around the corner from the office. We’re listening to Principal Gothard try to yell-without-yelling over a Brahms violin concerto. “They’re taking so long on purpose,” Alex says, and we all believe him. When they finally get the door unlocked Principal Gothard goes in, we can hear his shoes shuffling, while the custodians stay in the hall. We know he’s in there but he’s not doing anything about the music. The song finishes on its own and then Gothard says into the PA, in his slightly nasal voice, “Uh, thanks for listening folks. That was uh, Brahms? Yes, Brahms. Have a lovely afternoon, all.” And then from out of the door and around the corner comes Mr. Loring, ignoring the group of us on the floor as he walks in the direction of the art room, arms swinging at his sides.
No one really gives a shit about any of it until late into the semester, deep into autumn. He gets the key to the biology lab from Ms. Bailey so that he can supposedly watch the fish tanks at lunch time but instead uses it to bust out the frogs. He sets them loose in the teacher’s lounge. Only that’s not what freaks everyone out; what the teachers don’t like is walking into the lounge to find him sitting on the couch eating a blueberry yogurt with a frog on the cushion next to him. They say it’s not natural to eat comfortably with a frog in the vicinity. We don’t disagree, but we do start to get nervous when we see Principal Gothard pulling at his tie like it’s choking him.
Principal Gothard starts to pull us out of our other classes to ask if we feel safe in the art room. If there’s anything that ever makes us feel uncomfortable or weird. All of us feel weird all the time, but that’s nothing to do with art class, it’s just how we are. One kid tries to explain this feeling but really butchers it, and instead of pleading his case for the angsty teenager he ends up giving a verbal, off the record testimony that Mr. Loring makes us feel weird. “Can you believe it?” Alex says to us in class. “He asks us if we feel safe while practically breathing down our necks.” And then we all get quiet because it’s time to share one positive thing about our work for the day.
The decision comes without any one of us being told. There’s just a new person at his desk when we walk in. We all work silently until the bell rings and then we go outside, where it smells like rain and dead leaves and the whole world looks wet.
We gather in the alley outside the art room window and sit on the pavement. It’s cold and damp and there’s moss growing up the side of the building.
“Remember when he taught us how to use the self-healing mats?” Alex says, and all of us nod because we all remember.
In the front of the classroom, between the wall of student work and the windows that look out into the alley we’re cross-legged in now, he had shown us how to use the green sewing mats. “When you cut these mats, they always heal themselves. The fibers of the mat all fuse together again,” he had said, and then he gave us all Exacto knives and told us to practice cutting shapes. Then he reminded us that if we wanted there were oranges on his desk and that we were all great artists even if we didn’t know it.
A girl from the silent table tears-up at the funeral-like turn the conversation has taken and asks what will happen to him, now that he’s crazy and all. Alex holds his hands up to shush everyone even though no one but the crying girl is talking. He looks like he’s going to say something but he closes his mouth and his face looks like he’s just realized he doesn’t actually know anything. Someone says something about how wet the ground is and then someone else says to just shut up and show some respect, will you? Which is what we all do. And we sit and think about all that business with the oranges and the self-healing mats, and about how we’ll probably be thinking about it the next day, and the next day, and the next.
