I saw a headline on the internet that read “White People Need to Reckon with Atticus Finch’s Racism.”
What did I remember about Atticus Finch? That he was a character in a novel I read back in middle school called To Kill a Mockingbird. What else did I remember about Atticus Finch? Not a lot. I’d read the book thirty-seven years ago, and thirty-seven years is a long time to remember a book, or anything.
So I found the phone number of my eighth-grade English teacher, Mr. Crawford, and then called him. He didn’t pick up, and so I left a voicemail message for him that said, “Mr. Crawford, it’s Silas Barton. Long time no see! I have some questions for you, about Atticus Finch. Please call me back.”
After I hung up, I felt aimless, empty, like I should be doing something, something fulfilling. But what? I looked at my dog, Maude, lying at my feet. And then I typed into my phone, “Atticus Finch dog.” The first thing that popped up was the question “Why did Atticus Finch shoot the dog?”
I was inside, looking outside. It was a beautiful day out there! Everything was in its proper place. The sun was in the sky, the birds were in the trees, and my across-the-street neighbor, Mike, was sitting on his front steps, smoking a cigarette and looking at his phone. Sitting next to him was his own dog, Legend.
I leaned out my window and said, “Hey Mike, did you know that Atticus Finch shot a dog?”
Mike looked up from his phone and said, through his cigarette, ”Yeah, fuck that guy.” He spat his cigarette into the street, scrambled to his feet, and then charged back into his house, Legend right behind him.
I’d lived across the street from Mike for seven years, had small-talked with him pretty much every day. I knew he loved his dog, and dogs in general, and also people who loved dogs. “I don’t get a person who doesn’t love a dog,” he’d once told me. And I knew that he, like me, did something with computers for a living, I didn’t know exactly what, but I did know that, whatever it was, he could and did do it from his home. But what else did I know? Not much. He’d never been in my house, and I’d never been in his. Close your eyes, Silas, I told myself, and try to picture what Mike’s house looks like on the inside. I did that, but all I could picture was Legend sitting next to Mike while Mike did something on his computer.
While my eyes were already closed, I thought I might as well try to picture Mr. Crawford. I hadn’t seen him in thirty-seven years, but there he was, standing in front of the classroom, his pear-shaped body in a threadbare blue business suit that was too short in the sleeves. Mr. Crawford was bald. While he lectured, he liked to put his hand on the back of his head, fingers up, like rooster feathers, and then let them fall to his bald head, one by one, pinky first, thumb last.
“Hey, Mr. Crawford,” I said, the way you do when you walk into a teacher’s classroom, and then my phone rang and it was him.
“You have questions about Atticus,” Mr. Crawford said. I remembered this about him: that he referred to characters in books by their first names, although he referred to his students by their last.
“I do,” I said.
“As well you should, Barton,” Mr. Crawford said. “His book is a cabinet of mysteries, provocations, comforts, and wonders. Tell me what you remember about it.”
“Not a lot,” I admitted.
“That I find difficult to believe,” Mr. Crawford said. His voice sounded faint, barely there. How old are you? I wanted to ask. But then, I’d wanted to ask him that question thirty-seven years ago, too.
“It’s been thirty-seven years,” I pointed out.
“There is no time when it comes to literature,” Mr. Crawford said. “All the clocks were thrown out of heaven.”
And what did that mean? It sounded like a quote. Was it a quote from To Kill a Mockingbird? I typed “to kill a mockingbird clocks heaven” and the first hit was for high quality clocks inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird and made by independent artists. But the link didn’t say anything about heaven, and didn’t say anything about To Kill a Mockingbird, either, except that the independent artists had been inspired by it to make high quality clocks.
Meanwhile, Mr. Crawford was waiting for me to tell him what I remembered about To Kill a Mockingbird. “Do your best, Barton,” he said, which is what he always said when he was pretty sure your best wasn’t going to be good enough.
I tried. Atticus Finch, I told Mr. Crawford, was a judge, who had children, three of them, one of them was a boy named Harper. I couldn’t remember the names of the other two, although I knew one of them had been based on a real-life person who later became famous, although I didn’t remember the real-life person’s name, either. The book was set in Mississippi, and in it Atticus Finch was the judge for the trial of a falsely accused black man, whose name was Boo Radley. It was murder he was falsely accused of, but Atticus Finch ruled that Boo Radley was innocent, and he was freed. The end.
Then I stopped talking and waited for Mr. Crawford to tell me what I’d gotten wrong. I knew there was probably something. But Mr. Crawford didn’t say anything, at first. His breath came in rapid puffs out of his mouth, through the phone, into my ear.
“The book is set in Alabama,” he finally said, in a bored voice. “Atticus Finch was not a judge. He was a lawyer. The famous person was the writer Truman Capote, who was the basis for the character Dill, who was not Atticus Finch’s child, but a friend of his children. His children were Jem and Scout. Scout is the narrator. She is a girl. Harper, Harper Lee, was not a boy and she was not a character in the novel. She was the author of the novel. Boo Radley was a white man, the specter next door, with whom the children are obsessed. The black man was named Tom Robinson. He was falsely accused, but of rape, not murder. And he was convicted, and sent to prison, and then he was killed trying to escape from prison. Those are the facts, Barton. It’s startling that you don’t recall them, but then we don’t read novels for facts. We read novels for what they make us think, and how they make us feel. When someone asks you what you remember about a novel, they are not asking you what facts you remember; they are asking you to remember what it made you think and how it made you feel. Now I will ask you again: tell me, Barton, what do you remember about To Kill a Mockingbird?”
Again, I tried. I tried to remember what the novel had made me think, and how it had made me feel. And again, I couldn’t remember much. “Actually,” I told Mr. Crawford, “what I really wanted to know is whether you think Atticus Finch is a racist.”
Again, Mr. Crawford didn’t respond right away. I couldn’t even hear him breathing. He made no noise at all for one second, then another, then several more. I was starting to wonder if he was still on the phone, or alive, until finally he sighed, one big long whoosh. “Barton,” Mr. Crawford said, “I want you to listen very carefully to this,” and then he hung up.
Here’s why no one likes to talk on the phone anymore: because it hurts to be hung up on. Is there a more violent feeling of emptiness than being hung up on? Probably. And then, since you’ve been hung up on, you have the time, the occasion, to think of those more violent feelings of emptiness, and I did, and then I didn’t want to think of them anymore, and so I looked at my phone again and on it I saw those high quality clocks that had been inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird and made by independent artists. So I bought one. My phone congratulated me on my purchase and said the clock—my clock—would be delivered to my home within the hour by Instant Express Delivery.
Maude and I went out to my front porch to enjoy the sun and wait for my clock to show up, and while we did, two things happened.
First, Mike emerged from his house, followed by Legend. Both seemed worked up. Legend circled Mike while Mike attacked his phone with his thumbs. A cigarette was in his mouth, but it was not yet lit. “What’s that dog killer’s name again?” Mike shouted—into his phone, I thought, at first, but when his phone didn’t answer and Mike looked up, I realized he was shouting at me.
“You mean Atticus?” I said, and immediately felt this warm feeling come up, through my stomach and throat and into my face, and I understood then why Mr. Crawford referred to his beloved characters by their first names: because when you call someone from a book by their first name it signifies that you really know them. You would never call a character by their first name if you didn’t know them, intimately. Whereas you can call someone by their first name in the world, outside a book, and still not really know them at all. Mike, for instance.
Anyway, Mike nodded. “Atticus Rich, right?” he said, and started tapping something into his phone again. I know now that he was searching for a person named Atticus Rich in our city. There was one. Mike found him, found a way to communicate with him through the usual open channels. I hear you’re a dog killer, Mike said, or typed, to Atticus Rich. Atticus Rich said he wasn’t, but on the other hand, so what if he was? How was it any business of Mike’s? Who the hell was Mike? Who the hell did Mike think he was? They spoke, or typed, back and forth to each other like this, escalating, escalating, until Mike had enough, and went out and found Atticus Rich and shot and killed him.
I couldn’t have known all that at the time. But I could have corrected Mike when he said Atticus’s last name. “Atticus Finch,” I could have told him. “Not Rich.” And I would have, or I might have, and that would have changed everything, or almost everything, except that the other thing happened: I got a phone call—not from Mr. Crawford, but from Ms. Hardaway, my eighth-grade guidance counselor.
“Señor Barton,” she said, by way of greeting, and I remembered this about her: that when she talked with students, she would occasionally use Spanish words and phrases. One rumor was that before she’d become a guidance counselor, she’d been a Spanish teacher, or that she’d worked for the Peace Corps in a Spanish-speaking country. Another rumor was that she was high all the time. I tried to picture her, with my eyes open this time, and there she was: in her tiny windowless office, with an oriental rug taking up most of the floor, sitting in an enormous cushioned wicker chair that took up most of the office. Hanging from her neck by a chain was a pair of glasses that she never put on her face. Her eyes were watery blue, and all her clothes were much too big for her. It was like she was being swarmed by her clothes rather than wearing them. “Mr. Crawford said you might be having a little problem.”
“I couldn’t remember anything about To Kill a Mockingbird,” I admitted. “Plus, I wanted to know if Mr. Crawford thought Atticus Finch was a racist.”
Ms. Hardaway clucked her tongue—in sympathy, it sounded like, although I couldn’t tell if it was in sympathy for me, or Mr. Crawford.
“That is between you and Mr. Crawford,” Ms. Hardaway said. “That is a book, and a book is a thing that is outside my jurisdiction.”
“Your jurisdiction?”
“Yes, my jurisdiction. My purview.”
I tried to remember if I’d known, thirty-seven years ago, that Ms. Hardaway had had a purview, or even if I knew, thirty-seven years ago, what a purview was. But no, those things, like certain important details about what and how Atticus Finch and To Kill a Mockingbird made me think and feel, were also lost in the mist of time. “What is your purview?”
“My purview is that which you will become. My purview is your future. Which, thirty-seven years after you left my presence, is now your present.”
Just then a boxy yellow van pulled up in front of my house. On its side was the legend Instant Express Delivery. A man in yellow shorts and a yellow short-sleeve shirt emerged from the van holding a brown box. He trotted up my stairs, handed me the box, and said, “Here you go.” The man then reached into his pocket, pulled out a dog treat, said “Here you go,” and then tossed the treat to Maude, who caught and ate it with a snap. The man patted her on the head, descended the stairs, hopped back into his van, and disappeared with a puff of exhaust and a toot of his horn.
“What was that?” Ms. Hardaway asked.
“I got a package.”
“Yes, that is a thing we all get now,” Ms. Hardaway said. “We all get packages. That is the human condition.”
“It is?” I said. I quickly looked it up on my phone, and then read Ms. Hardaway the first definition I found there. “’The human condition,’” I told her, “’is the characteristics, key events, and situations which compose the essentials of human existence, such as birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict, mortality.’”
“In other words,” Ms. Hardaway said, “a package.” She paused and then asked, “What kind of package?”
“It’s a clock,” I said. “I got it—”
“Never mind,” Ms. Hardaway interrupted. “I shouldn’t have asked. It doesn’t matter what kind of package, or why you got it. Only that you got one. That is one of the only two things that matter.”
“What’s the other thing?” I asked.
“1981,” Ms. Hardaway said, and I heard the sound of pages being flipped. “In 1981, June 5, the week before you were to graduate junior high and move on to high school—which, as you remember, was just across the street—you and I conducted an exit interview. We did not call it an exit interview then, but that was what we would and do call it now. Do you remember that?”
“I do,” I said, but I really didn’t. I mean, I could see Ms. Hardaway, in her office, and I could even see her mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear or remember what came out of it. All this not-remembering was starting to scare me a little. Try, Silas, I told myself. Try what? I asked myself back, because I couldn’t remember what I’d been asking myself to try to do. So I looked at my phone. There on my phone was the definition of the human condition, which was different than the one that Ms. Hardaway had come up with, which was also different than the one that I came up with, right there, which is this: the human condition is not being able to remember the thing you were thinking about before the most recent thing you were thinking about.
“You clearly don’t,” Ms. Hardaway said.
“Don’t what?” I asked.
“Remember our exit interview,” Ms. Hardaway said. She sighed and continued. “You were wearing a sweatshirt, green, with a prominent white four-leaf clover on the chest. The sleeves had been cut off, not neatly, as though you’d cut them off with scissors using your weak hand, which, according to your file, was and, I assume, still is your left. Also, you were wearing gray sweatpants, and over those sweatpants, blue basketball shorts. A remarkable outfit, mi amigo.” She paused, as though giving me the opportunity to remember. I did, now. Although I wonder if you can be said to remember something that someone else is remembering for you. “I commended you for completing your junior school journey…”
“…in style!” I said, because I suddenly recalled her using that phrase, and how corny it sounded, and how good it made me feel.
“That is what I said,” Ms. Hardaway continued. “To you, and to approximately seventy-five percent of your graduating class. The upper seventy-five percent. To the lower twenty-five percent I said, ‘Well, it’s been a struggle, and there were moments, many moments, when I think we both wondered if you were going to make it through all three years of middle school, but you did it, and here we are.’”
“You actually said that?”
“Only to the lower twenty-five percent,” Ms. Hardaway said. “To the upper seventy-five percent I congratulated them for completing their junior high school journey in style, and then I asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. Do you remember what you told me? No, of course you don’t. No one ever remembers. Only one percent of the seventy-five percent remembers. A lawyer, hermanito, you wanted to be a lawyer when you grew up. When I asked you what kind of lawyer, you said, ‘Wait there are different kinds?’ Which I found touching. You with your absurd outfit and your stringy arms sticking out of those ragged sweatshirt holes and your three-year cumulative B+ grade point average and your surprisingly high score on the Iowa standardized test and that earnest look on your face. I wanted to hug you. But of course that was outside of my purview. Well outside. In any case, I did not hug you. Instead, I told you that yes, there were many different kinds of lawyer. I named some of them, and you contemplated what I’d told you. While you contemplated, you gnawed on the inside of your bottom lip. As did at least fifty percent of the top seventy-five percent when thinking about their future. You gnawed hard, too, pobrecito. I worried that you were going to draw blood. But you didn’t. Instead, you finally asked, ‘What kind of lawyer is Atticus Finch?’”
“And what did you say?” I asked.
“I said,” Ms. Hardaway said, “that Atticus Finch was in a book and as such was outside my purview. And the sad look on your face when I said that! Oh, I wanted to hug you again, real right. But I couldn’t do that. As you know. So instead, I actually answered your question. I said, ‘He was a lawyer who tried to do the right thing in a book.’ I specified ‘in a book’ because I wanted to stress to you that a book is not the world, and what is possible in a book, or valued in a book, or wanted in a book, is not always, or even usually, possible or valued or wanted in the world, or for that matter what was possible or valued or wanted in a book when it was written would not necessarily be possible, valued, or wanted when it was read. This is why my esteemed colleagues in the English Department are so insistent that I stick to my purview. Not that you registered the distinction between the book and the world anyway. Only the top five percent can register than distinction, and only two percent of them even care. And do you remember what you said? No, of course you don’t. But I do. You said something very sweet, something that gave me hope, something that I would have remembered, even had I not written it in your file, which I did. You said, ‘Yeah, that’s definitely the kind of lawyer I’m gonna be.’”
“I remember,” I said, now that she’d helped me remember. I could see myself, too, in her office, after I’d said what Ms. Hardaway had reminded me I’d said. I was sitting in a folding metal chair, hunched over, elbows on my knees, looking at the oriental rug. Why? Because I’d felt sheepish that I’d said this big thing, made this big claim, voiced this big hope about my future. And because I meant it. I was sincere. And I was afraid that Ms. Hardaway would make fun of me. No, that’s not it: I was afraid that she wouldn’t make of fun of me, that she wouldn’t say anything at all, but would instead think what I was thinking, which was this: I probably won’t end up being that kind of lawyer, or any kind of lawyer, or any kind of thing anyone would really want to be when they grow up. So yes, I looked sheepish, and sad, then. Or maybe it was that I felt sad, now, because I knew what question was coming next, and how I would answer it.
“Well?” Ms. Hardaway asked, and I could hear the flinch in her voice. “Have you become that kind of lawyer?” I told her I hadn’t, that I hadn’t become any kind of lawyer at all. “What have you become then?” she asked.
“I work from home, on my computer.”
“You’re a writer then?” she asked, her voice brighter now, and when I said yes, she said, “Thirty-seven years ago you asked me what kind of lawyer was Atticus Finch, and now I ask you, Silas, mi corazon palpitante: What kind of writer are you?”
“I write lists.”
“Lists?”
“Lists.” As I said this, I looked across the street. Mike and Legend had gone back inside his house, and they were now coming out of it again. Mike was holding Legend’s leash with his left hand and a handgun with his right. He wasn’t trying to hide it. He walked down the street, holding the gun like he didn’t care who saw him, like it was legal to do so. Because it was legal, in our state. I knew this because one of the lists I’d written last week was Top Ten States for Gun Lovers. “Top Ten States for Gun Lovers,” I told Ms. Hardaway. “Top Five Cities for Frozen Custard Fans,” which was the list I’d written earlier that day. “Seven Reasons Not To Have Your Wisdom Teeth Extracted,” which was the list I was planning to write tomorrow. “That kind of thing.”
Ms. Hardaway didn’t say anything. She didn’t hang up, but she didn’t say anything either. And this is another reason no one wants to talk on the phone anymore: a phone is a perfect vehicle for the communication of disappointment. You can express it by hanging up, and you can also express it by not saying anything at all. Just by holding the phone, in silence, can you make your feelings known.
“What kind of clock?” Ms. Hardaway finally asked. Her voice sounded tired. It suddenly felt like we’d been talking for a very long time.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Inside your package is a clock,” Ms. Hardaway reminded me. “An alarm clock? Digital? Analog? A Grandfather clock? A Kit Kat clock? A cuckoo clock? Is it a cuckoo clock? I’ve always liked those. That is what I wanted to be when I grew up. Not a guidance counselor, but a maker of cuckoo clocks. That whimsical sound. That happy little bird.”
“It’s not a cuckoo clock,” I said, and then told her what kind of clock it was. Again, there was silence, briefer this time, and then I heard the sound of something—my file, I guessed—slapping shut.
“That’s outside my purview,” Ms. Hardaway said, and then hung up.
I stared at the phone, like it had just insulted me. Then, I put it in my pocket, picked up the package. Maude got to her feet and followed me into the house. There, at the far end of the front hall, was a stack of packages, some of them opened, most of them not. I put this most recent package on top of the stack. I considered the stack, and felt so lost. What is even in those packages? I wondered. Why are they here? Why am I here? Why did I love To Kill a Mockingbird so much thirty-seven years ago? Why did I want to be like AtticusFinch? Why have I forgotten almost everything about it and him since then? Was he really a racist? Am I? What has happened to me? How did I get here?
How did I get here? A big question. The kind, I guess, you might turn to a book to help you answer. Maybe even a book like To Kill a Mockingbird. Except I didn’t have To Kill a Mockingbird. But I did have my phone. A book and a phone have something in common. They both can tell you how you got here, but a phone can tell you a lot faster.
So I took my phone out of my pocket and went through my search history, back through the clock and the human condition and Mr. Crawford’s phone number and Atticus Finch shooting the dog until, yes, there it was, the link that said that white people needed to reckon with Atticus Finch’s racism.
So I clicked on the link and discovered that what I’d assumed would be an article arguing that white people like me needed to reckon with Atticus Finch’s racism was instead an online course intended to teach white people like me how to reckon with Atticus Finch’s racism. I took, and passed, the course, which was easy—the test didn’t require that I read, or re-read, the book. It just quoted passages in which Atticus Finch said, or did, something potentially racist, and then asked a series of multiple-choice questions about whether what he’d said or done was not racist, somewhat racist, or definitely racist. The answer to every question was “somewhat racist,” except for the last question, which was, “Is being somewhat racist better than being definitely racist or just as bad as being definitely racist?” I suspected Atticus Finch would have said, “Better,” and so I said, “Just as bad,” and I got that one right, too—and then I felt much better, especially when I was told that within an hour I would receive, via Instant Express Delivery, a t-shirt that said I Reckoned With Atticus Finch’s Racism.
I was about to pocket my phone and go out and wait on my front porch for my t-shirt to arrive when I noticed that between the time when I first saw the link and now, many links had popped up in response to the first link. “White People Have Much More Racist Things to Reckon With Than Atticus Finch’s Racism,” was one link. “If I Reckon With the More Racist Things Do I Still Have to Reckon With Atticus Finch’s Racism?” was another. “All People Need to Reckon With Atticus Finch’s Racism,” was a third. Followed by “Asking for a Friend: Do Asian Americans Also Need to Reckon With Atticus Finch’s Racism?” and “Why Should Asian Americans be Any Different Than Other Americans?” and “A Brief History of Why Asian Americans are Different Than Other Americans” and “Other Americans: What You Will Not Find in To Kill a Mockingbird” and “There is No Such Thing as an ‘Other American’” and “How I Came to Embrace Being an ‘Other American’” and “There is a Case to Be Made That White Americans are the Only ‘Other Americans’ but is Anyone Brave Enough to Make It?” and “A Provocation: Atticus Finch Was the Only White American Brave Enough to Make the Case that White Americans are the Only ‘Other Americans’” and “A Sincere Question: Is There a Black Person on this Planet Named After Atticus Finch?” and “I Am a Black Person on this Planet Named After Atticus Finch” and “Another Sincere Question: Is There a Black Person on this Planet Not Adopted by White People Who Has Been Named After Atticus Finch?” and “I Loved My White Parents, but I Would Have Loved Them More If They Hadn’t Adopted Me” and “For Parents Only: How to Survive the Adoption Process” and “I Would Not Have Survived Being a Kid Without To Kill a Mockingbird” and “If I Had Known Being an Adult Would Be Like This Then I Would Rather Not Have Survived Being a Kid” and “Ten Kids’ Books that Make Childhood Worth Reading” and “Yes, Atticus Finch is Racist and So is To Kill a Mockingbird but That Doesn’t Mean We Shouldn’t Keep Reading It” and “An Inquiry: Want to Have it Both Ways Much?” and so on. There were too many links to mention, too many links to count, and definitely too many links to read. I scrolled down on my phone until I hit the most recent two links: “Does Anyone Really Give a Fuck About Atticus Finch and For That Matter Did Anyone Ever Really Give a Fuck About Atticus Finch?” and “My Eighth-Grade Boyfriend Really Gave a Fuck About Atticus Finch, and His Name Was Silas Barton and I Wish He’d Get in Touch With Me and Here’s the Link.”
I clicked on the link. There was no one there, just the message that my host would be joining the meeting shortly. I was sitting at my desk which was also my kitchen table, and I put my phone down on the table, because my hands were shaking and I felt jittery—maybe from reading through all those links, or maybe because I couldn’t remember who my eighth-grade girlfriend was. Think, Silas, think, I told myself, and then I did, and just in time I remembered her name—Cheryl Watterson!—and there she was on my phone, a white woman. I say that because she was a white woman, but also because this was one of the ways that the test had just helped with me reckon with Atticus Finch’s racism, which, for the most part, as far as the test was concerned, was synonymous with the book’s racism. According to the test, whenever a character in the book was black, the person was referred to as “black,” or a “negro,” or a worse word, a word I, as a white person, could never say, and would never say, unlike almost all of the white people in To Kill a Mockingbird, who said that word all the time, even when they were alone and doing something random, like brushing their teeth; but whenever a character in the book was white, they were referred to not as “white” but rather as a “person.” Was Atticus Finch’s disinterest in challenging this rhetorical double standard not racist, somewhat racist, or definitely racist? the test had asked. You know what the right answer was, and so did I, and in that spirit I should say that Mr. Crawford, and Ms. Hardaway, and the Instant Express deliveryman, and Mike were white, too. I didn’t say that when they first appeared in this story because I hadn’t taken the test yet…
Anyway, it was definitely Cheryl—a little older in the eyes and her black hair was gray streaked but with that same big smile that showed plenty of gum. Her head filled the screen, and other than it, all I could see of her was that she’d wrapped a big blue shimmery scarf around her neck. I’d noticed this: so many women her age, our age, wore scarves, all the time, no matter the weather (it was summer where I was, and I assumed where she was, too), or the occasion (there was none, as far as I knew, unless I was considered an occasion). It was mysterious to me, and I’d tried to write a list—Three Reasons Why Middle-aged Women Wear Scarves—as a way to try to understand the phenomenon, but so far I had only come up with one reason—that middle-aged women like their necks better when there are scarves around them—and as everyone knows you need at least three items to make a list. It’s considered best practices, in the listmaking industry.
“You big a-hole,” Cheryl said, and I remembered this, too: for Cheryl insults were endearments. “You haven’t changed at all!” she said. I knew this wasn’t true—I was bald, and I had a big gray bushy beard that suddenly I wanted to take off my face and put on my head—but I thanked her anyway, and then said the same thing about her, and she laughed and said, “Knucklehead, shut your mouth,” and then we caught up. Or tried to. But our screens kept freezing. And then our dogs kept jumping into the picture—Cheryl had a dog, too, named Gracie—and then we spoke from the points of view of our dogs, in what we imagined would be their high, sweet human voices—“I like your scarf, Cheryl!”—and then our screens froze again, and when they unfroze Cheryl said, “This is stupid. I wish we could just get together with the dogs or something.” It turned out that we could—Cheryl lived close to me, a twenty-minute walk away, just on the other side of Maude’s favorite dog park—“I love that place!” said Gracie, through Cheryl. So we decided to meet there in an hour. But once we agreed on that, we didn’t seem to want to get off the phone. We just sat there, grinning at each other. Until finally Cheryl said, “You know, I hadn’t thought of that guy in years.”
“What guy?” I said. Although of course I knew who she meant: Atticus Finch.
“But the minute I saw that link,” Cheryl said, “I thought of you. You loved that book, and that guy. I don’t think I ever met anyone who loved a character so much that he wanted to be him. You would walk around quoting him, just applying the things he said to random situations.” Cheryl paused, unwrapped and wrapped her neck, then asked, “Do you remember that?”
I didn’t, not really, but even so I said, “Sure.” Because my conversation with Ms. Hardaway had taught me even if I lied and told someone I remembered something, they would tell me about it anyway, and in that way I would eventually remember.
“I guess it was cute,” Cheryl said. “But I guess it was also annoying. For instance, when I was so upset because Therese Otto said I smelled like government cheese, you quoted, ‘It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.’ And then, when Therese Otto apologized for saying I smelled like government cheese, and when I told you it turned out that she was pretty nice after all, you quoted, ‘Most people are, when you finally see them.’ When we were in your rec room, watching a movie, which was The Elephant Man, and I said something basic, like, ‘That guy grosses me out,’ instead of saying something basic back in your own words, like, ‘Yeah’ or ‘Me, too,’ you quoted, ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ The quoting, it was constant, Silas. And eventually it drove me crazy. I’m sorry, but it did. I liked you, but even so I finally said to myself, If he quotes Atticus Finch one more time… And then you did it.” Cheryl drew a deep breath, and then continued. “We were sitting on a bench outside the cafeteria…” she said.
And then suddenly, I remembered. It was March, and cold. I hadn’t yet cut off the sleeves of my sweatshirt. My arm was around Cheryl. I was so happy: because I had a girlfriend, and also because I’d just gotten an A on the test Mr. Crawford had given us to see if we’d read and understood To Kill a Mockingbird. “What about you?” I asked Cheryl, and she shrugged, and my arm around her shoulders rose and fell.
“C+,” she said, and then shrugged again. This surprised me. Cheryl was a better student than I was, and it was much more common for her to receive an A on a test, and me a C+.
“How come?” I said, because the test hadn’t been hard—not for someone like me who loved the book and not even, I didn’t think, for someone who didn’t.
“I didn’t read the whole thing,” Cheryl said.
“You didn’t read the whole test?”
“I didn’t read the whole book.”
“How much did you read?”
“Fifty pages,” she said. “Maybe thirty.”
“Shut up,” I said. Because we’d talked about the book, constantly, over the past month—during study hall, when we were watching tv at my house or hers, when we were making out, or at least when we’d stopped making out to catch our breath and cool our jets, which is something that Cheryl had always said when our making out threatened to turn into something else. “Hey, loser, cool your jets,” she’d say, and then, “What’d you think about chapter twelve in To Kill a Mockingbird?”
“I didn’t talk about it,” Cheryl said. “You did. You quoted lines from it all the time. Like, all the time. That’s how I knew enough about it to get a C+.”
“Why didn’t you read the whole thing?”
“Because I didn’t want to,” Cheryl said.
“But it’s a great book,” I said, and Cheryl shrugged again.
“If you say so,” she said. “Me, I didn’t love it.”
It was a line meant to end a conversation, and it did. I didn’t know what Cheryl was feeling, but I felt used, and pissed off, too. How easy it is to hate the people who don’t love what we love. That was my thought, now; my thought then was, Fuck you. I wanted to say it, too. But I knew I shouldn’t. Instead, I asked myself, as I often did, What would Atticus Finch say? Then, I mentally went through all the things that Atticus Finch had said in To Kill a Mockingbird, found the right one, took a deep breath, patted Cheryl’s knee, and in a sage voice that didn’t sound like mine, not even to me, I quoted, “Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open.”
Cheryl nodded, like I’d confirmed something she already knew. Then, she took my hand off her knee, stood up, and said, “I’m breaking up with you, Silas. But don’t worry. I bet you and Atticus will be very happy together.”
“Fuck you,” I said. It was a very un-Atticus-like thing for me to say, but that didn’t seem to change Cheryl’s mind about me. “Goodbye,” she said. Then she walked away, and we’d not talked since, not once in thirty-seven years. And what was I supposed to say now? What do you say when the last words you said to a person you cared about were those words? I’m sorry, for starters. But would that be enough? Would it be a better apology if I told Cheryl that I was sorry and that I’d reckoned with Atticus Finch’s racism? Probably. And I would have done that, but Cheryl was still talking on my phone screen and I didn’t want to interrupt her.
“But maybe I was missing something. Maybe I’ve been missing something,” Cheryl said. “Because do you know what I think now?” Then, Cheryl apparently told me what she thought now. That is, I saw her lips moving. But I couldn’t hear what it was she was saying. I told her so, but now my screen had frozen, and so she couldn’t hear me either. Although suddenly, I could hear her. She said “Hello, hello?” I said, “I’m here,” but she still couldn’t hear me. Cheryl muttered under her breath, then started rubbing her eyes, just rubbing them and rubbing them. Finally, she stopped and I could see her eyes again. They looked tired, and I thought, God, we are so old, and we have wasted so much time. Although of course I didn’t say that to Cheryl. Instead, I asked if she was ok. This she heard, and said, “Life hasn’t worked out the way I wanted it to, Silas.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“I wanted to grow up to be a doctor who went wherever she was needed most. A doctor without borders,” Cheryl said. “But instead, I became a life coach.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said, although in truth, while I knew there were people who were life coaches, and while I had written a list called Nine Signs You Might Need a Life Coach, I had no idea what they did, or where they did it, if they coached from an office, or if they did it from home.
“Caring for yourself is an act of political warfare,” Cheryl said.
“That sounds like a quote,” I said, and Cheryl nodded. “Audre Lorde said it.” I nodded as though I knew exactly who Audre Lorde was, but Cheryl saw right through that. “Don’t bullshit me, Silas. Audre Lorde. Poet. Black woman. For her taking care of herself probably was an act of political warfare. But I get paid to say it to people who have always done a pretty good job caring for themselves.”
“White people,” I guessed.
“White people,” Cheryl agreed. She looked at me, head cocked, as though trying to make up her mind about me. Finally, she seemed to: Cheryl smiled widely again, and said, “Can I tell you something stupid? Atticus Finch meant so much to you that it made me jealous. I think that’s why I broke up with you. Not because you were annoying. But because I was jealous.” That was stupid, but sweet, like a lot of stupid things. But of course I didn’t say that. Instead, I said something stupid myself: “You broke up with me? No, I broke up with you!” Cheryl laughed at that and said, “All right, you jerk, one hour, dog park, don’t be late.” Then she disappeared from my screen.
She disappeared from my screen, but still I kept staring at it, grinning at it. I thought about Cheryl, just twenty minutes away. I wondered if she was feeling what I was feeling: that something important was about to happen. I wondered if this was the way Mr. Crawford felt when he first taught To Kill a Mockingbird, or how Harper Lee felt when she first wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, or how I felt when I first read To Kill a Mockingbird (I still didn’t exactly remember), or how whoever wrote the article about white people needing to reckon with Atticus Finch’s racism felt when they first wrote that.
Which reminded me that my t-shirt testifying that I had reckoned with Atticus Finch’s racism was on its way. It was still a beautiful day outside, and so Maude and I went out on the porch. While I was out there, I read two alerts on my phone: one, an automatic alert telling me it was time to order new contact lenses (and I did that), and two, an active shooter alert. But before I could read more about the active shooter, the Instant Express Delivery van pulled up in front of my house. The same driver as before hopped out of the van and said, “Here you go!” He handed me a padded envelope, tossed Maude a treat, and then sped off to his next house to deliver his next package.
I opened the envelope and there it was: a black t-shirt that said in white letters I Reckoned With Atticus Finch’s Racism. I immediately took off the t-shirt I’d been wearing—that t-shirt had words on it, too, but the second I took it off I forgot what they were—and put on the new one, and felt that heart-singing feeling you get when you receive a good report card. In this case the report card was the t-shirt, which fit me, too, much better than the old one. It fit me so well that I closed my eyes and tried to picture Cheryl, what she would think when she saw me walking up to her at the dog park wearing this t-shirt. There, in my mind’s eye, was Cheryl, in her scarf and with her dog. She saw me and waved, and smiled, and I saw those gums, and I was so happy, and she seemed so happy, too. But then she squinted and cocked her head. Cheryl was looking at my t-shirt. But she wasn’t seeing how well it fit me. She was seeing…well, I didn’t know. Was she seeing a guy who was mature enough, thoughtful enough, evolved enough, to renounce a book, even though that book had meant so much to him as a boy? Or was she seeing a man who had rejected—or even worse, basically forgotten— something fundamental to him, a man whose most cherished things were so meaningless to him that he could just take them on and off like a t-shirt, a man who had changed so much that she didn’t know him anymore and didn’t want to know him anymore?
And then I thought: Uh-oh, here it comes again: another reckoning. Life, I was learning, was full of them, and just because you’ve successfully reckoned with something and gotten a t-shirt to commemorate your accomplishment, doesn’t mean your work is done, and it doesn’t mean the next reckoning will be as easily pulled off as the previous one. And even if you do pull it off, you might not get a t-shirt for your efforts. But that was fine. I was willing to reckon with the t-shirt, just as I’d reckoned with Atticus Finch’s racism, if that’s what Cheryl wanted me to do. Whatever Cheryl wanted me to reckon with, I would do that. Because—and this was another reckoning—except for my dog and my phone, I’d been alone, for so long. And I didn’t want to be alone anymore.
“Silas,” I heard someone say. I opened my eyes and there, standing in front of me was Mike. No Legend, just Mike. He was still holding the gun in his right hand. Earlier, he’d held it up, chest level, so that anyone could see it. Now, it dangled at his side. Not like he was hiding it, but like he’d forgotten it was there. There was something wrong with his eyes, too. They seemed like he was looking at something far away. Maude growled at him, deep in her throat, which I thought was strange—she’d never growled at him before. But then, she’d never seen him without Legend before, either.
“Mike, where’s Legend?” I asked him.
“He ran away when I fired the gun,” Mike said, and his voice was far away, too. Although suddenly his eyes came into focus, and stared directly at my chest. And by my chest, I mean my t-shirt.
“Fired the gun?” I asked, and Mike told me who he’d fired at, who he’d shot and killed, and why. The entire time he kept staring at my t-shirt.
“Atticus Finch,” I said, when he was finished with his story. I pointed at my t-shirt. “He wasn’t a person who shot a dog in real life. He was a character. In a novel. To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“I remember now,” Mike said. “I really liked that book back in middle school.”
And then he shot Maude, and she died. And then he shot me, and I died.
And then I had a vision. In it, I was standing in front of my old middle school, which, as Ms. Hardaway had said, had been right across the street from my old high school. The high school was gone. In its place was a parking lot. There was a pedestrian bridge arching over the road to connect the lot to the middle school. There were no cars in the lot, which was instead full of people. A line of people that coiled and snaked through the parking lot, out of the parking lot, onto the ground on one side of the bridge, and then back on the other side, and then up the stairs that led up to the bridge and into the middle school. The line looked like it was moving slowly. The people in line in the parking lot looked relatively healthy, but the people on the bridge looked very sick: they were stooped over, and some of them were crying, or gasping, or both. At the edge of the parking lot were two women in nursing uniforms. When I saw them, I understood that the middle school had been turned into a hospital. One of the nurses was handing out umbrellas to people who we were about to cross under the bridge; the other was collecting umbrellas from people who were about to start climbing the stairs to the bridge. I wondered what the umbrellas were for, but just then one person on the bridge leaned over the railing and vomited onto the umbrellas of the people underneath. Then another person vomited, which then lead to another person vomiting, and then the entire bridge seemed to be vomiting onto the umbrellas held by the people below.
I wasn’t sure what any of this had to do with me until I saw an old, hunched-over bald man fold up his umbrella and hand it to one of the nurses. It was my eighth-grade English teacher, Mr. Crawford. He was wearing the clothes he’d always worn in class. They’d looked shabby thirty-seven years ago; they looked worse now. So did Mr. Crawford. His skin was papery, his lips translucent. He was about to start climbing the stairs, but when I said his name, he paused and looked at me, in silence. His tongue darted in and out of his mouth, then rooted around for something in his teeth. “Barton, what in the world are you wearing?” he finally asked. I told him. Mr. Crawford opened his mouth to say something in response but then started coughing, hard, and didn’t seem to be able to stop. I wondered if he was going to start vomiting right there, before he even made it to the bridge, but he managed to stop coughing before it came to that. He started walking up the stairs, and I walked with him. When we got to the top of stairs, Mr. Crawford said, “Well, what’s brought you here, Barton? Make it quick. I don’t have much time before I go…” And here he pointed toward the other end of the bridge, where people were entering the hospital.
I told him, about the link, and about how it had caused me to call him, and then how Ms. Hardaway had called me, and then Cheryl, and about how I’d taken the test and gotten this t-shirt, and then how Mike had shot Maude, and then me. Mr. Crawford closed his eyes as I talked, and they stayed closed for some time afterward. Finally, he opened his eyes. They looked filmy, as though there was something between them and me.
“I’m sorry to hear that things didn’t work out with Watterson,” he said. “I’d always dreamed of a future for the two of you. Full of children. Rewarding jobs. Overflowing bookshelves. Inventive sexual lives. With occasional insatiable exhibitionist needs. I’m speaking, of course, of intercourse in public. Grocery store bathrooms. Back rows of planetariums.” Mr. Crawford closed his eyes again. “That booth at Arby’s. No, not that booth, the other one.”
“Really?” I said, and Mr. Crawford opened his eyes.
“Really, Barton. Students always think their teachers are creepy, but they have no idea. But let’s not talk about that. You want me to tell you whether or not Atticus Finch is racist. Am I correct?” I thought about this, thought about another reason why I would be having this vision. I couldn’t think of one. Yes, I told Mr. Crawford, that’s what I want you to tell me. “Why?” he asked. “Suppose I say Yes? Will that make you feel better? Suppose I say No? Will that make you feel worse?” He paused to let me answer. But I didn’t. I felt like I was back in middle school, when Mr. Crawford tended to ask me questions that only he had the answers to. “Why ask me in the first place?” he continued. “I remember you being an enthusiastic reader. Dense, but dogged. In the B+ range. Why don’t you just re-read the book?” Again, he paused to let me answer, and again, I didn’t, and again, Mr. Crawford continued. “What happens to us, Barton, when we get older? We’re supposed to get wiser. But I think we only get scared. And lazy. And then we forget, because we’re too scared and lazy to remember. And because we’re old.” He raised his index finger, as though telling me to wait a minute, and then vomited over the railing. When he was done, he wiped his mouth with his jacket sleeve, turned back to me. “Fine,” he said, in a croaking voice. “I’ll tell you. But before I do, you need to answer one question for me.” We’d been shuffling forward all this time, and we were almost at the door to the hospital by now. “Barton,” Mr. Crawford asked, “what’s it like to be dead?” And finally, I knew the answer to one of Mr. Crawford’s questions.
“It’s like taking a long walk without your dog,” I said, and then suddenly I was back at my house. Maude wasn’t waiting for me, but there was a package, sitting on my front porch. I took it inside. Flicked on the lights, or tried to, but the power was out. It was very dark, very quiet inside the house. There was nothing in there except for me, and the pile of packages, and my new package. I couldn’t even remember what was in it, what I might have ordered. I threw the package on top of the pile. Then I picked it up, and threw it at the pile, as hard as I could, and then again, and again, and again. I threw it for hours, until the sun came up and there was light in the hallway and finally the package burst open. In it were the contact lenses I’d ordered, little fake eyes in little plastic pouches, scattered all over the floor.