Over the next several weeks, Dad lit into Eugnosis of Alexandria with a vengeance. “I love this guy,” he’d say. “Our Eugnosis has a unique and refreshing outlook on life and a wicked sense of humor. This project shouldn’t count as work; it’s too dang fun.”
He was working long and late hours. And loving it.
It was great to see Dad back in good humor, to hear him singing his stupid songs and making lame jokes again.
Mom perked up too, what with Dad making the scholarly score of the century.
Oh things were looking up all right. For them anyway.
Too bad I couldn’t say the same for myself. After all the excitement of “The Mystery of the Missing Manuscript” settled down, I was back to the same old grind at Gierman High School.
Although I’d been in Ms. Peel’s English class for several weeks, I couldn’t get used to having the ghost of Amy LaBlanc’s mother lurking in the air behind me.
You read a horror novel or go to a scary movie and it creeps you out sure, but eventually you walk away and it’s over. This wasn’t ever over. That poor woman’s terrified face was back there every day and on my mind every night.
Fortunately, English is usually a pretty easy class for me. Maybe there’s some genetic thing I got from Dad that makes me think like a teacher.
That’s a good thing because I was usually too freaked out and distracted to get much out of Ms. Peel’s classroom lectures, but I could still keep up with the reading and do an okay job on my assignments.
The other thing in my favor was that we were reading Hamlet. Sure, that could be a problem for a kid who was the product of a normal family, but, as you may have noticed, mine is not a normal family.
Normal families may have traditions where they watch movies like The Wizard of Oz or It’s a Wonderful Life together every year. My family watches Hamlet.
Murder, treachery, suicide, and a body count high enough to make Chuck Norris sit up and take notice. Real family entertainment.
I guess I’ve seen every version of Hamlet that’s been put on video: Lawrence Oliver, Mel Gibson (my personal favorite), Nicol Williamson, Ethan Hawke, and all four hours of Kenneth Branaugh.
After all of that I can proudly say that I get at least half of what’s going on in the story.
Which in Ms. Peel’s 6th period English puts me right at the head of the class.
So there I was, all set to coast through another 6th period on overstressed-auto-pilot when Ms. Peel had to go and wake me up.
She’d been explaining how she had just taken a workshop on something called “cooperative learning”, and now she was all set to try it out on us. She even jokingly called us her “guinea pigs”.
The Germ pointed out that being compared to rodents might do permanent damage our self-esteem, but Ms. Peel ignored him.
She told us she was going to break us up into groups of four and then give each group a question which we would then proceed to discuss intelligently.
Yeah, right.
Anyway, after our “intelligent discussion”, the group would send a spokesperson to the front of the room to explain the “intelligent answers” that came out of all the “intelligent discussion”.
I was getting a bad feeling about this assignment.
And it went downhill from there.
Ms. Peel randomly selected the groups by having us draw from a deck of playing cards. She was not playing with a full deck (sorry, I couldn’t resist), instead she had selected out certain groups of cards, (face cards, aces, deuces, and couple number cards), so there wouldn’t be any cards left over.
I drew the 8 of hearts.
That meant that when Ms. Peel divided the class, “We’ll have the Kings in this corner, Queens back there, Jacks up front, Aces right here…” I wound up in the back of the room with the “Crazy 8’s”: Me, a huge kid named Charles something-or-other, Jeremy Ferguss, and Amy LaBlanc.
This was random selection?
This wasn’t random; it was a conspiracy.
I remembered Dad’s stories about how the ancient Greeks believed that three old witches with really twisted senses of humor, the Fates they were called, would spin the threads of peoples’ lives on cosmic spinning wheels.
Suddenly, those old stories made perfect sense to me.
We were quite a crew.
The Charles kid looked confused, like he wasn’t sure where he was or what he was supposed to do. Then there was the Germ wearing his usual smirk, like he was just looking for an opportunity to ruin somebody’s day. And finally, Amy LaBlanc, slumped in her desk looking…hostile..? angry..? indifferent..? I couldn’t tell.
Fortunately, her mother’s ghost had dimmed down to a small patch of pale mist.
It was unnerving but I could deal with it.
The Crazy 8’s were assigned to discuss question number seven: “Describe the role of the ghost of Hamlet’s father in the play. Be sure to include an explanation of why the ghost returned from the dead and a description of Hamlet’s feelings and thoughts about the ghost.”
Not an especially hard question for a group of thoughtful, intelligent readers with a good grasp of the events of the play.
But for the Crazy 8’s…
If you know the story of Hamlet, you know how Prince Hamlet’s dead father, (also named Hamlet, just to make the story more confusing), shows up as a ghost and tells Hamlet (the Prince) that his evil brother, Claudius, (Prince Hamlet’s uncle, you still with me?) murdered him (dead King Hamlet), married his wife, (Hamlet’s mother) and made himself king. Then the ghost tells Hamlet he should seek revenge against the evil King Claudius.
For the rest of the story, Hamlet dithers around over whether to kill King Claudius or not while everyone else hatches complicated plots and conspiracies.
By the end of the play, pretty much everybody is dead.
I know it sounds stupid when I tell it, but it really is a cool story and believe it or not, I never get tired of watching those videos with my family.
Now anyone who has ever been in a small group discussion in school knows exactly how the Crazy 8’s meeting started.
Everybody sat around avoiding eye contact and hoping someone else would say something.
In our case, someone else turned out to be the Germ.
“It says we’re supposed to describe the role of the ghost,” he started.
“The ghost?” Charles asked.
The Germ turned to him. “Yeah, the ghost. The king. Hamlet’s father.”
“His father?” Charles again.
The Germ rolled his eyes. “Yeah the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The king that got murdered.”
“Murdered?”
Was this guy capable of human speech beyond repeating the last word anybody says to him?
I tried helping out. “Yeah, the ghost calls it ‘murder most foul’.”
“Foul?” So much for being helpful. How dumb was this guy?
“Right,” I said, “fowl, you know, like chickens.”
“Chickens?” Jeez. Where was he when all the brains got handed out?
The Germ was trying hard not to burst out laughing and there was an expression on Amy LaBlanc’s face that might have been a smile, but I doubted it.
“Yeah,” the Germ added helpfully, “the ghost is mad because Claudius murdered all his chickens.”
Charles got about as close to a thoughtful look on his face as he would ever get.
“My uncle had a dog what killed all his chickens once. He shot it with a deer rifle.”
Wow! An original thought!
“There you go, Charles!” I said. “Just like Hamlet!”
There you have it. Brilliant insights into Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the Crazy 8’s.
Sad to say, it didn’t get much better after that. After I got the results of my experiment to discover just how dumb Charles was, I was too depressed to get involved with any more “discussion”.
The Germ, of course, was so impressed by Charles’ ignorance that he spent all the rest of our discussion time messing with his mind. By the time the Germ was done with him, Charles believed that Shakespeare’s Hamlet included three gunfights, a car chase through a shopping mall, and an alien invasion.
As a result, when time came for Ms. Peel to stop our meeting and have us state our insightful answers to the rest of the class, I was frantically wondering just what the heck our spokesman would be able to share. Car chases? Alien invasions? Murdered chickens?
I was distracted enough by that question that I didn’t hear Ms. Peel ask who the spokesman was from our group. I did catch the answer though.
Charles and the Germ roared out together, “Swartz!”
I suppose I was the logical choice. I mean, what were our alternatives?
The Germ could expound on his theories about murdered chickens, Amy LaBlanc could stand in front of the class and refuse to say anything, or Charles could go up and nervously wait for someone to say something he could repeat.
Besides, I had a pretty good idea of what to say.
See, Zach and I had spent a lot of time talking about the ghost of Amy’s mother.
“Based on my observations of the lady,” he’d said, “I’d say it’s clear as glass she’s hearin’ somebody call to her. You see how she stops and listens and then starts up runnin’ and callin’ again?”
“You’re right. That’s just how it looks to me too.”
He went on. “I’ve got t’assume that it’s that Amy girl that’s callin’ to her.”
“O…kay…”
“…but then, why can’t the ghost see her? She’s right there.”
“I was hoping you were going to explain that.”
Zach shrugged. “Could be that I am. Can’t say for certain o’course, but I’m thinking as there’s some kind of wall there between them.”
“A wall?”
“Well, I’m callin’ it that, but like I said, I don’t know for certain. I’m thinkin’ though that just as much as that Amy girl is callin’ that ghost to her, at the same time she’s hidin’ from it. Makin’ herself invisible to her Ma who may, for all we know, have her reasons t’hide from her daughter.”
“Say what?” He lost me. “You say she’s calling her mom and then hiding from her while her mom is trying to find her without really finding her? You realize that makes no sense. Why would they do that?”
“Durned if I know. But then who ever gave you the idea that everything a person does makes sense?”
He had me there.
I remembered a quote from Eugnosis of Alexandrai that Dad had read to us one night after dinner: “We fear the thing we most desire”.
Could it be that Amy LaBlanc’s desire to see her mother was also canceled out by some fear?
Fear of what?
This conversation was fresh in my mind as I made my way to the front of the classroom. So when Ms. Peel asked, “Marcus, what insights has your group come up with on the role of the ghost in Hamlet?” I had something to talk about besides murdered chickens.
“Well,” I started, “in our…uh…discussion, we came up with some…unusual…ideas.”
Most of which I would leave unsaid.
I went on. “The obvious take on the question is that the ghost of Hamlet’s father is all mad and everything because his brother, Claudius, murdered him, stole his wife, and made himself king. Now he wants Hamlet to stop moping around and start taking revenge.
“But,” I continued, “why is Hamlet’s father a ghost? I mean, lots of people get screwed over and killed, but not all of them come back and haunt their relatives.”
I ignored the fact that there was no rational way that I could know what I was talking about and went on.
“See, I’m thinking that the ghost has to come back to haunt the castle because Hamlet wants him to come back. Think about it. Hamlet’s dad dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances and what does Hamlet do? Nothing! His creepy uncle marries his mom and again, he does nothing. Then the creepy uncle make himself king. What’s that all about? I thought that the king’s son was supposed to inherit the throne, not his little brother. So how does Claudius get to be king? Anyway, the point is, what does Hamlet do about it?”
A voice, “Nothing?”
“Thanks Charles,” I continued. “So Hamlet knows darn well that ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’, but he doesn’t trust himself to do anything about it, so he calls for his daddy.”
I started to wrap it up. “And that’s why the ghost shows up. Because Hamlet has, without even knowing he’s doing it, called his father back from the dead.”
Ms. Peel was giving me a funny look. “Thank you Marcus, that was…well, let’s just say I haven’t heard that interpretation before. Any questions class?”
Since most of the rest of the class hadn’t really been listening there weren’t any questions. The Germ called out, “Good job Swartz. You explained my ideas brilliantly!” Which I ignored.
One thing I did notice, though. As I made my way back to my seat, Amy LaBlanc was staring at me. Hard.
That, and her ghost was gone.