Sublime Messages

Second Interlude

George MacArthur wasn't a fool. He'd always been well-liked amongst the students, even as an older, sterner teacher, not one of those young noobs riding scooters or throwing rubber balls down the hallway to convince the teens of his youth or hipness. Parents had appreciated the fact that he'd stuck to what they'd been familiar with, pencil and paper and actual classic texts, none of those chrome books or cell phones, none of that young adult literature. Administration had stopped caring what he did in his classroom so long as he didn't cause a stir; he had only a couple of years before retirement, and they were banking on replacing him with a reading specialist. He knew what every category of person thought of him, being the perspicacious sort he was, and so he knew with absolute certainty there was no way he and the other staff members were getting out of this alive.

For one thing, they'd all been stripped naked, the purpose of which seemed nothing more than humiliation and assertion of dominance. But one didn't force people to degrade themselves without some inevitable conclusion in mind. These cultists had come into this knowing there'd be no going back, and when there was no return, there was no way out for those they took with them.

No staff member had tried to rebel, not when the lives of students were on the line. They'd been herded like animals into the drama department, an interior space virtually cut off from the rest of the building, a tomb within the bowels of the lower level, consisting of two smallish classrooms, a high-ceilinged choir room with terrible acoustics, and a small, dark area known as the black box theater. It was in this latter space that George and the other fifty or so male staff members (determined by genitalia) had been moved, and it was here they'd now been for nearly forty-eight hours. The women had been separated from them and gathered into the choir room, and though George couldn't speak for the women's situation, he was certain there were several armed guards with them as well.

Everything had been painfully quiet. Being so cut off from the rest of the building, the drama department had all the quiet it'd desired for its practices and performances (and no one else had been subjected to the choir's irksome warmups). The main auditorium was a floor above, with a well-disguised stairwell leading from the lower level up into the backstage rooms. George had more than once pondered whether these intruders had discovered that stairwell and figured the other staff members, especially the drama and choir teachers, had wondered it as well, but for all anyone might have considered an attempted coup or sneak-out, they'd been told quite firmly that any insubordination would result in immediate and impartial student casualties (the number dependant on the perceived severity of the infraction), and even the surlier and burlier among them were wary of risking the lives of the young people they were meant to protect. The situation was inconceivable and terrible, but if there were something to be done, neither George nor, he guessed, anyone else knew what that might be.

A few of his colleagues had endeavored conversation with their captors, but they'd been ignored or, in one more insistent pursuit, kicked in the groin. They'd fallen silent and impotent, spent hours in the dimness of the creative-space-turned-prison, shivering and ashamed, uncertain and exposed. There'd been a few difficult moments, as well. They'd learned quite personal details about one another they'd never wanted to know. That Marty Short, for example, the dull and graying current events teacher, suffered from explosive IBS when unable to frequently access a toilet (regular bathroom and water trips were quickly thereafter established). And that Brad England, a youthful fresh-out-of-school math teacher, was a trans male who'd have preferred to keep that to himself. And that Arnold Gomez, the absolutely pretentious ceramics and sculpture teacher, had some overt and painful-looking sores across the crotch which he tried to cover and which nobody really quite wanted to know about.

George, at least, had no such secrets. His form was nothing more than unexceptional, and while he'd been flustered when asked to strip in front of students, he'd ultimately found his zen place and managed to maintain calm. Perhaps it was his analytical mind that allowed him to process their situation. Or it might've been that he'd read enough over his many years to understand the utter inanity of the world. There were no promises in life, no guarantee that one's path would make sense, that one might never bump up against the absurd or the violent.