THREE
My Holocaust class teacher, Herr Silverman, never rolls up his sleeves like the other male teachers at my high school, who all arrive each morning with their freshly ironed shirts rolled to the elbow. Nor does Herr Silverman ever wear the faculty polo shirt on Fridays. Even in the warmer months he keeps his arms covered, and I’ve been wondering why for a long time now.
I think about it constantly.
It’s maybe the greatest mystery of my life.
Perhaps he has really hairy arms, I’ve often thought. Or prison tattoos. Or a birthmark. Or he was obscenely burned in a fire. Or maybe someone spilled acid on him during a high school science experiment. Or he was once a heroin addict and his wrists are therefore scarred with a gazillion needle-track marks. Maybe he has a blood-circulation disorder that keeps him perpetually cold.
But I suspect the truth is more serious than that—like maybe he tried to kill himself once and there are razor-blade scars.
Maybe.
It’s hard for me to believe that Herr Silverman once attempted suicide, because he’s so together now; he’s really the most admirable adult I know.
Sometimes I actually hope that he did once feel empty and hopeless and helpless enough to slash his wrists to the bone, because if he felt that horrible and survived to be such a fantastic grown-up, then maybe there’s hope for me.4
Whenever I have some free time I wonder about what Herr Silverman might be hiding, and I try to unlock his mystery in my mind, creating all sorts of suicide-inducing scenarios, inventing his past.
Some days I have his parents beat him with clothes hangers and starve him.
Other days his classmates throw him to the ground and kick him until he’s wet with blood, at which point they take turns pissing on his head.
Sometimes he suffers from unrequited love and cries every single night alone in his closet clutching a pillow to his chest.
Other times he’s abducted by a sadistic psychopath who waterboards him nightly—Guantánamo Bay–style—and deprives him of drinking water during the day while he is forced to sit in a Clockwork Orange–type room full of strobe lights, Beethoven symphonies, and horrific images projected on a huge screen.
I don’t think anyone else has noticed Herr Silverman’s constantly clothed forearms, or if they have, no one has said anything about it in class. I haven’t overheard anything in the hallways.
I wonder if I’m really the only one who’s noticed, and if so, what does that say about me?
Does that make me weird?
(Or weirder than I already am?)
Or just observant?
So many times I’ve thought about asking Herr Silverman why he never rolls up his sleeves, but I don’t for some reason.5
Some days he encourages me to write; other days he says I’m “gifted” and then smiles like he’s being truthful, and I’ll come close to asking him the question about his never-exposed forearms, but I never do, and that seems odd—utterly ridiculous, considering how badly I want to ask and how much the answer could save me.
As if his response will be sacred or life-altering or something and I’m saving it for later—like an emotional antibiotic, or a depression lifeboat.
Sometimes I really believe that.
But why?
Maybe my brain’s just fucked.
Or maybe I’m terrified that I might be wrong about him and I’m just making things up in my head—that there’s nothing under those shirtsleeves at all, and he just likes the look of covered forearms.
It’s a fashion statement.
He’s more like Linda6 than I am.
End of story.
I worry Herr Silverman will laugh at me when I ask about his covered forearms.
He’ll make me feel stupid for wondering—hoping—all this time.
That he’ll call me a freak.
That he’ll think I’m a pervert for thinking about it so much.
That he’ll pull an ugly, disgusted face that’ll make me feel like he and I could never ever be similar at all, and I’m therefore delusional.
That would kill me, I think.
Do my spirit in for good.
It really would.
And so I’ve come to worry that my not asking is simply the product of my boundless cowardice.
As I sit there alone at the breakfast table wondering if Linda will remember today’s significance, knowing deep down that she’s simply not going to call—I decide to instead wonder if the Nazi officer who carried my P-38 in WWII ever dreamed his sidearm would end up as modern art, across the Atlantic Ocean, in New Jersey, seventy-some years later, loaded and ready to kill the closest modern-day equivalent of a Nazi that we have at my high school.
The German who originally owned the P-38—what was his name?
Was he one of the nice Germans Herr Silverman tells us about? The ones who didn’t hate Jews or gays or blacks or anyone really but just had the misfortune of being born in Germany during a really fucked time.
Was he anything like me?