Mondays with Snakes
I. Monday
Mantling a hero’s smirk, Thomas Vidnley—or Tomaveed as he preferred to be called— entered class pinching the scaled head of a snake between his knobby thumb and forefinger. From its fanned hood and bull’s-eye markings, I took the serpent to be a cobra of some kind. Its lithe body glistened with a mosaic of scales and was wrapped, almost decoratively, around Tomaveed’s bulging forearm.
In a different climate, someone might have pinned him with a gold star or given him an elevating boost onto his peer's shoulders for the confident handling of such a deadly animal. But this was a college classroom. A place of learning. A sanctuary for working through tough questions and confrontations. This was the sort of space you typically chased snakes out of, not escorted them into.
“Tomaveed,” I said, halting my lecture. “I’m not sure you’re allowed to bring a snake to class. Maybe, please, leave it in your glove box or under your car seat or wherever. Just not here, ok?”
I’d be lying if I said a part of me didn’t warm at the thought of sending Tomaveed back into the clouds we could all hear gathering outside. Dark clouds that crumpled into one another. Clouds poised to rain. His attendance had lapsed of late, and when he was present he spoke with the arrogance of believing that conviction trumped reason. When challenged by his classmates, Tomaveed would roll his eyes and lean his chair on two legs. His was an entitlement not easily relinquished, and I found myself disliking him more and more with each passing day. Bringing a snake into my classroom was just another straw on the back of a wobbling camel.
“It’s all good, Prof,” Tomaveed said, his voice unhurried in any way. Holding the reptile’s glistening head to his chest, he tiptoed behind the first row of students toward his usual seat. Two at a time, the students’ eyes bulged as his leather boots squeaked the tile behind them.
“Nobody panic. I’ve got this baby under control,” he assured us.
“Even so,” I said, pushing my finger against my lip to keep it from curling. “I’m not sure I want it in my classroom.”
“Everything’s on the up-and-up,” Tomaveed said. When he reached his seat he flung his backpack to the floor with casual disdain. With his snake-free hand, he yanked a studded chain-wallet from his back pocket and spread it open on the desktop like a book. After some struggle, he removed a folded piece of paper from the leather gills and offered it for inspection. I snatched it up, keeping my eyes locked on the cobra at all times. The animal’s tongue darted in and out like a dollar bill in a vending machine.
Scanning the handler’s permit, I looked for an issuing seal. And an expiration date. The license was good for five years. I nearly laughed at the thought of Tomaveed—a digi-drone who’d never heard of Billy the Kid before enrolling in my History of New Mexico course—being deemed fit to care for a deadly animal for a week, let alone five years. I was curious who had decided to validate the licenses for such a long time, and what the renewal process for a deadly snake might look like? Did Tomaveed simply re-register his snake online and wait for his new license to arrive in the mail? Were there snake inspections to make sure everything was running accordingly, that no scale was out of place? Or maybe the slithering rope’s servitude to the licensee dissolved a la sparkling disenchantment, freeing the creature to steal away in the cover of night and return to its native refuge of crags and logs?
I handed Tomaveed the permit and asked the class “Where was I?” as I walked to the podium. No one responded. Each and every head in class was trained on Tomaveed as he struggled to fold the permit with his one available hand. Eventually bowing to frustration, he used the snake’s head to tack down a corner of the permit so he could crease the document before cramming it back into his wallet. Then he pulled out his chair and sat down, looking more satisfied with himself than ever before.
The silence filling the room was finally broken by a comedic whistle, and then a shhh from Jenatta, who, a few rows behind Tomaveed, ordered the parrot on her shoulder to pipe down. The bird, which had warily corkscrewed its head during the arrival of the viper, let out another whistle and clicked its tongue forebodingly. “Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh,” the bird continued to squeal as it bobbed on its perch, puffed its feathers in voluminous frustration, and alerted us to the presence of its own crude relative.
II. Monday, The Following Week
“John Sebat?” I called out to the rain-soaked, shaggy-haired teen who’d snuck in while I was writing the words “Pueblo Revolt of 1680” on the markerboard. Normally I’m not inclined to point out a student’s tardiness. But when John Sebat entered class he brought with him the distracting rattle of maracas, which—based on number of raised eyebrows and rubbernecks—had not gone unnoticed. Sitting in the back row, J.B. was not one to call attention to himself or volunteer his thoughts on a given topic, though the essays he’d written convinced me that I shouldn’t mistake his lack of exuberance for a lack of interest.
“Yes, sir?” John Sebat chimed, keeping his eyes in his lap.
“Would you mind telling us where that noise is coming from?” I asked.
“I don’t know, sir,” he said, tucking a strand of wet hair behind his ear.
“That’s not true,” Claradin said. She’d slid down the row, putting an empty seat between her and John Sebat. “I think he’s got a snake.” Her eyes darted to the bag under John Sebat’s chair. I watched as his legs crossed protectively in front of hissing bundle.
To my left, I noticed Tomaveed—snake in hand—start to rise. I shot him a glance and mouthed “no,” motioning for him to stop. He sat down slowly, shrugging as though wrongfully accused. The look in his eye was that of someone who’d shown up to a burning building with a bucket of water only to be told to go home.
I turned to John Sebat.
“J.S., do you have a snake in your bag?”
“I don’t have to answer that,” he said. He tucked another strand of hair behind his ear and started tapping his foot.
“Fair enough,” I said, taking a measured step toward the door. “Why don’t we step outside for a minute? Just you and me. Then we’ll come back and finish the lecture. Sound ok?”
John Sebat looked around the room. Most of the students were openly staring at him, their eyes begging him go. The remaining eyes were pegged on me, begging me not to leave them alone with Tomaveed and his cobra.
Rising, John Sebat clutched his pack and exited the door I held open. In the hall, he leaned himself up against the wall, waiting for the tongue-lashing he thought he was about to receive. But I had no intention of shaming him for the snake in his bag; I simply wanted to know why he had one. Tomaveed—with his fake tan and barbed-wire tattoos—I could understand. But John Sebat? Meek, gangly John Sebat? The same John Sebat who wrote essays about colonial brutality while Tomaveed, whose muscles seemed to engorge at the mere mention of conflict, littered his essays with words like “civilized,” “forceful intervention” and “corrected savagery”? How could these two people, these polar opposites, have anything in common?
“I have a license,” John Sebat said once I’d closed the door, guaranteeing us a certain degree of privacy. The snake inside his bag chattered and thrashed as he removed the license from a small pocket. The tinkling of the bag’s zippers reminded me of small charms in the breeze. “I applied for this particular permit so I could keep it hidden.”
The paper trembled out of his hand and into mine.
“But why hide it?” I asked, checking the expiration date. Like Tomaveed’s, the license expired after five years.
John Sebat glanced at his feet. “I don’t want anyone to know I have it.”
“Because…?”
He started to speak but the words stuck in his throat. He flinched at himself and I saw his right hand ball into a fist.
“It’s ok, J.S.” I said in my most reassuring tone. “You’re not in trouble or anything. We’re just talking. That’s it. Just talking. Alright?”
He nodded, keeping his eyes lower than mine.
“Ok?”
“Ok,” he said.
“So tell me, person to person, why bring it to class if you don’t want anyone to know you have it."
He swallowed a large breath, held if for a few seconds, and then let it out With his next breath he explained: “Because I don’t want to be one of those snake handlers, you know?” He jerked his wet mop of hair toward the classroom. “The guy that’s always gotta’ be waving it around, shoving it in everybody’s face. I can’t stand those people. People like him.”
It was my turn to nod.
“The machismo warriors, you know?” he added. For the first time, I saw something in John Sebat’s eye that I’d never seen before. A glint of red flashing in his iris. “I don’t trust them.”
“I get it,” I said. “I do.”
John Sebat outed a heavy sigh and let his shoulders relax. “The only reason I even have this thing is because of people like him,” he admitted, though a dip in the tenor of his voice made him sound unsure.
I nodded and returned the permit, which had identified his snake as a three-and-a-half foot long Arizona Diamondback. I wondered, though, if he wanted to be discrete, why carry such an audible animal? Feeling that the time for asking questions was over, I put my hand on John Sebat’s shoulder and said that I understood his frustrations. That his fears were normal. That many of us were just as confused and unsure about where the world was heading and where we were likely to end. “These are crazy times,” I said. “Which is why it’s even more important for us to keep our heads on our shoulders, you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Especially people like you,” I said. “People who aren’t afraid to think.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said, though he didn’t sound as though he’d truly taken the compliment.
*
After class, Tomaveed hung back and asked if there was any way I might offer extra credit to make up for some of his absences. I told him I didn’t believe in extra credit and that there was really no way to erase an absence. Both Tomaveed and his snake looked at me with pointed, bottomless eyes. Then, donning a reassuringly large smile, Tomaveed said, “That’s cool!” and picked up an eraser to help clear the markerboard. When he started whistling an old marching song, I wished he, his snake, and his spiky hair, would hurry up and leave.
III. Monday, Six Years Later
As it turned out, the expiration dates were real. When five years passed and the first round of handler’s permits began to expire, the newly liberated snakes crawled out of the gloveboxes and out from under pillows, out of drawers and right out of the quivers people had started wearing as holsters. They slipped and slithered and congregated in the lowlands of the city’s parks, knotting themselves into ropey masses. Vinous clouds of green lightning roved golf-course hillsides looking for people to chase, strangle, and pincushion into eternal slumber. The larger snake-hordes swallowed cats and dogs whole. When within a few yards, the snakes could be heard emitting a loud jumble of static hisses and lisps that cemented themselves in your dreams like bombastic white noise. They moved with flexed malevolence and at speeds that were frightening to see even from afar. I gave up running the wooded trails near my apartment because I could hear them scouring the ravines like mutated packs of steel wool, searching for something, anything, to scrub out.
I wear an inflatable suit now whenever leaving the house. Well, it’s more a protective bubble than a suit, but what’s important is that it puts a barrier between the snakes and me while still allowing for partial mobility of the arms and legs. With a nano-carbon layer meshed between two sheets of Kevlar, the bubble is impervious to snake bites, attempted stabbings, or any other threatening puncture. Maybe it’s a little over the top. Maybe I’m prone to paranoia. All I know is that without the bubble, I’m too anxious to go outside anymore. Without it, I feel naked and exposed.
They say eventually all the expired snakes will perish, but what’s to stop them from reproducing, creating a second generation of worming warriors? And once that colony is established, what’s to stop these newer snakes from making even more baby snakes that grow up into wriggling whips? Nothing. Nothing’s stopping nothing anymore. That’s why I own the suit.
I wouldn’t say my teaching has suffered because I deliver my lectures from inside a bubble now, but my penmanship certainly has. Standing at the front of the classroom, I’m constantly fumbling to maneuver the marker with any semblance of skill. Without a tactile response, it’s difficult to tell when the tip of the marker has made contact with the whiteboard. Each day as I’m wiping down my notes, I stare at the shaky words I’ve scrawled with my back to the class. If you were to walk in on one of my lectures and see only the trembling scratch of my unsteady hand, you’d swear it was the students I was afraid of.