Mr. Fish-Eyes
A Retelling of
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
We called him Mr. Fish-Eyes because his eyes were always glazed over, as if he were seeing Something. Something that no one else could see. The principal called him Mr. Hud, because she was obliged to, but once I heard her saying to Mr. K in passing, "ThatMan is coming." She said ThatMan in capitals and italics – and one could hear the disgust with which she infusedthe phrase. The teachers, similarly plagued by a sense of duty, said, "Mr. H" before him, and before us, but among themselves he was, "Mr. Pest-Control."
And it wasn't mere pests which he dealt with. It was computerbugs – the mystical viruses by which, in a single epidemic, 500 computers could be dispatched – the pests which could frustrate even the might of a network, fortified by the expertise of Mr. Q, Mr. U, and Ms. S, joint heads of the –Tronics Department . It cost each of them a hundred brain cells to wrestle, much less triumph, over a single pestilence. Even Mr. Q, head of the –Tronics Department, had once decreed in the School Newsletter that - "the ever-increasing intelligence of the great bugs of this Age has baffled every member of the –Tronics team, and despite desperate measures undertaken on our part to extinguish, once and forevermore, these pests – no, thesemonsters,we continue to experience monthly pestilences, monthly torment, during which the diligent –Tronics team, including Mr. U, Ms. S, and myself, are compelled to suffer for a protracted period of time, namely a period of two weeks, in which the children of our school are prevented from exhausting the Great Scope of resources which the computer, and the computer only, makes available to them, the children of Rhombus Hills."
Mr. Q. had never learned the meaning of concise.
The computer bugs seemed to have savage two-week fits per month; and in those two weeks we suffered. The teachers who had once granted us computer sessions in the hope that we would "exhaust" the Great Scope gave us book-work instead; and we, who exhaust our "Great Scope" in ways never anticipated by the –Tronics team, missed what we had lost. And because the two-week periods were never predictable, precious Microsoft Word Documents disappeared in the thousands. Then the –Tronics team issued yet another statement in the newsletter about the importance of the USB in "successfully easing this crisis in which we, as a resilient community, must stand, and triumph." Students must come to school armed with a USB. Or students must have hardcopies of their work always at hand. It was almost like the "Sun-Smart" policies which they have at other schools. "If not in possession of a hat, student will be given an automatic detention." Except, in this case, it was a USB.
The result – school paper supplies diminished at a rate of a thousand sheets a day, and the Detention Room was always full – even, overflowing. Of course, the morale of the school suffered, too. The year-level coordinators murmured about the number of hours they had to spend in a Detention Room – next door to the ladies' toilets, in which the stench had really got out of hand. The school was spending so much money on the –Tronics team efforts that they had little left forother things. We breathed rebellion – against I.T. teachers who had resorted to reading from ten-centimeter thick textbooks about "How to Combat the Bug", or "How to Effectively Extinguish the Pest," or "How to Deal with the Pestilences of the 21st Century: Technically Speaking" – against history and English and geography teachers who booked all our classes in the library where we kept company with yellow-eared tomes that must have been retrieved from the grave…
And then, Rhombus Hills, for the first time in a year, saw thelight!
In the form of Mr. Fish-Eyes.
No one, not even the resourceful –Tronics team, anticipated him, of all things. ThatMan, Mr.Fish-Eyes,Mr.Pest-Control, in the General Office. We had seen many modest, colourless, specimens of I.T. personnel, in black suits and spectacles, in our time; men who had come - and gone, in despair – until the Powers that Be learned that the Pestilence at Rhombus Hills was incurable, and the I.T. personnel ceased to come. I think that is why the –Tronics Team decided that Mr. Fish-Eyes woulddo. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Instead of the I.T. personnel, a quite striking character. "Really – really quite remarkable, don't you think, Ms. G?" quoth Mr. Q in our hearing, to our History teacher. His eloquence, like everything else at Rhombus Hills, diminished.
Mr. Fish-Eyes, tall and rainbow-clad, bearing not a briefcase, not credentials, not some modest attempt at a Cure, but – but a beret. A little, rainbow-coloured beret, like everything else which he wore. He himself was a hodgepodge of something. The rainbow was not some neat arrangement of colour, but an explosion of it - splattered and splodged rainbows, over his length, and width, and breadth. The hodgepodge was not merely in the colour, but in the style of dress – some parts of his rainbow-coloured coat, worn threadbare; some parts in tatters; in some parts, gone sadly to rags, such as the shoes on his feet, which were bound together by masking tape alone. And his face was a striking one. Very dark, and vividly coloured, with eyes fish-like in their large, round,moist appearance. It was a strangeface. I think it was a nice face, if one forgot the really absurd coat and shoes and fish-eyes – and yet there was something ugly in its hard lines. He was old – we could see it, in the way in which he looked at us, with his strange, wise,eighty-ish, eyes - and yet, yet he was young, because an eighty-year-old does not walk, rainbow-coloured into the General Office, with aberet instead of a briefcase, and a speech where his predecessors had resumes handy.
"I can fix it," he said to Ms. D, who for once had no answer. We quoted him for a week afterward.
A rainbow-coloured version of Bob the Builder? Maybe.
Ms. T. was drawing hertenth map of Australia when we first saw him. We were in a computer room, of all places; and of all times, the school's provision of markers had decided to diminish. And yes, the library was booked out.
Ms. T. grunted loudly, aimed her eleventh marker at the bin - and missed. We returned to texting under the table – to cast longing looks at the computers, which were, of course, in a comatose state – to murmur among ourselves about the famous Fish-Eyes, whom none of us had seen, but all of us heard –
"Don't talk," said a voice from the door. "I'm listening for the bugs."
It was the kind of voice you don't forget. Abeautiful voice. The kind of voice Martin Luther King must have had, except greater – I think, greater with passion.It was a voice many-coloured like himself; a voice which made you look up – andlisten.
We looked – and listened with one accord, and we saw him. We saw a lean, rainbow-clad Mr. Hud, fish-eyes unblinking as he moved into the room; moved, like a dancer, like he was winging through air, light-toed, silent – listening. His body, tensed, trembling beneath the rainbow-coat; listening for Something which wecould never hear – his weird, glazed eyes, looking for Something.
Mr. Fish-Eyes if you choose to call him so, stopped. Ceased to quiver, to pace, to move at all. And we, too, were still. It was like he had cast a spell on us; like he had charmed us into silence.
Because even Ms. T. – ceaseless Ms. T - ceased to move, and ceased to speak!
His eyes changed then. Changed so that the glaze passed from them; and we could see that they were haunted. Haunted, troubled with searching.
He opened his mouth, his eyes clear, no longer fish-like, and began to hum. A dim, dull kind of sound which grew, swelled into a Song without words –soared into Something. The kind of Something which I can't describe because everything pales beside It. Something for which you couldn't find a word in the English dictionary, or in Ms. G's vocabulary, for that matter, which could describe it to the letter. Something like promise. The promise of a million wonderful, absurd things. He was promising us an eternity of summer holidays. An eternity of free computer-time. An eternity of living without geography classes –without Ms. T's ceaseless voice. Without the itty, nitty, grittythings of life. It was as if he found all those things, in that moment. Found Promise. Found that Something, for which he had always been searching. As if he was seeing them with eyes suddenly clear – seeing that great Land where life was as he had promised us. Wonderful, and absurd.
We would have gone with him if we could. Gone with Mr. Fish-Eyes to the proverbial 'ends of the earth' to seek that Something - on pain of death.
Mr. Fish-Eyes' voice could do that to you.
But the song ended, of course. Like everything else.
It ended – dived into silence – dived into hushed air; and then it was no longer hushed, but loud with the sound of a rising; a rising of a great swarm of bugs. An uneasy kind of sound, like the legendary nest of disturbed or, worse still, displaced wasps; like the evacuation of a thousand lip-licking flies from a true-blue Aussie BBQ.
The computers were rising from paralysis. Each and every one of them. And the sound within them, the sound of bugs panicking in flight, rose into the hush. We were all expecting a Ms. T tirade, a lusty belting out of, "Enough!", but she, too, was in a trance. It was a strange transformation – screens blue in a uniform coma, shivered once; shivered as if in waking, as if in realization. And then life. Word by word, pixel by pixel the "log-in" page blinked itself awake, while the sound moved – no, oozed from a hum, to a murmur, to silence.
Mr. Fish-Eyes had sung the bugs to death – and the computers to life.
"They're dead," he said slowly. His voice was dull, dazed, as if he had done something which he could not understand, and his eyes were once more glazed, fish-like.
Ms. T.'s mouth moved, worked in the motions of speech. But no sound came out of it.
So Ms. T. stood, very deliberately, and with her fingers, demolished Australia. We laughed at the destruction of a Great Bight which had worked its way several thousand kilometres inland since it was last charted. Nervous, shaken laughter, but laughter all the same. I don't know how we dared to, in view of Ms. T.'s methods. But today she took no notice of us – she did not flare, storm, or speak, as she liked to do, often, and at length. She only pressed her lips together and suffered. In blissful silence.
And then, in the bare space where Australia had been, she wrote with her last whiteboard marker, "Computer time for therest of the period." The closest, of course, that any teacher from Rhombus Hills had, or will ever, come to an admission of defeat.
And Mr. Fish-Eyes? The one who had worked the magic?
He was gone, like he had come. And somehow that Something went with him. That Something which had shut our lips - and Ms. T.'s. For which we will always be grateful.