‘Living in Jeopardy’:
A Moth Story by Cameron Luke Peters

Who directed the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day? What is the capital of Paraguay? Who is cited as coining the phrase ‘The greatest happiness for the greatest number’? And, lastly, for bonus points, what really is the purpose of non-personal memories? There was a good while in the course of my formal education, please believe me, when these were the kinds of questions, and the uncovering of the answers to which, I found just indispensable to my continued peace of mind. I was a nerd of the world. I still am one, but these days I do have – a few – friends.

Everyone obsesses over something, or, at the very least, someone. The difference with me, I’ve recognized, is that I’ve always been intellectually adulterous. I don’t become bored with topics; I merely and only abandon them. The next subject is inevitably always sexier, always closer to the bottom of life. And so I spent most of my adolescence aspiring to be what you could call a teleological person. I implicitly thought there was such a state of being as absolute knowledge. In this regard, the metaphor I like most is this: if you’ve seen Independence Day, there’s a late scene in which the post-Invasion American President gets telepathically imprinted with a vision of the alien foe’s colonial modus operandi. In gritted horror he tells his aids, “I’ve seen their plans… They just go from one world to the next. Consuming every natural resource until there’s nothing left, and then they move on. The motherfuckers…” Well, that’s how I remember it. And my point is that I’ve always engaged in my way in pretty much the same process, starting from Lego, Geography and Harry Potter then meandering among the sovereign states of Science, History, Sport, Literature, and Music to eventually somewhat settle in Cinema, for now. As you could expect, such early canonical exposure left me an unreserved recluse. I had a pathological fear of annoying people. So, I thought, if I didn’t talk at all, no-one could object to me. And when I did speak, the only appropriate topic was whichever one I was presently addicted to. Thus I was happily, understandably left alone. I assembled my perches in most of Durban’s bookstores and libraries. My parents diagnosed me with Asperger’s Syndrome. My body stood underdeveloped and sad. I didn’t kiss anyone until the night before I turned 18. All the while though I knew I’d reverse the whole deal some distant day, and I did. And for the sake of a fun, symbolic story, I’m putting this down to an hour or so in Grade Eight, when I discovered my life could bear the capability of building up to something.

I don’t know about you but I found my first salad days to be rather tasteless and nigh on indigestible, at least when it came to the actual routine of new reality. I was at an all-boys private day school, which was only different from a boarding establishment in that I was never initiated, only got homesick twice a week and didn’t have the surplus time to find anything whatsoever in common with my generation. As I say, I didn’t care. I recently found a leather-bound journal I kept for two months of that year. It was entirely comprised of cricket results and film reviews. When I wasn’t called ‘Google’ or ‘Oxford’ (nicknames I never entirely discouraged), I was referred to as ‘Dino’ for my height and bad posture, and occasional pens were momentarily lodged in my butt-crack, and one or two people discovered I had gay parents and felt they had to tell me this was out of sorts. What were they to do; they were often as bored as I was. Our teachers were relatively disinterested in us, but we were usually fascinated by them. Or at least I was, and not just because they sometimes distributed a syllabus whose content required more than programmatic memorization. They entirely failed at holding us in contempt, as I had expected they would on the model of primary school. Rather, when they did blatantly consider us, from the remove of their cluttered corner-desks, they seemed affectionately perturbed with who we unselfconsciously were, how we all to a kid just didn’t know both how much and how little we were capable of thinking about the outside world. I was watching them right back of course, but it’s not like I yet had the means of empathizing with their ambivalence about the future. Anyway, I trust you can recognize these parties from your own experience. They’re important to me still because they constituted the first audience of my own choosing, on the day of the House Quiz.

This was later on in the year, arriving after many months of the aforementioned default alienation. I should just say as a side-note that Durban has no memorable seasons to speak of. The whole year there is one alternatingly high and receding wet summer, so if there was something different about the day in question I would’ve consciously remembered it as if noting down the opening paragraph of a potential novel. Suffice it to say I measured out my puberty in the occasional thunderstorms. Just like all schools have morale-retaining House Sports exhibitions, mine had only just brought in a ‘Cultural Day’ as a way of refining the place’s general happy pretension. I was not uninformed about its scheduling nor its participatory requirements, but I had to have missed the memo about the freely applicatory constituency of the general knowledge quiz teams. You can probably guess what the one culturally affiliated demonstrable skill I was a priori, and just unabashedly, confident about possessing was at the time… The quiz being the last event of the day, I had unknowingly spent the morning playing patient witness to a set of duologue duels and band battles aboard the same stage on which I would somehow soon be taking questions. These preceding events were master-classes, the emanations of titans. They weren’t really good, but there’s always a real distinction between value and impression. And these matrics – a whole posse of articulate Don Quixotes who I’d only viewed before as subtle, stolid commanders – could indeed make 13-year olds like me believe that their plucky versions of Monty Python’s ‘Kilimanjaro’ sketch and Led Zeppelin’s ‘When the Levee Breaks’ were schoolwide-celebrity-making renditions. So we clapped them off, and my house – of the only three in existence, the deep blue one – hadn’t garnered a garland yet. The last round then was not redemption time, but a potential shruggable consolation. Unlike the others, the quiz was purposefully egalitarian, and so each house had a team of five so that each grade could brandish their own representatives in every house. The thought went through my head just before the decisive moment of assembly: “I’ve really gotta be in on this. And why can’t I be?” Though I’ve repeated those sentences to myself only occasionally since, I probably never thought them at any point beforehand.

My house’s smallest team member was, miraculously, a popular toothpaste-smile kind of guy I’d actually once talked with face-to-face on a Drama project, and he was only participating because he was popular and had a toothpaste smile and was therefore not averse to the inspecting eye. This of course didn’t mean he was a trivial person, but it was partly why he didn’t particularly care for trivia. And so, when I asked him to, he swapped places with me in a gesture so offhand and rightfully nice that I didn’t really take cognizance of it until I began writing this. I was now seated on the chair at the furthest point stage-right, behind a bare steel table angled for team huddles and bearing a view facing obliquely to the other teams but straight at Mr. Boniaszczuk (or just Boni) – an ingenious History teacher whom I still love like a comrade. In later years we’d waste whole weeks with him lamenting everywhere’s politics and intently studying episodes of Blackadder Goes Forth. He’d even become good friends with my parents after I escaped to Cape Town. For the moment, he was only on the brink of becoming a known person to me.

He tested the mics, made the starting announcements, cleared his throat, then asked this question:
“In Greek Mythology, who solved the riddle of the sphinx?”
I should explain that in the absence of a marking team or much of an established protocol, this was a fastest-finger quiz all the way through, with five rounds of the usual topics and some musical interludes thrown in haphazardly, mostly to promote Mr. Boni’s own favourite acts.

I raised my hand. I knew I didn’t need to confer. The matric at my table passed our mic to me. I didn’t have to pass it back again.
“Oedipus, isn’t it?” I said in my doggish mumble.
“Correct,” Boni interpreted.

And, here it comes: some applause beyond the polite kind. I had noticed we still had an audience, but I assumed the whole damned school would react to me the way I’d reacted to their earlier champions: with appreciation, but devoutly without fanfare. Well, in the final tally I think I got about sixteen questions by myself, including the first three I mentioned when I started this story. And we won by ten points, concerning which, make no bones about it, I felt triumphant as never before. The sweetest part was that after that ecstatic first blood, the feeling in the theatre went right back to typically tepid interest, and seemingly just so it could gradually build up again to surpass itself as I kept accumulating answers. And when Boni expended his question sheet, he didn’t need to tally the scores. The crowd announced the winner for him, and it was me. I know that is an egotistical thing to say, but – again, please believe me – they were actually chanting my name. I didn’t know anyone knew my name but they were chanting “Peters! Peters! Peters!” because I too had done something impressive, and something that only I was presently capable of doing. There was nothing objectively important in the affair; I had just managed to surf the situation without slipping and knocking myself out on my metaphorical board, and this was revolutionary. I sat there looking like I had just taken opium.

For about a week afterwards I was given an average of fifteen distinct compliments a day from unknown people of every quarter, including even, if you’ll believe it, a few of those matric Don Quixotes. When I confessed proceedings to my mother I presented this story as if I had taken part in something shameful. I had always been a quiet person, and this had brought me academic achievement (really the only kind I knew), so I don’t think I knew how to contextualize high-decibel events as anything but moments of persecution. But you’ll be unsurprised to learn I developed a taste for this kind of relative cacophony. With a kindly trio of debaters I was corralled into a ‘Dream Team’ (as Mr. McCabe, the other madcap History teacher, deemed it), that over the years won about R25000 in books for our rural foster school from a few big- sponsor interschool quiz nights. I’m still good friends with all three of my teammates. And the girl who kissed me the night before my 18th birthday first noticed me at one such night. We’re actually, apologies for the cheese, still going out now, and she loves ‘useless’ knowledge at least as much as I do. Stated in such ways I can perhaps sound boastful, but what I’m trying to convey is just how spontaneous this course of events was, how inadvertent its stamp on my self-consideration. I can’t justify my loneliness; the fact that I’ve spent more hours in communion with words than with people. But such a predisposition as it is left me breathless in the middle of an utterly easeful moment amongst a company I’d always previously felt myself unconnected to. If I speak ill of most of what I’ve known it’s because I have to. I can’t think of my environment today as anything but more amenable to my being than every other stomping-ground I’ve haphazardly graced. However much I might describe it in such and similar terms, my secondary education was not a period of ignominy, but I do remember it that way. For all that I’m permanently retroactively paranoid, quizzes, in their own peculiar arbitrariness, have lodged with me because their results are for the most part so unambiguous, both in the moment and in recollection. It’s nice to discover you’re right about something. Hopefully I never let it all get to my head again as the fear of company once did. And oh yes, if you wanted to know the answers to my opening questions, they are, respectively, 1. Ivan Reitman 2. Ascuncion 3. Jeremy Bentham and 4. I still don’t have a clue, but I’m sure I’ll make up a good answer someday.

(October 1, 2015)