Alexander Westphal: "Ratty Paul"
A fictional tale based on real-world experiences, as told by Dr. Alexander Westphal, an Albert J. Solnit Child and Adult Psychiatry Fellow at Yale Child Study Center.
He was funny to have in class since he didn't care
what the teacher did to him, and since he was much
smarter than any teacher anyway.
Ratty Paul wore a raggedy purple sweatshirt. Deep purple, but with a neon streak about the arms—neon streak for a stalwart geek. Which is what Ratty Paul was. A stalwart geek. The kind of guy who got mauled in exitless alleys while carrying books like ‘Young Opthamologist.’ But Ratty Paul wore no glasses, not for books, not for alleys. That made no difference though, because his eyes were so distortedly pleading that he looked as googly as he would through a pair of fishbowl glasses. As googly as a panicked racehorse. As googly as a landlocked dolphin.
And Ratty Paul thought he was an animal. See someone dressed in the kind of tee-shirt you might find in the gift shop of a zoo? Might be Ratty Paul. He always wore clothes with animals on them. And he talked like a rat being squeezed. And smelled like hay and feta stew. He only ate Swiss cheese, and only at noon and teatime. And he sniffed and licked himself.
He was funny to have in class since he didn’t care what the teacher did to him, and since he was much smarter than any teacher anyway. He could tell you the index of refraction of orange fanta, of oxtail soup, of any liquid really, and could tell you about the differences between presbyopia and hypermytropia for ever. Sometimes he borrowed people’s glasses, and held them up to the sun to determine the focal length of the lens. When he did this without asking, the teachers usually gave him a pink slip and told him to sit outside, which they also did when he told them they were wrong about something and proved it. When he got a pink slip he’d just lick his arm and growl, and do this strange dance where he fluttered his hands, and then made a wave travel up the left side of his body.
One time I remember Ratty Paul bit our art teacher, Mr. Bark. Ratty Paul had fallen asleep at his desk, and was snuffling and yowling in his sleep, so Mr. Bark got annoyed. Mr. Bark, who had played rugby for New Zealand, ran from his easel and leapt onto the front of Ratty Paul’s desk to wake him. Ratty Paul was very frightened at being so abruptly woken, and without a moment’s hesitation seized the hairy ankle of Mr. Bark, and bit it. The two American sisters, Sherijelo and Oranjelo, who sat next to Ratty Paul, got hurt when Mr. Bark fell on them. Ratty Paul got in real trouble.
Ratty Paul was never sent down from the school because his father had bought the school a gym hall. His father used to come in a long Mercedes with a television and a driver, and pat the principal on the back, pat Ratty Paul on the back, and give every boy who was standing around a one pound note. We all spent the pound notes at the sweetshop on lemon bon-bons and cola fizz, except for Ratty Paul, who put it in the little white bucket that the “Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” had left there.
On Saturdays he would get permission to take the bus, and disappear for the day. I think he always went to the Brighton Zoo. I saw him there once because one of the boys in my class had a birthday party at the zoo. We were all looking at the monkeys when, on the other side of the enclosure, we saw Ratty Paul walk by. We all followed him, past the pictures of great auks, leafnosed bats, ula-ai-hawanes, and hairlip suckers, up to the tall cages of the Artic Peregrines, the Laysan ducks and the condors. There he stood on tiptoes and wobbled his arms, shook his head, and called: ‘Haoooork.’ Then he did that funny dance where he flutters his hands and makes a wave travel up the left side of his body. Afterwards he went to a bush, took his red pen-knife out, cut a branch with many leaves on it, and went back to the cage of the Laysan ducks. There he pushed the branch through the bars into the cage that only had concrete floors and a dead tree before he came. The green leaves looked out of place on the grey concrete.
Ratty Paul left our school after class 8, but I had moved to New York, so it didn’t matter to me. In New York, I went to the house of Sherijelo and Oranjelo, who told me that Ratty Paul had been put away because he had bit one of his father’s colleagues. Sherijelo and Oranjelo’s father, who was from Australia, said that he had been put in the rathouse which is where he belonged. Then he laughed for a while.
As I walked back from their house, the leaves were falling from the trees, coiling and swirling in the wind, rattling on the pavement. I took a cluster of them from the ground, and sat on the sidewalk by a grate, sliding them through the bars to the sewers below. I felt sick, maybe from the Malaysian duck laksa served at Sherijelo and Oranjelo’s house, or maybe because I knew that the rathouse was not where Ratty Paul should be.
Dr. Alexander Westphal is an Albert J. Solnit Child and Adult Psychiatry Fellow at Yale Child Study Center, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Yale’s Department of Investigative Medicine. This story, though it is a work of fiction, is based on events from his life.