Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) (10 page)

Feeling content, then jaunty, then philosophical—my tiny success would change nothing, I suspected; I’d still have to circumambulate the rug; I’d still have to live in my hole, surrounded, cowed—I went with Adam, Nina, and the cast to the Annex bar on Nassau Street, a watering hole for freethinkers on the prowl. Toasts were drunk, bubbles of flattery were blown, and I was pressed by the group to play the big shot, which was hard for me at first, but with a bit more alcohol and nicotine, alarmingly easy and instinctive. My speech sped up ferociously, my energized legs kicked away beneath the table, I rocked in my chair, I roared, I railed, I ripped. My paroxysm of pent-up ego drew people nearer—to feel the heat, perhaps—but eventually they withdrew to other groups, migrated to other scenes, and I found myself alone beside a stranger who looked like he’d slept in a field the night before but wore the vest-pocket pen of a professor. He’d plunked himself down at our table, uninvited, about an hour ago, and unobtrusively, stubbornly abided even though no one had spoken a word to him.

He introduced himself as Julian and said that it would be his privilege to buy me a cocktail in honor of my play. He said my work sounded interesting, provocative, judging by the talk around the table. A creep had cornered me, I feared. Still, because my throat was dry from boasting and I’d begun to dread leaving the bar, which meant either returning to the suite or going home with Nina to dish out sexual punishment till dawn, I accepted Julian’s offer, clinked glasses with him, and asked him what he did.

The best conversation of my life ensued—one I could never have had in Minnesota and one that helped me forget my recent troubles by occupying me with cosmic issues of just the sort a place like Princeton should raise but so far hadn’t, at least when I’d been listening. Julian taught psychology, he said, despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he’d written as an amateur. It had grown out of his reading of ancient literature and concerned, he said, “the history of consciousness.” I asked him to explain but keep it simple. He told me that he’d try. The modern human brain, he said, was actually two brains functioning as one brain, but there had been a time, long, long ago, when man’s double brain had operated differently. Its parts, its halves, had been separate then, divided. In fact, they’d been virtual strangers to each other. When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice. This voice seemed to come from outside the self, said Julian; it seemed to come from another being, really. But who was this being? Who were these secret speakers? Man had answered these questions in many ways. He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies. Muses.

“Back when, before the Breakdown,” said Julian, “before the gods and voices fell silent, writers truly believed in inspiration. They experienced inspiration. It was real to them. Tell me: did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“Honestly, I feel that way a lot. Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly. And sometimes it shakes me up a little. Should it?”

Julian shook his head, but not as vigorously as I would have liked.

“What was the ‘Breakdown’?” I asked him. I had to know. I had to know everything he did, suddenly. Julian was a genius, I’d decided, even if everything he’d said was crazy. And it probably was. Because I understood it.

“Ready?” said Nina, materializing behind me. She set her hands on my shoulders, squeezed them, kneaded. “You must be exhausted from your big night. I know I am. Let’s hit the sheets.”

“I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”

Her fingers cooled and stiffened. “How much longer?”

“Awhile, maybe. I don’t know.”

Julian rose and slipped off to the men’s room while I turned to Nina and managed a feat of candor that I’d been putting off for weeks, ever since I’d realized how bored I’d grown with the chore of besieging her in bed. I’d persisted because it offered me a break from the entrapment of my gloomy bunk, and also because being cherished as a brute, being adored as a gruesome primitive, beat being shunned by my roommates as a bum. But I wasn’t a bum, I understood that night, and I didn’t have to play a rapist.

“A little applause, and he craps all over us,” was Nina’s reaction to my breakup speech. “To be expected. Pitiful.” At least she left the bar, though, trailing a mist of that acidic cat spray girls exude when they mean to fix you good.

Moments later Julian returned but he made no mention of the Breakdown. He was sweating and looked much drunker than before. He kept reaching a hand into his hair and scratching around as if hunting for a tick. Eventually he appeared to catch the thing, but when he unclasped his forefinger and thumb, gingerly, holding his hand out over the tablecloth so whatever it was would be visible if he dropped it, there was nothing to see.

“What changed in us?” I said, resolved to get him back on topic. “The half brains fused? They knit together? That’s the opposite of a breakdown, isn’t it? Are you saying that what we call insanity now, schizophrenia, was normal once?”

His face had gone as white and blank as the disk of frosting inside an Oreo. He drank back the rubble of ice and citrus peel remaining in his glass. He crunched and chewed. Finally he spoke, his last words of the night before he fetched his coat from under his chair and hung it, all crumpled and labels sticking up, on his drooping, slanted shoulders. “It gets too quiet when it gets late. I like it when it’s loud, when there’s commotion. That’s how it should be. That’s what we miss, I think. Our wonderful old noisy, friendly world.”

M
y roommates were all on the sofa when I came in, watching a black-and-white movie, family style. Tim sat in the middle in his pj’s holding a bowl of popcorn on his lap that everybody was digging in at once.

“Hey,” said Jennifer, hearing me and turning. This was a thaw. Not much of one, but noticeable. Maybe the play had won me some respect.

“Hey there,” I said. I slowed my steps. Tim looked back with bulging popcorn cheeks and awarded me a fleeting grin. Peter also cast a glance at me, then briefly lifted a finger of his left hand, which was hanging over the sofa back. My feet were angled toward the rug, but not acutely, not aggressively. Unless a more formal welcome was extended, I’d go no farther. It was up to them. An apology would be nice, too, though it needn’t come immediately, just soon.

They faced the screen again, taking in the film, their temple muscles flexing as they munched.

“Good night,” said Jennifer.

I mounted my bunk without undressing and glared at the ceiling, trying to blast a hole in it. In my play, the President was considering firing Polaris missiles so as to summon the Messiah. His aide, who’d been arguing for calm while dutifully pouring bourbon for the maniac, was standing behind the President’s chair, in a perfect position to strangle him, when he picked up the phone to issue the directive. Stiffly, like a zombie, the aide raised his arms to perform his awful duty, but just as he was about to grip and squeeze, a battery of spotlights slashed the gloom with blinding beams of pure white light, causing both characters to jerk their heads back and behold … What exactly? We weren’t shown. The lights were cut as abruptly as they’d been activated, all of the lights, and the theater went black. And perfectly silent. But was the action over? Not quite, it seemed. The void was too complete, too absolute. Somehow it would be ruptured.

But it wasn’t. That was the dastardly Artaud in me. That was the radical new provocateur who’d killed off the bright, obliging Midwesterner and now masqueraded in his clothes. Snub them. Scorn them. Give them nothing. Give them only confusion, like they give you.

When my roommates went home to New York a few days later to get a jump on the Christmas holiday, I was left alone in the suite for eighteen hours, awaiting a flight I’d booked to Minnesota. I restrained myself at first, listening to one of Joshua’s tapes of the late John Lennon. I’d become a snob by then, and the album I chose was obscure and difficult—the one that came out of his psychotherapy sessions, with all the grunting and shrieking about his parents. As darkness fell I grew agitated, though.

I found myself guzzling Moët & Chandon and standing in the middle of the rug, watching the network news on the TV. I was smoking a Camel. I let the ashes fall. Then I dropped the butt, still glowing, and ground it into the Persian rug with my heel. Ah, the odor of burning silk. I lit a fresh cigarette, drank off the champagne, uncorked another bottle from the mini-fridge, and walked around to the back of the TV, where I poured the wine through the ventilation slots in the plastic cabinet. As the liquid streamed over the hot internal circuitry, plumes of noxious vapor rose from the slots, through which I could see a sizzle of orange sparks and the occasional fat blue one. The blue ones popped like flashbulbs. They were gorgeous. On the screen, the picture shimmied, wobbled, then fractured into broad diagonal bands that thinned away and trembled down to nothing after another splash of wine.

After that I really got down to business. With a sturdy pair of scissors rummaged from Jennifer’s antique vanity, I systematically clipped the harp of wires under the raised lid of Peter’s Steinway The instant I freed them from their tension, they sprang and curled away—an electrifying pleasure. I pounded the keys to make sure I’d killed the instrument. They made no sound and they stayed down. As a reprise, I cut the spokes and brake cables on Tim’s ten-speed bike, which he’d left out in the hallway. I ravaged the tires, too, jabbing them with the open scissor blades. The tires’ loss of air unbalanced the bike and it crashed over on its side. I stood on top of it like a trophy carcass and looked around for something else to wreck.

Adam peeked through the door about that time, his pupils gigantically dilated and glossy and slightly off center in his irises. I waved him in and opened more champagne. He knew the whole story of the rug and said it was no wonder I’d gone berserk, but he told me I’d gone too far with the piano. He seemed to harbor some notion that musical instruments were sacred or potently symbolic, the way some people think of books and artworks. I told him to come off it and be a friend. This seemed to wound him. To patch things up between us, he filled his mouth with champagne and swished his cheeks around, then spat a torrent of foam onto the sofa. “I just had a fun idea,” I said. I pushed aside the curtains, opened the windows, and had Adam follow me outside to the snow-covered courtyard below the room. We packed our snowballs tight and threw them hard, attempting to clear the sills we couldn’t see past. When we went in and took stock of the results—an off-kilter picture, a toppled lamp, heaps of gray slush on chair cushions and tables—Adam was seized by a fit of moral panic. He righted the fallen, mangled bicycle, he straightened up the picture, he rushed around kicking snow from the soaked rug. “Shit,” he kept saying. “Oh shit oh god oh shit. This is so grotesquely fucked, Walt. Shit.” He laid a flat hand on the mangled Steinway’s lid and sorrowfully caressed the polished wood, then hung his head and collapsed onto the bench. He fingered some keys and they thudded dully, still dead.

“What’s that nerve-gas smell?” he said. I directed his gaze to the TV, a dot of silver photons still pulsing in the middle of the screen. Its pesky persistence irked me. I speared it with a broom handle but the tip was too blunt and rounded for the job and bounced off the thick glass. Then I spied the ideal lance, a wrought-iron curtain rod with a finial of blade-shaped metal leaves. I stepped well back from my target to get a run at it and then impaled the thing. I ran it through, crushing the screen and leaving a length of rod protruding from the splintered cabinet. Adam groaned and covered his face. I told him he was excused. He staggered off, slipping and skidding in the melted snow.

In the morning I flew home to enjoy the winter holidays.

G
ROWING UP, I’D RESPECTED AUTHORITY, FEARED PUNISHMENT
, and played (or played
at
playing) by the rules, but at Princeton these habits and instincts weakened. I simply had no idea who ran the place. It allowed me to imagine no one did. The top officials were ghosts to me: a president I’d seen in photos but had never spotted in the flesh, a provost I’d heard about but wouldn’t have recognized (what was a “provost,” anyway?), and a number of deans who existed for me as signatures on documents which I seldom bothered to read. Nor were the first few professors I encountered particularly imposing figures. The younger ones struck me as squirrelly and insecure, while many of the tenured eminences seemed morose, distracted, and—when encountered outside the classroom—drunk.

Yet Princeton was orderly, orderly in the extreme, and I knew that this order had to come from somewhere. The grass was uniformly green, clipped right up to the edges of the sidewalks. The library books were in fine condition, generally, lined up straight and gapless on the shelves exactly where the catalogue said they’d be. The traditional a cappella groups who practiced their bumblebee-close harmonies in the resonant groins of Gothic archways were always maddeningly in tune. The black kids kept to their residential ghettos in down-campus Princeton Inn and Wilson colleges, while the Southern white guys, some of whom liked to hang Confederate flags from the ledges of their dorm-room windows, occupied the heights.

Even the outbursts of petty student anarchy felt orthodox and premeditated. One evening in December, Adam and I were passing Holder Hall, the neo-Gothic dormitory of choice for boozy, high-born sons of Dixie, when we heard a ruckus in its courtyard. Through an arch we saw dozens of naked bodies palely leaping and sprinting in the dusk. The bodies were smoothly muscled, sculptural, and though some of them had distinctly feminine voices, they appeared to be all male. Above them, in an open window, a pair of stereo speakers belched Southern rock.

“The Nude Olympics,” Adam said. “Annual undergraduate student festival held at the first snowfall.” He opened a palm to catch a meager flake.

“How come I’ve never heard of it?” I said.

“If you don’t know about it, you don’t belong at it.”

The antiapartheid rallies on Cannon Green had a similar ritualistic air. For Joshua and other folk-guitar players, they seemed to constitute unofficial recitals. The protesters gathered around them in swaying circles, singing “This Land Is Your Land” with lowered eyes. Their block-print signs were always clean and neat and their bullhorn-amplified demands free of jarring language or obscenities. The security guards at their periphery affected relaxed, open stances that showed no fear of bloody scuffles or flying debris.

Maybe the source of order was the old buildings. That was my initial theory. Governance through architecture. Spires and high windows made people stand up straight. Stout granite walls promoted stout behavior.

The oldest of the buildings was Nassau Hall, which housed the office of the invisible president, who surely knew he was merely squatting there, surrounded by stones more influential than he was. A plain colonial structure of yellow masonry whose staircase was flanked by a pair of tarnished bronze tigers, the building had served as our nation’s capitol once, back when we took our capitols less seriously, requiring only that they have bells on top and space to seat the Continental Congress, which wasn’t much larger than a modern school board. The first time I beheld the edifice, through the dusty windshield of the taxi that carried me from the airport, I felt as though I’d completed a long swim back to my spawning grounds as an American. I had no desire to go inside, however. Nassau Hall didn’t want me, I could feel it. The vault-like front doors. The tigers. Pass on by.

But once I grew used to dwelling among monuments, once I began to feel comfortable with grandeur, a certain lazy arrogance came over me. Princeton felt like a school without a principal where students were free to issue their own passes, police their own behavior, and grant their own pardons, if necessary. I concluded this was by design. For if, as the university asserted, we were indeed our nation’s future leaders, then what better way to prepare us for the task of framing, interpreting, and defending its laws than letting us—on an experimental basis, in a relatively safe environment, supervised only by bell towers and tigers—operate as laws unto ourselves?

No wonder I felt entitled to sack the common room and take justice into my own hands: someday justice would end up in them anyway. Assuming, of course, that some hidden hand of power didn’t reach down from the old towers and try to toss me out. I dismissed this possibility, though, because it had already happened, and I’d survived. It happened before John Lennon was gunned down, before the van from Bloomingdale’s pulled up, while I was still finding my way around the campus, still hoping that the road of multiple choice had finally led me home.

“
M
r. Kirn?” I heard when I answered my dorm-room phone. “Is this Mr. Walter Kirn?”

“It is. I am.”

The call came just after midterms, in the evening, when dire communications from officialdom are unexpected and unusually jarring. It served to inform me that I was under suspicion of violating the Princeton Honor Code, a solemn pledge of academic integrity that students were required to make in writing at the bottom of every test: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.” The caller didn’t specify the nature of my alleged infraction, just summoned me to a room in Holder Hall at seven the next night. I asked for clarification. Holder Hall was a dormitory, I pointed out, not an administration building.

“The Honor Committee,” the voice explained, “is entirely made up of other students.”

“Other kids, you mean?”

“Your peers.”

This sounded ominous, and not quite accurate. Any student whose idea of fun, of bracing extracurricular amusement, was prosecuting and sentencing his classmates was certainly no peer of mine. Or were they drafted, these traitors? Were they conscripts? No, they had to be volunteers, these monsters—Goody Two-shoes who’d traded up to boots.

I didn’t tell anyone where I was going the evening of the proceeding. I’d considered telling Joshua, but I wasn’t sure if his Quaker passion for justice—so keen in the matter of black South Africa—extended to individuals. Nor could I guarantee him I was innocent. That would depend on the nature of the charges. I didn’t remember ever actively cheating, but who really knew how cheating was defined here? I recalled being issued a booklet on the topic, but I’d treated it as junk mail.

“Walter or Walt? Or don’t you have a preference? Fantastic to meet you. I’m Rob. Come right on in.”

My inquisitor, my nemesis, the springy young Torquemada who’d answered the door, was a middleweight jock with a crushing, abusive handshake and the long hair of someone who favored short hair but hadn’t been to the barber for a while. He pointed me to a dilapidated couch and went to fetch me a soda from a mini-fridge with several glasses stacked on top of it. His dorm room wasn’t particularly fancy but it was the largest I’d ever seen. So this was how Princeton rewarded its quislings: with additional square footage.

I cast about for some reason to despise Rob as he brought me a cold drink and set a bowl of pretzel nuggets on the table between the sofa and his armchair. Once seated, he projected no majesty. His posture was loose and slumped. I noticed a cardboard folder on the table, but it seemed unimportant since he’d put the snack bowl on it.

“How were your midterms?” he asked me. “You survive?”

“Haven’t heard yet. Hoping so.” That I hadn’t been read my rights yet troubled me. The trial might already be under way.

Rob reached for a nugget. “You transferred here?”

“I did.”

“Hard to get in as a transfer student.”

“Yes.” But easy to get kicked out as one, I feared.

“If it feels like I’m beating around the bush, I’m sorry. This isn’t a formal procedure, it’s just an interview. It’s just a conversation. A you-and-me thing.” He ate his nugget and washed it down with a sip of beer. The can had been on the floor next to his chair and I’d thought it was empty, just trash. Incredible. They let the interrogators drink.

“So why did you cheat on your Spanish test last week?”

I protested. I denied. I took offense. I did so as a way of buying time for a mental review of the afternoon in question. I’d struggled and floundered, yes, but had I cheated? I recalled a moment of panic on page three when, aware that my time was running short, I’d glanced at the test sheets of the students beside me to determine how close they were to finishing. Perhaps I’d seen one of their answers—I didn’t recall. Perhaps I’d borrowed this answer—I didn’t recall. And now I had no incentive to recall. I picked up my Dr Pepper and switched my mind off before it could testify against itself.

“Forbidding cribbing and copying,” said Rob, “is only
one
aspect of the Honor Code. It also requires students who witness cheating to report the infraction without delay. What I mean is, we’ve got a witness, Walt.”

“Who?” I demanded. But I suspected I knew: Merrill, the Southern kid who’d sat across from me. He was fat in a way that suggested some imbalance, some inability to eliminate fluids, with a broad, soggy face and little seedlike eyes. He wore a coat and tie to class. We’d never actually argued, we’d never tangled, indeed we’d hardly spoken to each other, but we had sour chemistry from the day we met. A mystery. Some pairs of people are just natural adversaries.

“Not only is that irrelevant,” said Rob, “it’s also confidential.”

“Not according to the Constitution. The right to face your accuser—”

“I know, I’ve heard. We get that old debating point a lot.” Rob slid the folder from underneath the bowl and withdrew two sheets of paper. He laid them next to each other on the table, oriented so I could read them—copies of the Spanish test’s fourth page covered in my jagged handwriting.

“Question twelve,” said Rob. “You erased a wrong answer here, you’ll notice, and wrote in the same one the girl beside you gave. That’s awfully damning, I have to say. This thing will go quicker if you just admit it.”

But would it go any better? I doubted it. The evidence, Rob was correct, seemed fairly grim, especially the apparent pressure I’d used in making the erasure; I’d almost rubbed right through the paper.

My righteous outrage turned to gloom. Where would I go after Princeton sent me packing? Cozy, forgiving Minnesota would have me because it had everyone, that was just its nature, but to me this would feel like crawling back into bed. My life would be like one long sick day. That left the mythic bus ride to New York City and the descent into Times Square degradation. Eventually, if the needle didn’t take me, I might win the pity of a passing executive who’d give me a job in the basement of his headquarters refilling tape dispensers or sorting parcels. On my breaks I could write a novel or learn a language. It might turn out just fine. It might be how I should be living now, in fact.

“This totally blows for you, I’m sure,” said Rob. “Maybe while I grab more Dr Pepper you could think about a statement. Show some remorse, why don’t you? That never hurts. You want the same amount of ice?”

“I do.”

My gaze drifted back to the test sheets as Rob walked off. By the time he got back he was facing Perry Mason. Some desperate survival instinct unleashed a latent gift for legal reasoning.

“Question twelve on test sheet four,” I said, tapping a finger on exhibit A. “The critical word here—the one you say I stole—is
‘sueño
.’ Is that agreed?”

Rob granted me nothing.

“And
‘sueño’
is the right answer, is it not?”

Silence. Rob infuriated me. The law was supposed to be blind, not deaf and dumb.

“It is indeed the right answer. And so is mine. Is it possible, Rob—and I submit it is; I submit it’s even
likely
—that I arrived at this answer not through copying but in the same way my classmate did? Through
knowledge?”

Rob pushed back all the way into his armchair, his face as rigid as a hieroglyph. In the Star Chamber of the Princeton Honor Committee, the sunlight of logic seldom shone, I gathered.

Rob parted his stony lips. “You looked around,” he said. “Someone, our witness, saw you look around.”

“I was checking my progress against my classmates’.”

“You noticed the answer.”

“To look is not to notice. To look is physical, not mental.”

“But you erased what you’d already written.”

“It’s a crime to correct a mistake? To think again?”

“How do we know it was thinking, not copying?”

“You don’t know. You
can’t
know. Only I can, Rob.”

His whole body perked up. “Then you admit it.”

“What?” I asked.

“That you
know”.’

“I didn’t say that. I said that I’m in a position to. You aren’t.”

“So
do
you?”