Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) (18 page)

Tonight, though, I couldn’t bear the posing, and I understood why V.’s government was mad at him: he might have built great public-works projects for them, but now he was incapable of building anything. I excused myself to use the bathroom. I filled a glass of water from the tap, looked in the mirror, and beheld an absence—nothing but the reflected door behind me and a bathrobe hanging on a hook. Where was my face? I knew it still existed because I could feel it with my fingertips, but I couldn’t find it with my eyes—a hallucination in reverse.

“I need a doctor,” I told V. when I came back. “How late is the clinic open?”

He ignored me. He’d been holding a thought about Hegel all this time and was writing it down so that he wouldn’t forget it later. I left him and walked back down Prospect Avenue, thinking that if I could find the girl I’d left there and share a normal human word with her, it would help me see my face again. But the party was over and the door was bolted.

I didn’t have to wait long for my crack-up.

D
URING A CHAUCER LECTURE THE NEXT SEMESTER I LOST
the ability to discern the boundaries between spoken words. Professor F., a venerable medievalist who was one of my favorites among the faculty because of his clarity and wit, opened his mouth and out flowed streams of nonsense with no meter, no structure, no definition. I closed my notebook, which I rarely wrote in, and managed to isolate a few short phrases from the slushy, garbled flow. But I couldn’t link them into sentences. My sense of time disintegrated, too. From the moment the lecture turned to mush to the moment students left their seats, several hours seemed to pass. I couldn’t believe, when I exited the building, that it was still light out.

“Allotherwalt,” I heard someone say.

I scrammed.

I bought a cup of coffee at the student center, avoiding conversation with the cashier, and wandered around the campus for a while, thinking that what I needed was fresh air. The winter sun was dull and silvery, the snow on the ground a layer of crunchy filth. When I saw somebody I knew I changed direction, convinced by the formlessness of my inner monologue that my linguistic incompetence had deepened. Just outside the gates, on Nassau Street, I stared into the window of a shop at a mannequin of a model undergraduate dressed in a toggled wool coat and a wool cap. The figure was holding an old edition of Fitzgerald’s
This Side of Paradise
, which I understood—incorrectly, it turned out—to be a pure celebration of Princeton’s goldenness. I wished I had money to buy the coat. It looked like a garment a boy could hide in, with a hood that would cast a shadow over his face and pockets in which to conceal his trembling hands.

Someone touched my right elbow: Adam. He spoke. I smiled. He spoke again, at length. I held the smile. His eyes narrowed with what I gathered to be concern. I rubbed my brow in some vague, all-purpose excuse, and before he could inquire further, I darted across the street and set a course toward the Princeton Theological Seminary, where I felt confident I’d be left alone. Wrong. While I was resting on a bench there, Professor R. appeared beside me. He gestured bizarrely with a bent thumb, scratching at the air.

He wanted something.

I figured it out when I saw his unlit cigarette.

He was the last person I wanted to see. A poet in the Creative Writing Department, Professor R. was my junior-paper adviser and my only real friend among the faculty. The purple dents beneath his eyes, his powerlessness over coffee and tobacco, and his kindly, doleful manner had persuaded me that I could trust him. It helped that he was in his early thirties and looked like a student, just a very tired one. We met periodically in his small office to review my progress on my paper about John Berryman’s
Dream Songs
, a harrowing cycle of poems about rage, but within a few minutes the topic usually shifted to something broader. These discussions allowed me to flourish arcane concepts picked up from my bull sessions with V, but if Professor R. ever caught on to the thinness of my borrowed ideas, he was careful not to show it. With him, I was the thinker I hoped to pass as, skeptical, ironic, and unconventional. We drank our coffee black with sugar and let the ashes from our waving cigarettes fall where they might, on the floor and on his desk.

There was a fair chance I loved the man.

I read his lips as he thanked me for a light. My “You’re welcome,” though scrambled to my own ears, didn’t appear to alarm or disconcert him. His manner remained easy, casual. Judging by the shapes his mouth made and my memories of our last conference, I surmised that he was talking about Berryman; about his “melodic strategies,” perhaps, or, it could have been, his “misanthropy.” I devised a remark that allowed for most contingencies (“I’m still assessing that”) and then, in response to the thoughtful-sounding statement which then came forth from him, I said, “My instinct is you’re on the mark.” Any further than this I couldn’t go, though; my throat was swelling shut with panic. Worse, the faint creases between my teacher’s eyebrows had darkened and turned severe, suggesting, perhaps, that I’d been sorely mistaken about the nature of his utterances. What if he’d been remarking on the weather?

I finessed an exit from the encounter, and over the next few days I taught myself how to disguise a fugue state while in public. The secret was to mirror others’ expressions, not perfectly but approximately, scratching my forehead when they rubbed their chins or leaning back when they leaned to the side. Continuity was important, too. I had to maintain a flow of gestures that mimicked engagement, interest, and reflection, and I had to be sure not to freeze while choosing the next one. I learned that the more intently I seemed to listen, the less I would be expected to speak. Oddly, this caused people to open up to me. Friends who’d once seemed shy and awkward to me became loquacious and gregarious. It was as though by suppressing my own voice, I’d liberated theirs, and I saw in their faces a new affection for me. I noticed I was getting waves and winks from classmates who used to whisk past me with lowered heads.

I blamed my condition on exhaustion. One night I slept for twenty hours straight. When I finally got up, the floor felt like a waterbed; I had to brace myself against a chair. Then I heard vermin inside the walls. I knew that the noises came from warming water pipes, but I couldn’t stop picturing whiskered rodents nibbling through the plaster into my room. Having slept through breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I made my way to a convenience store next to the train station at the edge of campus, but the profusion of snack foods on the shelves swamped my decision-making center. I returned empty-handed to my dorm.

My aphasia worsened by the day. Words were disappearing from my memory like defective bulbs in a strand of Christmas lights. The words didn’t vanish in order of difficulty. One morning in the shower, swabbing my chest with a slick white lump of something, I lost track of “soap.” At lunch at the Terrace Club “bread” and “vinegar” blinked out. But trickier words persisted. In a religion class one afternoon the professor wrote “telos” on the board. Easy. A synonym for “purpose.” But what was the stick of plastic in my right hand? And what was the black stuff issuing from its tip?

For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grim, self-conscious labor. I began most of my sentences with “the.” Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It became my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness—the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. “The book is always …” “The book is thought to …” “The book is green and …” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There, I could rest. I’d done it. An hour’s work.

As compensation for these agonies I allowed myself nights of immobility in the Terrace Club TV room. Other viewers came and went, squeezing in next to me on the crumbling sofa. They included a girl whose family had pioneered the African diamond-mining industry, lent their name to the nation of Rhodesia, and founded the Rhodes Scholarships. She seemed to like me, and I envisioned a marriage that would entitle me to a splendid estate. It wasn’t a farfetched notion, either, for here she was, my princess, within arm’s reach. And yet something kept me from pursuing her. It wasn’t just my muteness. It was dread. Dread of exposure, of failure, and of collapse, but mostly dread of gaining what I sought (distinction, others’ envy, the world itself) and discovering that it wasn’t I who’d sought it.

My education was running in reverse as my mind shed its outermost layer of signs and symbols and shrank back to its dumb, preliterate core. I lay on my bed with a notebook at my side (in case my faculties suddenly returned) and tried to imagine a future for myself that wouldn’t require verbal communication. Other than a job as a night watchman, I couldn’t come up with anything. My dreams, when I finally managed to nod off, were full of sensory absurdities: handguns firing with cooing sounds, garden hoses spraying streams of sand. I woke after every one of them, woke fully, as though it were morning, time to wash and dress, and only by checking my watch (two thirty a.m.) did I manage to keep myself in bed. To fall back asleep, to relax, I had to smoke—a total of three or four cigarettes, most nights—and by sunrise my system was still so charged with nicotine that I had trouble handling a toothbrush. Soon streaks of blood appeared along my gum line, welling up into the cracks between my teeth and making me look like a wolf over a kill. I rinsed off the blood with Listerine, which stung, and then scourged my raw mucus membranes with yet more smoke, hungry for its noxious particles in a way that I no longer was for eggs and orange juice.

My breakdown climaxed with a strange prank that could have been taken straight from a bad novel about collegiate social Darwinism. I was watching TV in the Terrace Club library when in walked Leslie, a handsome blond campus prince—the descendant of a legendary industrialist—whom I knew to be one of the Joy Division’s high chieftains but had never felt worthy of engaging in conversation.

“Walter, may I speak with you?” he said. I was astonished that he knew my name.

I followed him outside to his car, a new European sports coupe with leather seats, where he asked me to help him with a “trust experiment” related to one of his sociology classes. He couldn’t describe the experiment, he said, because it might prejudice the results, and I didn’t press him. I wanted him to like me. I wanted him to owe me, too, perhaps. Having someone like him in my debt, if only slightly, might come in handy someday, especially if I kept on deteriorating.

Leslie started the car as I buckled in next to him. His instructions were simple: don’t speak and don’t resist. Then he blindfolded me with a strip of fuzzy dark cloth. He turned on a Laurie Anderson tape full blast—a gale of futuristic electronica—and drove without stopping for what felt like an hour, ending up on a bumpy stretch of road that I took to be rural and remote. At some point my blindfold loosened and slipped down, and I resecured it without being asked. That’s how trusting I wanted to appear.

The car stopped moving. The music ceased. Leslie got out, walked around to my side, opened the door, set his hands on my shoulders, and marched me forward across an expanse of spongy, uneven earth. He halted and commanded me to kneel, urging me down by pressing on my skull. I suspected by then that I’d been lured into a sadistic hazing ritual, but instead of lashing out or fleeing, I fantasized about the sort of club that I’d been deemed worthy of trying out for.

“Remove the blindfold,” Leslie said.

When I raised my dazzled eyes, I saw, about fifty yards in front of me, surrounded by stately trees, an actual castle, with countless tall windows, pediments, and columns. In the center of its crescent driveway stood an enormous dry fountain of leaping cupids.

“My family’s estate,” said Leslie. “Behold, poor serf! Behold a power you will never know!”

With that he ran back to his car and drove away.

It took me three hours, walking and hitchhiking, to make it back to Princeton. The pills that I’d taken earlier with Adam turned the trip into an odyssey of spectral laughing faces in the sky and miasmic whirlpools underfoot. When I was finally safe inside my room, I asked myself why I’d been chosen for this elaborate torture session. I couldn’t come up with a satisfying answer. Rumor had it that Leslie was gay, but he’d tried nothing physical with me. Maybe he’d planned to and chickened out. Or maybe, while I was wearing the blindfold and the music was roaring in the car, he’d unzipped his jeans and masturbated. There was also a chance he felt encroached upon. He considered himself a sort of Olympian overseer at the campus’s hippest, most vicious student theater, and I’d been hanging out there fairly regularly, shooting the shit about plays I planned to write and my disagreements with Artaud, in the weeks before my cerebral crash. It hardly mattered, though. I burned with shame for bowing to his orders and blamed the pills, prescription opiates, for my craven passivity, though I knew that deep down the problem was ambition. The drugs I could cut down or give up, as I vowed to almost every weekend, but not the ambition. Not the itch, the push.

The next day, through Adam, I heard the story from Leslie’s side. I learned that he’d been spreading lies. He’d said he’d seduced me in the woods. He said I’d been easy, agreeable, a pushover. This cruel tale incensed me. None of it was true. Neither, sadly, was it entirely false. I could dispute it on a literal level, but not on the allegorical, so I chose not to speak about it at all. This was wildly frustrating for me but not difficult, because by then I could barely speak my name. And now I didn’t really want to.