Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) (19 page)

I
I CHOSE TO STAY IN PRINCETON FOR THE SUMMER RATHER
than go home and shock my family with my listlessness and dissipation. I rented a room with a cot at the Terrace Club and took a job shelving books at Firestone Library. I also made a bargain with myself. If I couldn’t rebuild my brain within three months, I wouldn’t register for my senior year. And if my state worsened, I might kill myself. Should I decide that this was necessary, my model would be my favorite poet, John Berryman, who’d spent time around Princeton in the fifties but ended up, two decades later, in Minneapolis, teaching at the U of M, where he leaped from a bridge into the Mississippi. According to one account I’d heard, the river was covered with ice that day, so he’d actually jumped onto it. Either way, he’d succeeded. He met the silence.

Hoping to stave off this meeting, I bought a dictionary and a thesaurus and instituted a daily regimen of linguistic calisthenics. My alarm clock woke me every morning at five, and for the next three hours I’d lie in bed, with my reference books propped open on my stomach, and repeat aloud, in alphabetical order, every word on every single page, along with its definitions and major synonyms. The ritual was humbling but soothing, and for the first time in my academic career I found myself making measurable strides, however minuscule. “Militate.” “Militia.” “Milk.” I spent as much energy on the easy words as I did on the hard ones—my way of showing contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise. And in truth, they were all hard words for me by then.

My job in the library basement helped advance this program of self-styled mental reconstruction. Working under a young crew boss, Dan, who belonged to a self-improvement cult masked as an end-hunger organization, I emptied one-hundred-yard-long shelves of books, loaded them onto rolling metal carts, and transferred them to new shelves, one floor down, in perfect Dewey decimal order. When breaks were called, I opened whichever volume I happened to be holding at the moment and read until it was time to go to work again, picking up reams of miscellaneous knowledge about such topics as Zoroastrianism and the history of animal husbandry. And unlike the material from my classes and lectures, these fragments stuck with me—maybe because I’d collected them for their own sake, not as cards to be played at final-exam time and then forgotten when a new hand was dealt.

One day, during lunch, my boss sat down beside me while I was reading up on Zarathustra, whom I’d known before then only as a word in the title of a book by Nietzsche that I’d often argued with V about, despite never having gotten through the preface.

“Personal self-betterment,” said Dan. “That’s man’s purpose on earth, you know.”

I nodded.

“Do you understand the power of thought?”

“Not really.”

“Thought is stupendous. Thought’s a miracle. I’ll give you an example. This really happened. There were some monkeys living on an island. They drank out of streams, with their faces in the water. Then one of them had a breakthrough, an idea. He dipped half a coconut shell into the stream and drank from it like a primitive cup. Pretty soon, all of the monkeys were doing it. The whole pack or gaggle or whatever.”

“That’s amazing,” I said, not meaning it.

“No, it’s not. The amazing part is this. There was another monkey island a hundred miles away across the ocean, and the minute the monkey on the first one learned to drink its water from the shell, the other monkey on the second island got it in his head to follow suit. The thought was transmitted through space, a kind of signal. We call that ‘critical mass.’”

“Some scientist actually witnessed this?”

“You bet. Not that it was reported very widely.”

“Why not? Because it wasn’t true?” I couldn’t help needling brainwashed Dan. I knew it wouldn’t alter his beliefs, but now that I was struggling to think again, I couldn’t let such nonsense pass.

“Can you come to a meeting of people who share your drive? It’s absolutely free of charge,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I have to do this thing alone.”

“What thing?”

“Reconnecting certain wires.”

Rebuffing Dan’s invitation to join the cult harmed our relations. He hovered as I toiled, griping about my inefficient technique, and a couple of times he snatched my books away from me and showed me how I should carry and handle them so as to raise my rate of productivity. Whenever he caught me reading one of them, he reached out and slapped its cover shut, forcing me to conduct my hasty studies in unsupervised corners of the basement. Five minutes of peace was the most that I could hope for. But I adapted. The units were long enough. I stuffed my head with chunks of information that I knew I might never get to use—on medieval theology, general relativity, monastic architecture, Sir Walter Raleigh—and slowly displaced the vacuum in my skull.

A girl on the crew, a classmate, Kate, watched from afar as I toiled at my comeback. She was a Californian and a painter, an auxiliary member of the Joy Division who didn’t entirely fit in because of her breezy, beachy temperament, which wasn’t severe enough to impress the leadership. I liked her red hair. I liked its tumbling splendor. One night after work we went out for a beer.

“What’s all the sneaking away about?” she asked me.

“I’m trying to pass a test.”

“There aren’t any tests. It’s summer. It’s a rest. You’ll make yourself sick.”

“I’m already pretty sick.”

By fully confessing to my fatigue and speculating on its causes, I earned a few hours of messy groping that left me refreshed, if not proud of my performance. But Kate didn’t seem to care about performance. Like me, she was hungry for company itself, for simple epidermal contact, as though her world, too, had dematerialized and needed replenishment by any means. We stuck close to each other in the library, exchanging glances that said merely “I’m here,” and this elemental exchange of presence placed a sort of floor under my sorrows. I wasn’t sinking, for once. I wasn’t slipping. Further support was provided by my readings.
Sons and Lovers
explores the Oedipus complex. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim. When Troilus died and left the earth after discovering Cressida’s betrayal, he floated up into the sky and gazed back down and laughed at the pitiful folly of human wishes. It was basic stuff, nothing arcane or glamorous, but it was substantial enough to set my feet on.

By August, I felt human again. The hollow sensation behind my forehead was replaced by a reassuring fullness. The tics and twitches subsided. My gums healed up. I realized that for several weeks I’d been conversing normally—with Kate, at least.

“How do I look?” I asked her. “Compared to then.” She knew what I was referring to.

“You’re thicker.”

“Fatter?”

She shook her head. “Just thicker.”

A
nd then I wrote a three-act play—in verse. It took about two weeks, no more than that, and the process was more like flood control than ordinary composition. The lines surged out of me onto the page as though they’d been inside me all along, but the lexicon was new, I saw, drawn from my five-minute lessons in the library and blessedly free of theory terms. Where the play’s subject came from I didn’t know. The setting was a Manhattan artist’s studio that resembled Andy Warhol’s Factory, a messy crash pad for vagrant visionaries and a doomed teenage socialite named Dinah who, I suppose, was based on Edie Sedgwick, whose story I’d heard about from Adam. This crowd was alien to me, but no more so than the Joy Division. I called my main character “the Director.” He didn’t speak much, just lounged behind a movie camera, recording the love affairs, squabbles, and overdoses of his solipsistic groupies, who rarely acknowledged or even looked at him. I called the play
Soft White Kids in Leather
. No real reason. The title volunteered itself.

I sat at my desk in wonder the morning I finished, resting one hand atop the stacked white pages as though I were swearing on the Bible. I was afraid to reread the dialogue in case it made no sense. I took the manuscript downstairs to the dining room and waited for someone sane to come along who might be able to deem the thing intelligible, but when no one showed up, I took the play to work with me and showed it to Kate, who scanned a page or two and pronounced my creation “interesting,” which was all the affirmation I needed. Suicide wouldn’t be necessary, after all.

“
M
om?”

“Is everything okay?”

“I think so. I think it is. Is Dad there?”

“Fishing.”

“Is Andy there?”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Say ‘hi’ to him.”

“I don’t like the sound of this call.”

“Say ‘hi’ to everyone.”

“You’re all jazzed up. You’re scaring me,” she said.

“I’m rushing. I’m on a break. More books to shelve. Just wanted to phone and give everyone my love.”

“Your ‘love,’” my mother said suspiciously. It wasn’t a word that we used much in our family. I must have stumbled across it in the library.

I treated myself to a pizza that night, a pie with everything on it except pineapple. I ate alone. Kate had gone back to California. Afterward, on Nassau Street, I returned to the storefront where I’d seen the toggle coat. The new display featured autumn back-to-school clothes. Corduroy pants. Shirts with alligator insignias. Belts of pebbly hide. I had the money to buy a couple of items, but I’d have to wait until the morning, and I knew that by then I’d lose my nerve. I’d saved myself, by all appearances, but suddenly a new concern arose. With graduation just a year away and no firm career plans or even career desires (my vague interests in drama and poetry didn’t qualify), the only game I’d ever learned to play—scaling the American meritocratic mountain—was, I feared, about to end.

M
AKING MONEY DIDN’T INTEREST ME. WHILE MY CLASSMATES
signed up for on-campus “face-to-faces” with recruiters from Wall Street brokerage firms (becoming an “arbitrageur” was all the rage then, even among students who as juniors had vowed to spend their lives dancing or composing), I scanned the horizon for another test to take, another contest to compete in. I hadn’t learned any lessons from my breakdown. The curse had me right back in its grip. Here I was, just this side of mental paralysis, and again I was starving for medals, stars, acceptance letters. To me, wealth and power were trivial by-products of improving one’s statistical scores in the great generational tournament of aptitude. The ranking itself was the essential prize.

I applied for two scholarships to Oxford, an institution I regarded much as I’d regarded Princeton once—as a sociocultural VIP room that happened to hold classes in the back. The first application was for the Rhodes, created to fashion leaders for a future utopian global order dreamed of by the diamond-mining magnate who’d passed down his genes to the girl in the TV room whom I’d been too cowardly to court. Why I imagined that I was “Rhodes material”—which at Princeton meant someone resembling Bill Bradley, our most widely known recipient of the honor—I had not a clue. The other kids I knew who had applied were conspicuous campus presences, top athletes and leaders of student government, whereas I was an addled loner in an old raincoat who’d burped out a blank-verse play on Andy Warhol that hadn’t been staged yet and might never be, unless Adam dug up some funds for the production. I was also an unindicted vandal, a suspected offender against the Honor Code, a phony theory devotee, and a chain-smoking post-aphasic whose only bulwark against regression was a heavily underlined thesaurus.

Still, I felt I had an outside shot. I’d learned by then that the masters of advancement use a rough quota system in their work, reserving a certain number of wild-card slots for overreaching oddballs. I suspected that they only did this to keep more qualified candidates on their toes, but I also knew that an opening is an opening. Just get in the room, and then act like you belong there while cozying up to the folks who clearly do—this had always been my winning formula and I saw no good reason to abandon it.

To increase my chances of success, I made no contingency plans for failure. I threw myself on the mercy of the universe. V., who was seeking spots at various grad schools, cautioned me against overconfidence, but once I explained my superstitious reasoning—I wasn’t showing confidence at all; I was soliciting an act of grace—he backed me up by citing Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher of the nineteenth century who’d argued that faith in the divine makes sense only because it makes no sense whatsoever. Hearing my position thus affirmed should have heartened me, but it made me antsy. Philosophers weren’t reliable authorities on how to operate in the real world. Indeed, if you found yourself acting in accordance with one of their mad principles, it was probably wisest to change course.

When a letter arrived to tell me I’d been chosen as one of about a dozen state finalists, I prayerfully thanked the god of desperadoes, bought a blue suit at the store on Nassau Street, and flew back to Minnesota for my interview. I told a flight attendant on the plane that I’d already secured the prize—this to preview the awe I might expect if I ever really did. The woman poured me a Pepsi and moved along.

An hour after I landed, a doorman at the Minneapolis Club showed me upstairs to a gloomy paneled lounge where my name-tagged fellow aspirants were enjoying a get-acquainted party with the distinguished members of the committee that would formally screen us the next morning. I armed myself with a cheese cube on a napkin and a glass of red wine and strode into the fray, looking for someone important to impress, but my rivals had gotten the jump on me and wouldn’t loosen the tight perimeters around the professors and businesspeople tasked with assessing our leadership potential. To my mind, the vaunted mission of the Rhodes smacked of a sort of science-fiction Nazism, but perhaps because it hadn’t yet borne fruit in the form of a smarty-pants universal directorate (and because it paid for swank gatherings such as this one), no one had seen fit to put a stop to it.

I poured myself a second glass of wine and went on circling the inner circle. Seeing my rivals up close unsettled me. Back when I took the SATs, the contest had been abstract, statistical, waged against an anonymous national peer group that was no more real to me than the tens of thousands of other nine-year-olds vying for the presidential fitness prize. But this time the competition was all too personal. One short-haired young woman in a pressed dark suit was holding forth on national health-care policy to a man who kept peeking past her at a prettier girl whose panty lines were vivid through her dress. A crew-cutted young roughneck whose tag identified him as a West Point cadet was describing his diet and fitness regimen to a lady who seemed to be sleeping standing up. Every few minutes everyone changed partners, like dancers in a Jane Austen ballroom scene. What expert mixers they were! I hated them.

Then I noticed something more disturbing: the other contestants weren’t drinking their wine. They were using their glasses as props, as things to gesture with.

I looked down at my empty goblet. Caught out again.

By the time I succeeded in cornering a committee member, I was feeling squirrelly and light-headed. To give the irresistible impression of humble origins transcended, I affected a lazy backwoods drawl and combined it with a Sunday-best vocabulary garnered from my brain-restoring drills. I even got off the word “heuristic” once, an elegant bit of scholastic legerdemain, but I pronounced it in the manner of Johnny Cash. I knew I sounded demented, but by then I’d committed to the performance and feared that shifting to another register would only compound the impression of schizophrenia. The best I could do was gradually fall silent and pretend to be an avid listener. That, and refrain from lighting another cigarette. Besides being the party’s only young drinker, I was its only smoker, it turned out, aside from a bearded old fellow with a pipe whose name tag marked him as an English professor at a local college, Carleton. I approached him, seeking cover for my vice, and babbled away about my love of Whitman, a name I’d plucked out of the air. He seemed to sense this.

“What about Whitman do you admire?” he asked me.

“Well, his first name for one thing.”

“Why?”

“I’m kidding. Because it’s my name. Walt.” I tapped my name tag for proof. The old man squinted. I wondered what qualified him as a Rhodes judge. Not his powers of observation, surely. Some feeling that only an engineered elite could rescue humanity from doom?

“Actually, I admire his populist empathy. Dockworkers, farmers, soldiers—he loved them all.”

“But did he just love them as aspects of Walt Whitman? He called the poem ‘Song of Myself,’ remember.”

“Right.”

“And you wrote a poem once, at Macalester College, for which you won a prize, and which we’ve read, because you submitted it in your application, called ‘From an Uncolored Room.’”

I confessed the truth of this.

“Enlightening chat. Quite helpful. Good luck, young man.”

At the end of the cocktail party we drew times for our morning interviews. I drew the very first slot: seven sharp. I showed up white and trembling and dehydrated, speckled with crumbs from a cherry Danish I’d wolfed. My rivals were already seated in the waiting room, some of them paging through
The New York Times
, one of them filling out the last few squares of its famously challenging crossword puzzle, which he must have begun long before he reached the club. This was a stroke I wished I’d thought of, though I would have handled it slightly differently. I would have put random letters in the squares, since who was going to check?

My name was called and I sat down in a conference room at a long table of grim interrogators equipped with pencils, clipboards, and questionnaires. “What, in your opinion,” one woman asked me, not even giving me time to sip my coffee, “is the primary problem facing our world today?”

The moisture returned to my mouth, but it was sour, as though mucus membranes can perspire, too. I’d expected a little small talk first. I knew in my gut that to answer the question creatively would be a mistake; these were sober, high-minded people who’d woken up early to serve the citizenry by preselecting future American presidents and United Nations ambassadors. The only issues worthy of their seriousness, I strongly suspected, were the obvious two: poverty and war. My chance to show originality would come with the inevitable follow-up: “And how would you deal with this problem?” That’s where the challenge lay. I wanted to bring in poetry—but how? By calling for a new, transformative literature pledged to the empowerment of the voiceless through a concern with the universal values of justice and mutual respect?

That might be a winner, if I could just remember it.

But I couldn’t remember anything. All I could think about were the other applicants pretending to read their papers in the lounge while secretly wishing an epileptic fit on me. I could feel their ill will oozing in under the door. I could feel the high-pressure cell of their massed ambition pressing against the hinges of the door.

“Miscommunication would be my answer.”

Horrible. But my ad-lib would have to stand.

“Expand on that, please,” said a quiet female voice as pens began scratching across important papers. “Miscommunication among whom?”

I offered a roster of miscommunicators that included governments and their subjects, men and women, adults and children, and even—absurdly—human beings and animals. Halfway through my speech I knew I’d lost. Aside from the presidential rope climb, I’d never lost at anything before except for a spelling bee in Phoenix, and the feeling was like waking on the moon after having gone to bed on earth. I left my body. Or maybe my body left me. They zoomed away in opposite directions, with only an echoing “human beings and animals” indicating the spot which they’d once shared.

I returned to the waiting room ten minutes later, after a ceremonial round of questions about my beliefs as a “young artist.” My rivals scanned my face for clues: How had my interview changed the odds for them? I gave them more information than they deserved, hoping to win their favor for the future. Someday one of them might rule all earth, and I wanted to be remembered as a good sport.

“You’re safe,” I announced to all of them. “I blew it.”

“How?” said someone, eager for a tip.

“Don’t worry. It’s only going to happen once today.”

My competitors couldn’t help grinning. Then one girl hugged me—the health-care expert, whom I realized I’d known at Macalester, back when. “You really shouldn’t consider it a loss,” she said. “You should feel honored that you reached this level.”

I returned the hug against my will, my desire for pity prevailing over my dignity. Then I turned away and left the building, unwilling to wait for the winners to be named. Later I learned that the health-care girl was one of them—one of only two Rhodes from our home region—which made her gesture seem false in retrospect. She knew she was bound for the sharp end of the pyramid, and was merely rehearsing her royal manners.

“
I
s this Walter Kirn?” asked the phantom of Nassau Hall.

“It is,” I said. “It’s him.” Anxiety over poor grammar ensures poor grammar.

“The provost would like to meet with you next week about a confidential matter. Would Wednesday at noon work?”

“Any time would work. May I ask you a question?”

“Please,” the ghost said.

“How bad is it?”

“It’s good.”

The meeting spot was a modest diner across the street from Princeton’s grand front gate. A letter I’d received the day before explained why I’d been summoned: to talk about another overseas scholarship, less coveted than the Rhodes but more exclusive (only a handful were awarded each year) sponsored by the Keasbey Foundation, an organization based in Philadelphia. I’d applied for the Keasbey at the urging of a junior English professor, the cheerful medievalist whom I was fond of because he paused between his sentences and went light on theory. He’d won the Keasbey himself a few years back and thought it the finest scholarship on offer because it gave winners a choice of universities—not just Oxford, but also Cambridge, Edinburgh, and even Aberystwyth, in Wales—as well as supplying a generous “wine allowance” of a few hundred dollars per year. I asked why this was. “It’s in the will,” he said. I asked him whose will. “Marguerite Keasbey’s.”

I ordered a BLT and perched on a stool in the window of the diner, wondering how I’d recognize a being whose title had always been a cipher to me. It was easy, though. Provosts behave exactly like provosts. They shake your hand a moment before you’re ready, they lay a heartening arm across your shoulder that drops away the instant you feel heartened, they lightly scold you for using your own money to buy your BLT, and they don’t touch their coffee after the first sip because they’re granting you their full attention, which they somehow convince you that you deserve.