Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) (6 page)

Thrilling. Astonishing. It couldn’t help but be.

Then my teacher touched one of my shoulders and I flinched.

“Tonight,” he whispered to me and those around me as we peered out through our makeup at our town, “be proud of yourselves. That’s all I ask. Is everyone ready?”

We touched our costumes, nodded.

“Terrific,” he said. “Now go put on a show!”

M
Y FATHER HAD A SPELL. HE QUIT 3M. HE DECIDED
America’s future lay out West, moved the family to Phoenix in a U-Haul, flew off to Tampa to watch his own dad die, lost weight, lost his marbles, opened the Yellow Pages, turned to a page headed “Churches,” and called the Mormons. They came over right away. They came in the form of a pair of clean-cut missionaries with clip-on neckties and wrinkle-free white shirts. They asked us to kneel. They asked us to do a lot of things. There were also some things they asked us not to do. For me, the main one was to not touch myself. When we understood all the instructions, we were baptized. Then, a month later, my father bought some wine, which was one of the things he’d been asked not to do. His attitude was: “The Hell with it.” Ours was: “Oh, God, what’s going to happen now?” especially after my father lost his new job and called the Mayflower moving people. They parked a semitrailer in front of our house and loaded it full of our belongings, but my father couldn’t tell them where to take them. He couldn’t decide where we should move. He said he had a good feeling about Idaho, but he also retained a fondness for Minnesota. The Mayflower people grew impatient, padlocked the trailer that held our stuff, detached the cab, and drove the cab away.

We lay on the floor of our empty house in sleeping bags while my father discussed his options. He only discussed them with himself. If someone else chimed in, he cut him off. The only times he left the house were to stand on the lawn and stare at the long trailer or walk around it in slow, deliberate circles, as though considering his options. My mother consoled herself with her Book of Mormon and quoted verses from it to my brother and me when we showed signs of panicking. Seeing her try to hold our family together, I realized I’d never appreciated her plight as the lonely bearer of aspirations for a more refined existence. When we’d first moved to Marine, she’d taught herself French in her spare time, progressing from a series of cassette tapes to translations of Peanuts comic books to, after no more than a year or so, works by Voltaire, Balzac, and Camus. She repeated the feat with Italian later on, without neglecting her housework or her nursing career. And her interests also ran to subjects other than literature. Now and then I’d catch her in an armchair reading a popular history of philosophy by Will and Ariel Durant, and once, stacked high on the floor beside her bed, I found a complete edition, in many volumes, of
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
, its pages abundantly marked by strips of paper covered in minutely lettered comments. Her feats of amateur scholarship were purely private, though, and they went undiscussed with the neighbors or the rest of us, though I sensed that she hoped they’d rub off on us someday, and especially on me.

I was an eighth grader during our time in Phoenix, but only technically, since I rarely attended school in those strange months. I did, though, participate in a spelling bee. I memorized a booklet of tricky words which competitive spellers often stumbled over, won the local round, won the district round, and advanced to the final round for all of Phoenix. A lot of my rivals on the stage were Asians. Asians scared me. I’d never spoken to one. Finally there were just two of us onstage, me and an Asian girl not half my height. My word was “villain,” an easy one. I botched it. Nerves. The Asian girl didn’t botch her word. She hugged my waist. Then she was mobbed by dozens of her kin.

I had only my father there. “You had to be perfect,” he said. “You weren’t quite perfect. Sometimes there’s no in-between in life. I’m sorry.”

When I did go to school, I rarely attended class, preferring to meet up in the parking lot with a quiet Hopi friend who led me all over Phoenix on his bike, showing me where his aunts and uncles lived, shouting threats when he passed a Navajo kid, and sometimes giving me one of the blue pills he kept in a Baggie in his shorts. The pills made me mournful. Mournful, but outgoing.

“What do you want to be someday?” I asked him.

“Hopi.”

“You’re Hopi now.”

“And Hopi always.”

“You want to know my goal?” I asked him.

He seemed indifferent.

“A newspaper columnist who gives opinions.”

“Telling people what you think.”

“Exactly.”

“I hate to think. I like to see.”

I might have avoided much sorrow down the line by adopting the outlook of my Hopi friend, but I didn’t even get to say goodbye to him. When I got home that afternoon, the cab and the trailer were attached again and we were headed back to the Midwest. My mother had taken control. She’d called her father in Ohio, who’d called 3M in Minnesota and convinced them to give my father his old job back.

Weeks later, we bought our farm in Taylors Falls, a team of draft horses, some old machinery, a dozen chickens, a goat, and my father resumed his commute to the Twin Cities, stranding the rest of us in the nineteenth century and leaving my brother and me to the devices of one of Minnesota’s lowest-ranked schools. Its dullness revived my interest in Mormonism.

The ward house was located in a St. Paul suburb. I dressed for services in burgundy loafers, a knit red tie, and a blue dress shirt whose stain-resistant finish reacted with sweat to create a spoiled-meat smell. By then my parents were drifting toward full apostasy (my little brother had dropped out entirely) and they only came to church when the bishop scheduled me to speak. In Phoenix, I’d become quite a Sunday speaker, and I got even better in St. Paul.

“To want what another has is to lose the bounty which Heavenly Father grants equally to all of us and cannot be added to, only subtracted from, never burnished but only soiled: the chance for our spirit to know Celestial glory and govern dominions of our own creation, much as Heavenly Father governs ours.”

Establish a cadence, stretch it, vary it, return to it later in full force, and try not to think the words. That was the secret, I discovered. The words were interchangeable, anyway, particularly if they were fine or lofty words. “Holy,” “sacred,” “blessed,” “delightsome,” “pure.” Their potency lay not in their meanings but in the patterns they cut into the air. When I was speaking in top form, these patterns seemed to precede the words, in fact, drawing them out of me like melodies writing their own lyrics.

“Brother Kirn, you had the Holy Spirit. I saw it. I heard it. And I thank you for it.”

It wasn’t good form to take such compliments personally; I always made sure to credit the Mormon deities. My real muses dwelt on a lower plane, however, in the seventh row of pews, stage right, where the church’s trio of teenage beauties sat: Eliza, pristine and unattainable; Celia, restless and impressionable; and Kelly, whose nature blended the other girls’, making her a favorite with the boys.

“You were perfect last week,” she told me at a youth dance as “Nights in White Satin” heaved out of the speakers, simulating medievalism through overdubbing. “Want to smoke something illegal in my Dodge?”

“You liked my talk on backbiting that much?”

“It’s your delivery, your energy. I loved how you barely stopped for breath except for that wonderful pause after ‘incarnate.’ Give me a minute’s head start so no one catches us.”

That’s how my eloquence at church was graded: in parking-lot petting sessions, in wet French kisses. My school performance improved as a nice side effect and I was invited to join the declamation team by its chubby, mannish coach, Miss Normandy, who seemed to intuitively understand that speech and sex were linked for me. She let it be known that my teammates were all girls and that the regional tourney in Duluth involved an overnight stay in a motel. Of course I’d have to win district first, she said.

I did win, but not as handily as I’d hoped. My event, Small-Group Discussion, took place around an oval conference table that didn’t suit the soaring speaking style I’d perfected at the altar. Here the trick was directness and flexibility as I jousted with my tablemates over the less-than-galvanizing issue of government funding for the arts. It alarmed me that two of my rivals wore three-piece suits and toted brown accordion file folders stuffed with documentation for their points. It occurred to me then for the first time that I was vying for the world’s good things with a more cunning peer group than I’d realized, inside a broader, taller stadium.

“Subsidies, by removing risk,” I said, “promote stagnation and suppress unorthodoxy.” I’d emptied my clip in one big burst, an error. On my next turn to speak, I fired more slowly, with lower-caliber rounds. The judges scribbled on their clipboards, seeming to ratify my shift in tactics. It relaxed me to see this and boosted my confidence, which seemed to rattle the boys in suits. They clung to their note cards, spoke stiffly, forgot to gesture, and guaranteed me passage to the regionals.

I harmed myself the night before the match by staying up till dawn trying to walk off and bathe away the phosphorescent curlicues of dread loosed in my brain by a drugged cupcake I’d eaten with a teammate in her motel room. I hadn’t fully recovered when I found myself battling a girl with close-set eyes and the excessively brushed straight hair of a virginal prodigy. Here was a force I’d never faced before: the supercharged purity of postponed puberty augmented by early viola training.

It rolled me over. “You’re absolutely right, Kim. There’s nothing I can add to what you’ve said.”

Girl wonder seemed miffed at me. “You’re conceding?”

“Yes.”

I consoled myself for the loss with sacred oratory and carnal tussles in Kelly’s Dodge, whose interior she’d regaled with cultic bric-a-brac: a pentagram medal on a silver chain, a black rabbit’s foot dangling from the rearview mirror, Led Zeppelin decals in the corners of the windows. Such teeny-bopper occultism was rare with Mormon teens. The church gave the devil short shrift in its theology, diminishing his allure among young misfits.

“Why all the Lucifer?” I asked.

“Intelligence. He’s the viceroy of intelligence.”

I’d never heard this. “That’s God, I thought.”

“God created us to be obedient. Thought was the contribution of the Dark One.”

“You’re sure on that?”

“Read Genesis. Read
Steppenwolf
. You want to know what, Walter?”

“I do.”

“I think you’re one of His chosen. His elect. That’s why you speak so well. He’s in your brain.”

I started avoiding Kelly after that. Her notion that I had a supernatural patron obliged me to dazzle her, I felt, to keep the flourishes and wonders coming. It was too much to live up to. And I was tiring of church, tiring of arranging rides to services and of having to cover my parents’ absences with lies about health emergencies and such. I started spending more Sundays on the farm, directing my speeches on chastity and honor to our team of hulking Belgian mares. Sometimes, when they stamped their anvil feet, shivering the floorboards of their stalls, or loosed a long rolling shudder of dense muscle along their glossy flanks, I imagined they were responding to my eloquence. There was something at work in me, something strong and strange, and I wondered if Kelly’s theory wasn’t right. My father’s behavior over the past year had shown me that people’s wills can be invaded by inexplicable forces and agencies. I decided it might be time that I acknowledged them. Angels or devils? I didn’t really care. I wanted them on my side, that’s all I knew.

A
t the beginning of my tenth-grade year a large cardboard box marked FRAGILE arrived at school. It was brought to the classroom of Mr. Ka, our fussy Korean accounting instructor, and opened with razor blades by a pair of science teachers who behaved like archaeologists breaking the seal on an Egyptian tomb. After folding back the box’s lid and peering inside for a few moments as though considering how best to proceed, they gingerly removed its contents: a slightly smaller box, this one made of Styrofoam. Mr. Ka’s tense face drew tighter still as the razor blades were deployed again, but when the precious cargo was finally liberated, swept clean of foam crumbs and placed upon his desk, he beamed like a kid who’d asked Santa for a sled and been given a working flying saucer.

The thing was a computer—the first one designed for use by average people, according to Mr. Ka. He said that few schools of our size, or any size, were fortunate enough to own one yet, meaning that we, his students, would get a “major head start on the future” when we became familiar with the device. And we shouldn’t be fooled by its modest size, he said. Inside this machine lay the power of a thousand, maybe ten thousand pocket calculators. Inside this machine was the potential to generate telephone directories for America’s ten most populous cities. Inside this machine were lucrative careers for everybody in this room.

“So tomorrow,” he said, “we get started on tomorrow.”

It was a slow start; so slow it wasn’t a start. Our first problem—and our last one, it turned out; indeed, our
only
one—was philosophical. How could we know if the thing was working properly before we knew how it worked or how to work it? We read our computer books, hunting for the answers, searching for clues as to what the answers might look like, hunting for terms and phrases and sentences comprehensible to people who didn’t already know the answers. We read the books individually and silently, meaning that there was no way to determine who among us was just pretending to read them in the hope that others would actually read them and explain their findings to the rest of us. I was one of the real readers at first, but when I realized I wasn’t making headway, I became one of the simulated readers. By scratching my chin and glancing off into space and generally appearing vexed and baffled, I labored to make my act convincing, which I felt was my duty to anyone still persevering toward our goal. My feigned struggles might give them heart, or shame them out of quitting. Either way, the chances might increase that someday someone in Mr. Ka’s computer class would bring the inert beige box to life.