Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) (7 page)

But there was no evidence that anyone read the books.

While we waited to learn to program by inspiration, we sought a breakthrough using trial and error. The effort failed because we lacked a usable definition of error. That’s when we stopped touching the device and chose to regard it as an icon or a totem. Our classes turned into speculative chats about the wonders the object might perform if instead of addressing it in COBOL or FORTRAN, we could interact with it in English. To heighten the atmosphere of possibility, we kept the thing plugged in. This warmed its obscurely coiled and bundled insides, releasing unappetizing chemical vapors.

“Say we could feed it every single play in Osceola’s offensive playbook. Maybe it would think up perfect defensive plays. And say it was hooked to earphones in our helmets and told us exactly how to run them. We might take state next year.”

Mr. Ka looked from Nils, the speaker, our starting center linebacker, to me, an occasional blocker during punt returns. “Assuming the Apple could do that, how would
you
feel?”

“Happy. Great. Why not?”

“You wouldn’t feel …
humbled
?
”

“I would,” said Pat, another starting player. He was stretched out at his desk beside the mechanism, moving one hand in circles above its head as though polishing its invisible halo. “I’d feel like, hey, I’m not needed, why play football? Why get your bell rung and bruise your shins instead of just goofing off with Pac-Man and drinking an ice-cold Schlitz?”

“Hey, I know,” a guy said. “Picture this, okay?” He stood and approached the Apple with widespread arms, softly fluttering his hands, like wings. It was a courtship dance, it seemed. “We win its trust. We come in peace, we tell it. We want it to help us read coma victims’ minds, say, or write another Shakespeare play. Then, very slowly, careful not to scare it, we reach out for its little plastic throat”—he curved his hands into a choking position—“and throttle it till it starts to spark and shit. Smoke rolls out of it, bells ring, sirens wail. The cockpits of jet planes go haywire, they explode, missile silos open by themselves, and a dozen Chinese robots go berserk and kill all the pandas at the zoo.”

“My hour hand just hit ten,” said Mr. Ka. “Tomorrow, gentlemen. Excellent. Most excellent. We didn’t waste our time today.”

A month or two into the class I grew dissatisfied. Yes, they were pleasant, our hours of dreamy bullshit, and yes, the Apple was quite a talisman, but did our mutual agreement to give up trying to operate the thing mean, perhaps, that the world had changed around us while we, for the first time in our young lives, had rejected change? It hadn’t been this way during the Apollo years. We’d built model rockets then, we’d studied weightlessness. Shouldn’t we be taking that approach? Perhaps, but we were uninspired. Computers, larger models than the Apple, existed already and other people ran them, a situation we found acceptable because it allowed us the freedom to live in ignorance while receiving the benefits of modernization. We were only sixteen but somehow we’d grown old.

“This is Jason, class,” said Mr. Ka late in the semester. The boy was a tadpole-shaped twelve-year-old, all head. “Jason will help us relate to the computer.”

“It’s pretty outrageous, this machine,” said Jason. “Move your chairs in. Form a circle, guys.”

The exhibition unveiled no technical mysteries, but it did help me understand the term “conservative” as I’d once heard it used by a friend’s father while he was watching the TV news. A conservative was a person who stopped adjusting once adjustment brought him no vital benefits. The commandment to us from kindergarten on had been to grow, to expand ourselves, to stretch, but there was another option, too, I saw. One could let others cope with novelty and concentrate on the familiar.

Jason continued trying to excite us. He divided a string of numbers that ran all the way to the right side of a notebook page by another monstrous sum which started with ten or twelve zeros behind a decimal point behind a minus sign. The printer was already printing out the answer while most of us were still mocking the equation, and it was at this instant that I became something I couldn’t name till later: a student of the liberal arts, devoted to concepts and ideas which didn’t depend on disembodied logic, on greater-than signs and parentheses and ampersands. This decision guided my studies from then on. The hard sciences were just too hard for me.

“Hey Jason,” said one of my buddies to the whiz kid over hamburger salad at lunch one day. “Ever have a girlfriend?”

“What do you think?”

“You’re
twelve
. Get with it.”

“Eleven and a half.”

“Ever
want
a girlfriend?”

“What do you think?”

“Processing. Thinking. Tabulating. Printing.” This was me, satirizing Jason’s thinking in a cartoonish, transistorized monotone. “Conclusion: Negative. Categorically.” Then I switched over to my natural voice. “Jason, your new name is Neuter Nine.” Then back to a female version of the main voice. “Testicular excision now commencing. Working. Working. Surgery complete.”

Jason went on eating his hot lunch. He hadn’t flinched. I hadn’t made him cry. Until then, I’d merely considered him ridiculous. Now I feared him. I rose and took my tray to a table across the room. I had a book with me. I pretended to read it. The others could have their weird symbols. I’d take words.

F
or me, the remainder of high school was a drinking party held in a cabin beside a lake, followed by three or four months of casual reading in world almanacs. I had some idea that a head all full of facts might smooth my transition into college now that my SAT results were in and the brochures were pouring into my mailbox. When Macalester said I could skip my senior year, I started saying goodbye to people. The rubber-gloved lunch ladies. Mr. Ka. The janitors. It was all over school that I wasn’t coming back.

My last, most uncomfortable goodbye was to Mr. C, the English teacher whose wife’s first pregnancy had forced him to quit the grad-school program that he hoped would turn him into a novelist. I’d started ducking him way back in the winter, declining an invitation to an Eagles show and not responding either way to his assertion that it would be a gas to eat a dozen peyote buttons and go to a late show of
Saturday Night Fever
. When he tried to reestablish contact by biking over to our farm one weekend and coaxing me into getting high while I brushed and groomed the horses, I told him I’d only take one hit because I was feeling guilty as a Mormon.

Now it was time to pay him a final call. I drove to his modular house one Sunday evening, walked up the gravel path past his kids’ yard toys—plastic tricycles, deflated basketballs—and knocked on his hollow-feeling vinyl door. His wife let me in. Around her and behind her were three or four fussy infants and toddlers. In the back of the room was her husband in his recliner wearing sunglasses, reading a book of poetry.

“Walt, the new Dire Straits came. Come on in. You’ll want to hear two of the tracks on headphones first.”

“I can’t really stay.”

“Miller High Life, can or bottle?”

“Can,” I said. A beer can is opaque. You don’t have to drink it to the bottom.

“I heard you just
crushed
those college boards.”

“I guess I have a knack for multiple choice.”

He held out the headphones with their ear cups spread. I smelled wet diapers and wanted to get away.

“Macalester took you. I heard that, too,” he said.

“I’m thinking I might only spend a year there. I’d like to go somewhere out East if I can swing it.” Then I decided to ask the question that was my real reason for dropping over. Mr. C. was the only person I knew who might be able to answer it.

“Is Harvard the top or is all of that just talk?”

“Yes, it’s the top, but the talk is why it is. That’s how engineered hysteria operates. That’s why the Ivy League doesn’t fear encroachment by the Soybean Alliance or Coal Confederation. It trains its students to spread its propaganda, which attracts even brighter students who go on spreading it.”

“What about Williams College? They sent a pamphlet.”

“I see you at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.”

“Why?”

“It’s where I went. A little intense but not obnoxious. Though I guess you could also try Princeton, where your dad went.”

“No one knows that. How do you?”

“I asked him in a parent-teacher conference. It surprised me. I thought he was lying. I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“Fitzgerald studied at Princeton. I’ve read Fitzgerald.”

“Except that he barely studied. And didn’t graduate. Eugene O’Neill, the same. They kicked him out. I’d be suspicious of a place like that. If you want to crawl drunk and naked through the snow after being raped by your best friend, there’s always Yale, of course.”

I looked at my wrist as though I wore a watch but had forgotten to put it on that day. Our talk had grown dispiriting.

“Another Miller?” said Mr. C. “I dug up a British Hendrix bootleg that’ll melt your temples through those headphones.”

I rose from the couch without signaling or asking. Mr. C. looked resigned. He stood up, too. We’d had a few good times together, but I was absorbed in my plans now, and he knew it. He knew he’d been just a stop along the way.

“Well, wherever you go,” he said, “skip the drinking games, don’t buy acid or uppers on the street, and always—I want you to promise—wear a rubber. Even if her daddy’s very rich.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Funny.”

“Now get out of here.”

And that’s exactly what I did.

T
he year before I left for Princeton, during my last semester at Macalester, something happened to remind me that I’d chosen correctly in leaving the Midwest. My high school invited me back for senior prom as a sort of returning celebrity and I was given a choice of two exchange students as dates for the upcoming dance. One, a French girl, Genevieve, was conventionally pretty, with the sort of brown skin that looks fine with a few moles on it and isn’t terribly marred by a dark hair or two. The second girl, Lena, my favorite, was a lithe, unblemished stunner whose skin seemed dusted in powdered gold. I don’t remember her country of origin. It was one of those small, frigid nations that at the time was partly subjugated by the Russians but would eventually break free and dominate the worldwide modeling scene.

The reason I had the choice of the two girls was that they intimidated my male classmates, who sensed—correctly, I think—that the exchange students abhorred our monotonous rural culture and were counting the hours until they could jet home to the bastions of strong dark coffee and avant-garde theater where they’d been raised and educated. The girls, it seemed clear to us, had lost some lottery that had assigned their more fortunate peers to such hot spots as Florida and San Francisco. The idea was that we were to play ambassadors to this pair of lovely travelers, convincing them of the United States’ benevolent, easygoing character, but instead our high school found their presence embarrassing, perhaps because they spoke better English than most of us and seemed caught up in issues of global concern about which we had scant knowledge and few opinions.

I was considered the exception. I liked the girls and was thought by my shy friends to have something in common with them because I was already enrolled in college and had learned there to talk politics, which allowed me to voice polite agreement with their uncharitable assessments of “America’s cultural imperialism.” The only problem, as the prom approached, was that I couldn’t imagine choosing Lena—my clear favorite between the girls—without offending Genevieve. When I let Lena in on my dilemma, she failed to see the trouble: we should attend as a group, she said, a trio. My face remained still as we talked this notion over, but behind my brow strange thoughts unfolded, dim scenarios of new behaviors, of unfamiliar sensations, exotic postures. I began to sense that my small-town high-school prom—my symbolic farewell to the Midwest—would also be my introduction to a welcome new life of cosmopolitan decadence.

Accompanied by my two dates, the drive from the dance in the school gymnasium to the after party at a lake took about three hours—hours I can’t account for except as a drastic reconfiguration of my accumulated heartland notions about “going all the way.” I recall specifically a big, sweet slug of syrupy fruit wine that passed from mouth to mouth and then was allowed to stream down a bare chin onto a pair of dark breasts with perfect moles, which snagged the liquid in glinting droplets that I was invited to lightly tongue away while another tongue, and then another, shaped themselves into slim, wet, fleshy cones and drove themselves deep, deep into my ear canals. Skirts came up, pants slipped off, and legs made V’s that turned into X’s and shifted on complex axes that allowed for wonders of sidelong friction that brought forth fetching squeaks and grunty purrs that primordially bridged all language gaps. Some new bond was being stirred in that car, some fresh form of international understanding that the Rotary Club, or whichever organizations sponsored the exchange program, might not have planned on but shouldn’t have been displeased by, so intimately did it shrink our globe. I’d grown up a good son of rural Republican Minnesota, but now I was a citizen of the world. When we finally reached the party we smelled like sin, and not American sin but a deep-brewed funk of Romanized corruption that caused me to compulsively sniff my hands whenever I lifted my cup to sip my beer.

My buddies swarmed in to share their prom-night war stories, and my girls slipped away past the bonfire into the trees, leaving me alone to contemplate—with the distaste and contempt that I assumed they suffered from every moment of their visits here—-just how stupid Minnesota was. How stupid we all were, here in crass America. Everywhere I looked I saw the evidence. The barbarous chest-pounding of our square-jawed prom king as he bellowed “Seniors rule!” across the lake. The way the homely girl we’d nicknamed “Critter,” and who pathetically answered to the name, sat alone and shoeless on a log, dipping her toes in the froggy, fetid water. And the music! The music was the worst. Ted Nugent blaring at teeth-rattling volume from the tape deck of someone’s flame-streaked red Camaro. How had I ever borne this gruesome exile?