Read The Learners: A Novel (No Series) Online
Authors: Chip Kidd
The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (21 page)
“Well, not entirely.” He took another swig. Something about this was embarrassing him.
“What else, then? Mimi didn’t even see my portfolio. I don’t mean to make a big deal out of it, it’s just something that’s been nagging at me lately. Look, you’ve been so great to me, I don’t want to—”
“You have Darwin’s tubercles.”
He didn’t say it like a disease, but it didn’t sound normal, either.
“I have what? Darwin’s what?”
“Tubercles. Heh. These things.” He reached out, his great, thick hand at the side of my head; the fingers—fat as candles and stained midnight blue at the tips— gently plucked at a small part of my left ear, along the outer edge. It was the first time he’d ever touched me.
“This flap of skin, that juts out, here.”
His chapped thumb eased over it, this thing that until two seconds ago hadn’t existed at all—back and forth, one, two, three times. And oh. Sublime. Oh my God: This is what it was like to be happy again. Happy. To be the old me. The Before me.
Please, please don’t stop. Sketch, if only I were able to tell you: You could touch me like that for the rest of eternity. I could become Happy again.
“Not many people have ’em. They’re called Darwin’s tubercles—he thought they represented a higher level of human development. Not sure exactly what a tubercle is, but you get the idea.” He pulled his hand back, taking my Happiness with it. “Mimi read that in
Reader’s Digest
once, and ever since she’s always looking for ’em. Tip’s got ’em, too. Heh.” Staring into his beer. “That Mimi. She’s a pip. But listen.” He became serious. “She was right. You’re a damn good assistant, one of the best I’ve ever had. I mean it.”
If I could only believe that. “Thanks.” My great gift: mutant ear flaps. That’s why she kept staring at me. But not at me, at my ears. Because my ears were going to get her the Buckle Shoes account.
Normally, Before, that would have given me a good, long laugh.
WHO’DA THUNK?
C
ONTENT AS
I
RONY
.
Hi-dee-ho! It’s time for me. Irony!! Now, if you’re anything like me, you probably don’t quite grasp the concept. Isn’t that ironic?
Let’s see, how to explain…well, it’s easier by example than definition. Say you came upon a neon sign, brightly lit, that spelled out I H
ATE
N
EON
. Well, the reason that would be very ironic is because it’d be telling you one thing while showing you the opposite. Confused? Sorry, but you really should get used to me.
Because you know what? Right now, I’m pretty obscure and relatively unused in the culture, but I’m about to, as they say, “hit the big time.” Bigger than anyone could imagine. Soon I’ll be everywhere. Look for me as the artless paintings of Campbell’s soup cans that sell for millions (I’m not kidding!); the automobile ad with the picture of the tiny Volkswagen Beetle with the word
L
EMON
printed underneath it; the album cover for a record called
T
WO
V
IRGINS
that depicts a nude man and woman who’ve just had sex. And in
W
HATEVER
H
APPENED TO
B
ABY
J
ANE
,
when Bette Davis taunts Joan Crawford because she’s a cripple, I’ll be right there with her. You see: Joan is in a wheelchair as a result of previously trying to run over Bette with a car—but in the process she ended up turning herself into a parapeligic instead! Whatta scream.
But I’m nothing new. I’ve been around forever. Consider the idea:
Shakespeare dies of cancer of the tear-duct.
Puccini, cancer of the throat.
Get it?
Get ME?
At 4:00 a.m. the next morning, I woke with a start to the mosquito drone of the TV test pattern, and in a moment of revelation its true identity became dreadfully clear: stoking, growing, gaining speed; it was the front end of a distant but oncoming locomotive, mightily bearing the terrible freight of my unforgivable crimes, piled one on the other—Himillsy’s death, murdering Wallace, erasing Krinkle Karl. It was far off, yet heading straight for me. I was outrunning it, for now. But I was losing ground, and tiring out. At some point it would catch up with me. And what then?
I kept waking up every day and Himillsy was still dead. Because of me. Because the ad I designed led her to doom. And how many others?
My goodness, such
drama.
I kept going to the bathroom, taking showers, wiping and washing my body…with murderous hands. I kept telling myself I’d get over the aftermath of the experiment, like a stubborn case of flu, but the symptoms persisted, intensifying. Eye contact in the mirror was now out of the question. I just wasn’t getting better.
The train could not be stopped.
What I needed was impossible: I needed to take the experiment again and do the right thing this time. To reverse it. Erase it.
Ridiculous.
And yet. There was no alternative. I at least had to get back into that lab, I
had
to. If I could just see it again, be in it, talk to Milgram, maybe I could divert the train. I had to try.
It wasn’t hard to conjure an excuse; what crippled me was making the call. I picked up the phone five times before I was able to dial the number.
“Dr. Milgram’s office.”
“May I speak with him, please?”
“I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting. Can I help you?”
I explained who I was. To my surprise, he remembered me. And I remembered him. Williams.
I tried my best to sound like I wasn’t a nut case. To sound normal. Whatever that was. “Dr. Milgram had said to call, if I had…if I needed anything.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the experiment. I’m kind of fascinated by it, actually, and I know this will sound strange, but I can’t help but wonder…”
“Yes?”
“I mean, I keep picturing the room. Where the experiment was.”
“The room.”
“Right. I just can’t figure out how. How did Dr. Milgram observe me? He was nowhere in sight.”
Silence, then, “Can you hold a moment?”
“Certainly.”
There was a muffled discussion in the background. A short back-and-forth, “You’re not with the press, are you?”
“Oh, no sir. I’m in the design business, and I’m just curious as to how your experiment is…constructed.
It’s really just for my own edification.” Such as it was.
More discussion. Finally, “You could come back for a brief visit. We can show you the set-up.”
“Oh thanks!” Did I sound too eager? “That would be great, thanks. Thank you so much.”
Williams, ever spindly in his ash-gray lab coat and wire-frames, met me at the bottom of the basement steps. It was nine o’clock on Saturday morning, a half hour before their first appointment.
I stepped cautiously into the lab. The scene of the crime—there was the shock generator, the microphone, the sheets of word pairs. It all looked so innocent, like a hobbyist’s ham radio. Unthreatening. “In through here.” I was led to a small office recessed from the side of the test area. One entire wall was a window, looking into both parts of the adjoining room—a cutaway view of the teacher’s station and the other side of the partition where the learner would be “shocked.”
No, not a window. A two-way mirror. Of course. How could I have been so stupid, so unobservant?
“Hi there.” Dr. Milgram rose from his small makeshift desk. “I’ll admit I was hesitant to have you back.” He looked a little tired, but the trace of exhaustion was alloyed with an underlying excitement. Almost a giddiness. He motioned for us to sit. “Keeping what we’re doing here a secret until we can publish our findings has me a little paranoid. But then I remembered your question at the end of your session. That was very clever. So I’m trusting you.” He scanned the room—Wallace had just come in, removing his overcoat—then back to me. “Why did you want to come back here? You said you had some questions?”
“Yes, yes I do. Thank you for allowing me to revisit. I must tell you that I so admire what you’re doing.” I looked him squarely in the eye. “I would never, ever discuss this with another person, let alone talk to the press.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that. What do you do, may I ask?”
“I’m a graphic designer.”
“Oh really? That’s very interesting. Are you an artist?”
“I never know how to answer that. Not really, no. At least I don’t think so.”
“All right then,” he grinned, “what do you do all day?”
I tried to make a chuckling sound. “I wonder sometimes myself. I’m in advertising.” I decided ahead of time not to tell him I laid out the ad for the experiment. Somehow I thought that would suggest some sort of ulterior motive. And of course there was one.
“Really. That’s quite a profession.” He continued,
“I’d like to make a study of that myself sometime.”
“Yes. Um. So, I wanted to ask you,” I fumbled,
“there’s this friend of mine, who I think participated in your experiment. Probably in early August. A girl. If I gave you a name, could you verify it?”
This was obviously out of the question. “No, I’m afraid not,” he said soberly. “Something like that would be confidential. I hope you understand. Today’s an exception.”
“Yes, of course, I’m sorry.” Damn. “But women can take the experiment, right? The ad says ‘men.’ ”
“Does it?” He frowned. “I’ll have to check that. We certainly welcome both sexes.”
Aha. “So, how is your research going? Are you pleased?”
“That’s a good question. ‘Pleased’ is an odd way to put it. I mean, when one suspects foul play, is one pleased to find it?”
“Foul play.”
“Oh that’s just me being dramatic. It’s early in the day. Ignore it.”
“I can’t ignore it. Which I mean as a compliment.”
He smiled. Then scowled in thought, looking into the glass, the lab beyond it. “What’s been surprising is how many subjects have gone to the end, administered the highest shock. When I proposed this experiment to the Yale psych board last year, they practically laughed at me and said that less than one-tenth of one percent would do it. They almost didn’t approve the funding, thought I was wasting my time.” He closed his eyes. “They were wrong.”
“Wrong. By how many? How many have—”
“So far, sixty-five percent. On average, from the beginning.”
Including me. “That’s…unbelievable.”
“It was. It’s not anymore.” He took a deep breath.
“Do you want the jargon?”
I wanted as much as I could get from this man. “Please, yes.”
“Okay, here’s the theory.” He cleared his throat, turned his head away. “When an individual merges…into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality…” running his hand along the base of the two-way glass, eyes on something far away, he’d memorized it, “…freed of human inhibition. Mindful only of the sanctions of authority.” A rehearsed speech, and totally convincing.
