Read The Learners: A Novel (No Series) Online
Authors: Chip Kidd
The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (29 page)
Get this train moving, for the love of God. I’m dying. I can’t die here. Not part of the plan.
He grabs the paper bag next to him and unfurls the crumpled lip, hauling out a bulging submarine sandwich a good foot and a half long. He pokes at least a third of it into his piggy maw. And chomps. Chewing, in broad, barnyard fashion.
What an omnivorous swine. God, how I hate him. Hate what he is—the gluttony of the world. He is Man at his worst, exactly the kind of scum Milgram is lifting the rock to expose.
Don’t stare, don’t stare. I do anyway—it is like watching a boa constrictor unhinging its jaw and devouring a toddler. Then, it all just stops, completely this time: the hoagie suspended in front of him, he is not moving anymore. As if someone just took the key out of his back. What the piss is going on?
He gapes at me, full in the face, his hoggy hole full and dilated with a horrid muck of wet bread and mangled cold cuts. The smell is nauseating.
Now he’s trying to tell me something.
“Ack.”
“Hmmm?”
“Ack.” No, not trying to say something. No.
He is choking.
Choking on the sandwich.
Turning blue.
No. Don’t leave me. Please. Pleez.
Puleeze. I tri to stan. Stand. Oh.
It’s hard. Haaarrrrrrd.
Ooooh.
Da drugz. Da drugz arr wurking doo faszt. Doo faszt.
Nooooo. Nodd now. Nodd now! Gedd upp gedd upp! Eye halve do helb him.
Heel dye.
Vall. Eye vall ondo thuh vloor. No gedd up. Heez joking. Joking!
Breed. Eye muz breed. Breed deeeeeeeb.
Eye bull mi-zelf ubb. Pleez, pleeze. Eye maig mi arm muve. Yez. Eye bull id ubb and pudd mi fingas doun hiz throde. All da whey doun.
Id duzzunt wurg. Dammid!!
Zo eye hawl ovv annd zlapp im onda baag! Az hart az eye can!!
Hee jurggs annd jurggs. Pulleeze.
Eye zlap im ah-ggen!
Annd. Yez!!
Wee vall do thuh vloor ann hee heevez, hee…vom-eddz all ova mee.
And I vom-edd all ova
him
. Da bills. Dey arr beeyoudifool.
Hee iz shaygging annd shaygging. Annd breeding. Breeding.
Dadd fadd sunuvabidge izz BREEDING!
Annd eye um…Habby.
Eye um HABBY. AH-GGEN!!
.
for
J. D. McClatchy
THANK YOU
Colin Harrison
Sarah McGrath
Amanda Urban
Dave Eggers
Joan Brennan
David Rakoff
Charles Burns
Julie Lasky
Tim Young
Debbie Millman
Dan Frank
Michael Bierut
The Bogliasco Foundation
John Fulbrook
Chris Ware
While this is indeed a work of fiction, all details regarding Professor Stanley Milgram’s 1961 “obedience” experiments are historically accurate (including all of the language in the recruitment ad), based on Milgram’s own published accounts and repeated viewings by the author of his documentary film footage of the procedure.
A mere twenty-seven years old when he conceived the idea, Milgram was scoffed at by his colleagues in the psychology department of Yale University after they read his proposal. They predicted that only one-tenth of one percent of the subjects would deliver the highest level of shocks. The results, after nearly a year of study: Over sixty percent of the hundreds of test subjects administered the full 450 volts.
The obedience project brought Milgram nearly instant worldwide fame; but ironically, it also may have led to his undoing. He was denied tenure at Yale and then Harvard, largely based on accusations that the experiments themselves were unethical and put their participants through undue emotional stress. Legislation was soon introduced that would render conducting such an experiment impossible today. Milgram (who also originated the theory of “six degrees of separation”) eventually became a tenured professor of social psychology at the City University of New York. He died of a heart attack, in 1984, at the age of fifty-one.
