Walter Kirn

by Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

  “Who?” I demanded. But I suspected I knew: Merrill, the Southern kid who’d sat across from me. He was fat in a way that suggested some imbalance, some inability to eliminate fluids, with a broad, soggy face and little seedlike eyes. He wore a coat and tie to class. We’d never actually argued, we’d never tangled, indeed we’d hardly spoken to each other, but we had sour chemistry from the day we met. A mystery. Some pairs of people are just natural adversaries.

  “Not only is that irrelevant,” said Rob, “it’s also confidential.”

  “Not according to the Constitution. The right to face your accuser—”

  “I know, I’ve heard. We get that old debating point a lot.” Rob slid the folder from underneath the bowl and withdrew two sheets of paper. He laid them next to each other on the table, oriented so I could read them—copies of the Spanish test’s fourth page covered in my jagged handwriting.

  “Question twelve,” said Rob. “You erased a wrong answer here, you’ll notice, and wrote in the same one the girl beside you gave. That’s awfully damning, I have to say. This thing will go quicker if you just admit it.”

  But would it go any better? I doubted it. The evidence, Rob was correct, seemed fairly grim, especially the apparent pressure I’d used in making the erasure; I’d almost rubbed right through the paper.

  My righteous outrage turned to gloom. Where would I go after Princeton sent me packing? Cozy, forgiving Minnesota would have me because it had everyone, that was just its nature, but to me this would feel like crawling back into bed. My life would be like one long sick day. That left the mythic bus ride to New York City and the descent into Times Square degradation. Eventually, if the needle didn’t take me, I might win the pity of a passing executive who’d give me a job in the basement of his headquarters refilling tape dispensers or sorting parcels. On my breaks I could write a novel or learn a language. It might turn out just fine. It might be how I should be living now, in fact.

  “This totally blows for you, I’m sure,” said Rob. “Maybe while I grab more Dr Pepper you could think about a statement. Show some remorse, why don’t you? That never hurts. You want the same amount of ice?”

  “I do.”

  My gaze drifted back to the test sheets as Rob walked off. By the time he got back he was facing Perry Mason. Some desperate survival instinct unleashed a latent gift for legal reasoning.

  “Question twelve on test sheet four,” I said, tapping a finger on exhibit A. “The critical word here—the one you say I stole—is ‘sueño.’ Is that agreed?”

  Rob granted me nothing.

  “And ‘sueño’ is the right answer, is it not?”

  Silence. Rob infuriated me. The law was supposed to be blind, not deaf and dumb.

  “It is indeed the right answer. And so is mine. Is it possible, Rob—and I submit it is; I submit it’s even likely—that I arrived at this answer not through copying but in the same way my classmate did? Through knowledge?”

  Rob pushed back all the way into his armchair, his face as rigid as a hieroglyph. In the Star Chamber of the Princeton Honor Committee, the sunlight of logic seldom shone, I gathered.

  Rob parted his stony lips. “You looked around,” he said. “Someone, our witness, saw you look around.”

  “I was checking my progress against my classmates’.”

  “You noticed the answer.”

  “To look is not to notice. To look is physical, not mental.”

  “But you erased what you’d already written.”

  “It’s a crime to correct a mistake? To think again?”

  “How do we know it was thinking, not copying?”

  “You don’t know. You can’t know. Only I can, Rob.”

  His whole body perked up. “Then you admit it.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “That you know”.’

  “I didn’t say that. I said that I’m in a position to. You aren’t.”

  “So do you?”

  “Know?”

  Rob nodded.

  “It’s possible. But why would I ever tell you?”

  “The Honor Code.”

  “Versus the Fifth Amendment. Rock dulls scissors.”

  “Guilty or innocent? Yes or no,” Rob said.

  I ate a pretzel and let Rob’s anger hang there. I thought he should have to feel it in the air. I thought it might force him to face his ugliness. Then I said, “I heard this from a senior. In France there’s a critic, I forget his name, who teaches that antonyms, words that mean the opposite, don’t really mean the opposite at all. They aren’t the only alternatives, that is. There are other words between them. And all around them.”

  “Fascinating. Except this isn’t France.”

  “You tell me to choose, but the words I’m meant to choose from—‘innocent,’ ‘guilty’—aren’t my only choices. I choose another one. ‘Unconvictable.’”

  Rob pressed a thumb tip under the bony ridge between his eyebrows and just above his nose. He blew out a breath and let his head nod forward until the thumb tip held it like a hook. It looked like a stress-relief trick they taught to athletes.

  “You can go. We’re finished here,” he said.

  “For now or forever?”

  “I have to speak to people.”

  “I’m sorry I got prickly. What I’d wish you’d admit is I shouldn’t have to choose. Not ‘innocent,’ not ‘guilty,’ not anything. I shouldn’t be in this position. You have no case”’

  Rob thumbed his brow as I stood up from the couch. I pitied him, suddenly. He’d surely been cajoled into this job, and now, having realized he wasn’t really up to it—and having taken for granted the spacious dorm room, which had seemed at the time like such a prize—he probably wanted to murder the smooth talker who’d recruited him.

  “I’m very sorry we met this way,” I said.

  “How else would we have met?” said Rob. An excellent point. We came from different tribes. And now I knew to avoid his, to not go near it, the same way I gave a wide berth to Nassau Hall and, not long afterward, to the Persian rug.

  The fear of a terrible reckoning, of expulsion, of banishment from the ninety-ninth percentile and a quick trip to whatever hell is reserved for fallen overachievers who’ve mastered or out-maneuvered every challenge except adjusting to the company of their own merciless species, hit me on the last day of Christmas break, on the way to the airport in my father’s car. I belched sour orange juice into my throat as I remembered the limp piano wires, the toxic odor of the frying Sony, the glorious, heedless manic rush of tearing apart my prison with my bare hands. With motive galore and sole access to the crime scene, how had I expected to get away with it? I hadn’t, obviously. This seemed to mean that I’d been courting punishment, soliciting some absolute rejection that would remove the tension of awaiting one. I didn’t buy it, though. The better explanation, I believed, was rooted in Julian’s theories about consciousness, at least as I’d been able to understand them. We humans had come to believe over the centuries that our thoughts and actions belonged to us, that they were wholly ours, from our own skulls, and that had led us to feel we could control them or, when we couldn’t, that we should answer for them. But maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe, at times, the mind slipped back, evolution and history reversed themselves, and the ancient phantoms regained command.

  My defense, if it ever came to mounting one, would be possession, I decided. Or regression, that is. And it might just be the truth. A throwback lobe had made me slay the Steinway.

  My father exited the freeway and took a shortcut through downtown St. Paul that was only a shortcut under ideal conditions. As usual, they didn’t obtain today. There was construction. Then there was an accident. Luckily, we’d set out early, so being late for my flight was not our worry. Our worry—not just mine, I knew—was having extra time to talk but nothing much to say.

  “So it’s been good? You’re getting used to it?” My father had asked the same thing at Christmas dinner and I’d answered the same w
ay I did now.

  “It’s different. It’s a different kind of place.”

  “I can’t disagree. And it’s tough sometimes, I bet. But I made the best friends of my life at that damned place and you will, too, if you make a little effort.”

  I didn’t respond. Too anxious. And now too sad. I’d met my father’s wondrous college friends—all three or four of them—though only briefly, and never more than twice. They lived spread out around the country, mostly in the East, and every few years one would pass through Minnesota and show up at our dinner table, where my brother and I were expected to receive them like long-lost relatives. They always got drunk before the meal was over. Often, they arrived drunk. Then they told stories about getting drunk. For a few days after they left my father would talk about how much he missed them, how much they meant to him, what fine guys they were, but then a year would go by without him mentioning them, except when he was drunk.

  By the time we cleared the congestion and delays I was wondering if I should go back to school at all. I might be arrested on arrival. I’d certainly be given another bill; a fantastically large bill that I couldn’t duck and that my father would learn about eventually, possibly from a judge, who’d make him pay it. I considered confessing in the car to him; we still had fifteen minutes before the airport. I studied his profile, trying to gauge his mood—his character, really—and guess how he’d respond. He was dressed for work in an old suit bought from a thrift store called Next to New. Refusing to pay full price for office wear was part of his rebellion against the business world, as was his fondness for Copenhagen snuff. He spat a big gob of it out his rolled-down window and the subzero January air instantly froze it in a fan shape on the backseat window behind his shoulders.

  “You know how you say about 3M sometimes that they discourage being your own man?”

  “I guess I’ve said that. Or felt that. Sometimes. Why?”

  “Princeton can be like that, too.”

  “I’m sure it can be. That’s just the world for you, isn’t it?” he said.

  He craned his neck, merging back onto the freeway, and shot into a gap between two trucks. The daredevil move convinced me to stop talking. Instead of listening, he’d been gauging road speeds. I think he wanted me to know it, too. I think he was trying on purpose to cut me short. Desolation was rolling off me in waves and he wasn’t stupid; he sensed I had bad news. He’d probably sensed it since I’d gotten home. But bad news from me angered him, I’d always felt. It might require him to perform some duty, and duty, to my father, always meant loss of freedom, never an opportunity for strength.

  I knew this because I thought the same way.

  “Welcome, welcome, welcome,” said Jennifer.

  She was alone on the sofa drinking tea and leafing through a magazine. The common room had been restored. The TV was turned on, the rug looked clean and sleek, and on the piano was a sheet of music and Peter’s ashtray, bristling with butts. A Christmas miracle. And ominous.

  “How was your break?”

  I shrugged. My throat had closed.

  “Mine was perfect. Just heavenly,” she said.

  I smiled, re-smiled, dipped my head, and pushed down the hall against a current of dread. Each step took the energy of a hundred steps, the surge against me was that strong, but I told myself that if I made it to the bedroom, where I could hear Joshua singing “Heart of Gold,” I could plead with the Lord to turn back time.

  “You do know you’re going to jail,” said Jennifer before I’d gotten very far. “My father’s lawyers will see to it. You’re toast.”

  I stayed in my bunk for thirty-six hours, feigning the flu and subsisting on buttered dinner rolls that Joshua brought wrapped in napkins from the dining hall and set on my desk while I coughed and hacked and shivered. He allowed me a full day of drama before explaining, in his calm yet disquieting Quaker way, that my roommates were serious indeed about pursuing criminal charges but might be persuaded to show leniency if I made restitution and showed remorse.

  “For what?” I croaked.

  “I’m just saying. I’m not judging. I’m not conveying any assumptions.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Make sure to eat.”

  Adam came by later in the day and, in return for my promise not to squeal on him, left me a joint he’d dipped in liquid cocaine. When I lit up after he left, a crow with a scrap of something pink and fleshy dangling from its horrid black beak landed on the ledge outside my window, fluffed its feathers, and started pacing. It seemed to expect me to let it in the room. I willed myself into unconsciousness. Nina was next to my bunk when I woke up but the crow was gone. I suspected a metamorphosis. Confirmation came when she produced a packet of effervescent vitamin powder that she ripped open with her teeth, drizzled into a glass of lukewarm water, and presented to me like a witch’s potion, still bubbling.

  “First you’re going to shower and brush your teeth. Then we’re going to a play,” she said. “And no, they’re not out there. The coast is clear.”

  But my nightmare continued in the theater. Student actors whose heads were wrapped in bandages and whose faces were covered with fake boils crawled and limped and writhed across the stage. Baby powder used to gray their hair came off in clouds and drifted through the lights. The set conjured up no specific place or period and had to be explained to me by Nina. It was a French insane asylum, she said, during the era of revolution. The script combined verse and screaming. Its meaning escaped me. When the actors flooded into the audience, snorting and cackling and spitting, I formed a grudge against the art of live performance itself. It seemed unfair that I couldn’t attack them back.

  At the Annex after the show I drank as much liquor as Nina had money for and let her discourse about Artaud and “the sickness,” whose nature she didn’t specify but which had been bred by society, not people. I failed to see the distinction—people were society. Nina treated my observation as a witticism rather than a point to be debated and I let it pass. It was frivolous, under the circumstances. The circumstances being my looming trial for felonious destruction of property. No date for it had been set, but it would come.

  “Don’t be silly. Don’t be histrionic. Their insurance covered the damage. All they want is an apology. And make it spectacular. Bended-knee stuff. Really.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Please.”

  “It must have been an intruder.”

  “This hurts to watch.”

  “This hurts to be seen doing.”

  “You have problems.”

  “Problems you must like,” I said. “May I ask you why?”

  “I’m sure you know.”

  “I truly don’t. I want to, though. Maybe then I’ll like them, too. Right now I hate them. Tell me.”

  “Doomed is sexy. Lost is a turn-on in cute smart boys. Come over to my house. You can play intruder.”

  I didn’t want to, but I did her bidding. I knew better, but I heeded her. As though she were not a girl I could put off, a human being I could disappoint, but an irresistible spirit from my own brain.

  The next day my phone rang. Nassau Hall. Or maybe it was an immaterial aide in the ethereal office of the provost. Or some dean who slept in a coffin in a closet infested with bats and spiderwebs. In Princeton’s neo-Gothic shadowland, the figures who spoke from the castle were all one ghost.

  The voice didn’t let me get a word in edgewise. It ordered me to gather up my things and move to a university-owned house a block away from campus. The voice provided an address and a room number as well as instructions on obtaining a door key. No discussion. Go immediately. Without saying so directly, the voice suggested that my prompt obedience would close the file on my vandalism. I hung up feeling relieved but mystified. Had justice been served, evaded, or postponed? I couldn’t imagine through what process, or on the basis of what evidence, what testimony, what arguments, my case had been adjudicated. I further feared that I’d incurred some debt, som
e burdensome institutional obligation. Was this how Princeton sucked students into the Honor Committee?

  Joshua came in while I was packing but didn’t inquire about my destination, just offered to help me fold my shirts and sweaters. His beatific detachment would be missed. He expected so little from me. He accepted so little. Whole weeks had passed when I’d hardly acknowledged his presence, had barely checked for his presence in the room, and yet, I realized now, he’d been there beside me almost the whole time. Mourning John Lennon. Playing hits from Godspell. Growing his beard in a corner.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “They’re making me move off campus, but it’s fine.”

  “Where off campus?”

  I gave the house’s address.

  “Lots of committed vegetarians there. They all pitch in in the kitchen. You might like that.”

  “If a space opens up,” I said, “you could move there, too. I’d like that.”

  He crossed the arms of my homely flannel shirt and neatly reduced it to a square that he set on top of the garments I’d folded myself. His packing skills put mine to shame. I clamped the suitcase between my knees, compressed it, latched it, and hoisted it off the floor. It was heavy with books that I’d vowed to read, not skim. I wanted to reform.

  Going out, I said, “I’m curious. How do Quakers pray?”

  “Why?” Joshua asked.

  “I heard you do it differently. Than Mormons, say.”

  “How do Mormons pray?”

  “The usual. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘amen.’”

  “We sit very still, in silence, and we listen.”

  “Listen for what?”

  “Whatever comes.”

  “Interesting. Does it matter where it comes from?”

  He cocked his head. “Not sure I get you there.”

  “I’m not sure I do, either.”

  In the common room, at the resurrected piano, Jennifer, Tim, and Peter were working on songs for an original musical Peter hoped to mount later in the semester. “Break a leg,” I said, going by. I meant it. But then, at the door, I regretted meaning it. I took a Quaker breath. “Break a leg,” I said again, but nicely. They didn’t look over at me. Their backs stayed turned.