Walter Kirn

by Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

  I finessed an exit from the encounter, and over the next few days I taught myself how to disguise a fugue state while in public. The secret was to mirror others’ expressions, not perfectly but approximately, scratching my forehead when they rubbed their chins or leaning back when they leaned to the side. Continuity was important, too. I had to maintain a flow of gestures that mimicked engagement, interest, and reflection, and I had to be sure not to freeze while choosing the next one. I learned that the more intently I seemed to listen, the less I would be expected to speak. Oddly, this caused people to open up to me. Friends who’d once seemed shy and awkward to me became loquacious and gregarious. It was as though by suppressing my own voice, I’d liberated theirs, and I saw in their faces a new affection for me. I noticed I was getting waves and winks from classmates who used to whisk past me with lowered heads.

  I blamed my condition on exhaustion. One night I slept for twenty hours straight. When I finally got up, the floor felt like a waterbed; I had to brace myself against a chair. Then I heard vermin inside the walls. I knew that the noises came from warming water pipes, but I couldn’t stop picturing whiskered rodents nibbling through the plaster into my room. Having slept through breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I made my way to a convenience store next to the train station at the edge of campus, but the profusion of snack foods on the shelves swamped my decision-making center. I returned empty-handed to my dorm.

  My aphasia worsened by the day. Words were disappearing from my memory like defective bulbs in a strand of Christmas lights. The words didn’t vanish in order of difficulty. One morning in the shower, swabbing my chest with a slick white lump of something, I lost track of “soap.” At lunch at the Terrace Club “bread” and “vinegar” blinked out. But trickier words persisted. In a religion class one afternoon the professor wrote “telos” on the board. Easy. A synonym for “purpose.” But what was the stick of plastic in my right hand? And what was the black stuff issuing from its tip?

  For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grim, self-conscious labor. I began most of my sentences with “the.” Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It became my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness—the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. “The book is always …” “The book is thought to …” “The book is green and …” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

  There, I could rest. I’d done it. An hour’s work.

  As compensation for these agonies I allowed myself nights of immobility in the Terrace Club TV room. Other viewers came and went, squeezing in next to me on the crumbling sofa. They included a girl whose family had pioneered the African diamond-mining industry, lent their name to the nation of Rhodesia, and founded the Rhodes Scholarships. She seemed to like me, and I envisioned a marriage that would entitle me to a splendid estate. It wasn’t a farfetched notion, either, for here she was, my princess, within arm’s reach. And yet something kept me from pursuing her. It wasn’t just my muteness. It was dread. Dread of exposure, of failure, and of collapse, but mostly dread of gaining what I sought (distinction, others’ envy, the world itself) and discovering that it wasn’t I who’d sought it.

  My education was running in reverse as my mind shed its outermost layer of signs and symbols and shrank back to its dumb, preliterate core. I lay on my bed with a notebook at my side (in case my faculties suddenly returned) and tried to imagine a future for myself that wouldn’t require verbal communication. Other than a job as a night watchman, I couldn’t come up with anything. My dreams, when I finally managed to nod off, were full of sensory absurdities: handguns firing with cooing sounds, garden hoses spraying streams of sand. I woke after every one of them, woke fully, as though it were morning, time to wash and dress, and only by checking my watch (two thirty a.m.) did I manage to keep myself in bed. To fall back asleep, to relax, I had to smoke—a total of three or four cigarettes, most nights—and by sunrise my system was still so charged with nicotine that I had trouble handling a toothbrush. Soon streaks of blood appeared along my gum line, welling up into the cracks between my teeth and making me look like a wolf over a kill. I rinsed off the blood with Listerine, which stung, and then scourged my raw mucus membranes with yet more smoke, hungry for its noxious particles in a way that I no longer was for eggs and orange juice.

  My breakdown climaxed with a strange prank that could have been taken straight from a bad novel about collegiate social Darwinism. I was watching TV in the Terrace Club library when in walked Leslie, a handsome blond campus prince—the descendant of a legendary industrialist—whom I knew to be one of the Joy Division’s high chieftains but had never felt worthy of engaging in conversation.

  “Walter, may I speak with you?” he said. I was astonished that he knew my name.

  I followed him outside to his car, a new European sports coupe with leather seats, where he asked me to help him with a “trust experiment” related to one of his sociology classes. He couldn’t describe the experiment, he said, because it might prejudice the results, and I didn’t press him. I wanted him to like me. I wanted him to owe me, too, perhaps. Having someone like him in my debt, if only slightly, might come in handy someday, especially if I kept on deteriorating.

  Leslie started the car as I buckled in next to him. His instructions were simple: don’t speak and don’t resist. Then he blindfolded me with a strip of fuzzy dark cloth. He turned on a Laurie Anderson tape full blast—a gale of futuristic electronica—and drove without stopping for what felt like an hour, ending up on a bumpy stretch of road that I took to be rural and remote. At some point my blindfold loosened and slipped down, and I resecured it without being asked. That’s how trusting I wanted to appear.

  The car stopped moving. The music ceased. Leslie got out, walked around to my side, opened the door, set his hands on my shoulders, and marched me forward across an expanse of spongy, uneven earth. He halted and commanded me to kneel, urging me down by pressing on my skull. I suspected by then that I’d been lured into a sadistic hazing ritual, but instead of lashing out or fleeing, I fantasized about the sort of club that I’d been deemed worthy of trying out for.

  “Remove the blindfold,” Leslie said.

  When I raised my dazzled eyes, I saw, about fifty yards in front of me, surrounded by stately trees, an actual castle, with countless tall windows, pediments, and columns. In the center of its crescent driveway stood an enormous dry fountain of leaping cupids.

  “My family’s estate,” said Leslie. “Behold, poor serf! Behold a power you will never know!”

  With that he ran back to his car and drove away.

  It took me three hours, walking and hitchhiking, to make it back to Princeton. The pills that I’d taken earlier with Adam turned the trip into an odyssey of spectral laughing faces in the sky and miasmic whirlpools underfoot. When I was finally safe inside my room, I asked myself why I’d been chosen for this elaborate torture session. I couldn’t come up with a satisfying answer. Rumor had it that Leslie was gay, but he’d tried nothing physical with me. Maybe he’d planned to and chickened out. Or maybe, while I was wearing the blindfold and the music was roaring in the car, he’d unzipped his jeans and masturbated. There was also a chance he felt encroached upon. He considered himself a sort of Olympian overseer at the campus’s hippest, most vicious student theater, and I’d been hanging out there fairly regularly, shooting the shit about plays I planned to write and my disagreements with Artaud, in the weeks before my cerebral crash. It hardly mattered, though. I burned with shame for bowing to his orders and blamed the pills, prescription opiates, for my craven passivity, though I knew that deep down the problem was ambition. The drugs I could cut do
wn or give up, as I vowed to almost every weekend, but not the ambition. Not the itch, the push.

  The next day, through Adam, I heard the story from Leslie’s side. I learned that he’d been spreading lies. He’d said he’d seduced me in the woods. He said I’d been easy, agreeable, a pushover. This cruel tale incensed me. None of it was true. Neither, sadly, was it entirely false. I could dispute it on a literal level, but not on the allegorical, so I chose not to speak about it at all. This was wildly frustrating for me but not difficult, because by then I could barely speak my name. And now I didn’t really want to.

  II CHOSE TO STAY IN PRINCETON FOR THE SUMMER RATHER than go home and shock my family with my listlessness and dissipation. I rented a room with a cot at the Terrace Club and took a job shelving books at Firestone Library. I also made a bargain with myself. If I couldn’t rebuild my brain within three months, I wouldn’t register for my senior year. And if my state worsened, I might kill myself. Should I decide that this was necessary, my model would be my favorite poet, John Berryman, who’d spent time around Princeton in the fifties but ended up, two decades later, in Minneapolis, teaching at the U of M, where he leaped from a bridge into the Mississippi. According to one account I’d heard, the river was covered with ice that day, so he’d actually jumped onto it. Either way, he’d succeeded. He met the silence.

  Hoping to stave off this meeting, I bought a dictionary and a thesaurus and instituted a daily regimen of linguistic calisthenics. My alarm clock woke me every morning at five, and for the next three hours I’d lie in bed, with my reference books propped open on my stomach, and repeat aloud, in alphabetical order, every word on every single page, along with its definitions and major synonyms. The ritual was humbling but soothing, and for the first time in my academic career I found myself making measurable strides, however minuscule. “Militate.” “Militia.” “Milk.” I spent as much energy on the easy words as I did on the hard ones—my way of showing contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise. And in truth, they were all hard words for me by then.

  My job in the library basement helped advance this program of self-styled mental reconstruction. Working under a young crew boss, Dan, who belonged to a self-improvement cult masked as an end-hunger organization, I emptied one-hundred-yard-long shelves of books, loaded them onto rolling metal carts, and transferred them to new shelves, one floor down, in perfect Dewey decimal order. When breaks were called, I opened whichever volume I happened to be holding at the moment and read until it was time to go to work again, picking up reams of miscellaneous knowledge about such topics as Zoroastrianism and the history of animal husbandry. And unlike the material from my classes and lectures, these fragments stuck with me—maybe because I’d collected them for their own sake, not as cards to be played at final-exam time and then forgotten when a new hand was dealt.

  One day, during lunch, my boss sat down beside me while I was reading up on Zarathustra, whom I’d known before then only as a word in the title of a book by Nietzsche that I’d often argued with V about, despite never having gotten through the preface.

  “Personal self-betterment,” said Dan. “That’s man’s purpose on earth, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you understand the power of thought?”

  “Not really.”

  “Thought is stupendous. Thought’s a miracle. I’ll give you an example. This really happened. There were some monkeys living on an island. They drank out of streams, with their faces in the water. Then one of them had a breakthrough, an idea. He dipped half a coconut shell into the stream and drank from it like a primitive cup. Pretty soon, all of the monkeys were doing it. The whole pack or gaggle or whatever.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said, not meaning it.

  “No, it’s not. The amazing part is this. There was another monkey island a hundred miles away across the ocean, and the minute the monkey on the first one learned to drink its water from the shell, the other monkey on the second island got it in his head to follow suit. The thought was transmitted through space, a kind of signal. We call that ‘critical mass.’”

  “Some scientist actually witnessed this?”

  “You bet. Not that it was reported very widely.”

  “Why not? Because it wasn’t true?” I couldn’t help needling brainwashed Dan. I knew it wouldn’t alter his beliefs, but now that I was struggling to think again, I couldn’t let such nonsense pass.

  “Can you come to a meeting of people who share your drive? It’s absolutely free of charge,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I have to do this thing alone.”

  “What thing?”

  “Reconnecting certain wires.”

  Rebuffing Dan’s invitation to join the cult harmed our relations. He hovered as I toiled, griping about my inefficient technique, and a couple of times he snatched my books away from me and showed me how I should carry and handle them so as to raise my rate of productivity. Whenever he caught me reading one of them, he reached out and slapped its cover shut, forcing me to conduct my hasty studies in unsupervised corners of the basement. Five minutes of peace was the most that I could hope for. But I adapted. The units were long enough. I stuffed my head with chunks of information that I knew I might never get to use—on medieval theology, general relativity, monastic architecture, Sir Walter Raleigh—and slowly displaced the vacuum in my skull.

  A girl on the crew, a classmate, Kate, watched from afar as I toiled at my comeback. She was a Californian and a painter, an auxiliary member of the Joy Division who didn’t entirely fit in because of her breezy, beachy temperament, which wasn’t severe enough to impress the leadership. I liked her red hair. I liked its tumbling splendor. One night after work we went out for a beer.

  “What’s all the sneaking away about?” she asked me.

  “I’m trying to pass a test.”

  “There aren’t any tests. It’s summer. It’s a rest. You’ll make yourself sick.”

  “I’m already pretty sick.”

  By fully confessing to my fatigue and speculating on its causes, I earned a few hours of messy groping that left me refreshed, if not proud of my performance. But Kate didn’t seem to care about performance. Like me, she was hungry for company itself, for simple epidermal contact, as though her world, too, had dematerialized and needed replenishment by any means. We stuck close to each other in the library, exchanging glances that said merely “I’m here,” and this elemental exchange of presence placed a sort of floor under my sorrows. I wasn’t sinking, for once. I wasn’t slipping. Further support was provided by my readings. Sons and Lovers explores the Oedipus complex. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim. When Troilus died and left the earth after discovering Cressida’s betrayal, he floated up into the sky and gazed back down and laughed at the pitiful folly of human wishes. It was basic stuff, nothing arcane or glamorous, but it was substantial enough to set my feet on.

  By August, I felt human again. The hollow sensation behind my forehead was replaced by a reassuring fullness. The tics and twitches subsided. My gums healed up. I realized that for several weeks I’d been conversing normally—with Kate, at least.

  “How do I look?” I asked her. “Compared to then.” She knew what I was referring to.

  “You’re thicker.”

  “Fatter?”

  She shook her head. “Just thicker.”

  And then I wrote a three-act play—in verse. It took about two weeks, no more than that, and the process was more like flood control than ordinary composition. The lines surged out of me onto the page as though they’d been inside me all along, but the lexicon was new, I saw, drawn from my five-minute lessons in the library and blessedly free of theory terms. Where the play’s subject came from I didn’t know. The setting was a Manhattan artist’s studio that resembled Andy Warhol’s Factory, a messy crash pad for vagrant visionaries and a doomed teenage socialite named Dinah who, I suppose, was based on Edie Sedgwick, whose story I’d heard about from Adam. This crowd was alien to me,
but no more so than the Joy Division. I called my main character “the Director.” He didn’t speak much, just lounged behind a movie camera, recording the love affairs, squabbles, and overdoses of his solipsistic groupies, who rarely acknowledged or even looked at him. I called the play Soft White Kids in Leather. No real reason. The title volunteered itself.

  I sat at my desk in wonder the morning I finished, resting one hand atop the stacked white pages as though I were swearing on the Bible. I was afraid to reread the dialogue in case it made no sense. I took the manuscript downstairs to the dining room and waited for someone sane to come along who might be able to deem the thing intelligible, but when no one showed up, I took the play to work with me and showed it to Kate, who scanned a page or two and pronounced my creation “interesting,” which was all the affirmation I needed. Suicide wouldn’t be necessary, after all.

  “Mom?”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “I think so. I think it is. Is Dad there?”

  “Fishing.”

  “Is Andy there?”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Say ‘hi’ to him.”

  “I don’t like the sound of this call.”

  “Say ‘hi’ to everyone.”

  “You’re all jazzed up. You’re scaring me,” she said.

  “I’m rushing. I’m on a break. More books to shelve. Just wanted to phone and give everyone my love.”