The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  Mr. Kaplan handed Sarah a stack of note cards. She flipped the first one over and asked me a question about piezophiles, microorganisms able to withstand extreme pressure. I answered correctly. She asked a second question about piezophiles. Also right. I’d studied a lot over the weekend. I got the third question wrong, but it required a mathematical equation, and I didn’t have a pen. “Administer twenty volts,” Mr. Kaplan said. Sarah pressed the button and it buzzed.

  “Kind of tickles,” I said, reading from Dr. Van Laark’s response sheet. On the monitor, Sarah chuckled.

  I answered the next two questions, about halophiles, right. Then I goofed a second time.

  “Administer forty volts,” Mr. Kaplan said. Sarah pushed the button and I gave the instructed yelp. Sarah smiled, but she looked uncomfortable.

  Dr. Van Laark nodded at me. “Just like that,” she whispered. “You’re doing great.”

  I answered the next question incorrectly, too. It didn’t matter, but I didn’t like being wrong twice in a row. Meanwhile, Mr. Kaplan was asking Sarah to administer sixty volts. When she buzzed, I groaned, louder this time. Too loud.

  “She’s okay?” Sarah asked.

  “Please continue,” Mr. Kaplan said, his voice emotionless.

  The next two questions related to extremophiles I’d never even heard of, so of course I answered wrong. Sarah buzzed. I moaned. She buzzed again, and I moaned louder. Both times she shut her eyes as she pressed the button, like she didn’t want to see what her own finger was doing.

  And it was then—around eighty volts—that I stopped caring about getting the questions right. A girl my own age, who was sitting less than ten feet away, believed she was giving me high doses of electric shock! Jesus Christ, Murrow, I thought. I must have whispered it out loud because Dr. Van Laark put her finger to her lips.

  For the next few questions I moaned and cried out as I was supposed to, increasingly sickened every time I watched Sarah push a button. My heart was snapping in my chest, quick as a metronome, and I realized we were nearing 120 volts, the standard voltage of an outlet, and enough to kill a person. I kept looking at Dr. Van Laark for direction, wondering how Sarah could possibly keep going, but Dr. Van Laark’s smile was jelled in place.

  At 140 volts, Sarah stopped again to ask Mr. Kaplan whether I was okay. Again he assured her the shocks were harmless. She pressed the button, and in that moment a sickening sound grew in my belly, pushed its way up my throat, and flew from my mouth. How could you? I screamed inside my head. You hear me! I can see it in your eyes. You hear me in pain! How can you keep hurting me like this?

  I wasn’t wearing the wrist cuffs, but I was sweating like I really was strapped down. If I’d picked the role of interviewer I’d have stopped shocking Sarah at the first sign of trouble. No matter what Mr. Kaplan or Dr. Van Laark said. I would have known, instinctively, to stop. What’s wrong with her, Murrow? I pleaded. How is this possible?

  We were up to 180 volts and I answered the next question wrong.

  “Please administer two hundred volts,” Mr. Kaplan said.

  Sarah bit her lip, her face pained. “I really don’t—”

  “The experiment requires that you continue.”

  “Iris?” Sarah called out into the dark. “Iris, are you okay?”

  Dr. Van Laark put her finger to her lips and shook her head.

  “Iris?” Sarah’s voice echoed girlish and small in the black room.

  Mr. Kaplan leaned down next to Sarah and whispered with chilling solemnity, “The experiment requires that you continue.”

  According to my instruction sheet, I was supposed to give a loud cry and say, “Please stop.” But that wasn’t an adequate response for 200 volts. Not even close. Didn’t Sarah realize how dangerous it was to shock someone with 200 volts of electricity? There’s no way she’ll agree to it, I thought. No way she’ll—

  She pressed the button.

  “Oh, God!” I screamed. “Oh, Sarah. No more!”

  Dr. Van Laark looked at me, startled by my outburst, and started scribbling furiously on her clipboard. I didn’t care. I wanted Sarah to hear the sound that 200 volts made when it ran through the body of a 110-pound girl. I wanted my pain to echo inside her head until it sank into the very tissue of her brain. “No more!” I cried. “Please stop, please!”

  “Mr. Kaplan?” Sarah whimpered. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t think she’s okay, Mr. Kaplan. We have to stop.”

  Dr. Van Laark motioned for me to follow her around the divider. Sarah stood beside Mr. Kaplan, wiping tears from her face. “You’re okay!” she exclaimed when she saw me, but I couldn’t look at her.

  “How could you?” I hissed between my teeth. “I never would have done that to you.”

  “But Mr. Kaplan said you were . . . It was part of the . . . It’s not my fault!”

  I looked at Mr. Kaplan, waiting for him to upbraid Sarah for what she’d done. “Ms. Dupont,” he said. “Don’t judge Ms. Peters.”

  “What?”

  “You are both culpable for what has just taken place. You knew Ms. Peters wasn’t actually hurting you and yet you allowed her to continue, Ms. Dupont. You participated in the manipulation, and you did so with enthusiasm.”

  I was stunned. I wanted to sink into the darkness of the Black Box.

  “The point I’d like to emphasize,” Mr. Kaplan continued, “is that either one of you could have stopped the experiment at any moment. But you didn’t. You think it’s extreme to administer two hundred volts, but unfortunately it’s quite normal. Few people in either of your experimental roles ever stop. In this case, walking away is the extreme thing to do.”

  I looked around for Dr. Van Laark, expecting an explanation, but she’d hidden herself behind the divider, almost like she was embarrassed for Sarah and me.

  “‘Difference is the essence of extremity’ is not just a trite motto,” Mr. Kaplan said. “It is a challenge to live up to.”

  He dismissed us and prepared for the next two students. My body was clammy with sweat. What have I done, Murrow? I asked, walking out of the Black Box into the blinding lobby.

  “What’s the matter?” Chris Coon called out as I hurried away from the theater.

  “She probably failed Van Laark’s test,” David Morone snickered. “Just like everybody else.”

  It was only after we’d all participated in Dr. Van Laark’s study that Mr. Kaplan explained its origin and purpose. The experiment, he told us the next day in class, was based on the work of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who’d conducted a similar shock experiment in 1961, the same year an Israeli court sentenced Adolf Eichmann to death for helping to murder six million Jews. At his trial, Eichmann claimed that he was just “following orders.” The Israelis didn’t buy this (obviously), but Milgram was curious. What about all those clerks and administrators who had run the concentration camps? How was it, he wondered, that ordinary people came to commit acts of evil?

  “Difference is the essence of extremity,” Mr. Kaplan announced for the zillionth time as we slumped, dejected, in our seats. “To be extreme, you must assert yourself. No matter how much pressure you feel to obey. Because, I assure you, that pressure is everywhere. Remember our lesson on pressure-loving organisms.” Mr. Kaplan assaulted the board with his chalk, dust flying everywhere. “In Milgram’s original experiment, over fifty percent of the participants believed they were administering fatal-caliber shocks. Now imagine if those participants had been raised in environments where, from an early age, they’d been taught to question and resist. Do you think Milgram would have gotten the same results?”

  When Mr. Kaplan asked this question, his eyes caught mine, as though he’d directed it to me alone. I looked down at my desk, a cold-water chill rushing through my body.

  For the next few days, I worried incessantly about Mr. Kaplan. I couldn’t stand the thought that he viewed me as a zombie, the kind of person who would have failed Milgram’s experiment. But how could I convince him
otherwise? Murrow advised patience. At lunch the next week, he reminded me that I was lucky to have Mr. Kaplan as a mentor. He could save you from a lifetime of mistakes. Who knows what would have become of me without Ida Lou. This was true. Murrow had been a business major before his mentor, Ida Lou Anderson, turned him on to speech and helped him become the world’s most lauded journalist. Without Mr. Kaplan, I might have been heading for a lifetime of delusion. My classmates considered him a sadistic asshole, but I knew he was trying to help us—to protect us.

  Still, I felt sick over what I’d done to Sarah Peters in the Black Box.

  Human nature has its dark side, Murrow said as I pushed peas around my plate. If you want an optimist, I’m not the best guy to be talking to.

  I smashed a couple of peas flat. The person I needed to talk to, of course, was Dalia. Back in Boston, we sat together at lunch every day, discussing our post–junior high plans. Dalia wanted to be a famous novelist. “Crazy people make the best arteests!” she liked to say. “You’re not crazy,” I’d tell her, but I knew she didn’t believe me.

  I never expected to have a friend like Dalia at Mariana, but I also didn’t anticipate the school’s draconian enforcement of community bonding. To avoid self-segregation, students are assigned to lunch tables composed of various ages, races, and social groups. An upperclassman presides over us, leading exercises in table togetherness. On days like this one, feeling as unsociable as I did, I only wanted to read the New York Times with my mashed potatoes, but on the first day of school, my table leader had pointed at me in front of the entire table. “No news for you!” he’d proclaimed with an imperial air.

  So now I just sat beside my chattering tablemates, staring at my plate, waiting for the end-of-lunch bell to ring. Every few minutes I glanced at the large clock that eyed us from above the refectory doors. The clock was enormous, like the trophy kill of a Cyclops hunter. It seemed to me the minute hand was barely moving. Only then, at ten to one, something happened.

  “Attention, please! Attention!” The announcement boomed down from the PA system. “Attention!” The voice was jovial and energetic, like it was about to explain how to locate the emergency exits. It continued, “The following is an assessment of the Mariana community’s collective conscience.” There was a loud static crackle, and then: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree.”

  This was a different voice from the previous one. Female, with pitch-perfect diction. “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree.”

  Nobody spoke. And then all of a sudden a couple of table leaders at the far side of the refectory stood up. “Under the spreading chestnut tree . . .” Their voices were hesitant at first, but they seemed to draw strength from one another, and soon their words rebounded across the room. “Under the spreading chestnut tree!” More students followed their leaders and stood up beside their plates until nearly half the room had joined in. “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we . . .”

  The chant picked up intensity and speed as the voice from the loudspeaker championed it on. And then the table leaders left their chairs and began to walk, still reciting, coalescing around a table in the center of the room. I jumped down from my bench and hurried through the throng, pushing my way toward that middle table. I managed to stake out a spot between two students who were standing on a bench. Peering between their legs, I saw that the entire table was up except for one student: a fair-haired boy cowering in the middle of the bench. He looked around anxiously, a red flush spreading up his neck and across his face. Meanwhile, his tablemates pummeled him with their words, speaking each phrase like a curse, their faces twisted with disgust.

  “What are you doing? What did I do?” The boy’s panic was sweaty and thick. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree. Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree!” The voices chanted in lockstep with the intercom, and the words flew down over the poor, frightened student. He gave up protesting or trying to make sense of the situation and covered his head with his arms. It occurred to me that most students in the refectory couldn’t see the boy; they were shouting because the ones in front of them were shouting. Murrow, I thought anxiously, I have to help him! But I was stuck in the crush and couldn’t move.

  “UNDER THE SPREADING CHESTNUT TREE, I SOLD YOU AND YOU SOLD ME. THERE THEY LIE AND HERE LIE WE, UNDER THE SPREADING CHESTNUT TREE.”

  And then suddenly there was a tremendous record-like scratch, and the intercom voice went silent. The room fell silent too. The boy at the table kept his head buried, his shoulders quivering.

  “Today’s flash mob was brought to you by Prisom’s Party,” the original intercom voice declared. “Our diagnostic assessment of the school’s collective conscience has determined that you will harass a blameless student simply because the Community Council asks you to. The instructional email many of you received this morning did not come from the Council. It came from us. Prisom’s Party declares the collective conscience poor.”

  At that exact moment, the bell rang to signal the end of lunch. Everybody started talking at once and pushing toward the refectory doors. Meanwhile, the embattled boy had raised his head and was looking around dazed, as though he’d woken from a nightmare.

  Holy breaking news! I thought, and rushed off to find Katie Milford.

  II

  Intraterrestrials

  These extremophiles thrive in darkness, feeding on poisonous methane and sulfur gases. The renowned molecular philosopher Lucinda Starburst has written that “intraterrestrials grow strong on substances utterly destructive to human life, and yet they shape our lives at the most fundamental level. They force us to reexamine what it means to create and destroy, to benefit and harm.”

  —Marvelous Species: Investigating Earth’s Mysterious Biology

  Jonah

  September 2012

  UNTIL I STARTED teaching, I never knew how much faculty and students have in common. For one thing, we’re as territorial as our charges. The science teachers, for example, keep mainly to the department office. It’s where we grade papers, take coffee breaks, and complain about making so much less than our public school counterparts.

  I store my lunch in the departmental mini-fridge, a dirty box packed with miscellaneous containers of Chinese food (circa who knows when), mushy fruit, Red Bulls, and half-eaten yogurts. That—and a whole lot of loose paper—is what you get when seven science nerds share a tiny office. But I like to eat in less cluttered accommodations. The teachers’ lounge is spacious and newly renovated, albeit in a manner meant to preserve Mariana’s “aesthetic integrity.” That just means it has Gothic windows, heavy furniture, and dim lighting. The second week of school, somebody stuck a sign on the door that said, Ye Olde Teachers’ Lounge. (Probably a science teacher; we’re the only department with a sense of humor. At a recent science department trivia night, we decided to dub ourselves the Left Brains—the Bloods of the prep school faculty set. Pasternak put a stop to the game, because he didn’t want the students to think we were encouraging cliques.)

  Anyway, I walked into Ye Olde Lounge (reeking of ye olde coffee) and found half the English department settled around the oak table talking shop. I chose a high-backed leather chair and sat down with my tuna sandwich to listen in unobserved. As a student of animal behavior once told me, the trick to studying creatures in their natural habitat is to let them forget you’re there.

  If you were ever a fruit fly on the science department wall during one of our staff meetings, you’d hear an in-depth discussion of SimCity High, the online multiplayer video game where social cliques maneuver for power like feuding countries
and Queen Bees can be dethroned and put on trial for rogue activity. We never talk pedagogy. But the English teachers are obsessed with all brands of academic quackery.

  “You clearly haven’t read Blake’s Apocalypse!” a gruff voice spat as I removed the foil from my tuna. This was Mark Haloran, seventy-four years old and arthritic. A person could easily date this group of pseudo-scholars by their hair (gray), their foreheads (veiny), and their attitudes (self-righteous). At least two were PhDs who’d slunk back to these minor leagues after they failed to receive tenure.

  “I can’t take any more Harold Bloom today,” said Diana Trop, English department head. “Listen, I have invented a new procedure to help students with textual analysis. It’s called the Motif Number System. You give your class a list of motifs, say from Catcher in the Rye, numbered in order of importance. Innocence is one, experience two, herd mentality three, et cetera. And every time a motif appears in the book, the class writes the corresponding number in the margin. You repeat for each book. So in the Odyssey, Odysseus’s guile is ranked one, the guest/host relationship two, and—”

  “I was never very good with numbers,” Haloran muttered.

  I wasn’t at all sure about the Motif Number System. Undoubtedly there’d be some kid attempting to turn it into real math. Mr. Kaplan! I just proved that the square root of Odysseus’s guile is equal to Holden Caulfield’s hat. I totally deserve extra credit!

  The fact is, English class was always abhorrent to me. I’ve never forgiven my high school Epic Literature and Film seminar for destroying my love of Star Wars. I still can’t watch those movies without thinking about the myth of the hero, the etymology of Yoda’s name (the Sanskrit for warrior is yoddha), and, worst of all, how Obi-Wan Kenobi is a stand-in for Jesus. Have you ever noticed the ubiquity of Jesus in literature discussions? Think about it. A character is compassionate? He’s like Jesus. He’s got long hair? Jesus. He builds something out of wood? Definitely Jesus.