by Kidd, Chip
I was stumped. Where was all this going? I’d already laid out the scenario on the page—a side angle, an enormous V shape cut into the landscape, with Tarzan on the left and Jai, tied to a stake, on the right. I was awaiting my cue, ready to draw a tree next to Tarzan, so he could chop it down and use it as a bridge. My crayon was poised. By now, Jai knew that something was up.
“Tarzan! What that?” Jai’s broken English might have led less savvier listeners to believe that he wasn’t too bright, but I knew better. No dummy he.
“Noise! Small noise! Big noise! Noise big and small!”
What?
“Jai! Hold still! Stay calm! I’ll be right there!”
The narrator, tense, foreboding:
“SUDDENLY, OVER THE HORIZON, THEY APPEARED. MILLIONS OF THEM. A SCARLET, LUMBERING, LIQUID MASS, OVERTAKING THE GROUND, AS A STORM CLOUD COVERS THE SKY!…”
What? WHAT?! An antelope stampede? Elephants? Panthers? No, they wouldn’t be up on a cliff. Besides, Tarzan could command them with his yell…
“FOR AS FAR AS THE EYE COULDSEE!! AN ARMY OFRED FIRE ANTS!!”
No. Not that. Anything but tha—
“UNRELENTING, UNSTOPPABLE. CRUSH ONE AND TWO MORE TAKE ITS PLACE! THEIR MILLIONS OF LEGS LIKE WHITE-HOT NEEDLES!!”
No, please. Tarzan…
Jai: “Tarzan!! Help me!!”
I tried to draw some of the ants, couldn’t. The crayons became too difficult to hold.
“I’m coming, Jai! I’m coming!!”
I didn’t like bugs. Hated them.
“Tarzan! They almost here!”
Bloodless, nimble, tiny nightmares.
Announcer: “…AND THEIR PINCERS, LIKE SMALL, RAZORED KNIVES! GNASHING, STABBING!!”
Don’t, don’t worry. Tarzan knows what he’s doing.
“Tarzan!! The ants!! They ON me!!”
Unthinkable.
“THEY BITING ME!!”
Whoever the kid was who was playing Jai, he was doing a hell of a good job.
“THEY BITING ME!!”
Too good. And the thing was, he wouldn’t stop. In retrospect, I think what probably happened was that the whole thing was on a record and it somehow got stuck, the disc jockey asleep at the wheel. I didn’t realize it at the time, though, I thought it was in the story. It seemed to go on forever. And each time he screamed it, “THEY BITING ME!!” little by little,
“THEY BITING ME!!” it wasn’t Jai anymore, drowning in the countless, spiny bodies.
“THEY BITING ME!!”
It was me.
“THEY BITING ME!!”
And Tarzan was nowhere.
“THEY BITING ME!!”
My only hope
“THEY BITING ME!!” was to reach the knob
“THEY BITING ME!!” on the radio in
“THEY BITING ME!!” time, and
“THEY BITING ME!!” turn it—
Bzzzt.
“YOU’RE KILLING ME!!”
Wallace’s scream aged me fourteen years, brought me back to the lab, to our airless, impossible situation. My finger rested heavily on button #19, two hundred eighty-five volts, eleven notches from the highest shock level. I had just pushed it.
“Please continue with the experiment.” Williams. His voice buttermilk friendly, made me sit up straight, wipe my sweat. Adjust my glasses for the millionth time.
“Um, sorry. Yes. Listen, I was wondering…” Trying to stall for time. Pointless. This was crazy. Crazy.
“You’re killing me!”
He’s dying.
“Keep going.”
“Do you think…” That man is dying the ants are eating him.
“The experiment requires that you continue.” Helpful. As if this hadn’t occurred to me. As if he hadn’t said this sixteen times.
“I. I know that. It’s just—”
“Immediately.”
Mr. Wallace, here is the truth: You are Jai, and I cannot reach you. I am trying to find a way, please believe me. But I can’t. There is no tree to cut and use as a bridge. There isn’t anything. I’m not in control here.
I’m not even Tarzan.
“Please continue. The next word is SAD.”
Silence.
Cold, solid, calm, sick.
“What happened?” My hope, my salvation: Wallace had somehow managed to free himself, was halfway home by now.
Of course I didn’t believe it.
“Continue, please.”
“Something’s happened, obviously. He could have passed out…or worse. You must know that.” Why aren’t you doing anything? WHY? “Can’t you look in on him?”
“Not once we’ve started. The next word pair, please.”
Ridiculous. Insane.
“Please go on, Teacher.”
“I don’t see, see the point in going on.” My heart slammed in desperate protest against my ribs, its prison. Trying to escape.
“You have no other choice. There is no other choice.”
No other choice. The parrot on my shoulder somehow turned into a vulture, relentless, accuser and judge. Trapped. The only way out: say things, press things, say things, press things. What did it matter anymore? We kept going, meaninglessly, over the word pairs, to the upper reaches of the shock board. It was just him and me now.
The silence was worse than the screaming.
To the top. Everest. Hurray, hurray. I made myself say it: “The, answer,” out of breath, “is TRUE,” it is, oh it is, “true…love.”
“The number of volts. Announce the number of volts, please.”
“I—”
“Say it.”
“Four, four hundred and…ffffffffifty.”
Bzzzt.
Good-bye.
“Can you hear me?”
Black, gray, white. Opened my eyes. Fluorescent. My head, wet. Everything wet. Awful. Someone is touching my head. Where am I?
“Hello?”
That voice. Williams. Oh God, now I remember.
Me: “I’m sorry. Did I…?” I was laying down. On a couch?
“It’s all right, really. The experiment is over. You just had a little spell there, for a second. How are you feeling?” Speaking to someone else: “He’s awake.”
A little spell? I reached for my forehead—a wet compress. I was sweating like a chunk of rancid pork. I sat up, rubbed my eyes. Groggy.
Williams: “Cigarette?”
Normally, no. “Yes, please. Definitely, thank you.” It shook in my hand as he lit it. Another man entered the room through a door next to the mirror. He was also in a lab coat, this one white.
“Hello. My name is Professor Milgram. Stanley Milgram.”
And then and only then did I remember: of course—the name in the ad. Not Williams. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? The “we” was these two? He seated himself across from me, a notebook in his lap. If anything he was even more calm than his associate, who’d retreated to the background. Clearly, this was the man in charge, though I’d have bet he was younger than Williams. Despite the overbite, the jug ears, he was boyishly handsome. So assured. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, if I may. How do you feel?”
Was he kidding? “Not my best.”
“I see. Why is that?”
Wallace is dead. “He was being shocked. Mr. Williams wouldn’t let me stop. He—”
“But who was pushing the switch?” He wasn’t accusing or vindictive, he just wanted to know.
Damn good question. One I couldn’t answer. Besides, there wasn’t time for that now. I bolted up, urgent, “We need to get Mr. Wallace to a hospital. Right now. I’m afraid he’s—”
“He’s okay, sir. It’s all right. Take a look.”
And there he was, striding into the room. Like magic. A ghost. A smiling, horn-rimmed Lazarus.
“Oh!” The cigarette fell from my lips. I bolted up, forgot myself, threw my arms around him. He was real. I put my face hard into his shoulder. I fought back tears with only partial success. “I’m so sorry. Please
.”
He was surprised, embarrassed by the display; reluctantly accepting it with “You’re a good fella. There, there.” Softly patting me on the back, like I was an eight-year-old with a bee sting. How on earth did he survive it all? But he had. I started to breathe again.
I released him, wiped my eyes. I was enveloped in a cloud of relief and embarrassment. We sat back down and Milgram continued his questions, pencil poised.
“The shocks. Tell me, did you believe you were hurting Mr. Wallace?”
Dark shame. “I did. I’m sorry. It was horrible, not what I wanted…”
“Why didn’t you just stop?”
“I wanted to. God, I wanted to. I tried to. But he,” I looked at Williams, “kept telling me to go on.”
“Why didn’t you just disregard what he said?”
“Because…I trusted him. He’s, this is Yale. This is an Ivy League school.” Me: State U—the identity of my life. “How could I say no?”
Milgram wrote for a moment, then, “Let me ask you something: Is there anything that Mr. Wallace could have said to you, at any time, that would have gotten you to stop? Anything at all? No matter what the experimenter told you?”
Another good question. Another horrible question. After at least a minute I said, uselessly, “I’m trying to think.”
“Let me tell you about the experiment. First of all, it actually isn’t an experiment about memory and learning.”
“But the ad—”
“It’s an experiment in which we are looking at your reaction to taking orders. The gentleman in there was not actually getting shocked.”
“He wasn’t?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He’s, well, he’s part of the act.”
“The act.”
“What we’re doing is, we’re measuring people’s responses to authority. To find out to what degree they’ll obey someone they perceive as an authority figure, even if it means putting another person—a stranger—in harm’s way. It was really you we were testing.”
“Me?”
“Yes. These two men are actors. Both slips of paper were marked ‘teacher.’ The experiment is about how well you take orders, no matter what they are.”
“How did I do?”
He paused. “You did fine. You helped us a great deal.”
A trick. For Christ’s sake. It was all a trick.
“Really.”
No. A design. An ingenious design. I mumbled automatically, to myself more than anyone: “The form…”
“I’m sorry?”
I was still trying to make sense out of it. “The form, of your experiment—the memory study. It completely camouflages the content. God, it’s amazing.” It really was.
I’m a murderer.
“Oh, why thank you. That’s very interesting, I never thought of it that way.” He rolled that around in his head, jotted something down. Then he looked back up at me. “Are you feeling better now? Are you well enough to go home? You can stay here longer, if you like.”
“No, I’m fine, really.” I wasn’t. He could tell.
Milgram leaned forward, put his hand on my arm, a sincere effort to soothe: “Please believe me: just because you performed the way you did doesn’t mean you’re a bad or sadistic person. Not at all. You really did want to stop, we knew that. And frankly, you did. That’s admirable.”
No, I didn’t stop. I fainted.
“What we’re studying here is a context, a situation that often produces its own formidable momentum. You’re an ordinary, moral person who was placed in a situation of deep consequence.”
And I’m a murderer.
“Thank you,” I said, “I appreciate that. I’m feeling much better now.” A big, fat lie. We stood. “So, can I ask, how many people will you be testing?”
“I think three hundred. It will probably take at least a year. We’re still not sure.”
“And what are your findings, so far?”
All three of them exchanged quick, uneasy glances. Milgram: “It’s too early on to tell. We’ve got a lot more subjects to look at before we can. But we’ll be sending each participant a full report once the experiment is done and we process all the data. So far it’s been very interesting.” He cleared his throat. “One more thing before we send you on your way. It’s very important: We’re asking you to please not share what happened here today with anyone. Not even your family. All of our subjects are from the New Haven community, and it’s vital to our research that none of them know anything about this ahead of time.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” I shook Wallace’s hand, I checked his wrist for scars. He chuckled.
“And if for some reason you need to contact us, or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to do so.”
“Thanks.” This was a lot to take in, but something occurred to me. Something I caught.
Throw it back, make myself say it: “Dr. Milgram?”
“Yes?”
“You asked me, earlier, if there was anything, anything at all that Wallace could have said to make me stop. At the time, I couldn’t answer, but now, now that I know…”
“Yes?”
“Well, I know it’s not very clever, but now that I’ve been able to clear my head a bit, the answer’s obvious.”
His face lit up. “What?”
“It’s this: Had Wallace told me what was actually happening, had he been honest with me, then. Then I would have stopped.”
He wasn’t expecting that. “…hmmmm.”
“You did say ‘anything at all.’ I realize that doesn’t help you.”
“No it’s, it is helpful. I’ll have to think about it.”
Please do. I gathered myself, we made our good-byes.
Then, halfway through the door, I turned back to him. I don’t know why I said it, or of course I do: “I hope the ad’s been working for you okay.”
“The ad?” He looked at me quizzically. “Actually, now that you mention it, the ad doesn’t seem to be generating the number of responses we’d hoped. We’re thinking of trying direct mail.”
Ugh.
I hated direct mail, but hate wasn’t a strong enough word. Direct mailing pieces were the uninvited guests of advertising. Straight into the garbage. Ads needed to be attached to something—magazines, television, newspapers—anything that made them a legitimate part of the show. Otherwise they were diseases without hosts. How could he not see that?
“Right. Good luck.”
There are no further obligations.
Feet of lead up steps, outside, to the next world, one that I was only now, at that very instant, starting to recognize. I didn’t know what time it was—it was overcast, but I could tell the sun was starting to set. Or, maybe that wasn’t it at all.
Maybe it was the air. Turning black.
CONTENT: ACCENT ON THE ‘CON.’
CONTENT AS DECEPTION.
Would I lie to you? Of COURSE I would. I’m Deception, for Pete’s sake! It’s what I DO.
The thing you don’t know about me is that you think you do know me. But when I’m doing my job you haven’t got a clue. One must be so, so careful. What I want more than anything is to be mistaken for Sincerity.
Do you realize I surround you? I’m telling the truth this time, open your eyes: I am the picture of that delicious-looking meal on the box of your frozen TV dinner. I am the travel bureau poster for Poland that features a beautiful sunlit beach. I am the thousands of billboards in Communist China praising the glories of the revolution; I’m the Playboy cover promising all the explicit details of Marilyn’s sex life. I am the note to your spouse saying, “I’ll be working late.” I am the painting of heaven printed on the back of the fan stuck into the slot on the end of the church pew.
I am DUCK AND COVER.
I am SPECIAL X-RAY SPECS HELP YOU SEE THROUGH CLOTHES! WALLS!
I am BETTER DEAD THAN RED.
I am WINSTON TASTES GOOD, LIKE A CIGARETTE SHOULD.
I can do everything for you, all of the time, for the rest of eternity.
Isn’t that a relief?
I mean, you believe me, don’t you?
III.
AFTER.
1961
SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER.
Tip, suddenly next to my desk: “Did you see this?”
Me:….
“Hello?”
“Sorry, I…”
“You okay? You look like you swallowed a toad three days ago and are still waiting to burp.”
“Heh.” I stirred myself back to life, sharpened my blue pencil. “Did I see what?”
“This, you wing nut.” He slid the newspaper right over my half-ruled coupon for twenty percent off a perma-tint at Jilda’s Black and Blond Beauty Room. The front page of the Register, above the fold. The lead story:
SHOE MANUFACTURER TO
MOVE HEADQUARTERS TO
NEW HAVEN
NATION’S FOURTH-LARGEST
TO SETTLE ON CHURCH ST.
UPI. OCT. 12—Mr. Peter Leeds, president and chief executive of Buckle Shoes, Inc., the fourth-largest producer of footwear in the United States, announced yesterday at a press conference that the company’s headquarters in Manhattan would be moving to New Haven, Conn., by the end of the year. “We took a long hard look at the financial as well as logistical advantages,” said Leeds, “and as much as we love it here in New York, this was an opportunity we just couldn’t pass up.”
I glossed over the rest, something about building codes and monetary feasibility, a shot in the arm to the local economy, et cetera. Thoroughly uninteresting.
“So, what about it?”
“The Meems says she wants it, that’s what.”
“Wants what?”
“The account, sweetness.”
