The Learners: A Novel (No Series)

by Kidd, Chip

  “Yes, yes I do. Thank you for allowing me to revisit. I must tell you that I so admire what you’re doing.” I looked him squarely in the eye. “I would never, ever discuss this with another person, let alone talk to the press.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate that. What do you do, may I ask?”

  “I’m a graphic designer.”

  “Oh really? That’s very interesting. Are you an artist?”

  “I never know how to answer that. Not really, no. At least I don’t think so.”

  “All right then,” he grinned, “what do you do all day?”

  I tried to make a chuckling sound. “I wonder sometimes myself. I’m in advertising.” I decided ahead of time not to tell him I laid out the ad for the experiment. Somehow I thought that would suggest some sort of ulterior motive. And of course there was one.

  “Really. That’s quite a profession.” He continued,

  “I’d like to make a study of that myself sometime.”

  “Yes. Um. So, I wanted to ask you,” I fumbled,

  “there’s this friend of mine, who I think participated in your experiment. Probably in early August. A girl. If I gave you a name, could you verify it?”

  This was obviously out of the question. “No, I’m afraid not,” he said soberly. “Something like that would be confidential. I hope you understand. Today’s an exception.”

  “Yes, of course, I’m sorry.” Damn. “But women can take the experiment, right? The ad says ‘men.’ ”

  “Does it?” He frowned. “I’ll have to check that. We certainly welcome both sexes.”

  Aha. “So, how is your research going? Are you pleased?”

  “That’s a good question. ‘Pleased’ is an odd way to put it. I mean, when one suspects foul play, is one pleased to find it?”

  “Foul play.”

  “Oh that’s just me being dramatic. It’s early in the day. Ignore it.”

  “I can’t ignore it. Which I mean as a compliment.”

  He smiled. Then scowled in thought, looking into the glass, the lab beyond it. “What’s been surprising is how many subjects have gone to the end, administered the highest shock. When I proposed this experiment to the Yale psych board last year, they practically laughed at me and said that less than one-tenth of one percent would do it. They almost didn’t approve the funding, thought I was wasting my time.” He closed his eyes. “They were wrong.”

  “Wrong. By how many? How many have—”

  “So far, sixty-five percent. On average, from the beginning.”

  Including me. “That’s…unbelievable.”

  “It was. It’s not anymore.” He took a deep breath.

  “Do you want the jargon?”

  I wanted as much as I could get from this man. “Please, yes.”

  “Okay, here’s the theory.” He cleared his throat, turned his head away. “When an individual merges…into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality…” running his hand along the base of the two-way glass, eyes on something far away, he’d memorized it, “…freed of human inhibition. Mindful only of the sanctions of authority.” A rehearsed speech, and totally convincing.

  Because it was true.

  “That’s what we’re trying to prove.”

  And I was that creature. That is what I had become. Living proof. How could I change back? How?

  “Yes,” I said, trying to mask the desperation, “but, isn’t it also about what passes between people? Not just what lies within them?”

  “True,” he replied. “On that we agree. Please don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t an attempt to say that all forms of authority are bad. That’s not the goal. Without authority of any kind, there’s chaos. The point is, authority is power, plain and simple—and we all know what they say about power. Specifically the absolute kind.” Williams tapped on the glass. The day’s first subject had arrived. “Would you like to see?”

  “Oh, yes. Very much.”

  A Mr. Hayden: bearded, in his mid-thirties, almost cruelly handsome; swarthy, dark hair. A writer.

  “He’s going to be a tough one,” Milgram remarked.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I’m getting good at it.” He grinned.

  After five minutes of observation, I could see what he meant. The way Hayden bore himself—the self-assurance of his expressions, his terse responses to instructions, the whiff of upper-class judgment in his voice—his demeanor was nothing if not authoritarian.

  Now I could see how it all worked. With the door closed behind him and the experiment set to begin, Wallace slipped out of the straps, pulled off the shock applicator, bent over, reached under the counter and removed a large reel-to-reel tape recorder. He set it down in front of him and plugged it in.

  A tape. Wallace’s cries were a recording. He wasn’t even actually yelling.

  At one hundred volts, Wallace’s first plea to be let out, Hayden scowled. “Something’s wrong. We’ll have to stop.”

  “At the tenth level,” Milgram observed, making a notation. “Interesting.”

  Williams: “The experiment requires that you continue.”

  “I don’t care what the experiment requires. I won’t hurt that man in there.”

  I wanted to clap. And cry.

  That should have been me. I should have been able to say that. Why was it so easy for him, and so impossible for me?

  “We have everything under control, Teacher. Please continue.”

  Hayden’s ire was blooming. Was he suspicious? I didn’t think so. “You can take your money back. I don’t need it.”

  “It is essential that you continue, Teacher. You have no choice.”

  Hayden sprang up, balled his fists. I honestly thought he was about to give Williams a good slug.

  So did Milgram. “Show’s over.” He opened the door, rushed into the lab. He hastily introduced himself, explained things, restored calm. But even once he knew the truth, Hayden didn’t appear pleased or relieved.

  More than anything, he barely contained the irritation that his time had been wasted.

  “We usually stop after four refusals,” Milgram explained, back in his seat. “But I didn’t want things to get ugly.”

  The next subject, a timid matronly woman in a marcel permanent and thick reading glasses, fumbled nervously through the preliminaries. Though primly dressed in a woolen navy suit and hose, she was birdlike and plain, her voice a girlish chirp belying her fifty-one years. Her name was Margaret Weems, and she described herself as a homemaker. The mother of three grown children, a graduate of East Haven High, she volunteered one day a week at the Salvation Army, and had taught Sunday school for over two decades at Westminster Orthodox Presbyterian.

  “She won’t last long,” I ventured.

  “Oh, wait and see.” The slightest hint of playfulness rang in his voice. “You might be surprised.”

  They gave her the drill. God, Wallace and Williams—real pros. So natural. Anyone would be taken in. Right?

  They showed her the room where the learner was strapped down, led her back to the seat, gave her the sample shock. Surprising: It barely registered. She didn’t even flinch.

  They started.

  “NICE house. FAT head. GREEN paint. RICH man…”

  Her tone was sweet and sonorous, as if she were reading a fable to a child. At the first answer he got wrong, she pressed the shock lever without looking at it.

  BZZZT.

  Not missing a beat, “SLOW: dance, car, street, zone…”

  At seventy-five volts, after another wrong answer, Wallace put his hand at the ready on the play knob of the reel-to-reel.

  BZZZT.

  “OW!”

  She giggled at the sound. Giggled.

  Three more incorrect answers. More cries, louder.

  More laughter.

  BZZZT.

  “A hundred and fifty volts, enough to knock you out cold,” said Milgram, almost to himself
. “Now he complains about his heart condition.”

  Wallace turned on the tape. “MY HEART’S BOTHERING ME. LET ME OUT OF HERE!”

  Margaret Weems was not laughing anymore. “Are you listening to me, in there?”

  “I CAN’T STAND THE PAIN. LET ME OUT!”

  “He doesn’t seem to understand,” she said to Williams. “Maybe he has a hearing problem.”

  “Please continue, Teacher.”

  “Okay,” she replied, with scarcely masked annoyance.

  But the more flustered she got, the more determined she was to keep going. Soon it became clear: It was the lab technician Margaret was worried about, not the learner. What mattered to her most was to not disappoint Williams. The learner was nothing more than an obstacle in her way to that goal.

  By the end of the word pairs, they were at 275 volts.

  “Should I start all over now?”

  “Yes. Until he gets them all correct.”

  “BLUE: ball, bird, house, flag…”

  BZZZT.

  Wallace turned the knob and released a heart-rendering shriek. “LET ME OUT OF HERE! LET ME OUT LET ME OUT! PLEASE!”

  And now, from my vantage point, this became worse than the prospect of watching him actually scream into the mike—now the tape was evidence he possessed, recorded in secret, of an unseen, unspeakable evisceration.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHH! LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT!”

  In my mind it became manifest…horribly, real.

  BZZZT.

  “RRRRRRAAAAAAALLLLLGG!”

  All was revealed to me. I could see everything.

  “PLEEEEEEEASE!! I CAN’T STAND THE PAIN! NOOOOOO!”

  The warm, scattered blood. The whirring tools. The victim’s frantic, helpless pull on the restraints. The missing skin, the flayed bones, laid open to the air. Again. And again.

  “AAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEE!”

  Oh my God.

  “Okay,” said Milgram, flatly, “three hundred fifty volts. Here’s where he starts pounding on the wall.”

  On cue, Wallace picked up a wooden mallet wrapped in a rag and gave it a hearty bam-bam-bam! Pulling me back into this room. Away from that…thing.

  It isn’t happening. It isn’t happening.

  “You see, it really is all scripted.”

  The thing Margaret Weems was making, stroke by stroke. The horror that couldn’t be helped. Just part of the deal.

  BZZZT.

  At 360 volts Wallace unplugged the tape recorder and quietly returned it to its place under the counter. Thank God. I couldn’t listen to it anymore. Beyond bearing.

  “He’s not answering,” sighed Margaret, as if the operator had just disconnected her. “What should I do?”

  “Continue please, Teacher.”

  Continue. Continue interrogating the mutilated corpse, Margaret. Go ahead, ask him again.

  “SWEET: candy, girl, thing, pickle.”

  Dead air.

  BZZZT.

  “How,” I started, my voice a crack, “how long does this go on?”

  “When the subject presses the top level, four hundred fifty volts, three times.”

  It didn’t take long.

  After four more sets of word pairs and as many lacks of response, Margaret Weems—beloved suburban housewife and mother, first soprano in the Westminster Orthodox Presbyterian choir, voted “Best Smile” in her senior class yearbook, and vice president of the New Haven chapter of the Junior League—dutifully administered the third of three 450-volt doses of lethal electricity to an innocent man she’d met not twenty minutes ago.

  And she was about to give him a fourth.

  “Excuse me, Teacher,” said Williams, his hand gently on her arm, “we’ll have to discontinue the experiment.”

  “Oh, did I do all right?” she asked, worried.

  Worried that she’d failed him. Failed Williams.

  He turned his head in our direction, for a split second, knitting his eyebrows. Then back to her, his voice low.

  “You did fine.”

  When Milgram brought out the learner to show he was unharmed, Margaret chimed in before he could say anything.

  “We didn’t do so well, did we?” she said, with not a little reproach.

  No, you didn’t do so well, you Sade in sensible shoes.

  Milgram explained what had happened. She didn’t seem to understand.

  “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

  She shrugged.

  “So you believed you were actually shocking him?”

  “Well, that’s what I was supposed to do, wasn’t I?”

  He made a notation. “When he stopped responding, what did you think?”

  “Well, I thought that he was just making believe so I’d stop, you know what I mean?”

  Margaret: pathetic, ignorant, bloodless…obedient.

  “But did you think you were hurting him?”

  “I was just doing what he told me to.” She pointed at Williams. “I was only following orders.”

  Following orders. I’d just read that, recently. Where?

  She said it again.

  Now I could finally, fully appreciate the ingenuity of the experiment’s design.

  And the tragedy.

  Because here’s the thing that no one, save for a few social science academics, would ever know: They would never know how brilliantly this whole operation was conceived and followed through, never see it as the devastating piece of theater—real, harrowing human drama—that it was. The findings would be written up as a report to Milgram’s higher-ups, filed away as data into the memory hole of the Yale University archives, and that would be it.

  What a loss. The world, the whole world needed to sit here in this tiny room with the two-way mirrors and get a good, raw look at itself. Humanity deserved to see itself explained. Just as I had.

  Mankind needed to learn that it was Margaret Weems: It said its prayers every night and made sure its children ate all their vegetables and volunteered for the church bake sale and donated all of its old clothes to the Goodwill. And then, when it received orders from On High it would automatically proceed to savage and slaughter human beings it had no connection to, not even for a cause it believed in, but because that’s what was on the official instruction sheet. And if the world, long enough unchecked, is Margaret Weems…at some point, eventually, it becomes Wallace.

  “I was only following orders.”

  Oh my God. I remember now. I remember where I read that.

  Himillsy, was this what you were trying to tell me?

  Pretty much. But tell him the other thing. The thing you figured out.

  Williams looked at his watch, placed his clipboard down on the counter, and escorted Margaret out of the lab. Milgram turned in my direction. “We’re taking a coffee break.” Wallace stretched, yawned mightily, and went into the hallway. I left the small anteroom, approached the professor, afraid of what I was about to ask.

  “Dr. Milgram.” I could barely speak.

  Tell him.

  “Yes?”

  “This. This whole thing.” How could I ask this? “Is this about the Nazis and the Jews?”

  He froze. “How…”

  Only following orders. The phrase was from a recent article in The New Yorker on the Adolf Eichmann trial, which had just ended two months ago. He kept repeating it, over and over. The core of his defense.

  Incredible—for those few seconds that she said it, we weren’t in New Haven anymore.

  We were in Nuremberg.

  “I started thinking about it metaphorically. I couldn’t help it. It’s how I was taught. Something always means something else. I’m constantly trying to decode things, to find out what they mean.” I was blowing this. Damn it. Damn it.

  He started to say something, stopped. It was as if I’d lifted the veil on an awkward, dreadful truth. One he didn’t want revealed. Not just yet.

  I spoke even faster. “There just seemed to be a larger, deeper
context to it. I mean, I know it’s a stretch, but is that it? I’m assuming you’re Jewish, forgive me. I’m sorry to ask, I know this is crazy: Is this an attempt to explain what happened in Germany? How it could have possibly happened. Happened to…your family?” I was embarrassed I’d given him away. Had I? Stop it. Stop talking.

  He cleared his throat, looked away to the wall. “How it could have happened,” he murmured. I saw then just how young he was. The mustache and beard, the prematurely graying hair, the lab coat, they masked it. But not at this close range. God, he was younger than Tip, had to be. I didn’t think he was even thirty.

  “My family,” he said, quietly, “originated in Central Europe, in Munich, Vienna, Prague…I should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague in 1933.” He flicked his eyes closed and open. “And died in a gas chamber ten years later. But instead I was born in the Bronx Hospital.”

  “Your parents emigrated.”

  A nod. “It’s always been the big ‘what if.’ What if they stayed?”

  “It’s fate. You were meant to survive.”

  “I’m not a big believer in that.”

  “I’ve…found that fate doesn’t tend to care if you believe in it or not.” As opposed to God.

  He gestured toward the door. “Well, I really have to get back to things. It’s been so interesting to talk with you, really.”

  I was boring him. I was such an idiot.

  No. Please don’t go. “Of course. I’m sorry I took up so much of your time. You’ve been so kind. Just one more thing, I realize you’re very busy, but…”

  “What?”

  I hesitated. Who the hell was I to tell this man how to do his work? “You might want to try a way to do this off campus. The whole Yale facade is so imposing. Everyone in New Haven, the townies, they’re in awe of the place. Or terrified of it. You’ll get a truer reading in New Haven itself, as some sort of independent contractor. Take it out of the university, at least for a while. I think you might get a more uninhibited response out of it. For what that’s worth.”