Raised in Captivity

by Chuck Klosterman

  You spend all this time convincing yourself that you’re not the center of the universe and that reality isn’t some movie where you’re the main character. You stare at the ocean and remind yourself that the waves crashing against the shoreline have been crashing that way for two billion years, and this realization proves your existence is a minor detail within a trivial footnote inside a colossal book that can never be opened or closed. But then you walk off the beach and put on your socks and shoes, and you try to live like everyone else, and (without even trying) you’re forced to reckon with the conclusion that every perspective is fixed and that the most myopic way to view life is the only way possible. There is no alternative to being who you are. You remain the nucleolus, against your will. But what are we to make of all the supplemental particles that buzz around our atomic structure? What is the purpose of a person who punctures the membrane of that nucleolus, displaces a few electrons, and then disappears forever?

  A guy comes into your universe and tells you he’s crisp. For whatever reason, you believe him. He wears horse blinders and burns your home to the ground. Somewhere between his interview with the police and the arrival of the insurance adjuster, he gets on an Amtrak and never comes back. You knew him for two years. You temporarily loved him. You knew his name, but it’s a name many people have. He cannot be found. You knew everything about him, but nothing useful. Now he’s a story, a story you tell, a story you tell where there is no plot, a story that is not actually a story. He was in your life. But you were not in his.

  [ ]

  TITLE: Super Awesome Sports Dynasties (Eli Weinroth, editor)

  PUBLISHER: Steele & Simmons Young Adult Press (copyright 2048)

  LANGUAGE: English

  PAGES: 164

  LEXILE MEASURE: 1085L

  — 99 —

  despite the injury. Auriemma retired due to health concerns in 2021 with a career-winning percentage of .878, a mark that continues to stand. To this day, the Lady Huskies’ 111-game winning streak remains unchallenged.

  Perhaps the only other college cage dynasty to rival Wooden’s Bruins and Auriemma’s Huskies involves the strange-but-true four-year run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Beavers from 2007 to 2010. Prior to their ascent, the Cambridge-based research university (commonly referred to as MIT) was perceived almost solely as a scholastic institution, competing in hoops as a lowly Division III program. But a controversial administrative decision in 2006 temporarily altered the school’s view of competitive sports, and with it, the culture of NCAA basketball.

  — 100 —

  According to Charles Murray’s 2021 book MIT: A History, upheaval in the MIT philosophy department in the wake of George W. Bush’s presidential reelection led to the curious conclusion that academic excellence must be pursued across all avenues, including activities that were primarily physical. This sea change coincidentally corresponded with the NBA’s adoption of its so-called one-and-done rule, ushering in an era where high school basketball players were forced to wait at least one year before entering the professional ranks. The timing prompted MIT to pursue a radical reinvention of its identity: They would compete for national titles in basketball by exclusively recruiting players whose only expressed intent was to immediately apply for the NBA draft the following year. In order to sustain the institution’s academic reputation, these particular student-athletes were regularly described and promoted as “nontraditional prodigies” whose social, ethnic, and class-based experiences made traditional enrollment standards irrelevant. Virtually all Beaver players from this era pursued independent study programs in philosophy and epistemology that did not involve classroom participation. Undrafted players almost never returned to the school as sophomores.

  Due to MIT’s $11 billion endowment, the development of the program was unusually aggressive, launched with the rapid construction of Donald Thomas Scholz Arena, a state-of-the-art 17,000-seat venue with unprecedented acoustics. Previously “Engineers,” MIT’s moniker was officially changed to “Beavers” in a high-profile rebranding initiative, accompanied by an unsuccessful (and widely excoriated) campus genetics program designed to incubate and raise an 800-pound semiaquatic rodent. Assertive lobbying by alumni Kofi Annan, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf, and actor James Woods allowed MIT to be immediately reclassified as a major

  — 101 —

  independent on the Division I level. The university elected to hire no head coach and permitted the players to govern themselves, in concert with a team of unnamed consultants (three of which were rumored to be then NBA coach and future Texas senator Gregg Popovich, flamboyant identity-based filmmaker Spike Lee, and art critic Dave Hickey). How and why so much top-flight hoop talent elected to attend a school with no coach and no basketball tradition remains something of a mystery. “It was a self-perpetuating phenomenon,” wrote Murray in his widely criticized history. “It appeared that many of the student-athletes were attracted to Tech’s unwavering willingness to publicly insist that they were, in fact, autodidactic geniuses who coincidentally excelled at the game of basketball.”

  The Beavers perfected a freewheeling, pro-entropy style of play that alienated hoop traditionalists. In their first season as a D-I program, the squad went 39–0. Led by the freshman trio of Kevin Durant, Greg Oden, and Mike Conley, MIT defeated defending champion Florida in the national title game 88–69. The following season was virtually identical, as the Beavers again finished 39–0 behind the frosh efforts of Derrick Rose, Kevin Love, Michael Beasley, and O. J. Mayo. The third season (punctuated by Player of the Year Brandon Jennings and “regular student” Jimmy Bartolotta) brought home a third national trophy, though the Beavers lost twice during the regular season and failed in their quest to match UCLA’s eighty-eight-game win streak. The Beaver empire ended

  — 102 —

  after the 2009–10 campaign, when an MIT roster populated by Derrick Favors, DeMarcus Cousins, Xavier Henry, and John Wall finished the campaign 38–1, downing Butler 112–77 on the season’s final Monday.

  The abrupt end of MIT’s basketball reign (and its subsequent return to Division III) was spurred by a confluence of contentious media events. An exposé by Sports Illustrated published during the 2010 Final Four anonymously interviewed twenty-five former Beaver players, most of whom were actively playing professionally in the U.S. and Europe. According to the story, twenty-two of the interviewees could not properly define (and in some cases remember) the academic field they were alleged to have studied during their time at the university. Equally troubling was a public walkout by much of the school’s faculty in response to the 2009 commencement speech, delivered by popular TV personality Dick Vitale. A third factor was the discovery that longtime metaphysics professor Monroe Wrathbone, broadly viewed as the intellectual engineer behind the original decision to classify basketball no differently than mathematics, was not of sound mind (and had, in fact, spent almost twenty years unsuccessfully attempting to lure former NBA superstar Moses Malone into a sex dungeon he’d constructed one level below the basement of his Tudor residence in suburban Boston).

  Though sometimes dismissed as a compromised anomaly, the 153 wins registered during the Beavers’ fleeting sovereignty represent the last true dynasty for men’s collegiate basketball, as the NCAA itself would collapse and dissolve over the coming

  — 103 —

  two decades. It also serves as proof that even failed experiments can sometimes generate positive results, most notably the breakthrough text A Critique of Existential Memory, published by Dr. Gregory Oden in 2030.

  I Get It Now

  I’m almost you. We’re almost the same. What you believe right now is what I believed before, when it seemed like the only reasonable thing to believe: “This is happening.” What other conclusion could be drawn? How could it not be true? But I was wrong about that.

  Accept what I am telling you now. I realize you won’t.
Your eyes are already angry. You’re squinting and you’re not blinking enough. You’re shaking your head. But that’s fine. That’s part of it. If all this were easy to accept, I would be way more worried. It would mean I was wrong again, in a context too complicated to untangle.

  Let’s open with the annoying part: the French guy. Remember the French guy? We were really into that guy, the French guy, in college, and then again, briefly, after that movie. The French guy whose name I always mispronounced, undermining whatever point I was trying to make. Remember when he murdered his life? He wrote that dumb thing, that thing about how the Gulf War didn’t happen. This, as you may recall, was published when the Gulf War was still happening. I think it was literally titled “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.” Man, did we mock the fuck out of that essay. We were like, “But it’s on TV. Missiles are going down fireplaces.” The French guy became a joke to us, for twenty-five years, up until the day he died. And even after he died, since it was so easy to make jokes about how his death didn’t actually happen.

  But here’s the thing: I get it now. I finally get it. Not the way he described it, because he was never particularly good at describing things, even though that was his only job. Yet in a broader sense, in a broader framework, in a broader broadness—yes. I know what he was getting at. And it’s not like how it was in the movie. Nobody is using humans for batteries. This is not the work of robots. This is not the work of someone else. We did this. You’re doing it now, and I’m helping. I can see it in your dead shark eyes, and you can see it in mine.

  Here, for the sake of oversimplification, is a metaphor: Imagine you’re watching a football game. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like football. Imagine someone dragged you along. All that matters is that you’re there. You’re at the game and you have terrible seats. You’re sitting in the top row of the upper deck, hundreds of feet from the action. Maybe the angle is bad. Maybe the view is partially obstructed by a beam. The tickets were junk. But you’re there, so you’re invested. You’re engaged by default. You can see the microscopic players running pass patterns and covering punts upon the artificial grass. Some of them are getting concussed. Some of them are ripping up their knees and writhing in agony. Some are taunting their opponents. Some are fluid and beautiful. You glance at the scoreboard. Statistics are being accumulated and points are being scored. There’s a jumbotron that’s allegedly broadcasting a version of the same game you’re watching live, and the multitudes of people around you are cheering and booing and guzzling Bud Light and arguing over the potential outcome. All of those things are happening. Yet there’s one detail removed from the equation: There is no ball. The players are collectively pretending to throw and kick and carry a leather prolate spheroid that does not exist. It has not been there for years. Perhaps it was never there at all. It’s been absent for so long that most of the players aren’t even pretending. They believe that the ball must be there, just as you do. They need to operate as if this game is genuine, because it would be terrifying to believe otherwise.

  This is the whole world now.

  I’m not suggesting this is a dream. I’m not saying that the thing you’re crying about is not something worth crying about. I’m not trying to make you feel better or worse. It’s just that I finally understand. I understand that dumb thing about the Gulf War. It wasn’t a war. It was the reproduction of a war. It was a TV show about a war, except they used real bullets and annihilated real houses. The French guy was simply the first lunatic who noticed. The only problem was that he didn’t go far enough. He fixated on the semiotics of the semiotics. He talked himself out of it. He was right the first time, before he tried to explain what he meant. The war didn’t happen, in the same way what’s happening now only happens if you believe it. The president? He’s the president, sure. I mean, I guess he is. He won and she lost, or whatever. But he’s obviously acting. He’s pretending to be a president who shouldn’t be the president. Nobody actually acts like that. Nobody actually talks like that. He’s just doing what the character is supposed to do. On a conscious level, he knows he’s not real. On a subconscious level, we all know this, too. He had a lawyer named Ty Cobb. Come on. He had a communications director named Hope Hicks. It’s not like this was some kind of brilliant subterfuge. The people who voted for him were acting how they thought disenfranchised citizens were supposed to vote. The resisters who hate him are resisting because they have been self-programmed to do so. They believe they’re driven by some greater moral imperative, because that would make so much more sense. But certain constructed feelings need to be constructed. None of this would work if those manufactured emotions were not manufactured. It’s Method acting. This is all Method acting, including your reaction right now, to this.

  What else can I tell you, friendo? It’s an unscripted play, to the benefit of no one. There’s no conspiracy here. No lizard people. We’re in this together. We’re both involved. Or maybe it’s that I’m involved and you’re committed. Can I choose to be uninvolved? Can you choose to be uncommitted? Are those options available? I assume they are not. Maybe I’m only telling you this because that’s what I’m designed to do, which means I failed before I even began. I can tell you don’t believe me. In your mind, you’ve already walked away. But the French guy was right. We are the same illusion we see. The president is not the president. It’s only happening on television. And I’ve been told that nobody watches television anymore, so maybe it’s not happening at all.

  The Power of Other People

  He awoke at dawn, made coffee, and went back to bed. The plan, as always, was to rise with the sun and get to work, but that felt a bit performative every time he actually tried to do so. He worked inside a windowless room. Sunlight was inessential. In the future, it might be nice to tell other people he diligently started working every day at the crack of dawn. It might provide the artifice of tenacity. But that future deception was the only practical upside, and he could always just claim he did, anyway. There was no record of his movements.

  He awoke a second time, five minutes before nine. He sat in the quiet kitchen, drank the coffee he’d made two hours earlier, and ate three peanut butter cookies and a cold sausage. He wore yesterday’s clothes, except for fresh socks and underwear. The house, which had once seemed to be the perfect size, was now colossal and cold. He pulled on his rain boots and exited through the back door, traversing down a short gravel path to a wooden shed partially obscured by trees and shrubbery. He wondered if any of his neighbors watched him as he walked, and if they ever wondered who he was and what he was doing, day after day after day, alone inside the shed.

  He opened the door to the shed and closed it behind him, all in one motion. He flipped on the overhead light and activated the space heater. He turned on the radio and tried to find a station that didn’t talk about the news and didn’t play music that reminded him of anything he’d experienced in the past. That was getting more and more difficult, but never impossible. He spent a few minutes staring at the plywood boards he’d cut yesterday with the jigsaw. They’d seemed perfect when he was carving them up, but now they looked deficient. He couldn’t recut them, of course. You can’t cut the same wood twice. He could theoretically start again from scratch, but the end result would be identical. He was always embarrassed by his own craftsmanship. It made more sense to just stick with the imperfect boards and return his attention to the titanium skull and the aluminum spine, although that would require him to focus on the wiring, and that would consume the whole day. It might be more efficient to instead start mixing the chemicals. The PVC piping needed to be treated with the lubricant. Another option was to get back to molding the fiberglass around the battery—that was all detail work and would take hours, but he knew he was good at it, so at least it would be satisfying. Mounting the keyboard and the amplifiers would be easy. That could wait until the end. The larger issue would be with the proximity of the fan to the nitrous and the coal, and there was no easy solution t
o that dilemma. He was going to use coal no matter what, even if that made no sense to anyone else. He’d just have to incrementally fiddle with the speed of the fan until he didn’t notice the problem. That was almost the same as solving it.

  The thing didn’t look right. It didn’t look the way he imagined, and that became more and more apparent the longer he worked. He could picture other people thinking it was impressive, but they’d be reaching that conclusion for the wrong reason. He could just as easily picture people seeing it exactly the way it was supposed to be and still thinking it preposterous, and he wasn’t sure if that reaction would be better or worse. The thing had no utility. That was a given, and that didn’t bother him. He only wanted it to look the way it was supposed to look and to operate the way it was intended to operate, in accordance with his own personal standards. But even if he were able to achieve that, he would still need other people to recognize that those unspoken goals had been achieved. He needed strangers to know that whatever they perceived was intentional, and that he had preconceived that perception, and that he was the person who’d made it happen.

  He mixed chemicals for over three hours. The lack of ventilation made him nauseous and woozy, so he decided to walk back to the house and drink some ice water. He’d almost reached the back door when he heard a voice call his name from what sounded like a long distance away, almost as if the source was screaming in pain from the bottom of a well. But when he turned around, the man calling his name was only ten steps away, smiling and holding a leaf blower.