Lost in the Meritocracy Part 6

"For now or forever?"

"I have to speak to people."

"I'm sorry I got p.r.i.c.kly. What I'd wish you'd admit is I shouldn't have have to choose. Not 'innocent,' not 'guilty,' not anything. I shouldn't be in this position. You have no to choose. Not 'innocent,' not 'guilty,' not anything. I shouldn't be in this position. You have no case"' case"'

Rob thumbed his brow as I stood up from the couch. I pitied him, suddenly. He'd surely been cajoled into this job, and now, having realized he wasn't really up to it-and having taken for granted the s.p.a.cious dorm room, which had seemed at the time like such a prize-he probably wanted to murder the smooth talker who'd recruited him.

"I'm very sorry we met this way," I said.

"How else would we have met?" said Rob. An excellent point. We came from different tribes. And now I knew to avoid his, to not go near it, the same way I gave a wide berth to Na.s.sau Hall and, not long afterward, to the Persian rug.

The fear of a terrible reckoning, of expulsion, of banishment from the ninety-ninth percentile and a quick trip to whatever h.e.l.l is reserved for fallen overachievers who've mastered or out-maneuvered every challenge except adjusting to the company of their own merciless species, hit me on the last day of Christmas break, on the way to the airport in my father's car. I belched sour orange juice into my throat as I remembered the limp piano wires, the toxic odor of the frying Sony, the glorious, heedless manic rush of tearing apart my prison with my bare hands. With motive galore and sole access to the crime scene, how had I expected to get away with it? I hadn't, obviously. This seemed to mean that I'd been courting punishment, soliciting some absolute rejection that would remove the tension of awaiting one. I didn't buy it, though. The better explanation, I believed, was rooted in Julian's theories about consciousness, at least as I'd been able to understand them. We humans had come to believe over the centuries that our thoughts and actions belonged to us, that they were wholly ours, from our own skulls, and that had led us to feel we could control them or, when we couldn't, that we should answer for them. But maybe it wasn't true. Maybe, at times, the mind slipped back, evolution and history reversed themselves, and the ancient phantoms regained command.

My defense, if it ever came to mounting one, would be possession, I decided. Or regression, that is. And it might just be the truth. A throwback lobe had made me slay the Steinway.

My father exited the freeway and took a shortcut through downtown St. Paul that was only a shortcut under ideal conditions. As usual, they didn't obtain today. There was construction. Then there was an accident. Luckily, we'd set out early, so being late for my flight was not our worry. Our worry-not just mine, I knew-was having extra time to talk but nothing much to say.

"So it's been good? You're getting used to it?" My father had asked the same thing at Christmas dinner and I'd answered the same way I did now.

"It's different. It's a different kind of place."

"I can't disagree. And it's tough sometimes, I bet. But I made the best friends of my life at that d.a.m.ned place and you will, too, if you make a little effort."

I didn't respond. Too anxious. And now too sad. I'd met my father's wondrous college friends-all three or four of them-though only briefly, and never more than twice. They lived spread out around the country, mostly in the East, and every few years one would pa.s.s through Minnesota and show up at our dinner table, where my brother and I were expected to receive them like long-lost relatives. They always got drunk before the meal was over. Often, they arrived drunk. Then they told stories about getting drunk. For a few days after they left my father would talk about how much he missed them, how much they meant to him, what fine guys they were, but then a year would go by without him mentioning them, except when he was drunk.

By the time we cleared the congestion and delays I was wondering if I should go back to school at all. I might be arrested on arrival. I'd certainly be given another bill; a fantastically large bill that I couldn't duck and that my father would learn about eventually, possibly from a judge, who'd make him pay it. I considered confessing in the car to him; we still had fifteen minutes before the airport. I studied his profile, trying to gauge his mood-his character, really-and guess how he'd respond. He was dressed for work in an old suit bought from a thrift store called Next to New. Refusing to pay full price for office wear was part of his rebellion against the business world, as was his fondness for Copenhagen snuff. He spat a big gob of it out his rolled-down window and the subzero January air instantly froze it in a fan shape on the backseat window behind his shoulders.

"You know how you say about 3M sometimes that they discourage being your own man?"

"I guess I've said that. Or felt that. Sometimes. Why?"

"Princeton can be like that, too."

"I'm sure it can be. That's just the world for you, isn't it?" he said.

He craned his neck, merging back onto the freeway, and shot into a gap between two trucks. The daredevil move convinced me to stop talking. Instead of listening, he'd been gauging road speeds. I think he wanted me to know it, too. I think he was trying on purpose to cut me short. Desolation was rolling off me in waves and he wasn't stupid; he sensed I had bad news. He'd probably sensed it since I'd gotten home. But bad news from me angered him, I'd always felt. It might require him to perform some duty, and duty, to my father, always meant loss of freedom, never an opportunity for strength.

I knew this because I thought the same way.

"Welcome, welcome, welcome," said Jennifer.

She was alone on the sofa drinking tea and leafing through a magazine. The common room had been restored. The TV was turned on, the rug looked clean and sleek, and on the piano was a sheet of music and Peter's ashtray, bristling with b.u.t.ts. A Christmas miracle. And ominous.

"How was your break?"

I shrugged. My throat had closed.

"Mine was perfect. Just heavenly," she said.

I smiled, re-smiled, dipped my head, and pushed down the hall against a current of dread. Each step took the energy of a hundred steps, the surge against me was that strong, but I told myself that if I made it to the bedroom, where I could hear Joshua singing "Heart of Gold," I could plead with the Lord to turn back time.

"You do know you're going to jail," said Jennifer before I'd gotten very far. "My father's lawyers will see to it. You're toast."

I stayed in my bunk for thirty-six hours, feigning the flu and subsisting on b.u.t.tered dinner rolls that Joshua brought wrapped in napkins from the dining hall and set on my desk while I coughed and hacked and shivered. He allowed me a full day of drama before explaining, in his calm yet disquieting Quaker way, that my roommates were serious indeed about pursuing criminal charges but might be persuaded to show leniency if I made rest.i.tution and showed remorse.

"For what?" I croaked.

"I'm just saying. I'm not judging. I'm not conveying any a.s.sumptions."

"So what are you saying?"

"Make sure to eat."

Adam came by later in the day and, in return for my promise not to squeal on him, left me a joint he'd dipped in liquid cocaine. When I lit up after he left, a crow with a sc.r.a.p of something pink and fleshy dangling from its horrid black beak landed on the ledge outside my window, fluffed its feathers, and started pacing. It seemed to expect me to let it in the room. I willed myself into unconsciousness. Nina was next to my bunk when I woke up but the crow was gone. I suspected a metamorphosis. Confirmation came when she produced a packet of effervescent vitamin powder that she ripped open with her teeth, drizzled into a gla.s.s of lukewarm water, and presented to me like a witch's potion, still bubbling.

"First you're going to shower and brush your teeth. Then we're going to a play," she said. "And no, they're not out there. The coast is clear."

But my nightmare continued in the theater. Student actors whose heads were wrapped in bandages and whose faces were covered with fake boils crawled and limped and writhed across the stage. Baby powder used to gray their hair came off in clouds and drifted through the lights. The set conjured up no specific place or period and had to be explained to me by Nina. It was a French insane asylum, she said, during the era of revolution. The script combined verse and screaming. Its meaning escaped me. When the actors flooded into the audience, snorting and cackling and spitting, I formed a grudge against the art of live performance itself. It seemed unfair that I couldn't attack them back.

At the Annex after the show I drank as much liquor as Nina had money for and let her discourse about Artaud and "the sickness," whose nature she didn't specify but which had been bred by society, not people. I failed to see the distinction-people were were society. Nina treated my observation as a witticism rather than a point to be debated and I let it pa.s.s. It was frivolous, under the circ.u.mstances. The circ.u.mstances being my looming trial for felonious destruction of property. No date for it had been set, but it would come. society. Nina treated my observation as a witticism rather than a point to be debated and I let it pa.s.s. It was frivolous, under the circ.u.mstances. The circ.u.mstances being my looming trial for felonious destruction of property. No date for it had been set, but it would come.

"Don't be silly. Don't be histrionic. Their insurance covered the damage. All they want is an apology. And make it spectacular. Bended-knee stuff. Really."

"I didn't do it."

"Please."

"It must have been an intruder."

"This hurts to watch."

"This hurts to be seen doing."

"You have problems."

"Problems you must like," I said. "May I ask you why?"

"I'm sure you know."

"I truly don't. I want to, though. Maybe then I'll like them, too. Right now I hate them. Tell me."

"Doomed is s.e.xy. Lost is a turn-on in cute smart boys. Come over to my house. You can play intruder."

I didn't want to, but I did her bidding. I knew better, but I heeded her. As though she were not a girl I could put off, a human being I could disappoint, but an irresistible spirit from my own brain.

The next day my phone rang. Na.s.sau Hall. Or maybe it was an immaterial aide in the ethereal office of the provost. Or some dean who slept in a coffin in a closet infested with bats and spiderwebs. In Princeton's neo-Gothic shadowland, the figures who spoke from the castle were all one ghost.

The voice didn't let me get a word in edgewise. It ordered me to gather up my things and move to a university-owned house a block away from campus. The voice provided an address and a room number as well as instructions on obtaining a door key. No discussion. Go immediately. Without saying so directly, the voice suggested that my prompt obedience would close the file on my vandalism. I hung up feeling relieved but mystified. Had justice been served, evaded, or postponed? I couldn't imagine through what process, or on the basis of what evidence, what testimony, what arguments, my case had been adjudicated. I further feared that I'd incurred some debt, some burdensome inst.i.tutional obligation. Was this how Princeton sucked students into the Honor Committee?

Joshua came in while I was packing but didn't inquire about my destination, just offered to help me fold my shirts and sweaters. His beatific detachment would be missed. He expected so little from me. He accepted so little. Whole weeks had pa.s.sed when I'd hardly acknowledged his presence, had barely checked for his presence in the room, and yet, I realized now, he'd been there beside me almost the whole time. Mourning John Lennon. Playing hits from G.o.dspell G.o.dspell. Growing his beard in a corner.

"It's fine," I said. "They're making me move off campus, but it's fine."

"Where off campus?"

I gave the house's address.

"Lots of committed vegetarians there. They all pitch in in the kitchen. You might like that."

"If a s.p.a.ce opens up," I said, "you could move there, too. I'd like that."

He crossed the arms of my homely flannel shirt and neatly reduced it to a square that he set on top of the garments I'd folded myself. His packing skills put mine to shame. I clamped the suitcase between my knees, compressed it, latched it, and hoisted it off the floor. It was heavy with books that I'd vowed to read, not skim. I wanted to reform.

Going out, I said, "I'm curious. How do Quakers pray?"

"Why?" Joshua asked.

"I heard you do it differently. Than Mormons, say."

"How do Mormons pray?"

"The usual. 'Please' and 'thank you' and 'amen.'"

"We sit very still, in silence, and we listen."

"Listen for what?"

"Whatever comes."

"Interesting. Does it matter where it comes from?"

He c.o.c.ked his head. "Not sure I get you there."

"I'm not sure I do, either."

In the common room, at the resurrected piano, Jennifer, Tim, and Peter were working on songs for an original musical Peter hoped to mount later in the semester. "Break a leg," I said, going by. I meant it. But then, at the door, I regretted meaning it. I took a Quaker breath. "Break a leg," I said again, but nicely. They didn't look over at me. Their backs stayed turned.

I slammed the door hard enough to crack the cas.e.m.e.nt and pounded down the stairs into the cold.

I VOWED TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT MY STUDIES. I CHOSE TO VOWED TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT MY STUDIES. I CHOSE TO major in English, since it sounded like something I might already know. I a.s.sumed that my cla.s.smates and I would study the cla.s.sics and a.n.a.lyze their major themes and such, but instead we were buffeted with talk of "theory," whatever that was. The basic meanings of the poems, short stories, and essays contained in the hefty Norton anthologies that anch.o.r.ed our entry-level reading lists were treated by certain professors as trivial, almost beneath discussion; what mattered, we were given to understand, were our "critical a.s.sumptions." major in English, since it sounded like something I might already know. I a.s.sumed that my cla.s.smates and I would study the cla.s.sics and a.n.a.lyze their major themes and such, but instead we were buffeted with talk of "theory," whatever that was. The basic meanings of the poems, short stories, and essays contained in the hefty Norton anthologies that anch.o.r.ed our entry-level reading lists were treated by certain professors as trivial, almost beneath discussion; what mattered, we were given to understand, were our "critical a.s.sumptions."

I, for one, wasn't aware of having any. Until I was sixteen or so, my only reading had consisted of Hardy Boys mysteries, world almanacs, books on UFOs, a Time-Life history of World War II, and a handful of pulpy best sellers linked to movies (The Day of the Jackal (The Day of the Jackal and and The Exorcist The Exorcist stood out), which I'd read for their s.e.x scenes and air of general perversity. I knew a few great authors' names from scanning dust jackets in the public library and watching the better TV quiz shows, but the only serious novels I'd ever cracked were stood out), which I'd read for their s.e.x scenes and air of general perversity. I knew a few great authors' names from scanning dust jackets in the public library and watching the better TV quiz shows, but the only serious novels I'd ever cracked were Frankenstein, Moby-d.i.c.k Frankenstein, Moby-d.i.c.k (both sold to me by crafty high-school teachers as gripping tales of adventure, which they weren't), and (both sold to me by crafty high-school teachers as gripping tales of adventure, which they weren't), and The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald. by Fitzgerald. Gatsby Gatsby I actually finished. Among my mother's collection of mail-order leatherette masterpieces, it was the shortest, the least remote in time, and the only one narrated by a Minnesotan. The tale didn't strike me as tragic or cautionary. To me, it was the invigorating chronicle of several high-spirited Midwesterners storming through the mansions of the East. Gatsby's demise barely registered for me. I focused on the dancing and the drinking, the motorcar outings, the rich girls, the grand hotels. I actually finished. Among my mother's collection of mail-order leatherette masterpieces, it was the shortest, the least remote in time, and the only one narrated by a Minnesotan. The tale didn't strike me as tragic or cautionary. To me, it was the invigorating chronicle of several high-spirited Midwesterners storming through the mansions of the East. Gatsby's demise barely registered for me. I focused on the dancing and the drinking, the motorcar outings, the rich girls, the grand hotels.

With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical a.s.sumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I'd reached myself. I'd honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and I didn't regard them as sins against the Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own. "Be Honored," it stated. "Or Be d.a.m.ned." To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway. What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?

In my private Princeton honors program, the deployment of key words was crucial, just as the recognition of them had been on the SAT. Because I despaired of ever grasping these theory words, style of presentation was everything. "Liminal," spoken breezily enough, and "valuational," served up with verve, could make a professor shiver and drop his chalk, but if delivered hesitantly, they bombed. They bombed before they reached one's lips, while still emerging from one's throat. Unless they were spit out promptly and with spirit, such words could actually choke a person.

This suffocating sensation often came over me whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism Deconstruction and Criticism, a collection of essays by leading theory people that I spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force. Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume's most prestigious name: "He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it." On the same page I encountered the windpipe-blocking "heteronomous" and "inv.a.g.i.n.ation." When I turned the page I came across-stuck in a footnote-"unreadability."

That word I understood, of course.

But real understanding was rare with theory. It couldn't be depended on at all. Boldness of execution was what scored points. With one of my professors, a snappy "heuristic" usually did the trick. With another, the charm was a casual "praxis." Even when a poem or story fundamentally escaped me, I found that I could save face with terminology, as when I referred to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land The Waste Land as "semiotically unstable." By this I meant "hard." All the theory words meant "hard" to me, from "hermeneutical" to "gestural." Once in a while I'd look one up and see that it had a more specific meaning, but later-sometimes only minutes later-the definition would catch a sort of breeze, float away like a dandelion seed, and the word would go back to meaning "hard." as "semiotically unstable." By this I meant "hard." All the theory words meant "hard" to me, from "hermeneutical" to "gestural." Once in a while I'd look one up and see that it had a more specific meaning, but later-sometimes only minutes later-the definition would catch a sort of breeze, float away like a dandelion seed, and the word would go back to meaning "hard."

The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery-honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps-left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted. Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds. We recognized one another instantly. We toted around books by Roland Barthes, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Walter Benjamin. We spoke of "playfulness" and "textuality" and concluded before we'd read even a hundredth of it that the Western canon was "illegitimate," a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert. In our rush to adopt the latest att.i.tudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors-the ones who drank with us at the Na.s.sau Street bars and played the Clash on the tape decks of their Toyotas as their hands crept up our pants and skirts-we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we'd never constructed in the first place.

For true believers, the goal of theory seemed to be the lifting of a great weight from the shoulders of civilization. This weight was the illusion that it was civilized. The weight had been set there by a range of perpetrators-members of certain favored races, males, property owners, the church, the literate, natives of the northern hemisphere-who, when taken together, it seemed to me, represented a considerable portion of everyone who had ever lived. Then again, of course I'd think that way. Of course I'd be cynical. I was one of them.

So why didn't I feel like one of them, particularly just then? Why did I, a member of the cla.s.ses that had supposedly placed the weight on others and was now attempting to redress this crime, feel so crushingly weighed down myself?

I wasn't one of theory's true believers. I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion. The literary works they prized-the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion-were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique. The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example. My cla.s.smates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say "recursive" by then. We could say "incommensurable."

Both words meant "hard."

I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they, too, were fakes. In cla.s.sroom discussions, and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new att.i.tude of antic postmodernism that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I-a born con man who knew little about great literature-had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability, the nonreader was king, it seemed. Long live the king.

This lucky convergence of academic fashion and my illiteracy emboldened me socially. It convinced me I had a place at Princeton after all. I hadn't chosen it, exactly, but I'd be foolish not to occupy it. Otherwise I'd be alone.

Finally, without reservations or regrets, I settled into the ranks of Princeton's Joy Division-my name for the crowd of moody avant-gardists who hung around the smaller campus theaters discussing, enjoying, and dramatizing confusion. One of their productions, which I a.s.sisted with, required the audience to contemplate a stage decorated with nothing but potted plants. Plants and Waiters Plants and Waiters, it was called. My friends and I stood snickering in the wings making bets on how long it would take for people to leave. They, the "waiters," proved true to form. They fidgeted but they didn't flee. Hilarious.

And, for me, profoundly enlightening. Who knew that serious art could be like this? Who would have guessed that the essence of high culture would turn out to be teasing the poor saps that still believed in it? Certainly no one back in Minnesota. Well, the joke was on them, and I was in on it. I could never go back there now. It bothered me that I'd ever even lived there, knowing that people here on the great coast (people like me-the new, emerging me) had been laughing at us all along. But what troubled me more was the dawning realization that had I not reached Princeton, I might never have discovered this I might have stayed a rube forever. This idea transformed my basic loyalties. I decided that it was time to leave behind the sort of folks whom I'd been raised around and stand-for better or for worse-with the characters who'd clued me in.

I soaked lentil beans in iron stew pots, formed falafel patties in my bare hands, harvested bean sprouts with pinking shears, and squeezed the moisture from slices of tofu between double layers of paper towels. My new housemates, all uppercla.s.smen and Grateful Dead fans, believed that preparing and consuming food were sacramental acts. The kitchen was a temple, and the mood at our table was reverential. There, according to our leader, Greg, a bearded political science major with mesmerizing, unfocused brown eyes and sandal-strap tan lines on his feet, we "shared the good things of the earth." soaked lentil beans in iron stew pots, formed falafel patties in my bare hands, harvested bean sprouts with pinking shears, and squeezed the moisture from slices of tofu between double layers of paper towels. My new housemates, all uppercla.s.smen and Grateful Dead fans, believed that preparing and consuming food were sacramental acts. The kitchen was a temple, and the mood at our table was reverential. There, according to our leader, Greg, a bearded political science major with mesmerizing, unfocused brown eyes and sandal-strap tan lines on his feet, we "shared the good things of the earth."

Among these good things were the hallucinogenic mushrooms that Greg must have had some nearby source for, because they were moist when he shook them from their bags. Sometimes he shook them directly into the soup pot. Due to his knowledge of life in poorer countries and to his sympathy for their customs and folkways and religions, Greg thought of himself as a sort of village shaman. This gave him a lot of leeway in his conduct. One weekend I caught him sleeping with a girl who'd flown out to visit me from Macalester College. Instead of apologizing or scurrying off, he looked up from the bed-my bed-and said, "In some cultures, Walter, men share their women proudly." Then, to my girl, whose head was under a pillow, he said, "It's okay. Stay mellow. I expected this. At some stage when you trip on shrooms, there's always a visitation from the shame realm."

There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene. Kids can't just get high; they have to seek epiphanies. They have to ground their mischief in manifestos. The most popular one around the veggie house held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs-especially plant-based psychedelic drugs-helped to break down the rigid inner part.i.tions that restricted one's full humanity. This belief in creative derangement came down to us from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the Beat poets, but in my case it didn't quite apply because my mind had few part.i.tions in the first place. It was one big dark and empty room with sc.r.a.ps of paper strewn all over the floor.

Our drug sessions were the opposite of parties; they brought on bouts of crushing introspection and spirals of anxious cerebration. One night Adam came over to the house for Thai spicy noodles and a square of blotter acid. After the bowls and chopsticks were put away, the smells of burned sesame oil and peanut b.u.t.ter and the climate of well-fed hippie piety drove us outside for a long walk. Our first stop was the Princeton chapel, which was closer in size and splendor to a cathedral. Something had drawn us there. As we walked down its infinite main aisle toward the gaudy holy end, Adam dropped to the floor-not kneeling, sprawling. He said an invisible force had knocked him down. He said it seemed to be displeased with us. We scrambled out of the place as though pursued and hid behind a sculpture by Pica.s.so of a gigantic triangular-faced woman. It, too, had an angry force field, though. It, too, cast us away.

"I feel punished," said Adam as we wandered. "I feel like I offended. Did I offend?"

"Don't let those thoughts push in."

"They're in. They're here."

"I know," I said quietly. "Me, too."

"But you didn't quit premed," said Adam. "You didn't renounce tradition and leave the path."

"Maybe I was never on the path."

"You had to be. You're here."

We ended up on the grounds of the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Studies, a lofty think tank secluded in the woods. The place was best known as a haven for famous physicists, including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and through its lamplit windows we glimpsed the silhouettes of n.o.bel Prize winners, their heads surrounded by pulsing pink coronas that persisted even when we blinked. Now and then someone would pa.s.s us in the darkness, absorbed, we imagined, in algebraic reveries related to fusion reactors and plasma beams.