Lost in the Meritocracy Part 9

"I didn't go to prep school."

"Then why the att.i.tude?"

"I didn't realize it was att.i.tude."

"To me-to an army brat-it's att.i.tude."

I heard a zipper I hadn't known was down being zipped back up. The presence retreated. Ten minutes later, pretending nothing had happened, I delivered the food and coffee to Herr Blick's table, fussing over the placement of plates and silverware. A German girl at the table, early twenties, ample chest, high cheekbones, reddish hair, appraised me as I stumbled through my duties. Later, when I was back behind the bar, she came up and introduced herself as Hannah, but I a.s.sumed she was addressing Wilhelm, who was pouring a whip of shining Blue Curacao into a silver c.o.c.ktail shaker.

"This is my number," Hannah said in English, pushing a paper napkin toward me. "Ring me on Sat.u.r.day. We'll discuss Herr Blick. I'll show you my squat and we can see a play that's being performed by my collective. Do you admire the work of Dario Fo?"

It was Europe. Why not be honest? "I don't know him."

"Super," said Hannah. "Soon you'll know him well."

But my father made other plans for me that Sat.u.r.day. He accepted an invitation on my behalf from Dr. Frisch, the German attorney who'd gotten me my tiny room. The invitation, which I couldn't decline, was to a festival way out in the countryside. It celebrated the wedding anniversary of a medieval Bavarian princess.

Dr. Frisch picked me up at seven in the morning and drove at high speeds in his sedan deep into what he termed "the land itself."

"How are you liking it at the Corps?" he asked me. He meant the sinister fraternity, and the pride in his voice suggested he'd once belonged to it. So did the fencing scar on one of his cheeks. "Have you conversed yet with any of the brothers?"

I explained that my schedule prevented any such contacts. The young men conducted their sword fights in the mornings and were gone by the time that I woke up. "That is a shame," Dr. Frisch said. He seemed angry. "I warned your father that your job would isolate you from the true German society. To labor on a good dairy would be much preferable."

The route into the village hosting the festival was barricaded from motor traffic. We parked in a mucky field and walked to town. Dr. Frisch had the strongest walk I'd ever witnessed. His heels chopped into the sod and flung chunks back at me. While I tried to keep pace, he vented his contempt for the decadent Munich nightclub scene, a.s.serting that it was filled with prost.i.tutes and political subversives. "This is the wrong introduction. Corrupt. Absurd. Today will prove an antidote, I hope."

We entered a throng of costumed revelers who may or may not have had roles in the parade. Some of the ladies had flowers in their hair and some of the men carried daggers on their belts. The warm, midday air felt thick with ancient kinship. I'd discovered during my time in Germany that I had a high tolerance for foreignness, thanks, perhaps, to my first year at Princeton, but here, among the damsels and the knights, as the buglers and string players tuned their instruments and little girls dressed as fairies went dancing by, I suddenly felt so smothered by the exotic that my esophagus closed up and bouncing black dots appeared before my eyes. The problem wasn't the pageantry itself, which wasn't so different from American pageantry-also based on hats and horns-but the solemn comportment of the spectators. In the States, we grinned at dress-up holidays, but here the crowd was sober, worshipful.

We watched the procession from a balcony. A waiter circulated with a tray laden with rolled-up cold cuts and cubes of sausage. I was among some wealthy people, I sensed, but I couldn't gauge how educated they were. They licked their fingers when they ate. They drank from beer gla.s.ses with napkins stuck to them. The clues about cla.s.s that I'd picked up at Princeton were useless to me here.

Beneath the terrace, ranks of heavy horses trudged through drifts of manure and flower petals, drawing old carriages filled with storybook characters. I gathered from Dr. Frisch's shifting responses-outbursts of clapping, pauses for meditation, gleams of high amus.e.m.e.nt-that the profusion of huntsmen, ladies-in-waiting, falconers, peasants, and royalty spoke to his soul in distinctive, varied ways.

"Hers is a beauty uniquely German," he said. He was waving at someone.

"Whose?" I'd looked away.

"The princess's. Our dear princess," he said. He pointed out a gilded, antique conveyance that had already pa.s.sed before the balcony, its wheels cutting parallel ruts in the manure. It dawned on me then that I'd missed the main event, the glorious, folkloric climax of the day. And Dr. Frisch had noticed. His brow grew stormy.

I needed an excuse. Immediately. I'd insulted my host in a country where such things mattered.

"I'm sorry. I was lost in thought," I said.

Dr. Frisch c.o.c.ked a huge German eyebrow.

"It's Herr Blick."

I described my entrapment at the coffee machine, playing to Dr. Frisch's fiercest prejudices about the degenerate climate at the bar. His bologna-colored skin went crimson. The man didn't like me much, intuition told me, but he respected me as a high-caste guest, and hearing that I'd been dishonored in his realm made icicle points of his blue eyes.

"Do nothing. I will do everything," he vowed.

While waiting for the storm to break, I spent as much time as I could with Hannah, the anarchist, in her surprisingly well-furnished squat. One day we bathed together in her tub. I asked her why the hot water was still turned on if no one was paying for it. She acted perplexed. I concluded that withholding rent was normal behavior with Hannah's generation and didn't merit any particular punishment.

As we dried off, she produced two small foil packets that she said contained a strong narcotic in fast-acting suppository form. I braced my hands on a wall as she inserted one between my parted legs. Then I returned the favor. Then we had s.e.x. I enjoyed the directness of it all and thought once again about not returning to Princeton.

That evening we saw the Dario Fo play. The performers were Hannah's age, all unemployed, all living as she did, apparently. On nothing. The lines were in German but I could follow the story. It concerned the interrogation of a man by a group of crazy secret police. I knew from the style of the poster that the play was supposed to be a comedy, but the audience in the smoky coffeehouse showed little mirth as it unfolded. When the suspect was murdered, they finally laughed. It felt to me like revolution loomed here, but not in the fanciful way it did at Princeton. Munich's youth were preparing for a true fight. They'd do it with painkillers in their rushing bloodstreams, and if I stayed they might make me join their ranks.

"You know that the girl's a prost.i.tute," Herr Blick said when he learned that I'd been seeing Hannah. We were upstairs in the private VIP bar, where he was throwing a party for two Englishmen who were dancing back-to-back to disco music after stripping off their shirts. My job was to top up the drinks and empty the ashtrays. Dr. Frisch hadn't come to save me yet. Where was he?

He must have heard my silent call. The next afternoon, in my room at the fraternity, he described his plan of battle, pacing the creaky floorboards in stiff black shoes. He brandished a pencil and a notepad on which he'd tabulated what I was due as a gentleman who'd been wronged in his Bavaria.

"You contracted for another five weeks of labor. Your unpaid salary will be our base. Then we will multiply it by the injury. Not only the injury to you. I feel that a factor of five is justified, but he will agree to a factor of eight or nine. If not I will speak to Wilhelm as a German and Wilhelm will do what is honorable, I know, and threaten resignation. This will work."

The speech made me want to back out of the scheme. I felt Dr. Frisch had vastly overestimated the value of my good opinion of his homeland. But I knew why he had. It was Princeton. Princeton awed him. Its role at the forefront of theoretical physics-the subject he'd trained in before becoming a patent lawyer-was the source of his awe. We'd talked about this once.

"The factor is too high," I said. "I'll settle for the five weeks pay."

"But I will not," Dr. Frisch said. "Now we go."

We surprised Herr Blick in his office above the barroom. He was counting his money from the night before and tapping one foot to a perky Euro-pop song playing on his desktop radio. When he saw us, he tried to stash the cash in a drawer that was open on his right, but Dr. Frisch stopped him with a word of German. He then brought forth his notepad, tore a page off, and placed it on the blotter on Herr Blick's desk. There were no negotiations. The bills that made up the fine were counted twice-once by each party, the sinner and the avenger-before being placed in the pit of my right hand.

"Now Walter Kirn is whole," said Dr. Frisch.

I felt a bit guilty, but he was right. For it was then, that day, in Munich, Germany, as I filled my pockets with blackmail money extracted for a slight against my dignity (and again that night, with Hannah, when I bought beer for a table full of anarchists who thanked me with a noisy, sloshing toast), that I at last knew my power and my status as what I'd forgotten I was: a Princeton man.

I was ready to go back.

MY CLa.s.sMATES' LOOKS HAD CHANGED OVER THE SUMMER. Some of them now resembled adults. It had nothing to do with the loss of baby fat. It had nothing to do with wisdom in their eyes. It was their haircuts, literally their haircuts. By experimentation or inspiration or simply by yielding to the wills of experts, they'd finally found the haircuts which best suited them and allowed them to squarely meet the world.

Not that there was just one world to meet. By my second year at Princeton I'd catalogued a half-dozen social groups whose members I found recognizable at middle distances of thirty feet or so, across a quad or down a hallway, and each of which stirred in me, for different reasons, potent feelings of envy and contempt, longing and revulsion. All of these factions, it seemed to me, had certain attributes I lacked and lacked certain attributes I had. And though I knew it was too late for me to belong to any of these groups-not wholly, not permanently, not plausibly-I hoped that by picking and choosing among their traits I could a.s.semble a persona that would let me belong to me. Reason told me this project was impossible, since any "I" fabricated from a "they" would forever regard itself, deep down, as nothing but an "it" and end up feeling lonely in its own company. But reason was not my reigning faculty then. Nor could it be, I felt, in a post-deconstructionist era of wild guesses. No, what ruled me was restlessness, disquiet, a nagging sense of missing out on things that others, more cla.s.sifiable, had access to.

These others were as follows.

Those Who'd Been on Sailboats The tender, sheltered skin that forms the eyelids seemed to cover their entire bodies. Their enemy was sunlight, which turned their skin a pre-carcinoma scarlet, while their friend was the double gin and tonic, which flushed vitality into their capillaries. Most of them suffered from thinning hair, the males and females both, which might have explained their fondness for stupid hats. They favored straw hats when cheering the rowing crew, Princeton or prep-school team caps when jogging, canvas hats while lying in the gra.s.s, and any old hat when they were drunk, a state that was hard to diagnose in them because they held their liquor well. Sometimes they started nipping away at breakfast, if their responsibilities were light that day.

Their responsibilities seemed light on most days. Their money arrived by stealth, in neutral envelopes sent by lawyers, accountants, and trustees, though sometimes it was delayed by court proceedings in Newport or Kennebunkport or Southampton, where their semiretired parents' sloops were docked. The names of these craft remembered beloved ancestors (Aunt Melissa) (Aunt Melissa), alluded to family commercial interests (Bid and (Bid and Call) Call), or displayed an inbred nautical wit (Triton's Trifle) (Triton's Trifle). I saw a few of them once in coastal Connecticut, where I'd gone to the beach to pick up young foreign au pairs with a friend who'd grown up in the area. There were a lot of these girls, but they ignored us, maybe because I was swimming in cutoff jeans.

The effortlessness of the sailboat caste was their most appealing quality. If they dropped something-a pen, a book, a dollar-they scooped it back up like a ball at Wimbledon. They napped during lectures, but rarely to their detriment because they could always charm some awestruck stranger-a plump girl with a limp, a science major with untied shoelaces-into giving them copies of their notes. They danced at a pleasant low intensity, avoiding any new or tricky moves that might jostle the drinks in their right hands or stress their knees, the weakest part of them. If, toward the end of a weekend party night, you spied one puking behind a hedge, he'd grin and salute you, then carry on heaving. Later you'd see him on the dance floor joking away with some girl you'd never speak to because you didn't understand lacrosse, and lacrosse was all she had to talk about. That, and the time her madcap cousin at Andover, a guy named Topper or maybe Tuffy, released a muskrat in the records office.

For the boaters, Princeton was a lark before the real work of life began: building client lists, hiring tax advisers, courting the daughters of their fathers' partners, guiding the restoration of summer homes. This lent their time at Princeton a touch of pathos. Custom decreed that they live like there was no tomorrow, but tomorrow was coming, laden with obligations. Tradition and duty owned these kids.

Still, for about a week, I tried to ape them. I found a wall that ab.u.t.ted an empty courtyard and went there at night with a junk-store tennis racket to serve and rally un.o.bserved. I'd had a few lessons in eighth-grade gym cla.s.s, but I lost all of my b.a.l.l.s by the fourth session because my strokes were too hard for the small s.p.a.ce. I watched them ricochet off into the darkness like little yellow comets. Next I scrounged up some money to buy deck shoes. The problem was that such shoes had no charisma until they were scuffed and wrinkled and worn out. I tried to distress them by soaking them in water and tumbling them in a coin dryer. This shrunk and dehydrated the leather, causing me to get blisters when I wore them.

Those Who Strove to Serve Mankind They studied at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Policy, a selective college within a college housed in a sprawling, stylized Greek temple barricaded from the outside world by an array of slim white columns shaped like vertical drips of Elmer's glue. The edifice, whose design was so replete with futuristic optimism that it already seemed comically defunct, faced a plaza with a broad reflecting pool whose centerpiece was an abstract sculpture evocative of the maggot-scoured remains of a giant chicken carca.s.s. Set across the street from the main campus, the complex had no aesthetic connection to the rest of the university, which accorded with the insular nature of its pre-senatorial occupants. So crisp and determined they seemed, so sure and steady, so confident that their country would make them boss one day. Did they have doubts? Being young, they probably did, but they also had procedures for removing them, pie graph by pie graph, seminar by seminar. Someday these kids would be nothing but firm handshakes. When they stood on the granite steps below the columns or sat on the plaza eating lunch (the largest expanse of treeless s.p.a.ce at Princeton other than the football field), they didn't look to me like human beings but like stick figures in an architect's scale model.

What I wanted from them-the only thing I wanted; I certainly didn't want their workloads-was their seriousness, their certainty, their seeming immunity to second thoughts. The world for them was not some tricky text but a color-coded manila folder. Open it, remove the stacked white pages, scan the outline on page one, read for half an hour, walk down the hall, nod to the guards, and brief the president. The war should begin no later than next April. These short-term interest rates are unsustainable. Only three breeding pairs of black-beaked hawks remain, all of them near the Utah air force base where we're conducting Operation Parabola. "Thank you." "You're welcome, sir." "How's the family?" "Excellent." "Run today?" "Fifteen kilometers." "Good man."

A little faith in the establishment and in the orderly cosmos for which it stood wouldn't hurt me, I decided. With it, I might be able to decline the next hit of mescaline from Adam and pa.s.s the sand ashtray outside of Firestone Memorial Library without digging for a b.u.t.t. From orthodoxy might come self-esteem, even a measure of discipline, perhaps.

I started hanging around the Woodrow Wilson School ("Woody Woo," the students called it) in the hope of absorbing its can-do spirit. I poked my nose into the lecture halls, which took the form of austere amphitheaters where one might imagine ill.u.s.trious alumni such as Paul Volcker and John Foster Dulles sketching diagrams on the wide blackboards. Unlike Yale and Harvard, Princeton didn't breed leaders, historically, but loyal lieutenants, trusted aides, self-effacing senior bureaucrats.

One afternoon on the plaza, eating yogurt, I got to chatting with a girl who hoped to help inst.i.tute universal health care. It would be free to everyone, she said. She seemed to be talking about me.

"What are you doing later?"

"Studying."

"After you're done studying," I said.

"Sleeping, probably. If I can sleep. I haven't been able to lately. It's terrible."

"What keeps you up at night?" I couldn't imagine.

"Worrying that I should be studying, not sleeping."

My chance encounters at Woody Woo were like that. They apprised me of concerns I'd never thought about. Some were profound concerns. Epidemics. Border wars. Land distribution in Central and South America. I grew ashamed of my solipsism, my foolishness. The sun on the naked plaza seemed to spotlight them, eventually driving me back into the shade.

Those Who Never Raised Their Eyes They were scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. Life was a distraction to them. They ate and drank to sustain their neural chemistries, but only while doing more constructive things such as walking to the lab or punching calculators. Somehow, someday, they'd reproduce, but that phase was not yet upon them, blessedly. For now they were free to decline communication and dress in pants that didn't reach their shoes. They were free to read while climbing stairs and free not to say they were sorry when they b.u.mped into people. People didn't expect them to apologize. People didn't see them as other people.

I coveted their oblivious self-sufficiency, but I coveted their silence most. I was tired of having to blabber to survive. Sometimes I pretended to be one of them. I'd cross the campus staring at the sidewalk, projecting patterns onto the cement. I'd baffle my friends by declining to say hi to them. I'd ride the elevator three floors down into the deepest strata of the library and systematically pace the aisles between the acres of tall shelves. I'd go to bed without undressing and clip a light to a book and turn the pages with tick-tock regularity, paying the same attention to difficult pa.s.sages as I did to patches of dialogue. I made notes with colored pencils: black, red, green. Black meant this part is worthy of memorization. Red meant this part might be flawed or dubious. Green meant this part called for fuller a.n.a.lysis, should I ever find the time. I read James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by precisely this method, my pencils hovering. The girl who'd later lose her will to live by mistaking herself for Anna Karenina and Adam for Vronsky spied me at this work when she came to retrieve a book she'd loaned me. by precisely this method, my pencils hovering. The girl who'd later lose her will to live by mistaking herself for Anna Karenina and Adam for Vronsky spied me at this work when she came to retrieve a book she'd loaned me.

"How can you hear Joyce's music if you keep stabbing it with pencils?"

"I can't afford to read for music anymore. I'm reading to put this behind me and move on."

But English could not be reduced to engineering. When I put down a book that I'd marked up, it left my mind so thoroughly that when I picked it up again, the characters were aliens, the story unfamiliar, and the setting no place I'd ever visited. I was toiling twice as hard for one-eighth or one-sixteenth of the gains. And my few friendships were dissolving.

It was Adam who snapped me out of it. He aced an exam, without doing any work, on which I got a B after nights of study. I'd forgotten to dapple my answers with theory words. I'd forgotten to use "gestural."

"Plus, I was stoned," Adam told me when the grades arrived. "What the h.e.l.l did you think you were doing?"

"Remaining focused."

"Play to your strengths," he said.

"They feel like weaknesses."

"Not if you play them for all they're worth," he said.

Those Who Pursued Disintegration Fully They were injecting cocaine when I came in. They p.r.i.c.ked their arms, drew the blood up through the needle, let the blood swirl in the fluid in the barrel, and then pressed the plunger while tipping back their heads. Barry was there, but the other kids in the circle were strangers to me. They didn't look like students. One of them had ball bearings instead of eyes. Another one had cheeks like sneaker soles, with repeating V shapes stamped into them. I found out why. Before I'd wandered in, the guy had been pa.s.sed out on a rug woven with the same pattern. They'd revived him by dripping the c.o.ke solution on his tongue. Now he was revving. He flicked the fine-gauge needle, clearing it of bubbles, then jabbed himself in the soft crook of his elbow. "d.a.m.n right!" he yelled. Then he ran out of the room.

"Your turn," said Barry.

"It isn't sterile."

"I'm holding it over a candle. You're watching me do it."

"My mother's a nurse. That doesn't work."

I stayed to help in case someone overdosed. AIDS wasn't yet a fear, just heart attacks. Barry appeared to have one after he stuck himself, but only a mild one, a tremor. After a lapse into pallor and clamminess, he stuttered back to life. Then we went off on a tear of Marxist rhetoric that only ended when ball-bearing eyes clamped a veiny hand over his mouth. By then, the rest of the users had the jitters. One was facing a wall and running in place. One was bickering with the ghoul beside him about a girl they'd both seduced-together, apparently, on the same night-who was complaining of having caught a bug that the first guy believed came from the ghoul and the ghoul was blaming on a third guy. But they all had it now, this bug, or feared they did. I strained to hear the girl's name. They talked too fast, though. Then, suddenly, they were talking about music-bands they'd seen and records they'd bought, musicians they'd personally spent time around. I discerned from this that they all came from New York and had known one another, through school, for years and years. Other than that, the only resemblance that I detected among them was a distracted indifference to one another. When the drugs were gone, so were their bonds. Some wind arose that they offered no resistance to and blew them from the room.

I would have to be myself.

MY CLOSEST FRIEND AS A JUNIOR WAS V., A PAKISTANI boy who'd disappointed his family-and even, as he told it, his nation's leaders-by leaving his intended major, electrical engineering, for philosophy. He claimed that his decision was purely intellectual, but I suspected a social motive. Among the campus's tastemaking elite, philosophy was in vogue just then, especially the arcane linguistic variety that allowed one to brandish Ludwig Wittgenstein's boy who'd disappointed his family-and even, as he told it, his nation's leaders-by leaving his intended major, electrical engineering, for philosophy. He claimed that his decision was purely intellectual, but I suspected a social motive. Among the campus's tastemaking elite, philosophy was in vogue just then, especially the arcane linguistic variety that allowed one to brandish Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, whereas engineering was deemed unsuitable for anyone other than indentured third worlders whose governments were paying their tuition in return for future work designing missiles and irrigation projects.

This had been V.'s deal. Once he broke it, whether out of conviction or in deference to fashion, he couldn't go home again. That made two of us.

I met V on one of my rare visits to the labyrinth of open stacks housed in the bombproof trio of subbas.e.m.e.nts beneath the Firestone Library. The place was designed like an iceberg, with most of its square footage buried and a fortresslike outcropping on top. Standing on the plaza near its entrance, lighting yet another cigarette as a way of postponing going inside, I could imagine a legion of the literate aiming crossbows from the parapets at onrushing armies of hollering barbarians. The confrontation might end in countless casualties, but the books would survive, civilization would endure. Not me, though-I'd probably be slaughtered. Firestone intimidated me, breeding a sort of cultural vertigo whenever I found myself in its vaulted lobby presenting my puny ID card to the guards. When the battle for civilization finally came I'd probably be stranded outside its walls.

I went there that evening not to read but to listen to tapes of ill.u.s.trious dead poets reciting their best-known works. The tapes were a bit of labor-saving luck that I'd heard about from an older English major who was even lazier than I was. You weren't allowed to enjoy them in your room, though; you had to consume them in the library, through pairs of gigantic cushioned headphones that might have been surplus from NASA Mission Control. I chose Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell that night because I was in the mood for doomed New Englanders. Plath's voice, pressured and brutal, frightened me because I could truly imagine her alive, which helped me picture her killing herself, too, while Lowell's voice was so antique and magisterial that I couldn't believe he'd ever lived on earth. After hanging the headphones on their hook and signaling the attendant that I was finished, I decided to ride the elevator downstairs and look for a volume of Lowell's poetry with an author photo on the jacket. I wanted a.s.surance of his materiality.

About an hour later, while waiting in the checkout line to present my dubious credentials as a trustworthy borrower of masterpieces, I fell into a conversation with V., whom I found instantly engaging. He was the first brown person I'd ever spoken to on an approximately equal basis, and I liked the slim symmetries of his face and figure. I also liked the way he dressed. His dark V-necked sweater, though slightly pilled and stretched into shapelessness at the cuffs and hem, seemed effortlessly collegiate. His black shoes were stout and nicely scuffed. His pants were proper pants, not jeans. He dressed as I fancied the young Lowell had dressed, and as I wished I dressed, with offhand British elegance.

Immanuel Kant was the topic that broke the ice for us. My knowledge of the impeccable old German came from a philosophy cla.s.s whose internationally respected professor taught that Kant, with his clockwork daily strolls and monastic temperament, was the last in a line of ambitious eminences who'd sought to "ground" ethics, morals, and metaphysics in a realm of changeless "authenticity." Kant had almost succeeded in this feat, but the fact that he hadn't proved, said the professor, that the whole endeavor was futile and ought to be abandoned for the pursuit of a humbler form of wisdom: "the conversation." This was fine with me. Never did I consider it bad news when someone who'd devoted decades to mastering a knotty subject reported that the subject, in the end, wasn't worth devoting decades to.

Our chat about Kant saw V and me across the Firestone plaza to Na.s.sau Street and down the staircase of the Annex. We found a table near a wall, close enough to the crowd to feel its warmth but far away enough to hear each other speak. I felt invigorated in V's company. Whatever the schools were like in Pakistan, they clearly did a better job than ours in instilling a.n.a.lytic agility and at least the beginnings of erudition. Given no more than a phrase ("the conversation," say), V could cite a set of cla.s.sical precepts that were both plausible and graspable, good for hours of heightened interaction. I felt, in his company as in no one else's, that my bulls.h.i.tting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to real enlightenment. And I felt flattered when he listened to me. Here was a young man who represented the best of the best of an entire country-of an entire people people, as I saw it-and I was holding his attention.

Drugs played no part in our relationship. Ours were purely sober colloquies, fueled by aspiration and affection. We walked through the leaves, past sunlit spires of stone, attacking the roots of language and understanding with hatchets of iron skepticism. Reality softened around us. We came to regard ourselves as lonely Nietzscheans who'd cast off thick veils of prejudicial nonsense and emerged as unenc.u.mbered wills. "I'm leaning over. I'm picking up this rock. I could throw it," I said, "and break that window, but instead I'll hold on to it. Because I'm free."

Later that fall we sat by a ca.n.a.l and watched the crew team row past in its trim vessels. By then we'd declared ourselves "phenomenologists." I wasn't sure what this required of us besides a refusal to meet the gazes of students who were still mired in what we termed, dismissively, as "consensual cert.i.tude."

"After you graduate," I said, "how long will they let you stay in the U.S.?"

"Indefinitely, I hope. Provided, of course, that I find secure employment or continue with my studies."

I nodded, chilled. I'd given not a single thought, I realized, to the question of what I might do once I left Princeton.