Prodigy
Page 13
Lang knew how much it irritated Headmaster Latimer, all of this flesh-pressing and compromising, the bending of the rules to suit their school’s needs and assorted backroom deals, but she was simply working within the reality that existed outside of the cloistered walls in which the old man had become so comfortable. That was why, after all, the trustees had hired her in the first place. The distinguished academics could live in their little Garden of Eden while she built up its protective gates and foundations so that they could continue educating their specimens without concern for the dreaded real world.
President Lang examined herself in her pocket mirror: masterfully colored brown hair (not a trace of that foolishly bright blondeness with which she was born), a strong jawline, the perfect set of capped and laser-whitened teeth that have been de rigueur in political circles for some time now. It was the face of a breadwinner, the master of the house, the Hector who would defend the walls of Dr. Stansbury’s mythical Troy until all of their foes were sprawled before them in defeat. This school was her castle. She wore the pants, both literally and figuratively, keeping the place safe for those prissy little professors to continue teaching their impossibly gifted specimens in a state of perpetually blissful ignorance of the machinations that went on behind the scenes. And yet she adored each and every one of them and would not have had it any other way.
Alan Partridge, however, did not deserve President Lang’s friendly condescension, at least not on that particular day, arguably the greatest since the school’s founding back in 2009. The man—with help, of course, from the elite of Stansbury’s elite—actually discovered a one-in-several-billion combination of amino acids and proteins that would destroy virtually every cancerous tumor known to mankind. Panacetix was his brilliant name for it, a new name derived from the word panacea: the cure of all cures. The only thing that exceeded Partridge’s scientific and medical genius was his marvelous sense of timing. Certainly, Lang had a much more than adequate curriculum vitae to parade before the Senate committee, one packed full of revolutionary advances in the arts and sciences produced over the years by scores of child prodigies who would give Mozart himself a run for his money. But the cure for cancer! It was a challenge to mankind so great that it had become proverbial in its impossibility. Panacetix. She had the right to feel exultant. It was the final, most splendorous feather in the school’s cap, one that virtually guaranteed a successful vote to allot $1 trillion to Stansbury, thereby freeing it from the tedious chains of annual fundraising drives and the arduous process of dragging distinguished professors and the occasional specimen across the country to parade before potential donors. Most important, that vote would provide the one thing that Dr. Stansbury, the headmaster, and everyone else inside the tower had always craved: a permanent legitimacy in the eyes of the nation. With the government’s stamp of approval, the school would no longer be regarded as the genius—and possibly insane—stepchild of American education. The Senate’s validation would render all of the debate about Stansbury’s methods moot. The special interest dinosaurs could picket all they wanted, the underachieving thugs who ran the teachers unions would be—to use their kind of language, Lang smiled to herself—pissing in the wind. All she needed to do was make certain committee chairwoman Frieda Mark stayed focused, keep those fifty-one carefully selected and lobbied senators in her pocket, and Stansbury would become part of the American lexicon, along with the founding fathers, the Industrial Revolution, Wall Street, and the War on Terror. It would be a synonym for excellence. Progress. Ambition.
There was only one thing that prevented her from lighting up a celebratory cigar in the privacy of her own office at that very moment. It was a person, actually, more than a thing. The man who could sink the future prospects of Stansbury, Panacetix, and everything else; an anachronistic voice from a bygone era, the relic of all civil rights relics: Senator Arthur Milford Bloom (R-California). Indeed, the thought of him made President Lang’s carefully applied facial features cringe, but alas, that thought was not all with which she had to contend that morning. Bloom had logged a last-minute request that she provide testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Education, on which he sat. It was a ploy to stir up the waters and make the Stansbury grant proposal seem more controversial than it really was: if he could cloud the issues and start playing his standard game of fear politics, he reasoned that he might attract some last-minute defectors to his side of the aisle in the debate. She refused to obey his beck and call to travel to Capitol Hill in person, so the old coot had to settle for a simulcast. Lang’s terminal trilled.
“Madam President?” asked her assistant, Mr. Samuel Matthias Toll, Class of 2029.
“I gather it’s time, Samuel?”
“It is.”
“Tell me, is the old man simulcasting to us from a shuffleboard court at his rest home in Palm Springs?” She heard him chortle over the speakerphone.
“The committee’s office in Washington, D.C., I believe.”
“Very well then. Let’s go live.” The plasma screen on her desk lit up. She saw the Senator’s face: skin tanned leathery like a cowboy clad in a television-friendly suit, a smirk that said he’d like to have known Judith Lang back in the good ol’ days when he could give her ass a nice love tap after a four-martini lunch at the Army-Navy Club.
“Mornin’, Madam Judith,” he drawled. Bloom grew up in Tennessee before moving out to Hollywood in the pre-San Angeles days, where he made a fortune producing blockbuster action films, all of which featured lantern-jawed heroes shooting, stabbing, and blowing up whichever brown-skinned ethnicity happened to be the most sinister that year. He styled himself a Reaganite idealist for the twenty-first century, but found his success trading on the aw-shucks modus operandum of big-stick diplomacy made popular by the Bush dynasty. He was an outspoken proponent of archaic curriculums that were still mired in the perpetual extolling of Western Civilization’s virtues, complete with faith in a patriarchal, Eurocentric society, God, apple pie, and any and all words scribbled down by the Dead White Men from which he no doubt descended. Cowboys like Bloom routinely called for an erosion of civil liberties, never failing to wrap their soft bigotry in the flag of “tradition” and “family values.”
“That’s Madam President, Senator.”
“You can call me Artie if I can call you Judy.”
“Senator Bloom,” came the impatient voice of her friend and chairwoman Frieda Mark (D-New York).
“Right then, my friends,” said Bloom. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? Now, Madam President, in the committee’s discussions regarding the imminent vote involving your fine educational institution, the topic of standardized testing arose, leaving us sharply divided.”
“By standardized testing,” answered President Lang, “I take it you mean the vastly flawed, biased, and overemphasized means of evaluating student progress and achievement? The tests that have beholden schools of all levels to the corporations who create and distribute them? The tests whose proponents readily admit only provide evidence of the students’ ability to take that particular test—and of course, pay the test-taking fee—and nothing more?”
“If you mean the only feasible means to determine the general aptitude of an impossibly large body of students, the least imperfect of all the imperfect methods of evaluating academic potential, then yes, I do,” he countered.
“What my distinguished colleague is driving at,” said Senator Mark, “is his belief that Stansbury provides its students with an unfair advantage when it comes to taking the standardized tests required for college entrance, such as the SAT or Stansbury’s own Eaves exam, which, thanks to your school’s considerable marketing efforts, is rapidly being adopted as the new certification accepted by elite academic institutions.”
“The only advantages we provide our specimens are quiet rooms in which to study, round-the-clock tutors, and a nice breakfast on the morning of the testing day,” said Lang. “And these benefits are extended to each and every one
of the children at Stansbury, regardless of race, gender, or economic background.”
“Beg your pardon, ma’am,” smirked Bloom, “but it isn’t your tower’s windowless rooms or fancy little croissants in liquid form that gives a reasonable man such as myself pause.” His mangling of the English language caused Lang to return his gaze with a smirk of her own: your tow-ah … croy-sants … mah-self … “I was speaking of all the drugs that your people are shootin’ into those young boys’ and girls’ bodies. The bookworm’s version of steroids…” Bookwum’s vuh-shun of steeeroyds …
“Stansbury’s med cycle has been vetted by multiple studies in the labs of major universities,” she responded. “The chemical combinations involved are safe and legal. The med cycle is no different than responsible parents seeing to it that their children eat healthy, get plenty of rest, and follow a light exercise routine on a daily basis.”
“Let’s say the Eaves exam is a horse race, why don’t we? Are you gonna wager on the pony that’s been eatin’ healthy and joggin’ each day? Or the stud that’s been shot up with stuff that buries anxiety attacks and keeps him up studying for three days at a time? Specimens,” snorted Bloom. “You raise ’em, stick ’em in uniforms, give ’em pills, keep ’em inside for months at a time … frankly, ma’am, I’m surprised you people don’t take the ones who don’t get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton out behind the woodshed and put ’em down right on the spot.”
“There is a flaw in your premise, Senator,” said Lang, as the syrupy, insouciant drawl in his voice seemed to turn hers harder and crisper. “You operate under the assumption that all children are raised under conditions of equality, that they enter that testing room coming from identical backgrounds across the board. But even you must know this is not the case. I’ve seen tens of thousands of children over my career, and know very well that the son of a lawyer—or a big-time Hollywood producer, for that matter—has a huge advantage over the son of a mechanic in the inner city. But economics are not where it ends. Some are born with mental disabilities while others are quick studies. Some girls may not succeed because of subtle sexual discrimination within the classroom. What we at Stansbury are doing, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, is merely evening out the playing field. In our school, all specimens, no matter what their histories, undergo the same med cycle, and the benefits are not exclusive to those whose parents are particularly generous donors. In fact, the valedictorian of the Class of 2036 is an orphan who won a full-ride scholarship in our annual lottery. He overcame the odds presented by poverty, a dead father, and an absentee mother, worked within our system for twelve years, and is now bound for Harvard in the fall. Are you, Senator Bloom, going to tell this young man that he won his achievements by cheating? By taking the easy road?” Of course you won’t, she thought. Because men like you are all the same: fat cats who love dictating right and wrong from the comfort of your country clubs, surrounded by nodding, glad-handing mirror images of yourself. And when someone like Dr. Stansbury comes along and starts leveling the playing field, all they are left to do is start crying foul and wistfully reminisce about the high times when everyone knew their place and no feisty young’uns got uppity.
President Lang knew this all too well. Uppity should have been her middle name growing up in a working-class town outside Detroit. Around the age of twelve, she realized that distance from Flint, Michigan, was directly proportional to her chances of success in life and decided that she would like to attend a school as far away as possible. A boarding school, like the kind she read about in A Separate Peace. Mr. Meyers, her seventh-grade guidance counselor, laughed it off at first, but upon seeing the earnest look on her face, he printed out some information downloaded from various Web sites of famous prep schools like Griffin, Harrowton, and Parkinson. They were all, predictably, beautiful to young, blonde-haired Judith: big white buildings covered with ivy and dotted with red brick, paths winding through carefully manicured green lawns, and, of course, the fresh-faced students in gloriously crisp, distinguished uniforms bearing brightly colored coats of arms. She distinctly remembered those proud emblems because she always thought only those who were born into aristocracy were allowed to take them as their own. But no! Not outside Flint, anyway. All you had to be was a student on one of those pristine campuses and you got to wear one yourself. It was like being part of a club.
“I’d like to get a scholarship to the Griffin School,” Judith decided. She was already thinking about how good she would look in one of those dark green blazers, how the color would be a pretty contrast to the yellow of her mane.
“But only boys are allowed to go there.”
“Mr. Meyers,” she said, invoking that soon-to-be familiar tone of precocity for the first time in her life. “There are things I can do better than everyone else, including boys.”
“Like what, Judy?”
“Lots of things.”
“You should pick one of them and stick with that.”
Judith thought about gym class that morning. They played tennis on a cracked, uneven asphalt court behind the school. She won all of the matches she played, even against the boys. Her mother had a racquet at home she could practice with. Tennis balls were probably cheap, and if they weren’t, she could steal them from the school. “In that case, I think I’ll pick tennis,” she decided.
And so it went. Even sitting there in her executive suite while simulcasting before the Senate Select Committee on Education, she remembered the details. Later that day she watched the older girls on the high school varsity team play, and heard their coach berate them for their poor backhands, which usually ended up in the net or far out of bounds. In gym class, Judith saw that girls her own age were also bad at backhands, so she tried to hit the balls to that side of the court as much as possible. And then a new strategy struck her: initially, she played right-handed, but if she could teach herself to hit left-handed, she could not only hit more balls to her opponents’ weak side, but she could also switch hands in the middle of the match—in the middle of a point, even—making it almost impossible for the girl on the opposite side of the net to adjust her game properly or strategize her shot selection. For several weeks, that racquet never left her hand, right or left. Other kids made fun of her at first, watching Judith’s clumsy attempts at hitting balls with her off hand. But then her shots started landing in the court. Soon after, they weren’t just plopping inside the service box. They became fluorescent yellow blurs that just barely skimmed the white lines of the court, snapping against the green surface with the torque of a vicious topspin. And always to her opponents’ weak side. If she (or he, by this point; the school’s tennis coach found it simply too demoralizing for other girls to get mauled by Judith Lang on a daily basis, and he began matching her up against boys) had a decent backhand, she’d pummel her with ground strokes. If they could keep up, she’d move to volleys, attacking the net, finessing drop shots, and pounding overhead smashes. And if all else failed, she’d end it quickly with a killer serve. Soon she was playing against the high school men’s team while in eighth grade, and Mr. Meyers did his part by calling the Griffin athletics director and raving about this budding tennis prodigy from Flint, Michigan. It just so happened that the following year the distinguished old school in Maine was going coed and they needed to start filling out the rosters of their women’s sports teams.
College—Amherst—followed Griffin. The coach who gave her the scholarship put his hand up her skirt after the team’s first practice and she promptly quit the team. At first she thought it might be hard, giving up this game she had come to master and love over the years, but it was not in the least. She always controlled her skill more than it controlled her: it was simply the means to her end of getting away from Flint, shortening the distance to a better station in life. She taught herself to play ambidextrously, not because she viewed it as an innovation within the sport, but because it simply got her where she needed to be in a more efficient manner, as quickly as possible.
And now that apprentice would sooner slit her own wrists than watch Arthur Milford Bloom stop the progress of her school. President Lang knew that she had him on the ropes. She watched him on the simulcast screen, huffing and puffing about moral standards, family values, and hallowed traditions. He was coming up short, sounding just like the style-over-substance reactionaries who opposed suffrage for women, integration of schools and the military, open immigration, and gay marriage in years past. She caught a glimpse of Senator Frieda Mark on her screen and could see from the look on her face that Mark had already tuned him out. It was right there, clear as day: they were going to win the vote because Senator Bloom was simply on the wrong side of history. She felt her morning cocktail of 300 milligrams of Equimode, an antioxidant nutrient blend, and Stimulum, surge through her body. Senator Bloom looked at her on the screen, saying something or other. President Lang glanced at the clock on her desk: roughly thirty hours before the vote and all was going according to her carefully laid plans. She glanced at the wheezing gasbag and realized she had only one thing she wanted to say: