Walter Kirn

by Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

  “What do you want to be someday?” I asked him.

  “Hopi.”

  “You’re Hopi now.”

  “And Hopi always.”

  “You want to know my goal?” I asked him.

  He seemed indifferent.

  “A newspaper columnist who gives opinions.”

  “Telling people what you think.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I hate to think. I like to see.”

  I might have avoided much sorrow down the line by adopting the outlook of my Hopi friend, but I didn’t even get to say goodbye to him. When I got home that afternoon, the cab and the trailer were attached again and we were headed back to the Midwest. My mother had taken control. She’d called her father in Ohio, who’d called 3M in Minnesota and convinced them to give my father his old job back.

  Weeks later, we bought our farm in Taylors Falls, a team of draft horses, some old machinery, a dozen chickens, a goat, and my father resumed his commute to the Twin Cities, stranding the rest of us in the nineteenth century and leaving my brother and me to the devices of one of Minnesota’s lowest-ranked schools. Its dullness revived my interest in Mormonism.

  The ward house was located in a St. Paul suburb. I dressed for services in burgundy loafers, a knit red tie, and a blue dress shirt whose stain-resistant finish reacted with sweat to create a spoiled-meat smell. By then my parents were drifting toward full apostasy (my little brother had dropped out entirely) and they only came to church when the bishop scheduled me to speak. In Phoenix, I’d become quite a Sunday speaker, and I got even better in St. Paul.

  “To want what another has is to lose the bounty which Heavenly Father grants equally to all of us and cannot be added to, only subtracted from, never burnished but only soiled: the chance for our spirit to know Celestial glory and govern dominions of our own creation, much as Heavenly Father governs ours.”

  Establish a cadence, stretch it, vary it, return to it later in full force, and try not to think the words. That was the secret, I discovered. The words were interchangeable, anyway, particularly if they were fine or lofty words. “Holy,” “sacred,” “blessed,” “delightsome,” “pure.” Their potency lay not in their meanings but in the patterns they cut into the air. When I was speaking in top form, these patterns seemed to precede the words, in fact, drawing them out of me like melodies writing their own lyrics.

  “Brother Kirn, you had the Holy Spirit. I saw it. I heard it. And I thank you for it.”

  It wasn’t good form to take such compliments personally; I always made sure to credit the Mormon deities. My real muses dwelt on a lower plane, however, in the seventh row of pews, stage right, where the church’s trio of teenage beauties sat: Eliza, pristine and unattainable; Celia, restless and impressionable; and Kelly, whose nature blended the other girls’, making her a favorite with the boys.

  “You were perfect last week,” she told me at a youth dance as “Nights in White Satin” heaved out of the speakers, simulating medievalism through overdubbing. “Want to smoke something illegal in my Dodge?”

  “You liked my talk on backbiting that much?”

  “It’s your delivery, your energy. I loved how you barely stopped for breath except for that wonderful pause after ‘incarnate.’ Give me a minute’s head start so no one catches us.”

  That’s how my eloquence at church was graded: in parking-lot petting sessions, in wet French kisses. My school performance improved as a nice side effect and I was invited to join the declamation team by its chubby, mannish coach, Miss Normandy, who seemed to intuitively understand that speech and sex were linked for me. She let it be known that my teammates were all girls and that the regional tourney in Duluth involved an overnight stay in a motel. Of course I’d have to win district first, she said.

  I did win, but not as handily as I’d hoped. My event, Small-Group Discussion, took place around an oval conference table that didn’t suit the soaring speaking style I’d perfected at the altar. Here the trick was directness and flexibility as I jousted with my tablemates over the less-than-galvanizing issue of government funding for the arts. It alarmed me that two of my rivals wore three-piece suits and toted brown accordion file folders stuffed with documentation for their points. It occurred to me then for the first time that I was vying for the world’s good things with a more cunning peer group than I’d realized, inside a broader, taller stadium.

  “Subsidies, by removing risk,” I said, “promote stagnation and suppress unorthodoxy.” I’d emptied my clip in one big burst, an error. On my next turn to speak, I fired more slowly, with lower-caliber rounds. The judges scribbled on their clipboards, seeming to ratify my shift in tactics. It relaxed me to see this and boosted my confidence, which seemed to rattle the boys in suits. They clung to their note cards, spoke stiffly, forgot to gesture, and guaranteed me passage to the regionals.

  I harmed myself the night before the match by staying up till dawn trying to walk off and bathe away the phosphorescent curlicues of dread loosed in my brain by a drugged cupcake I’d eaten with a teammate in her motel room. I hadn’t fully recovered when I found myself battling a girl with close-set eyes and the excessively brushed straight hair of a virginal prodigy. Here was a force I’d never faced before: the supercharged purity of postponed puberty augmented by early viola training.

  It rolled me over. “You’re absolutely right, Kim. There’s nothing I can add to what you’ve said.”

  Girl wonder seemed miffed at me. “You’re conceding?”

  “Yes.”

  I consoled myself for the loss with sacred oratory and carnal tussles in Kelly’s Dodge, whose interior she’d regaled with cultic bric-a-brac: a pentagram medal on a silver chain, a black rabbit’s foot dangling from the rearview mirror, Led Zeppelin decals in the corners of the windows. Such teeny-bopper occultism was rare with Mormon teens. The church gave the devil short shrift in its theology, diminishing his allure among young misfits.

  “Why all the Lucifer?” I asked.

  “Intelligence. He’s the viceroy of intelligence.”

  I’d never heard this. “That’s God, I thought.”

  “God created us to be obedient. Thought was the contribution of the Dark One.”

  “You’re sure on that?”

  “Read Genesis. Read Steppenwolf. You want to know what, Walter?”

  “I do.”

  “I think you’re one of His chosen. His elect. That’s why you speak so well. He’s in your brain.”

  I started avoiding Kelly after that. Her notion that I had a supernatural patron obliged me to dazzle her, I felt, to keep the flourishes and wonders coming. It was too much to live up to. And I was tiring of church, tiring of arranging rides to services and of having to cover my parents’ absences with lies about health emergencies and such. I started spending more Sundays on the farm, directing my speeches on chastity and honor to our team of hulking Belgian mares. Sometimes, when they stamped their anvil feet, shivering the floorboards of their stalls, or loosed a long rolling shudder of dense muscle along their glossy flanks, I imagined they were responding to my eloquence. There was something at work in me, something strong and strange, and I wondered if Kelly’s theory wasn’t right. My father’s behavior over the past year had shown me that people’s wills can be invaded by inexplicable forces and agencies. I decided it might be time that I acknowledged them. Angels or devils? I didn’t really care. I wanted them on my side, that’s all I knew.

  At the beginning of my tenth-grade year a large cardboard box marked FRAGILE arrived at school. It was brought to the classroom of Mr. Ka, our fussy Korean accounting instructor, and opened with razor blades by a pair of science teachers who behaved like archaeologists breaking the seal on an Egyptian tomb. After folding back the box’s lid and peering inside for a few moments as though considering how best to proceed, they gingerly removed its contents: a slightly smaller box, this one made of Styrofoam. Mr. Ka’s tense face drew tighter still as the razor blades were deployed again, but wh
en the precious cargo was finally liberated, swept clean of foam crumbs and placed upon his desk, he beamed like a kid who’d asked Santa for a sled and been given a working flying saucer.

  The thing was a computer—the first one designed for use by average people, according to Mr. Ka. He said that few schools of our size, or any size, were fortunate enough to own one yet, meaning that we, his students, would get a “major head start on the future” when we became familiar with the device. And we shouldn’t be fooled by its modest size, he said. Inside this machine lay the power of a thousand, maybe ten thousand pocket calculators. Inside this machine was the potential to generate telephone directories for America’s ten most populous cities. Inside this machine were lucrative careers for everybody in this room.

  “So tomorrow,” he said, “we get started on tomorrow.”

  It was a slow start; so slow it wasn’t a start. Our first problem—and our last one, it turned out; indeed, our only one—was philosophical. How could we know if the thing was working properly before we knew how it worked or how to work it? We read our computer books, hunting for the answers, searching for clues as to what the answers might look like, hunting for terms and phrases and sentences comprehensible to people who didn’t already know the answers. We read the books individually and silently, meaning that there was no way to determine who among us was just pretending to read them in the hope that others would actually read them and explain their findings to the rest of us. I was one of the real readers at first, but when I realized I wasn’t making headway, I became one of the simulated readers. By scratching my chin and glancing off into space and generally appearing vexed and baffled, I labored to make my act convincing, which I felt was my duty to anyone still persevering toward our goal. My feigned struggles might give them heart, or shame them out of quitting. Either way, the chances might increase that someday someone in Mr. Ka’s computer class would bring the inert beige box to life.

  But there was no evidence that anyone read the books.

  While we waited to learn to program by inspiration, we sought a breakthrough using trial and error. The effort failed because we lacked a usable definition of error. That’s when we stopped touching the device and chose to regard it as an icon or a totem. Our classes turned into speculative chats about the wonders the object might perform if instead of addressing it in COBOL or FORTRAN, we could interact with it in English. To heighten the atmosphere of possibility, we kept the thing plugged in. This warmed its obscurely coiled and bundled in-sides, releasing unappetizing chemical vapors.

  “Say we could feed it every single play in Osceola’s offensive playbook. Maybe it would think up perfect defensive plays. And say it was hooked to earphones in our helmets and told us exactly how to run them. We might take state next year.”

  Mr. Ka looked from Nils, the speaker, our starting center linebacker, to me, an occasional blocker during punt returns. “Assuming the Apple could do that, how would you feel?”

  “Happy. Great. Why not?”

  “You wouldn’t feel … humbled?”

  “I would,” said Pat, another starting player. He was stretched out at his desk beside the mechanism, moving one hand in circles above its head as though polishing its invisible halo. “I’d feel like, hey, I’m not needed, why play football? Why get your bell rung and bruise your shins instead of just goofing off with Pac-Man and drinking an ice-cold Schlitz?”

  “Hey, I know,” a guy said. “Picture this, okay?” He stood and approached the Apple with widespread arms, softly fluttering his hands, like wings. It was a courtship dance, it seemed. “We win its trust. We come in peace, we tell it. We want it to help us read coma victims’ minds, say, or write another Shakespeare play. Then, very slowly, careful not to scare it, we reach out for its little plastic throat”—he curved his hands into a choking position—“and throttle it till it starts to spark and shit. Smoke rolls out of it, bells ring, sirens wail. The cockpits of jet planes go haywire, they explode, missile silos open by themselves, and a dozen Chinese robots go berserk and kill all the pandas at the zoo.”

  “My hour hand just hit ten,” said Mr. Ka. “Tomorrow, gentlemen. Excellent. Most excellent. We didn’t waste our time today.”

  A month or two into the class I grew dissatisfied. Yes, they were pleasant, our hours of dreamy bullshit, and yes, the Apple was quite a talisman, but did our mutual agreement to give up trying to operate the thing mean, perhaps, that the world had changed around us while we, for the first time in our young lives, had rejected change? It hadn’t been this way during the Apollo years. We’d built model rockets then, we’d studied weightlessness. Shouldn’t we be taking that approach? Perhaps, but we were uninspired. Computers, larger models than the Apple, existed already and other people ran them, a situation we found acceptable because it allowed us the freedom to live in ignorance while receiving the benefits of modernization. We were only sixteen but somehow we’d grown old.

  “This is Jason, class,” said Mr. Ka late in the semester. The boy was a tadpole-shaped twelve-year-old, all head. “Jason will help us relate to the computer.”

  “It’s pretty outrageous, this machine,” said Jason. “Move your chairs in. Form a circle, guys.”

  The exhibition unveiled no technical mysteries, but it did help me understand the term “conservative” as I’d once heard it used by a friend’s father while he was watching the TV news. A conservative was a person who stopped adjusting once adjustment brought him no vital benefits. The commandment to us from kindergarten on had been to grow, to expand ourselves, to stretch, but there was another option, too, I saw. One could let others cope with novelty and concentrate on the familiar.

  Jason continued trying to excite us. He divided a string of numbers that ran all the way to the right side of a notebook page by another monstrous sum which started with ten or twelve zeros behind a decimal point behind a minus sign. The printer was already printing out the answer while most of us were still mocking the equation, and it was at this instant that I became something I couldn’t name till later: a student of the liberal arts, devoted to concepts and ideas which didn’t depend on disembodied logic, on greater-than signs and parentheses and ampersands. This decision guided my studies from then on. The hard sciences were just too hard for me.

  “Hey Jason,” said one of my buddies to the whiz kid over hamburger salad at lunch one day. “Ever have a girlfriend?”

  “What do you think?”

  “You’re twelve. Get with it.”

  “Eleven and a half.”

  “Ever want a girlfriend?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Processing. Thinking. Tabulating. Printing.” This was me, satirizing Jason’s thinking in a cartoonish, transistorized monotone. “Conclusion: Negative. Categorically.” Then I switched over to my natural voice. “Jason, your new name is Neuter Nine.” Then back to a female version of the main voice. “Testicular excision now commencing. Working. Working. Surgery complete.”

  Jason went on eating his hot lunch. He hadn’t flinched. I hadn’t made him cry. Until then, I’d merely considered him ridiculous. Now I feared him. I rose and took my tray to a table across the room. I had a book with me. I pretended to read it. The others could have their weird symbols. I’d take words.

  For me, the remainder of high school was a drinking party held in a cabin beside a lake, followed by three or four months of casual reading in world almanacs. I had some idea that a head all full of facts might smooth my transition into college now that my SAT results were in and the brochures were pouring into my mailbox. When Macalester said I could skip my senior year, I started saying goodbye to people. The rubber-gloved lunch ladies. Mr. Ka. The janitors. It was all over school that I wasn’t coming back.

  My last, most uncomfortable goodbye was to Mr. C, the English teacher whose wife’s first pregnancy had forced him to quit the grad-school program that he hoped would turn him into a novelist. I’d started ducking him way back in the winter, declining an invitation to
an Eagles show and not responding either way to his assertion that it would be a gas to eat a dozen peyote buttons and go to a late show of Saturday Night Fever. When he tried to reestablish contact by biking over to our farm one weekend and coaxing me into getting high while I brushed and groomed the horses, I told him I’d only take one hit because I was feeling guilty as a Mormon.

  Now it was time to pay him a final call. I drove to his modular house one Sunday evening, walked up the gravel path past his kids’ yard toys—plastic tricycles, deflated basketballs—and knocked on his hollow-feeling vinyl door. His wife let me in. Around her and behind her were three or four fussy infants and toddlers. In the back of the room was her husband in his recliner wearing sunglasses, reading a book of poetry.

  “Walt, the new Dire Straits came. Come on in. You’ll want to hear two of the tracks on headphones first.”

  “I can’t really stay.”

  “Miller High Life, can or bottle?”

  “Can,” I said. A beer can is opaque. You don’t have to drink it to the bottom.

  “I heard you just crushed those college boards.”

  “I guess I have a knack for multiple choice.”

  He held out the headphones with their ear cups spread. I smelled wet diapers and wanted to get away.

  “Macalester took you. I heard that, too,” he said.

  “I’m thinking I might only spend a year there. I’d like to go somewhere out East if I can swing it.” Then I decided to ask the question that was my real reason for dropping over. Mr. C. was the only person I knew who might be able to answer it.

  “Is Harvard the top or is all of that just talk?”

  “Yes, it’s the top, but the talk is why it is. That’s how engineered hysteria operates. That’s why the Ivy League doesn’t fear encroachment by the Soybean Alliance or Coal Confederation. It trains its students to spread its propaganda, which attracts even brighter students who go on spreading it.”

  “What about Williams College? They sent a pamphlet.”