Obedience

by Will Lavender

  “Stanley?” asked James McDonough, the man who would be acting as Milgram’s learner. “Are you all right, Stanley?” He assured the man that he was.

  Milgram was looking at the shock machine, at this creation that would make him famous. Slight shock. Moderate shock. Strong shock. Very strong shock. Intense shock. Extreme intensity shock. Danger—severe shock. Milgram touched it, ran his palm across the cool surface. The machine seemed to pulse with some hidden life. It had become like some kind of a weapon. He had dreamed about the goddamned box for weeks. He had gone back to mescaline so that his mind might dodge the machine in his defenseless sleep.

  “Stanley,” said McDonough. The man was not nervous. It seemed that nobody was nervous except Milgram himself. “We’re ready now.”

  Milgram went into a back room, where he could watch the proceedings through a two-way mirror. He saw his experimenter, the man who would play the “scientist,” appear in the open room. The experimenter was wearing a gray coat. Not white, Milgram had demanded. Definitely not white. White presented the idea of medicine. Of sterility. People automatically distrusted white for that reason. So Milgram’s experimenter would wear gray, and upon seeing him in the coat for the first time Milgram thought he looked like a slab of granite. This was exactly what Milgram had intended.

  He then saw his subject enter the room, a middle-aged man with red hair wearing a light smoker’s jacket and a wet hat, for it was raining outside. The man took a seat, and the experiment began.

  “I’d like to explain to both of you now about our Memory Project,” the gray-coated experimenter said to the man and also to McDonough, who was already in his act, nervously twitching in the chair next to the subject. The plan was to place McDonough in a separate room and have the subject shock him. There wouldn’t really be shocks, of course. No electricity, either. The box was a grand hoax. The point was that the subject should be obedient to the experimenter. The subject should respect the experimenter’s authority, only because the experimenter wore a coat and spoke with a deep voice and held a clipboard.

  “Psychologists,” the gray-coated man went on, “have developed several theories to explain how people learn various types of material.”

  Milgram stopped listening. He had fallen away somewhere, to that other plane.

  “Okay, now we are going to set the learner up so he can get some punishment,” the experimenter said. “Learner, let me explain what’s going to happen, what you’re supposed to do. The teacher will read a list of word pairs to you.”

  Milgram shut his eyes.

  “So he later reads to you,” the experimenter was saying, “‘strong: back, arm, branch, push.’ You would press this one—”

  McDonough hesitated. “Well,” he said, as he had been instructed, “I think I should say this. When I was in West Haven VA Hospital a few years ago, they detected a slight heart condition. Nothing serious. But as long as I’m getting these shocks—how strong are they? How dangerous are they?”

  The experimenter ignored McDonough’s question. He went to the subject. “All right,” he said. “Now listen carefully to the instructions. First of all, this machine generates electric shocks.” He slid his hand over the box, his palm making a hiss as it moved across the black surface.

  Milgram thought of Eichmann. He thought of Mengele’s pressure chambers. He had heard from his father that Mengele had frozen Jews alive until their bodies could be cracked apart limb by limb. One Jew, his father said, was pointing. Perpetually pointing, a statue on the frozen ground at Auschwitz. They called him zarah: the compass.

  “Before we begin,” the experimenter said, “I’d like to ask you, the subject, your name.”

  The subject’s voice came through the static and into Milgram’s tiny room. “Orman,” the man said. “Edward Conrad Orman.”

  An Excerpt from Will Lavender’s

  Dominance

  Unusual Literature Course Rocks Small Vermont Campus

  by Ethan Moore, Jasper Mirror Staff Writer

  January 9, 1994

  The Jasper College Faculty Board has approved a controversial night class on a vote of 5 to 4.

  LIT 424: Unraveling a Literary Mystery will be taught by famed professor and literary scholar Dr. Richard Aldiss. Aldiss contacted the Jasper administration late last year and was adamant that this campus was where he would teach if he did return to the classroom. He will teach via satellite from the Rock Mountain Correctional Facility, where he is serving consecutive life sentences for the brutal 1982 murders of two female Dumant University graduate students. He will be prohibited from speaking about his crimes and from using his victims’ names. The class will be open to nine undergraduate students, each of whom will be specially chosen from the literature honors program.

  There are those who adamantly oppose the course and its professor. Dr. Daniel Goodhurn, a Virgil scholar at Dumant, claims that Jasper College is making a horrible mistake by bringing Aldiss back into the classroom.

  “Is Richard Aldiss a genius?” Goodhurn asked. “Of course. But what that man did to two innocent women at this institution goes beyond evil. I ask you: What will the students at Jasper learn from this monster? Richard is a twisted, deceitful individual. I assure you that teaching literature will not be his intention in this class. His true mission will be revealed very late in the semester—and by then it may too late.”

  Those in favor of the night class, however, are just as unwavering.

  Dr. Stanley M. Fisk, professor emeritus at Jasper College, says that Richard Aldiss will “inject life into a program of study that has become very stale. The man and his work, especially his research on the reclusive novelist Paul Fallows, is truly groundbreaking. Our students here at Jasper will be reenergized by the great professor. In my mind it is as simple as that. Aldiss will revolutionize how they think about books.”

  The class will begin on the first evening of the winter term. The nine students have been chosen and will be allowed to turn down the invitation if they so desire.

  First Class

  1994

  1

  Just after dark they rolled in the television where the murderer would appear. It was placed at the front of the lecture hall, slightly off center so the students in back could see. Two men wearing maintenance uniforms checked the satellite feed and the microphones, then disappeared as silently as they had come. It was now five minutes before the class was to begin, and everything was ready.

  This was the first class of its kind, and its novelty—or perhaps its mystery—made it the most talked-about ever offered at tiny Jasper College. As mandated by the school president, there were nine students in the classroom. They were the best of the best in the undergrad literature program at Jasper. Now, on the first night of the semester, they waited anxiously for their professor to emerge on the screen.

  The class was LIT 424: Unraveling a Literary Mystery. It had been offered at night because this was the only viable time, the only hour when the warden would allow the murderer free to teach. He would teach, if you believed the rumors, from a padded cell. Others said he would be in front of a greenscreen, with special effects to replicate a lectern before him—an illusion of a classroom. The rest claimed he would simply be shackled to his chair in an orange jumpsuit, because state law prohibited anything else. They had to remember what this man had done, these people said. They had to remember who he was.

  The room was warm with the closeness of bodies. The chalkboard seemed to glisten, even though the Vermont night outside was bitterly cold. The quads were mostly silent, save for the protesters who stood the stipulated two hundred yards from Culver Hall, where the night class would be held. The class met in the basement of Culver for this reason: the powers-that-be at Jasper did not want the protesters to be able to see what was happening on that TV screen.

  The few students who were out at that cold hour witnessed the nervous candlelight of the protest vigil from a distance, through the copse of beech and oak that dotted the wood
sy campus. A light snow fell, flakes rushing upward in the January wind like motes of dust. Not far away, Lake Champlain purred in the wind. It was as if, one freshman said as he looked down at the scene from a high dormitory window, someone were about to be executed.

  Just beyond the protesters, in a building that was dark save for a few bottom-floor lights, a pair of state policemen sat in a room the size of a broom closet, drinking coffee and watching their own blank feed on a tiny screen.

  Unraveling a Literary Mystery—this too had been contested. The president of the college chose the title because it sounded to him fitting for what the professor had in mind. But in fact the president did not know exactly what the class would entail. He could not know; the murderer had only hinted at a “literary game” his students would play in the class. About his syllabus he had spoken to no one.

  It was this, this inability to even guess at what was about to happen, that silenced the classroom now. In the weeks before the semester had begun, when they went home to their families on Christmas break, the students who had registered for LIT 424 had time to think. To weigh their decision to take this strange course. They wondered if something could go wrong in that lecture hall, if their professor could somehow … it sounded crazy, yes. Most of them did not say it aloud, or if they did they spoke only to their roommates or their closest friends. Slight whispers, torn away by the wind, carried off into nothingness.

  If he could somehow get out.

  This was what they were thinking in those final seconds. Some of them talked about their other classes that semester, flipped through textbooks and highlighted paragraphs in trembling arcs of yellow. But mostly they sat, saying nothing. They stared at the dead television screen. They wondered, and they waited.

  Finally the television went to a deeper black, and everyone sat up straight. Then the box began to hum, an electrical, nodish oohing, a kind of flatline that moved left to right across the room. Their professor—the MacArthur-winning genius, once a shining star at nearby Dumant University and the closest thing to celebrity a professor of literature could possibly be, the same man who had viciously murdered two graduate students twelve years before—was ready to appear.

  Then the blackness dissolved and the noise died away and the professor’s face came to them on the screen. They had seen pictures of him, many of them preserved in yellowed newsprint. There were images of the man in a dark suit (at his trial), or with his wrists shackled and smiling wolfishly (moments after the verdict), or with his hair swept back, wearing a tweed jacket and a bow tie (his faculty photograph at Dumant in 1980).

  Those photographs did not prepare the students for the man on the screen. This man’s face was harder, its lines deeper. He was in fact wearing a simple orange jumpsuit, the number that identified him barely hidden beneath the bottom edge of the screen. The V of his collar dipped low to reveal the curved edge of a faded tattoo just over his heart. Although the students did not yet know this, the tattoo was of the thumb-shaped edge of a jigsaw puzzle piece.

  The professor’s eyes seemed to pulse. Sharp, flinty eyes that betrayed a kind of dangerous intelligence. The second the students saw him there was a feeling not of surprise, not of cold shock, but rather of This, then. This is who he is. One girl sitting toward the back whispered, “God, I didn’t know he was so …” And then another girl, a friend sitting close by, finished, “Sexy.” The two students laughed, but quietly. Quietly.

  Now the professor sat forward. In the background the students could see his two prison guards, could make out everything but their faces—the legs of their dark slacks, the flash of their belt buckles, and the leathery batons they carried in holsters. One of them stood with legs spread wide and the other was more rigid, but otherwise they mirrored each other. The professor himself was not behind a pane of glass; the camera that was trained on him was not shielded in any way. He simply sat at a small table, his uncuffed hands before him, his breathing slow and natural. His face bore the slightest hint of a smile.

  “Hello,” he said softly. “My name is Richard Aldiss, and I will be your professor for Unraveling a Literary Mystery. Speak so I can hear you.”

  “Hello, Professor,” someone said.

  “We’re here,” said another.

  Aldiss leaned toward a microphone that must have been just out of the camera’s view. He nodded and said, “Very good. I can hear you and you can hear me. I can see you and you can see me. Now, let us begin.”

  New from

  WILL LAVENDER:

  From the New York Times bestselling author of Obedience comes

  an explosive puzzle thriller in which a group of college students

  unravel an elaborate literary hoax—then fifteen years later find

  themselves hunted by a killer, who may be one of their own.

  “A brilliant concept, brilliantly executed.

  Dominance soars to the top of the thriller genre.”

  —JEFFERY DEAVER, #1 international bestselling author of

  Edge and The Burning Wire

  Pick up or download your copy today!

  www.simonandschuster.com

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a book is hardly a solitary effort, and I am fortunate to have worked with some gracious, fiercely intelligent folks during this process. Thanks are in order to my wonderful agent, Laney Katz Becker. Laney’s guidance and support—and her novelist’s eye—made this book so much better than it was when it first showed up, bloated and misshapen, on her desk. To Anna Stein, whose tenacity pleased and scared me at the same time. To my editor, Sally Kim, who was so kind and attentive and who really made the editing process a sort of perverse delight. To Dr. Thomas Blass, whose book The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram was an invaluable resource. To James Leary, who helped me kick this book’s butt when it needed kickin’. To my family in Whitley City, of course. And finally to my lovely wife, who is just days away from giving birth to Jenna Marie at the time of this writing. My passion burns for you…

  About the Author

  Will Lavender is a professor of writing and literature. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife and children. He is currently working on a second novel.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Will Lavender

  This work contains an excerpt from the forthcoming novel Dominance, copyright © 2011 by Will Lavender. Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York. Available wherever books are sold.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Shaye Areheart Books with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lavender, Will, 1977–

  Obedience: a novel / Will Lavender.—1st ed.

  1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. College teachers—Fiction. 3. Indiana—Fiction. 4. College stories. I. Title.

  PS3612.A94424O24 2008

  813'.6—dc22 2007015005

  eISBN: 978-0-307-40734-4

  v3.0_r1