Old School (7 page)

I wasn’t writing, but that didn’t trouble me—I knew I could deliver my story when the time came. What I was doing was tanking up on self-certainty, transfusing Roark’s arrogant, steely spirit into my own. And as I read the book I could feel it happen, my sense of originality and power swelling as my mouth resumed its tightness of contempt.

For once I had a complete picture of the world: over here a few disdainful Roarks and a few icy Dominiques, meltable only by Roarks; over there a bunch of terrified nobodies running from their own possibilities. Now and then I caught glimpses of other ideas in the novel, political, philosophical ideas, but I didn’t think them through. It was the personal meaning that had me in thrall—the promise of mastery achieved by doing exactly as I pleased.

When classes started I still hadn’t begun my story; and the longer I went without writing, the more convinced I became of its inevitable superiority. By now I was reading
The Fountainhead
for the fourth time, my confidence at a boil as I fell behind in my assignments and picked up demerits for missing chapel and chores. Bill had to prod me to keep my side of the room halfway neat, and one afternoon he confiscated the novel and wouldn’t give it back until I’d picked up the mess around my bed. Man, you’re really hot on this stuff, aren’t you?

She’s good, I said. She’s damned good.

She’s okay.

Okay?
Come on. I distinctly remember you saying how interesting she is.

I said she had some interesting ideas. Have you read her other book—
Atlas Shrugged
?

Not yet. I will.

It’s all right, I guess. Same kind of thing. More speeches. Longer speeches. It kind of got on my nerves, actually—all that
Übermensch
stuff.

The German word shut me up. Our history master used it often—too often, really, and with excessive pleasure in his accent—to describe the Nazis’ ideology. Because of this association, when Bill flashed the word I became instantly conscious of his Jewishness, and all the more so because he kept it to himself. I could have argued that a man with a mind of his own and a pair of balls to back it up didn’t have to be a Nazi, but of course Bill hadn’t actually said that. And something else made me hold my tongue. He knew that I’d caught on to his Jewishness, but he wasn’t aware of mine, such as it was. I didn’t want to say something that would touch so tender a nerve, a tenderness I assumed in him because I suffered from it myself, covertly bristling when I read or heard anything that might be construed as anti-Semitic. In fact that part of my blood felt most truly my own at just those moments when it seemed liable to condescension or ridicule. I figured Bill had kindred feelings, and I didn’t want to provoke them by pushing a view that he identified with German murderers. Our balance was fragile enough anyway, with so many complications of ambition and envy and pretense.

The crowning irony was that Bill himself should appear so much the poster Aryan—so blond, so fair, so handsome. More than handsome: over the past months he had become beautiful. How had that happened? What had changed? Here, too, my secret knowledge of him cast a shadow, because what made him beautiful was a quality of melancholy that softened his gaze and the set of his mouth, and that I attributed to his Jewishness. It seemed to me that the other Jewish boys in school were subject to a similar poignance of expression—intermittently, of course, and some more than others, but all of them to a degree. It was one of the marks of their apartness.

As the submission deadline approached I entered a fever of elation, as if Ayn Rand had already chosen my story. I literally had chills, my brow was hot and clammy. I began to hear the voices of my characters and see their faces. It was all coming together: a great story, a masterpiece!

The day before it was due, without yet having committed a word of it to paper, I rose to read a passage of
L’Etranger
in my French class and my head kept floating up until it reached a zone of absolute silence and the faces turned toward me looked as featureless as plates of dough. Then my knees went watery and I reached out to steady myself but fell anyway, bringing my desk down with me. I was all tangled up in it. I tried to sit up and fell back again and lay there, waiting.

They kept me in the infirmary for almost two weeks. My fever was not, it turned out, the fizz of genius. It was influenza, complicated by walking pneumonia. Later, once he knew he wasn’t going to lose me, the school doctor said that people had been dying of this particular bug and that I was lucky not to have died myself.

My dreams were so vivid those first few days that I could hardly tell waking from sleeping. The one thing I could be sure of was the constant presence of Grandjohn and Patty, who’d driven up from Baltimore right after the headmaster called them. They took turns at my bedside, sponging my face, helping the nurse feed me and change my sheets, supporting me on my wobbly, dizzying trips to the bathroom. Whenever I woke up, one of them was there. At first the sight of Patty or Grandjohn in the chair beside me made me weepy with gratitude, but as my head cleared I got tired of them and worried that they were imposing their dullness on the masters and boys who dropped by to say hello, and telling them more about me than I wanted known.

Then one morning the nurse brought in a box of chocolates with a tender farewell note from Patty and a copy of
Advise and Consent
Grandjohn had inscribed
To the budding writer.
The Colonel left these off for you, the nurse said. Didn’t want to wake you up. Nice fella, the Colonel. Fine figure of a man.

I watched her set up my breakfast, a brisk, gum-chewing blonde with strong red hands. Her shoulder brushed mine as she cranked the bed upright, humming to herself, and I became aware of her as a woman. I knew my grandfather still made love to Patty. I’d heard their headboard banging the wall as I lay reading, and it embarrassed me, mostly for Patty’s sake. She seemed too old for this—I thought of her as a victim in the transaction. But Grandjohn was still, as the nurse said, a fine figure of a man, tall and strong and jut-jawed, and I could sense his pleasure in the company of women. The nurse obviously had responded with pleasure of her own. I couldn’t help thinking of their hours alone here among all these empty beds, the Nurse and the Colonel, and this thought—framed in that impersonal, tritely pornographic way—made me raw with suspicious envy. She must have caught it in my face because she gave me an amused, sidelong glance and flicked my shoulder with the napkin before dropping it in my lap.

That afternoon a third former who’d just been admitted to the infirmary told me that Purcell had won the audience with Ayn Rand. We were playing chess in the sunroom, and I bent low over the board so he couldn’t see my face.

Not that I’d even submitted anything. Indeed, by now I could hardly remember the story I’d been so sure of. Most of it had vanished with the fever, leaving only traces of plot like the outlines in a coloring book. Since I couldn’t have won, it followed that someone else would. So why not Purcell—talented, serious Purcell, Purcell who cared so much? Over the next few days I scraped together enough generosity to convince myself that I was happy for him, and when I got discharged the first thing I did was stop by his room to shake his hand.

What are you talking about? he said. I didn’t win.

You didn’t win? I heard you did.

Well, I didn’t. Big Jeff won.

Big Jeff?
Big Jeff
won?

Purcell’s roommate was all pretzeled over in a chair, cutting his toenails. He looked up and said, How’s about
them
apples? Big Jeff, the award-winning author!

Purcell looked at him, and he laughed and went back to work with his clippers. They always acted like they hated each other, then signed up as roommates again every year.

I can’t believe it, I said.

Purcell was lying on his bed. He lowered the book he’d been reading and stared up at the ceiling.

Jesus, I said. Big Jeff. Did you submit anything?

Yes, I have to admit I did. I actually put myself in the position of being judged by Ayn Rand.

Oh, bull. Have you even read her?

He didn’t answer.

You haven’t seen Big Jeff’s story? the roommate said to me.

No. I’ve been sort of out of commission.

He looked at Purcell and smiled. It’s a classic, he said. Schoolboys will be parsing its subtleties for generations to come.

Purcell closed his eyes.

So Big Jeff won, I said. Too much! I didn’t know Big Jeff could write.

He can’t, Purcell said.

Then why did she choose him?

He just shook his head, eyes still closed.

I’ll tell you why, the roommate said. Because the blood of an artist runs in Big Jeff’s veins. Because he’s a two-fisted, bigger-than-life, award-winning author and not one of your local
artistes
who give themselves orgasms by forswearing capital letters and boring the living shit out of everybody. That’s why.

He bent toward his desk and picked up a copy of the school paper. Here, he said. Read him and weep.

Big Jeff’s story was called “The Day the Cows Came Home,” and it managed to combine his vegetarianism with his interest in space travel.

It went like this. A flying saucer lands in a field outside Boston. The police and various armed services try to destroy it, without success. Then it fires a ray that atomizes a nearby truck, mercifully empty, and everyone backs off while an exhaustively described robot disembarks and demands that a delegation of world leaders present themselves to the saucer’s commander. Tomorrow—or else.

Old hat so far, but not for long. The next day the president, the Soviet premier, and the queen of England assemble in the field and are led by the robot to the command center. And what do they find there, sitting at the controls and surrounded by a crew of the same species, but an enormous bull! This is no ordinary bull, but
a horned argonaut of imperial carriage
whose eyes
flash with preternatural intelligence
and who otherwise bears the same resemblance to earthly bovines that
the untrammeled wolf, bold ruler of his arctic realm, bears to the permed and coiffured poodle in his rhinestone sweater.

Then the world’s leaders get the story. Long ago, one of the aliens’ ships had developed engine trouble and been directed to our planet because of its nutritious flora. Their own galaxy was light years away and by now the crew would’ve been dead for scores of centuries, but this expedition had come to gather the descendants of that valiant band and take them home. They
had
left descendants, hadn’t they?

The perils of answering this question are not lost on the humans. They deny any knowledge of such creatures, until the ship’s commander produces a picture of cows in a field—at which point the queen of England,
her tender female spirit unequal to the sternness of his gaze,
breaks down and babbles out the truth. The travelers gathered around her are not pleased to learn the present state of their kin, or the uses to which they’ve been put. Indeed they can hardly believe their ears, and the commander insists on a fact-finding tour.

He visits a dairy in Wisconsin, where he sees the cows sucked dry by machines and shot full of sperm from bulls they’ve never even met. He watches calves being castrated and branded in Texas, and tours a farm in Japan where the animals are force-fed gallons of beer to sweeten their flesh. He’s taken to a messy bullfight in Mexico, a rodeo in Wyoming, and a killing-floor in the Chicago stockyards.

The commander of the spaceship sees all this and more. He grows ominously silent. After returning to the ship to confer with his comrades, he emerges to make a grand tour of all the ranches and farms, gathering the herds around him to tell them exactly what lies in store if they don’t accept his invitation to return to the home planet. They retain just enough of the old language to understand the warning, but most of them shrug it off. Instead they invite
him
to join
them.
They’ve got it made: all they can eat, protection from predators, medical care—the works. The commander is reviled as a troublemaker, and in Montana a bunch of steers stampede him off the ranch. Finally, only a handful of the bravest and smartest choose to leave, and even this small procession is diminished when some of them lose their nerve at the sight of the long ramp leading into the ship, and defect.

At sunset the saucer lifts off with its crew and their newfound cousins. But they don’t head for home—not yet. They hang up there for a while putting their ray to work. The killing is efficient, implacable, and completely misanthropic. In the end not a single human being remains alive. The story concludes with this line, spoken by one of the crew to a cow weeping for the little boy who milked her:
He’s lucky we didn’t eat him.

In her front-page interview, Ayn Rand praised Big Jeff as a great writer in the making.
It is most gratifying,
she said,
to see someone of Mr. Purcell’s youth dare to challenge the collectivist orthodoxy that tyrannizes intellectual life in this country—and nowhere more than in its colleges and schools. Mr. Purcell excels in his depiction of the victim kissing the whip. Of course the herd denies the truth of its own enslaved condition, and attacks the heroic truth-teller. One need only read the reviews of
Atlas Shrugged
to see that principle at work in our so-called free press, which can appear free only to those who’ve been completely brainwashed by egalitarian mystifications. But just look what happens when truly superior men like John Galt cease to exercise their powers—the whole world comes to a halt!

Ayn Rand spent most of the interview going on about this John Galt. Since I didn’t know who he was I skipped to the end, where she came back to Big Jeff and complimented his use of the farm and the stockyard as a metaphor for the welfare state,
whose siren song lures us ever closer to the wasteland of coerced mediocrity—where to be done for matters more than to do, where freedom is a fantasy achieved by shutting one’s eyes to the corral in which one lives, and where the herd counts itself fortunate to be fattened on the proceeds of its own eventual slaughter. Mr. Purcell has here revealed a great and most unpopular truth. The dream of universal equality leads not to paradise, but to Auschwitz!