Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (24 page)

The road between antiquity and thirty-foot buttocks turns out to be a two-way street.

Flipping through this second notebook at random, you would find the following:

Foreign Films & Directors

Animals

Body Parts

Fashion Phrases

Famous Women

Flags of the World

Abstract Art

Ancient Geography

All in the first eighty pages or so, often accompanied by diagrams that seem drawn by a madman.

Some subjects were surprisingly fascinating.
ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY,
for example.

I had never particularly cared that Alexander the Great once conquered Asia Minor. I mean, big whoop. The thing about Ancient History is that it might as well be ancient history. I didn’t even know where Asia Minor
was.

It’s not like I was ever going to visit Asia Minor on vacation.

But wait—it turns out Asia Minor is the biggest chunk of modern-day Turkey. Oh.
That’s
where that is. Hmm. And Carthage, why, that was in what we now call Tunisia. And Thrace—who knew that Thrace was a place? Roughly speaking, it’s what we call Bulgaria at the moment, although in another century or three it’ll probably be called something else. Like everything usually is. Countries and peoples are temporary things. They come and they go, but they’re as permanent to us as a storm to a fruit fly.

This was all kinda cool to think about.

There’s an actual hill, not far from a town called Çanakkale, where archaeologists think they’ve found the ruins of Troy.
Troy,
as in big giant horse, and ship-launching-faced Helen, and (somewhat more recently) Brad Pitt pirouetting in a leather skirt.

Troy. Is still
there.

I wondered how it might feel to see that in person someday.

As a young boy trapped on a long family car trip, I had once been to the Civil War site of the Battle of Bull Run. The guide told of Washington socialites traveling for hours to enjoy the view of a simple skirmish, hoping to sit on a hillside supping on tea and madeleines while young men were slaughtered below.

This story stuck with me for life, partly for the appalling idea of well-off people enjoying a picnic holiday while delighting in carnage, and partly because the tour guide could point to the exact hillsides and grassy fields where both kinds of ugliness raged.

Unmarked by the years, those hills could have still been in the previous century. Forgetting the timeline, I could almost hear the gunfire and see the panicking petticoats scurrying back to their carriages. I was no longer looking at grass and trees and hills or a story in a book. I was looking at a real place, and real events, and thinking about what they meant in ways I hadn’t expected.

This was my first glimpse of Trebekistan.

Trebekistan is a location unfixed in physical space and time. It’s a place of pure learning, where hard playful work can bring sudden shocks of unexpected perception. In Trebekistan, art and math and geography and science stop pretending to be separate subjects, and instead converge in a glorious riot. Every new detail creates two fresh curiosities, so you know less as you learn, and yet nothing seems unknowable. Trebekistan, oddly, is a place of expanding dimension yet increasing connection, both growing and shrinking with every new step.

Of course, even the best places can be screwed up. Toured foolishly, I would learn, Trebekistan can become a place of self-absorption, where knowledge has no purpose but the accretion of other knowledge. One can sin with intellectual greed as self-destructively as one who hoards wealth, love, or pride itself.

I have gotten ahead of the story again. But the timeline in Trebekistan can be surprisingly flexible.

As I continued to work, I kept seeing details that gave breath and blood to dry names and events that had once seemed like dust on the page. This was often a great source of glee.

A key breakthrough in physics was the Michelson-Morley experiment, meant to measure a pervasive invisible space-goo called the
luminiferous ether.
If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because Michelson and Morley so definitively
didn’t
find space-goo that soon it was clear that it didn’t exist. In other words, their work so thoroughly discredited their own ideas that they radically leapfrogged our understanding of the universe. (Coincidentally, they were working in Cleveland, at what became my alma mater, in what became the department where I got a degree.) Failure, taken far enough, can be brilliant success.

The greatest logician of the twentieth century, Kurt Gödel, pioneered entire fields of mathematical reasoning that brilliant minds take years to comprehend. However, much of what he proved with indisputable math was that many things cannot be proven.
That
much, you can prove. Outside of his work, he was a schizophrenic convinced he was being poisoned by unknown beings. So that’s humankind’s greatest logician.

Mark Twain (a distant relative, it turns out, but then aren’t we all) suffered great personal tragedies, could not handle money, and slowly became depressive with age. He was rescued from ruin when he started to drink with the ruthless head of Standard Oil, Henry Rogers, a robber baron so merciless he was widely known as “Hell Hound,” a man Twain’s characters might have once held in the deepest contempt. Rogers, in turn, was humanized by the great humanist, and donated small fortunes to the education of black Southerners and numerous others in need. So Twain’s distressed kindness, returning the friendship of a man he could have judged harshly, was redeemed many times over, in the end.

Fun to contemplate: Twain’s financial woe may well have indirectly led to the education of Helen Keller. It can be hard to know good news from bad.

The world is far stranger than I could ever have hoped. So are all of us in it—spectacularly mixed bags, varying less by absolutes than degrees.

Gandhi, great soul, disowned his own firstborn. Einstein’s first published paper asserted deep significance in the action of drinking straws. Arthur Miller, sensitive dramatist of family issues, pretended his youngest son didn’t even exist.

Ancestrally speaking, the Windsors of England are more German than English. George V switched to “Windsor” (from “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha”) in 1917 when England was warring with Germany. It would be hard to persuade young men to die in the trenches to prevent Germans from taking over if it seemed clear that they already had. So, Windsor it is. Carry on.

There seem to be as many examples as there are human beings.

How fragile and brilliant and vain and sad and vulnerable and ludicrous everything started to look. A strangely familiar world began to open. No one had ever told me this, but the whole of humanity seems to be mostly a bunch of screwups who do their best, get it right most of the time, but often don’t.

Yes, yes,
of course
plans fail, leaders are corrupt, and self-proclaimed paragons get caught with their pants down. History screams: this is
normal.
That’s just what we humans often do. But we also learn and recover and rebuild and nurture each other in magnificent ways.

Which is why striving to be better, every day, and with all of our energy, is so damn difficult, rare, and admirable.

It’s why pride is a sin and humility a virtue. And so at least four words in the
Concordance
were now making more sense.

Very slowly, my
Jeopardy!
notebooks started changing, from a list of dry information I needed to memorize to outlines of things I wanted to know more about, field guides to a world I’d barely even seen.

When I first saw Trebekistan in the midst of a battlefield, Bull Run had been made into a park. My parents paid to get in, and some guy led us around, so it all had a special-world air to my child’s mind. It never occurred to me that the whole planet is actually like that hillside in Virginia, if you learn to start seeing with more careful eyes.

I wanted eyes like that. I’m still trying to see to this day.

As was becoming habit now, I checked the air dates for the Tournament games. Only the two-day $100,000 final, pitting the three remaining contestants from a field of fifteen, fell on significant dates.

The first game would air on February 12: Abe Lincoln’s birthday. The second game would air on a Friday the 13th.

A notebook soon filled up with everything Lincoln. Phobias took over another.

Of course, it would be useless if I didn’t make it through the first two rounds.

The gods of state-dependent retrieval received proper tribute.

The bright lights and bookcase-turned-podium would remain in place for the next four months. (Even if Annika, on the other hand, might not.) My never-rest study habits would continue. If it was good enough for
A Clockwork Orange,
it was good enough for me. But I realized there was still more I could do.

The effect of physical state on recall has even been proposed—with some good evidence—as extending to the foods you eat, the medicines you’ve taken, and how much sleep or caffeine you have had. Rats who are given an intravenous drip of alcohol before learning to run a maze will later repeat the maze better when drunk than sober. (They’ll also be more comfortable wearing little party hats, doing Jell-O shooters off each other’s tummies, and flashing their tiny rodent breasts while squeaking “whoo.”)

Such is the power of physical state.

On a taping date, I would have to be awake at 7:30 a.m., and I would play my actual games sometime between noon and 5:30 p.m. During the day at Sony, I would have access to a limited menu of food and drink, although I could surely sneak protein snack bars into the green room. So: with rare exception, every day for four months, I awakened at 7:30, studied most intensely between noon and 5:30 (often standing at the bookcase that doubled as my practice podium), and ate exactly the green room snacks and protein bars I would eat on a game day, plus a Sony-lunch-style sandwich around 3:00 p.m.

Annika was usually at work. But not on weekends. So two days a week, I shared my life with someone who definitely thought I had completely lost my mind.

This was entirely possible.

It’s also likely that I was involuntarily responding to another type of programmed retrieval: classical conditioning.

We all remember Pavlov’s Dog: ring a bell when you’re feeding the dog, and soon the dog starts salivating at the sound of a bell, even in the absence of food. (Pavlov himself, incidentally, was as trained as one of his dogs: he rose, ate each meal, and slept at the same time every day, vacationed each year at exactly the same place, and always left on the same day on the calendar—
p-TING!
indeed.)

I had just spent weeks on end training myself to push a button and feel smarter a few seconds later. And then, on national television, I had pushed a button and gotten rewarded, pushed a button and gotten rewarded, and pushed a button and gotten rewarded, over and over and over.

In some sense, I’m not sure the Tournament of Champions—or any external stimulus—even mattered. Of course I was still pushing the button.

Perhaps I was Pavlov’s Contestant.

Further on in my notebooks, you’d also find the following lists of information:

State Flowers and Birds

Different Shapes of Seashells

Diacritical Marks

Names of Foreign Parliaments

And so on.

Looking back, I’m not sure what I was thinking. Or if the word “thinking” even applies.
Jeopardy!
asks for
STATE CAPITALS,
sure, but I’ve never seen the flowers or birds without some sort of hint.

Seashells? Wow. Was I really expecting to be asked to reel these off?
What are—left to right—a chiton, a cowrie, a whelk, and a limpet?

Diacritical marks? What the ellipsis was I thinking?

I was certain, however, that the parliaments would be helpful. Knowing my Knesset from my Althing would matter someday.

More important, though: I
wanted
to know this stuff.

I couldn’t imagine
not
wanting to know everything about everything. Every day was a rush of excitement, new knowledge and worlds and perceptions unfolding. I was an eager captive, unable and unwilling to leave.