Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) by Walter Kirn

next few nights were just as black and taxing. By the weekend I’d developed a rolling twitch, a sort of chronic electrical disturbance, deep in the calf muscles of both my legs. When I tried to massage away the spasms, they spread to my thighs, then up into my hips. I started taking aspirin with every meal, switching to Tylenol when aspirin hurt my stomach. I borrowed a book on Buddhism from the library, learned the rudiments of meditation, and even devised a mantra for myself, “Ormalatala,” a string of nonsense syllables that sounded as if they ought to soothe me but made me feel silly, desperate, and unhinged.
    The one thing I didn’t try was disobedience. I reacted to the new charter by strictly heeding it, thinking this might draw attention to its absurdity. I limited my movements to the traffic lanes, looking away when the TV was on and laying not a toe upon the rug. My wardens ignored me, unembarrassed, strangers both to pity and to shame. Two weeks after sending me into outer darkness, they started throwing big parties in the common room, setting out trays of vegetables and cheeses and mixing cocktails from a well-stocked bar whose bottles and glasses had arrived by limousine. The guests were giddy campus drama types, mostly from New York City or its best suburbs, who seemed to have known one another, in many cases long before they entered Princeton, through a network of New England summer arts camps directed by luminaries I’d seen in magazines and couldn’t imagine stooping to teach teenagers. The party guests looked at me with shining eyes and curious faces as I trod silently past them to the bathroom or darted, head down and sheepish, into my bedroom. What did they think was my problem, or did they know?
    One night a dark-haired junior named Nina, an established director at Princeton’s Theatre Intime, shadowed me to my bedroom. She plunked down a whiskey sour on my desk next to the Hermes manual typewriter which held a page from a play I’d started writing about the president and his top national security aide. Making up lines for imaginary people eased the spasms in my legs, I’d found. As long as I was them, I wasn’t me, and as long as I wasn’t me, I didn’t twitch.
    “You’re fond of stichomythia,” said Nina, straightening and reading the curled page. “You’re a Beckett fan, obviously. Or is it Pinter?”
    I let these baffling allusions ride.
    “What’s it about?”
    “Armageddon.”
    “In what respect?”
    “Pretty much all of them,” I said.
    Nina sat down with her drink on Joshua’s mattress in a manner that showcased her black stockings and the red straps that hooked them to her garter belt. Her skirt was made of wet-looking black vinyl, a fabric I’d only seen once, on a TV show, worn by a foxy LA vice cop working undercover as a prostitute.
    “I know why you’re not at the party. Infantile. If it makes you feel any better, they’re clowns. They’re hacks. Their idea of a show is girls in tights, kicking their pretty ankles above their heads.”
    I toasted this insult with my plastic cup. Nina’s black turtle-neck tightened across her chest as she returned the gesture. I could tell she’d grown up in New York like all the rest of them, and I thought I could even guess which neighborhood: the Upper West Side. One of her parents was probably a professor, of history or philosophy, most likely. Childhood trips to Florence and Madrid, a fondness for Jamaican reggae, and a sibling who was in trouble with the law thanks to a weakness for heroin or gambling. Just a few months after leaving my small town, I was becoming an expert social bird-watcher. And there weren’t all that many species, I’d discovered—not, at least, among the Princeton art crowd. There were the somber iconoclasts like Nina, children of darkest intellectual Europe, and the exuberant show-offs like my roommates, who reveled in spectacle and song. My natural loyalties were with the first group, but not