Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) by Walter Kirn Page B

My largest concern is not the content, though. It’s the shape of the play. The narrative skeleton.”
    I nodded to show respect for his concern, then blew out a roiling plume of cigarette smoke into the beam of a high-intensity can light.
    “You’re saying it’s cloud-shaped. A swirl. A nebula.”
    “I’m saying nothing. I’m letting physics speak for me.”
    “So what’s my goal in this thing? My inner arc?”
    “To launch a nuclear missile, call God to earth, and usher in the age of peace and love. It might be a dream, though. A hallucination. Happening not in the White House to the president but to a patient in an asylum.”
    “I can’t even tell you how often that’s been done. It’s like when the Martians invade and people panic, except it turns out they’ve come to teach, to heal.”
    “Maybe. But not to my knowledge,” I said.
    “Then get more knowledge. Please.”
    “Stand on your tape mark and wait till Adam gets back. Practice your speech about when you were a kid and blew up a firecracker in your hand that left a round scar like the sky wheel in Ezekiel.”
    I’d put down the revolt, but I was rattled. I stopped attending rehearsals. When I learned that my roommates had all bought tickets to the opening performance, I begged Adam to call off the production, but his drug-stoked momentum was unstoppable. “We’re here to disturb, not impress or please,” he said. “And the play’s not just yours now. It’s all of ours. It’s its. It belongs to itself. It’s a creature with a will. You need to drop the leash and let it run.”
    “The coke’s all gone, isn’t it? Let me see the ampoule.”
    Adam tapped a finger on his forehead. “Metabolized, not gone.”
    My adversaries took seats in the third row, their playbills neatly settled on their laps, their postures preposterously magisterial, as though they were overseeing a war-crimes trial. I lurked in the back against an exit door. The shudders rippled down my thighs and calves as though my legs were being unzipped. The disasters materialized early. The President skipped an entire page of dialogue only a minute or two into the show, while the National Security Adviser absently twisted a pinkie in his left ear during a speech that was intended by the author as a symphonic lamentation over our hunger for belief, for faith, and the dangers posed by the fact that we never feel full. There were technical issues, too. The lighting guy, who’d eaten a hash brownie which he’d sworn would wear off before the show, toggled at random between clashing colors, turning the stage into a cruise-ship disco, and during the silences between big lines misfired foosballs from the upstairs lounge bounced on the ceiling, as sharp as hammer strikes, then rolled along endlessly above our heads in grainy, resonant acoustic detail.
    The audience didn’t seem to mind, though. There was even a fair amount of laughter. It came in different spots than I’d anticipated, but this made it no less heartening to me. Indeed, it seemed to bear out Adam’s theory about the way that plays escape their masters.
    People patted my shoulder as they left. I even got several kisses on both cheeks from stylish upperclassmen. My roommates’ reactions were stingy and oblique but nothing like the sharp lashes I’d expected. Jennifer winked in the way that people do when they want you to lie in bed all night wondering exactly what they meant. Peter said, “Not at all a total debacle.” Tim turned and faced me as though he planned to speak but instead he tapped me on the breastbone with a tightly rolled-up playbill, either granting me a kind of knighthood or threatening me with Mafia violence—I couldn’t tell. Which I knew was what he wanted.
    Feeling content, then jaunty, then philosophical—my tiny success would change nothing, I suspected; I’d still have to circumambulate the rug; I’d still have to live in my hole, surrounded, cowed—I went with Adam, Nina, and the cast