TESTING

Charles Oberndorf

 

A Bantam Spectra Book/September 1993 SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.   All rights reserved. Copyright © 1993 by Charles Oberndorf. Cover art copyright © 1993 by Bruce Jensen. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.   If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”   ISBN 0-553-56181-2   Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada   Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries, Marca Registrada. Bantam Books. 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.   PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 

But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one life into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life.   —FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, Crime and Punishment translated by Constance Garnett

~

Whenever he thinks back on it, on all those things that had gone wrong during the fall of his senior year at Westminster High, a public-owned preparatory school, the first thing Karl remembers is not the illicit excursion he took with his friends, the school’s dreamchair testing, or the decision he was forced to make; rather, it is the walk-and-talk for the Campaign to Reelect Deborah Madison that slips into his mind so readily.

He was dropped off in a neighborhood that had been all apartment buildings when he was a kid and was now shiny AmerDream homes, all sided white or yellow with expensive and fashionable asteroid nickel. Deborah Madison’s husband handed him a palm-reader with a list of names and addresses called up from the last primary and a beat-up canvas satchel filled with info-cards and prefolded flyers, and Deborah Madison herself gave him the trunk talk: “Be yourself,” she said, “be friendly. We’ve practiced the routine, and I know they’ll like you. People like to see students involved in politics, so everything will go fine.” Her eyes, they were dark brown, held his, and Karl felt like she was waiting for him to say something. He wished he had something to say. Deborah Madison nodded, said, “Good luck,” and left him there.

After some hesitation, during which he juggled anxiety and commitment, Karl checked his palm-reader for the first name and address on the list of neighborhood people who had voted for Deborah Madison’s party. He found the house with the matching address and knocked on the door. No one answered. He considered leaving before anyone could answer, but he knocked again. It was Saturday afternoon. Maybe no one would be home. People in houses like these had to stay busy to keep them. He hooked a flyer over the doorknob and left. The next home on his list had a new owner, an older woman who seemed friendly enough.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Seventeen.”

She thought about that for a moment. “And you’re campaigning for Deborah Madison?”

Karl nodded, ready to launch into his rap about the upcoming election.

“I’ll be damned,” she said, “if I vote for anyone with her kind of politics.”

The slamming of the door reverberated long after the sound waves had dissipated. Karl just stood there, shocked and angry. He had done nothing to this woman. He had been polite, hadn’t he? Jody, his girlfriend, had been right, this was a mistake. He didn’t know anything about Deborah Madison except what she’d said in morning assembly, and morning assemblies had been full of politicians looking for volunteers who’d help out on campaigns in return for citizenship points that would go on their student transcripts. He and Jody had shared lots of laughs, sneering at kids who volunteered for two or three different political campaigns, who ushered at school events, or who tutored kids at suburban schools, because half of these volunteers, these contributors to the nation’s promised renaissance, wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help anyone if some citizenship points hadn’t been promised in return. Now Karl felt like he was just another point grubber.

There are no point grubbers, Westminster’s headmaster had said. Points show commitment to social process. They can’t be grubbed. Yeah, right. Then why was he out here? His uncle knew why. It was his senior year, it was October 24, applications for limited university positions were due January 15, and Karl’s transcript wasn’t all that good. He needed the citizenship points.

For a month now candidates had come to school for Monday morning assembly, and all of them had extolled the same virtues, all of them good for a laugh. America had been number one once, they said, the Brazilians and the Chinese have shown they don’t know how to be world leaders, our country has the energy and moral commitment like no other country, if we only work together—all of them talking in slogans no kids with a decent training in rhetoric would ever trust. But last Monday, Deborah Madison spoke, and she had been the first to say something Karl could believe in. She made Karl want to be a part of small, step-by-step solutions. He wanted a world where America accepted its appropriate share of the pie, not a return to the old America that had tried to control it all. He wanted a politics that replied to local problems. That Monday afternoon, Karl sheepishly admitted to Jody that he had signed up after the assembly to help the Madison campaign.

Remembering Madison’s energy and commitment helped him make it to two more addresses listed on the palm-reader. There were two names listed at each address. A little girl answered at the first, and he asked to speak to her mother or her uncle. Her uncle was happy to take the flyer. He said thank you and closed the door. The mother of the house answered at the second, and she took a flyer, too. This wasn’t so bad. The third address belonged to a married couple, so there was only one name listed. Karl wasn’t sure if it was polite to ask for the mother of the house, but it turned out that no one was home. Across the street, the first address had two names listed, but it turned out they were married. Still, the man didn’t mind being called an uncle. “My brother lives with our sister. He’s more the ladies’ man.” Karl found out more about the man’s personal history than about his politics, but the man did ask for one of the info-cards, which contained Deborah Madison’s voting record, the text and explanations for the bills she’d cosponsored, and a survey of her upcoming projects. All he had to do was slip it into his terminal, and all the data could be called up. The man said he was more than happy to help.

Suddenly the whole thing became easy. There were still empty homes and the mild sense of despair caused by a pause in the routine, but Karl began to feel unstoppable. People were interested. Fewer took flyers; more requested info-cards. Mothers called their brothers to listen; wives called their husbands. Between houses Karl rehearsed what he’d tell Jody tonight: they’d been wrong, people cared, they believed in the right things, they were just waiting for the right person to come along to ignite the energy behind that belief. By the end of the second street, people were asking him his opinion, and though Deborah Madison’s husband had suggested that he not say a whole lot—he was a newcomer to the campaign—Karl couldn’t help but talk. Except at church picnics and AmerValues Day celebrations, he really hadn’t talked with so many strangers who were so friendly. He listened forever to a bald man, who had the face of an anemic prune, talk on about how much he liked Deborah Madison and the things she stood for. A handsome woman, with white hair that looked as soft as cotton and who wore a wedding band on her ring finger, calmly explained how Deborah Madison was betraying her political party.

It seemed like for once all his angry quips were wrong. He was feeling wonderfully connected. There was a part of politics that went beyond the quickimage and audio overlays; it was here in a neighborhood, where everyday (well, better-off than everyday) people lived.

At the corner house of Karl’s third street, the door was answered by a young man, his blond hair set in a perm, like some young executive, Karl asked for the mother of the house. The man scowled and looked Karl over. Karl felt like he was with the headmaster, who liked to look you over and make ready judgments based on your clothes and the way you crushed your hair. “Tell me,” the young man with the executive perm said, “are you doing this because you like this Madison person, or are you doing it for the points?”

The old, familiar core of anger opened within Karl. He’d never really wanted to go on a walk-and-talk. He wasn’t a point grubber. Karl wanted to tell the young man with the executive perm, yes, I’m out here because of Deborah Madison. But the words in his mind already sounded like a lie. “You figure it out,” Karl said, and marched away.

“Asshole kid,” the man said, under his breath, just loud enough for Karl to hear.

Karl dumped the campaign flyers and info-cards into the nearest ‘cycler. He wanted to pound the palm-reader into the pavement and watch it crack. The anger kept him walking, self-righteous thoughts bursting into his head, extended monologues he’d never deliver. Then he realized that there were only two more streets to do and no way he could have used up all those cards and flyers. The cards weren’t cheap. What was he going to say?

The Committee to Reelect Deborah Madison picked him up ninety minutes later, and he told them that he’d done well “You must have,” said Deborah Madison’s husband. “You came back with an empty satchel.”

He told them that some mothers of the house had wanted cards for their brothers. That’s why he didn’t have anything left over. He was sure Deborah Madison wouldn’t believe him, not for more than a second or two. “That’s the way it works,” she said. “When brother and sister live together, they each have to have their own. We gave you plenty of cards just for that reason.” She offered him a professional smile that made him feel part of everything.

Karl lived with his family in an old brick home that always had something breaking down. It was located on the edge of the city proper, but the neighborhood was slowly being suburbanized: two small houses on the street had already been cheaply subdivided and rented out to people who looked like they could barely afford them.

It took two salaries to keep a small house going. His mother was a legal researcher, spending her days with four other women, each seated in front of a screen and cross-checking all sorts of files for key words. Up until Liana was born, Mom had worked at home for the same firm doing the same work, but allegations that their researchers were using firm software to help out nonpaying customers made the firm decide to keep all its secretaries and researchers in the same place, where extensive monitoring of company-owned equipment was legal.

Karl’s Uncle Jonathan, with a degree in anthropology, was a business consultant specializing in setting up the software for long-distance, cross-cultural conferences. All the software and hardware used in the house came from equipment that Uncle J no longer needed after a systems upgrade. He never bought the best, so he often could be seen huddled over an opened terminal, checking through cards and crystals, his puffy face flushed red with concentration and too much Scotch. His mother, in turn, was responsible for the upkeep of the house. She said she liked it after all those hours in front of a screen. Karl’s friends had been amused whenever they saw a someone who looked like a dowdy society matron from last century’s movies up on a ladder, fingers delicately holding a nail, while she tapped the nail with a hammer, then spreading her fingers against the wall so she could drive the nail into the wood with several well-placed thwacks.

The house itself had three bedrooms upstairs and an uncle room, added onto the house by the previous owners, that opened onto the kitchen. There was a tiny backyard, which had seemed large enough when Karl had been small, and an empty garage that housed some gardening equipment and a grass trimmer. The house itself was small when compared to the houses of his friends at school, but his mother had worked things out right: a son first, a daughter second, so everyone got their own room.

No one was home when he got back late that afternoon from the walk-and-talk. Uncle J was downtown helping work out the bugs in a conference-room program for a medical deal: when the Chinese, Yanomami, and orbiter businessm’n, each in her own office, pulled on gloves and hoods and sat down to work out the science, the investment, and the profits, Uncle J wanted their conference setting to be pleasing to the cultural eye, no one sitting too close or too far away, all of the colors friendly, and enough of a time delay so he could translate his clients’ gestures into gestures best appreciated by the Chinese and Yanomami. Actually, he was to make sure the two orbiter women who had hired him looked much friendlier than their intentions, which is why Uncle J had been drinking more Scotch than usual. Karl’s mother was out with his ten-year-old sister, shopping for a dress Liana could wear to the Election Day dinner their grandmother held every year to close out the holiday.

He liked the quiet of the house, or rather, the absence of voices and the house’s own creaks, hisses, and hums. He sat in the kitchen, sipping coffee and eating a QuickStart roll while staring at the closed door to Uncle J’s bedroom. Uncle J wasn’t here to ask Karl if he’d found out yet how many points he’d earned on the walk-and-talk, or if he’d sign up with another candidate to earn some more points next week. His mother wasn’t here to ask him if he’d met anyone nice, made any new friends. His sister, who’d taken absolutely no interest in him until he started seeing Jody, wasn’t here to ask what the two of them would do tonight.

The thought, on its own, signaled a diversion of blood to his penis, and now he was a bit embarrassed how easily it could happen, even though he was alone, even though there was no one to catch him if he went up to his bedroom and eased away that particular tension.

“The essence behind morality is the control by our hearts, our minds, our wills, over impulses that resist control.” It was his headmaster’s voice, but not quite. It was his own internal voice, mocking the headmaster’s voice. Henry St. August. Tiny feet, large body, deep blue eyes that held you. Jody thought his eyes were beautiful; she said his face would be attractive if he ate a touch less. But no one had ever seen him eat that much; when he told them to restrain their desires, no one could say the headmaster should restrain his. He ate a full meal at lunch, but no more than any of the eight students who sat at his table. Some said it was his genes. Others said he was a hypocrite; he must eat like a pig at home. Karl was never quite sure. He had called the headmaster Mr. St. August to his face, and the Saint and Hank the Tank behind his back, but Karl was never sure how he truly felt about the headmaster himself. Karl had been drawn in by the headmaster’s speech in September, the one that had opened the Morality Enhancement Program all seniors went through. The words, their meaning, had appealed to the part of Karl that wanted to take control of the constant desire, the insistent anxieties; so today he took another pee and tried to think about things that had nothing to do with sex. It meant ignoring an erection that wouldn’t go away.

He tried to work on some simulations at his computer. Karl was scheduled for dreamchair testing on Wednesday, and he did not feel prepared to undergo the three dilemmas and articulate his rationale afterward. He tried a simulation where he and his pregnant wife had to decide whether they wanted to abort a five-month fetus whose genetic enhancement had gone wrong, a baby who would most likely be born severely handicapped, physically as well as mentally. But Karl’s hood and gloves were old, hand-me-downs from his uncle, the whole thing looked unreal, and he found he couldn’t care less. Plus the whole thing had been soured by the stink his mother had made when she found that a number of the simulations involved married couples.

Karl’s ideal-figures disk was due on Wednesday. He could work on that instead, but he could do that tomorrow, too. He discarded hood and gloves and indexed through recent news and sports.

He tried another cup of coffee to pump some life back into his body. Mom said he was old enough for caffeine; Uncle J had wanted him to wait until the university. Uncle J used not to care how Mom raised her kids. He would play with Karl and Liana and listen to them when they were worried about something they didn’t want to tell Mom. But now he was home every night. It had been ages since he’d spent the night at a woman’s house or brought one to his room, and more and more he got into arguments with Mom about what was best for Karl and Liana, and Karl was hearing them all: about caffeine, study-habits, friends, birth control, and on and on.

The house’s emptiness amplified the cacophony in his head. He looked around his room, felt like there was too much to do, too much ever to get a handle on, so he picked up his readman, switched it on to Crime and Punishment, and scrolled on from where he had stopped reading last night.

Raskolnikov has been called in to see the police. They must know, he thinks. Somehow they know that he murdered the vile pawnbroker yesterday, striking the crown of her head again and again with the blunt side of an ax, then splitting apart the head of her passive sister, who had never done anything wrong but show up out of nowhere to witness her sister’s death. But the police don’t want him for that. He owes money to his landlady; she’s filed a complaint. They want him to sign a statement saying he’ll pay by the set date, that he won’t leave town, that he won’t sell any of his property. He protests, then signs, and he considers confessing, ending it all here. And that’s when he overhears the policeman and the clerk debate how likely it is that the porters are telling the truth. They said they had found the bodies of the pawnbroker and her sister, and the police had arrested the two porters as suspects. One of them—the clerk—says the porters couldn’t have done it. Someone still inside the room had to have done it. Raskolnikov tries to leave the room, but faints instead. He awakens, the two men ask if he’s ill, and Raskolnikov does all he can to leave as quickly as possible. He’s sure they suspect that he was the one who had been hiding behind the door when the porters came knocking.

And for Karl, Raskolnikov’s plight took on a new urgency. He couldn’t put the readman down, was reading faster than usual and having trouble scrolling the lines at a smooth pace. Each time the phone rang, he answered it, hoping it might be Jody, but it was instead a schoolmate of Liana’s or one of Mom’s friends or one of Uncle J’s drinking buddies. With each passing chapter he began to feel that the next phone call would be for him, that when he flipped on the screen, the image of Deborah Madison’s husband would flash on, and he’d ask Karl what, exactly, had happened to the extra campaign cards and flyers.

Karl went jogging before dinner to try to shake off the feeling. He wished cross-country season hadn’t already ended. If there had been a meet he wouldn’t have gone on that idiot walk-and-talk.

The couch was a refuge of soft darkness, and the warmth of their embraces, the lingering kisses that reddened and chapped their cheeks, made everything disappear. Jody’s brother, three years younger, had been sent to bed at ten. Not much later, Jody’s mother had discreetly headed upstairs to experience a video before going to sleep. Her uncle had said that he wouldn’t be home until one or two.

It was sometime after eleven, and Karl had to be home by midnight. Their lips and faces were wet from so much kissing. Both their shirts, and Jody’s bra, were beside the couch on the floor. Jody had wrapped her legs around Karl’s, and Karl found it hard not to press into her. The remaining layers of clothes (four, to be exact) keeping them apart created a sense of exalted, sweet, unreleased pleasure. Karl felt on edge and wonderful and, at the same time, horribly uneasy about everything that could go wrong by happening too soon.

He had tried several times to say, “Do you want to make love?” but the words had become trapped in his brain, a programmed loop that he couldn’t escape, even though they had already made love twice before, both moments horrible because he’d reached his moment so quickly (a surprise because it took forever to happen with his hand). After the first time, he’d used his library subscription number to call up some texts and find out what he should do afterward, but the next time, just when he was about to put theory into practice, Jody gave him this tight embrace and kissed him passionately like the moment had felt special (when he knew she must have been disappointed) and insisted that they dress right away before anyone came down and caught them.

Karl repositioned his weight so he could roll onto his side, which caused his butt to hang over the edge of the couch. Jody, with alternating jerks of hips and shoulders, maneuvered her back up against the couch. They both smiled at the awkwardness of it all. Karl tried to look at her breasts as best he could in the darkness bleached gray by the streetlight filtered through the curtains. He barely made out the silver necklace her uncle had given her, a tiny crucifix resting along her breastbone just where flat skin met the beginning of curves. He wanted to stare, to touch lightly, but he felt like there was never enough time, or just too much shyness (never mind the two times) to study each other, to trace the curve and texture of skin like they did in videos, in books.

“Hey,” Jody whispered, “my face is up here.” And she pulled him to her, placing lips against lips. He reached between, elbow sticking awkwardly out, to touch her breast, feathery fingerprint against nipple, afraid of what her reaction might be, or afraid of what really could happen. He’d learned from Hamlet, read in September during school, how frightening true passion was, how you didn’t want to change your life so thoroughly that you lost all control. His hand, as if taking a life of its own, went from touching nipple to cupping breast. Jody kissed him more intensely. Karl wanted to ask her again, but the words were still looping through his brain. His hand, programmed in some other part of his brain, slid down from breast, along belly, down to slacks, and it seemed like everything was positioned just right for him to comfortably slide his hand across descending curves. Jody’s fingers encircled his wrist, gently, as if taking his pulse, and drew his hand back up to her breast.

The gesture frustrated him and endeared her to him all at the same time.

“You can press against me,” she whispered. She sounded sheepish.

He, too, felt guilty, like there was something wrong with him, some energy he couldn’t contain, but Jody could.

Their shirts were on, Karl had just called for the electra, and they were standing by the front door, their last kiss turning into two, or three. “I wish it were next Saturday.” Jody’s voice was barely audible. The kiss had been so long, her embrace so warm, his erection placed so firmly between them, that Karl all at once let his mind glide over this week’s morality testing and land on next Saturday night when Jody might not feel a need to stop his hand and her passion. The kiss lasted so long—the sweet warmth of tongue learning tongue—that Karl almost missed the electra.

But he made it out the front door in time, and one of the passengers had hit the hold button, so the electra didn’t take off without him. It was one of the shiny new red-and-orange six-seaters imported from Brazil. A man and a woman were sitting together, and there was a middle-aged woman keeping her finger on the hold button until Karl waved good-bye to Jody, who was standing fully clothed on the front-door step, her hand raised into the air, her body, visible in the front porch light, shivering from the late October chill. “You know,” the woman said to Karl, after she released the button and the electra jerked forward, “you should come out and wait after you make the call.”

“Sorry,” Karl said. He found the keypad and pressed out his bank access code, the last four digits of his social security number, and his address. It turned out that he lived closer than anyone else, so the electra headed for his house first. He sat there and kept quiet, feeling like the three others were watching him, wondering what he and the girl had been up to that he ran out the door so late. The tiny dome lights were too dim for them to see his chapped cheeks, or the way his erection pressed against the fabric of his slacks, but he felt like they knew anyway.

The electra stopped in front of his house, and he said good-bye before stepping off. He was five minutes past his curfew, but no one would care. He found the front-hall light on. Liana, his mother, his uncle, were all in bed, the doors to their rooms shut.

It took forever for Karl to fall asleep. The current of unfulfilled need still ran through him. His balls felt like they were imploding.

~

The next day came upon him with a Sunday kind of listlessness. He went to church reluctantly, Uncle J ushering him and his sister out the door, only once reminding Karl of the importance of a good attendance record. After the services, he considered seeing the youth minister to tell the man how he had wanted to make love and hadn’t, and how he had felt the insistent pressure afterward and hadn’t masturbated to relieve it. But each statement, while making Karl look good, seemed a lie: neither refusal to his desire had made Karl feel very good about himself. He wondered if Jody, a Catholic, would confess her desires to someone. He wondered, because he’d never really thought to ask until now, if the Catholic Church allowed its university-bound members to accumulate morality points for proper behavior. He knew some of the Baptist churches did not: God expects you to follow the right path throughout life, not just the path that takes you to the university.

Besides, his ten-year-old sister was waiting for him, and she would tell Mom and Uncle J that he had seen the youth minister, and both of them would have wanted to know why.

His mother called him from his room while he was reading. Marmeladov, that drunk, that gambler, who lost so much money that his daughter Sonia must earn her family’s living as a prostitute, has been run over by an elegant carriage and is now on a bed dying. Sonia, small and thin with wondrous blue eyes, has arrived. Out of breath, surrounded by a whispering crowd in the lobby, she stares at her father, her face frightened, mouth open, her gaze terrified. This was the first time Raskolnikov had seen her, and Karl didn’t want to leave his room.

Every time his mother wanted him, she had an ulterior motive. At the end of August, just before school, when he and Jody were running preseason cross-country and going out with each other almost every night, his mother had him help replace some corroding pipes so she could ask, “Jody’s Catholic, isn’t she? Does her mom live with Jody’s father or her uncle?” “Her uncle,” Karl had said, knowing the discussion had been meant to go further, but couldn’t. His mother didn’t like to make waves, not at work, not with her children, rarely with her brother. If things went bad, she picked up her readman, went to her bedroom, and closed the door. So a week later he was helping her slice vegetables for a stew that would feed them for a week, when she said, “It’s funny about Jody’s mom. Most Catholics I knew in school got married.” Karl got her talking about Catholicism, which in her opinion wasn’t real Christianity, so it wasn’t until they were cleaning out the garage, where she stored her gardening tools, that she found the chance to say, “You know, with a younger brother, she’s going to have to wait awhile until she can have kids. Are you sure she’s not the type who’ll be looking to get married instead?” Karl assured his mother that Jody was intent on being a medical researcher (if she made it to university, she’d start studying hard, is what Jody had told Karl, who knew better than to pass on such information to his mother). So his mother never got to the heart of the matter. At least not with Karl. Several nights later, she had a heated discussion in the kitchen with Uncle J, and he must have had too much Scotch that night, because both Liana and Karl in their separate bedrooms could hear him say, “He’s too young for that,” and Mom, not to be outdone by her brother, said even louder, maybe loud on purpose so Karl would hear the message this time: “Yes, he is too young, Jonathan, but he has a younger sister, and she’ll have kids, and I want to make sure he’s around to support them.” Uncle J stormed off and slammed his door; Mom always left him alone when his door was shut. For the next week, Liana asked Karl what he was too young for, and though he suspected the truth, he was still dismayed when Uncle J took him to the doctor, who did the tests and wrote out a prescription for the pill so no Catholic girl could trap him: “She wouldn’t do it on purpose,” his uncle assured him, “but accidents do happen.”

The whole thing had made Karl feel ashamed. He didn’t even tell Kevin and James that he’d gone on the pill. They’d think things had gone hot and heavy with Jody, and James would probably tell enough people that Jody would find out. And if Jody thought he was after that and only that, then the whole thing would be over. Cross-country was going well. September was like a mild summer, charmed, and everything seemed to be going right for Karl and Jody. He secretly hoped that things would get that hot and heavy, but he never believed there would be the kind of moment that made the pill a necessity.

A week after they first made love, Jody, turning bright red, got up the nerve to ask if he had been, well, safe when they had, you know. She wasn’t using anything, hadn’t ever thought anything would happen until… well, she didn’t know when, but not while she was still in high school.

So when his mother called him down from his room, he knew there would be a chore and some questions. He turned off the readman and went to find his jacket. Whatever she wanted to talk about, he knew it wouldn’t be good. It was probably the dreamchair testing, how little he’d been studying. Or maybe Deborah Madison’s husband had called about the campaign cards Karl had tossed. The asshole with the executive perm had called the campaign phone number. Or Deborah Madison’s husband had done a follow-up in the neighborhood—calling various names listed on the palm-reader, or actually visiting some homes on the last two streets—and discovered that Karl had never been there, and yes, they’d been home all Saturday afternoon.

But his mother just wanted him to dig holes so she could plant bulbs for the coming spring. It had rained last week, so the dirt was moist, and the old battered trowel sliced into it with ease. Every now and then Karl looked over at his mother, who was laying the bulbs into the holes he’d dug and tenderly spreading the loose soil over them, her jacket open and hanging over her back like a canvas tent. He was embarrassed by his mothers size, by the way she’d get up and go inside for a snack, then go back in fifteen, twenty minutes later for another. At some point, she’d get so big that she’d waddle rather than walk. Her friends had told Karl that in her younger days she’d been this energetic paralegal. She knew the software, she learned the law, and she saved people, especially some poor people in the suburbs, the kind of money it took to get a lawyer or rent legal software. She gave that up to do home-work, her friends said, so she could be with her children. His uncle must have been doing extremely well then: more time at work, less time with his buddies or a bottle of Scotch. Or maybe that kind of energy just gets used up, like those disposable batteries that you read about, the ones leaking in the dumps and poisoning the groundwater.

In a way he wished his mother still had that kind of energy. He remembered all the things she had done with him: the games, the songs, the trips, the stern, red anger when everything got said. Out here, now, stabbing the ground with a trowel, cutting the roots of a network of weeds, Karl found that he did want her to say something, ask some sort of probing question so he could tell her everything that was bothering him. If she just asked the right question, talking would be so easy.

When Liana had been a baby, Mom would nurse her in the living room while Karl told her about school, and she’d answer all his questions, sometimes telling him more than he ever wanted to know. Back then, Uncle J had been involved with a woman who was expecting their son, and he came home only on Saturdays to play with Karl and on Tuesday nights to go through the budget software with Mom.

But now she just complained about how tired she was. She ate more, read more, and she talked less. Jody said maybe moms got that way when uncles were around the house a lot, a statement that had made Karl sort of angry, because her uncle was always out sleeping around.

Jody called later that afternoon. She looked lovely on the vidscreen. “Did you have a good time last night?” she asked him.

He was never sure how to answer that question. They’d spent most of the night standing around while he had tried to talk her into going out to the suburbs and try out one of the dives that would serve them beer, but she didn’t want to do that the weekend before testing—What if someone found out?—so they ended up on the couch, kissing. Calling it a good time made it sound like fun: fun like dancing, or going to the arena, or sneaking out to the suburbs, but not like the touching of lips, and the building of energy, and something happening, or something not happening. “Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t… well, you know.”

“That’s okay. We were controlling our baser desires.”

She giggled. “I think they’re rather nice desires.”

If they were so nice, he wanted to ask, why did you pull my hand away? Instead, he asked her other things, and they talked for more than an hour. Years later he wouldn’t remember one thing they might have talked about that would take up an entire hour.

Jody’s call had reminded him to take his pill. It reminded him of other things, too. The way the arrow of desire had such urgency and no target made him feel unclean afterward: his socks damp with sweat, the patches of stickiness where tissues had wiped but not cleaned, the point of wetness that had soaked into his underwear while he tried to ignore all his imaginings. He wanted to take a shower or wash up, but he didn’t know what Liana or his mother might think if they heard the water running longer than it took to wash your hands.

He sat down in front of the terminal to work on some of the simulations, but he didn’t even bother to put on the gloves. He went over the software he had to prepare for the testing, the positive and negative ideals. He had done the comparisons of the ideal uncle and his uncle, the ideal mother and his mother; the ideal siblings and his sibling, the ideal woman, ideal man, ideal friend. He had been honest with the comparisons. When he drew his ideal mother, he tried to get the software to make her look like holoes of his mother when she’d been younger. He liked the way this got him to think, and at times he was glad he would turn this in, then his family wouldn’t be a secret that the family kept to itself. But he also felt like he was betraying them. If his mother read his description, if she knew that she wasn’t the ideal mother in his mind (even though they both knew the ideal mother never existed), she would be horrified. She would hide in her room for days. She wouldn’t talk to him at all.

But it wasn’t his fault that he was doing this. Once his mother had recognized that. His freshman year, Mr. St. August had given a talk about the joys of marriage, and Karl had come home to ask why his mother and uncle hadn’t married someone, didn’t they miss the day-to-day of being with someone they loved. His uncle was flabbergasted. His mother got angry, the same way when he’d been a kid, a deliciously scary anger, her cheeks all red with emotion. She had called up St. August, “the unmarried bastard,” and told him that she did spend the whole day, every day with people she loved, and she didn’t want her son’s mind polluted with the idea that you could find joy only in marriage. Too many of her friends who had gotten married were alone now. And he’d better learn to be sensitive to people who lived their lives differently.

Karl had been surprised that you could talk to Mr. St. August like that. It was thrilling to see how nicely the headmaster had treated him the following week, but St. August’s newborn friendliness made him wonder: if St. August was true to his own moral vision, how could he pander to Karl and his mom like this?

Karl called up the ideal woman to rewrite the description a bit, to redo the holographic sketch. He thinned out the cheeks, made her hair a bit more blond, reduced her stature and the size of her breasts, and even though the software kept her clothes on, and breast size was evident only in the way it affected the curve of her clothes, he had started to think about Jody’s breasts, how weeks ago he had gotten up the nerve to touch one, the left one, with his right hand, how the next night he asked, his voice hoarse, almost not coming out, if he could take off her shirt, and desire was back again.

He picked up his readman and Crime and Punishment to find out how Raskolnikov and Sonia would meet, if they’d talk to each other, how her presence would affect his life. She was sacrificing her life for her family; Raskolnikov’s own sister had offered to marry a civil councillor so that there would be someone to pay for Raskolnikov’s studies. He read on and on, knowing he should do other things, pleased with himself that desire had so slowly faded away, leaving an unfulfilled restlessness and an edge that he could take care of later with a nice long run.

Sometimes, now, when he and Liana sit at the kitchen table and talk late at night and get all confessional, his sister looks at him and tells him the only mistake he really made during that whole ordeal was going out with his two friends. She has forgotten their names, which irritates him, mostly because he has lost touch with both of them, Kevin’s sister insisted that they move to New York so she could take a job at the Met; James had run off on his younger sister after her son was born in order to marry a New York actress, whom he also abandoned for parts unknown, leaving behind two daughters.

But back then, for the three of them, before Jody, it had been “Solidarity Forever,” a song they had learned in history class and sung at the end of each outing, sung with gusto if they could get ahold of some liquor. Kevin ran the school newspaper, helped a teacher coach the debate team, and turned in excellent work, so no one questioned his ability to get into university. James was the class ham who had gone on to be an actor, and the university did look at artistic points, and Kevin and Karl had gotten used to his wanting to go out late in the evening when rehearsals were over. Mother Oldham had liked both boys, had looked forward to their creditable endeavors having some influence over Karl, so she didn’t mind too much if they showed up on a school night to take Karl out, because Fridays and Saturdays were for Jody, and she didn’t want Jody to be his only influence.

But it was obvious that Mother Oldham wasn’t quite sure what to do when Kevin and James showed up for a study break that Sunday evening.

“I don’t think you’re ready for the test,” she said to Karl, aggravating him to no end because she was right.

Uncle J, who talked about Kevin and James like they were Karl’s equivalent of his own drinking buddies, thought it could do no harm. “Karl doesn’t go until Wednesday. He needs a break.”

Liana is right; Karl should have stayed at home. But nowadays he’s not so sure what they ended up doing was wrong. Nowadays you can read the studies and find out that this was part of growing up back then. New vaccines, new contraceptives, new anxieties over competing social roles, and an age-old solution to complex tensions. A lot of people had done it. A few years back, after drinking too much wine, Liana admitted that she and several friends had gone to one of the classier places her senior year. “Hell,” she said, “your girl friend Jody and some of her friends probably gave it a try.”

But back that Sunday night it hadn’t been premeditated. Kevin lived with a wealthy uncle who supported his mother and his aunt and who had given Kevin a nice used car. The three friends went driving around in Kevin’s car, chatting, making fun of Hank the Tank, this teacher and that, mocking some of the simulations: “On the test, if I have a choice between driving into a stone wall and driving into a crowd of kids, I’ll choose the wall and pass the test. In real life, I drive into the kids.”

“You don’t mean that, James,” said Karl.

“Hell if I don’t.”

“You could live with that?”

“With that, I could live. With the wall, I’m dead.”

“Lighten up,” said Kevin. “Where do we want to go?”

They didn’t know. Downtown on Sundays was dead. And there were no parties at the homes of nearby rich people. So they drove out to the suburbs where the homes began to look like Karl’s, then worse: old big homes subdivided and dilapidated. They joked about maybe getting drunk, then about seeing a lewd show, then about getting laid, no simulation, no paper suits and computer gear, but real, do anything you want, men and women. They joked about who would go for the men. They joked about what they could do. They asked Karl what Jody would do. “Maybe, Karl,” said James, “you should try out someone new and see how Jody compares.”

And somewhere the joking became planning and planning became getting up the nerve and talking each other into it because the night before the morality testing wasn’t the night to do this, but if it was all bullshit, and if you knew what to do on the test, what better night?

There were several places in this part of town that they had heard about at school; they had hunted them down, driven by them, and delighted in each other’s lewd commentary about the place, the neighborhood, the clientele. Once, during sophomore spring, just after Kevin had gotten his driver’s license, they’d driven by one of those places and yelled things at the johns who were walking back to their cars. This place, like the others, was in a residential district, so there were no parking lots, and they had to park three blocks away. Three blocks walking in the late October chill with no jacket on was enough to make Karl thoroughly uncomfortable. He knew that with just the right words Kevin and James could be talked out of it, but he didn’t know why he couldn’t manage to say anything, why he let them get closer and closer until backing down became impossible.

The place was an old two-story brick house. Last century’s zoning laws didn’t allow for any signs to be posted in or around houses, with the exception of an eleven-by-eleven notice in a front window, so every now and then there was a quickimage flash. It was like when you thought you saw a dead animal out of the corner of your eye, and you turned to see a pile of leaves; here you saw a mostly naked woman or a mostly naked man or the words El Dorado, but when you looked more closely, all you saw were the darkened windows of an old house with its porch light on, everything but the quickimage giving the impression that the house was empty, the owner out for the evening.

Inside, however, all the lights were on. A woman, who was as old as their mothers and who wore an elegant blue dress, led Kevin, James, and Karl inside. She said she hadn’t seen such handsome young men in a long time and apologized for asking to see some identification so she could know they were at least eighteen, because the local prosecutor thought corruption of minors was a crime worth prosecuting. And Karl now wondered how long it would be before the police raided the place, took them all in. What would he say when he called home? What he said now was nothing. He handed over his state ID card, the fake one Howie Lewin had made up last year, using the school computer network for free and charging Karl a reasonable profit because the ID worked in all the cheapie computer checkers they used out in the suburbs. The woman just looked at it, at James’s real state ID, and at Kevin’s driver’s license. She led them by the stairs (and Karl wondered how big the rooms were upstairs, how clean they might be; he’d heard some stories) and down a hallway. They passed one curtained doorway, the curtains parted enough so Karl could get a glimpse of several men—who were as elegantly dressed as the woman in the blue dress—seated around a coffee table and chatting. “Hey, James,” whispered Kevin, “maybe this room would be more to your taste.”

“Wouldn’t want to risk it. I might ran into your mother.” James grinned at Karl.

By now the woman had stepped aside, holding back a curtain so the three friends could enter an overdecorated living room. In the corner was a bar. At the opposite end was a fireplace with a fire. Sitting around the room in sofas and armchairs were half-dressed women. All of them, all seven, stopped chatting and smiled as the boys walked in.

Karl still felt cold, like he was outside. He wondered when he’d get an erection. All Jody had to do was open her mouth to his and the blood would drop out of his belly; here, nothing was happening. It felt more like walking into the doctor’s office and discovering the other patients had been asked to undress out in the waiting room. Did his uncle ever come to places like this? Had he ever come here?

The woman served them soft drinks—they were overaged for illicit sex and underaged for booze—and apologized that Sunday was the slow night. Usually things were much more exciting. Kevin made chatting with her look easy. He told her what school they went to and how the morality testing was coming up. “Well,” the woman said, “we’ll have to make sure you have such a good time that you leave here with a clean conscience.” She introduced them to the seven young women sitting around, and James and Kevin talked with them as if they’d known the women for ages. Karl felt like he was back at some big school get-together where he didn’t know how to talk with anyone (meaning: any girl) he didn’t already know. It had taken three years of running cross-country and track together before he asked Jody out. He couldn’t just ask her. It had to feel friendly, like a beneficial accident, not something planned step by step. So here, where he had to plan, making it seem like it wasn’t the transaction it was became a task he found woefully impossible.

Soon Kevin and James were each paired up with someone. The young women were vaguely attractive. If he could have seen them with clothes and without makeup, Karl might have sat across a room and yearned for their attention. Now he wasn’t so sure. He still felt cold, as if October had walked in with him.

“Come on, Karl,” said Kevin. “Choose someone and let’s go upstairs.”

He repeated what he’d said in the car. “I’m broke.”

The woman gave him the exact same look Mrs. Morgan gave you when you swore in class. It disappeared when Kevin repeated what he’d said in the car. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll cover for you.”

James had a part-time job. Kevin had an uncle who was rather free with his money. How could Karl ever pay him back? Several of the women were smiling at him. If one of them had just taken his hand, led him up the stairs, he might have gone and found out what it was like not to have to please someone, but just enjoy it for what it was. But he sat there, shook his head, and said he was sorry.

“If he changes his mind,” Kevin said to the woman, “I’ll cover it.” He walked over to Karl and bent over to whisper into his ear. “It’s stupid to come here and not take advantage of the situation. I swear, you’ll have a good time. Ask for an hour, that way you can enjoy yourself for a while. Please, don’t make us feel like we’re cheap enough to leave you behind. Get someone and come on up.”

Last century Karl could have claimed a fear of disease, and everyone would have understood. But now it was safe, and Kevin said he would pay. How could he say no? Karl nodded and forced a smile. Kevin slapped him on the shoulder before heading to the stairs.

The woman in the elegant blue dress sat down next to him and chatted. She didn’t put any pressure on him. Some of the women talked to him. He felt embarrassed that he didn’t choose anyone. After a while they left him alone, and he sat there waiting for his friends. Why they were doing this, this night of all nights, right before testing week, he didn’t know. He wished he had his own car so he could get right up and leave. He could always call for the electra, but they didn’t run in the suburbs Sunday nights after six. The fire in the fireplace never changed, never diminished, never crackled when a log shifted. It must be a recording. All image; no warmth.

The woman sitting across from him had started to read something after it became clear that nothing would happen, and the other women had begun to chitchat about the kinds of things everybody else chitchatted about when you wanted to pass the time and not offend anyone. The problem with readmen was you couldn’t make out what a reader of the opposite sex was reading. The fact that she was reading made Karl notice her and notice the stockings and the garter belt and the loose-fitting chemise cut low enough to reveal the tops of her breasts whenever she leaned over the table to pick up her drink and take a sip. Her skin was pale, almost white, and her body was small. She looked like someone who was a bit lost maybe looking for answers or a destination in the book she was reading. Karl tried to imagine her dressed up, like the men in the other room were dressed up, but with simpler clothes. A yellow blouse, a skirt (he wasn’t sure what color), the blouse perhaps with a few of the top buttons undone.

She lowered the readman, and her eyes met Karl’s. “Would you like to go upstairs with me?” she asked.

Her voice was direct and cut through all the other voices. The other women in the room looked at him. Karl couldn’t help but shake his head again. He couldn’t even say no thank you. He couldn’t even bear to be there anymore. He felt like Kevin and James were going to be up there until they’d drained their bodies of every last drop of desire, so they would be totally clean, free from temptation for the whole week, and he wished he could have said yes to her, but now it was too late. So he stood up, realized he didn’t know the polite way to say good-bye when you hadn’t done anything you could say thank you for, and he made his way to the front door.

The woman in the elegant blue dress met him there. “Should I tell your friends to meet you somewhere? There’s a nice bar two blocks from here.”

He shook his head. “I’m going to walk home.”

She tried to talk him into staying, insisted that walking back to the city was dangerous at this hour. But Karl didn’t want to wait, didn’t want to impose on his friends and call them down from their adventures. The woman called for Monique to give the kid a ride home. “And, please,” she said to Karl, “don’t come back for a while.”

Monique turned out to be the pale woman who’d invited Karl upstairs. She had thrown on a long coat, but as Karl followed her to her car, he could catch the occasional glimpse of the fabric that stretched from stocking to garter belt. The car was new, much nicer looking than Kevin’s, and Karl knew this woman wasn’t sacrificing her life for an impoverished family. Or maybe she was, and a new car was her way to reward herself for everything she’d done. How long had she worked and saved to buy a car like this?

She recognized the name of the street where Karl lived and promised to have him there in ten, fifteen minutes. The car was smaller than Kevin’s, a simple four-seater, and he had to sit right next to her in the car, waiting and hoping she would ask him about what had happened so he could explain himself, show her that he was sensitive, not just inept, then maybe she’d get a sense of who he was, take an interest in him, even offer to take him to her place. But although she followed the same tracking as the electra, she kept her eyes on the road and said nothing. “Let me drop you off a block from your place,” she said after the car had turned down his street. “That way your mom won’t have to know that you didn’t come home with your friends.”

“I’m sorry about all the trouble,” he said while he got out of the ear.

“It happens.”

He stood on the curb, looking at her in the glow of the car’s ceiling lamp, and he wanted something to say, something to make this all turn out right.

“I gotta go,” she said.

He swung the door shut, and the car drove off. He watched the taillights of the car go down the street, the red brightening when the car slowed at a corner; then it turned, and the car, and the red taillights, disappeared behind rows and rows of houses.

All the lights but the one in the front hall were out. He switched that one off on the way up. The doors to his mother’s and sister’s rooms were closed. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. While walking home and up the stairs, while brushing his teeth, he imagined Monique tracking him down several days from now and inviting him out. It was difficult to pee when you had an erection.

Karl did not want to go right to sleep. There was too much on his mind. If he had stayed at the El Dorado, he would have felt bad about one thing, and that might have felt good.

Sometime after he closed his door, another door opened. He heard the rustling of a nightgown, then nothing. He was painfully aware that someone was standing outside his bedroom door, that she was standing there for the longest time, listening to him. Speaking to the closed door, his mother finally said, “If you’re going to stay up even later, I hope you use the time well.” She meant he should be going through some of the simulations. But he was lying in bed, the readman resting on his chest.

Raskolnikov’s friend Razumihin has told him that the examining magistrate is questioning everyone who had pawned things to the murdered woman. Raskolnikov knows he’ll be questioned, knows he’s been acting suspiciously, asking stupid questions around the scene of the crime, fainting at the police station when they talked about the crime itself… so he and his friend go to visit Porfiry Petrovich. The magistrate was described as short and stout with a yellow pallor, but once Karl read about the awareness in the eyes, he began to see, in his mind’s eye, a version of Henry St. August, a bit slimmer perhaps, a bit poorer for the wear, but Henry St. August nonetheless. And he wants to help Raskolnikov get the pawned items back. He explains how to go about doing it, but in the course of conversation, he tells Raskolnikov about an article he’s read in Weekly Discourse, an article Raskolnikov himself had written about how there are ordinary people and extraordinary people and how extraordinary people can transgress the law.

Karl knew that Porfiry didn’t believe it. He wondered if he believed it, that you could be special enough to go beyond the social contract. And where did what happened tonight fit in the social contract? Were James and Kevin beyond the law? The prostitutes weren’t extraordinary, but they were there; they were expected to be there. Without prostitution how would Sonia have earned money for her impoverished family? And with all these questions running through his mind, in a kind of neediness, Karl read on, and on, knowing he should be sleeping or going through simulations for the testing he would go through on Wednesday, but he kept on reading until he made it clear to Sonia what he had done and Sonia burst out wailing, fell to her knees in front of him, and said, “What have you done, what have you done to yourself?”

~

It was Monday. Karl woke up feeling tired and sluggish. A bowl of cereal improved things. “You look a little off,” his mother said. “Was the good time worth it?” his Uncle J asked. “Here’s some coffee,” said Liana, in mother’s-helper mode. He looked at the coffee she’d set in front of him, and it looked like coffee always looked. Liana had put in one teaspoonful of sugar and a dollop of milk, just the way he liked it. He couldn’t even bear to taste it.

Waiting for the bus, he planned to sit next to Jody, wrap his arm through hers like they always did, and sleep until they got to school. That way he could enjoy the comfort of her presence; that way she wouldn’t get a chance to ask what he did last night. Once on the bus, he couldn’t sleep. Jody got on board several stops later, sat next to him, and didn’t say a thing. “You’re lucky you get to go today,” he said, “and get it out of the way.”

“I’d rather go on Friday.”

“But Saturday will be nice.” The words were barely out when he knew it had been the wrong thing to say.

“I can’t think about Saturday right now.”

There was the usual Monday-morning flux of quiet, talk, and laughter on the bus; this was a special day only for seniors.

Everyone milled about in the cavernous lobby of Westminster High School, waiting until the last possible moment to file into the auditorium for morning assembly. Most of the seniors were gathered by the bulletin board where the listings were posted: clear black letters against the white of the extended screen.

Alatis through Dehority on Monday. Emerson through Kubek on Tuesday. Kundtz through Polson on Wednesday. Pomerzanz through Wykoff on Thursdays. Make-ups and Re-takes on Friday. To the left of each name was the time the student was to report to the gym. All this had been known since the second week of school. You could call up your day and time, your appointment, on any school network, and for weeks everyone had been telling everyone else when they were scheduled to go, when someone else was going. There wasn’t anything odd or telling about the order. But almost every senior that morning found herself standing near the bulletin, moving up through the crowd to take a look at her time, at a friend’s, at someone else’s. Everyone seemed to wander by poor Wykoff to joke and commiserate with him about going last.

Jody was off with her friends, looking at the board with them, and Karl stood alone in the crowd, unsure of what to do. Yes. He was second to last on Wednesday. He had checked the board three times. He felt every now and then like people were looking over at him, like they already knew where he had gone. Jody was with Alice and Abby and Holly, and maybe they were telling her what they had heard about his adventure last night.

James was standing beside him. “Sorry you left early.” He had on that lopsided grin, the one that distorted his face every time he wanted to break your balls about something. Looking a little more composed, Kevin stood beside him.

Karl didn’t know what to say.

“You know,” said James, “the lady who ran the place…”

Kevin lowered his hand through the air. “Tone it down.”

“Sure. Sorry. She told us who took you home.”

“Yeah.”

“She was cute,” said Kevin.

“We heard that she asked her boss for the rest of the night off. Did you get home on time?”

“I got home on time.”

“I bet,” said James.

They had been like this when he started going out with Jody. They teased him about going steady after only a few dates. They teased him about screwing her before he had worked up the nerve to touch her breasts. Now this. How much of their patter did they really believe? A year ago it would have been Kevin and Karl teasing James about his hamming it up in class, his acting, and all his dates with ugly girls who starred in the plays he was in. If Kevin had called up someone first to do something, it had been Karl. Now Kevin and James had gone upstairs together, had screwed whores together, and were breaking his balls about Monique driving him home. But it would be worse if they said something about how she had just left him standing on the curb, watching the car’s taillights go up the street, turn at the corner beyond his house, and disappear.

In the auditorium he sat between Stephanie Musser and George Polson, whom he had sat between for three plus years without ever getting to know them. In fact, he knew them less well than he knew the talk Henry St. August was giving to the entire student body to kick off the week of dreamchair testing. He had given variations of it their junior year, their sophomore year, and their freshman year, and Karl was certain that he had given it often enough that the teachers who had been here longer than the students must have memorized whole chunks of it.

Standing firm behind the lectern, Mr. St. August talked. Karl found himself fighting the headmaster’s energy, the way his rotund body produced a voice that held the ear, a mind that found the words to work into the ear, eyes that held you, that could hold an audience who watched and decided to listen for a moment or two. There was the occasional shuffling, but as he spoke, St. August’s eyes found the site of the disturbance, and everything became quiet again, a field ready to be furrowed by his voice.

“You attend a public preparatory school, and we have striven to prepare you for a better life. Not only a life of the mind at a university, but a life of the spirit at the university and after, so that you will use your talents and your skills for the betterment of your family, your community, your country, and, we hope, all of humanity.

“This is a public school. You owe a debt to that public. The Great Fall of our economy shattered our country when your parents were children. But we don’t have to see that moment as a tragedy. We can instead interpret it as a challenge to our spirit and to our community. Just as the Great Depression of the last century demanded that we create a government that cared for its elderly, its sick, its poor, and its common workers, our Great Fall had deeper meaning than a simple economic collapse. Although many in this country are not Christian and worship God in their own way, our tradition is Judeo-Christian. When we say fall, we think of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace. And the Great Fall was our nation’s fell from grace.”

Karl was thinking about his own fall from grace and how impossible it was to go back and do anything about it. In sophomore history class they had talked about what the economic community could have done to have avoided the Great Fall, but they never talked about how the discussion was too late. They couldn’t go back in time and change a thing. Now they lived with the consequences of that fall: the poverty, the anger, the soul-searching, and the ignominy. Other countries, who once couldn’t pay their own debts, now lent them money.

“Our country educated and trained an elite who earned their jobs with the names of their schools because those schools had both the resources and the prestige. They were taught the mythology of the elite, that they were born to lead, to think, to create, but honorable as the words and goals were, the fact that they received this education because they were members of the elite—not because they were necessarily the best or the brightest—imbued them with a sense of public commitment that was a commitment to everything that did not interfere with retaining membership in that elite.”

His mother had assured him that they weren’t among the elite, but he had driven through the suburbs. He and his friends bought cheap beer in makeshift bars in the basements and first floors of subdivided houses. Monique probably lived in one of those old subdivided houses. That car was probably the only thing of value she owned. If she had a daughter, if the daughter grew up, would she end up in a place like Westminster? He imagined himself successful, he imagined himself important enough that Hank the Tank would listen to him when Karl insisted that Westminster High School take on Monique’s talented daughter as a student.

“This is a public preparatory school, and your debt is to the public. We owe them the deliverance of young men and women who have learned to use their creativity, their intelligence, their intuition, their empathy, for our benefit. You have been trained in the body and the brain and the soul. This week is a watershed for you.

“Just before the Fall, there was one moral question: can I afford to do what is right? Is what is right the best for me, my career, my family? Again and again, people around the world reminded us that ethics cannot be built upon such a question. We owe something to the deity who created us, to the world in which we live, to the nation that protects us, to the community that serves us, and to the family who nurtures us.

“We look to other communities in the world and see that they all share the same basic values. They each ask: Should I do this? Ought I do this? They each want to determine their own future. They each want to act in a way that benefits others so their own lives will be enhanced. They each want to reduce the harm they cause others. They each want justice and fairness. And they each value life itself. But these five values cause conflict, and so we must learn to consider our decisions carefully, because our decisions determine our values. When it is time to make a decision, we have to look at the circumstances. We must consider various options. We must take into account our own prejudices. And finally, we must look at which values compose each choice we might make.

“And now we bring you, the members of the senior class, to the culmination of four years of education. At an appointed time, you will each come to the gymnasium. Awaiting you will be a high-resolution sensory apparatus, a dreamchair. You will experience three different scenarios. You will have to make a series of choices and will have to witness the outcome of those choices. And finally, you will discuss with an adviser the reasoning behind those decisions you have made.

“The Morality Enhancement Program gives you, a member of the senior class, a chance to consider your soul. It is not an ending point. If you do not do well, your career is not terminated, derailed, or sunk. It is a moment where you can see yourself and begin again to make yourself the person you want to be.”

He went on about the rebirth of the country, of cities, of schools. He went on about the new moral quandaries of the day. Should genetically engineered babies be aborted if the engineering turns out to be faulty? Should data produced by private hands be privately owned? Should the ownership rights of medicines developed from plants in Brazil or elsewhere be owned by anyone? Should individuals be held responsible when a system—a computer, a car, a power plant—is not built to required specifications?

There were too many examples in too much detail, and Karl couldn’t follow them at all. The dreamchair test wasn’t the end point, the derailment, Hank the Tank had said. He hadn’t said that last year or the year before, Karl was certain of that. But last year Howie Lewin, the senior who’d made Karl his fake ID, didn’t feel ready, didn’t feel like he could live with the shame when he didn’t pass the test and didn’t go to the university; he knew that he’d taken advantage of half the loopholes in the school’s computer network and had profited nicely from it and that it would be found out. The morning he was scheduled to be tested, Howie had hanged himself from a pipe in the school tech room.

“From those to whom much is given,” St. August was saying, his body full of energy, his hand reaching out to his students, “much is expected.”

Howie had expected too much.

St. August went on to thank New Realities Dream Emporium and the city’s Chamber of Commerce for making this week possible. A representative of each agency stood to receive a round of applause from the students and faculty.

Nancy Alatis was the first to go. Miss Prim and Proper, whom all the adults adored and who had gone out with half the males in her class over the past four years, could head for the gym right after everyone had finished applauding St. August’s speech. In the confusion that ensued when everyone left the auditorium, she could make her way to the athletic wing virtually unseen. Fifteen minutes later, when it was Marvin Anderson’s turn, everyone would be in class. Anderson would have to raise his hand, ask to be excused, and every eye in the class would watch him leave. Unless, of course, the teacher told Anderson not to bother to show up for class at all.

Dr. Jacobi, the comparative-religion teacher, wasn’t that way. She insisted that Wilhelmina Avery, number three in the line-up, stay in class, take notes like everyone else, and ask to be excused when it was her turn to go down. Tomorrow they would be doing an interactive with Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi, so they were in groups working out questions to ask the computer simulations about the purposes of nonviolence, Schindler and Landau were fed up with Jesus Christ and were making fun of the assignment while Karl hardly heard a thing they said: he kept visualizing pale Monique, her low-cut chemise, and the way she looked at him when she asked if he wanted to go upstairs. Ten minutes before class was out, Wilhelmina raised her hand, and somehow everyone in the class knew when to turn and watch what was happening. Jacobi could have nodded at Wilhelmina, signaling her to leave, or she could have said, “On your way,” but instead she asked, “What is it, Ms. Avery?” “I have to go downstairs.” “Then you may be excused.”

If she had been going to the doctor’s or to the bathroom or even to see Mr. DiBiasio about some trouble she had gotten herself into, class would have gone on while she walked out. No one said a thing. Karl watched her get up, walk out, the door swinging shut behind her. Jacobi asked the class something about personal nonviolence and political nonviolence, but no one raised their hand or spoke, not even Ezzidin, who usually answered everything.

No one would go for the next forty-five minutes, as all three dreamchair would be in use; then three more would go down, fifteen minutes apart. With less regularity, the first three would be returning.

In classes the tension was palpable. The air felt as if it had substance, and it took an effort to get words through it. In the weeks before the testing, there had been preparations and jokes. Wealthy mothers purchased new state-of-the-art gloves, visors, and software so their children could work on the best simulations possible. Their sons and daughters went downtown to New Realities or Touching Visions, the two certified dreamhouses, to try out the same kind of dreamchairs the school would be using, to experience the full reality of a moral situation. Even though St. August had discouraged it, Ho and Carter had gone through expensive prep courses. Others had gone out to the suburbs to the cheaper dreamhouses to try out one simulation or another. Marvin Anderson said he’d gone with his fake ID to try out another kind of simulation. “Even better than getting laid,” he had said, just loud enough for no one to believe him.

And before this week they had joked. About simulations and stimulations. About moral behavior and what they’d really do. They exaggerated what they’d really do. They told lies about what they’d really do, anything to get a teacher going. Johnson had been discussing the change in the meaning of the term suburb, and suddenly there were all sorts of jokes about what you could and couldn’t get in the suburbs. Johnson lectured them about how for the last six years, since testing had started, you couldn’t conduct a class properly this week or next.

On Monday there was no joking; or to be more precise, the freshmen and sophomores and juniors were doing the joking, telling each other stories about what it was like, spreading gossip about what scenarios had been presented to what senior. But among the seniors, especially in class, there was a kind of hush. The teacher tried to deliver a lecture or begin a discussion or set up a task, and kids were constantly glancing at their wrists, or up at the wall, counting down the hours or minutes, calculating what would be the exact right moment to leave for the gym. If you were late, they fined you (your parents, really) and made you go on Friday. All during class, kids silently rose from seats or asked out loud to be excused, made a face or waved good-bye to friends, sometimes waving like this was the last good-bye, then off they’d go, heading toward the athletic wing, which had once been, for most of the students, the most popular section of the building. One by one, they returned, each with a set expression that must have been rehearsed in the bathroom mirror before returning: warm smiles that rang false, grins accompanied by a punch to some buddy’s shoulder, straight faces like from some poker game, and, in one case, tears. Karl tried to imagine what horrors that person had found within himself.

“Will you tell me what happens?” he said to Jody at lunch. Both of them had eaten little of the meal, some sort of beef goulash. Marvin Anderson, rumor had it had thrown up after his test; lunch was hence dubbed Anderson Stew.

Jody stared at hers. She got silent this way when Karl asked her something she didn’t want to answer.

“You’ll tell me, won’t you?”

“It wouldn’t be fair,” she said, “would it? No one else knows what’s going to happen.”

“Sure they do. From their older brothers and stuff.”

“Then ask them.”

“I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“Quit hitting on me, Karl. I don’t want anyone to even think we might have cheated. I need these points. I’m not going to sit around at home until my brother can support me.”

The second-to-last class of the day was ethics. The teacher was Rob Chabert, a second-year teacher. He asked questions, and he listened to responses. He didn’t seem to have the long agenda of answers he had to hear, or of things you had to know before you graduated so your life wouldn’t fall into intellectual and moral ruin. Everyone liked him. Except today.

Today he was conducting class like usual, as if students wanted to discuss one more ethical issue. “Here’s the situation. You’re driving through the desert. There’s a small village up ahead. It’s an impoverished country. The buildings are more hovels than anything else.”

“Sounds like Texas,” James said, and no one laughed.

“Everyone in the village is standing in the plaza. They’re surrounded by soldiers. You pull over to find out what’s going on. The soldiers are led by a captain. He steps forward. You want to know what’s going on.”

“I’m driving right out of there,” said Nancy Alatis.

“I’m coming with you,” said James.

“But in this scenario, you are driving into this village. Alone. The captain tells you that everyone in the village will be shot. But you can save them. He hands you his gun and tells you that if you shoot one of the villagers, the rest will be permitted to live. What do you do?”

“You know,” said Kerrick Curtis, “that Mr. St. August always uses that one when he subs for someone.”

“Not always,” said Stephanie Musser, who always liked things to be correct. “He’s only used it two or three times.”

“Then you’re experts at it,” said Chabert. “Let’s see how you handle the situation this time. Tell me what you do, James.”

“Hank wouldn’t let us shoot the soldiers.”

“Hank?”

“Mr. St. August,” said James.

Chabert nodded. “You have to shoot a villager or drive away.”

James said nothing. Usually a teacher would call on someone else. Chabert waited, and James said he’d shoot an old man. “You know, he’s lived his life.” They discussed what it meant to live your life fully, if old age meant that your life had been lived fully. Kerrick Curtis wanted to shoot someone who was really sick, because in a poor town that person wouldn’t survive anyway. So they talked about when you had the right to kill someone who was going to die anyway. Stephanie Musser wanted to know if you could trust the captain to keep his word. “If you kill someone, what’s to say that he won’t kill the rest of them when you drive off?”

“That’s a good question,” said Chabert. “Mr. St. August once told a group of faculty that in his mind the best response was to drive away. That way you haven’t involved yourself at all in making an immoral decision. You don’t have to worry that you might be betrayed after you have just shot an innocent person. Talk to me, Karl. What do you think?”

Karl looked up. Chabert singled you out when he knew you hadn’t done the work or when he didn’t think you were following along. It was more a game than an attack, but this time Karl felt cheated. He had been following; he had been thinking about everything that was said; and he had been growing increasingly upset with situations like this that were geared in such a way that they worked only in classrooms and not in life.

“Would you drive away?” Chabert asked him.

Karl shook his head—his topic sentence. Now he had to back it up. “I’ve just seen everything. I’m a witness. So I’m responsible, aren’t I?”

Chabert smiled slyly. All September they’d talked about the intolerance atrocities of the twentieth century and how they could have been prevented in many cases if people had taken action before the round-ups and mass arrests, the death camps and killing fields. “Okay, so you’re a witness. What do you do?”

“I shoot the captain.”

“You can’t do that,” said Kerrick Curtis. “It’s not part of the situation.”

Karl expected Chabert to second Curtis’s remark, but the teacher just said, “Why would you shoot him?”

“I can’t leave. I’m there. And I can’t kill someone who’s no threat to me. It would be awful, I’d have nightmares for the rest of my life. But I can kill him.”

“But you would be shot.”

“I could live with that.”

Several people in the class laughed.

After school Karl sought out Jody. She was pale. Her dark hair made her look like a walking corpse. “Are you okay?” he asked. She shook her head no, Karl escorted her to the bus. She said nothing the whole way. She sat on the bus, hugging her shoulders and staring out at the passing buildings. Walking from the bus stop to her house, she stared down at the sidewalk. Karl didn’t know what to say. He wanted to ask her what had happened, what had the dreamchair done to her, but she’d think he was prying. He didn’t know what to do. The fact that he not only wanted to comfort her, but that also, deep down inside, he wanted to know what the dreamchair would be like, made him feel like there was something terribly wrong with him.

Since there was a school bus stop near their home, Karl’s mother didn’t want him spending her money on the electra when it was perfectly safe to walk home from Jody’s house in the daytime. That afternoon Karl liked the idea of walking. After Jody’s reaction to the test, the paleness of her skin, he couldn’t bear to sit alone among strangers. Plus, there was some new energy in him that made walking easy. Galvanized, he thought recalling the word from a vocab test. He was being galvanized into action: he would return home, find all the materials he had on the dreamchairs, boot up the situational disks, and play out the preparatory exercises. He would be ready. In fact, before any of that, he would call Deborah Madison, tell her about what he had done with the campaign materials, and clear his conscience the same way a teacher cleared the flatboard, flipping a switch so the writing would go opaque before the entire board went blank.

Deborah Madison was at home—her campaign headquarters—and was the one to answer the phone. She recognized Karl immediately. “It’s good to see you. My husband was planning to call you.”

Karl tried to swallow, but couldn’t. He knew what she was going to say, what her husband would call about, and Karl wanted to be the first to bring up the subject.

“You look a bit nervous,” she said. “I guess that’s the nature of volunteering for the first time. You know they’ll ask you to volunteer again.”

“Huh?”

“How about it? Can you come with us, again, this Saturday, on another walk-and-talk?”

“I can’t,” he heard himself say.

“Are you sure? You did a great job last time.”

He shook his head, but didn’t say anything.

“You look a little pale. Are you okay?”

He wanted to tell her that he hadn’t done a good job, but the lines of dialogue that he’d practiced on the way home went looping through his mind.

Deborah Madison began to speak faster, the way phone salesm’n speak when they were sure you were about to disconnect. “I know you won’t get any more citizen points for working again on the same campaign, but I got the impression that you were there because you liked what we stood for, not because you wanted any points.”

This was his chance. He could tell her about the man with the executive perm; maybe she’d understand. He still couldn’t swallow. His throat felt raw.

“Isn’t there any way you could work it out so you could join us this Saturday?”

“Sure.” He said it so quietly that he had to say it a second time. He decided then that he would tell her later, in person, this Saturday. He felt like a failure.

He spent the hour before dinner almost calling Jody. He wanted to ask her what was wrong, why had she been so breathless last Saturday night and so eager for next Saturday and now was so distant and so closed? But if she was at all open and honest with him, then he would have to be open with her. Maybe it was best to let Jody call him.

At dinner he considered telling his mother and his uncle, because he had a feeling these things didn’t stay secret. He would say that he had gone to the El Dorado, but he hadn’t done anything. Maybe they’d admire his willpower. But Liana was playing Ms. Innocent because she wanted to cajole some sweets out of Mom, which made it impossible to say anything of the sort. Perhaps his uncle would be the one to tell, later, when he was alone.

As it turned out, his uncle skipped his weekly get-together with his drinking buddies and remained home to go through some situational materials with Karl. You are driving down a hill; your brakes go out. Do you drive off the road into a stone wall, sacrificing yourself, or do you continue down into the intersection, risking the lives of others? Your best friend has cheated on a test. Do you talk to him? Do you talk to a teacher? Do you do nothing? Do you go to a whorehouse?

“What would you do, Uncle J?”

His uncle took a sip of his Scotch. “Trying to turn the tables on me?”

“No. I just wondered.” Maybe Uncle J would get confessional like he sometimes did after a Scotch or two, and that would make it possible for Karl to confess, or at least to hint to him what had happened last night.

“I’d talk to my friend,” Uncle J said. “I think. But that’s not what you would do. You’d talk to a teacher.”

“I wouldn’t have a friend anymore.”

“Probably not. But your work at school has not been good enough to play free and easy with these tests. You’re not a Kevin Haviland. Your friend could fail this test, but his other work is so good that the university would be foolish if they didn’t take him.”

“But what if he was immoral? Wouldn’t it be wrong for the university to promote him, to educate him to do immoral things well?”

Uncle J smiled. They’d had this talk before. He voted liberal. He complained at the first sign of corruption in politics or in business. He thought the Yanomami deserved every cent they could get for their knowledge of the medicinal value of plants, and he hated representing the orbiters, who wanted to pay as little as possible. But every time they talked about this, his response was the same. “You’re right. We maybe shouldn’t spend our resources on educating a very talented, immoral person. We can tell him to educate himself. You know, if we could change human nature, that might be the right thing to do. And maybe if we weren’t in economic competition with the rest of the world, that would be the right thing to do. Your very own Henry St. August pulled a few tricks to get the job he has now. No one blames him. No one thinks the worse of him for it. But there’s a line there. And too many people crossed over it last century. When you’re older, you’ll understand what I mean.”

The phone rang three times that evening. Two of the calls were for Liana; the third was for his uncle.

“Who is the murderer?” Porfiry Petrovitch said to Raskolnikov that evening. “Why you, Rodion Romanovitch! You are the murderer.” And Porfiry wants Raskolnikov to turn himself in, to confess in order to mitigate the sentence. And after explaining his reasons and letting Raskolnikov explain his own, the magistrate leaves him there in his room, and Karl couldn’t go on any longer. It was too much to bear, all this suffering, all this talk about who can murder and who cannot and the good of suffering and the good of finding Christ.

What good did any of this do for him? He would be with Jody for a while, and they’d go off in different directions one day, and he’d have his sister to take care of and the freedom to love whomever he wanted who was available and wasn’t married. And one day he could be like his uncle, sitting up, telling Liana’s children what they had to do in school, and drinking Scotch until sleep came.

~

Karl woke up Tuesday morning feeling miserable, like he had drunk too much beer and had followed it with some of Uncle J’s Scotch. His head ached when he was lying down and felt disconnected from his body when he stood up. A shower helped a little. He would have to get enough sleep tonight. He couldn’t go in on Wednesday feeling like this.

On the bus Jody sat beside him, but she didn’t say a word. It was like she was there because the seat had been assigned, so she’d sit there and say nothing and suffer through the ride. When they got off the bus, she strode into the building, her pace quick enough, his reflexes slow enough, that he would have to run to catch up with her. Which he might have done, but fat Holly had lodged herself at Jody’s side, and they had begun to talk like a ban on talking had just been lifted.

Everything else seemed a bit more normal. Seniors were telling each other what they had heard about yesterday’s test. Kevin and James were huddled around Nancy Alatis, who was smiling a lot and enjoying the attention.

He was going to join them, but Carrie Kausen came up to ask him how it was going and to tell him not to worry. Her older sister hadn’t done well on this, and she was doing great at the university. Carrie was a runner, too, the team’s MVP, even though she was only a junior. Last year Karl had been enamored of her, but she had acted like he wasn’t there. She had turned down his one tentative offer to go out together, but Kevin and James had told him that most girls with married parents wouldn’t go out with boys who lived with their uncles. The truth was Carrie had had nothing to say to him during her freshman and sophomore years on the cross-country and track teams, but now that he was a senior and going out with Jody, she would come out of nowhere to chat with him.

There were no big speeches in assembly, just David Bigley reading announcements. Karl survived his first two classes. A classmate leaving, another coming back was now part of the routine. Today Dr. Jacobi simply inclined her head toward the door when someone raised their hand to leave. In geophysics they were plotting the orbits of asteroids and shipping routes to those that had the greatest mining potential, and instead of differential equations, Karl was seeing Monique reach down for her glass, the low-cut chemise revealing the tops of her small pale breasts, and imagining what it might have been like to go upstairs with her. The math became overwhelming. If anyone left for the gym, Karl hadn’t seen her go.

He and Jody both had third period free, and he looked for her in the empty classroom where they often met. She wasn’t there. Two juniors were teasing a freshman about some girl he had taken to the cinema. Karl checked the library and the computer room and over in the arts wing, where she sometimes liked to go to draw, and he finally found her in the lunchroom sitting alone at one of the round tables. She had her notebook open and was keying something into it.

Karl sat down beside her. She turned and said, “Oh, hi.” No smile. Maybe she needs to be alone, he thought. He knew she would take it the wrong way, however, if he just got up. She could be touchy that way; every time he disagreed with her or said no, she took it as a rebuff. Perhaps he should have called her last night instead of waiting for her to call him.

“I looked all over for you,” he said.

“I didn’t know I had to keep you informed of my whereabouts.”

What could he say to that? She didn’t have to keep him informed, but for the past few months she always had.

Fortunately, she knew that, too: “I had some work to do. I should have waited around to tell you.”

He didn’t know what to say next. Just yesterday, or at least last Friday, talking had been so easy. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No. Should there be?”

“Not at all. You should be happy. The test is over.”

I guess.

“You worried about the results?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it that bad?”

“Not really. It’s just the questions they ask you afterward. I got Ms. Insoporto, and she just turns all your words around. Mr. St. August and Dr. Fisher are supposed to be nicer about it.”

“What kind of questions did she ask you?”

Jody looked at him suspiciously. “You can wait until your turn, you know.”

“Other people aren’t being so quiet.”

“Well, you can join Kevin and James and go talk to Nancy Alatis, if you want. Make sure you go with Kevin. She’ll tell Kevin anything. She doesn’t know about Kevin.”

He was going to say What about Kevin? but then it occurred to him that Jody had heard about Sunday night. She didn’t have anything to say to him because she had heard that he had gone to a whorehouse and had driven off with a whore. If she confronted him, what could he say? I went. I saw. I didn’t touch? Would she think him relapsed and redeemed or just some kind of coward? What kind of person went to a whorehouse and didn’t screw a whore?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know he’s your best friend.”

“That’s okay.”

“Karl…”

She was looking down at her notebook. Her fingertips were lightly brushing the keys, like she was going to type him a message. “What?” he whispered, knowing this was it, she was booting up to ask him.

“It’s still too early to worry, but what would you say if I missed my period?”

He barely heard the last half. He sat there trying to figure out what she had just said.

“I should have figured as much,” she muttered.

“No… no… it’s not that… it’s that I don’t understand. I’m on the pill.”

“They told you, didn’t they? That the pill isn’t one hundred percent?”

The doctor had told him that and had explained the reasons why, but Karl couldn’t remember the logic of it, if it had to do with suppressing sperm production or pH levels, but the doctor had warned him not to go hog-wild, it wasn’t foolproof. “When were you supposed to have started your… you know?”

“Sunday,” she said.

But she had been happy when she was talking to him on Sunday. But she hadn’t been happy Monday morning. With that and with the tests… why couldn’t she have told him? Why did it have to take a whole day for her to tell him? “You know, it could be the stress. You told me that once. Around semester exams, it came late.”

“But what if it’s late because of, well, because your pill wasn’t foolproof?”

“Let’s wait and find out.”

She looked at him like that was the wrong answer. He took her closest hand in his two hands and tried to hold it reassuringly. He wanted to tell her he’d marry her, that his sister could take care of herself, and it would be Karl and Jody forever, anything to make her smile at him again and hug him again and talk to him like he meant something in her life. In the kitchen you could hear the clatter of silverware and pots as the machinery prepared lunch for four hundred students.

He corralled Kevin after lunch, pulled him aside to where he thought no one might hear, and told him Jody’s news.

Kevin took it calmly, like such things were as normal as too big a reading assignment in Dr. Jacobi’s class. “When was she due?”

“Sunday.”

“It’s only Tuesday. I wouldn’t start worrying until next Tuesday.”

“But what if it’s the same way next Tuesday?”

“Don’t worry. It won’t be. She’s just testing your feelings for her. Be nice and supportive, and she’ll end up wishing she was having your baby.”

“Great. That’s all I need.”

“It’s a joke, Karl. Calm down. She’s not pregnant.”

In literature class Mr. Benes yelled at Karl for not doing the reading. Karl didn’t know what to say. Mr. Benes didn’t know what to say to Karl’s quiet, so he kicked Karl out and sent him over to monitored reading in the library. Karl sat in the quiet reading corner of the library with two other guys. They each knew how to scroll at the right speed so the computer would think they were reading. They each thought their own thoughts.

But it didn’t end there. Mr. Benes was Karl’s adviser, and he wanted to know what was going on.

“It’s just a bad week.”

“It’s not just this week.” They were still in the library, so Benes asked Karl for his social security number and his password, and he called up Karl’s file. He hopped from one portfolio to another: the plans, the pictures, and the whaling ship Karl built to scale in primary; the series of poems he wrote in middle school; the running study he did freshman year during the physics trimester. Karl noticed how tired he was feeling, and how terribly parched his throat was. But it wasn’t a healthy thirst—not the kind he felt after a good run when the downed glass of water felt earned. He felt like he could drink and drink, and the thirst would remain.

“Are you okay, Karl?” Mr. Benes asked.

“I’m just tired.”

“You’re a little pale.” Mr. Benes reached out and placed his wrist against Karl’s forehead, then applied the same wrist against his own. “You feel a bit feverish. Maybe you should go to the athletic wing for a medcheck.”

“I’ll be fine. Once the test is over, I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. And maybe we should have this talk next week.”

“Sure.”

They’d had the talk before. In fact, Karl had had the talk before with several different adults, and it was always the same. They looked at different process portfolios. They looked at profiles and tests. For some reason during junior year Karl started to do other things besides the work he was told to do. They wanted Karl to explain why things had changed. They didn’t want to hear that you preferred War and Peace to behavioral biology. They wanted to hear about motivation and intellectual interest, not about how hard it was to always have to care about so many different things.

He almost made it to the student lounge and the juice dispenser, but James intercepted him in the hall. “I’m done,” James said, all smiles. “I am free. It is over. I can go to play practice and enjoy it again. I can go out with girls and enjoy it again. And, Karl, you’ll feel the exact same way tomorrow. You’ll be free. God, is it a great feeling.”

Jody sat next to him on the bus, and Holly the bitch sat behind them, sometimes talking with Jody, sometimes talking with the two guys sitting behind her. About halfway home she leaned forward, her face right between Karl’s and Jody’s, and said, “Hey, Jody, when’s Karl going to tell his sister?”

“Shut up, Holly,” she said.

Jody should have been glaring at Holly, but her eyes were fixed on him: one long unspoken question.

Jody let him walk her home and let him hold her hand. He wanted to make some kind of promise, but he couldn’t.

“Boy, do you look awful,” his mother said when she got home from work. She placed her wrist against her own forehead, then against his. “And you’re hot. Maybe you should lie down and rest, and if you’re like this tomorrow, we’ll call you in sick.”

“I’m not going to call in sick tomorrow.”

“Have it your way, then.”

He tried to read the book Mr. Benes had assigned, but it was stupid. This guy in an African village killed his adopted son because he was from an enemy village. Some moral value to this novel. Math was a touch easier. There weren’t any story problems. Anything, but to think about tomorrow. He started to work on his idealization program when the phone buzzed. He dumped the math into a do-later file and cleared the screen for phone use.

It was Kevin. He wanted to talk about the issue Karl had brought up this afternoon. Karl opened his door and looked down the hall. His mom’s and Liana’s doors were both open. He could hear Liana laughing downstairs watching the holo. Mom and Uncle J were probably in the kitchen talking over empty dinner plates. He pressed the door shut, listening for the knob to click into place.

They talked for a while about the test. Kevin said it wasn’t worth worrying about. Dr. Fisher was really nice. You just had to explain yourself well. And they talked about whether Jody was pregnant or not and what to do if she was.

“You know,” Kevin said, “I’m sure your uncle would help you pay for an abortion.”

“She would never have one. She’s Catholic.”

“She’s not that kind of Catholic. Her mom lives with her brother, just like your mom does and just like my mom does. She’s not a twentieth-century Catholic.”

“You don’t know that. Her mom had a girl first. She took her children the way they came.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe she used foam screen or something. Some people just don’t like to sort sperm, and foam screens don’t screen out much of anything but your cash.”

“Kevin, she didn’t use a foam screen. She once asked me what the world would have been like if everybody had been born the sex nature intended them to be born.”

“You never told me that.”

“Look, Kevin, Jody’s mom might live with her brother. She might have missed out on the sanctity of marriage. But she is Catholic. The whole family is. They all wear crosses. And her brother’s first communion was a big deal. The kid might as well have been Jewish and having his bar mitzvah.”

“You don’t think Jody wants a kid, do you? I thought she wanted to be some kind of scientist.”

“She doesn’t have the grades. Maybe she’s scared.”

“Maybe she is. And maybe she’s not pregnant.”

James called him about one half hour—about two math problems—later. “I was just talking to Kevin. I wish you had told me this stuff about Jody. Look, I shouldn’t tell you this, but one of my tests had my girlfriend telling me she was pregnant. I live with my uncle like you. I got a sister to take care of. What do I do?”

“What did you do?”

“She got an abortion.”

Karl wondered if that was the best way to respond to the scenario, but he didn’t say anything. He had begun to think that maybe an abortion was the best answer. If he married her, no one would be happy, not even Jody.

“But that’s not the point,” James was saying. “What if Jody was given the same test? Maybe it left her with some questions. You know, like how much you really love her. I mean, look, if you’re never going to get married, there’s only one thing you want her for, right?” James smiled, and Karl would remember that smile much longer than he would remember other details of that week. James turned out to be the one who got married, and five years and two daughters later, he ran out on his wife. Karl ended up seeing the same woman for fifteen years.

In fact, he fathered two children for her. She had wanted a boy first, a girl four or five years later. She had wanted it to feel romantic, even though friends of hers had warned her that trying to have a baby could make you both feel more like machines than lovers. The antibody screens not only looked for specific proteins that would identify a Y or X chromosome sperm, they also caused her vagina to itch and burn with the intensity of a yeast infection hyped-up by torturers. So they had to purchase an overpriced toy box that genetically sought out and neutralized the sperm with the X chromosome.

Romance did not come easily. There was the two-month wait after he’d gone off the pill. Then he had to produce the sperm to be sorted. At first she had cuddled with him while he did the deed, but more and more he felt like a pet performing an obscene trick. The first several times, they had to spread out the instructions, make sure they were following the right steps when loading the sperm into the sorter and using it properly. Now the sperm was sorted, and he still remembers vividly how she lay in bed, her legs splayed, his fingers parting labia majora, labia minora, while he carefully slid the specially lubricated applicator into position and pressed the release button. Afterward, she rolled a prophylactic onto his penis, and they made love. The ritual made him feel silly in the face of what he thought others might think of what they were doing, but when they conceived their daughter doing everything privately—he producing the sperm alone, she applying the applicator alone—he missed the absurdity of trying to develop a ritual of love where no ritual had existed before.

They had loved each other for fifteen years when she died in a plane crash, her two children divided between her two brothers. He still sees them every one or two months, and he mails them each a present for their birthdays and for Christmas.

“You can’t get to sleep?” Uncle J asked him.

“Not really.”

“You’ve been studying too hard. Draw up a chair. We’ll play some rummy, and you can relax.”

Karl poured himself a glass of orange juice and took a seat at the kitchen table. Uncle J closed his files, folded his briefcase, and carried it into his room. He emerged a moment later with his bottle of Scotch and a deck of cards. When Karl had been younger, Uncle J had made him play with a gameboard, the computer randomizing the deal and displaying the card images on a raised screen so Karl would get the hang of manipulating keyboard and mouse; it would prep him for the things to come in school, for all the good that did. The feel of things had become a fad as of late, and now Uncle J used real cards, and more than once he’d remark about the feel of the shuffle, the tension of the deal, the way he liked to play with the cards right in his grasp. Karl had nothing good in his hand. He had to blink several times to make sure he saw the numbers on the cards clearly. After downing a glass of juice, he still felt thirsty. Within two turns Uncle J had laid down four tens. Karl only had two sixes.

“How do you think you’ll do tomorrow?”

“Okay, I hope.”

“You look real pale. Your mom might be right. Maybe you should think about calling in sick tomorrow.”

“I can’t miss the test.”

“If you’re sick, they gotta let you do a make-up test, don’t they?”

“Yeah. But I don’t want to wait. I’ll feel better when this thing is over.”

“I bet.”

They played on, Karl lost the first game, and he did unusually well the second game. It was getting late, but he didn’t care. He was even starting to feel a little better. He and Uncle J talked about sports with augmented players and about computerized voting fraud in England, and he was forgetting everything else, enjoying himself in the routine of shuffling, dealing, drawing cards, rearranging his hand, eyeing what his uncle had laid out. He couldn’t ever imagine doing this with a parent. His uncle loved him, but not too much, not the way his mother did.

“You want to discuss some scenarios? You know, so you won’t feel like you’re wasting time?”

“You mean so you won’t get in trouble with Mom.”

Uncle J smiled and sipped his Scotch. “Tomorrow’s the big day, you know.”

“I know.” Karl almost told him no, but other words came to mind, and he didn’t try to stop them. “How about this, Uncle J? There’s someone evil who lives in your neighborhood. She takes advantage of poor people, sucks them dry. Nothing she does is illegal. Is it acceptable to kill her?”

“Are you going to kill her, or is someone else?”

“I don’t know.”

“What gives you the right to kill her?”

“How can we let her continue what she’s doing?”

“But what gives you the right? Are you better than she is? And can you prove it?”

“But what about someone extraordinary? Not ordinary, but extra. Someone special enough that he didn’t have to follow the rules. He wouldn’t have to let laws get in the way of justice.”

“So you’re saying it would be okay to kill this woman if you’re extraordinary.”

His uncle didn’t make it sound like a good idea. He sounded as put off as Porfiry had, but Karl nodded and said yes. He wanted to see what his uncle would say.

“Look, an ordinary person is allowed to kill someone in self-defense. An ordinary person can kill a person when he’s executing someone in the name of the government. An ordinary person is allowed to kill lots of people in a war. Why do we need extraordinary people to kill taxpaying citizens?”

“But this woman keeps on doing what she’s doing. And no one stops her.”

“Look, Karl, I don’t know where this is coming from, but this won’t be one of the scenarios tomorrow. They want to test you for ordinary morals. They don’t want you to question the whole fabric of society. They want to send you to the university. It’s their job. Just help them do it right, okay?”

His uncle had gone to bed, and Karl just sat there in the kitchen, listening to the faint sounds of his uncle dressing, his uncle getting into bed, then the quiet. He stared at the door to his uncle’s room. He could walk up to it and knock, even though a closed door in this house pretty much meant do not disturb. His uncle had been softened by the Scotch. He was sure to listen calmly if Karl told him about Jody, if Karl asked him what to do.

But Karl just sat there and rehearsed telling someone (would his mom be more understanding?) that Jody was pregnant. He rehearsed the argument about abortion. For some reason, he was defending the baby’s right to exist while everyone else was telling him how he was ruining his life. He had seen enough movies where people got married, had attended the wedding of a distant cousin, so he could imagine that well enough. But he tried to think about what the kid would be like, what kind of job he would have, where he and Jody would live. He tried to imagine living out in a run-down flat in the suburbs. Jody wouldn’t be in research. He wouldn’t be in whatever career he would have otherwise been in. For some reason, maybe because of movies and books, he thought everything would be run-down, banal, the silence that infiltrated homes, not at all the press of bodies and the urgency that had thrilled them.

And maybe Jody wouldn’t marry him. Maybe she’d have an abortion. And how would she look at him then? Would she still lean toward his warmth and tighten her embrace?

Uncle J’s bottle of Scotch was sitting on the kitchen counter. Mom would have a fit if she saw it there. Karl walked over to it, held it in his hands, and stared at the amber liquid. The thoughts kept going through his head. He’d never get to sleep. He’d only feel worse tomorrow. He got out a clean glass and poured himself a little. The glug-glug of the Scotch leaving the bottle, the air taking its place, was loud enough that Karl was sure his uncle had heard it, would soon be pounding out of his room and asking what the hell was going on. But there was only silence. Karl was amazed how often no one knew what was going on.

He raised the glass, pressed rim to lips, contemplated the light pressure while watching the Scotch faintly lap back and forth in the glass. His hand tilted up, a dash of liquid rolled forward onto his tongue. It tasted horrible: a bitter sting that numbed what it touched. He forced himself to swallow. He rinsed the glass out and put the bottle away. He wasn’t going to drink it: morality enforced by taste buds.

That night, at three A.M., he went to the police station, spoke with the clerk, Ilya Petrovitch, and left. Sonia was standing there, across the street. He walked back in, walked up to Ilya Petrovitch, and said, “It was I…” He refused the water they offered him. “It was I who killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister…”

Karl lowered the readman and stared.

Raskolnikov had made himself ordinary. He had confessed. He had been tested. He had transgressed against society’s laws, and he had returned to society. Why had he carried out his terrible experiment? Hadn’t he known the answer from the start? Karl had known from the word go it was wrong for Raskolnikov to kill the pawnbroker. But when the time came, would he make the right decisions, even in his dreams? Especially in his dreams?

~

It was raining and cold that Wednesday morning, but Karl felt hot in his jacket. He had already begun to sweat while waiting for the bus. His mother had insisted that he call in sick, his sister had told him to listen to Mom, and his uncle told them both to let the boy alone. He took his jacket off in the bus, folded it, and placed it in his lap. A sudden chill from the open bus door hit him, and he shivered. The folded umbrella rested against his legs, and he could feel the dampness against his calves.

The bus waited for Jody at her stop, and Karl watched the rain ripple a puddle near where Jody usually stood. He shouldn’t have been relieved by her absence. But once he was at school, he wanted to call her, to see if she was all right (and, yes, to see if her period had started).

“Don’t worry,” Kevin told him before assembly. “You’ll do just fine.”

“You’ll feel great when it’s over,” said James. “Maybe you’ll think about Monique in a better frame of mind after this is over. Maybe we can make a return trip.”

Al Baron must have been listening in, because he stepped forward to join them. “Hey, Karl,” he said. “I heard about Monique. It took balls to do that the night before testing week. I sure hope your girlfriend doesn’t hear.”

“Hear what?” said Karl. He was confused, but he knew if you didn’t acknowledge it, it might just not have happened.

“Okay, play dumb. Probably shouldn’t talk about things like that, anyway.”

“What things?” asked Karl, and he was asking Kevin because maybe Kevin could clear the whole thing up. But Kevin didn’t hear him. His eyes were fixed on James, and James was looking away, forced nonchalance, like nothing had ever happened. How many people had he told?

Classes dragged on and on. Now that half the seniors had taken the test, the teachers had a body of students they could call on, students who might just be paying attention. At least that’s the way it seemed to Karl, because they never called on him. He barely followed anything that was said. He just watched for the people to leave and to come back. All of them seemed better composed than he was.

“You look awful,” Carrie Kausen told him right before lunch. She placed her wrist against his forehead. Her wrist felt cool. He liked the feel of her skin against his. “You’ve got a fever. You should really say you’re sick and go home.”

“I can’t.”

“You’ll kill yourself being so dedicated.”

At lunch they served water to drink. There was a machine that dispensed milk and fruit juices for people who wanted to pay extra. Partway through lunch, Carrie leaned over him (for a moment he felt the press of her breast against his arm, but just for a moment) to place a milk and an o.j. in front of him, then stood up. “You need the liquid. Drink it up, because you have to make it until the end of school. Good luck.”

Karl watched her walk back to her table. She saw him watching, stopped, and smiled. George Polson, who sat at the table with him, shook his head in mock disbelief. “Oldham, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“Don’t be so hard,” said Stephanie Musser. “A girl has to notice someone like Karl before other girls do. Then they take a second look and see what they’ve been missing. That’s just the way of it.”

There was something nice in feeling so miserable and getting this kind of attention. It would have been nicer if it hadn’t hinged on Jody’s feelings toward him. Maybe he should call her after lunch, find out how she was. He began to worry. Maybe this whole thing had gotten to her more than he had been willing to accept. She was the one who might be pregnant, not him.

So right after lunch he called. With each ring of the phone, the hole in his stomach became larger. Jody’s mother answered the phone; she must have taken the day off from work. Had Jody told her? Probably not, because she looked happy to hear from Karl. “She’s taking a nap right now, but I’ll tell her you called. That will make her feel a little better.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s exhausted. This whole last few weeks have really gotten to her. She’ll be better by tomorrow or the next day.”

Better? Then she definitely hadn’t told her mother. Or maybe her mother wasn’t telling him the real reason Jody was absent from school Jody had said she told her mother everything—well, of course, except for one or two things—and she had smiled at Karl when she said that, then kissed him and held him so deliciously close.

Later in the day, he saw Holly. “Hey,” he said, “do you know what’s wrong with Jody?”

Her shrug was exaggerated, actorly. “I don’t know.” She paused for a beat. “Maybe morning sickness.”

“Bitch,” he said, but only when she was far enough away so she wouldn’t hear.

Ethics with Rob Chabert. Second-last class, penultimate class, of the day. His last class. Ultimate? class. In twenty minutes he was out and on his way to the gym. Chabert was talking about a policeman from last century who charged store owners extra money. Most cops did it. Now, this same cop steps in the way of a bullet to save an old lady. He does it without thinking. He does it because it’s right. How moral a person is this policeman?

It was sort of interesting. Karl wanted to pay attention, but he couldn’t. After three years and two months of ethics, after four different ethics teachers, after talking about inner being and outer looks, sex and love, listening to authority and listening to your conscience, jobs that provide wealth and jobs that provide meaning, being a leader and being a follower, self-confidence and self-doubt and self-knowledge and what you owed your community and what a community owed you, after so many classes, uncountable classes, and essays and speakers, and written tests and role-playing and questions out of nowhere that put you on the spot, how could you stay interested? Karl wasn’t. He just felt tired and hot and a little bit sweaty and like his head would levitate away from his body if muscle, skin, and bone weren’t already holding it in place. The only things that seemed to interest him right now were the way his hands looked on the desk and the numbers on the clock.

Chabert kept glancing over at him like something was wrong. Maybe he was sickly looking. But he couldn’t have stayed home, not today. He would be free. Whatever happened, it would be over. The test. There was still Jody and there was James shooting off his mouth. And now he remembered that James knew that Jody might be pregnant. How long before everybody knew about it?

“You know, Mr. Oldham,” Chabert said, “if you want to take some time out to wash up, you can leave now.”

This surprised Karl.

Chabert had this real concerned look, like he understood something was wrong. “Go on. The policeman’s dead. The lady lived. And whatever we say is just words. Take the time you need. Do well on the test.”

Karl nodded because he wasn’t sure if thanks was appropriate. For the past two days Chabert had just nodded at the one or two students who had needed to leave. “Good luck,” Chabert was saying as the door closed behind him.

The washroom was empty of people. Karl set the temp of the water and turned it on. The water he splashed on his face felt too cool, so he turned up the temp. He splashed and splashed, like the water could do some good. He wanted a shower now, just to stand in front of the water and let the downpour ease everything out of his body.

He looked at himself in the mirror. His hair was oily. You wouldn’t have thought he had washed it this morning. His skin was pale. He could see why Chabert had kept looking at him. Computer-screen white, which made the dark circles under his eyes look even worse. His own image held him, and he stood there.

Chabert had kept looking at him. Because Karl looked sick, or because Chabert knew something? It occurred to him that Al Baron was always hanging out with Kerrick Curtis, and Kerrick told everything to Rob Chabert, who probably had no choice but to tell other teachers. And Al and Kerrick had taken the test. They could say whatever they wanted. Karl still had to take it. In less than five minutes he had to be down in the gym. Why had he gone out with Kevin and James on Sunday? Why hadn’t he stopped with Jody’s shirt? Why had he let his fingers find the way to undo her skirt that one Saturday night three weeks ago? Why hadn’t he done his work on time like he was supposed to? Why hadn’t he done it as well as he could, even when he hated it, even when he saw no reason for it? Kevin could flunk the test, and he’d still go to the university, his work was so good. Karl’s work had never been that good.

But I’m a good person, he told himself. I’ve never hurt anyone. Not on purpose. Not in any way that mattered. I’ve been a good person. I’ve never purposely harmed anyone. Real harm, not the hurt feeling here or there, but I’ve always meant well. I’m a good person. That’s what this test should show. That I’m a good person.

The gymnasium, an old-fashioned gym that the school was proud of, with wooden floors and wooden bleachers, ropes and rings raised high into the ceiling, Plexiglas headboard and metal hoops at either end, seemed an odd place for them to set up the three tall metal things that looked liked vats and were hooked up into all sorts of instrumentation. Hanging from the ceiling were several banners with the New Realities logo. At the far end of the gym three folding tables were set up, one for Ms. Insoporto, one for Mr. St. August, and one for Dr. Fisher.

Dr. Fisher was an imposing man, tall and broad-shouldered. Kevin said he looked like an intellectual bouncer. His suit was always finely pressed, his beard impeccably trimmed. Dean of Students, and unofficial assistant headmaster, he was the only teacher who never raised his voice; well, once he did yell, and quite loudly, at a ref, who at a basketball game called a foul against the Westminster player, when it had been the player on the other team who had been quick with an elbow to the ribs.

“You don’t look well,” he said after Karl sat down. “Are you sure you should go today?”

Karl nodded. The gym felt chilly.

“You don’t want to put it off, I take it.”

“No, sir.”

“You know, it’s not that bad. And you’ll do better if you’re well rested.”

“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

Dr. Fisher hesitated. Maybe he was thinking about Karl’s late work, his hastily done papers and video displays, or perhaps he was trying to think of another way to talk Karl out of taking the test today. “To tell you to wait,” he said, “would overemphasize the importance of this whole thing. You seniors act like it’s the end of the world. So let me have your disk, and we’ll get it over with.”

Dr. Fisher looked through the images and entries Karl had produced. His face was blank. What kind of judgment was he making? That Karl’s ideal mother was asking too much of his real mother? That his ideal woman was an impossible dream, too much the male sex fantasy Mr. Benes was always talking about? But Dr. Fisher was nodding. “A lot of work went into this. I’m impressed. You’ve been very thorough and very thoughtful.” It had been so long since a teacher had said that to Karl that he wondered how honest Dr. Fisher was being.

The disk was handed over to a technician who began to ready the dreamchair. Karl was directed to the boys’ locker room, where the storeroom clerk dispensed a dreamchair suit to him. “Get naked and put this on,” he said.

Karl unwrapped the sterilized paper and tossed it into the ‘cycler. The suit’s glittery red fabric felt funny. He tried to remember how it was designed to carry data to his skin, but although he had understood DiBiasio’s explanation in science class, he couldn’t remember any of it now. Jody had been good at explaining things like this. She had a talent for science. Why didn’t she study the way she should?

He hung his clothes in his locker and put on the suit. It had feet and gloves. Liana had worn pajamas designed just like this when she had been a baby, but the hands had mittens to prevent her from scratching herself when she slept. The fabric was pajama thin, and tight. He felt naked, like everything was showing. Stephanie Musser right now was in the vat across from Insoporto. How had she felt walking out in one of these? Had they let her wear a bra, or had her big breasts bounced rather nicely against the fabric? Wrong thought to be thinking.

He tried to think of other things before he walked out. The technician was very casual about the whole thing, like it was an everyday occurrence, which it was for her. She helped him step into the vat and helped him adjust the chair so it was comfortable, and she strapped on skullcap and visor. The visor immediately showed the scene of an open field.

Something happened. He felt like he was standing up. Messages were being sent to his skin and muscles so he felt his soles touch the ground, his legs support his ass, his torso surrounded by loose fabric and air. A dull hardness against his back, where the fabric was uncoated, the chair perfectly flat, was there to remind him that this was an illusion.

There were whirs and clicks as the door into the vat closed, as mechanisms lowered to encase him, but he only knew that intellectually. He saw a field, and now more than ever felt like he was standing up. “Reach out and point,” her voice said in his head. He knew his arm wasn’t moving, but he had flexed his muscles so the machine could read the gesture and send the message along the fibers of his arm to signal his brain that his arm was indeed moving. At first, it didn’t feel terribly realistic, but the technician asked him to make other gestures so she could calibrate the program so the tiniest motion on his part could interact with the mechanism, so it would provide the necessary sensation. This was state-of-the-art, expensive. “Walk… good, now run… now stop and lie down. Perfect. We’ll go through some typical scenes and move on to the scenarios.” A plane flew high above the field. It trailed a banner: “This experience has been made possible by New Realities Dream Emporium and the contributions of the City’s Chamber of Commerce.”

It was sort of fun doing this, walking in a field, laying out a picnic, even if it was by himself. He never would have been able to afford a dreamchair experience of this quality. The picnic setting dissolved, and he was now standing in the school lobby. But rather than head for the locker room or an empty classroom to hang out, he ended up in the English Department office, Mr. Benes turned to say hello and so did several others. When he sat down at his own desk, he realized that he was a teacher and not a student. The chair behind the desk molded perfectly, firmly to his back, except for the cool flat spot that reminded him that this wasn’t real, that he was just a student. The idea of being a teacher, however, intrigued him. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. He was still feeling a bit light-headed, but the wonder of what he was experiencing seemed to have canceled out his other symptoms. Until now, when he remembered them.

A student came to see him. He said his name was Pierre Bezukhov, which was a funny name, and the name Karl had chosen for his ideal male. When he had read War and Peace last year, he had found that his attention always perked up when Pierre was in the scene. Although absent-minded and bumbling at first, Pierre was kindly, simple, and modest, and Karl had answered on the disk that having a strong center is what made it possible for the ideal person to grow and change. Karl’s Pierre wasn’t of the same formidable size as Tolstoy’s, in part because Karl almost always inserted a generic protagonist for the main character of every book he read; this Pierre was of average height and handsome, but not handsome in any striking way, there being no distinguishing features to capture the eye’s imagination.

Although he is Karl’s ideal man, transformed by the computer into a young man of seventeen, Pierre’s situation is less than ideal. On Karl’s screen is a sample of Pierre’s work, a video-enhanced scene taken from the African novel Karl never finished. Pierre hadn’t even bothered to make the Africans black, much less give them any features common to Yoruba men and women. Or were they Ibo, not Yoruba?

“What can I do for you, Pierre?” Karl hears himself say.

Pierre explains in a rush, and Karl must get him to slow down and repeat several things. It has to do with the evaluations Karl had written about Pierre’s work. The evaluator in the office has translated Mr. Oldham’s words into a low point score for senior-year literature class.

“Are the points fairly assigned?” Karl asks, even though he knows most teachers hate how their evaluations get translated into numbers.

Pierre doesn’t really answer the question. He explains how he’s gotten a rare chance—he has a position lined up next year for a carpentry program. He is good with his hands, and this is what he wants to do. But if his points are low, they won’t take him. He can’t afford the low points in literature class. There aren’t many people who can afford highly skilled carpenters. “I love working with wood, Mr. Oldham. This is the chance of a lifetime for me. I can have a job I love, and it’s one that pays enough to provide for my sister and her children.”

Karl knows he should be sympathetic, but the anger surfaces so easily. Why is his ideal figure saying this? He looks at the guy and automatically likes him, so why does he have to be in such an awful position? Had Benes talked to them? Had he suggested this kind of scenario for Karl to experience?

“Why?” Pierre is saying. “Why should my lack of interest in computers force me out of a career with wood? What gives you the right to put my sister and me in such a predicament?”

Karl is a teacher now. What he says goes on the record. He can’t be like the man with the executive perm and throw Pierre out. And he remembers teachers’ stock lines. “You’re really too young to say if computer work will help or hinder your career. I would imagine that computer displays would be important to planning anything you might build.”

“But the points I have are killing me. Can’t some of your evaluations be a little more positive? That’d get them to attach a higher point value.”

“Well, maybe you can redo some work.”

“In one night?”

A day calendar flashes on Karl’s computer screen. It is January 14. Applications are due tomorrow. Karl knows the program is manipulating him, that none of this is real. Pierre Bezukhov is a character out of a novel that only Karl and his mom had read. He isn’t real. He doesn’t have a love of carpentry and a hatred of computers. Karl is being put on the spot, but he will later have to answer like it had been real. The chair he sits in feels real enough. The hush in the English-department office as his colleagues listen sounds real enough. And Pierre looks real anxious.

“You didn’t rewrite your evaluation of him,” Dr. Fisher said to Karl. It was now the follow-up, and Karl had to explain the reasoning for all his actions during the three scenarios. “Why not?”

“It wouldn’t have been honest.”

Dr. Fisher waited. You were supposed to be articulate. There were no obvious answers. Jody said that Insoporto had twisted her words.

“I assumed that I had done what my teachers usually did. They wrote a careful description of what I did, and explained how those showed my strengths and weaknesses as a student.”

“The dishonesty part interests me. You could have rewritten your evaluations in a positive light without lying by intention or omission. You could have raised his points that way.”

“But then I should rewrite everyone’s evaluation.”

“Is—” he glanced at his screen—“Pierre in competition with everyone else?”

Yes, he was, for limited positions, but Karl knew better than to say that. Education was about knowledge and ideas. “If it had been truly important to Pierre, he could have seen me before January fourteenth, and that would have given us time to improve his efforts so that my evaluation would be an honest one.”

“But he’s seeing you on the fourteenth. He’s young and insecure. Should he be made to pay such a heavy price for his procrastination?”

Why couldn’t he let it rest? Karl had done the right thing. He knew he had. What was he supposed to do? Distort his evaluation? Cave in to pressure? Why couldn’t Dr. Fisher get on with it and get to scenario three? That’s the one Fisher really wanted to talk about.

Scenario two featured Karl with his uncle, his mother, and his sister. Not their idealized versions, but the ones whose holoes he’d included in the disk. They were in a tiny sailboat. They were dressed in slacks and shirts, and they weren’t wearing life jackets. Karl was irritated by the implausibility. It was more incongruous than the hard cold surface pressing against his back.

The boat capsizes. Everyone is tossed. The water, cold against the skin, hits him hard. It soaks through his clothes, his shoes, and it’s weighing him down. A wave rolls over his face. He almost chokes on the water and realizes that there is no water in his mouth. He ducks under the water to remove his shoes, watches them sink into the depths, and he realizes that his mouth is completely dry. Very dry. There’s no way for the machine to tell his tongue there is water, even though his body feels submerged, is struggling with the water, the waves, and the wind tousling his hair like a chilled hand.

The boat is flipped over; the keel glistens in the sun. The waves around it have finely carved ripples. Karl removes his pants, finds it easier to tread water, and turns to seek out his family. He hears their voices, their shouts, all carried away by the wind. His uncle and his mother and his sister are scrambling at the surface, tearing at it like they can’t swim. The boat is beginning to drift away. It’s their only life preserver. Karl swims to his sister. He knows how to position his arm around her chest, so he can swim back with her. Swimming to the boat is hard. He’s feeling tired. The boat’s drifting farther away. His mother goes under, struggles back up, her flailing hands sending up explosions of water. But his mother, the real one, knows how to swim. This one doesn’t, and she looks as real as the water feels, and she’s drowning. His sister’s body is cool in his arm. Swimming with her is hard. He feels like he’s going to sink, like his chest will explode, like his legs won’t be able to scissor one more kick, that his free arm won’t haul him forward one more time through the water. Once he gets to the boat, once he gets his sister secure, he will be too tired to do anything more. He won’t have time to do anything more. He will have lost his mother and uncle. He keeps swimming.

“Now,” said Fisher, in the follow-up, “why your sister?”

Karl didn’t understand how Fisher could be so calm. Saving his sister wasn’t the issue. He felt like this long delay, talking him through each little decision, was being done on purpose, to drive him mad, to force out ill-considered answers once they got to the third scenario.

“She’s my sister, that’s why.” He reminded himself that everything was in the follow-up. But how could you be articulate about saving your sister?

“Why not your mother?”

“I would have saved her if I could.”

“You could have swum back out to her.”

“I would have. If I thought my sister could stay on the boat and not slip off, I would have.”

“Even if it meant dying?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“The scenario didn’t give me a sister who would hang on until help came. If it had, I would have gone after my mother.”

“And not your uncle?”

“He’s next, after my mother.”

“Why?”

“She’s my sister. She’s the one I’m supposed to take care of.”

These days, whenever there’s some scandal in politics or commerce and there becomes a hue and cry for a return to morality testing in the schools, Liana asks Karl what it had been like. He tells her as little as he can get away with; he never has and never will tell her about how he saved her life, because she would wonder why he had let Mom drown, even though Mom was now living comfortably in a rented apartment, which her brother’s inheritance had paid for. There were two or three times when he almost told the woman whom he had loved for fifteen years, who had died in a plane crash. Their first months together they told each other everything. Or almost everything. There were one or two things she hinted at but never revealed, and although he wanted to, he could never bring himself to tell her about the El Dorado and about this. Later, he could never understand why he hadn’t. It wasn’t like he had done something no one else had done.

The third scenario starts with him standing on a suburban street at night. It looks a bit like the neighborhood the El Dorado was in, but the houses are more run-down: paint peeling, a window here and there boarded up. The streetlights give everything a translucent quality. Lighted signs hang in first-floor windows. He stands across the street from a well-lit house with no signs. There’s a quickimage of a couple copulating, and he knows what kind of house it is. The flat coldness in his back is still there. The place is nothing like the El Dorado. Did they find out from James? Not from James himself, but from someone he had told? Were they really testing their lives, not just their morality?

He knows he shouldn’t cross the street, but he can’t help it. It’s like fete is pulling at him, drawing him in. This is one way to come clean, but he doesn’t want to come clean. He wants to turn, but instead he finds himself walking up to the door, ringing a bell, and stepping past a woman who lets him in.

It still doesn’t look like the El Dorado, but he is taken to a room where half-naked women sit. His ideal woman is there. She is short, fair, has blue eyes, and a slightly terrified quality as if she’s afraid of being wronged one more time. He wants to comfort her. She says her name is Sonia. The name is a natural, obvious name for her. He forgets, to his later embarrassment, that he had picked the name, had sat at a keyboard and with some artistry software had developed her entire look. Right now her hand is warm in his, and he knows she won’t betray him. The feeling of comfort is wondrous.

He lets her lead him up the stairs to her room, which is run-down, but he feels like he understands her poverty, the reason behind it. She undoes her chemise and lets it fall. He can’t help but watch her roll the stockings down her legs, but the gesture is so unlike Sonia that he can’t help but remember the cold flatness in his back and where he really is and why he’s here and why it would be so nice just to fall into their trap and enjoy it because they’ve rented these dreamchairs from a place that makes a part of its living off scenarios like this and he does so much like her small breasts, and the way she lets him stare, unlike Jody, who would press against him without inhibition, then become painfully shy and withdraw from him. How would he explain this to Jody? How would he explain Monique to Jody? What if Jody was pregnant? Had he just saved his sister to cast her out on her own, without family, away from the family she could count on? How could they do this to him? Present him with such a lovely woman who behaved nothing at all like the Sonia he had dreamed of, the one who would sacrifice everything to make him better so she too could be better? And he didn’t know why he desired her so or why he hated them so, but he was pushing out, first enough so the program had naked Sonia stumble back, trip, legs up—Karl considering if he should help her back up—then pushing really hard, not an illusory push, but pushing so that a buzzer went off and equipment rose away from his grip and the damage he could cause. He ripped off the visor, was now on his feet, shaky, uncertain where up and down were. The door popped open. He stepped out into the gym. Its reality was disorienting; the wooden floor, the brick wall, the basketball hoop. He just stood there. The technician was firing questions at him. Dr. Fisher was standing up. Mr. St. August was turning to see. Dressed in blouse and skirt, Stephanie Musser, sitting across from Ms. Insoporto, was staring at him.

That’s when he realized he should have stayed in the dreamchair, until everything had settled down. The silvery red fabric was so tight and thin that he felt naked, his desire on display.

“Take a shower,” Dr. Fisher called to him from across the table, “get dressed, and meet me in my office.”

So now they had finished discussing the first two scenarios. Karl was no longer sure, exactly, what was right anymore.

“Now,” said Dr. Fisher, leaning forward. The large frame of his body was imposing. His chair was set up in front of his desk. Karl was in the chair opposite him. “We have to talk about the third scenario.” Dr. Fisher shifted in his chair. “You’re standing across the street from a… house of prostitution.” It shouldn’t have been so hard for Fisher to say that. He and St. August had chosen that scenario just for him, because James had talked too much and now they knew. “Why do you cross the street?”

He thought back on that. For some reason he remembered not wanting to cross, but that couldn’t have been the case. Hadn’t he later taken Sonia’s hand? Hadn’t he walked up the stairs to her room?

“Did you find it hard to avoid crossing the street?”

Fisher’s question was leading him somewhere. “What do you mean?”

“Did you try not to cross the street and ended up crossing anyway?”

He remembered that. “Yeah.”

“And was it equally hard not to walk in?”

“I guess.”

“But you did walk upstairs with the prostitute?”

Her name was Sonia, but he didn’t say that. He nodded.

“Why?”

How could he answer that honestly? How could he make it sound like the moral thing to do?

It surprised him that Fisher didn’t press the point. “It wasn’t much later that you terminated the simulation. Why?”

“It wasn’t right.”

“What wasn’t right?”

She wasn’t Sonia, but he said, “It just wasn’t right for me to be there.”

“And you remembered it was a simulation.”

“I don’t know. I guess.” It was then he noticed that Fisher hadn’t asked a question. He had said it slowly: a careful declarative statement.

“If it had been for real, would you have backed away?”

Karl found himself shaking his head, but it was more of an “I don’t know” shake of the head than a “no, I wouldn’t.” He felt like there would be tears, so he didn’t say a thing. He tried hard to find a place to look so he could sit there naturally and not have to meet Dr. Fisher’s eyes. Fisher must know. Why wouldn’t he just come out and say it?

“It’s upsetting to be tempted the way you were tempted. If I were your best friend and asked you if you wanted to go to a whorehouse, you’d probably tell me no. But if I drive you there, walk you to the door, no becomes harder to say. Morality is tricky that way.”

Fisher went on that way for a while, but Karl had stopped hearing the words. It would just be easier to confess, explain the whole thing. Clear the air. Yes: it would clear things perfectly. In the simulation, he had gone upstairs. In reality, he had left. He had done the right thing in reality. That should count for something.

But what was he going to tell Fisher? He couldn’t talk about the El Dorado, because Fisher would call home. The school always called home when you broke the law and the school’s code of conduct. They did when Marsha Singer had been caught drinking beer behind the loading dock. And when they called home, his mother would be sure to mitigate the blame; she would have no choice but to tell Fisher that her son had been with Kevin Haviland and James Gateman.

“How do you feel about what I’ve been saying?”

“I guess I agree.”

“What do you agree with?”

“That I was tempted. That I shouldn’t have been tempted.”

Fisher shook his head, just slightly, enough for Karl to understand what he was thinking. Whatever he had said when Karl wasn’t really paying attention, he had decided that Karl was just not up to understanding it. “Okay. What should the evaluation say?”

“That I blew it.”

“Should it say anything about how you tried to walk away?”

“I guess so.”

“Karl,” he said, “why aren’t you angry? The program has a glitch in it. Even if you try to walk away, it still makes you cross the street and go inside. Only when you’re inside and with the women do you have the freedom to leave. That should bother you. We don’t force people into situations like that.”

Every time he remembered that moment, he would know what he should have said but didn’t, because he didn’t think of it until years later: You forced me into all those other situations, too. What’s the difference?

“Look,” Fisher said, clearly agitated, his voice strained like he was holding back some incredible anger, “I’ll be right back. I have to talk to some people.”

Before Karl could say anything, Fisher was out the door, which closed behind him with a click. Karl sat there, stared out the window at an immense landscape: a holographic image. He didn’t know how long he sat there. He expected Fisher to return with St. August or with his mother or with a letter calling for his dismissal. The longer Fisher was gone, the worse it seemed, but the less justified it felt. He hadn’t hurt anyone. No one was dead. No one had been wronged, except maybe Sonia. But Monique had a nice car. Karl’s mother didn’t have a car. But she had a home and two children and a miserable job, which she hid from in her room reading book after book, talking with her children only when she could take them out shopping or find something around the house that they could help her fix. The thoughts went around and around. Karl wished he had murdered someone. Or caused some terrible accident. He wanted something to happen that would erase all ambiguity. He wanted the lines drawn neat and clear. He wished he had fucked Sonia. Then Fisher would have had to fail him on the third scenario, and this whole thing would be over with.

Instead, Fisher returned, calmer now, almost meek. “Here’s what we’ve worked out. We received some complaints about the third scenario Monday night, and we requested that it be pulled. You shouldn’t have been subjected to it. You didn’t do as well as you could have, but you did break away. You terminated the scenario. But in the scenario itself, you stayed. You never made the decision to leave the room itself. In an actual experience, there’s no chair to step out of. You have to leave on your own.

“Now, I know there’s a fine line of difference there. As far as Mr. St. August is concerned, the scenario went unfinished. We’d like you to do a different third scenario this Friday. You have fourth period free, so why don’t we say you’ll report to the gym and go through a reasonable third scenario?”

He should have felt relieved. Fisher had said nothing about the El Dorado.

“Karl, how does that sound?”

He said it sounded okay.

Leaving Dr. Fisher’s office, Karl realized that no one else ever got a second chance. How would it look when he went back? How could he explain it?

Whatever reserve of energy had kept him going during his discussion with Dr. Fisher dissipated immediately afterward. His body felt like it had in scenario two, weighed down by water, just on the verge of sinking. People spoke to him, and he couldn’t do more than nod. On the bus someone reached into her back pocket and pulled out a gun. Karl was about to scream, but his eyes refocused, and he realized that the girl was taking out her wallet to show the bus driver her ID.

He had nothing to say when he got home. His mom wanted to know how things went, and he said fine. She said he looked horrible and sent him off to bed. He woke up for dinner and found he didn’t care about anything. Mom told him that she had been reading the election-talk net to see what people were saying, and for local stuff Deborah Madison was doing really well. Her enthusiasm felt as distant as the winter sun. Karl stared at his food and wondered why he wasn’t hungry. His uncle kept asking him questions about the test, and Karl answered in monosyllables. “You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep,” he said.

In his room he picked up Crime and Punishment, but he didn’t care about what happened to Raskolnikov after his confession. He didn’t care what happened to Sonia, or if the two of them stayed together. Nothing mattered anymore. He didn’t deserve the university. How would he ever explain it to his sister?

~

He had slept fitfully that night, and the next morning he couldn’t remember how many midnight conversations he had with Jody, with Fisher, with Kevin and James, with… the list went on. His mother felt his forehead and asked him not to go to school. He relented. He couldn’t bear to see anyone. He called up The Idiot and had it transferred to his readman. His uncle willingly paid for all book transfers if they were in the public domain. He read all day, feeling more and more miserable. When he had been reading Crime and Punishment, he had felt like he was Raskolnikov; now, reading The Idiot, he wanted to be like Myshkin, virgin, pure, Christ-like, adored for the right reasons and hated for the wrong. But in the end, the message was no different: if you transgressed God’s law and killed someone, society got you; if you obeyed God’s law, society got you just the same.

Karl never read Dostoevsky again.

He fell asleep at some point that afternoon. A hand lightly touched his arm, and he dreamed it was Jody’s. She was sorry. She wanted things to work out between them. When he opened his eyes, he was startled to see that it was Liana.

“It’s dinnertime,” she whispered.

“What are you doing in here?” Ever since she turned ten, Mom had been telling her she was too old to be going into her brother’s room.

“Uncle J sent me up.” She lowered her voice even more: “Something awful happened at work, I think. Mom went upstairs right away to read.”

Uncle J cooked from scratch, so sometimes it was nice when Mom’s day at work wasn’t that good. And tonight she wouldn’t be there to ask him how the testing had gone. He promised Uncle J to tell what it had been like once he felt better, which was fine with Uncle J. After a few days, if he thought things had gone well, he’d forget to ask his nephew about the test. But once the evaluation packet showed up, Uncle J would want to know everything.

After dinner Kevin called, and they talked for a while. Karl asked him what scenarios he’d been given. Kevin listed them, and Karl only half heard, waiting to see if he, too, had been given the whorehouse, if maybe he had misread Fisher, and the school did know about Sunday night.

“Which ones did you get?” asked Kevin.

Karl hesitated. He told him about the student who wanted his evaluations changed. About the capsized sailboat.

“What was the third one?”

He didn’t know how to explain it.

“Well… ?”

“There was this whorehouse.”

Kevin broke out laughing. “So you’re taking the retest tomorrow, right?”

Karl was confused. He tried to look like what Kevin said made sense. How did Kevin know? The meeting with Dr. Fisher had been in Fisher’s office; it had been private.

“Well, you should call up Nancy Alatis’s mom and thank her. Boy, was she pissed. She called up my mom and talked about it for hours.”

“What about?”

“Well, Nancy told me that in this thing you stand across the street, and you should be able to cross the street and walk on your merry way. She tried to walk away, but she couldn’t. So, she planned to walk away when she got to the door. And suddenly she’s ringing the bell. It’s not until she’s in a room full of men that she can take off. On top of that, Ms. Insoporto hits on her for being so tempted by the whole thing. You don’t do that to Nancy Alatis. She’s worked too hard at being Miss Prim and Proper. She went right home and complained to her mom. Her mom right away was on the phone to Hank the Tank. She didn’t want any evaluation with her daughter’s name on it saying that her daughter willingly walked into a House of Questionable Legality and Moral Purpose.”

“Why am I thanking her?”

“Anyone who got the whorehouse is retaking it. Some parents are really mad that they even had something like that in the test. Hank the Tank says they tried to get rid of it, but there was some kind of misunderstanding with the programming people downtown.”

“Did James get the whorehouse?”

“No.”

“Do you think they know?”

“About what?”

“About last Sunday.”

That caused Kevin to pause. “You didn’t tell them, did you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how could they know?”

“Because James was blabbing his mouth.”

“Yeah.” Kevin started to sound a bit angry. “He talked. But you know, there’s so much that teachers never find out. And what teacher would want to screw you to the wall by turning you in for that? It’s not like we killed someone.”

“Well,” James said during their phone conversation, “I hope you did in the chair what you did last Sunday.”

Karl hadn’t told James about the third scenario, and Kevin had promised to keep quiet. Maybe James had talked to Stephanie Musser. They’d gone out last year for a few weeks. “Of course I did,” Karl replied. “I walked out the first chance I got.”

Jody called late that night. “How are you feeling?”

“Better.”

“I missed you at school today.”

“I did, too.”

“How could you?” she asked. “You weren’t at school.”

“I missed you at home, then.” He heard the echo of some double meaning, the suggestion that there could be a home for both of them together.

“I thought I should tell you that my period started today.”

“That makes life easier.”

She looked hurt, like he should have been hoping that it had come true.

“Well, I didn’t want you to worry anymore.” She broke the connection.

It was after ten, and the override his uncle had programmed into his phone wouldn’t let him call her back. He couldn’t go downstairs and talk about this with her on the kitchen phone. So he stared at the gray screen. James had once told him that it’s a game what goes on between men and women. Karl hadn’t believed him. But now he wondered. Jody must have been relieved once her period started. Why did he have to pretend a different emotion?

The next morning his body ached from too little sleep, but he wasn’t feverish enough for his mother to insist that he stay home. Jody smiled at him when she boarded the bus, and she sat next to him holding his hand. Neither said a word. The bus ride was the liveliest it had been all week. It was Friday. Morality week was almost over. The noise of conversation increased as each person spoke louder to be heard above the general noise. Karl and Jody traveled on in a bubble of silence.

At school all the seniors were comparing their experiences, comparing how they had behaved. Milt Shroyer was shaking his head, saying, “I blew it. Boy, did I blow it.” No one believed him. He said that every time he finished a test. Milt was the class valedictorian. On the other hand, Thomas Tichman was all smiles, but Thomas had already been caught once for stealing and once for cheating.

On the bulletin board, they had the list of times and names for make-ups and re-takes. Karl scanned the list. Nancy Alatis’s name was up there. And so was his.

“Were you sick on Wednesday, too?” asked Jody.

“No. I got the same scenario Nancy got.”

“Oh, the whorehouse? Did you have fun?”

The question was so pointed that he wasn’t sure what she meant. Whatever James had been telling people must have gotten to her by now. Is that what she was asking?

“I guess boys will be boys,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She leaned toward him, her voice low, angry. “I heard about you and your friends.”

“Nothing happened.”

“You didn’t have to go, did you?”

The answer of course was no, but he couldn’t say that.

“I gotta get my seat,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

He sat between George Polson and Stephanie Musser. He tried hard not to glance over at Stephanie, who had seen him when he had emerged from the dreamchair, standing there, the alarm buzzer going off. What might she have told people? As always, Stephanie said hello to him and that was it.

Fourth period, and he was staring at the bulletin board, at the list, black letters upon white screen, of everyone scheduled to take make-up or re-take tests. He should just take the hundred or so necessary steps to the athletic wing, to the gym, do the re-take, and have the record cleared. He continued to stare at the list, not seeing anything, almost dreamy, when, like in a dream, two arms curled around one of his.

It wasn’t Jody. Carrie Kausen leaned lightly against him. “Were you sick or did you see a prostitute?” she asked.

“I was sick,” Karl said. “But I was here for my test.”

“So you got the whorehouse special. Some of the moms are signing a complaint against St. August. My mom says he was taking the whole morality thing too far.”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell the difference. In one I got to watch my mom drown. In the other I met a prostitute. Why’s one more unfair than another?”

“I don’t know, but you know what?”

Karl shook his head.

“There’s a rumor going around that someone didn’t say no. Someone (can you believe it?) went ahead and screwed in the dreamchair. Do you know who I think it was?”

“No.”

“I think it was Wally Wally. You know he’s been caught twice in the men’s room… you know, taking care of business.”

Karl had heard the same thing, in greater detail, from a bunch of people. It was easy to believe about the pudgy kid who walked around school looking lost and friendless.

“I mean,” she was saying, “it’s okay at home. Everybody does it, but no one admits it. The Greatest Secret and Greatest Activity of High School Students’ is what my mom calls it. But you don’t do it in school.”

Karl pointed at Walter Wallace’s name. Karl always called him Walt to his face, but not when he talked about him with friends. “There’s an M by his name, Carrie. He was absent yesterday. He’s taking the make-up.”

“Oh. Then who could it be?” She thought for a moment. “Maybe Marvin Anderson.”

Marvin Anderson’s name had an R by it. He was retaking the test. He had said he’d gone to one of the suburban dreamhouses to try out one of the sex dreams. He had told a lot of people. It would be easy to believe it was him. Karl wanted to tell Carrie that it hadn’t been Marvin. In fact, it had been no one. But Karl had come close. He stood there, hoping that silence wouldn’t be taken for agreement.

“Well,” she said, “I have to get back to acting class. I saw you reading the board, and thought I’d sneak out. I’ll see you around.” The smile she offered him was wondrous.

At that point it should have been easy to walk down the hall of the athletic wing. He could apologize for being late. It was re-take day, so it wasn’t like they would punish him for his tardiness by asking him to come back on Monday.

Jody was in the empty classroom where they usually studied on Fridays. She had her notebook open, and her fingers were busy tapping keys while her eyes moved back and forth between the two screens. This was how he was used to seeing her on Fridays, trying to organize a whole week’s worth of notes in forty minutes. It was more than Karl did. “That was quick,” she said.

He sat down in another desk. He had put his notebook in his locker and hadn’t taken it back out.

“You did go, didn’t you?”

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should go down now.”

“I can’t.”

“Do you want me to go down with you?”

“I’m okay. I’m just not doing it.”

She closed her notebook and looked at him carefully. “Why not?”

He waited for the words to come out, but they didn’t. Perhaps that’s why even today he doesn’t talk about it, why he never shared it with the woman whom he loved for fifteen years: he could never articulate what he so fully felt at that moment. “There’s something wrong about it.”

“About the test?”

“Yeah. There’s something wrong about the test.”

“That’s why they’re letting you retake it.”

“No. I mean the whole idea.”

She looked away from him for a moment.

He began to doubt his feeling. Retaking the test would be the smartest thing to do.

“Is it the test,” she said, “or is this really about what you guys did last Sunday? You didn’t get caught then, so you want to get caught now.”

“That’s what my mom would say. She was a psych major, all the good it did her.”

“Maybe your mom would be right.”

“So what? Why do I have to go through this? Why do I have to let them pry at everything I do? Why can’t I be left alone?”

“God, you sound paranoid.”

Karl couldn’t argue. Every feeling he’d felt wrong, was wrong.

“How about this, Karl? You want to go to the university. Your work is about as good as mine. We need points. You do well on this test, and you get lots of points. It makes a university education possible. Most people don’t get past high school these days, you know.”

“I know. But why should it be decided by what I do in a whorehouse?”

“Why shouldn’t it? Why shouldn’t we care about things like that? Before the Great Fall, you could do anything you wanted and no one cared. See where that got us?”

Dr. Fisher found him after lunch. “Where were you fourth period?”

Karl didn’t have an answer, so he shrugged.

“Is it a problem to take this over again? I’ve already told you that it wouldn’t be the same test.”

Karl stood there, amazed what power silence had over adults. They thought words were so easy to come by that silence could only be intentional. If you gave them no words, they had none to twist around.

“I’ll expect to see you there last period.”

He went to ethics class, then math, figuring if they came for him, he would go. But they forgot about him in the confusion of dismantling the machines, or they wanted him to come down of his own free will. He felt like a spy in some bad movie as he walked cautiously from classroom to bus, hoping no one important would spot him.

He had walked Jody home. In the past, before this week, they would stand on the front-door step, she would drape her arms around his neck, and she would kiss him sweetly good-bye. They stood awkwardly now. It was the end of October, and it was cold. The sky was the kind of hard blue you saw just before winter. The trees were bare. “I’ll see you on Monday,” Jody said.

Karl’s mother was surprised that Karl was home on Friday night. It had been the first Friday night in months that he had been home. “Is everything okay between you and Jody?”

“We had a little fight,” he said.

“You’ll be back together by the end of next week.”

They weren’t back together by next week, and Karl spent months wondering what had happened during her dreamchair test that had made her rethink everything, or what he should have done differently when she thought she was pregnant, or how he never should have gone out with Kevin and James that night. Jody told him that he was too wrapped up in sex, that it wasn’t that big a deal for her.

It was a big deal for Carrie Kausen. Finally, during the spring track season, they started going out, and the evening she found out he was on the pill was the evening she took him to her bed. She was an only child, her mom and dad were always out in the evenings, so they had her home to themselves. There was no hurry, no fear of a mother coming downstairs and finding them, no shyness about staring, touching, kissing. There was one night when he was amazed to discover how the desire could be gone but the need persisted.

But Carrie, who never seemed to be at a loss for words with her friends, had hardly a word to say to Karl. And Karl felt his mind go blank every time talk was needed to fill the void. So they lay there after sex, hardly a word spoken, and awaited Karl’s next erection.

And during the school days, he found himself watching Jody from a distance, first with Milt Shroyer, then with Marvin Anderson, and he wondered what they did, and if they could talk afterward. He remembered talking all the time with Jody, but he couldn’t remember about what.

~

The next afternoon he went on his second walk-and-talk with the Campaign to Reelect Deborah Madison. He almost didn’t go. His mother thought he looked too pale, Deborah Madison’s husband thought he should take it easy, but Deborah Madison said the last Saturday before elections was too good to miss and took Karl with her. They did one street together, Karl holding the packets while Deborah Madison introduced both of them, listed some key points of her campaign, and asked the adult at the door to vote for her if she agreed with her goals. Starting with the second street, they did sides, and Karl found that within several houses he had recovered his early enthusiasm from last week. He had watched Deborah Madison fend off one hostile person, and Karl had admired her charm and tact, the way she had controlled the situation by avoiding arguments with a man who so obviously disagreed. By the third street, Karl was loving it, talking to the people and handing out info-cards to nearly everyone who showed interest. It was like last week had never happened. He was making up for dumping those cards and flyers. Maybe it hadn’t been such a big deal after all.

Yet an edge of guilt still cut into him, and at the end of each street, when he met up again with Deborah Madison, he wanted to confess it to her. Not only did he want to set the record straight, he wanted to ask her what he should have done on Friday. Maybe she could explain it to him so he could believe that retaking the test had less to do with morality and more to do with expediency. But each time he met up with her, Deborah Madison was so thrilled with how he was doing, the things she’d overheard because his voice carried so easily, that he couldn’t bear to hinder her enthusiasm for him.

At the end of the afternoon, they drove Karl to his house rather than drop him off at a pay phone where he could call an electra. On the way home, Deborah Madison said that she was impressed by Karl’s work. “I called your school on Wednesday and talked to your adviser, Mr. Benes. He said great things about the kind of work you could do when you’re committed. I need an intern to help out in the capital this summer, and I would like you to consider doing it.”

Karl couldn’t believe this was happening. After failing everybody this past week, someone was impressed by what he could do.

“How does that sound to you? I mean you can think about it for a while.”

“What if my dreamchair score isn’t that high?”

“You mean the morality tests?”

Karl nodded.

“Between you and me, the results of those tests rarely influence my decisions. They’re a test, and everybody knows what’s right to do on a test. Besides, they’re testing for the old individual morality, and that kind of morality is too limited. They don’t put you in a dreamchair and show you a nice oriental rug. They don’t show you a little girl who helps make that rug, or the candy she’s fed to keep her happy, or the teenage girl who has lost most of her teeth. They don’t show you how little she gets paid or what her parents do with the money. If you buy the rug, you support the girl and the people who pay the girl. By supporting the people who pay her, you perpetuate her living conditions. Is it right or wrong to buy that nice rug? That’s not the kind of moral question you’re asked.”

Karl had known nothing about rugs and little girls. Kevin’s uncle had recently purchased several nice oriental rugs; Karl had admired their craftsm’nship. Deborah Madison’s self-assurance, her easy speech-making, made him uncomfortable. But it was a discomfort he liked. “Is the job just for the summer?”

“Well, yes. You’ll be going on to the university.”

Karl shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Deborah Madison looked a bit surprised, as if she had understood the situation differently, but she recovered her poise immediately. “If you do a good job, I’m sure we can find you some kind of work that’ll pay the bills.”

The feeling was too good to last. It was so good and so worthy of suspicion that Karl wasn’t surprised in the least when he stepped inside his house and saw his mother standing in the living room, her arms crossed, her eyes hard, her cheeks red with some kind of anger. Her voice was surprisingly calm. “Mr. St. August called, and he would like you to call him back the moment you get in.” There was a familiar edge to her voice that said: there’s something you haven’t told me.

Karl closed the door to his room before switching on the terminal and typing in phone access and the number his mother had given him. It was a surprise to see Mr. St. August in something other than a nicely pressed suit. He was wearing an interaction suit, something gray and silvery, much nicer than the ones the seniors had worn, and Karl wondered what kind of interaction Mr. St. August would have. Would he be conferencing with other educators; living through a learning experience; or perhaps simulating a conversation with God? James and Kevin would say next week that Hank the Tank had been simulating something stimulating, but here, with St. August’s solemn, concerned face on the screen, only a hint of jowls, the framing of the screen cutting off any memory of his too-large belly, it became impossible for Karl to think of this man in any way that could be considered irreverent.

“Karl,” he said, “I’m glad you called.” There was a professional enthusiasm to his voice.

“I just got back from a walk-and-talk.”

“Good. Your mother told me. I’m impressed by your dedication. This was your second walk-and-talk?”

“Yes. But it was with the same person. So there weren’t any points.”

“Points aren’t everything,” he said. “Now, the reason I called has to do with the evaluations done last week for the Morality Enhancement Program. I understand that you did your evaluation with Dr. Fisher, and he requested that you go through another simulation in place of your third simulation on Wednesday. Did I understand that correctly?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“Well, Dr. Fisher wasn’t happy with the way the third simulation was programmed. He said that…”

“Karl, I apologize for interrupting, but what I meant was: what happened after Dr. Fisher asked you to do a re-take? Did you agree?”

“I guess.”

“You guess. Did you express any reservations to Dr. Fisher?”

“No.”

“Then can you tell me what happened on Friday?”

“I didn’t go.”

“Did you forget?”

He could say yes, he had. Or he could say that talking to Carrie Kausen had made him late, and he was afraid that he wouldn’t be allowed to take the test.

“Let’s say you forgot. Students take this test seriously, too seriously, actually, and sometimes we blank out on things that cause stress. Dr. Fisher saw you, though, after lunch?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And he asked me to do the retake during last period.”

“What happened?”

He wanted to sound defiant; years later he would still think there had been something wrong with him because he had been unable to muster any defiance, any resonance in his voice. He just sounded miserable. “I didn’t take it.”

“Can you tell me why?”

Something about the test is wrong, but he couldn’t say what. He knew that St. August would ask him for specifics, would ask Karl to explain himself, and although St. August didn’t sound like he was out to get him, Karl was at a loss for words. St. August’s own self-assurance made Karl doubt everything he might have said.

“You know, Karl, I think it would be a mistake not to retake the simulation. As Dr. Fisher pointed out, the situation was unfair. You had no choice but to cross the street and walk into the bordello. Even with that noted on the evaluation, the end result does not look good. Perhaps you would have walked away and never have entered, but once you entered, you did choose a young woman and you did go to her room. It was commendable that you terminated the simulation then, but I’m not sure everyone would evaluate those choices the same way an experienced teacher would. It is one thing to avoid temptation. That is a solid moral recourse. But all temptations cannot be avoided. How you handle them is important if you are to be a moral success in almost any profession.”

“But I missed the retake.” The machines must have been dismantled, the gym once again ready for basketball and floor hockey.

“We can give you one more opportunity. First thing Monday morning, report to New Realities. If your mother calls me on Monday morning and assures me you will be there, I will meet you at New Realities. We will conclude the test then.”

“I don’t know.”

St. August hesitated, and this gave Karl a sense of the kind of power he had in this transaction. “You don’t know. Do you want the results of your current evaluation to stand as they are?”

Karl shook his head.

“If you went to such a place, would you do in reality what you did in the simulation?”

Did St. August know? Had the news caught up with him? And what was the truthful answer? What if Monique had taken his hand in the living room? What if she had invited him back to her place? What about Kevin and James, who probably had done well on the tests, but who in reality had gone upstairs without a moment’s hesitation? Karl replied, “No,” while he was thinking all this, and he was surprised how easily the expedient thing to say had rolled off his tongue.

“But that’s not what your evaluation would show. At best, we can note the presence of mixed emotions. At best, we can include several caveats about the nature of the programming and late-adolescent confusion. But we can’t demonstrate the very simple no to the question. Now, can you explain to me why you shouldn’t retake the simulation?”

Karl couldn’t.

“Then I expect to see you at New Realities on Monday. The school has asked you to do this retake, and we cannot accept you back at school until you fulfill your prior commitments.”

Karl nodded.

“Can you tell me what I’ve just said?”

“That there’s no school until I retake the test.”

“Do you understand why?”

“Yes.”

“Then, if I may, I would like to speak to your mother.”

Karl paced the living room, walking around the couch and two chairs, while Mom spoke with St. August. His mom didn’t like St. August, but that didn’t matter. Mom had long ago decided to go along with whatever you had to, that’s the way you got by, that’s the way you could come home, be with your family, and be left in peace.

It had been ages since his mother had been so full of energy; years since she cared enough to rage the way she came out of the kitchen raging, her face livid, alive, her dowdy body awkward and shaking with anger. “You lied to me, Karl. You lied. I can live with anything but lies. I want to know why I didn’t know about this on Wednesday when you told me everything was just fine. I want to know why the headmaster himself has to call me up on Saturday and tell me everything and issue me ultimatums. I want you in the kitchen. I want you to sit down. And I want you to explain it to me. Everything.”

His mother asked a lot of questions, so it took a long time for Karl to tell her the story. She thought he had done the right thing when he refused to help out Pierre. And he expected her to be hurt that he’d saved Liana and let her drown, but she instead wondered if he’d been doing so well, why there should have been any problem at all. He paused a lot, he could feel his cheeks heat up, but he finally started to tell her about the third simulation. His sister returned home from playing with a friend, and Mom insisted she go upstairs to play, which Liana did, with exaggerated pouts and complaints. She knew the story must be good: her brother’s suffering looked exquisite.

He told his mom about the glitch in the program, about Nancy Alatis and how you had to walk in, how you had to be escorted to where the prostitutes were. And then he picked someone. It didn’t matter that it was the ideal figure; his mother’s disappointment fell like lead. The way she looked, the way she held herself, altered, loosened, like he had deprived her of that newborn energy.

“And did Nancy Alatis chose someone?”

“No.”

Of course, the energy was back. “You mean Nancy Alatis walked out and you didn’t. Nancy Alatis, if she’d been born without her mommy’s money, would probably be working in a place like that right now. And she walked out. And you didn’t.”

Karl wanted to defend Nancy Alatis, whose mother had taken her children the way they came, and who, like Jody, had a younger brother. But she was Miss Prim and Proper. Her mother was known to brag about her daughter’s self-control, but everyone at school knew that Nancy Alatis was a little less prim and proper when alone with a boy. Until her brother was older, there was only so far that Nancy Alatis would go, but everyone knew that she had gone that far with a lot of people. Mom and her friends had thought going farther was more interesting, and, furthermore, what Nancy’s mother deserved, so that had become the truth they told each other.

But his mother didn’t want to hear about Nancy Alatis. “I want to hear what you did next,” she said.

Karl was explaining, very slowly, because it was next to impossible to talk about this, when his uncle returned home. So he had to start all over again, and somehow, this time—even with Liana walking into the kitchen twice and asking if she could come down yet—he made it through to the end.

“Can you just tell me,” his mother asked, “why you couldn’t take the retest on Friday?”

“It’s not that important.”

“It’s not?”

He tried to explain to them about Deborah Madison’s job offer, but he was already doubting his memory. Had he been offered a job, or just the opportunity to apply? His mother didn’t make the distinction, either. She responded as if the job had been offered and accepted, the contract signed:

“That’s just great. Why don’t we just sell this house right now and buy a flat out in the suburbs? Because if you take a clerical job like that, then that’s the best you’ll be able to give your sister.”

“You didn’t know about the job on Friday, Karl.” The calm voice belonged to his uncle. “Why didn’t you take the retest?”

“I just couldn’t go.”

“Why not?” asked Mom.

“Because it’s wrong.”

“Why in hell’s name is it wrong? Jonathan, how can morality testing be wrong?”

“Is this some church thing?” Uncle J asked. “Judge not lest ye be judged? Is that what’s bothering you?”

“I don’t know. That’s part of it.”

“And the other part?”

“I don’t know,” said Karl.

“Something about this must have struck some kind of nerve. What nerve has been struck? A retest is a great opportunity. You did great on the first two tests. Now you get a chance to do great on the third. Why do you want it to look like—” Uncle J stopped himself there and watched Karl carefully.

Even though he knew it was the wrong thing to do, Karl couldn’t help but look away.

“When Karl? When did you go?”

“What are you saying, Jonathan?” asked Mom.

Uncle J watched Karl evenly. “I think Karl should say it.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Things haven’t been right since this weekend. Maybe when you went out with Kevin and James.”

“Nothing happened.”

“But there’s nothing really to do on a Sunday, so you guys went out to the suburbs, right?”

“No. Nothing happened.”

“I’ll call them right now and talk with their mothers.”

He was caught. “Okay,” he said, voice flat. “Don’t bother calling. You’re right.”

His mothers gaze had drifted away. She probably wanted to go upstairs and read and forget about the whole thing. Karl wanted to go upstairs and read and forget about the whole thing.

“So the test was accurate.”

Karl shook his head.

“You went to some place like Getting Together or the El Dorado, right?”

“Yes. But I left.”

“Because you were broke.”

“No. Kevin said he’d lend me the money. I just couldn’t.”

Uncle J nodded. His mother was looking at him now, but saying nothing. He wondered when she would talk to him again like he was her son.

“So,” Uncle J said, “you feel guilty, and you feel the test got it right.”

Karl shook his head.

Uncle J didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Whatever your reasons for not taking the test are, they’re not good enough. We don’t live in the twentieth century anymore. It takes two salaries to keep a small house like this going. It takes two people to raise children. You are going to take this test. You are going to do well. You are going to the university. And you are going to get a job that pays well. You can’t be some individualist who goes off, does what he damn well pleases, and fucks over whoever gets in his way. You aren’t going to run off on your sister. I’m not going to watch her get married to some man who will leave her ten years later when he wants a change of scenery or wants to feel good about himself again. It’s not easy, but it’s the way to do it.” Uncle J took Karl’s hand in his, clasped it tight, and met Karl eye to eye, and was silent until Karl stopped looking away. “Your mother and I share the same mother. Your sister and you share the same mother. In the end, this will last longer than the kind of love a man and woman feel for each other. One is blood. The other’s semen. One you need to start life. You need it once. Blood you need forever.”

~

Karl’s mother grounded him, but of course there was nowhere to go. Jody had said she would see him on Monday. In bed that night, unable to sleep, he pictured Monique in her small but expensive new car, and he pictured himself leaning over the passenger door, looking back in at her. This time she asks if he really has to get home so soon, maybe he’d like to stay with her a bit longer? When the car drives off for her home, he’s not standing there on the curb, watching the taillights dwindle until they disappear around the corner. Monique is everything he imagined Sonia would have been like, and what he imagines is comforting and pleasurable.

But while asleep, he dreams he is sailing with his family, and they are caught in a violent storm. The boat capsizes. He swims out to help his sister, but hard as he tries, the waves are too much, the wind and water carry her farther and farther way.

Karl woke up drowning.

Sunday lasted forever. At church he felt like everyone knew. When David Bigley said see you in school tomorrow, Karl was sure the words were loaded with double meanings.

It had been a windy night the night before, and along with several fallen branches, there were somehow even more leaves on the ground to be raked. There was schoolwork to do afterward, but Karl couldn’t concentrate on anything. Kevin and James called. He told each one that Jody didn’t want to go out with him, and each one assured him that in a week or two she would be running after him faster than she ever ran on the cross-country team. He didn’t tell them he was grounded. He didn’t tell them about the test. He wanted to, but he knew what they would say: take it; you’d be foolish not to.

All Sunday afternoon he brooded. He couldn’t get his mind off Monique and Jody’s pregnancy and the simulated whorehouse. He wanted to go back and relive each moment, do the right thing so he wouldn’t have these memories that kept coming back at him.

These days, he can barely remember Monique, and the woman he remembers probably doesn’t resemble at all the tired woman who dropped him off at a street corner while on her way home so that a seventeen-year-old boy with a fake ID wouldn’t get robbed, beaten, or worse, out in the suburbs. But he does remember the woman from the other whorehouse. He can picture her in his mind as vividly as if he had visited her yesterday. But he never remembers the cold flatness pressing into his back.

Monday morning, in the shower, he rehearsed telling St. August that he had done the right thing in reality, the wrong thing in his dreams. He would tell him that the test made you do the right things and give the right responses, but it didn’t mean that was what you would do in real life. The test’s morality was dubious. He liked the word dubious. And because you couldn’t participate in a morally dubious enterprise and maintain your innocence at the same time, it was best to just walk away. He was tired of helping build an extraordinary nation of ordinary people who would always do what was right.

When his mother and uncle took him to New Realities, he had expected to meet a smiling, triumphant Henry St. August, but the headmaster, in his nicely pressed suit, looked visibly upset and a touch relieved. His smile was professional and forced, an attempt at consolation. He asked Karl’s mother and uncle to wait in the lobby before he led Karl inside and showed him to the changing rooms. Walking alongside Mr. St. August, Karl was once again surprised how such a large man could have such small feet.

The interaction suit felt fresh and new. It carried the New Realities logo on the left breast. Karl examined the logo’s curves, the way they changed color as he watched, and he told himself it wasn’t too late to back out. Deborah Madison liked him, would hire him, and he knew he would do a good job. St. August was waiting for him. Mom and Uncle J were in the lobby. Liana was at school, probably being mean to one of her friends and oblivious to it all.

St. August led Karl to the dreamchair, a much sleeker and streamlined version with all the computer apparatus buried beneath the floor. The same technician who had set Karl up at school set him up here, and Karl didn’t know if he was more comforted or embarrassed by her familiar face.

Karl was sitting in a Jeep that drove itself down a desert road. Karl could feel his palms against the steering wheel, his fingers wrapped around it. Something flat and cool pressed against the small of his back.

Up ahead was a series of huts built of cement and paste: white stucco walls, broken red pipes for roofing. People were walking arm in arm into the plaza—no—people were being dragged out into the plaza. Soldiers, in uniform, were shouting at them, pulling them from their homes. Without willing it, Karl found himself pulling the Jeep over to the side of the road. This was too good to be true. Was he going to be asked to kill one of the villagers? On Monday, Chabert had told them St. August’s preferred answer.

“What’s going on?” he heard himself say.

The soldiers turned. Their drab olive uniforms matched the blank expressions on their faces. A man dressed in khaki stepped forward. “We’re conducting a search for contraband. There’s no need to be concerned.”

“What kind of contraband?” His mouth hadn’t moved. He heard the words blow across the plaza.

The man approached him. There were insignia on his shoulder, medals across his left breast. He wore a black holster with a gun. When was he going to ask Karl to use the gun? “The villagers have given aid and comfort to terrorists. Five soldiers in the capital were killed by a bombing yesterday. We tracked the culprits to this village, and we want to know where they are. These people won’t tell us.”

“So you’re going to kill them.” The words came out with his voice, but he wouldn’t have said them. The scenario had provided the words. The officer looked at Karl, and he instinctively regretted the words. The officer had been made to look like Karl’s ideal uncle, someone to be trusted. Deep down, Karl liked him and didn’t want to offend him.

“No,” the officer said. “We don’t have to kill them. We have to make an impression. My soldiers want to make an impression on other villages. Five of their comrades are no longer with us. They know they could be next. But I would be willing to settle for making an impression on this village alone.” He lowered his hand to his holster, and Karl knew this was it. “Take my gun,” he said. “Shoot one of them.” He gestured to the huddled villagers. “That will make them reconsider how much they want to help our local terrorists.”

It was Karl’s question this time: “If I kill one of the villagers, then you’ll leave?”

The man nodded.

Karl looked at the villagers. Their clothes were raggedy. An old man who looked to be his uncle’s age opened his mouth. Teeth were missing. The man was thinner than his uncle. Everyone here was thinner than his uncle. They were thinner than the scrawniest member of the cross-country team. None of the villagers, not the three children, nor the two young women, nor the several men, nor the older women matched any of his idealized figures. The officer did, Karl’s ideal uncle. And what was to prevent his ideal uncle from staying here and shooting villager after villager until someone confessed some knowledge of the terrorists? What was to prevent him from shooting Karl? Something cool and flat pressed against the small of Karl’s back.

This wasn’t real. He could take the gun. He could point it right at the officer’s head and fire, knowing that would end it. The soldiers would fire, but even if he felt a thing, he would live to tell about it. And he couldn’t walk away. He was a witness. If he left, if the guns went off, if the villagers collapsed like bundles of sticks onto the ground, wouldn’t some of the fault belong to him?

The officer had snapped open his holster, had drawn a pistol that looked like something out of last century’s movies, and now held the gun out to Karl. Whatever Karl did, he would be back in school. But the university? If he worked as hard as he could, if he was careful with his papers and video displays, if he produced work on time and avoided all those things that seemed for more interesting than school, maybe he could build up a record impressive enough for the university. But applications were due January 15. It was November 2. He wasn’t Kevin Haviland.

“Take it,” the officer said, “and only one person has to die.”

He could take it, he could aim it at the officer’s head, he could do what was right. It was what he thought was right. He and only he, so he shook his head. He walked back to the Jeep and drove away. Every now and then, somewhere between sleep and dream, he hears the carbines, quick, loud shots, tiny explosions of gunpowder, then silence. He was too far away to hear the bodies fall.

He had done what St. August would have done, he had walked away, but the headmaster grilled him for half an hour about each decision Karl had made. For a while Karl began to wonder if he had misunderstood Chabert, or if Chabert had misrepresented St. August. But he stuck to the moral of the tale: he would lose his innocence by taking the gun. If he drove off, he didn’t contribute more to an impossibly immoral situation.

At the end of it, St. August shook his hand and told him to take the rest of the day off.

There wasn’t too much to do at home. The day before elections was a day of reflection, so there was no news about the electoral campaign, no advertisements, no debates, except by voters on the nets, and those didn’t interest Karl.

The next day was an AmerValues Day, a holiday. After church, his uncle keyed in his terminal to vote, ID’ed himself with his thumbprint, then asked Karl to help him cast his ballot. “Next year, you’ll be doing this.” Karl was surprised at the number of candidates whose names he didn’t recognize. After all those assembly presentations, he thought he’d known everything about the elections. When it came time to vote between Deborah Madison and her opponent, Uncle J pressed his thumb against the key that entered Madison’s name and said, “This is so you have a job this summer.”

That night they went to his grandmother’s house, and his mother cheered up, and everybody went on like nothing had ever happened. They told Karl he was old enough to drink some wine while they followed the election returns. Deborah Madison won.

A month later the evaluations were in. The several pages of text that accompanied the table of symbols and numbers evaluated both Karl’s actions and his rationale for those actions. At the bottom of the page, printed in capital letters, were the two words a university admissions director inundated with applications would look for: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Karl went on to work for Deborah Madison that summer and for the following three summers. He went on to the university, studied international economics and cultural politics, and he did better than anyone expected. When he graduated, he was hired by several different businesses as a political consultant. Within his field, he developed a name for himself.

When Liana, three years into her first job, became pregnant, Uncle J turned his room over to Karl before moving into his mother’s home to help her get through old age. Liana made sure her first child was a boy, her second a girl; the third she didn’t care, she just wanted another child, no matter what her brother said. So Karl now worked harder than ever, and felt he wasn’t home enough, the way Uncle J had been. But he did good work, and he stayed away from the Scotch, knowing that the bitter liquid was one of the reasons he had grown up on the edge of the city.

All in all, a successful life.

But sometimes late at night, for no reason at all, really, he thinks back and what he remembers first is the walk-and-talk, the man with the executive perm, and the info-cards he had tossed. He remembers it not because of what had happened there, but because of the way it had established, without his intent, the pattern of his life: the things dumped that no one knew about, the illicit desires he had toyed with but never consummated, the cars driving off into the night, cars he would have gladly ridden if someone had invited him in. All his life he’s been like this, at work or with loved ones, and always when it came time to present himself, in love or at work, he knew exactly what to say or what to do so that, in the end, he would end up highly recommended.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to a number of people who made this novella possible. A teacher at the 1988 Ohio Leadership conference suggested that one day we’d know to teach morals and to test for them. Bioethicist George Karoti spoke with me about ethical decision making. Robert Coles, Jerome Kagan, and Howard Gardner, in one way or another, have written about the moral growth and life of children. I have also benefited from writings by Kathleen Gough and Howard Rheingold. Chris Barton, Joe Heinen, Geoff Landis, Mary Turzillo, Vicki Wright, April Stewart-Oberndorf, and Jennifer Hershey suggested various improvements. Lisa Rodgers, once again, caught mistakes others missed. Bill Johnson, friend and colleague and fellow coffee-drinker since 1984, has twice saved stories by helping me find their proper shape and direction. After so many discussions about education and politics, and about art, entertainment, and storytelling, I would be remiss if I did not dedicate this novella to him. He was the one who said to make it long.

About The Author

CHARLES STEWART-OBERNDORF is a native Clevelander who has studied in New Hampshire, Granada, Spain, and the Clarion Writer’s Workshop (1987). He currently lives in Cleveland Heights with his wife and six-year-old son. When he’s not with them, he teaches English and social studies at University School. He is the author of one previous novel, Sheltered Lives, and is at work on a new novel entitled Foragers.