The Year of the Gadfly (6 page)

Sarah stood up and rolled her eyes. “Bringing your briefcase?” She laughed and headed through the doors.

Home to one-acts and plays, Mariana's theater is called the Black Box. It's utterly unlike the auditorium (used for assemblies and musicals), upon whose polished stage you'd expect to see a soprano with serious décolletage belting out high Cs. The Black Box has no formal stage; the design students build new sets for each production, and the school's website boasts pictures of student actors soliloquizing from suspended catwalks and in boats floating on water. Right now, though, the room was chilly and dark. It was difficult to orient myself because the four walls were mirror images of one another. I felt trapped, and yet something about the Black Box felt vast, as though the tangle of black wires and lights above me expanded into infinity.

Dr. Van Laark's lab coat was startlingly bright in the darkness. She stood beside a machine that resembled a sound mixing board but had fewer buttons. Next to each button was a number, starting with 20 and increasing by intervals to 200. On the side of the machine, a label read:
Control Panel. Property of UMass.
Unauthorized Use Prohibited.
Dr. Van Laark led us around a divider in the center of the room. On the opposite side was a second strange machine. This one resembled a stereo. Two wires protruded from the front. On the end of these wires were wrist cuffs. The funnel in my stomach was picking up speed, like the beginning of a small-scale tornado. I looked at Mr. Kaplan, but his face was blank.

“Thank you again for participating, girls,” Dr. Van Laark said, her lips curving into a fruit slice of a smile. “In a moment, you will select slips of paper with a designation—interviewer or subject. The subject will sit here and wear the cuffs. The interviewer will sit in front of the control panel and read questions from a list. For every question the subject gets wrong, the interviewer will press a button, giving a slight shock. It's no more than a slight buzz and totally harmless. All right?”

“And then what?” Sarah asked. “What are you trying to prove?”

The little tornado in my stomach gained speed, but Mr. Kaplan's dispassionate expression reassured me. “Just a little shock?” I asked.

“Totally harmless,” Dr. Van Laark repeated.

Sarah and I flashed competing glances at each other; neither of us wanted to be the subject. But then I thought about the kids who'd come before us and emerged looking so upset—all four of them, come to think of it, not just the two subjects. Maybe they were
instructed
to act upset. Maybe all of this was some kind of psychology trick in which the people outside of the Black Box were really the experiment subjects.
What do you think,
Murrow,
I wondered.
Is that the catch?

“Sarah,” Dr. Van Laark was saying, “why don't you select first.”

Sarah plucked a strip of paper from Dr. Van Laark's palm. “Interviewer,” she announced, like she'd won a prize.

There was only one other option, but I picked up my paper anyway.

“Have fun, Subject,” Sarah scoffed, as Mr. Kaplan led her around the divider.

“Iris,” Dr. Van Laark said, “please take a seat.”

I looked at the wrist cuffs, my heart beating fast. Dr. Van Laark opened a laptop, and Mr. Kaplan and Sarah appeared on its screen.

“Now, Sarah,” he was saying. “You should press a higher-numbered button for every question Iris gets wrong. These deliver increasingly stronger volts.”

I looked in horror at Dr. Van Laark and was about to protest when she put her finger to her lips. Then she leaned down, so close that I could smell her perfume. It was deep and sweet, like a rare, intoxicating flower. “The machines are fake,” she whispered. “You won't even wear the cuffs, but for each question you get wrong, you must give an increasingly strong reaction. Twenty volts should be a relatively minor yelp. The higher we go, the more intense. Here's a sheet with suggested responses. Understand?” She placed the instructions before me.

So that's the catch,
I thought.
The interviewer thinks she's in control, when really
she's
the subject.
Mr. Kaplan glanced at the video camera that was recording the scene on his side of the divider, and I swear he was looking right at me, his expression full of intimate understanding. For the first time since coming to Nye, I felt confident, even powerful.

Mr. Kaplan handed Sarah a stack of note cards. She flipped the first one over and asked me a question about piezophiles, microorganisms able to withstand extreme pressure. I answered correctly. She asked a second question about piezophiles. Also right. I'd studied a lot over the weekend. I got the third question wrong, but it required a mathematical equation, and I didn't have a pen. “Administer twenty volts,” Mr. Kaplan said. Sarah pressed the button and it buzzed.

“Kind of tickles,” I said, reading from Dr. Van Laark's response sheet. On the monitor, Sarah chuckled.

I answered the next two questions, about halophiles, right. Then I goofed a second time.

“Administer forty volts,” Mr. Kaplan said. Sarah pushed the button and I gave the instructed yelp. Sarah smiled, but she looked uncomfortable.

Dr. Van Laark nodded at me. “Just like that,” she whispered. “You're doing great.”

I answered the next question incorrectly, too. It didn't matter, but I didn't like being wrong twice in a row. Meanwhile, Mr. Kaplan was asking Sarah to administer sixty volts. When she buzzed, I groaned, louder this time. Too loud.

“She's okay?” Sarah asked.

“Please continue,” Mr. Kaplan said, his voice emotionless.

The next two questions related to extremophiles I'd never even heard of, so of course I answered wrong. Sarah buzzed. I moaned. She buzzed again, and I moaned louder. Both times she shut her eyes as she pressed the button, like she didn't want to see what her own finger was doing.

And it was then—around eighty volts—that I stopped caring about getting the questions right. A girl my own age, who was sitting less than ten feet away, believed she was giving me high doses of electric shock!
Jesus Christ, Murrow,
I thought. I must have whispered it out loud because Dr. Van Laark put her finger to her lips.

For the next few questions I moaned and cried out as I was supposed to, increasingly sickened every time I watched Sarah push a button. My heart was snapping in my chest, quick as a metronome, and I realized we were nearing 120 volts, the standard voltage of an outlet, and enough to kill a person. I kept looking at Dr. Van Laark for direction, wondering how Sarah could possibly keep going, but Dr. Van Laark's smile was jelled in place.

At 140 volts, Sarah stopped again to ask Mr. Kaplan whether I was okay. Again he assured her the shocks were harmless. She pressed the button, and in that moment a sickening sound grew in my belly, pushed its way up my throat, and flew from my mouth.
How could you?
I screamed inside my head.
You hear me!
I can see it in your eyes.
You
hear
me in pain!
How can you keep hurting me like this?

I wasn't wearing the wrist cuffs, but I was sweating like I really was strapped down. If I'd picked the role of interviewer I'd have stopped shocking Sarah at the first sign of trouble. No matter what Mr. Kaplan or Dr. Van Laark said. I would have known, instinctively, to stop.
What's wrong with her, Murrow?
I pleaded.
How is this possible?

We were up to 180 volts and I answered the next question wrong.

“Please administer two hundred volts,” Mr. Kaplan said.

Sarah bit her lip, her face pained. “I really don't—”

“The experiment requires that you continue.”

“Iris?” Sarah called out into the dark. “Iris, are you okay?”

Dr. Van Laark put her finger to her lips and shook her head.

“Iris?” Sarah's voice echoed girlish and small in the black room.

Mr. Kaplan leaned down next to Sarah and whispered with chilling solemnity, “The experiment requires that you continue.”

According to my instruction sheet, I was supposed to give a loud cry and say, “Please stop.” But that wasn't an adequate response for 200 volts. Not even close. Didn't Sarah realize how dangerous it was to shock someone with 200 volts of electricity?
There's no way she'll agree to it,
I thought.
No way she'll
—

She pressed the button.

“Oh, God!” I screamed. “Oh, Sarah. No more!”

Dr. Van Laark looked at me, startled by my outburst, and started scribbling furiously on her clipboard. I didn't care. I wanted Sarah to hear the sound that 200 volts made when it ran through the body of a 110-pound girl. I wanted my pain to echo inside her head until it sank into the very tissue of her brain. “No more!” I cried. “Please stop, please!”

“Mr. Kaplan?” Sarah whimpered. “I don't want to do this anymore. I don't think she's okay, Mr. Kaplan. We have to stop.”

Dr. Van Laark motioned for me to follow her around the divider. Sarah stood beside Mr. Kaplan, wiping tears from her face. “You're okay!” she exclaimed when she saw me, but I couldn't look at her.

“How could you?” I hissed between my teeth. “I never would have done that to you.”

“But Mr. Kaplan said you were . . . It was part of the . . . It's not my fault!”

I looked at Mr. Kaplan, waiting for him to upbraid Sarah for what she'd done. “Ms. Dupont,” he said. “Don't judge Ms. Peters.”

“What?”

“You are both culpable for what has just taken place. You knew Ms. Peters wasn't actually hurting you and yet you allowed her to continue, Ms. Dupont. You participated in the manipulation, and you did so with enthusiasm.”

I was stunned. I wanted to sink into the darkness of the Black Box.

“The point I'd like to emphasize,” Mr. Kaplan continued, “is that either one of you could have stopped the experiment at any moment. But you didn't. You think it's extreme to administer two hundred volts, but unfortunately it's quite normal. Few people in either of your experimental roles ever stop. In this case, walking away is the extreme thing to do.”

I looked around for Dr. Van Laark, expecting an explanation, but she'd hidden herself behind the divider, almost like she was embarrassed for Sarah and me.

“‘Difference is the essence of extremity' is not just a trite motto,” Mr. Kaplan said. “It is a challenge to live up to.”

He dismissed us and prepared for the next two students. My body was clammy with sweat.
What have I done, Murrow?
I asked, walking out of the Black Box into the blinding lobby.

“What's the matter?” Chris Coon called out as I hurried away from the theater.

“She probably failed Van Laark's test,” David Morone snickered. “Just like everybody else.”

 

It was only after we'd all participated in Dr. Van Laark's study that Mr. Kaplan explained its origin and purpose. The experiment, he told us the next day in class, was based on the work of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who'd conducted a similar shock experiment in 1961, the same year an Israeli court sentenced Adolf Eichmann to death for helping to murder six million Jews. At his trial, Eichmann claimed that he was just “following orders.” The Israelis didn't buy this (obviously), but Milgram was curious. What about all those clerks and administrators who had run the concentration camps? How was it, he wondered, that ordinary people came to commit acts of evil?

“Difference is the essence of extremity,” Mr. Kaplan announced for the zillionth time as we slumped, dejected, in our seats. “To be extreme, you must assert yourself. No matter how much pressure you feel to obey. Because, I assure you, that pressure is everywhere. Remember our lesson on pressure-loving organisms.” Mr. Kaplan assaulted the board with his chalk, dust flying everywhere. “In Milgram's original experiment, over fifty percent of the participants believed they were administering fatal-caliber shocks. Now imagine if those participants had been raised in environments where, from an early age, they'd been taught to question and resist. Do you think Milgram would have gotten the same results?”

When Mr. Kaplan asked this question, his eyes caught mine, as though he'd directed it to me alone. I looked down at my desk, a cold-water chill rushing through my body.

 

For the next few days, I worried incessantly about Mr. Kaplan. I couldn't stand the thought that he viewed me as a zombie, the kind of person who would have failed Milgram's experiment. But how could I convince him otherwise? Murrow advised patience. At lunch the next week, he reminded me that I was lucky to have Mr. Kaplan as a mentor.
He could save you from a lifetime of mistakes.
Who knows what would have become of me without Ida Lou.
This was true. Murrow had been a business major before his mentor, Ida Lou Anderson, turned him on to speech and helped him become the world's most lauded journalist. Without Mr. Kaplan, I might have been heading for a lifetime of delusion. My classmates considered him a sadistic asshole, but I knew he was trying to help us—to protect us.

Still, I felt sick over what I'd done to Sarah Peters in the Black Box.

Human nature has its dark side,
Murrow said as I pushed peas around my plate.
If you want an optimist, I'm not the best guy to be talking to.

I smashed a couple of peas flat. The person I needed to talk to, of course, was Dalia. Back in Boston, we sat together at lunch every day, discussing our post–junior high plans. Dalia wanted to be a famous novelist. “Crazy people make the best
arteests
!” she liked to say. “You're not crazy,” I'd tell her, but I knew she didn't believe me.

I never expected to have a friend like Dalia at Mariana, but I also didn't anticipate the school's draconian enforcement of community bonding. To avoid self-segregation, students are assigned to lunch tables composed of various ages, races, and social groups. An upperclassman presides over us, leading exercises in table togetherness. On days like this one, feeling as unsociable as I did, I only wanted to read the
New York Times
with my mashed potatoes, but on the first day of school, my table leader had pointed at me in front of the entire table. “No news for you!” he'd proclaimed with an imperial air.