Authors: Eugene Burdick
The Ninth Wave (11 page)
From the start it was a losing battle for Mardikan. Mike began to read
everything. He read anthropology, sociology, psychology, mathematics,
philosophy, ethics, history and logic. He stole books from the library,
bought used books in Palo Alto, borrowed books and bought still more
books. Some books he glanced at, threw under his bed and never opened
again. Some books he read twice. A few books he read over and over,
marking the pages, scribbling in the margins. Mike's eyes became red from
reading and he was quite unaware of it. The cottage began to overflow
with books. They spilled off the tables, squashed the salami skins into
the rug; they slid under the bed and gathered dust; they were stacked
under the washbasin and were covered with water stains.
"I thought you were going to get a job hashing," Hank said in the middle
of the year.
"Sure, I was, but I don't have time now," Mike said. "I've got too much
to read. No time to work."
"Why do you want to prove that Mardikan was wrong about medieval
society?" Hank asked. "You keep after him like it was a battle."
"Battle?" Mike looked up with surprise. "You're crazy. I don't give
a damn about Mardikan. Also I don't care about the medieval society
argument any more. I'm reading other things."
"What other things?"
"Lots of things. History, sociology, just about everything. I just
realized this year that there was something in books except fiction. I
never thought before that the people who wrote all those books believed
them; that they studied history or people or situations and then tried
to write about them in books. I thought they invented it all out of
their heads."
"Is it pretty good stuff?" Hank asked cautiously.
Mike looked up and thought for a moment. He shook his head.
"Most of it is crap. Real crap. Every once in a while one of them puts
down something honestly. It sounds hard and real. Then he takes a look
at it, realizes how grim it sounds and rushes to cover it over with a
bunch of crazy interpretations and explanations. Some of them never say
anything real. They just write. Like I said, most of it is crap."
As they talked, Hank realized that Mike really did not see that he was
engaged in a battle with Mardikan. Actually he was hardly aware that
Mardikan existed. The Armenian was just someone on whom he could try
his ideas and reading. But everyone else saw it as a battle. Students
from other sections began to drop into Mardikan's section and sometimes
the room was overcrowded. Also graduate students started to come to the
section meetings.
The section became fabled around the campus. The pattern of the
section became set. Every day Mardikan walked in, leaned against the
blackboard and looked around the room. Mike's hand went up in the air.
Mardikan called on him and the struggle commenced. Mike brought old
and obscure books to class; he quoted from notes; he referred to
little-known periodicals; he challenged the authority of great and
well-known historians and discovered almost anonymous sociologists and
supported their interpretations. The class was confused, but they were
delighted. At the end of every hour Mardikan came away from the board
with a slight moist sound and left the glistening mark of his nervousness
on the hard black material.
Mardikan capitulated in the middle of the third quarter. They were
discussing anarchism and Mardikan was defending the viewpoint expounded
in the textbook which had been issued to the class.
"The textbook is wrong when it states that anarchists are optimistic
about human nature," Mike said. "The anarchists are as pessimistic about
human nature as Spencer or Malthus or Adam Smith. They . . . "
"That is not the generally accepted view," Mardikan said. He was tensed
against the blackboard, his hands held rigidly in front of his waist,
the fingers spread defensively. He fought against Mike's words, the way a
small overtrained terrier will fight against a tough mongrel. "Generally
there is a view . . .
"A general view that is held by people who have not read the anarchists,"
Mike said. The class took a sudden breath. Mike picked up a small bound
copy of a newspaper. "Right here it says something that is right on
the nose."
"What are you quoting from?" Mardikan asked.
"The newspaper put out by the Society of Egoists," Mike said.
"All right, Mr. Freesmith. There is no need to read from it," Mardikan
said. He began to gather up the papers on the table in front of him. "That
is all for today."
He walked out the door, his shoulders slumped forward. He stumbled on
the door jamb, recovered and disappeared into the corridor. The class
got up silently and left.
Mardikan went to the chairman of the Department of History and asked to
talk with him.
"It's no use, sir," he said. "I can't keep up with Freesmith. I have
orals to study for, my wife is pregnant, I take time out for meals, I read
the daily newspapers. Freesmith doesn't do any of those things. He just
reads and he understands what he reads. Oh, I'm not sure he understands
what he reads, but he can use what he reads; he knows how to manipulate
it. I can't keep up with him. I want to drop out for a year and then
I'll pick up my studies again."
The chairman looked at Mardikan's fingers, at his tired face, at the dull
eyes and he told Mardikan that he thought the year's leave of absence
was a good idea.
In the summer vacation between their junior and senior years they went to
Santa Barbara and worked. They hoed beans, picked lemons, curried polo
ponies in Montecito, cleaned fish at a fish-canning factory and were bar
boys at a big hotel during Fiesta. They wound up the summer with eighty
dollars in cash, a half case of bonded whisky they had stolen from the
hotel, two cashmere sweaters they found in the lockerroom at the polo
grounds, a pair of hand-tooled shoes that an Englishman had placed outside
his hotel door not knowing that they would fit Mike, and a case of canned
tuna which was a gift from the owner of the fish-canning factory.
When they got back to the cottage at Stanford, Mike looked at it as if he
were seeing it for the first time. He looked at the heaps of dusty books,
the bits of food on the floor. He noticed a stream of ants flowing in and
out of an old box of crackers, each ant waving a tiny shred of cracker
above its head. He noticed that the clothes hanging from hooks needed
cleaning and he wondered how long they had been that way.
Mike got the cigar box out and counted the money. There was less than
a hundred dollars.
"O.K.," Mike said, almost as if he were talking to himself.
"O.K. what?" Hank asked.
"O.K., I'm going to go to law school," Mike said. "I just made up
my mind."
"Why law school?" Hank asked.
Mike looked at Hank and for the first time his eyes shifted away and
Hank saw a protective, private look cross Mike's face.
"Why not?" Mike asked.
"I don't give a damn what you do. I won't give you reasons why you
shouldn't go to law school. I just thought you might have some good
reasons for doing it."
"Maybe I do," Mike mused. "Just maybe I do. Anyway what we've got to
worry about now is financing me through law school and you through
medical school. What are you going to do about finances?"
"Well, if my grades don't drop, they tell me I'll get a scholarship which
will take care of the tuition," Hank said. "And I'll keep working in the
bakery. It doesn't cut into my studies. I've even worked out some wooden
braces on the wrapping machine so that I only have to load it with paper
every forty-five minutes. I'm all set. What about you?"
"I should get a hashing job, but it takes too much time," Mike said. "I
still have a lot of reading I have to do and I don't have much time; I
can't take a hashing job."
"What'll you do? Don't kid yourself, Mike. You can't get through law school
like this. You'll be up against competition. Most of your competition won't
be working on the outside either. You have to get a job, but if it takes
too much time you'd better give up law school until you've got some money
saved."
"Christ, I'll worry about law school when I get to it," Mike said. "Right
now I'm worrying about this year; what I'm going to eat, how often, and
how? Five minutes after that I'll start to worry about getting through
law school."
Something flitted through Mike's mind; elusive, vague, suggestive
somehow of a cashmere sweater and a look of well-being. He could not
fasten it down.
"Maybe you could get a job at the bakery," Hank said. "They've been
getting more business and they may put on another person on the wrapping
machine."
The impressions going through Mike's mind slipped together and in a
quick moment of recollection a name crossed his mind: Connie Burton. She
was the girl who had been in the experiment. She had worn a cashmere
sweater. Somehow she looked expensive, groomed, as if she had money. Mike
made up his mind.
"Thanks,, Hank, but I think I'll try a few other things first," Mike
said. "O.K.?"
"Sure. I don't care what you do, just so you do something."
Mike looked around at the room again; the books, the bits of smeared
food, the dust. He liked it. The cottage had been a good place. Idly
he put his foot out and blocked the passage of one of the streams of
ants. They hesitated, milled in microscopic confusion, waved their bits of
cracker in the air. Then cautiously they began to move around his foot,
following in the general direction indicated by a few fast-scurrying
scouts. Mike raised his foot and slapped it down directly on a cluster
of the ants. He stood up.
"I'll do something," he said. "I don't know what, but it'll be something."
CHAPTER 7
Young Love
Mile looked up Connie Burton's phone number in the University directory
and called her. At first she said that she did not remember him, but
then he reminded her of the experiment. He talked to her for fifteen
minutes and then asked her for a date. She hesitated and accepted.
He borrowed a car and took her out to Rossotti's beer garden back in the
Stanford foothills. Mike bought two quarts of Acme beer, four hard-boiled
eggs and a bag of potato chips and they carried them out to the tables
alongside the stream. It was late afternoon and the beige-colored hills
were turning a light pink. In the meadow a fraternity was having a pledge
party and the muted, beery shouts floated over the live oaks and were
finally lost in the sound of the stream.
Connie told Mike she was from St. Helena. Her family owned a winery
there and she had gone East to prep school. She was studying sociology
and she wanted to go into social work or politics when she graduated.
"My folks think I'm an awful radial," Connie said. "I'm a New Dealer
and they think that's awful."
"My father thinks I'm pretty far gone too," Mike said.
"Why are parents so conservative?" Connie asked.
She peeled the shell off an egg, sprinkled it with salt. She bit into
it and smiled up at him with a little piece of yolk clinging to her chin.
"My father's not conservative," Mike said. "He thinks I'm awful because I'm
not out throwing up the barricades in the street or leading an insurrection
in Washington or joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain."
"Really?" Connie asked. She was not sure he was serious.
"Really."
Her eyes were suddenly respectful. She asked him some questions about
politics. He said he did not know the answers.
She's a good average girl in looks, Mike thought. Not too bright. Not
too dumb. Probably doesn't have many dates. She's got money though.
When they had finished the beer and eggs they walked over to the edge
of the stream. Mike threw one of the bottles out into the water and they
watched it float jerkily away, bumping against rocks and almost hanging
up on the grass that grew in the stream bed. It got colder and a mist
came off the stream in thin tendrils that dissolved quickly.
On the way back to the campus, Mike asked her for another date and she
accepted. She told him that she had a Mercury coupé and they could go
out in that if Mike didn't mind.
Mike took her out four times. The fifth time he took her to the cottage.
It was early in the evening and Hank was working at the bakery. Mike
had bought a gallon of port wine and it was resting on the table. He
had washed out the only two glasses in the cottage and dried them
off carefully with Kleenex and they were placed neatly beside the big
gallon bottle.
"This is a cute little place, Mike," Connie said when they walked in. "I
thought it would be real run down and dirty, but it's cute."
Mike unscrewed the cap on the wine and poured port into both of the
glasses. He handed Connie one. The dusty odor of the room was cut by
the heavy, sweet smell of the wine. Connie sat down in one of the chairs.
Mike studied her as they talked. She was attractive without being in the
least beautiful or unusual. She had regular features and her figure was
good. Her hair was the best thing about her. It had a sheen that came from
much brushing and it curled up slightly when it reached her shoulders.
Connie tasted the wine and wrinkled her nose.
"I don't like wine very much," she said. "We have so much of it at home."
"I've got some whisky," Mike said.
He reached under the bed and pulled out the half case of Old Taylor they
had stolen from the hotel. He opened a bottle and poured two inches of
whisky into Connie's glass and added some water from the tap.
She took the glass and swallowed half of it in one gulp. At once her
mouth narrowed and she blew softly. Her eyes watered and she fidgeted
with the handkerchief in her hand. She smiled thinly.
Mike waited until she had had two drinks and then he changed the
conversation.
"I understand that you're one of the big liberals on campus," he said.
"What do you mean by liberal?" Connie asked.
"Big interest in the Young Democrats, take subscriptions to 'PM' and
'The New Republic,' leader in the drive to get Negroes admitted to
Stanford. That sort of thing."
"If that's being a liberal, I guess I'm a liberal."
"Why are you interested in all that stuff?" Mike asked.
"Oh, it's hard to say just right out," Connie said and she sipped at
her drink. "I believe in economic and social justice and so I try to
help those people that can't help themselves."
everything. He read anthropology, sociology, psychology, mathematics,
philosophy, ethics, history and logic. He stole books from the library,
bought used books in Palo Alto, borrowed books and bought still more
books. Some books he glanced at, threw under his bed and never opened
again. Some books he read twice. A few books he read over and over,
marking the pages, scribbling in the margins. Mike's eyes became red from
reading and he was quite unaware of it. The cottage began to overflow
with books. They spilled off the tables, squashed the salami skins into
the rug; they slid under the bed and gathered dust; they were stacked
under the washbasin and were covered with water stains.
"I thought you were going to get a job hashing," Hank said in the middle
of the year.
"Sure, I was, but I don't have time now," Mike said. "I've got too much
to read. No time to work."
"Why do you want to prove that Mardikan was wrong about medieval
society?" Hank asked. "You keep after him like it was a battle."
"Battle?" Mike looked up with surprise. "You're crazy. I don't give
a damn about Mardikan. Also I don't care about the medieval society
argument any more. I'm reading other things."
"What other things?"
"Lots of things. History, sociology, just about everything. I just
realized this year that there was something in books except fiction. I
never thought before that the people who wrote all those books believed
them; that they studied history or people or situations and then tried
to write about them in books. I thought they invented it all out of
their heads."
"Is it pretty good stuff?" Hank asked cautiously.
Mike looked up and thought for a moment. He shook his head.
"Most of it is crap. Real crap. Every once in a while one of them puts
down something honestly. It sounds hard and real. Then he takes a look
at it, realizes how grim it sounds and rushes to cover it over with a
bunch of crazy interpretations and explanations. Some of them never say
anything real. They just write. Like I said, most of it is crap."
As they talked, Hank realized that Mike really did not see that he was
engaged in a battle with Mardikan. Actually he was hardly aware that
Mardikan existed. The Armenian was just someone on whom he could try
his ideas and reading. But everyone else saw it as a battle. Students
from other sections began to drop into Mardikan's section and sometimes
the room was overcrowded. Also graduate students started to come to the
section meetings.
The section became fabled around the campus. The pattern of the
section became set. Every day Mardikan walked in, leaned against the
blackboard and looked around the room. Mike's hand went up in the air.
Mardikan called on him and the struggle commenced. Mike brought old
and obscure books to class; he quoted from notes; he referred to
little-known periodicals; he challenged the authority of great and
well-known historians and discovered almost anonymous sociologists and
supported their interpretations. The class was confused, but they were
delighted. At the end of every hour Mardikan came away from the board
with a slight moist sound and left the glistening mark of his nervousness
on the hard black material.
Mardikan capitulated in the middle of the third quarter. They were
discussing anarchism and Mardikan was defending the viewpoint expounded
in the textbook which had been issued to the class.
"The textbook is wrong when it states that anarchists are optimistic
about human nature," Mike said. "The anarchists are as pessimistic about
human nature as Spencer or Malthus or Adam Smith. They . . . "
"That is not the generally accepted view," Mardikan said. He was tensed
against the blackboard, his hands held rigidly in front of his waist,
the fingers spread defensively. He fought against Mike's words, the way a
small overtrained terrier will fight against a tough mongrel. "Generally
there is a view . . .
"A general view that is held by people who have not read the anarchists,"
Mike said. The class took a sudden breath. Mike picked up a small bound
copy of a newspaper. "Right here it says something that is right on
the nose."
"What are you quoting from?" Mardikan asked.
"The newspaper put out by the Society of Egoists," Mike said.
"All right, Mr. Freesmith. There is no need to read from it," Mardikan
said. He began to gather up the papers on the table in front of him. "That
is all for today."
He walked out the door, his shoulders slumped forward. He stumbled on
the door jamb, recovered and disappeared into the corridor. The class
got up silently and left.
Mardikan went to the chairman of the Department of History and asked to
talk with him.
"It's no use, sir," he said. "I can't keep up with Freesmith. I have
orals to study for, my wife is pregnant, I take time out for meals, I read
the daily newspapers. Freesmith doesn't do any of those things. He just
reads and he understands what he reads. Oh, I'm not sure he understands
what he reads, but he can use what he reads; he knows how to manipulate
it. I can't keep up with him. I want to drop out for a year and then
I'll pick up my studies again."
The chairman looked at Mardikan's fingers, at his tired face, at the dull
eyes and he told Mardikan that he thought the year's leave of absence
was a good idea.
In the summer vacation between their junior and senior years they went to
Santa Barbara and worked. They hoed beans, picked lemons, curried polo
ponies in Montecito, cleaned fish at a fish-canning factory and were bar
boys at a big hotel during Fiesta. They wound up the summer with eighty
dollars in cash, a half case of bonded whisky they had stolen from the
hotel, two cashmere sweaters they found in the lockerroom at the polo
grounds, a pair of hand-tooled shoes that an Englishman had placed outside
his hotel door not knowing that they would fit Mike, and a case of canned
tuna which was a gift from the owner of the fish-canning factory.
When they got back to the cottage at Stanford, Mike looked at it as if he
were seeing it for the first time. He looked at the heaps of dusty books,
the bits of food on the floor. He noticed a stream of ants flowing in and
out of an old box of crackers, each ant waving a tiny shred of cracker
above its head. He noticed that the clothes hanging from hooks needed
cleaning and he wondered how long they had been that way.
Mike got the cigar box out and counted the money. There was less than
a hundred dollars.
"O.K.," Mike said, almost as if he were talking to himself.
"O.K. what?" Hank asked.
"O.K., I'm going to go to law school," Mike said. "I just made up
my mind."
"Why law school?" Hank asked.
Mike looked at Hank and for the first time his eyes shifted away and
Hank saw a protective, private look cross Mike's face.
"Why not?" Mike asked.
"I don't give a damn what you do. I won't give you reasons why you
shouldn't go to law school. I just thought you might have some good
reasons for doing it."
"Maybe I do," Mike mused. "Just maybe I do. Anyway what we've got to
worry about now is financing me through law school and you through
medical school. What are you going to do about finances?"
"Well, if my grades don't drop, they tell me I'll get a scholarship which
will take care of the tuition," Hank said. "And I'll keep working in the
bakery. It doesn't cut into my studies. I've even worked out some wooden
braces on the wrapping machine so that I only have to load it with paper
every forty-five minutes. I'm all set. What about you?"
"I should get a hashing job, but it takes too much time," Mike said. "I
still have a lot of reading I have to do and I don't have much time; I
can't take a hashing job."
"What'll you do? Don't kid yourself, Mike. You can't get through law school
like this. You'll be up against competition. Most of your competition won't
be working on the outside either. You have to get a job, but if it takes
too much time you'd better give up law school until you've got some money
saved."
"Christ, I'll worry about law school when I get to it," Mike said. "Right
now I'm worrying about this year; what I'm going to eat, how often, and
how? Five minutes after that I'll start to worry about getting through
law school."
Something flitted through Mike's mind; elusive, vague, suggestive
somehow of a cashmere sweater and a look of well-being. He could not
fasten it down.
"Maybe you could get a job at the bakery," Hank said. "They've been
getting more business and they may put on another person on the wrapping
machine."
The impressions going through Mike's mind slipped together and in a
quick moment of recollection a name crossed his mind: Connie Burton. She
was the girl who had been in the experiment. She had worn a cashmere
sweater. Somehow she looked expensive, groomed, as if she had money. Mike
made up his mind.
"Thanks,, Hank, but I think I'll try a few other things first," Mike
said. "O.K.?"
"Sure. I don't care what you do, just so you do something."
Mike looked around at the room again; the books, the bits of smeared
food, the dust. He liked it. The cottage had been a good place. Idly
he put his foot out and blocked the passage of one of the streams of
ants. They hesitated, milled in microscopic confusion, waved their bits of
cracker in the air. Then cautiously they began to move around his foot,
following in the general direction indicated by a few fast-scurrying
scouts. Mike raised his foot and slapped it down directly on a cluster
of the ants. He stood up.
"I'll do something," he said. "I don't know what, but it'll be something."
CHAPTER 7
Young Love
Mile looked up Connie Burton's phone number in the University directory
and called her. At first she said that she did not remember him, but
then he reminded her of the experiment. He talked to her for fifteen
minutes and then asked her for a date. She hesitated and accepted.
He borrowed a car and took her out to Rossotti's beer garden back in the
Stanford foothills. Mike bought two quarts of Acme beer, four hard-boiled
eggs and a bag of potato chips and they carried them out to the tables
alongside the stream. It was late afternoon and the beige-colored hills
were turning a light pink. In the meadow a fraternity was having a pledge
party and the muted, beery shouts floated over the live oaks and were
finally lost in the sound of the stream.
Connie told Mike she was from St. Helena. Her family owned a winery
there and she had gone East to prep school. She was studying sociology
and she wanted to go into social work or politics when she graduated.
"My folks think I'm an awful radial," Connie said. "I'm a New Dealer
and they think that's awful."
"My father thinks I'm pretty far gone too," Mike said.
"Why are parents so conservative?" Connie asked.
She peeled the shell off an egg, sprinkled it with salt. She bit into
it and smiled up at him with a little piece of yolk clinging to her chin.
"My father's not conservative," Mike said. "He thinks I'm awful because I'm
not out throwing up the barricades in the street or leading an insurrection
in Washington or joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain."
"Really?" Connie asked. She was not sure he was serious.
"Really."
Her eyes were suddenly respectful. She asked him some questions about
politics. He said he did not know the answers.
She's a good average girl in looks, Mike thought. Not too bright. Not
too dumb. Probably doesn't have many dates. She's got money though.
When they had finished the beer and eggs they walked over to the edge
of the stream. Mike threw one of the bottles out into the water and they
watched it float jerkily away, bumping against rocks and almost hanging
up on the grass that grew in the stream bed. It got colder and a mist
came off the stream in thin tendrils that dissolved quickly.
On the way back to the campus, Mike asked her for another date and she
accepted. She told him that she had a Mercury coupé and they could go
out in that if Mike didn't mind.
Mike took her out four times. The fifth time he took her to the cottage.
It was early in the evening and Hank was working at the bakery. Mike
had bought a gallon of port wine and it was resting on the table. He
had washed out the only two glasses in the cottage and dried them
off carefully with Kleenex and they were placed neatly beside the big
gallon bottle.
"This is a cute little place, Mike," Connie said when they walked in. "I
thought it would be real run down and dirty, but it's cute."
Mike unscrewed the cap on the wine and poured port into both of the
glasses. He handed Connie one. The dusty odor of the room was cut by
the heavy, sweet smell of the wine. Connie sat down in one of the chairs.
Mike studied her as they talked. She was attractive without being in the
least beautiful or unusual. She had regular features and her figure was
good. Her hair was the best thing about her. It had a sheen that came from
much brushing and it curled up slightly when it reached her shoulders.
Connie tasted the wine and wrinkled her nose.
"I don't like wine very much," she said. "We have so much of it at home."
"I've got some whisky," Mike said.
He reached under the bed and pulled out the half case of Old Taylor they
had stolen from the hotel. He opened a bottle and poured two inches of
whisky into Connie's glass and added some water from the tap.
She took the glass and swallowed half of it in one gulp. At once her
mouth narrowed and she blew softly. Her eyes watered and she fidgeted
with the handkerchief in her hand. She smiled thinly.
Mike waited until she had had two drinks and then he changed the
conversation.
"I understand that you're one of the big liberals on campus," he said.
"What do you mean by liberal?" Connie asked.
"Big interest in the Young Democrats, take subscriptions to 'PM' and
'The New Republic,' leader in the drive to get Negroes admitted to
Stanford. That sort of thing."
"If that's being a liberal, I guess I'm a liberal."
"Why are you interested in all that stuff?" Mike asked.
"Oh, it's hard to say just right out," Connie said and she sipped at
her drink. "I believe in economic and social justice and so I try to
help those people that can't help themselves."
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