Free Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) by Walter Kirn

the Dark One.”
    “You’re sure on that?”
    “Read Genesis. Read Steppenwolf . You want to know what, Walter?”
    “I do.”
    “I think you’re one of His chosen. His elect. That’s why you speak so well. He’s in your brain.”
    I started avoiding Kelly after that. Her notion that I had a supernatural patron obliged me to dazzle her, I felt, to keep the flourishes and wonders coming. It was too much to live up to. And I was tiring of church, tiring of arranging rides to services and of having to cover my parents’ absences with lies about health emergencies and such. I started spending more Sundays on the farm, directing my speeches on chastity and honor to our team of hulking Belgian mares. Sometimes, when they stamped their anvil feet, shivering the floorboards of their stalls, or loosed a long rolling shudder of dense muscle along their glossy flanks, I imagined they were responding to my eloquence. There was something at work in me, something strong and strange, and I wondered if Kelly’s theory wasn’t right. My father’s behavior over the past year had shown me that people’s wills can be invaded by inexplicable forces and agencies. I decided it might be time that I acknowledged them. Angels or devils? I didn’t really care. I wanted them on my side, that’s all I knew.
    A t the beginning of my tenth-grade year a large cardboard box marked FRAGILE arrived at school. It was brought to the classroom of Mr. Ka, our fussy Korean accounting instructor, and opened with razor blades by a pair of science teachers who behaved like archaeologists breaking the seal on an Egyptian tomb. After folding back the box’s lid and peering inside for a few moments as though considering how best to proceed, they gingerly removed its contents: a slightly smaller box, this one made of Styrofoam. Mr. Ka’s tense face drew tighter still as the razor blades were deployed again, but when the precious cargo was finally liberated, swept clean of foam crumbs and placed upon his desk, he beamed like a kid who’d asked Santa for a sled and been given a working flying saucer.
    The thing was a computer—the first one designed for use by average people, according to Mr. Ka. He said that few schools of our size, or any size, were fortunate enough to own one yet, meaning that we, his students, would get a “major head start on the future” when we became familiar with the device. And we shouldn’t be fooled by its modest size, he said. Inside this machine lay the power of a thousand, maybe ten thousand pocket calculators. Inside this machine was the potential to generate telephone directories for America’s ten most populous cities. Inside this machine were lucrative careers for everybody in this room.
    “So tomorrow,” he said, “we get started on tomorrow.”
    It was a slow start; so slow it wasn’t a start. Our first problem—and our last one, it turned out; indeed, our only one—was philosophical. How could we know if the thing was working properly before we knew how it worked or how to work it? We read our computer books, hunting for the answers, searching for clues as to what the answers might look like, hunting for terms and phrases and sentences comprehensible to people who didn’t already know the answers. We read the books individually and silently, meaning that there was no way to determine who among us was just pretending to read them in the hope that others would actually read them and explain their findings to the rest of us. I was one of the real readers at first, but when I realized I wasn’t making headway, I became one of the simulated readers. By scratching my chin and glancing off into space and generally appearing vexed and baffled, I labored to make my act convincing, which I felt was my duty to anyone still persevering toward our goal. My feigned struggles might give them heart, or shame them out of quitting. Either way, the chances might increase that someday someone in Mr. Ka’s computer class