فصل 04

4

In her quest to see that her children were educated, my mom drove us more than a hundred miles north, to the nearest big city, Las Vegas, so we could take our PSATs, SATs, and ACTs. She joined the school board, rallied teachers, and demanded that AP classes be added to the curriculum. She was a phenom: she took it upon herself to transform the Kingman school system, and she did. Suddenly there was a feeling in our high school that the two mountain ranges that bounded the town no longer defined the horizon: it was what lay beyond them.

Senior year, my close friend Leo, our salutatorian and the poorest kid I knew, was advised by the school guidance counselor, “You’re smart—you should join the army.”

He told me about it afterward. “Fuck that,” he said. “If you’re going to Harvard, or Yale, or Stanford, then I am, too.”

I don’t know if I was happier when I got into Stanford or when Leo got into Yale.

Summer passed, and since Stanford began classes a month later than every other school, all of my friends scattered, leaving me behind. Most afternoons, I’d trek into the desert alone and nap and think until my girlfriend, Abigail, got off her shift at Kingman’s lone coffee shop. The desert offered a shortcut, through the mountains and down into town, and hiking was more fun than driving. Abigail was in her early twenties, a student at Scripps College who, wanting to avoid loans, was taking a semester off to stockpile tuition money. I was taken with her worldliness, the sense that she knew secrets one only learned at college—she had studied psychology!—and we’d often meet as she got off work. She was a harbinger of the sub rosa, the new world awaiting me in just a few weeks. One afternoon, I woke from my nap, looked up, and saw vultures circling, mistaking me for carrion. I checked my watch; it was almost three. I was going to be late. I dusted off my jeans and jogged the rest of the way through the desert, until sand gave way to pavement, the first buildings appeared, and I rounded the corner to find Abigail, broom in hand, sweeping the coffee shop deck.

“I already cleaned the espresso machine,” she said, “so no iced latte for you today.”

The floors swept, we went inside. Abigail walked to the cash register and picked up a paperback she’d stashed there. “Here,” she said, tossing it at me. “You should read this. You’re always reading such high-culture crap—why don’t you try something lowbrow for once?”

It was a five-hundred-page novel called Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven. I took it home and read it in a day. It wasn’t high culture. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t. However, it did make the throwaway assumption that the mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naïve understanding of the world. Of course, it must be true—what were our brains doing, otherwise? Though we had free will, we were also biological organisms—the brain was an organ, subject to all the laws of physics, too! Literature provided a rich account of human meaning; the brain, then, was the machinery that somehow enabled it. It seemed like magic. That night, in my room, I opened up my red Stanford course catalog, which I had read through dozens of times, and grabbed a highlighter. In addition to all the literature classes I had marked, I began looking in biology and neuroscience as well.