The Gibberish Solution continued...
Teaching Beardsley's lab section felt weird, because I was now grading the very papers I had only a year earlier paid a Phd candidate in engineering a total of $1000 dollars to write for me. The undergrads talked with one another, as, in pairs, Greg -- the other teaching assistant -- and I watched them as they in turn watched and every few minutes jotted down the repetitive doings of the hungry mice. Any and all student questions were referred to Greg. There were twenty students partnered up, two to each caged mouse. The mice, doped up on morphine, intermittently pawed at a lever on the side of their cage, an action which could or could not deliver a food pellet into the receptacle. The pellets as they dropped or failed to drop down the hatch did so, at least to the mice's ears and taste buds, irregularly and unpredictably so as to reflect negative or positive reinforcements and punishments only we savvy humans were supposed to understand. Usually, pawing the lever got the mouse nothing, and these absences conditioned it as much as receiving the pellets did. Using the data collected at the lab, the students would then write papers, which included graphs, charts and applied statistics, to explain the significance of the interval patterns -- roughly, the conditioning process, which was the interrelationship between the frequency with which the pellets were delivered and the number of times the hungry mouse pawed at the lever for them.
It was fun to look official, and there were some cute girls in class. Of course I could never look too long -- I was about to turn 30, and though they were mostly Juniors and Seniors, the younger ones had just been teenagers a few years before. And of course there was a strict "hands off" rule about the grad students not being allowed to molest the undergrads, and I assumed in some way that that included not staring too terribly long at them.
If the students for whatever reason got bored, I would hear a derogatory comment or two about Beardsley, and these were nice moments. They were what made life interesting. I felt as thankful for this as I'd been when I had had Beardsley as an undergrad and his antics overshot themselves - like when he would become tearfully poetic about the angle at which certain breeds of dogs ran down the slopes of hills, or once when, becoming so moved by recounting Trotsky's feat of having learnt and mastered Spanish in just one night, he then dissolved into sentimental tears -- and my classmates started groaning or looking impatient. Now, as a teaching assistant with an unofficial minor in gibberish, I thought, shit, it's about time somebody said something about this prick; to me it was always like Beardsley had made it rain all the time and everybody was acting as if the sun was still out. So of course I was grateful to my students -- especially the more scantily clad variety of the female persuasion -- who would voice my feelings. I would nod to myself with a grave air of significance when they complained about him, letting them know in this cowardly way that they weren't alone in their objections, and made a note to give them a more favorable score on the papers I was scarcely competent to grade anyway.
"I wonder why," one of the girls said one day, "Beardsley thinks he can keep calling us stupid in class like this. Is he going to retire or something after this semester?"
"I'm going to give him a terrible evaluation," a second girl said.
"Like anyone cares, those evaluations are so gay," a third girl called out from across the room. "I bet students have been shitting on his evaluations for years. He's too much of a big-shot to care or for anybody to do anything about him."
"I think he's trying to train us, like we're an experiment," the first girl said, "or he wants to make us try harder."
"He's bringing out the best in us," the third girl said with feigned conviction as she stared wide-eyed at her mouse, then snorted and began to laugh.
As usual, when this type of conversation took place, I was nodding in agreement with the students' words. Then the unhappy Greg lifted his eyes from whatever else had been bothering him and slowly approached our corner of the lab.
"Beardsley is extremely respected in his field," he said with icy disapproval. As he ended the sentence, I could hear the faint click of a lever, and the abrupt snap before the food pellet dropped down and rolled a few times in the receptacle. Things got quiet; I bit my lip. I couldn't challenge Greg, nor, for that matter, should I tacitly encourage the undergrads to make fun of a senior professor. If I vocally took their side, Greg, who knew about some of my gibberish work with Beardsley, might go to him and question my intentions. There was the click of a lever, then silence. No reinforcement for that mouse. Then two more clicks, three, then a sudden barrage of clicks that seemed to come from all the cages at once, as if the less stupid mice had been listening to the humans talking and finally realized that the conversation had now ended. More levers were hit, as, from different cages in the room, there were the hollow sounds of pellets dropping into the tiny tin receptacles. It was like being in the slots section of a gambling Casino, except without all the other stimuli.
When, less than 10 minutes later, class having ended and I learned about my fateful C- on the latest Statistics exam, the world became a scary place. I stood in horror, looking at the coded number assigned to my name that was pasted up on the wall outside Benjamin's office. My grade stood out like a malignant tumor in the healthy lung tissue of the low As and high Bs of the other students.
I wobbled down to the first floor. When I saw the cheap light making itself felt on the tiles beneath the crack of Beardsley's office door, I went to my office and grabbed the small digital recorder I had used years ago to tape Biology lectures. I pressed the record button, put the small gadget in my slacks pocket and walked into Beardsley's office, telling him despairingly about my C-. Looking at him sitting there blankly behind his desk, I was reminded that since January when Benjamin's statistics class had begun, Beardsley's beard had for some reason increasingly begun to serve as a metonym for all things statistical; the worse things got for me with statistics, the more furiously Beardsley's beard seemed to sit on his face. He jolted slightly as I waited for him to respond to the news of my low grade, as if a lever had been pushed inside his head, and he opened his mouth as if to deliver the pellet.
But before he could speak I began talking frantically, as if trying to yell my C- away through words. I told him that I had a young undergrad girlfriend who was taking a lot of my time.
"What I like about her is her mischievousness," I blurted out, "even if she is ruining my life. She likes intellectuals, so of course that works out well… I… had an advantage there. Just yesterday she was on the bed completely naked, watching a TV show about crime scene investigation, so I came into the bedroom with a pair of tweezers, saying that I needed to gather evidence. 'If you ever leave me,' I told her, 'I'll find you: I'm going to put your pube in a love database for criminals who have stolen my heart.' So I took the tweezers and tore out one of her pubic hairs. She really screamed. She didn't think I would do it, which is why she had just continued lying there, but after a few minutes, after hitting me a few times, she did start to giggle. She's adorable! Try that with a 30 year old woman, she'll remember it for weeks!"
"Ha!" Beardsley said, becoming animated, as he only could after one of our sessions with the inmates. I didn't think even then that he believed the anecdote, but instead that maybe he enjoyed playing along.
"Well," he said, "think of her as a representation of the good things in life that can only be enhanced by obtaining an advanced degree in psychology. Think of your earning potential. There is your weakness in Statistics. God, there certainly is that. But there are other fish in the sea, um, other programs, other schools, if it comes to that."
He was being a bit evasive, but I could hardly fault him for that; it wasn't his job to shove his hand in my head and raise my IQ, as if that were as easy a process as pumping air into a tire. Nonetheless, he hadn't offered to intervene with Benjamin on my behalf. Because of his disbelief in the anecdote (which was a fiction), I thought his amused reply was deceitful and condescending, and this roused me to lie further.
"Having such a young girlfriend is interfering with my studies," I said, very loudly and mechanically. "The other day Millers was saying that toxins in food, medicine, and even drinking water are causing girls to reach puberty at outlandishly young ages. It made me think of this stunt with the tweezers and at what age I would stop doing it. I hate to say it, but though I would never sleep with a 17 year old girl -- which I guess would only be rape, anyway -- I wouldn't mind seeing one undress and lie down, and then maybe asking me to come over and pull out one of her pubic hairs… It would be like a violation that would be bad -- really, quite distasteful, but if she asked sincerely, still somewhat acceptable." I stopped here for a moment, as though I were an actor calculating a dramatic pause and pretending to reflect on what had just been said -- which was, in fact, exactly what I found myself doing, and not without some surprise. "Maybe it's all this stress I am under!" I burst out, "I am starting to have weird thoughts! I don't think being around all these nut jobs for our work, or me copying them at home with all this aggressive chatter is helping either. Do you ever have weird thoughts?"
Beardsley was looking at me with disgust. I tapped the digital recorder in my pocket hopefully, maliciously. "You need to get your head back in the game," he said severely. "We both know," he continued critically, "that impulse control is especially interesting for psychologists who are looking at patients who get angry and simply can't find their words -- who stupidly, and not with true malice, resort to violence or empty deception. I have a conviction that an internal word salad is involved not just with how many crimes are committed - but that the spontaneous gibberish we have been teasing out is also involved with issues of impulse control that roundly appertain to all human interaction. We are all more similar to prisoners and mental patients than we care to admit. I do wonder about the ethics involved when we just casually trot on through the facilities with our phony consent documentation, but I trust, just by you calling these poor souls 'nut jobs' and presenting me with this unseemly excuse, that you in particular have not been as negatively affected by it as you say. That is why I chose you as the only one to accompany me into the forensic units in particular. You are wildly self-absorbed. I didn't feel you would be as sensitive to other peoples' suffering, and I suspected you would drop or fail out of the program anyway."
Suddenly I felt a surge of electricity clamoring from the bottom of my spine, and I saw a spasm pass across Beardsley's face as well. We were getting upset.
"But you'll always be welcome," Beardsley said, "with cats, as well, with cats. The oyster bait is probably there too." That was all he said, and I started to feel my leg shake with nervous anger.
Wobbly, I squirmed in the chair and began to get up to go. "Not yet!" I cried back. Thinking, suddenly, that the shock to my lower back had somehow been caused by the recorder, I reached in my pocket as non-conspicuously as I could and turned it off. The shocking sensation subsided.
"Wait," Beardsley ordered. "I want you to understand what is at stake -- we aren't dealing with language just on the basis of human interaction anymore. We have become a metaphysical consideration. I want you to meet me at the engineering campus tonight at 10:00. Then you can see what we are dealing with. You have been a great help to me. You need to see how important our work is and that you can't let yourself get distracted."
When he said that, I knew it was over with me academically -- the academic hole of a C- and the work lying ahead was one that was too deep; I needed someone to talk to Benjamin then and there!
But though I didn't want to go and meet Beardsley after having reported him to the dean of studies and the chair of Sociology half an hour later, I knew I would be forever curious if I didn't find out what he'd been talking about. When I got to the energy resources building that night, I noticed that Beardsley looked smug -- maybe proud is a better word for it. We walked down a narrow path between the library and an annex building for coal research until we approached a relatively small power generator. We walked by it, and Beardsley pointed at a wall constructed of vertically piled cinderblocks. We hesitantly walked around it. I was surprised to see that his body lurched back two or three times toward the small generator, his thighs and lower abdomen lifted up slightly and skidding erratically, and because of this he walked sideways and haltingly, so as to keep his balance with the foot farthest away from the generator.