He lit a cigarette as he climbed the stairs to his dorm room, not looking back to see if Paul would follow him. Paul thought about leaving until Julian’s ill temper had ebbed; he decided, as always, that there was more honor and loyalty in enduring it.
Julian didn’t slam the door behind him, which was the only evidence of an invitation. Paul lingered in the doorway while Julian picked up an ashtray and threw himself onto the bed. He crossed his booted ankles on the quilt and blew a mouthful of smoke at the ceiling.
“If I have to deal with one more person today, I’ll fucking kill myself.”
Paul almost snapped at him, but he didn’t want to explain why the threat made him feel sick. Instead he said, very quietly, “I can leave.”
“Don’t be dumb,” said Julian, “you don’t count.”
That stirred something inside him, something ill-defined but instantly calming.
Paul sidled inside and shut the door. Julian watched impassively before rolling to one side to ash his cigarette. Paul pocketed his glasses and sat on the bed, still a little wary, but Julian pulled him down by the back of his shirt.
“I don’t feel like getting lunch after all,” Julian said. If he was sorry, he didn’t sound it. He wrapped one arm around Paul’s neck and held him in place.
“It’s fine,” said Paul. “I’m not that hungry.”
They lay like that for a long while, Julian watching the ceiling, Paul watching him. He tried to pour his consciousness only into the parts of his body that Julian touched. He wanted to forget everything but the way Julian’s blood ran a little hotter than his own, how the warmth of him pooled just below his rib cage and at the hollow of his throat.
“I don’t understand why you haven’t tried it yet,” Julian said carelessly. He glanced at Paul’s mouth, so fleetingly that he might have imagined it. “I wouldn’t stop you, if that’s what you’re worried about. You could do anything to me and I’d let you.”
It didn’t surprise him that Julian had asked, but he still felt a shock of shame—not at the desire itself, but at the fact that Julian could see him. He wasn’t ready to be seen, not yet. He hadn’t done anything to earn it.
“It just—” He started from the beginning, trying to steady his stammer. “It feels like it would be disrespectful.”
“I don’t need you to treat me respectfully. I’m not made of glass.”
When Paul still didn’t move, Julian sighed and turned his gaze back toward the ceiling.
“Tell me you love me, at least,” he said quietly. “Please. I need to know somebody does.”
When Paul shut his eyes, he could pretend someone else was speaking. Someone he hadn’t become yet; someone who deserved to speak.
“I love you,” he said, and once he’d spoken, the words took hold of his tongue like a prayer. Julian pulled him nearer, but he didn’t dare open his eyes. I love you. I love you. I love you.
7.
Their classmates never seemed to find the film clips troubling. Distasteful, perhaps, in the same way as a flayed specimen or a foul chemical smell. When Paul couldn’t stand to look, he watched the others instead, their faces lit moon-white by the screen. He’d kept an eye on the girl from Physics a few weeks ago, while the class watched Japanese children wither slowly from cancer in unforgiving black and white. Here was her discipline’s crowning achievement, mirrored in the lenses of her glasses so he couldn’t quite see her eyes. He should have seen shame in her face, but it wasn’t there. All he saw was distant revulsion.
His classmates’ faces were the same today—politely repelled, with no evidence of anything so unscientific as an emotion. Today’s clip wasn’t as showy as some of the others had been. There was no gore, no disfiguration, no animal vivisection in service of some “higher purpose.” But when Paul watched it too closely, he could hardly stand to keep his eyes open.
The experiment was notorious; Paul hadn’t heard of it, but Julian had. It was a dire practical joke, played decades ago on unsuspecting Yale boys who still wore suits to class. They weren’t the subjects, the researchers claimed—they were just helping, seeing if they could help a fake subject at the other end of an intercom pass a quiz by punishing him whenever he got an answer wrong. A little zap of electricity, barely painful, until they were told to turn up the voltage notch by notch and the victim begged them to stop.
The victim’s pain wasn’t real, of course, but the subjects thought it was. The subjects squirmed, giggled with alarm, occasionally even asked the researchers whether this was really all right. But they didn’t stop. Even when the dial said the voltage had edged from painful into dangerous; even when the unseen victim’s pleas faded away, and he stopped responding at all. They didn’t question it, because the researchers wore white coats and spoke with authority, and that meant they must know what they were doing.
The subjects weren’t cruel people, the narration claimed. They just didn’t think.
Before the film played, Julian had told Strauss it was the reason he’d chosen to study social psychology. Paul felt an unwanted surge of fury toward him now for having the capacity to be fascinated—for the way Julian could look at the truth, even feel it, without it overwhelming him.
The light afterward was a shock. Strauss lifted the projection screen with a clatter; behind it on the blackboard, the milgram experiment had been scrawled large.
Strauss rested his hands on his hips before speaking. The chalk left silver shadows on his clothes.
“Mr. Fromme,” he said, “perhaps you can get us started. What was so controversial about this experiment?”
Paul didn’t even parse the question at first, because it was inconceivable that Strauss wanted them to argue about the mechanics of the experiment itself. It missed the point so decisively that it felt deliberate.
“What was controversial about it? Honestly, the fact that nobody liked the results,” Julian said. “I mean, they dress it up in a lot of hand-wringing about informed consent and whether the subjects experienced undue distress and all that. But I think if the findings had made us feel good about ourselves, nobody would care one way or the other about the methodology.”
“Oh, come on, we spend half this class talking about how science has a responsibility to treat ‘the human variable’ with kid gloves,” said the girl from Physics. “But when it’s your discipline, suddenly it’s hand-wringing.”
“The difference is, the human variable chose its own outcome this time. The experiment was about the decisions the subjects would make—they made them under false pretenses, sure, but they made them of their own free will. If they got their feelings hurt because they learned they were Eichmanns waiting for a Hitler, that’s on them.”
“In other words, it’s all right to mess with their heads because they had it coming,” Brady interjected. “It’s a nasty trap to spring, and I don’t even think you can make broad inferences from it—it’s such an artificial scenario, so to extrapolate from it into real-life applications . . .”
“And if there’s really no way to gather that data without inflicting that kind of distress on the subjects, even if the data were informative,” the girl went on, “I don’t see how it’s even worth it to try.”