Strauss was busy making notes on the chalkboard. The room had turned decisively against Julian. Several students were nodding along; others still wore their looks of mild disgust, as if the experiment was just another film-strip horror that had failed to touch them.
Under the accumulated weight of their indifference, something inside him collapsed.
“It is worth it.”
Paul’s voice trembled, but it still left silence in its wake.
“You don’t get to complain about a test being a ‘trap’ when it’s your own decisions that cause you to fail it.” His stammer was rising to the surface, but he didn’t care. “It’s—the experiment proves that people only respond to the authority, they have no sense of morality themselves—we need to know that, science needs to know that. I don’t care how upset they got about learning what they were.”
“Mr. Fleischer certainly isn’t alone,” said Strauss quickly, as if to smooth things over before they got out of hand, “in finding the ethical implications of the results themselves disturbing—”
“Hold on now,” Brady said, affronted but calm, holding up his hands as if in self-defense. “At the end of the day, these are ordinary people. It’s natural to trust authority, so of course most people do. This experiment was predicated on abusing that trust. Drawing the worst imaginable conclusions about the subjects, based solely on an extreme and contrived situation that put them under immense stress—”
“Crying crocodile tears afterwards about the atrocities you commit isn’t morally exculpatory.” Red flooded the edges of Paul’s vision. He could feel his pulse in his teeth. “Tell me what makes them different from every Nazi who ‘just followed orders’ and only felt bad about it after the fact. Don’t you dare ask me to fucking pity them.”
The high wave of adrenaline swelled through him and then receded into the shallows.
In the ringing quiet, the others all stared. Some were irritated, others on the verge of nervous laughter, but none showed any sign of comprehension. All they could see was the rule he had broken, one of the innumerable unwritten boundaries of politeness designed to protect them.
Only Strauss was grim with compassion, as if he understood too well for his own comfort. His hands reminded Paul sharply of his father’s—fine dark hairs, knuckles thickened by early-stage arthritis. It was Strauss, in the end, whose presence Paul couldn’t bear any longer.
He didn’t speak; he wasn’t sure he could. He retreated up the lecture hall steps as quickly as he could without running. He realized too late that he’d left his belongings at his desk, but he refused to turn back. The hallway was deserted. Paul ducked into the bathroom—empty, cold, lit by fluorescence so that every detail screamed. He filled his hands with frigid water and cradled his face and throat, then lifted his glasses to splash another handful over his eyes.
Slowly, Paul turned off the faucet. There was a strange sound in the room, rapid and rhythmic, that Paul thought at first must be coming from a faulty pipe. It took him a long time to recognize it as his own breathing. His reflection looked inhuman and barely familiar.
He didn’t see Julian follow him into the washroom; he just wicked into being like a ghost. He leaned against the counter, already dressed to leave, Paul’s knapsack and coat draped over one arm. The harsh light clarified the filaments of artery in the whites of Julian’s eyes.
“I’ve had all the bourgeois apologetics I can stomach for one day, I think,” said Julian. “We can go once you’re ready.”
“Where are we going?” Paul asked, but Julian only shrugged. Paul tried to scrutinize his reflection, but he could hardly stand to meet his own eyes. “Do I look normal? I can’t tell if I look normal.”
“You never do,” said Julian dismissively. “Thank god for it.”
“You know what I mean, though, do I look—you know—”
Julian handed him his coat, gentle and impatient in equal measure.
“You’re fine. Not that you need to care. Think for a second about what ‘normal’ means.”
They were headed to the river; that was all either of them bothered to know. Paul waited in the snow while Julian conned a liquor store clerk out of a bottle of bourbon. It shouldn’t have worked, but even from the other side of the plate glass it was a convincing pantomime—Julian searching his wallet for a nonexistent driver’s license, all apologies and sheepish smiles, until it yielded an Okay, just this once. “You can get away with anything,” Julian had told him beforehand, “as long as you act like an authority on the truth.” It sickened Paul a little to watch Julian prove this right.
“So what happened after I left?”
They were passing the bottle between them as they walked, as if there were no chance anyone might notice them, as if they were the authority on whether or not they were visible. There was a hum of unease in Paul’s body, but he didn’t think it was from the drink. He couldn’t remember his heartbeat slowing since they left.
“Don’t pay attention to them,” said Julian bitterly. “I mean it. You use other people’s useless fucking opinions as an excuse to hate yourself—”
“I don’t care what they think. I just need to know whether I have to drop the class.”
Julian considered this around a mouthful of alcohol. Then he swallowed hard and shrugged. It was a superficially careless gesture, but Paul recognized it as the first gust at the head of a hurricane—Julian’s face was the mask of vibrant serenity that always marked his cruelest whims.
“It’s a very complex case,” he said, but it was no longer him speaking. His body language was changing; his gestures became less expansive, emphatic but constrained, hands held awkwardly, as if he had been an ungainly child long ago and had never quite forgotten it. “There is, as you can imagine, a fair bit of historical resonance, some still very recent—”
“Stop that.”
“—was intended, certainly, to provoke a discussion, and it’s natural for emotions to run high.” Julian brought his free hand to his face, as if to push a pair of wire-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. There was no trace of him left; he’d even borrowed Strauss’s voice, dropping from tenor to baritone as if the shape of his throat had changed. “We cannot fault any of our colleagues for responding to the real-world implications—”
“Stop it,” Paul pleaded. “I mean it. It’s horrible—”
“If you can’t be objective, the least you can do is recognize your own bias.” Julian had shifted to Brady’s self-satisfaction and blunt gestures as easily as donning a coat. “Put in the effort to gain some distance, or recuse yourself before you hurt your argument by—”
“I’ll knock your teeth in if you don’t stop.” Paul didn’t know whether he was talking to Julian or to the simulacrum of Brady, and he didn’t care. “I mean it, I swear to god—”
It was over as suddenly as it had begun. Julian relaxed back into his own body and flashed Paul a wide showman’s grin.
“Not bad, right? That’s my party trick—five minutes of observation, and I can do anyone. I do a great one of my dad. His underlings all love it, and he can’t stand it.”