“Really? That’s hard to believe.”
“Why? ’Cause my tits are real?”
They both laughed.
Micah had arrived a couple of hours before. The room was large, and at that hour sunlight pooled through the circular window between their dressers. Even now, Cal remembered how golden the light had been at Plank. In the morning, the sun spread across the floor and his desk—he kept his neat, almost bare, whereas Micah’s was always covered with books and pens and dirty dishes. In Cleveland, Cal and his mother used blackout curtains, but at Plank the windows were naked, and he often woke at dawn even if he didn’t have to get up then to work the school’s small farm. A previous generation of Plankers had probably voted against drapes, in the same way they had rejected the Internet and the coed question, the gingham curtains burned in a bonfire one crisp winter night, the boys howling.
“I like the room,” Cal said, after they’d agreed who would sleep where. “I feel like I’m in a time machine.” What he meant to say was: Plank felt lost in the past. Not stuck, but suspended there, in its beauty and slowness.
“We’re encased in amber,” Micah had said, and smiled.
Plank’s student body was made up of thirty male students. All of them lived in a converted farmhouse, though two second-years got to board in the house’s former kitchen, coveted for its wood-burning stove. Cal was the only first-year from the Midwest, and one of the few kids who hadn’t gone to a prep school. Micah hadn’t either, but he’d attended an intense public high school in L.A. where you had to test highly gifted to get in. It closed from lack of funding a year after he graduated. Micah couldn’t milk a cow, as Cal could, but he had already read Plato and Derrida. “The jugness of the jug” was how he explained Heidegger to Cal, as if that explained anything at all.
It made him laugh now, thinking about the way Plankers used to talk. They’d farm in the mornings, bring the goats out to pasture, and then, with dirt under their fingernails and smelling of animal shit, they’d head into seminar to toss big words back and forth at one another.
Out here, in the middle of nowhere, the real middle of nowhere, those big ideas offered him solace but not much else. Cal glanced once more at Frida, whose eyes were shut tight against the world, and he wondered what she might say about all the books he and her brother had once devoured. Like any of it could rescue you, she might say.
There were only two years at Plank. If you were admitted, it was free, but there was no real degree at the end. Most of the boys transferred to one of the Ivy Leagues, went traveling, or fell off the map. Cal’s dad had been the one to show him the application. He ran his small organic farm holistically, which meant the cows were moved often, so as not to wreck the land, and the chickens followed, pecking at the manure, and the vegetables were grown without pesticides. Cal’s dad had always urged his son to learn his trade. “You have skills that this school will nurture.” But did his dad know that beyond working the school’s alfalfa farm, milking its cows, and learning to slaughter the occasional goat, Plank’s students trafficked in the abstract?
Many Plankers wanted to fight injustice and poverty throughout the world, though certainly not with religion; it seemed like everyone was an atheist or headed there. They’d use their brilliance and tenacity, not God, to make a difference. His first week, Cal heard another student talking about his plans after graduation; the guy had a whole business plan already written, but he wanted to get everyone’s opinions on environmental tariffs and microloans. Cal had never met anyone like that before, a person so open about his ambitions, but at Plank it was common for someone to announce his lofty ideals over a meal or in class or in the lounge at 3:00 a.m. Plankers would change the world. A lot of other colleges had closed in recent years, but Plank was cheap to run, and its endowment was solid because its alumni believed their small but mighty network of graduates would solve the crises that blighted the present. He hadn’t realized it when he was accepted, but after he’d arrived, it was clear: Plank expected something of him. He was not to take his education in vain.