Lux Et Veritas
II.
Sophomore year was a blur of success. In September, the student body voted to make participation mandatory, professors and administrators included, and also to instate a fee of $18.76 per semester per student to support the significant cost of keeping the exercise machines updated and in good condition what with the ceaseless use. The jocks walked around with happy, dazed, self-righteous faces. They’d had this “idea”—what if not just the Gymnasium, but also the dorms? What if not just the dorms, but also the classrooms? The library? Hell, the Dean’s house? Our campus was rated the #1 Greenest College Campus in America. More news coverage, always featuring us (our diversity must’ve helped, because it was really the jocks who’d taken over now—we were the Idea people)—America loved us! US HEARTS US (Viv, drunk, wrote it in glow-in-the-dark paint on the wall of the common room).
We were still on Team Forty-One. The only difference was that now we had to go. Viv was pissed. Hungover, she ripped her fuchsia tights to shreds (that’s one regulation that got loosened up—the silver leggings were no longer required—but everyone on campus, it seemed, had developed a sentimental attachment to their silver leggings and we’d never seen anyone except Viv go to Duty in anything except silver leggings). She flopped down on Orange Couch, tearing into her fuchsia tights with kiddie scissors, old grapefruit rinds plastered to her humid flushed thighs.
Fuck!” she was yelling. “I fucking bought these fucking tights for wearing with short fucking skirts and big fucking boots, not for a fucking Stairmaster.”
Ali brought her a super-size bottle of a drink we’d discovered: Hang-O. It tasted like grapefruit and ginger and it healed us.
The thing was, we were all really attractive now, as was everyone on campus, radiant and strong from so much exercise, straight-spined with the pride of helping create the electricity that ran the college. You’d want to sleep with pretty much any person you passed, even some of the professors too. Ali, who’d already been drop-dead, was now a total Aphrodite. So she never got down about Duty. Noah, Rob, Joey, and Tran felt the same way—they were happy, didn’t mind Duty, even liked it, relished it. In our wildest dreams we’d never imagined we could look as good as (if not better than) the jocks.
But Viv—Viv hated it. “This sucks!” she’d scream on her way out the door to Duty. “Sucks, sucks, sucks.” Les and Pat understood where she was coming from, sort of, but the thing was, you got used to it. You got used to going, just one intense half-hour a day, no big deal really, and afterward you could eat as many grapefruits and chocolate bars as you wanted. We still sat around bullshitting and inventing at three a.m. We still linked arms and stole from the cafeteria and mocked everything. Whatever, you know? But Viv hated it, barelegged on the Treadmill, forever climbing an artificial mountain.
Then it turned out we—we as in The College Community, not we as in The Eight—were producing excess energy. After a lot of paperwork and many uplifting speeches, the Gymnasium was linked via underground wires to the neighborhood of the Invisible Poor.
The Invisible Poor! Those about whom we had sometimes worried.
Our campus got rated the #1 Most Ethical College Campus in America. We got rated the #1 Most Innovative Undergraduate Student Group in America. And Viv got happy knowing the Invisible Poor would have free light in which to perhaps become less Invisible. Many students, including us, elected to stay on campus all summer and earn a small stipend for keeping the Gymnasium running. Now it was one hour three times a day. We became ever stronger.
Even though it was our system still we had to undermine it. Les and Joey ran illegal wires from the Gymnasium out to the lily pond so we could keep our champagne icy cold during an epic twelve-hour party in the tremendous, drunken heat of mid-August. At Hour 11 we made a rule that everyone had to kiss everyone else. On the lips. For a total of X different kisses. You do the math. Rob kissed Viv. Joey kissed Noah. Joey kissed Viv. Noah kissed Pat. Tran kissed Rob. Everyone was excited to kiss Ali. Everyone watched Viv kiss Ali. Pat squeezed in because it was his turn. Viv kissed Les. Les kissed Joey. Joey kissed Tran. Etc., etc., etc. Not to mention all the three-way possibilities! Two tongues in your mouth, your tongue in two mouths.