Harrison, glancing around the room, could plainly see his sister Sally, seated on one of the oak benches against the wall, looking stunned. Two teachers and a parent, magenta with rage, were surging in Aaron’s direction. Harrison himself was thrumming with excitement. For the very first time in Walden’s self-described Fulcrum of Enlightenment, he was being enlightened, and by a towering stranger who was also, by his clear reception here, a loathed iconoclast.
Loring stood calmly before the audience for another thirty minutes, parrying the sputtered outrage of adolescents and their “teachers.” He was a tree in a maelstrom, bending his strength with the winds, never losing his composure. He calmly suggested books a young man might read to elucidate the notion of individual responsibility, and made philosophical arguments a young lady （young lady!） might turn to for a very clear statement on the subject of personal freedom. Scholarship, books, the record of centuries—millennia!—of human （well, human male） thought; before Harrison’s eyes, this tall man in his three-piece suit was pulling back a screen to reveal a groaning board of new （old） knowledge. Incredibly, he laughed at his enraged audience. He did not even condescend. In fact, as far as Harrison could tell, he seemed to be looking for something: a capable debater he might set himself against, a young person to whom he might hand over a thing in his possession—a thing of value.
Whatever that thing was, Harrison Oppenheimer wanted it. He was seventeen years old, and he had groped his way alone in the darkness long enough.
Loring wasn’t difficult to find. He had an email address on the Columbia University Philosophy Department website, but Harrison opted to contact him in the traditional manner, on paper, explaining that he was a Walden student who’d admired the stand Dr. Loring had taken in his remarks, and would he possibly be willing to meet for coffee and further discussion? The response, also in writing, also mailed, was swift if succinct: Symposium on West 113th, the following Thursday at five. When the much-anticipated day arrived, he lied to his swim coach and headed to Manhattan on the subway, surfacing into a thunderstorm on Morningside Heights.
Symposium was below street level, and Harrison descended in a trill of nerves. Loring, the restaurant’s only customer, sat in a green faux-leather booth on the far wall, one of his bony hands wrapped around a china coffee cup, as if for the warmth. The other hand hovered over a short stack of blue exam booklets, the uppermost of which—Harrison saw as he drew near—Loring was liberally annotating with a classic red pen. Somebody was going to be very disappointed with their final, he thought.
“Dr. Loring?”
“Well,” said the man himself, giving Harrison a once-over. “I wondered if I’d recognize you when you got here. I don’t think I spotted you in that congestion of anti-intellectualism that passes for your high school.”
Harrison grinned. He couldn’t help it.
“I should have spoken up, but I guess I was too shocked. Please forgive me.”
“You’re forgiven. Sit down. Coffee?”
“Sure,” Harrison said, sliding into the booth. The green Naugahyde was troublingly sticky. “I’m afraid I cut swim practice.” He wasn’t sure why he’d led with this, and regretted it the minute it was out of his mouth.
“Why afraid? Do you think someone will punish you? Do you think I’m going to punish you?”
“No, no,” he shook his head. “I just … I’m feeling a little guilty.”
“Well, that’s a waste of your time,” Loring said. He was putting the blue books down on the seat beside him. Harrison couldn’t help seeing the bright red D on the cover of the booklet on top.
A waiter came with a coffee for him, and refilled Loring’s cup. Harrison wanted milk but was too shy to ask for it. Loring, he saw, was drinking his black.
“Tell me about yourself.”
“I’m a triplet,” Harrison heard himself say. He was surprised he’d said it. He rarely thought it, or at least, he never tried to think about it.