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Transcript

Latrines · I Believe

0:36
SPEAKER_00: Behold again the stars.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: The light, the stairs, down, down.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: There are no windows in the basement of the residence hall.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: The light comes from tubes that hum in the ceiling.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: It does not change.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: The same at five in the morning as at noon.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: He could work an entire spring semester down here and never once know what the sky was doing.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: He lets himself in with the key on the loop at his belt.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: The door shuts behind him.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: The hum of the fixtures, the only sound in the part of the building that is awake.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: He fills the bucket at the mop sink.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: Warm water, it will be gray inside the hour.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: He wheels the cart down the tiled row to the elevator.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: The squeaky casters have needed oil since before he started this job and he has stopped hearing them.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: He begins on the third floor at the far end where the rooms are worst because the morning can only get better after those.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: He works the stalls first.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't think much about what the weekend has left him.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: It's the same every Monday.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: He mops, rings the mop, sets the yellow sign across the door though no one will come for an hour.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: He does the work the way it needs done because there is no reason to do it the other way.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: A bathroom is clean or it is not.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: A great and shining institution cannot have filthy bathrooms, and so the bathrooms are clean.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: Who would clean them?
1:48
SPEAKER_00: And so he does.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: It's not the hardened waste or urine on the floor or vomit or hair or broken glass or cups or mud or the smell that beats him.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: It's the wall under the hand dryers.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: The hot air throws water off wet hands, and the water carries what is on them.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: And over the years it streaks down into the paint.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: A yellow bloom low on the wall in the shape of everyone who ever made the mark and walked out.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: He scrubs, he has scrubbed since September.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: He found the cabinet with the stronger chemical and used the stronger chemical.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: The bloom lifts a shade.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: It's the color of piss, but it's been scrubbed clean.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: The supervisor is an older man who has been in the building longer than some of the faculty.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: He stops on his round and looks at the wall and tells him kindly to give it another go.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: The supervisor believes the wall comes clean.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: It is his building and his name on the schedule, and he cannot allow himself to believe it will never come clean.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: Even though he knows only paint will make the wall white again, the boy gets back to it.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: He works the brush in tight circles.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: The chemical bites the back of his throat.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: The musty heat of the room comes up through his jeans.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: Above him, the dryers wait their turn.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: He scrubs it again.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: It does not come clean.
3:13
SPEAKER_03: Act 1.
3:14
SPEAKER_03: No windows.
3:17
SPEAKER_03: 10 o'clock.
3:19
SPEAKER_03: The boy's hands clean and resting on a table on the second floor where there are windows.
3:25
SPEAKER_03: He showered, changed his shirt.
3:28
SPEAKER_03: The cart back in its closet, yellow sign hung above the mop sink.
3:33
SPEAKER_03: None of the morning is on him now.
3:36
SPEAKER_03: Not the smell or the chemical.
3:38
SPEAKER_03: Nothing a person could see.
3:41
SPEAKER_03: The room is comfortable in a way, the basement was not.
3:44
SPEAKER_03: The light moves through clouds outside.
3:47
SPEAKER_03: He takes a seat where he can watch it.
3:50
SPEAKER_03: There are nine of them and the professor.
3:52
SPEAKER_03: They are reading roles.
3:54
SPEAKER_03: The professor asks a question he is fond of.
3:58
SPEAKER_03: Imagine you do not know who you will be.
4:01
SPEAKER_03: Rich or poor, gifted or ordinary, this family or that one.
4:07
SPEAKER_03: You must choose the rules of the society before the curtain lifts, and you are told which life is yours.
4:13
SPEAKER_03: He lets it sit.
4:15
SPEAKER_03: Would you choose this one?
4:17
SPEAKER_03: The boy across the table answers first.
4:20
SPEAKER_03: He almost always answers first.
4:23
SPEAKER_03: This boy's room is on the third floor.
4:26
SPEAKER_03: A corner suite, good light, and two windows.
4:30
SPEAKER_03: The nearest bathroom to his is the worst room in the hall.
4:35
SPEAKER_03: The third floor boy doesn't know that anyone knows this.
4:38
SPEAKER_03: All he knows is that the room is clean when he wakes.
4:42
SPEAKER_03: He has never wondered who cleans it.
4:44
SPEAKER_03: No reason he would.
4:46
SPEAKER_03: The world arrives each morning already ready for his use, the way it always has.
4:52
SPEAKER_03: The loud boy says, society is just.
4:56
SPEAKER_03: He speaks well.
4:57
SPEAKER_03: He says that the door is open to anyone, and that the ones who walk through it do so because of who they are, not who they were.
5:05
SPEAKER_03: On the other side of the door is a place that doesn't ask where you came from, only what you can do.
5:12
SPEAKER_03: No one hands you anything here.
5:15
SPEAKER_03: The boy who scrubbed his bathroom at five stays silent.
5:19
SPEAKER_03: He could say something.
5:20
SPEAKER_03: He knows the thing you would say.
5:23
SPEAKER_03: He read it in this very seminar three weeks back.
5:26
SPEAKER_03: They had all read it.
5:28
SPEAKER_03: There are as many students here from the top percent of the country as from its entire bottom three-fifths.
5:35
SPEAKER_03: He knows which part he came from.
5:37
SPEAKER_03: He cleans bathrooms at five in the morning.
5:40
SPEAKER_03: He could lay it out for them now.
5:42
SPEAKER_03: He does not.
5:44
SPEAKER_03: The attention is not on him, and he would rather keep it that way.
5:48
SPEAKER_03: He folds his hands, watches the cloud move across the light.
5:53
SPEAKER_03: The seminar runs its hour.
5:56
SPEAKER_03: The professor is not cruel.
5:58
SPEAKER_03: Not one of them is lying.
6:00
SPEAKER_03: But the room cannot see.
6:02
SPEAKER_03: Up here, the room believes everyone here is equal.
6:06
SPEAKER_03: The corner room boy believes the door is open, because when he walked through it, it was open.
6:12
SPEAKER_03: The professor believes the question is still a question.
6:16
SPEAKER_03: Only the boy with the mop sees both parts of the building, and he says nothing because there is nothing to say that the room will hear.
6:24
SPEAKER_03: The professor closes the book.
6:26
SPEAKER_03: The hour is up.
6:28
SPEAKER_03: The boy from the third floor gathers his things and goes, and does not look at him on the way out.
6:34
SPEAKER_03: The way you do not look at what you do not know is there.
6:38
SPEAKER_03: At five tomorrow, he will be scrubbing the wall again.
6:42
SPEAKER_03: At ten, he will be back in this chair.
6:45
SPEAKER_03: He is the only one at the table who is both, and no one at the table knows it, and that is the stain.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: Act two, the dark page.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: There is a window.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: At night the window is a black square with his reflection in it, not a view.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: He sits at the desk in the dark so as not to wake his roommate.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: The light comes off the screen and the cursor waits on him.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: The assignment, six pages.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: Take the veil of ignorance and test it against a life.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: He can finish the essay in an hour.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: He has it in his head already.
7:21
SPEAKER_00: He starts.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: Behind the veil, not knowing whether we will be rich or poor, we would build a society that protects the worst off, since any of us might be the worst off.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: True.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: He keeps going.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: He writes that protecting the worst off does not have to mean the dishwasher and the surgeon take home the same pay.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: It means the dishwasher's kid gets a fair run at the surgeon's job.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: He thinks of a runner's analogy and writes that fast runners should be allowed to run.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: He believes a piece of it.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: After all, in a classroom, he is a fast runner and has always been.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: That's how he came to be at this university.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: He has known since he was small that his mind closes on a problem faster than the room around him, and he cannot pretend otherwise.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: He also knows there are slower runners, and you can't make a slow runner fast.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: He writes that the rules should clear the track so a man or woman willing to run can get somewhere.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: This is what justice owes a person.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: Not the finish line, but a fair run at it.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: He reads it back.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: It is clean, correct.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: He cannot find a false sentence in it, and it is a lie, not in what it says, in what it leaves out, which is the whole of his own life.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: He is fast, and he cleans the bathroom at five.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: Both.
8:28
SPEAKER_00: No one cleared the track for him.
8:29
SPEAKER_00: He ran it carrying a mop at an hour the corner room boy will never see, and he is going to make it anyway.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: And the essay he just wrote would say that proves the system works.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: The fast runner ran and won.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: It is a lie.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: He keeps at the philosophy, and the philosophy keeps beating him.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: Reward the runner who's willing to run.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: Fine.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: But who handed the runner the will?
8:50
SPEAKER_00: The ability to run with the pain in your side.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: The discipline to run the sprints, quarter mile after quarter mile.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: He didn't build the part of himself that works.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: It came down to him, from a mother, from somewhere, set before he could choose it, the same as the fast came down to him.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: Praise a man for trying, and you're praising him for something somebody handed him.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: Turn it the other way, though, and it's worse.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: If trying comes down to pure luck, then nothing is earned by anyone.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: A world that hands the man who runs and the man who sits the same bread will get a great deal less running.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: He has seen it.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: He knows the difference between a man who works and a man who waits.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: Even if neither one chose the engine he was born with.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: The philosopher can prove on paper that no one earns anything.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: The boy who cleans the floor at five has seen too much to believe him and could not tell you why.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: The old king had it three thousand years ago, and the seminar hasn't caught up.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Not because the swift aren't swift, because the race was never the only thing happening.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: Time and chance happened to us all.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: It goes through his mind, but he doesn't write it down.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: The professor wants Rawls, not an old king.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: He looks at the clean, correct, lying page, and he does the only thing there is to do with a thing that will not come clean.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: He turns it in.
10:13
SPEAKER_03: Act three.
10:14
SPEAKER_03: The stage.
10:17
SPEAKER_03: The professor hands the papers back on a Tuesday.
10:20
SPEAKER_03: He saves the boys for last, and he means to discuss it.
10:23
SPEAKER_03: He sets it down and taps it and says it is good work, but that he lost the thread at the end.
10:28
SPEAKER_03: The connection to roles fell apart.
10:31
SPEAKER_03: Would the boy say a little more about what he was reaching for?
10:35
SPEAKER_03: The room glances at him.
10:37
SPEAKER_03: He could give them the quick, easy version.
10:40
SPEAKER_03: He has it in his head already.
10:42
SPEAKER_03: But he can't quite get to it.
10:45
SPEAKER_03: Instead, he says he wasn't reaching for anything.
10:48
SPEAKER_03: He says he was trying to write down what he already knew and couldn't make sense of.
10:54
SPEAKER_03: He doesn't say this out loud, but he knows it in his gut because he cleans the bathrooms.
10:59
SPEAKER_03: But putting it into words is they wait.
11:04
SPEAKER_03: He knows it the way he knows the weight of a mop bucket and they don't.
11:10
SPEAKER_03: He says, You asked us to imagine, not knowing who we'd be.
11:15
SPEAKER_03: He says he doesn't have to imagine it.
11:18
SPEAKER_03: He says the man who wrote the question didn't have to imagine it either.
11:22
SPEAKER_03: Rawls learned it somewhere.
11:24
SPEAKER_03: The man beside him died and he didn't.
11:27
SPEAKER_03: For no reason that made any sense to anyone.
11:29
SPEAKER_03: And he couldn't afterward call the difference earned.
11:33
SPEAKER_03: That much comes out plain.
11:35
SPEAKER_03: He watches it land on nothing and keeps going anyway.
11:39
SPEAKER_03: He says everyone in this room was born on one side of the veil and has never seen the other.
11:46
SPEAKER_03: He looked.
11:47
SPEAKER_03: They didn't have to.
11:49
SPEAKER_03: They know which cards life dealt them.
11:52
SPEAKER_03: They've known since they were small.
11:55
SPEAKER_03: The exercise asks them to pretend for an hour not to know, which is something a person can't do.
12:02
SPEAKER_03: If your belly has never been empty, how can you pretend to know what hungry is?
12:08
SPEAKER_03: He says this university is the finest institution one could make, and he means it.
12:14
SPEAKER_03: The professors teach well, and no one is cruel, and not one of them is lying.
12:20
SPEAKER_03: The question he can't answer is how you can build a thing this crooked while not doing a single thing wrong?
12:28
SPEAKER_03: They let him in and took his picture for the brochure, but he has to clean the bathrooms.
12:34
SPEAKER_03: He reaches for the last part.
12:37
SPEAKER_03: The part he wrote in the dark and deleted, whose father's name opens the door, and why the door has to stay this narrow to be worth walking through.
12:48
SPEAKER_03: He reaches for it, and it will not come.
12:52
SPEAKER_03: He says finally, the only piece of it he can say plainly, that the building runs on the public's money and hangs the public's oldest word over the door, and he has cleaned its floors at five in the morning, and still does not know who the place is for, the ones who pay for it or the ones who run it.
13:12
SPEAKER_03: Then he is done because the rest of it will not come.
13:16
SPEAKER_03: For a moment there is a quiet that could go either way.
13:21
SPEAKER_03: A phone buzzes.
13:23
SPEAKER_03: A boy across the table drops his eyes to it under the lip of the table, reads, half smiles at whatever it is, and is gone.
13:33
SPEAKER_03: Somewhere else now.
13:35
SPEAKER_03: The professor lets the quiet finish and nods.
13:39
SPEAKER_03: He says that is a rich response.
13:42
SPEAKER_03: He says it raises the distributive question Rawls cares most about the difference principle, and that it would make a strong revision if the boy grounded it more firmly in the text.
13:54
SPEAKER_03: He says they are nearly out of time.
13:56
SPEAKER_03: He says good work again and means it, and moves to the next paper, and that is all.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: Then, spring, outside in the yard, in the late morning.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: They call his name and he crosses the stage, shakes a hand.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: He is out of the basement for good, up the stairs, into the open air.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: He will not return.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: He finds his seat in the rows.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: The speeches run on, and at some point he stops hearing them.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: That evening, the party, his parents are there, his friends from before.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: Some of them want him to go take on the world to prove it could be done.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: His mother wants him home, and a few, the honest ones, know that a man who comes back from up here only makes the dark harder to sit in, and would not thank him for it.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: He cannot tell anymore whether he can't go home or won't.
14:45
SPEAKER_00: The sky opens up, and the first of them show.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: Somewhere, a wall waits under a dryer for somebody's smartest child.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: He got out, and the getting out is what seals the next kid in.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: He looks up, cold and far and indifferent, the same ones over everyone who ever got out and everyone who never did.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: Behold again the stars.
15:21
SPEAKER_02: Park the car, lock the door, drop the keys next to your square.
15:36
SPEAKER_02: My man has got me waiting so complicated.
15:41
SPEAKER_02: I know only takes a found a cure underneath your own.