Choose Your Own Disaster Read online

  “I always knew she was smart,” the stranger will reply, validating your years of schooling and thousands of dollars of debt from miles away.

  It’s easy. Well, not always easy in practice (you still have nightmares about diagrams in organic chemistry, sloppy lines facing the wrong way, cramped notes taken in a foreign language of which you haven’t yet grasped the grammar), but at least the path forward is clear. That’s the terrifying thing about adulthood, right? Leaving the tributary river of childhood in which progress is so clearly prescribed along a narrow to-do list—high school, college, internships, good grades—and then spilling out into a massive ocean. But being a doctor has steps: You get internships in laboratories; you volunteer with patients; you take organic chemistry and study for the MCAT and apply for medical school. And then it’s three years of school and then an internship and then a residency and by then you’ll be a bona fide adult, most likely with an apartment where you live with a cat and a significant other and you will have a job. You will be a doctor and you will be respected.

  As soon as you settle on the plan in your mind, you feel as though you might as well be comatose for the next ten years. You wish you could skip ahead. In knowing exactly what you’re going to do, you might as well have already done it. Is there any way to get the acclaim and recognition of being an internationally famous and wealthy doctor who is universally renowned as an expert in her field without having to work really hard and figure out if you’re actually good enough? Isn’t there just a way to skip all of the school and the studying and the proving yourself and the anonymity and coast to mind-boggling success based on potential alone? It’s as if the System somehow seems entirely indifferent to the fact that your parents called you gifted as a child.

  So for now you’re alone, in a room in the cold fluorescent hallways of a biology lab three floors beneath a neo-brutalist concrete building, and you have three more plastic crates, each filled with a litter of mice, to go through, snipping tails and mutilating ears. It will be a few hours before you see another human again. You know, somehow, that the research you’re obliquely facilitating is going to help people someday, or at least will disprove someone’s idea of something that might have helped people someday. But right now, in this basement room in the cold fluorescent hallways of a biology lab, it doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything useful.

  One day, when you have time and the light is just right and you’ve already eaten breakfast and done yoga (you’re the type of person who does yoga now), you’ll spend a full day reading every single scientific paper that’s been produced about lab mice and cancer until you’re an expert in the field. It doesn’t matter that every paper you’ve attempted to read thus far has become gibberish by the first sentence—in this morning/yoga fantasy, you understand every word even better than the author. You actually get to mail snooty letters to the editor about minor mistakes. That’s how well you understand it.

  Someday you’ll have a lab of your own filled with exotic specimens flown in from other labs all over the country and you’ll know what to do with them. You’ll have your own undergraduate student alone in a room on her first day, snipping off mouse tails and trying her best not to get scratched. You just have to stick to the path.

  As you finish disfiguring a particularly fidgety mouse and recognize that you still have half a dozen left to go, a particularly insidious thought floats into your head: You don’t have to come back to the lab tomorrow. That tiny realization blooms in your brain like a rosebud submerged in water. There’s no reason you have to work in this lab now, as a sophomore, not really. You can send an email to the head of the laboratory saying you were wrong, you’re sorry but you’re too busy with schoolwork and you just don’t think it’s a good fit. You are staring down a long year of hours spent using pipettes and PCR machines and making careful notes and keeping track of how many mouse babies are born and how many are male and how many are female and how many were eaten by the mother because, yes, you learn, that does happen.

  You are staring down your entire future, but you don’t have to be.

  Do you continue to work in the mouse lab?

  A. Yes. Even though today it’s just cutting tails and tagging ears, in a few years your life will be just like Grey’s Anatomy—you’ll wear scrubs that inexplicably still make your butt look cute and you’ll hook up with the other cute-butted doctors in the break room in between lifesaving procedures that end with families in tears hugging you for your incredible work. (You haven’t actually seen Grey’s Anatomy.) You’ll win awards and walk in clacking heels down hospital hallways and get called brilliant. All you need to do is follow the right steps.

  Turn here.

  B. No. There’s a reason you don’t really know what you’re doing, because this isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing. You’re far too creative and funny to be wasting your life in the back room of a basement laboratory. You’ve never been that meticulous or organized either, and when you’re a doctor, that will probably lead to accidentally killing a bunch of people. You’re smart; you can find something else to succeed at that doesn’t take about fifteen years and $150,000.

  Turn here.

  You are becoming a doctor. Good! That feels right. You are so proud every time you go to the grocery store with your mother on weekends back in the suburb you grew up in. “What are you up to?” the mother of a high school classmate asks, her purse jangling against her grocery cart filled with SmartPop!

  You give a practiced shrug of modesty. “Well, I’m a senior at Brown now and applying for med school.”

  Your mom interrupts here. “She’s already been offered a spot at [Harvard/Yale/Penn/UChicago],” she says, beaming.

  Remember all of those doubts you had? How you felt as though you were always on your back foot, and any internship or lab position or good grade you received was granted only by luck and trickery? Well, you must have been wrong, because now you’re going to be a doctor. If you ever doubted you were smart enough, well doubt no more. All you need to do is follow along the instructions on this path as they’re given and you will be a Success.

  And eventually, you are. You like what you do—you’re helping people every day, and you’re on your feet, running through the squeaking white linoleum hallways of hospital buildings and you get to tell people what to do and make small incisions in flesh and sew up bodies like they’re the halter tops you made out of bandanas when you were in seventh grade. You’re good at your job, and people thank you for it. You are Dr. Schwartz and people respect your opinion and entrust their vulnerable, mortal flesh into your care.

  When your children have finally made it off to college, you buy a nice cabin in Vail (you ski in this future) with your husband Ari or David or Jonathan or Adam, and you wear Lululemon pants every day and have sex when you can stomach it, and you buy a nice purse for yourself on your birthday, and you take vacations. You collect the mementos of upper-middle-class life one by one and you tell yourself, sure, being a doctor is a lot of paperwork, and Ari or David or Jonathan or Adam is losing his hair, and there will always be someone skinnier than you, and did you hear that Jenna—you know, Jenna from high school—actually works as a producer on SNL now? and people are just a little more jealous of her and her glamorous life, but you are a doctor, and you make a good living, and you have a family, and maybe you don’t really save lives anymore because you’re a dermatologist, but you did catch that mole the other week, and you are content doing this professional, worthwhile thing that impresses people and you are happy. Or at least, happy most of the time. What is being happy anyway? It’s the few moments you have to yourself, in the quiet while you’re brushing your teeth or folding laundry when you realize you have a good job and a good family and enough money to get by and to appreciate it. So, yes, you think. You’re happy.

  THE END

  Or go back here.

  WHAT SORT OF WRITER

  WILL YOU BECOME?

  1. When someone asks you what your favo
rite book is, what will you say?

  A. The Crying of Lot 49. You would say Gravity’s Rainbow, but you haven’t exactly finished it yet even though you keep it in a very prominent spot on your bedside table.

  B. You tell the truth: Ender’s Game, the book you read when you were in fifth grade. It was the first book that seemed to speak directly to you, to understand you in a way no other book, or even person, had ever understood you before. Ender, like you, was the third child—brilliant but lonely, better at things than older kids but caught between the desire to show off and the need to avoid bullying. The ending of the book, so maudlin and condescending to your current cynical twenty-four-year-old mind, was perfect when you were twelve. It was heartbreaking and as fragile as the ice that crystallized over a puddle, waiting for someone to crack it with their boot. Years later, you would find out that its author, Orson Scott Card, is a homophobe and bigot, an entrenched, angry old man who stands against everything you believe, and you’ll feel almost violated with how easily he had slipped into your child-brain. He was a terrible person, and he understood you completely in a way that you felt your parents would never be able to. You don’t like telling people Ender’s Game is your favorite book anymore. Sometimes you say The Martian Chronicles, a book by Ray Bradbury you read in seventh grade that left you with the same sense of delicious heartbreak when you finished it.

  C. Proust, in the original French. It changed your life, but you’re not such an asshole that you tell people that you read it in French.

  2. What do you eat for breakfast?

  A. Black coffee, with a side of a half pack of cigarettes.

  B. You usually don’t. But if you’re only running an hour late for work, rather than your typical two, you’ll spend $7.00 on a latte and croissant at the chain coffee place around the corner from your office. Most of the croissant will end up in flakes on your lap.

  C. French press coffee and a bowl of oatmeal with fresh berries. You didn’t microwave the oatmeal, nor did you make it in a pot that you’ll leave unwashed in the sink, resulting in a permanent coating of heated milk gluing itself to the pot’s surface. The oatmeal just appears on your vintage writing desk in your apartment that gets natural light, always at the perfect temperature.

  3. What will your novel be about?

  A. A young man attempting to discover himself through sex and vinyl records and literature he picks up at secondhand stores. The reader never learns his name. The book will be written without any punctuation and you expect it to be nominated for several prestigious awards even though no one will ever want to read through the entire thing.

  B. A coming-of-age young adult novel about a girl, funnier and more ornery than you, taking a trip through Europe just like you took a trip through Europe. People will describe it as a romp. It will sell fine.

  C. A marriage falling apart, a girl unearthing an age-old secret in her town, and a mute priest. Their stories intersect in a way no one ever would expect. The novel is 600 pages and critics will rave about the sparkling prose and call you a rising literary superstar.

  4. What do you wear on, say, a random Tuesday?

  A. Torn black jeans that you haven’t gotten around to repairing, the T-shirt you slept in, and a leather jacket.

  B. The same leggings you’ve worn all week, a bra you haven’t washed in months, a black tank top, and the same sweater you’ve had since middle school.

  C. Dark jeans, a crisp white button-down, big sunglasses, and red lipstick. You always look like an off-duty model or an on-duty Parisian.

  5. How do you write?

  A. In a Moleskine notebook with an expensive fountain pen. Writing is all about the aesthetics; you are a serious writer and you want everybody in your MFA program to know it.

  B. Rarely, and on a laptop with keys stained with Chinese food splatter and a screen with a dead black space that runs a full inch down the right side that’s been there since you dropped the computer while standing up to answer the door for the Chinese food deliveryman.

  C. On a vintage typewriter that you got as a gift from a very famous writer that you’ll decline to name, because you’re not that type of person. You whip through pages with ease—you are the type of person for whom a typewriter makes sense and not the type of person who would spend $450 on a typewriter that will gather dust on the shelf by your bed because the opportunity never feels quite right to actually sit down and use it. The typewriter always feels right for you. The morning light comes through your window, and your desk has flowers that you never forget to water. Oh, it’s not easy, of course not. Writing is a craft, and when you’re done with the first draft, you have the patience and fortitude to sit down with your red pen and edit until the prose is as dazzling as you are.

  If you answered mostly As

  You are that guy in your MFA program. Not necessarily a guy, but just, you know: that guy. The one who wears the slouchy beanie for the carefully cultivated effect of nonchalant artist, the one who always talks in class, who writes pretentious poetry and says he’s working on a novel that no one’s ever seen. There are two options for your future: (1) You will give up as a writer after a single rejection from the New Yorker or (2) you write a slim, experimental novel that becomes a surprise runaway bestseller and you will float through New York for the rest of your career, guest editing anthologies and fucking nineteen-year-olds in your East Village apartment.

  If you answered mostly Bs

  You will get a job writing—first for a magazine and then for the same magazine’s website when the magazine is no longer in print. You will become the type of person who spends more and more time online, scrolling through social media and allowing your brain’s once-sharp edges to gradually become round. When you do write a book, you will wonder if it was for the right reasons. You care too much what other people think.

  If you answered mostly Cs

  You are a liar. You exist only in the fantasies of someone who answered mostly Bs, especially after she eats a heavy lunch and succumbs to two doughnuts that someone left in the office kitchenette and feels her stomach pressing up against her waistband. Someone who answered mostly Cs would have always been in control. She would have a defined jawline, and green eyes, and wouldn’t contemplate getting a nose job because her nose would already be perfect. She would be described as willowy. She would write every day and be praised constantly even though she wouldn’t need it because she doesn’t base her self-esteem on external praise.

  There is a folk legend every student knows but that no one has ever been told, a legend that has traveled across the globe and through the generations like a deadly airborne virus, or that way you all knew how to draw that cartoon S on your notebook paper, starting with six vertical lines in two rows. The legend is as follows: If a professor is more than fifteen minutes late to class, the class is canceled, and every student is permitted to go home.

  It is tested only one time in your entire tenure as a student: the first day of Introduction to Fiction Writing.

  The class is a workshop, only fifteen people, and tucked into a corner room on the second floor of the library. With the library’s concrete walls (another neo-brutalist addition to the campus sometime in the 1970s) and densely packed shelves, it has the eerie gloom that seems like it’s always sundown. You had a certain idea of what an Ivy League university library would look like—Raphaelesque paintings on the walls; mahogany desks, each with its own cozy green banker’s lamp; walls of books dappled by sunlight and reachable only by ladder. This is a barren structure, built in the ’60s and close to the ground. Most of the books are kept in subterranean basement stacks, with automatic lights so finicky and difficult to activate that you’ve found yourself using the flashlight on your phone to find the tome you want.

  This classroom hasn’t been set up for a writing workshop: all of the desks face different directions, so you all sit facing different directions. But heads are all turned toward the clock. Your professor is now officially sixteen minutes late. You
look at one another.

  “This is A204, right?” someone asks.

  You all murmur your assent.

  “Level two fiction writing?” someone else asks.

  “Wait, no. Arabic, right?”

  There are more mumbles, and it is established that the rest of you are there for level two fiction, not Arabic. “Oh. Oh, shit,” the Arabic-taker says, and he heaves his backpack up and leaves the room. You hear his footsteps echo down the hallway, past the stacks and all the way to the library’s central spiraling staircase, but it’s the only set of footsteps you hear. No one is coming from the other direction.

  Seventeen minutes after two.

  “It’s the first day,” one boy suggests to no one in particular. He already has the two course books out of his bag and stacked neatly on his desk. “Maybe he’s just finding his way.”

  And then, like he’s been summoned, the door opens and a man who can only be the professor enters. His age is impossible to determine: He could be a fifty-five-year-old with a good, even tan and a thick head of black hair, or a thirty-year-old with a world-weary expression. He isn’t smiling when he enters, and he traces over every one of you with his gray eyes before settling at the desk in the front of the room. He looks more like someone who would play a young, troublemaking uncle on The O.C. than a professor.