I was finally called up on the Friday of that first week. By that point Leaky was averaging about three students a class. I was the third one of the day. I knew he was going to call my name before he said it, but something still somersaulted inside me when he did. As I stood up and crossed the room to the door, I felt the class turn into a firing squad. Over the past four days, Leaky had made us vicious, until we had begun to will failure on one another. He had managed to instill in us a pleasure in watching our classmates stripped bare. By now we all knew what to look for, and we could immediately spot the difference between the performance of neutrality and the genuine state of being present. I knew what it looked like, but the question was whether I could embody it.

I closed the door behind me and began counting to ten. I looked at the old play posters on the walls. The black-and-white photographs of past students. They had survived the Zone and I would too. I listened to the echo of the third-years’ Shakespeare intensive down the hall. I asked my body not to betray me. I asked my mind not to betray my body. And then, in the remaining four seconds, I did everything in my power to join them, realizing that perhaps that was the trick to the Zone, to be so integrated that there was no difference between being and performing. I would erase myself and become nothing more than a unit of sentience moving through space and time. I turned the handle of the door and stepped into the room.

“Stop!” Leaky yelled after my second step. The class burst out laughing.

“You’re too much in your head,” Ana told me that evening as we were walking home. “I could see you thinking your way through every attempt. You’ve got to get out of your head and into your body.”

I thanked her for the unsolicited advice. She was just parroting what I was already being told by our teachers. Get into your body. God knows I was trying, slamming my consciousness into my pelvis, my diaphragm, my “swamp,” as the Chafer called it. Where was I if not in my body? And who could blame me for being in my head — I was your son, for Chrissake; the son of a neurotic academic who spent her days trying to perfect a giant artificial brain.

One morning, midway through the third week of Leaky’s regime of humiliations, I didn’t get out of bed. Ana knocked on my door about eight minutes before class, which was a ten-minute walk away. I told her I wasn’t coming. It had been revealed to me and the entirety of our class beyond any reasonable doubt that I was a self-deluded fraud, and I knew enough to cut my losses. Ana let herself in and sat down on the edge of my bed.