The Poison Ivy League

Classical scholars since at least the time of Gibbon have pegged the beginning of the Roman Empire’s decline to the death of Marcus Aurelius and the coronation of his mad son, Commodus, in 180 AD. However, at least until the defeat and humiliating capture of the Roman Emperor Valerian in 260 AD, life largely progressed as normal in the capital city after Aurelius’ death. But despite appearances, something new was indeed in the air. For the eighty years between the expiration of the philosopher-king and the catastrophe at Edessa, a gloom hung over the empire, a sort of polluted haze belched out from below, the kind that diffracts light and creates glorious sunsets almost beautiful enough to distract viewers from the poison lurking in their very nostrils. What was a succession of mediocre emperors and the beginnings of an umpteenth civil war in the eyes of most observers compared to the glorious spectacle of Rome’s one thousandth anniversary celebrations held by Philip the Arab, a violent usurper whose face even today graces the banknotes of his homeland?

For Kimel, February and March were like those eighty ambiguous years rolled into two months. To be sure, the marble facades of Rome still shone brightly as ever. Honors were still won, friendships were still strong, and the future still seemed promising. But lack of success at debate soon threatened Kimel’s title, and he was forced to resort to base politics to secure access to that for which he hungered. And hunger itself was only a distraction from a deeper and altogether more sinister condition: Hamlet’s curse, the indecision of the artist in the face of growing up. Until the end of March, greatness on APDA, the possibility of graduate study, and the strength of his camaraderie with Scott remained as crutches for a man already secretly disabled. They were soon to be removed, and Kimel would be promptly left to topple on his own devices. Now sing through me, Muse, of opening and closing doors.

Between the fourth and fifth of February, New York University held its annual tournament. At 100 teams, it was one of the largest of the year, and even reaching the final round would have virtually assured Kimel the title of TOTY. In fact, Harvard crowded out semi-finals, representing three of its four teams. In one room, Harvard B faced off against Arianna and Scott, a new and unexpectedly effective partnership. In another, Crassus and Pompey were left to battle it out for the circuit’s highest honor against Harvard A. Having just soundly defeated Metella and Sappho in quarter-finals on Opposition, Kimel and Jason were now on Government and produced an old case for the skirmish: that the NAACP should not have staged a boycott of the state of South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag. The case had been strong enough to disarm Antony at Brown; the argument that African American workers would be harmed by a lack of tourist dollars was hard to disarm. The laurels were Kimel and Jason’s to lose. They lost them.

Kimel had never quite appreciated the artistry of Crassus and Pompey before that round. To be sure, the case was so old that he was able to anticipate every response to its arguments. His opponents even missed the most piercing counter-point: that few people would take the NAACP’s boycott seriously, and with minimal real-world economic harms, it was mostly a symbolic gesture of disapproval. Simply emphasizing the gross injustice which the Confederate flag symbolizes for African Americans, Crassus and Pompey completely carried the sentiments of the room and dominated the round. Unique and unexpected arguments were not this team’s forte, but a sort of raw charisma was. Pompey was magnificently mocking and calculating in equal parts. At his best, the sound of defiance and self-assuredness in the voice of Crassus was enough to make the strongest analysis seem insubstantial. Challenged to name other means by which the NAACP could voice its objections, Kimel read at least ten off of a pre-prepared list. But the unexpected liveliness of his adversaries and their primal abilities brought out like cornered beasts scrambling to defend their survival in the TOTY race robbed his speech of persuasive vigor. William and Mary won on a landslide, their style and substance as speakers, it seemed to Kimel, virtually united.

Having deservedly lost their respective rounds, Kimel and Scott went off to philosophize rather than watch the Sullas defeat William and Mary in the final round. But the following week, Crassus and Pompey unexpectedly won the BU tournament over Petronius and Josephus. Triumphing over 81 teams, the victory was just great enough to push them ahead of Harvard in the TOTY race. For their part, Kimel and Jason had lost a messy octo-final round to a resurgent Piso and Plancinus. Kimel was robbed of his title—he now set himself to winning it back by any means necessary.

It was around this time that Sulla A withdrew from Harvard for the rest of the semester and moved away. The announcement was an unexpected one for Kimel, who had been his roommate for three years running. Their mutual ambitions had cast them as rivals since they were sophomores, but they had always lived happily together and Kimel was sorry to see him leave. (He would still meet him, however, every weekend at debate tournaments.) Now left alone in a two bedroom apartment complete with a kitchen and a living room, Kimel could safely boast that no one at Harvard enjoyed better on-campus housing than he. Nevertheless, preferring company to spacious solitude, he promptly invited Scott to move in. Their respective doors were always open to each other and their friendship was further cemented by proximity.

Again hoping to channel the dynamic of their conversations into success at debate, the two made plans to partner together at the Bowdoin tournament in Maine. No one else from Harvard was planning to attend. It proved to be one of Kimel’s final victories on APDA.

After winning two rounds, or so they assumed, Kimel and Scott walked confidently into their third. That they were paired against novices from Bates was immaterial. Half of the tournament was made up of people from Bates. Finally, the judge arrived.

“I’m a very informal judge,” he said, taking his place at the center of the table. “So first speaker, speak.”

Kimel did his best to contort his face into a smile and shuffled to the front of the room, increasingly wishing he’d worn socks with every soggy step in the aftermath of his odyssey through the snow. Ignoring his frost-bitten toes, he put forward his case about returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece. When the LO only gave a three minute response, Kimel leaned over to Scott.

“We’re not two up,” he said.

Scott nodded gravely. Then he rose and gave a first-rate speech, somehow filling up the full eight minutes. He pointed out that the Elgin marbles were not “balls,” as the LO was calling them, but famous statuary. Then, two more speeches; the MO was four minutes long, and the LOR was three. Kimel gave what he thought was a compelling PMR, but noticed that the judge was no longer bothering with the pretense of taking notes. It is a credit to Kimel’s patience that he was more amused than annoyed by the news that he had lost the round. The judge’s only comment was “the first speaker should remember to zip one’s fly” (sic).

Kimel and Scott then deposited their luggage on couches at a dormitory and parted ways, Scott for a horrendous APDA party at a frat house, and Kimel for a meeting with Bathsheba. This Bathsheba had been the most popular and beautiful girl at Kimel’s high school. They’d spoken together on the telephone almost every night as Kimel tutored her in history and English. His cynical friends warned that he was being manipulated, but Kimel never thought so. He very nearly asked her to the prom, but then second-guessed himself and skipped the dance altogether. Better to maintain the pretense of intimacy, Kimel told himself, than to destroy it altogether by inviting a refusal. They parted ways at graduation, he to Massachusetts and she to Maine, and they were now seeing each other for the first time.

They hugged awkwardly and complimented each other just as ineptly. Then, they fell victim to inane chatter. Deciding whether to shake hands or to embrace was a difficult decision; the weather was cold; their old friends from high school were up to miscellaneous tasks; rumor had it that so and so had done this and that. Their meeting was over quickly. She had to get back to her boyfriend, she said.

“Can you give me a lift back to the fraternity house?” asked Kimel. “You know, I never learned to drive. I would have nightmares about it when I was younger. The slightest turn of the wheel could slam me into oncoming traffic.”

“I remember that I would give you rides back in high school” she said, collecting her things. Then, to break the silence: “Are you excited about your debates for tomorrow?”

“Not really,” lied Kimel. “After all, debate doesn’t mean that much to me. There’s something slightly comical and slightly pathetic about loud-mouthed people getting together to argue with each other every weekend. And for what? Plastic trophies? The memory of honors that no one will eventually remember?”

“If you feel that way, then why do you compete every weekend?”

“To distract myself from myself! And besides succoring my existential despair, I’ve made my closest friends at debate. The relationships I’ve created mean more to me than the competition. Those are what will last. As for the rest, I guess that circus freaks can’t take life in the travelling carnival too seriously, or they’d lose their minds.”

By the time that Bathsheba and Kimel reached the frat house, the APDA party was breaking up. Kimel embraced his old friend again, and said in farewell,

“You know, I had a crush on you in high school.” Laughing preemptively to avoid the possibility of an awkward pause, he added, “Would you have gone to the prom with me?”

“Aww.”

“Let’s leave it at that. There’s something poetic enough about a sigh to make it more than a glorified grunt.”

She smiled at him. Then he watched her car disappear down the road and, eventually, rejoined Scott. The friends walked back to the dormitory through fields of ice and snow. The sky was so clear that the wide band of the Milky Way was visible against it. Scott mentioned that Kimel was back earlier than expected.

After a long wait locked outside of the building, Harvard’s two delegates to Bowdoin were finally let inside. The Brandeis team was playing a game of Hearts along with a ragtag collection of people from BU. The air smelled of alcohol. Everyone was drunk. Kimel noticed that his backpack was thrown on the floor, Rufinus from Brandeis having seized his prospective bed.

“I think that that’s my couch,” Kimel said in what he hoped was a polite voice.

“No it’s not,” said Rufinus. “It’s mine now.”

The room burst into laughter.

“But I was here first and I don’t have a sleeping bag.”

“I don’t care.”

Kimel thought that Rufinus might be joking, so he gave him a sort of half smile. Rufinus returned the gesture. Seeing this as an indication that the couch was relinquished, Kimel approached it, but Rufinus extended his arm to wave him off, saying he had no valid “property rights” to the territory in question. (People found that funny for some reason. Everyone but Scott burst into laughter again). Defeated, Kimel hobbled over to the far side of the room, snapping “Now I know how the Palestinians feel.”

Slouching uncomfortably in a wooden chair draped in his winter coat, Kimel noticed an empty ottoman, which he used to prop up his legs. An Amazonian BU member actually punched Kimel in the stomach when she saw what he did, hissing,

“That’s MINE.”

As the lights turned off, he sat quietly in his little chair, feeling a dull pain extend in concentric circles from where she’d punched him. Soon, there was a symphony of snores, annoying at first, but ultimately hypnotic.

Having lost two out of their initial three rounds, Kimel and Scott enjoyed relatively easy draws on Saturday and managed to just sneak into the break after successfully opposing the case that a doctor who discovered his daughter’s boyfriend had AIDS should leak the confidential information. In quarter-finals, they were paired against a team of infrequent debaters from Bates. Unsure at first who their opponents were, they eventually discovered that it was the same pair of young competitors to whom they’d lost the previous day. “I think that we’re hitting those fools again,” Scott observed rather more loudly than he intended to, horrifying a good number of members on the opposing team.

Kimel decided to experiment on his adversaries with a new weapon, a lethal bludgeon adapted from Livia and Tiberius’s arsenal. In their heyday, Yale A had won some notoriety for their case advocating the legalization of champerty. The obscure term refers to the sharing of the proceeds of a successful lawsuit by its winner and a potentially anonymous third party who paid for the expenses of the trial. Its legalization would likely lead to a competitive market in lawsuits, with corporations investing in those cases most likely to result in profits. While the ramifications of the proposal seem extreme, it’s difficult to argue against the fact that the creation of such a free market might help impoverished individuals to bring deserving cases to court. The illegality of barratry would diminish the possibility of frivolous law suits. After a lengthy online conversation about the case with Tiberius, Kimel decided to broaden the concept and argue that all forms of legal maintenance, of which champerty was only a subset, should be permitted. After all, in many legal systems, an individual can only contribute to the expenses of a trial if he or she has a specific interest in the facts of the case—the total legalization of maintenance would mean that anyone could pay for anyone’s legal fees, whether for a chance at profits or for more altruistic purposes. Overall, the case was a nasty and boring one far removed from all of Kimel’s areas of interest other than conquest. Keeping it secret, he hoped to wield it in the future in important rounds against other people from Harvard, since his teammates already knew most of his other cases. Little did he know that this plan would soon lead to melodramatic consequences, bringing tensions in Cambridge beyond the boiling point and permanently ruining friendships.

After unceremoniously slaughtering Bates, Kimel and Scott now found themselves against another team from the same school, the very pair to whom they’d lost in semi-finals of the previous year’s Clark tournament. They capably avenged themselves on Opposition after their rivals ran the same case about ICBMs that they’d just presented in quarter-finals, though this kind of repetition at the same tournament was taboo on APDA. On Opposition again in finals, Kimel and Scott went on to defeat Stanford and win the tournament, arguing that “truth and reconciliation committees” should not be used to heal animosities between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. Why would something which failed so miserably in sub-Saharan Africa, they asked, work any better in the volatile context of the Middle East? Thrilled to have won a tournament with his best friend, Kimel returned to Cambridge in high spirits, particularly since he was also awarded a first place speaker award despite his 3-2 performance in in-rounds. This cemented his position as the only speaker from Harvard in the top ten SOTY (Speaker of the Year) race. Unfortunately, since he wasn’t partnered with Jason, his victory had no impact on the TOTY competition.

Kimel’s pleasure quickly turned to apprehension when he was told that Lepidus and Antony had won the same weekend’s William and Mary tournament against Piso and Plancinus. Learning on the grapevine that the final round was extremely close, Kimel could hardly believe that Crassus and Pompey would willingly pave the way for Johns Hopkins to potentially overtake them, since this victory propelled them toward the front of the TOTY board. (He learned in retrospect that Crassus, at least, recognized the danger.) William and Mary were promptly rewarded for their good-sportsmanship when they failed to even break at the following week’s Princeton tournament, one of the largest of the year at 94 teams, just as Harvard A had faltered at Fordham and Johns Hopkins at MIT. Since Crassus and Antonina were APDA’s golden couple, this showing at Princeton was all the more unexpected.

Princeton’s tournament is always a prestigious event. Readers will recall that in the 2002-2003 season, Yale B effectively conceded the TOTY race when they failed to break there, Germanicus and Atticus gallantly refusing to allow the results of the few small competitions that remained before Nationals to determine who would take home the honor. Even if a similar impulse lay buried somewhere in the minds of any of the new TOTY competitors, Princeton was no longer the last major tournament of the year, since it was only late February and Yale was scheduled to be held exactly one month later. In the eyes of the APDA community, the TOTY race was thus still very much on. Ultimately, the results of Princeton served to make it the closest and most ruthless scramble in the circuit’s history.

Perhaps Sulla A’s most far-sighted contribution as President of HSPDS was to alter longstanding tradition and allow teams to compete by their initials instead of by ranked letters, an innovation Scott wisely decided to continue as his successor. For this reason, Kimel and Wen usually competed as “Harvard KW.” Since the graduating class of 2005 was so riotously touchy, this policy was likely a blessing. At Princeton, however, the conservative tabulation room forced everyone to follow their own team’s practices and compete under letters. Since Kimel and Jason were ahead of the Sullas in the TOTY race, they were given the title Harvard A by the staff.

This led to a pleasant repercussion. Before the announcement of outrounds, Kimel sat by himself in the general assembly room drawing cartoons of eyeballs in his notebook to pass the time. He thought about the expressions on the faces of Germanicus and Atticus when they failed to break at Princeton their senior year. Nervous and bored, he looked for someone to socialize with and found Lucretia sitting among her friends from Amherst. They talked about the TOTY race for a while and how exciting it had suddenly become. Kimel said that he hoped that things would turn out well for himself and knocked on wood. If he were an ancient Roman, he observed, he’d make some kind of sacrifice to a chthonic deity to help himself along. Lucretia smiled and said that regardless of the outcome of the race, Harvard had managed to qualify more people than any other school for Nationals that year, more people than any other team in history in fact, and to compete as Harvard A in the company of such a crowd was already a victory. Kimel thanked her for these words and committed them to memory, considering them a fitting epitaph with which to console himself should he ultimately lose out on the TOTY race.

The tournament broke to octo-finals and every important team but Crassus and Pompey managed to advance. After avenging themselves against Piso and Plancinus, Kimel and Jason faced Johns Hopkins in quarter-finals. Harvard was on Opposition. The Sullas had fallen in octo-finals and were in the audience, so Kimel hoped to put on a good show for them. As it happened, this hope went unfulfilled. In no mood to lose, Antony and Lepidus ran the case that the United States should grant asylum to individuals in danger of assassination in foreign countries due to their homosexuality. In retrospect, this was an almost impossible case against which to effectively argue, but Jason did exceptionally well milking the idea of the slippery slope as best he could. He was in rare form in his Member of Opposition speech and seemed to carry a good deal of positive sentiment among the audience members. Nevertheless, Harvard lost the round on a 2-1 decision and was forced to watch mutely as Johns Hopkins mowed over Cato and reached finals. Another victory would have ended the TOTY race then and there. Only Sappho and some anonymous student from Swarthmore now stood in their way. Vespasian, Jason, and Kimel sat beside each other in a cramped car during the round with no idea what its outcome would be. It was by telephone that they learned the news. Lepidus and Antony had lost. Needless to say, this was grounds for celebration.

Kimel knew that a victory at the following week’s Mount Holyoke tournament would be just enough to propel him from third place back to first in the TOTY race. Realizing the contest’s importance weeks beforehand, he had systematically begun setting the battlefield to his advantage, forcing himself to memorize the names of the leaders of the Moho team and socializing with them in hopes of endearing himself to his future judges. He was well aware that Lepidus had been dating the former leader of the team and that he was consequently very popular at the school. Kimel knew that he would have to do everything possible to deflect any favoritism toward his cause. Feeling out the sentiments of each individual student, he gossiped strategically about Lepidus but managed to learn nothing more interesting than the old rumor that his family transported him around exclusively by limousine and helicopter.

Ultimately, Kimel and Wen broke to outrounds and, as if the Fates were determined to make matters as dramatic as possible, faced Crassus and Pompey in quarter-finals, who also had TOTY in their sights. This would in fact be the last time that these teams would debate against each other.

Crassus and Pompey were strong adversaries who went on to achieve legendary status on APDA. Seldom had a pair from the North or South seen such competitive success week after week. By the end of the following season, Crassus would in fact even break the record of the legendary Brian Fletcher in his total number of final round appearances, though in fairness, many of the tournaments that he won were comparatively small. That Crassus of all people would so distinguish himself was surprising to Kimel, since he was known for sticking mainly to a handful of strong rhetorical points in most speeches and seldom presented especially original ideas. He was masterful at swaying judges to his side in ambiguous rounds, but certainly not especially effective at responding to barrages of strong, concisely stated counter-arguments, as quarter-finals at Moho proved. Crassus ran the case that public universities should not favor in-state students in their admissions processes. Kimel pointed out that these universities were funded by local tax-money, and that it thus seemed reasonable to favor the local populace. An additional advantage would be preventing brain-drains by enticing talented local students to attend state-schools, to say nothing of the competitive disadvantage the state would suffer compared to its neighbors who would effectively discriminate against its students by continuing to favor their own. This ability to map out a web of arguments was usually enough to ensnare Crassus. He was really more of a murmillo than a retiarius.

Johns Hopkins also advanced to semi-finals and were meant to hit Harvard now, but the well-meaning directors of the Moho team evidently wanted to wait until the final round for this matchup, since this would lead to the most drama and help both teams’ TOTY ambitions. What this scheme implies about the likely results of semi-finals readers can decide for themselves. As it was, Alexander from Amherst, partnered with Arianna and very rarely a survivor in the break, caught that the rounds were paired incorrectly. Like it or not, Hopkins would have to face Harvard in semi-finals.

Stuck on Government, Kimel knew that he had a difficult, pivotal round before him. Lepidus and Antony were more effective than Crassus and Pompey at facing a diversity of arguments and then focusing the debate on more singular issues, a potentially effective antidote to Kimel’s manic approach. Kimel somberly remembered that he should have been more assertive at Northams when it came to case-selection in semi-finals, and so he convinced Jason to let him run the case with which he was most comfortable: whether or not the Brothers Grimm should censor their fairy tales. But this was a case that everyone had heard by now, and dealing as it did with issues of aesthetic taste, Lepidus and Antony were especially well equipped against it. As it played out, the round was tense but unmemorable enough that Kimel eventually forgot what side each team defended. When it was all over, the three judges looked nervously at each other and left the room.

Everyone waited in the general assembly for the results. Minutes felt like hours. Kimel had done his best to stare at the judges during his opponents’ speeches (he’d picked up this habit from Germanicus) and, after gauging their reactions, guessed that he might have won, but just barely. But then a member of the Mount Holyoke team shuffled sadly to the microphone and announced that on a “fiercely contested decision,” the winner was Johns Hopkins. Lepidus and Antony would be facing the Amherst/Harvard hybrid in finals.

Kimel shook his opponents’ hands and then wandered out of them room. By chance, he met one of the judges in the hallway. She began to cry.

“Sic transit gloria mundi,eh?” said Kimel with a forced smile

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. Besides, what control did you have over the situation?”

“But you don’t understand,” she said with sudden urgency. “You weren’t supposed to hit until finals. And besides, you and Jason should have won semi-finals.”

“Truth is in the eye of the beholder.”

“But you lost… lost because of politics.”

For a moment, Kimel said nothing. His first instinct was to doubt what he heard. The round had been messy and unpleasant, and Kimel’s victory was by no means obvious. At the same time, he could not believe that Lepidus’ popularity, for all of its strength, would ever pave the way for deliberate corruption on his part. He was, however, willing enough to concede that feelings of friendship toward Hopkins might have swayed some decisions in the ambiguous round. After all, who was Kimel to argue with someone who would know?

“Is the TOTY race over for you now?” she asked mournfully.

“It will be,” Kimel said quietly, “if Hopkins win this round.”

“Oh!”

“But if that wasn’t to happen, I would say that the race would remain most contentious.”

The judge looked at Kimel thoughtfully for a moment, and then they both smiled.

Arianna and Alexander now faced Lepidus and Antony. Arianna was thoughtful and intelligent as always, but Alexander was just superb. Finally in a final round and eager to show off his long-overlooked talents, he ran the case that Amherst should not have excluded a radical Republican speaker from its campus, but should rather have welcomed his views in service to open discourse. This was perhaps almost as difficult a case to argue against as America supplying aid to oppressed homosexuals, but Lepidus and Antony did a good job making their observations sound more meaningful than they really were. The judges soon left the room to deliberate. A few moments later they returned. Kimel caught the eye of his confidante. On her face she wore a grin.

It was an 8-1 decision. With Arianna by his side, Alex had managed to do what never proved possible with Messalina and win a tournament. Lepidus ultimately won a third place speaker award. Kimel was second, and Jason first. The TOTY race was now anyone’s guess.

After the Mt. Holyoke Tournament (which Kimel sardonically branded the best he ever attended to that college’s newspaper), the members of Harvard A arranged a pagan rite to ensure their victory in the TOTY race. Vespasian, Jason, Scott, and Kimel gathered together in the large apartment on DeWolfe street. Rose petals and tom-toms were distributed, then Venetian and African masks. With so much done, the procession of four marched to the sound of music to a bridge spanning the Charles, where the flowers were scattered over the water. Kimel intoned prayers in Latin, English, and Hebrew. Addressing the spirit of the river, he cried,

“Oh spirit of the river—bring us victory over our enemies!”

Then, however, some Judeo-Christian scruple impelled him to add,

“Let our triumph be one/won among gentlemen—for there is a thin line between friends and foes in our current world.”

With the rite concluded and immortalized on video-tape, the four ambled back to Scott and Kimel’s apartment. More friends arrived and the evening assumed a festive atmosphere. To finish off the night in proper style, a handful of adventurers smoked Diviner’s Sage, which was legal in those days. While it induced some to laugh hysterically and others to temporarily lose their wits, it seemed to have no effect on Kimel, beyond inspiring him to jump on his bed and then hide behind an oversized lamp.

At the end of the evening, Scott, Kimel, Jason, and Sulla C made plans to take a trip to Amsterdam. Sulla B was their only fellow Mario Tennis aficionado to pass on the prospect. In a few days time, everything was arranged. Their flight was scheduled to leave in three weeks, directly following the conclusion of the Yale tournament.

The next competition for Kimel and Jason was Bates, a small contest so out of the way that Lepidus, Antony, Crassus, and Pompey left its results to the fates, competing instead at Duke, its southern counterpart. Kimel, Arianna, and Jason arrived one day early to participate in a demonstration round against members of the Bates team, winning over enough of the crowd for the match to be declared a draw.

The three were presently led to a well-furnished guesthouse meant for visiting big-shots. Since there were only two bedrooms, Arianna was given one to herself, and Kimel and Jason were left to share a king-size bed between them. Harvard A promptly joked about the last time necessity compelled Kimel to share a bed with a teammate—two years beforehand, when in the middle of the night, Sulla A turned in his sleep with the cry “Final round!” inadvertently hitting Kimel squarely in the face. (He had yet to reach a final round in those days). This time, Kimel was allowed to sleep more soundly. In the morning, however, a cleaning woman burst into the room thinking it empty, screamed when she saw two men side by side, and slammed the door. This provided more fodder for laughter. The remainder of the morning was spent stealing junk food and soft drinks from the amply-stocked cabinets.

The tournament itself proved disappointing. Though Jason won a third place speaker award and Kimel a second (Sulla A was first), both Harvard A and B faltered in quarter-finals. For his part, Kimel was defeated by Alex from Amherst, avenging his previous loss in high style. Amherst considered punishing Harvard by running the case that gerrymandering should be reformed in a duplication of their semi-final round at Columbia, but then decided against it. Ultimately, Josephus won the tournament, a well-deserved victory, and his first in ages.

Kimel and Jason were, of course, bitterly disappointed. Now only three weekends remained until Nationals. As the god of the Charles River would have it, though, the TOTY scramble would in fact end before that. Only one more weekend would count, which, as the next chapter of this remarkable history will show, proved to be more than ample time to reveal several characters’ true colors.

The Providence College tournament was exactly well-attended enough to be worth 14 points, in other words, enough for Kimel and Jason to tie Lepidus and Antony for first place TOTY in case of a victory. There was a good chance of this, since the playing-field was relatively thin. As it happened, a large portion of the tournament’s population was composed of teams from Harvard, including Ursus and Attila, sophomores now. Kimel was glad to see Attila at the competition and reminisced with him about their unexpected victory there the previous year. In the back of his mind, Kimel wondered what was underway at the University of Virginia’s tournament. A victory there would likewise allow Pompey and Crassus to tie Lepidus and Antony at 82 points.

That Kimel and Jason would fight their way into the break was only expected. They found themselves against Arianna in quarter-finals and hoped that she might punt to them, since her partner was an infrequent participant, and she was so ill that she was openly lamenting her continued presence at the tournament and threatening to leave. In fact, she had even tried to punt her fifth round to another team, but this irritated the judge, and so she broke to quarter-finals unexpectedly as punishment. Kimel’s hope for an easy time did not go fulfilled, for Arianna very much wanted to win the round. She ran a case Opp choice about whether prescription drug commercials should be legal and peppered her observations with insights derived from her thesis. Kimel intuitively felt that these commercials should indeed be legal, and all of Arianna’s specific knowledge about the issue came to no end. The fact that a doctor’s approval is necessary to take any medicine and that and a list of side-effects is required by law to accompany all airings seemed to mitigate the harms of her case. This sort of reasoning was enough to win the judges over.

In semi-finals now, Kimel and Jason were paired against none other than Ursus and Attila. Sulla A now openly declared that Kimel and Jason should have to throw the round, in keeping with what he and Sulla B had done to help Sulla C’s girlfriend to qualify for Nationals at Dartmouth. Josephus, Porus, and Sulla C loudly took up this preposterous cause, and the latter, newly crowned heir to Scott as President of the team, even threatened not to provide funding for Harvard A’s participation at future tournaments should the round not be thrown. These arguments, however, were petty and unreasonable. TOTY was on the line, which was a more important distinction for the team than an umpteenth person qualified for Nationals; remember, no one from Harvard had ever won the distinction of first place TOTY before. Scott overruled Sulla C’s rash decision, and Kimel and Jason proceeded calmly to their round, running the case about champerty against the sophomores, the strongest in their casebook. They were not about to lose this round.

Again, the case about the legalization of maintenance was as strong as it was boring. In response to it, the sophomores cautioned that corporations would take advantage of gullible clients by duping them into agreements with abusive contingency rates, but Kimel proved why this was not in fact the case. As it stands, lawyers hold a monopoly on the contingency market. More competition could only lower the rates for prospective clients, since now corporations would vie with law firms to entice the most claimants to their offices. This was a subtle counter-response to the argument at hand and deserved to win Kimel and Jason the round, though it was worrisome when one of the judges fell asleep during the PMR just while Kimel was emphasizing its importance.

As it happened, Kimel indeed won the round and now proceeded to finals, where he was to face none other than Scott and Sulla C. They had triumphed over Lucretia in semi-finals, who had in turn beaten Josephus in quarter-finals, inducing him to remove his outlandish woven ski-cap in frustration during the round. Thus, the four teammates who were planning the trip to Amsterdam were all against each other. Lucretia, doubtless overjoyed by her first real success on APDA, could console herself with a first place speaker award. Once more, Kimel was second.

Sulla C now had a sudden change of heart and offered to punt the round, admitting that a TOTY win outweighed the marginal benefit of his potential victory. However, everyone knew what had happened to Arianna during her fifth round. Something like that would be a disaster, so it was decided for the round to go forward, though whether this meant that Sulla C and Scott would not try hard was unclear. Sulla C’s request that Jason and Kimel buy him dinner for his efforts, however, suggested that they would not be doing their best. The topic of the round was secretly known to all beforehand by the arrangement of its participants—the question was whether dueling should be legalized.

Sulla C either changed his tactics when the round started or acted in accordance to a plan he had wrongly assumed everyone had understood once it began. One way or another, he delivered a marvelous speech and made every effort to win the round, probing Kimel with questions during his LOC and, to Harvard A’s horror, winning over the sympathies of the audience, who were still angry that semi-finals had not been thrown. Kimel delivered good reasons that dueling was undesirable in an ideal society. In addition to clichéd arguments about the nature of consent, he offered also more imaginative points about the potentially destructive effects of legalization in an urban context (innocent bystanders killed, the effective permission it would give to the justice of gang violence, etc.) But the audience was unenthusiastic about these points and they thus lost persuasive vigor. No applause meant no support. The speeches of Scott and Jason balanced each other out. Scott delivered his oration nervously, and Jason confusedly. Then Kimel delivered a caustic rebuttal speech proving in exhaustively intimate and graphic detail the terrible repercussions of the policy and the message it would send to the world about the US’ legal priorities. The mood of the room was suddenly uncertain. But then, Sulla C delivered the PMR of his life. The sympathies of the audience were decided, and they were not on the side of the victor—Harvard A, on a 4-3 decision. A great deal of damage to friendships had been done, but Kimel hardly cared. He was now at the top of the TOTY board again, and agreed with Jason that they did not owe Sulla C a meal of any kind.

On the way home from the tournament, a telephone call informed Kimel and Jason that William and Mary had in fact won the University of Virginia’s tournament, meaning that the TOTY race was now down to a three-way tie for first place. Yale and Swarthmore were the only tournaments left in the year, and it looked like they would decide the day. Kimel and Jason had one important advantage on their side: merely reaching the final round of Yale would give them enough points to ensure a sole TOTY victory, while their rivals would actually have to win the tournament to inch ahead.

In his heart, Kimel immediately wondered whether it might be worthwhile to come to an armistice and allow everyone to split the title. Simply put, the marginal benefit of winning TOTY alone, a subtle distinction few people would know or care about in the long run, was not worth the very real risk of losing the award through bravado. Kimel soon learned that he was not the only debater with these kinds of thoughts. On the way back from PC’s southern counterpart, Crassus and Lepidus had talked of nothing else but a deliberate end to hostilities and a declaration of a three-way peace on their own ride home. The offer to split the award was submitted that very night to Kimel by Instant Message, and within a few days, Harvard A had agreed to it. There was only one stipulation: that Harvard’s name would always be placed first in official listings. In the mind of Harvard, this was as a credit to the seniority of its members and their more advantageous position in the race; in the eyes of everyone else, this was a reflection of the alphabetical supremacy of the letter “H.” When William and Mary and Johns Hopkins conceded to this point, there was not much more to say. Diplomacy had won the day, and the closest TOTY race in APDA’s history was over. This course of action immediately drew a storm of strong words, both for and against it.

Ultimately, why did Kimel agree to come to terms with his TOTY rivals? The situation seemed like a classic prisoner’s dilemma, where reason proved that it was in the best interest of all actors to reach an agreement rather than pursue a selfish course of action. Reasonable minded people, like Sulla B, applauded the decision, which Jason left in Kimel’s hands. For her part, Sappho correctly predicted that the result of the race would render it the most memorable in the circuit’s history. TOTY had been seized through treachery in the past, but never before or since had TOTY been reached by consensus, and never before had it been enjoyed as a Triumvirate.

We are approaching the end of this long, not-so-secret history. In the days leading up to the following week’s Yale tournament, the Internet was abuzz with debate about the TOTY Triumvirate. Not a few people considered the arrangement to be unsportsmanlike. Fabius urged Kimel not to agree to any sort of terms, and a big-mouth from BU actually suggested retroactively altering the APDA constitution to make the agreement impossible. Others defended the pragmatism of the Triumvirs. For her part, Livia implied that she for one did not condemn the arrangement, and it even had a side benefit for her. It indirectly protected her own TOTY-point total with Tiberius, then the second-highest ever after Brian Fletcher.The Triumvirs had to content themselves with a record of third place, which soon slid slid down the ranks when Hannibal went on to break all records as a senior.* Ultimately, though, no one’s opinion amounted to anything of practical import, and Kimel hardly cared about the gossip. He now had other, more pressing problems with which to contend, to be discussed in due course.

Kimel partnered with Scott at Yale and won a fourth place speaker award, impressing Germanicus with a speech defending a woman’s right not to prosecute abusive spouses for domestic violence. Kimel considered the 27 he received in the round one of the greatest honors of his senior career. Livia might have been more fearsome and slippery, but Germanicus’s ingenuousness was more worthy of emulation and respect than her ingeniousness, and this praise meant a lot to him. Nevertheless, “Harvard KL” finished the tournament at ninth place, just missing the break to quarter-finals. As it happened, Jason and Vespasian won the tournament which, coupled with Kimel’s speaker award, led many a spectator to wonder “what if.” But Kimel himself was more skeptical. Yale was the only major APDA tournament at which he never broke, and he was not especially popular with certain judges on the team, as history proved. Before the final round began, Kimel crouched behind a podium and hid from the audience. Vespasian began his speech by claiming that he was someone else in disguise and ducked down. Then, Kimel emerged from his hiding place to the sound of applause, declaring “to hell with détente!” Directly after the final round, Sulla C, Scott, Kimel, and Jason departed for Amsterdam. To put it cryptically, the trip moved memorable enough to be forgettable. Kimel was amused to see Jason and Vespasian in the final round of Yale. Indeed, since the latter was in no small part responsible for the rise of Harvard A, there was something comically appropriate about his final triumph on APDA.

It was around this time that Kimel received two pieces of news simultaneously: that he was to be one of 60-some students to graduate “summa cum laude,” and that he had been rejected from every graduate program to which he’d applied. Truth be told, this failure was due more to Kimel’s uncertainty about his future plans than a lack of credentials. He put perilously little thought into his personal statement and only completed the applications at the last minute, and then only to the most selective schools. Nevertheless, with the TOTY race over and only Nationals to look forward to, there was now no distraction from the practical problem of what was to become of him. A simultaneous and more disorienting blow was when Scott suddenly found himself with a virtual wife.

Scott and Kimel had become inseparable friends over the course of the year and enjoyed a lively intimacy bound to a mutual love of blunt and unpretentious conversation and, at least in those days, philosophy. To summarize their nightly conversations in a paragraph or two of even the most elegant prose is to do them a fundamental injustice. Hours would be spent analyzing the nature of social behavior and cultural institutions working from the fundamental assumptions that on average, human beings are both lazy and self-interested. The most appropriate eulogy to these discussions is this: Kimel could say without hyperbole that they taught him more about the analysis of history than four years of a Harvard education, and they shared a scope and liveliness comparable to the sum total of his debate experience, but were by contrast never self-interested or ill-natured. They were an oasis of questions and answers the memory of which would often make Kimel’s subsequent thirst in Sinai all the more scorching. The wells dried up suddenly rather than over time. The problem was the Slattern.

*Livia claimed in a forum post that she was an impartial voice in the debate, despite her apparent interest in no one improving upon her record.

The Slattern was not beautiful but had the talent of being able to imitate beauty in a pinch through studied choices in clothing and makeup. A struggling sophomore at BU, day by day her mind turned from thoughts of finishing college to thoughts of finishing her career as an unmarried woman. At first she settled her hopes on the proprietor of the illegal poker game where she spent her nights dealing cards and flirting with strangers. Then, she transferred her hopes to the most talented regular player at the table, a certain red-head from Harvard. His good fortune to live in a giant apartment in effect became her good fortune after a single date. She promptly made herself the latest piece of furniture and scarcely left the place, dropping out of school and spending her days in a daze.

The first time that Kimel met the Slattern, she decided to break the ice by describing her traumatic past. In place of polite discourse about television or film or literature or health or the weather was an awkward and graphic monologue. At first, she tested the waters with stories about her hardships as a Korean girl adopted by a white family, and then, when Kimel passed the test by keeping quiet, weaved into the conversation descriptions of her former suicide attempts, including grisly details of vomiting up black sludge in the emergency room. So this was the sort of discourse that had replaced Scott and Kimel’s philosophizing—nothing but a memory now, like Mario Tennis games and weekend debate parties.

Kimel did not begrudge Scott his sex life, but the unexpected alteration in his living situation proved unbearable. He had invited his friend to live with him for the last few months of the year and did not sign on for a third roommate who used the shower and ate the food and broke the furnishings. Paper-thin walls and closed doors finally prompted the decision to deny Scott’s offer to live with him in Cambridge the next year, a painful but ineluctable conclusion. He divulged the news mournfully after one of their daily workouts, a ritual the lazy Kimel detested but kept up with because it had by then become his only chance in the week to talk to Scott alone. Scott wrinkled his brow and asked Kimel where he would go. Kimel didn’t know what to say. It was too late in the year to make sudden plans. He eventually took the first job he was offered—a position teaching English in a South Korean school for some 20,000 dollars a year. The deal fell through at the last moment, prompting Kimel to take another job teaching English at a steel factory in a squid fishing village on the Sea of Japan, a sort of Chosun Constanza.

And what did Kimel’s debate friends think of all of this? As Kimel discussed his uncertain plans for the next year with a supposed confidante, she replied gravely that she would be busy with law school in September and wouldn’t be able to return many letters. At the time, Kimel considered this response to be in supremely bad taste, but in retrospect he came to realize that his friend was only being honest with him, unlike some of her more hypocritical counterparts. They all had their own plans for next year; they all had their own problems. The superficiality of Kimel’s most valued relationships was starkly apparent to him for the first time. This seemed to be the grand revelation at the end of the bildungsroman: that no one cared about anyone, unless they were fucking.

Nor were Kimel’s family any more helpful. Accustomed to seeing him self-motivated and honored, his sudden lack of direction worried them, and their concern was manifested in the form of insults, sometimes deliberate and sometimes inadvertent. Had there been a single wise voice to advise Kimel, portraying the coming year as an adventure and his past record as an asset not as hollow as it seemed, he might have been a great deal less miserable and lonely than he felt at the time. But as it was, Kimel was left to the counsel of his chorus of inner demons. His last hope, a proposal to visit Pitcairn Island and write a novel detailing the experience of women on the island since the days of the Bounty Mutiny, was rejected in favor of providing a grant to enable a young musician more active in Eliot House social life to tramp around Europe for a year. (Kimel’s consolation prize was a novel with an Eliot House sticker on the back cover.) Soon after this final rejection, the hope of finding answers in the haze of a hallucinogenic mushroom proved nauseating rather than enlightening.

Despite smiling less than he once did, Kimel the debater continued to convey the illusion of confidence and prosperity. By this time, the only major event left in the year before Nationals was the Swarthmore tournament. Kimel and Crassus made plans to partner together, which seemed like a promising arrangement. Over time, their mutual respect had become less grudging, especially now that the TOTY race was over. Crassus even threw his arms around Kimel and nearly sent him plummeting down a flight of stairs when Harvard B’s loss in quarterfinals of Yale was announced, thus destroying once and for all the TOTY pretensions of the only potential rival to the Triumvirate. But at the last minute insistence of Antony, Kimel took on a different partnership. Though he never suspected it before, his younger rival evidently looked up to him. Antony was incredibly eloquent during in-rounds, deservedly winning a top speaker at the tournament and going on to debate beside Kimel until an undeserved loss in semi-finals about whether a utopia should punish its citizens with exile or prison. The next year, Lepidus and Antony would make finals of Nationals and run the case whether Faust should be condemned or redeemed at the end of the legend about him, a topic perhaps inspired by the types of rounds Harvard A had pioneered. For their part, Crassus and Pompey became the first team to win TOTY two years in a row.

The Slattern eventually left the apartment for a whole night—long enough to collect her possessions, anyway During this respite, Sulla B and C returned to DeWolfe. Laughs were shared over drinks and video games, and thoughts for the upcoming year were thrown about. This would prove to be the final meeting of this kind, and Kimel wasn’t there.

Assuming that the night would be no different from any other, he made plans to spend the evening with Verginia, the Novice of the Yeat and Sulla B’s former girlfriend, who’d impressed him over the Internet by correctly identifying a very obscure quote from “Anna Karenina.” An early evening turned seamlessly into a late night, and Kimel unexpectedly found himself sleeping over at her apartment, news which did not fail to reach the party at Dewolfe.

An ascetic when it came to appetites of any sort, this was a rare occasion when Kimel would have really valued physical intimacy for its own sake. He looked back ruefully in those days to his romantic awkwardness in early college. But in fairness, those were days before he’d even shared a kiss with anyone yet, and he was afraid of intimacy and embarrassed by his body. Perhaps too some lingering notion from film or literature rendered sex without love distasteful. At least now, though he was virtually just as inexperienced as he ever was, he’d come to realize that filet mignon does not negate the existence of more humble cuts of meat. He thought back to his role in “Sweeney Todd,” in which he’d removed a girl’s bra strap with his teeth. His lips brushed against her chest once. The thought of soft skin and thoughtlessness was comforting now.

But nothing came to anything. If the embarrassment of psoriasis and romantic inexperience had defeated his chances with Lucretia, he had no higher hopes with Verginia. They soon fell to talking, to Kimel’s chagrin. Her style of conversation either resembled Kimel’s in that it hopped from one non-sequitur to another, or she was passive enough that his own erratic preferences determined the course of the conversation.

“If you were going to die tomorrow, what would you most regret not doing?” she chirped.

“In the first place, I would regret not publishing a book of substance and popularity. I consider not having done so already a real personal failing. It enervates me—makes me listless and pessimistic. I take most things as they come, but this unrealized dream is something that festers. It makes me actively unhappy. It makes me ashamed of myself. I’m not powerless to do anything about the problem, of course. But the nepotism in the publishing world scares me—I’d almost rather entrust my work to no one than to someone who’d carve out a mediocre fate for it. Then at least in my imagination, I might have achieved great things. There are so many characters I want to bring to life. Sometimes, it’s all I can think about, meeting new people and wondering how to combine the best and worst in them into new souls. The thought of one stillborn birth after another is almost too much for me to stomach. But these are the sorts of things I learned not to talk about a long time ago.”

“And in the second place?” she asked as if he’d said nothing.

“I would regret not having had sex with more people.”

“Is that really so important? Sex is so mundane, so common. Everyone has it. It’s pretty boring.”

“The same could be said about money, my dear, but I’d still like to have as much of it as possible.”

She laughed at that. Kimel pressed his advantage,

“If we’re really on the hunt for a good analogy, sex is like conversation, isn’t it? Everyone has their own tropes, their own secret anecdotes for when the party turns tedious and a joke is in order. Yes, repeated jokes aren’t very funny, and listlessness sets in with repeated conversations about the same things with the same people. But isn’t there something to be said for a free discourse of minds and ideas? Even if everyone talks, doesn’t everyone talk differently? And doesn’t it follow that we should talk to as many different people as possible?”

“Your metaphors aren’t very subtle. This isn’t really how you think, or you would make different life choices.”

“Would I?” Kimel laughed. “You might be right about that. I still think there’s something tragic about rabbits in a cage fated to reproduce only because their captivity happens to unite them. True love is a cousin to beastliness. But we’re trapped no matter what we do—even realizing you’re a cliché is a cliché. I’m humble enough to realize that now.”

“The same things you said about sex can be said about debate—the same talented mix of people losing to each other every year, some good, some bad, all balancing out to nothing very unique.”

“But it’s better to have questioned each other than never to have spoken at all, right? Better to have gone for it, to have created a memory. All that we have to live on are memories.”

Kimel kept his eyes fixed on the girl, but the subject of creating memories was uninteresting to the novice.

“I was talking about a debate case with Lucretia and wondered what you thought. Do you think that debate make you a good person?”

Defeated, Kimel launched into his concession speech.

“Good and bad are relative terms, Verginia. From the vantage point of deliberately twisting the truth to win rounds and insisting on seeing both sides of one-sided issues, even the ancient Greeks condemned debate, and the Romans periodically banned rhetoricians and philosophers from the city. Friendships might be made in the trenches, but the activity lends itself to jealousy and schadenfreude because it gives the illusion that academic discourse is a zero-sum game, and no one likes to lose an argument.“

“Is that the whole story?”

“Not necessarily. Debate also teaches you to weigh both sides of an issue carefully and to determine what percentage of black and white is mixed into a particular patch of gray. It makes you clever, open-minded; it rewards hard work and ambition, and it breeds the most intelligent conversations most people are likely to have at college. Ultimately, I can’t complain. APDA rewarded me with the distraction of competition, the thrill of the chase, and some memorable, superficial friendships. It taught me about the sacrifices people make to actualize the dreams for which they settle as they become adults.”

“A lot of people love you, David.”

“Love is a dangerous word when it’s used too carelessly.”

He took a deep breath. Then he said that he was tired, and laid awake.

Though its results have no bearing on the Team of the Year race, Nationals was (and is) the most important individual tournament of the year; the most competitive contest and best judged competition; prelude to the swan song every senior hopes to belt in Finals. As the fruits of an individual tournament subject to every whim of fortune, however, the results of Nationals were often surprising. Sulla C’s irrational protestations to the contrary, victory did not always go to the most accomplished team of the season; some luck was involved. That very year in a break to octo-finals, the higher-ranking seed lost every round but one to a numerically humbler counterpart.

The contest that year was to be held at Wesleyan, whose senior members were close friends with Sulla A. If ever there were an advantageous battleground for him to prove his mettle, this was it. This fact was not lost on Kimel’s former roommate, who thirsted for a title with an intensity that doubtless surpassed the combined passions of Harvard A’s helmsmen, already assured their honors. If Kimel was an enthusiastic improviser and natural athlete, Sulla A was a deliberate and calculating machine, his every humble merit augmented by years of professional training, a grueling regimen molding him for this moment and none other. His Spartan single-mindedness doubtless rubbed off on Sulla B. With a less disciplined partner, he might never have overcome his initial awkwardness and become the sparkling wit into which he’d evolved by senior year. Already assured a place at Yale Law School, Nationals was all that was left in the year that mattered professionally to the Russian giant.

For Kimel, as interesting a distraction as the results of Nationals might have been, the debate year was already over. TOTY had been won by hard work, negotiation, pagan rites, and intrigue, and he and his fellow Triumvirs were rewarded by the knowledge that theirs was a struggle that would not be forgotten. It was even immortalized on an APDA-wikipedia, the brain-child of Lepidus and his greatest legacy to the circuit—a treasure-trove of data with more information about APDA’s past than APDA’s own official website. First-place TOTY was a victory with an asterisk, to be sure, but that little star led to a most interesting footnote. By its singular conclusion, Kimel’s career had become a part of APDA’s history.

Besides, TOTY had never been won by a team from Harvard before, and 6th place SOTY, which Kimel also won, was a better showing than that of anyone else from his school in recent memory. For all of these reasons, Kimel allowed himself the luxury to be weary—perhaps to ask for more would be hubris. Besides, he had other matters on his mind that, suddenly, seemed altogether more important than the illusory triumphs of college debate rounds and the sea of plastic trophies he now had the burden of packing and misplacing.

At the end of the second night, before the break was announced, senior speeches were delivered. Vespasian and Kimel were perhaps most memorable—Vespasian for his wit, and Kimel for being alternately haunting and ridiculous. The Triumvir quoted Tennessee Williams about “the long parade to the graveyard,” waxing lyrically about how recently it was that he’d watched senior speeches as a humble sophomore. Now he was already a participant; time flies and destroys all things (that he never saw a single senior speech before his junior year was beside the point). He then thanked Arianna, Scott, and Jason, one for her exemplary commitment to the club, one for being his best friend, and one for his position as the temporary partner of his labors. He concluded by calling Jason the Willy to his Wonka, and immediately realized that the ghost of Dahl just had a joke at his expense. Everyone had enough respect to clap at the conclusion of this valedictory, though a third of the room had never stopped its conversation once, even at the height of the speech. No one else was treated with more courtesy, though.

In his heart, Kimel doubted that his connection to anyone but Scott would last the summer. He knew well that he was everyone’s acquaintance and no one’s friend, and soon, he would be thousands of miles away besides. A world war might as well have decimated his class—every now and then in the future, he might glimpse a former face and inquire, “oh, did you survive Guadalcanal after all?” before going back to assuming that everyone’s experiences had ended with his own experience of them. Kimel thought to himself as he returned to his seat that he might as well have been addressing a collection of hideous grinning masks in some Venetian peddler’s cart.

The next morning, out-round pairings were announced and a gasp went out—Harvard A was paired against Havard B. The collective mutter pleased Kimel’s vanity, but he was disappointed by the news. The Sullas had performed poorly during in-rounds and subsequently plagued everyone involved with a difficult octos draw. At least, for once, he won a coin-flip. Opposition was the obvious choice. Jason and he held three strong cases in reserve for prospective future rounds, including a gem for Finals about God’s existence. Octo-finals was to be a three-judge affair headed by Marcus, but Kimel, wary that the Wesleyan dino on the panel might have been biased toward the Sullas, suggested that the number be raised to five, a request that was immediately granted without any ceremony or complaint.

As Kimel and Jason waited impatiently for the Sullas to complete their preparations and begin the round, everyone took turns guessing what Harvard B would run. In deference to Sulla A’s reputation since sophomore year, by now unjust, most spectators suspected a tight case. Kimel doubted this, however, and Vespasian correctly surmised that Harvard B might run an old Opp-choicer about whether a just legal system would permit absolute prohibitions on double-jeopardy. When the Sullas indeed ran this very case, Harvard A’s choice was assured: there should be no absolute ban on double jeopardy. In other words, it should be possible to send someone to trial twice for the same charge. The fact that technology could reveal new sources of evidence after many years’ passing suggested that this was the correct side of the issue.

In the following round Sulla A and B were at their most magnificent; they must have been pleased that their performance was taped, for their talents were never shown off to greater advantage. To be sure, Kimel and Jason thought of many strong arguments to bolster their side of the issue: that there existed concrete harms to lunatics walking the streets, that new sources of evidence might become available over time thanks to future technology mandating new trials, and that the DA would try someone twice very rarely because it was an expensive process and doing so would seem inept without good reason for a second trial. It was all to no avail—the strength of Harvard A’s opposition only served to make Harvard B’s triumph seem all the more hard-fought and neatly-won.

Ultimately, the Sullas had three advantages on their side. First, there was the question of who would decide what cases were to be revived over time. Kimel suggested the DA should do this, but the Sullas had pre-prepared reasons to prove why this would be unreasonable and inflated the importance of the point. In the second place, Harvard B emphasized to strong advantage the significance of the degradation of evidence—in Kimel’s world, an innocent victim to a tyrannical DA could not salvage evidence that might have saved him decades after a purported crime was committed. Both of these points were answered by Harvard A to some extent or other during the round, but they paled before the third and most important reason for the Sullas’ triumph. Simply put, the pair dominated the room’s sentiments. They spoke more assuredly and with greater passion and fluency than Harvard A and justly won over the crowd.

Kimel congratulated his teammates on their victory before it was announced, which Jason considered to be bad form. For his part, Sulla A smiled and said that he’d already been leaked the result—he was advancing to quarter-finals on a 4-1 decision. It was at least a comfort to Kimel that seemingly every strong team at the tournament also lost their octo-final round, including Seneca and Antonina from Princeton, Crassus and Pompey, Lepidus and Antony, Sappho and Metella, and Piso and Plancinus. Petronius and Josephus too soon joined the ranks of the defeated.

Hannibal survived late into the game, presaging a promising career. Kimel made a point of congratulating him after the tournament and confiding that his accomplishments augured great things for Yale’s debate program. The future record-breaker was so self-assured and magnificently arrogant that he could not help but be successful. Since he never lost a round to Hannibal, Kimel’s vanity was intact enough for this prediction to have been delivered earnestly and in high spirits. The University of Chicago too lasted long in the competition, despite one of the participants being a relative novice to the activity. (After slaughtering this team in semi-finals, Sulla B smilingly told Kimel that the round reminded him of their octo-final pairing in difficulty. Kimel nodded and made it a point to smilingly throw his recent night with Verginia into the conversation).

Soon, it was down to two, the pairing that everyone predicted after the drop heard round the world in octo-finals: Licinius and Cato versus the Sullas. On Government, the Sullas ran the case that the Harvard faculty ought not to have taken steps to formally admonish Larry Summers for his comments about the possibility that women might be worse than men at math and science for innate reasons. It was an eloquent round on an open topic and made for a memorable video-tape. Everyone spoke nicely, and Sulla A’s PMR was delivered with just enough heartbreaking intensity to prove to the audience how much he wanted to win, but not necessarily that he should. In the event, it was a split decision—a single vote decided the issue.

As Kimel waited, bored, for the results of the final round, he suddenly felt a strong urge for Cornell to win the round. It was a strange sensation, and one he’d never felt before—so long as anyone’s victory did not upset his TOTY chances, he was rather happy for his peers’ successes, as a rule. What was the source of this pettiness against two voices that had matured in the same nest as his own, then? Why should he derive satisfaction from seeing Sulla A brought within an inch of what he wanted most and then have it torn from him? TOTY had been won. Why should Kimel begrudge the Sullas this particular victory? It was not that he thought Cornell deserved to have won the round. He wasn’t paying enough attention to know. It was not that he hoped Cato should finally win a tournament, a feat he’d never accomplished despite appearing in the final round of two National Championships two years running. It was not that he begrudged his loss to the Sullas in octo-finals. He himself had openly conceded the round, whatever its outcome, before he’d even heard the judges’ decisions. Nor was jealousy the culprit, that the Sullas should have been there on stage in place of him.

No, if the human heart can be read and summarized in a paragraph, the answer might be this: that Kimel was the type of man who loved those people who loved him and who admired those voices that expressed admiration for his own, and he had never achieved real emotional intimacy with any of his teammates. So everything that transpired between them remained a game of sorts, a competition for honors in which even his closest ally was an opponent. Besides, in so many words, hadn’t Sulla A told Kimel to deliberately lose TOTY “for the good of the team” with a straight face at PC? Why should this sort of showing inspire loyalty? Harvard B’s victory at Nationals would overshadow TOTY. That’s what counted. Hence the secretly crossed fingers for Cato; hence the pettiness. In a world of sinners, what is a sin but a virtue?

The news that the Sullas were National Champions was, however, far from devastating for Kimel when it broke—indeed, it wasn’t even unpleasant. From the team’s perspective, it provided a valuable photo opportunity before a trophy of vulgar size. Now, Kimel was happy for the Sullas. His former thoughts had been transitory things, phantoms, illusions. He was a consummate sportsman in the company of like-minded friends of equally illustrious accomplishment. And anyway, he was too dispassionate to care very much about debate. Too much passion about anything was un-aristocratic.

For the third year running, Kimel finished as the highest speaking debater from Harvard (at 5th), and the highest placed SOTY (at 6th, tied with Terentius, top speaker at Worlds). Crassus was First Place Speaker of the Year, and Sappho, in a victory pleasing to everyone who believed her to be underestimated (that is, those with taste) claimed First Place Speaker at Nationals. The debate year concluded with some final honors for our hero: a financial bonanza at the Triangular Debate Contest two years running, and even victory at Incest-fest, which Kimel did not take in the least bit seriously (he ran the case “it’s raining men” and tried to prove its truth through Parmenidean metaphysics.) But he made it to finals somehow and concluded his career by annihilating Sulla B and Arianna on a case about whether “Amadeus” deserved to win the Best Picture Oscar. Kimel analyzed the movie well, describing in eloquent detail the mediocrity of the celebrated Salieri and the infuriating genius of the friendless Mozart. Whatever the final vote-count, the round was no contest; Sulla B and Arianna only had “The Year of Living Dangerously” on their side, and no one in the room (and certainly not Sulla B) had even seen that movie, and subsequent research proved that it wasn’t even up for the prize that year.

Search the record-books, and you will find that Crassus won TOTY twice and Antony SOTY once. No one has appeared in more final rounds than Crassus, and Hannibal broke all time TOTY-point records. (Interestingly, none of these men ever won Nationals.) Brian Fletcher’s record isn’t so impressive anymore. No one but those on the scene remember the greatest voices of past classes. Only all-time records stand out over time, and, fortunately for Kimel, occasional oddities, like the year that by some miracle produced three TOTYs or, according to the jealous, none at all.

In Harvard’s greatest year of competitive excellence on APDA, Kimel was in the eyes of many the school’s most eloquent competitor, one who combined, at his best, an infuriating but charming self-assuredness with a skill for intelligent improvisation and original analysis. Only those who knew him more closely suspected a fascination for Machiavellian politics that gradually evolved into rudimentary skill, and fewer yet his almost maniacal sensitivity toward real and imagined slights to his reputation. There were those who considered his warm nature a façade. Wiser eyes saw that most of his walls were really windows. But a single point is sure. From parodies in APDA newsletters to newspaper articles to long online debates about his TOTY arrangements to articles on APDA’s wikipedia to this very project, no debater’s career likely spilled so much ink, though in fairness to the gods of justice who are the final arbiters of all debate rounds, he himself did a great deal of the spilling.

(See the Epilogue for the Conclusion)