Glyph (5 page)

That’s it. I will not quarrel with the argument, offer objections to its form, premises, implicit assumptions, or its mission. I will only ask that you entertain further:

This was what I wrote on a nice stiff sheet of pink paper while seated on a turquoise blanket on the floor of the psychologist’s office at the University Hospital. She had been pleasant and indulgent of my parents up until the time I used my father’s fountain pen to begin my message to her. Then she became nervous and animated and suggested numerous times that it was all a trick and that obviously I had superior, abnormally superior, motor skills, but insisted that I couldn’t possibly know what I was doing. And so I added in a crude, childlike scribble:

what does shrinkie want ralph to do?

The doctor, a very tall woman named Steimmel, looked at me and screamed something unintelligible, then looked at my parents and screamed again. She excused herself and returned just less than a minute later.

“Well, Mr. and Mrs. Townsend, shall we sit down and talk?” Steimmel asked. “I’ll have one of the nurses watch Ralph.”

My father glanced at me and I gave a quick shake of my head to show my disapproval. Inflato said, “I’d like Ralph to stay with us.”

“Mr. Townsend, I think it’s better if—”

“No, I want him here,” Inflato said.

My mother questioned him by saying his name.

“Ralph wants it,” he whispered loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Ralph wants it?” Steimmel repeated his words.

Mo looked at me and asked me, “Do you want to remain in here with us?”

I nodded.

“You don’t really believe he understands what’s going on?” asked Steimmel. The woman was staring at me like I was on fire and so I rolled my eyes as I had seen my mother do when talking with my father. Steimmel looked away, then sat down on the sofa across the room.

The conversation that ensued was full of furtive and not-so-furtive glances over toward the baby in question. It began with the Amazon Steimmel saying, “Your son is, shall we say,
special.
”

“We know that,” Mo said.

“Well, Ralph is a little more than what we usually mean when we say
special.
I’d like to run some tests, both physical and intelligence. Do you have any problem with that?”

Mo and Inflato looked over at me and I shrugged.

“I guess not,” Inflato said.

Steimmel was not as inept as I presumed as she looked Inflato in the face and said, “Are you for some reason intimidated by your son?”

And it turned out that Inflato was quicker than I had given him credit for being, because he responded, “No more so than you.”

Mo nodded, then said to get things on track, “It’s not just the writing. Like I told you, he reads. He reads everything.” She opened her bag and pulled out a stack of pages. “Here are the notes he writes to me. He dissects arguments in scholarly texts. He comments on the structure of novels. He also writes poems. He wrote a story, but I don’t understand it.” Saying it was hard for her, she then paused to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Is there anything wrong with my child?”

Steimmel looked through my notes. Her face registered her plummet deeper into terror. “You’re sure he wrote these?”

“Positive.”

Steimmel was silent for a few seconds. “And he has never spoken?”

“Not a word.”

“Any sounds at all?”

“He cried for the first week or so when he was hungry,” my mother said.

“Then he started pointing,” Inflato said, appearing to be confronted with the information for the first time himself. “I didn’t even know what he was doing. I just thought his hand was flying around. But he was pointing.”

“That’s true,” my mother said.

Steimmel got up and walked over to her desk, regaining some composure and control, and looked at her appointment book. “Can you bring him here tomorrow morning at nine?”

My parents said they could.

I don’t know what possessed Steimmel at that point, but she knelt down on the turquoise blanket beside me and said in a baby voice, “You’re a sweet wittle thing, aren’t you? Doctor Steimmel will see wittle Ralphie tomorrow. Okay?”

I looked away from her to my parents. It was she at whom they were staring.

My babiness aside, there was and is nothing
wrong
with me. Nothing about me functions improperly or incorrectly or fails to function. If anything, a couple of things worked too well, but, of course, there was the problem. If the boat knows two speeds, stop and fast, docking becomes a difficult and perhaps impossible task. One could cut the engines and drift in, but there is little control and currents can play loose with the mission and those on the pier will just hate to see you coming. I wanted, still want, and expect to continue wanting a slower gear for my brain. I cannot even say that I am smart, only that my brain is engaged in constant and frantic activity. Mo and Inflato touched me when I was an infant as if I were a container of erosive or caustic or potentially explosive material. They would race to walk away, trying to force the other to have to lift me and bring me along. Still, I know that they did not want to leave me. Mo loved me. Both were doomed by a sense of duty and societal pressure and a basic fear of doing something wrong to keep me with them and to not put me into a sack with a brick and drop me into a lake. Often, however, I found comfort in that very thought. The idea of my drowning made me more interesting to myself. I hated the helplessness, the doorknobs so far above my head, not being able to completely trust my sphincter muscles. I was constantly afraid that some adult would fry me in a skillet. Frying is very much like hunting. The unsuspecting prey is startled by the sudden heat of attack and as I saw myself as likely prey, tender, helpless, small enough to carry back to the cave, I feared for my life. My only bad dream was discovering myself in a cast-iron pan, sitting in sizzling butter. But even in the dream, I simply lay back and tried to feel the fear for all it was and sought complete silence and absence of sensation. The dream, though bad in the beginning, did not awake me with a start, as I have read happens, but became an intense, but welcome immersion into sublime pain and finally stillness. However, I caution the reader to not rush to some assumption about my wanting death or hating life in an attempt to understand me. Occam’s razor is sharp and I am not afraid to use it. In fact, attempts at filling in my articulatory gaps with a kind of subtext, though it might prove an amusing exercise, will uncover nothing. At the risk of sounding cocky, my gaps are not gaps at all, but are already full, and all my meaning is surface.
²⁰
My parents watched me read and take notes, sitting on the sofa, pretending to read themselves, but studying me all the while. During those gaps in time when my eyes were not on a book and my hand not set to writing (i.e., when I was thinking), they would sit up straight as if feeling the initial trembling of an earthquake. I did not like the effect I had on them and I regretted having allowed them knowledge of my capacities. They thought I was a genius and this I found laughable. I reserved that designation for someone who could drive a car or at least hold his shit. But I was going to go ahead with the trifling tests and I had no doubt that I could come out smelling like a great mind, true or no. That I could and would live with, and from there on I would do what I wanted and devil take the hindmost. I knew that I was headed for the battlefield and I knew what the enemy looked like and how they dressed, but I didn’t yet know what any of our weapons would be.

Knowledge of my ability to see the world caused my father to act as if he were the drunken Noah at the end of the ark’s voyage and I, Ham. But there were no Shem and Japheth to hide his nakedness. So, whereas I still caught a occasional glimpse of my mother’s breasts, I never again saw my father’s willy. Nor did my father ever again bathe me. My willy, on the other hand, was still of interest to me and I learned that I could change its attitude. At first I thought I had broken the thing, but a bit of reading cleared up the matter.

No
C
hildren are
V
olunteers. Therefore, no children being tested by
P
sychologists are volunteers—

Statius, in the eighth book of the
Thebaid
describes how after Menalippus mortally wounded Tydeus in the war of the Seven against Thebes, Tydeus was still able to kill Menalippus. The interesting part is when Menalippus’ head was brought to Tydeus, Tydeus chewed on it like a big apple in a fit of rage. I cannot decide whether Tydeus was so outraged because his opponent had taken his life or because Menalippus had done such a poor job and allowed his dying to drag out so.

The sounds of the hospital were what I expected, whispering, the rolling of carts, the unrhythmic buzzing from this way and that, and an infrequent cackle from a nurse or doctor and that is what I heard until my presence was detected. Word spread like airborne pheromones and then all on the floor was silent, all available eyes turned to me and a few previously absent pairs appeared around the corners of doorways. Steimmel met us outside her office. She was not wearing her khaki skirt showing beneath her lab coat that day, but a pair of demin trousers and a loose-fitting sweater, as if she expected a fight or, at least, to get down on the floor and wrestle.

“Professor and Mrs. Townsend,” she greeted my parents and then to me, with the same insipid baby-chat she’d ended our last time together, she said, “And how is wittle Ralph doing?”

Mo, sensing my mood, asked, “Can we just get started?” She adjusted my weight on her side.

“Certainly. If you two would just take seats in the waiting area over there, I’ll take Ralph in for the first test.”

Inflato moved to protest.

“Please, Professor Townsend. I assure you everything will be just fine.”

My mother looked at me and I gave her a covert wink. She then handed me over to the hard and awkward hands of the doctor.

Steimmel took me into a room with tiny furniture obviously meant for child a few years older than me and sat me at a tiny table. “Okay, young man,” she said, stepping to the large mirror across the room, then walking back to me. “Let’s see what you can do.” She took a tray from a cabinet and put it in front of me. “Boy, do I feel stupid saying this to you, but, why don’t you put the blocks here into the right holes.”

I looked at her and frowned, then shrugged.

She turned to the mirror and said, “A learned gesture, no doubt. Not much more than a tick. Go.”

The eight holes were filled with circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles before her lips had closed from saying the “o” in go. I looked up at her wide brown eyes. Then I dumped the pieces out onto the table and did it again as quickly.

“Well, okay.” She paused as if to compose herself, then said to the mirror, “As I mentioned, the child exhibits extraordinary motor skills.” Then to me, “Repeat after me.”

I shook my head. Then I gestured that I wanted paper and something with which to write. She went back to the cabinet and returned with a pad and a marker, put them in front of me.

“Q,” she said. I didn’t write. I knew she wanted to give me a string of things and so I waited. Then, as if accepting a challenge, she fired off, “Q, seven, T, Q, V, B, N, Q, thirteen.”

I wrote down the letters and spelled out the numbers.

Steimmel gasped. Then, double rapid-fire, “T, U, K, six, Y, Y, Y, A, I, E, Y, Y, Y, Y, X, D, J, K, J, L, two, two, Y, Y, Y, Y, I.”

I wrote down what she had said.

“Okay,” she said and now she was pacing, to the mirror and back to me. “The subject appears to have an excellent memory. We’ll try something crazy here.” She pointed at me. “Two plus two.”

4

“Three times seven.”

21

“Two hundred seventy-six divided by thirty-three.”

8.36363636363636…

“Solve for x, 3x equals thirty-nine.”

x=13

Steimmel went to the cabinet and took out a book. “All right, you little bastard,” she said. She read: “’If a plane area is revolved about a line that lies in its plane but does not intersect the area, then the volume generated is equal to the sum of the area and the distance traveled by its center of gravity.’ Can you make any sense of that?” Steimmel was perspiring, casting desperate glances at the mirror. She appeared unsteady on her feet.

1st theorem of Pappus. And may I point out that it is the product and not the sum of the area and the distance traveled by its center of gravity.
²¹