Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel (18 page)

I’d had a couple of Skype conversations with the savant syndrome expert Dr. Treffert by now. It meant the world to me that the man I’d seen on television in the report about autistic savant and synesthete Daniel Tammet, which helped me know I was not completely alone, had become a guide as I navigated these waters. I hoped to meet him in person one day, but it would require taking time off from the store and flying to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Dr. Treffert is so revered in the field that people fly from all over the world—even the Far East—to his beautiful little midwestern town to see him. He explained that my intense focus on body language could be attributed to the increase in sensitivity and awareness that many acquired savants experience. He asked me a lot of questions because he was worried my sensitivity to other people’s behaviors might be compulsive. After discussing it with me, he said, “Sometimes the increased sensitivity is a gift and sometimes a burden, again, depending on how intrusive it becomes. In your case I would list this as a plus, and not a tradeoff.”

It
was
mostly a plus, but sometimes it was a burden too. I began to notice that when I was with people, if someone was uncomfortable, I was often aware of that person’s discomfort long before anyone else in the room noticed. Or I’d sense someone’s boredom with whatever subject was being talked about. When I felt someone else’s embarrassment or boredom, I tried to change the subject or somehow change the dynamic of what was going on. Just like having OCD, it was a lot of work and a lot of worrying and very tiring to be on guard for not only myself but everyone around me at all times. I think Dr. Treffert would categorize that part as obsessive. So it did sometimes go into the negative area. If I had to rank the hierarchy of conditions in my head, I’d say that empathy trumped my aversion to germs in most cases—I didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable by obviously avoiding touching them. But sometimes my OCD did battle with my empathy when I applied antibacterial lotion on my skin right after shaking hands with someone. I knew I might embarrass people but I just couldn’t help it, and I would apologize profusely. When I thought about it, I realized I’d begun saying “I’m sorry” an awful lot.

I was still having difficulty with written forms of communication. (Except when it had to do with math research; the obsessive drive to know more about math, particularly geometry, got me over any inability or lack of desire to read or write.) It was very frustrating to me because it was such a crucial part of my schooling and I needed the skills for business. But at the same time, I had this heightened sensitivity to nonverbal cues. Why wasn’t my whole ability to communicate wiped out? According to Greg Ayotte, the director of consumer services for the Brain Injury Association of America, communication is no longer believed to be localized in a particular part of the brain, and diffuse areas may get rewired and take over. State-of-the-art brain scans have shown that this sort of rewiring can happen in TBI survivors.

The hyperaware parts of me were a new positive for my work at my current store, Planet Futon, in the sense that I could plan my sales approach from the moment customers arrived. I’d had plenty of practice with salesmanship since we’d opened the store in 2001, but since my brain injury, I found myself better able to read people. For example, if a sedan pulled up—no sale. A minivan was more likely to be a serious customer, and a pickup truck was a sure bet. If a couple walked in, I’d focus on the less open of the two, monitoring cues like crossed arms, which signaled being closed off. If they had kids and were buying bunk beds, I’d try to get them to upgrade to better memory-foam mattresses, knowing most parents will do anything for their children.

Tacoma is not as economically prosperous as Seattle. There are a lot of people struggling to get by. I tried to meet them halfway by offering a no-credit-check policy. I made an arrangement with a finance company that would help customers with their purchases if they could provide proof of employment and had checking accounts.

This began to draw in some hard-luck types who couldn’t make purchases at the bigger stores, and while I was really happy to be helping people, we took our share of hits from being so open. One woman bounced a check she wrote to us and when I phoned her, she said, “That’s impossible, I still have two checks left on the account!” Another woman was about to bounce her check and the bank called me; I deposited the forty-dollar difference so our sale would go through. The customer phoned me furious that her account had been wiped out, though she’d received a forty-dollar discount. When I explained that intentionally taking merchandise and writing a bad check on it was just like stealing, she said, “Oh, you big companies can afford it.”

I had enjoyed sales much more in the past. So much of my time was now taken up policing things. But that didn’t mean it never got interesting. My best moments in the store became those spent talking about math and science, even with people who weren’t going to buy anything. It was a real joy to see people’s faces light up when they understood something, and I’d have to hone my own expertise on things when they asked difficult questions. Oftentimes I’d spend the rest of the evening reading things related to our conversations. It was one of my greatest pleasures to learn something new this way. It occurred to me that if I didn’t have an outlet to discuss this with the general public, I’d probably go mad. I purposely turned conversations to the subjects that interested me just to get through the day.

I was alone in the furniture store one day when a brick wall of an ex-con walked in with his girlfriend and her two kids. “I want to know what’s so good about this store. They say you have deals. I need a bed,” the towering, totally bald man said. Though slight of build now, I thought back to my own days as a gym rat and figured the man weighed somewhere around 260 pounds, most of it muscle. I noticed the prison tattoos running up and down his arms.

“I’m Jason, and I can help you,” I said nervously, still on guard with strangers.

“I’m Jason too,” the customer replied. We chuckled at the coincidence, and the ice was broken. I couldn’t help myself after that. I launched into my life story and apologized for being distracted when he first walked in. I told the man that ever since being mugged, I preferred to think about math and science over just about anything else, futons included. The brain injury I suffered appeared to have given me unexpected gifts, I offered.

The customer was staring wide-eyed. “I strong-arm-robbed a lot of people, but I never made nobody smarter!” He admitted he needed the bed because he’d just gotten out of prison and didn’t have one waiting for him at home. I caught myself swallowing hard and slow. “You know the worst part about being in prison?” the parolee asked. I shook my head.

“I didn’t get to smile for a year. I had to look mean. And I love to smile, don’t I?” He looked toward his girlfriend while her kids jumped up and down on a nearby mattress. She laughed.

I started showing the man bed frames and box springs, walking backward to keep him in my line of sight. Trying not to stumble or look scared, I directed the conversation back to one of my comfort zones: the mathematical concept of pi. “Do you know that circles don’t actually exist? If you zoom in close enough, their perimeters are actually zigzags—hundreds and hundreds of tiny little straight lines that are so close together they visually blend into a smooth curve from our perspective.”

“For real?” Big Jason asked.

I went further, describing how if you fill in a circle with triangles, you can better measure its area, because there really is no curve to it at all. As I continued with the impromptu lecture, my customer’s eyes lit up with understanding. I was thrilled to see that look on his face.

I carried on with the Doppler effect: “Imagine you’re on one street corner and I’m on the next, and a car is speeding past both of us,” I said. “I’ll hear it as one pitch and you’ll hear it as another, and overall it’ll make that weird
nyeeeeeeruh
sound.”

The customer nodded. “I’ve heard that sound.”

“The pitch is relative to your position in space.”

“That’s all it is?” Big Jason looked scandalized. Then he reached into his pockets. “Don’t you hate it when you spend time with a customer and they don’t buy nothing?” the giant man teased.

“N-n-no, it’s okay,” I stammered. I was thinking I didn’t care if the man bought anything as long as he left the store without hurting me. The customer pulled out a handful of wadded-up hundred-dollar bills and threw them on the mattress in front of us. “Well, I got the cash,” he said with a smile. I sold him a king-size mattress and frame for a thousand dollars.

The man shook my hand and it was all I could do not to turn around and use the economy-size bottle of hand sanitizer behind the counter.

“I come to Planet Futon for a bed and I get life lessons,” the ex-con said, his girlfriend and her kids trailing him out the door. “No circles,
wow
. . .”

I quickly washed my hands, then locked the store, hurried out the back, and ran down the street to deposit the money in the bank, looking over my shoulder every thirty seconds. Big Jason hadn’t followed me.

I slowed my pace and as I walked toward the parking lot, I glanced up at the sunset and noticed the curvature of the sky. The half-dome shape began to divide itself into triangles, the figures sliding into place and glowing in the twilight. The streetlamps flickered on, and their light rays fanned out into perfect circles before filling up with the same procession of subdividing triangles. I watched the traffic go by in a slipstream, the images trailing one another like a stack of Polaroids.

My heart was still beating fast. I almost never felt completely out of danger interacting with that somewhat threatening stranger, but at least I completed the sale. That was a big moment for me and a sign of how far I’d come since my reclusive days.

Another day, I was delighted when a very clean, well-dressed man of about fifty entered the store. He looked a lot more promising than most of my customers and I felt that he was neither unhygienic nor dangerous. It turned out he was a pastor.

This gave me pause. My only association with organized religion until then was the Baptist church I’d attended with my grandparents for a time in Anchorage. They were evangelicals and there was a lot of threatening fire and brimstone shouted from that church pulpit that scared me away from their vengeful deity. Furthermore, the church battled the community where our home was, Hillside, by placing an illegal antenna in our neighborhood for their radio broadcasts. My mom headed the community group fighting to get it removed and was ultimately successful. Congregants started showing up in our front yard, cutting down tree branches and carting away our decorative stones for revenge. I was not a total disbeliever and knew not every congregation was like that; however, this had all soured me on being a churchgoer.

The pastor was a polite and friendly man. I guess cleanliness really is next to godliness, as the saying goes, because he looked so fresh and pure, even by my exacting standards. I found myself sharing my story and listening patiently as he talked about the miraculous nature of my recovery. I told him I couldn’t argue that it was truly remarkable I was still walking around, much less experiencing my extraordinary new perspective, but I also told him that I had my share of questions about divinity being behind this. “I mean, if there is a God, didn’t the same deity who might be responsible for my amazing new life also allow me to be beaten to within an inch of my life in the first place?” I asked.

“I have questions too,” the graying visitor said. This surprised me. I’d never known a clergyperson to admit doubts.

“Here’s one of them,” he said. “If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, how is it that we also have free will? It doesn’t seem like these two things should coexist. God would already know the outcome, and if He knows it, how are our actions independent of that knowing and that power?”

I agreed and quickly ran through the logic of how these ideas might be mutually exclusive—even this was a math problem to my mind, I noticed. I took out a piece of paper and a pen to draw it for him. I put an omnipotent God in a big circle, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t put people and their actions in a separate circle next to it; their actions just couldn’t be independent of that kind of force, I told him. The circles wouldn’t even just overlap; they would have to merge. I added that I couldn’t imagine an all-powerful Creator who, in giving us choices, would also have created evil. “An all-powerful God knew torture would happen, knew the Crusades would happen; heck, God even knew that I’d be mugged, and if that’s true, we are just pawns in that plan without real free will. I think evil exists to give context to the good, but if I were God, I would just let people know about evil in their imaginations and not give them the ability to act on it.”

My visitor smiled and walked over to my drawings hanging behind the counter. “Did you do these?”

“Yes. I have been drawing what I see in my head for several years now. That circle is pi, and that snowflake-like design is wave-particle duality.” I explained these concepts during what would turn into a three-hour conversation.

“You say you can actually see these things?” he asked at one point.

“Yes.”

“This is a part of creation too, then.”

“I suppose it is. To me, it is the fundamental structure of things.”

“God must be quite a mathematician,” he said, shaking his head and putting his hands in his pockets. “I imagine your view of the universe is much larger than my own.”

I told him, “It’s not universe, it’s universes, plural.” I explained that astronomers claim that there are about five hundred billion galaxies in addition to our celestial home—the Milky Way galaxy—and that according to string theory there are at least 10
⁵⁰⁰
different universes. But then some physicists believe there are actually infinite universes. We started talking about the idea of parallel universes, with all possibilities existing somewhere in each their own realm. “There is a me talking with you here in one universe and at home taking a nap in another,” I said.