It was a neat office; tidy, but not sterile. The walls were hung with comforting diplomas; and, amidst the clutter on the desk, sat a nameplate carved in oak: Doctor Dave. The man himself—thin and sporting a great big bird beak of a nose, beaming face encircled by a sunburst of hair—sat at ease behind the desk and smiled.
It was all supposed to relax her, she knew. A doctor’s office, yes; but homey. Chocked with familiar features. Crayon drawings in childish hands thumb-tacked to the wall beside the stern diplomas. A somber row of medical texts…but festooned with colorful page markers. A stand-up, Lucite photograph on the desk featuring the doctor embedded in familial bliss. She shifted slightly to a more comfortable position on the sofa and straightened her skirt. She didn’t know what she was doing here. Doctor Khan had referred her, but…She couldn’t afford a specialist; certainly not a…She squinted at the diploma again. Certainly not a pediatric neurologist.
She glanced at Ethan, who was staring off at some infinite wonder, and put her arm around his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Ethan,” she whispered to him. “There’s nothing to be frightened of.” She did not expect a response; was not disappointed when she received none. What sort of vision was he staring at? What sort of dreams did he have?
The doctor folded his hands into a ball on his desk. “I’m glad you could come and see me today, Mrs. Seakirt. From what your pediatrician told me when she referred your case, I believe we may be able to do something to help little Ethan.”
She had heard those words before. They had never meant anything except high hopes and disappointment. She shook her head. She would not allow herself to be disappointed again, even if it meant foregoing hope. “I won’t see him institutionalized, Doctor Silverman. He’s my obligation. I won’t turn my back on him the way my husband did.” Ex-husband.
Ethan pulled away from her. “Frightened?” he said.
“You’re scaring the boy,” she told the doctor, pulling Ethan to her. She stroked his hair gently and he snuggled against her. After a moment, he began to make small, contented noises. Alma looked back at the doctor. “He’s happy with me.”
“No one says otherwise, Mrs. Seakirt. We do not plan to institutionalize him.”
“Then what? He’s been in and out of every therapy there is. Play therapy; clown therapy.” Even, God help her, aversion conditioning therapy. “None of it has helped and the insurance has long run out. Ethan is severely retarded. That’s something I have learned to live with, that’s all.”
“I love you, mamma,” said Ethan suddenly; and Alma tightened her hug on him.
“And I love you, too.”
Silverman seemed about to say something, then changed his mind. Instead, he reached into a drawer and came from behind his desk with a brightly colored mechanical pinwheel. He squatted in front of Ethan. “Hi, Ethan,” he said. “My name’s Doctor Dave. I’d like to be your friend.” He held the pinwheel in front of Ethan’s face and caused it to spin by pumping the trigger with his thumb. The petals whirled and the colors seemed to dance.
Ethan did not react. He simply grinned into space.
“I told you, doctor. Ethan is retarded.”
Silverman nodded. “Yes. I think that is exactly right.” He paused. “Mrs. Seakirt,” he said, “do you know much about computers?” He continued to pump the pinwheel while he studied Ethan’s face.
Computers? Why on earth did he want to talk about computers? Well, let him explain things in his own way. The consultation was not costing her anything. She had been quite firm about that when Doctor Khan had suggested it. “I have a workstation at home. My office lets me telecommute because of Ethan. They are really very understanding. They know that…” She was babbling. She had met Mick because of her telecommuting. His company had the maintenance contract on the PCs, and one day he had come by personally to see how…Alma took a breath and smoothed her skirt once more. “I can operate a desktop and modem,” she said, “but I don’t know any of the theory.”
Silverman’s grin split his beard. “Neither do I. I leave that to Tom. But I do know that there is something called an I/O buffer.” He transferred the pinwheel to his left hand and, holding it off to the side, he caused it to spin again. Ethan did not turn his head to follow the movement.
“Input/Output buffer,” she started to say; except that Ethan began to bounce up and down on the sofa, waving his hands in the vacant air in front of his face. Alma caught her lip between her teeth. She knew the pattern. Soon he would start flailing about and crying. She reached an arm out to stop his agitation, but Silverman stopped her. “Excuse me,” she said in a voice that tolerated no excuses.
“Pretty,” said Ethan. “Prety-pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty.”
“Just bear with me a moment, Mrs. Seakirt. Tell me, does your I/O buffer ever become backed up?”
She spared an anxious glance at Ethan. “Yes, sometimes.” She struggled against Ethan’s jouncing. He was becoming unruly. He would embarrass her in front of the doctor.
Suddenly, Ethan twisted to the right and his flailing hands grasped hold of the pinwheel that Silverman had been patiently spinning all the while. Silverman closed his own hand over Ethan’s so he would not drop the toy. A few seconds later, Ethan grinned.
Alma fell silent and stared at him; while Silverman waited, watching her. The silence lengthened a beat or two, until Ethan slurred, “Prettypretty,” again. Alma’s heart was suspended over a deep chasm. Silverman had held the pinwheel here, then there. And Ethan had reached for it here, then there. But late, seconds late. “Doctor…?”
Silverman pursed his lips and nodded. “I told you. He is simply retarded.”
“Retarded,” Silverman repeated a few minutes later, after she had composed herself. He had asked the receptionist to bring them both cups of tea, and he sat now returned to his throne behind the desk, dunking his bag up and down, up and down.
The hot, bitter liquid had helped calm her, but her heart still hung dizzyingly over the abyss. She watched Ethan playing with the pinwheel beside her on the sofa. The boy had discovered that the trigger made the blades spin. He would push the trigger (and the blades would spin, and slow, and stop.) And a moment later, his eyes would light up. And then he would laugh at the unmoving pinwheel. That behavior had never made sense before. Now…
She sat the trembling tea cup on the lamp table. “Ethan’s I/O buffer is backed up,” she recalled his earlier words.
“That’s right,” said Silverman, squeezing his teabag against a spoon. “Ethan’s mind may be as sharp as yours or mine, but the sensations—the sights and sounds and such—arrive moments late, perhaps even out of synch; and the responses are delayed, as well. High viscosity sensation, I call it. Tell me, Mrs. Seakirt, does he cry often?”
A lifetime of reaching for things that were no longer there. Oh, God, the disappointment! “Yes,” she said. And then, more firmly, “Yes, he does.” She looked back to Ethan, sitting beside her, playing with the fascinating toy. When he dropped it, as he eventually would, he would not realize it for several seconds, because according to Doctor Silverman, he would still be seeing an “afterimage” in his hand. That was why he had trouble picking things up: he reached for an image of a fallen toy and, unless he had held—or had been held—completely still in the meantime, his groping fingers would close on nothing—or on the wrong thing.
It was strange, thinking that way. In a way, her son was blind. Blind to now; seeing only then.
“And his speech,” continued the doctor. He took a sip of his tea. Alma had already downed hers in ragged gulps. She clenched and unclenched her fists in her lap. She wanted him to get on with it. Explain my child to me! “Since he doesn’t hear his own voice when he speaks, he lacks the feedback we all use to control our timbre and intonation. He keeps hearing echoes of what he has already said. That—”
“I called a radio talk show one time,” Alma said, “but I forgot to turn my radio down. You know how they use tape delay? I started he
aring my voice saying what I had said three seconds before. It was impossible to think straight.”
Silverman nodded. “Exactly. Ethan talks in short bursts most of the time so he can finish before the echoes start. I imagine that his longer vocalizations are very rhythmic, and full of repetitions.”
Prettypretty. Once he had sat for nearly a quarter of an hour saying mamma mamma mamma over and over, until his tongue had finally tired and lost the rhythm. “Why, yes, they…”
“You know why, don’t you? He is synchronizing his voice to the echoes. Ethan lives in a world of afterimages and echoes. It’s amazing to me that he functions as well as he does.”
“Doctor,” she said suddenly. “Sometimes he hunches up with his eyes closed tight and his hands over his ears…”
“Waiting for the buffer to clear.”
It annoyed her the way he sometimes finished her sentences. “What about his other senses?” she asked. “Smelling and touch and taste.”
“His tactile and proprioception senses are probably unaffected. And likely his smelling, too. Odors go straight to the old reptile brain. If he dropped the pinwheel, he might notice something odd because while he could still see it, he could no longer feel it. He may have learned to use such moments as cues to enable him to cope somewhat. We’ll run the usual tests to be sure; but that is how it has been with the other children.”
“There are others like Ethan?” That surprised her: That there should be others like Ethan.
“Some. Not many. Autism and dyslexia are much more common I/O disorders. But I have described several cases in the New England Journal.”
Ethan dropped the pinwheel. It fell to the floor while he continued to gaze happily at his empty hands. Alma quickly scooped the toy up and placed it back into Ethan’s hands, as she had done with countless toys countless times before. Always in vain, because Ethan would drop them again. She had always thought that it had been from loss of interest. But she knew how to handle it now. She knew how to handle it! Ethan cried, “Oh!” and made his belated grab toward the afterimage of the fallen toy; but Alma held his hands tight around the pinwheel’s handle and waited for his vision to catch up with his reality. When she released him at last, he again had a firm grip on the toy.
Three seconds later, he said, “Thankyoumamma.”
She turned back to Silverman. “It’s so simple. All those years, and I never noticed.”
“Not so simple, really,” Silverman assured her. “It just seems so with hindsight. It’s not something we’re conditioned to notice. We’re so used to living in the Now that it’s hard to imagine that others might be…living on tape delay. Only after a period of relatively constant inputs—say after napping or engaging in an absorbing, repetitive task—does the buffer clear. My colleague believes it is the variability of the inputs that somehow overloads the brain’s buffer. Provide a low-sigma data stream and—” He stopped abruptly and laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m starting to talk like he does.”
“Doctor Silverman, who is this colleague you keep referring to?”
“Oh. I didn’t say? Doctor Zachariah. Tom Zachariah.”
“He’s not a pediatric neurologist, is he?”
A slow shake of the head. “No, he’s a Ph.D., not an M.D.”
Not a real doctor, in other words. “And his degree is in…?”
“Computer science.”
“I see.” She had known he would say that. All that talk of computers and buffers and they were sitting in a doctor’s office, after all. “And what is it you propose to do to my Ethan?”
Silverman stared at her for a moment and rubbed the side of his ample nose. “Bypass the buffer,” he said.
Food smells. Sweet and delicious. BabblebabbleEthanbabblebabbleMick. Hug Momma! Hug hard cold smooth Momma. Kiss her warm. Cold metallic taste. Flicker. And…Momma gone. Silvermetal table leg reflecting long thin mirror-shaped Ethan. Warm tears flow. “Momma!” Babblebabble. Fly! [Vertigo.] Grab soft warm table leg. Sweet Momma smell. Smoothsoftouch. Hairs tickle. See Momma reaching down!
“Yes, mother,” Alma spoke patiently into the phone. “Yes, mother.” It was hard balancing Ethan on her hip and the phone on her shoulder. “Nothing. He tried to kiss the dinette table leg, that’s all. No, I’ve told you that before. This is his home.” Ethan squealed in fright—of what? What had happened a few seconds ago?—and grabbed her choking tight around the neck. His breath was sweet and hot in her ear. He whimpered and Alma hitched him around so she could support him more easily. “I thought I would let Dr. Silverman test him. No, it won’t cost me anything.” Not that that would affect you anyway, you tight-fisted bitch. “Dr. Silverman said that part of the costs are being covered by a donation and the rest by a federal research grant. Research grant, mother. Yes, I know that means it’s an experimental treatment. No, Ethan is not a lab rat. Mother, Ethan is my son and I will decide what’s best for him. Certainly, mother, I always treasure your advice.” Whether I take it or not. “Good-bye, mother. Yes, yes, I know you only want what’s best for me.”
She fumbled with the phone and it slipped from between her chin and shoulder and swung at the end of its cord, banging against the wall like a suicidal bungee diver. She set Ethan down—[and he danced in circles arms outstretched crying, “Mommymommymommy” and laughing]—and she hauled in the receiver like a fisherman hauling in a net. She checked quickly to see if Beatrice were still on the line. Beatrice would assume that the banging sound had been her daughter slamming the phone on the hook and they would go around and around about it.
But she heard the happy dial tone and, with a sigh of relief, cradled the wall phone. Mother’s problem was a compulsion for micromanagement. Strategic advice was not enough for her; she was a master tactician, as well. She could not simply tell Alma what to do—half her friends were plagued with parents who still did that—but she had to tell her how to do it and when to do it, and she offered critiques afterward. It had never been simply: Do the dishes, Alma, dear; but Why did you do the plates before the glasses? Never just: Get dressed for school, Alma, dear; but Why don’t you wear the new plaid skirt with the pullover sweater? And always, always, the orders were framed as questions. She had spent a lifetime trying to guess what Beatrice had wanted of her; and a lifetime guessing wrong.
It’s not right to experiment with children. Oh, isn’t it, mother? What was that medicine you made me take? Better than the Pill; better than a diaphragm. An implant inserted under the skin at the clinic, so you never had to worry about being careless, or forgetting, or the damn thing leaking, for cripes sake. So all you had to worry about was—
Chromosome damage.
And Ethan.
Thank you so very much, mother; but I will take it from here.
She took the phone off the hook again and scanned the bulletin board where she had pinned the doctor’s card. She hurt her finger when she stabbed the buttons.
Tom Zachariah, to Alma’s surprise, was an Indian. Not a wild west, whoop-em-up, paint and feathers Indian; but the short, tan kind from South Asia. He had an office of unbelievable clutter. Books, magazines, reams of machine paper—one accordion pile snaking onto the floor like a stationery slinky, a pulpish creature creeping off the desktop. Odd corners of desk, table and shelf were occupied by the eviscerated remains of computer equipment: slain, half-eaten and left for electronic jackals; circuit boards and the short ends of wires exposed like rib cages in their gaping carcasses.
Zachariah folded his hands as if praying. He smiled at her. Everyone smiled at her; pity or sympathy or even friendliness, she didn’t know. His face was a muted coffee, thin and with a narrow nose, the cheeks pocked with the craters of ancient acne, as if he had been the victim of a very tiny shotgun blast.
“So, Mrs. Seakirt,” he said, with his odd, melodious accent rising and falling in unexpected turns. “You are Ethan’s mother.”
She had the sudden disorienting notion that he was appointing her to that post. It hadn’t sounded like a ques
tion. “Why, yes. Yes, I am. They are testing him now.” She wondered if he could fail the tests. What if he’s not suitable for their “procedure”? She picked at imaginary lint on the arm of the leather-clad captain’s chair. He’s never been apart from me this long. What if he panics? I should have remained with him. I should have insisted.
Zachariah nodded. “Dan will take several hours at it, but the preliminary results last week looked very promising. Tactation and proprioception are in real time, as we had thought. Otherwise, Ethan could hardly stand upright. Olfaction is only slightly delayed. Meanwhile, I—Yes?”
“Excuse me, Professor Zachariah, but I hope I’m not being personal…”
“Yes?” He waited smiling.
“You are Indian, aren’t you?”
His smile broadened. “Oh, yes indeed. From Kerala State on the Malabar Coast.”
“But, your name. Thomas Zachariah?”
“Ah, Mrs. Seakirt, India is no more homogeneous a sub-continent than Europe. There are twelve million Christians in India, a community that dates back to St. Thomas the Apostle. His missionary travels were not so well documented as St. Paul’s, I fear.”
“I see. I didn’t mean to pry. I…”
He waved a hand. “No, no, no. It is perfectly all right. It is the fallacy of lumping. When I was a child in Kerala State, I thought all Americans were either cowboys or gangsters.” He laughed at his childhood foolishness.
She laughed with him. “All right, Professor Zachariah—”
“Call me Tom.” He leaned back in his desk chair and the springs and leather creaked. “Computer nerds are not formal.”
She was suddenly fascinated by the coordination of her own senses. What must it be like, Alma wondered, if the creak of the chair and the sight of Zachariah leaning back entered the brain at different times? How could you ever learn to associate a sight with a sound with a touch with a smell with a taste? “All right, er, Tom. Dr. Silverman said that you would explain the computer side of the procedure to me.”
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