Father's Day

by Buzz Bissinger

  —I remember our cleaning ladies Mi and Liu they were those Korean cleaning ladies we used to have remember when I used to get like all those warts all the time on my hand and I would keep going to this Doctor Winston remember that ice-cream place we used to go to all the time I remember it it was called Kopp’s that was a good place there was nowhere to sit I remember Dad I also remember what else do I remember from Milwaukee I remember I had some interesting bus drivers this lady my first year was Alexis also I remember I went to one of Alexis’s kids Alex I went to one of Alexis’s kids’ birthday parties once I remember a lot of Gerry’s friends from school Michael Brumley and a kid named Calder who we went to a Brewers game with his dad and he got his foot stuck in the seat it was May 11 1991 I remember a guy named Andy who worked at the JCC and was a lifeguard at Family Park and we went to a Brewers game together and he baby-sat me and Gerry once and I loved him so much I remember that movie Wayne’s World you took me to it I remember when you and I Dad went to Milwaukee November 11 1994 when we came back to visit and we went to a Milwaukee Bucks game remember the last time we saw one of the friends we are going to see her name is Lois we saw her on August 15 2005 in New York remember Dad?

  He knows I don’t know. I can tell by the little crease of impishness and the upward lilt of the voice.

  My kid is trying to punk me.

  —Zach, I don’t remember what I did yesterday.

  My kid is trying to punk me again.

  —Remember the names of the hospitals in the Milwaukee area Froedtert and St. Michael’s and Columbia remember the name of the obstetrician who delivered Caleb named Sylvia and her son named Corey and the dad named Allen and the name of the hockey team called the Admirals and the soccer team called the Wave and the food delivery truck called Schwan’s that delivered the push-up ice creams and the little sausage biscuits that were so good to eat remember that operation I had we couldn’t do it when I was born why did they have to do that?

  This I actually do remember.

  —I think you were circumcised. They couldn’t do it when you were born because you were too little and too sick.

  —What’s a circumcision?

  —It’s when they peel back the foreskin on your penis.

  —What’s a foreskin?

  I can’t continue.

  My own groin is having flashbacks.

  II

  Zach is a savant. Embedded within him are the classic symptoms, a darkened cognitive landscape accompanied by remarkable skills in the area of calendaring—phenomenal recall of people’s birthdays and the dates on which the most obscure events occurred, the capacity to see someone once and remember ten years later where and when he saw him, flawless recall of the street grids on maps, the ability to give you the day of the week for virtually any specific date in his lifetime.

  Almost without exception, savants show their remarkable skill in one of five specific areas—calendaring, mathematics, landscape painting, innate memorization, and playing the piano. They are distinctly different from those defined as geniuses, because geniuses are not born with severe mental disabilities. The condition is rare, favors males by a ratio of six to one, and tends to occur in those with either autism or developmental disorders stemming from birth.

  Virtually all savants are linked by phenomenal memory, concrete to the extreme and accompanied by what Dr. J. Langdon Down, the father of savantism, described in the 1880s as “a very great defect of reasoning . . .” Lacking the ability to interpret people’s intentions or engage in other forms of abstract thought, they safe-harbor in the concrete. They navigate the world through rote and repetition and routine, much like an athlete tries to perfect muscle memory. But they do it without constant repetition and practice. It is just there. “The significance of Savant Syndrome lies in our inability to explain it,” wrote physician Darold Treffert, the country’s leading expert on savantism. “The savants stand as a clear reminder of our ignorance about ourselves, especially about how our brains function. For no model of brain function, particularly memory, will be complete until it can include and account for this remarkable condition.” Echoing Down, Treffert points out in his book Islands of Genius that “whatever one names [the] form of memory, it always includes certain characteristics: it is immediate; it is literal; it is automatic; it is very deep and extensive, but it is very narrow . . .”

  I was present when Mary Berryhill, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, investigated firsthand Zach’s memory abilities in his twenties.

  She gave him a series of random dates and asked him to tell the day on which they occurred. He got every date right that occurred in the 1990s and 2000s and roughly eighty percent of those occurring in the 1980s. Chance performance is about fourteen percent. Of the dates that occurred during his lifetime, he got twenty-six out of thirty correct. The four he got wrong were due to a slip-up in recalling a leap year. She then told him a day and date (Monday the third, for example) and asked him to give the month and year on which it occurred in either the past or the present. He got all six correct.

  Berryhill described Zach’s abilities as a “remarkable talent” and “highly intriguing.” Her goal was to try to figure out how his brain did this, whether it was an “automatic process or his brain’s way of organizing time usefully.” She was unable to pinpoint it because savants have trouble articulating or even understanding such abstract mental processes.

  I told her of Zach’s ability to hold thousands of concrete memories within his hard drive—his endless, effortless recall of the obscure dates and the street grids and the birthdays. It is common for savants to ask a new acquaintance his or her birth date; it attaches a fixed point of identity to a person whom they can’t identify by features of their personality as the rest of us do—“God, is he boring,” “God, is he funny,” “God, is she mean,” “God, is he successful. I hope he dies.” What is truly unique about all the people Zach encounters is the date on which they were born. That data point easily becomes part of his constant effort to create predictable structures: everyone has a birthday and it never changes unless of course you’re a Major League baseball player from Latin America or a Hollywood star. It’s the same with knowing the day of the week when given a date. As Treffert notes, there is a pattern and regularity to calendaring: it too is predictable and highly structured.

  For at least a decade, I have watched Zach practice his brand of practical mysticism. Being a father, I frequently test him by picking a date at random and asking him if he knows the day. He has never gotten one wrong. Over and over, I have asked him how he does it.

  —I just do.

  —But how? Do you remember a certain date and then use it as a base to figure out other ones?

  —It’s just in my head.

  I know Zach’s IQ is in the range of borderline mentally retarded. I know his comprehension skills in many categories are at the third-grade level. I also know I am in the presence of something spooky and weird, the closest I have ever come to believing there is a God—or at least some otherworldly presence that chose to take up residence in my son’s mind.

  Accounts of savantism date back to the 1700s when a man named Gottfried Mind, unable to read or write, with no concept of the value of money, was able to draw stunning, lifelike pictures of cats and other animals. His appearance was such that he was constantly teased by young children when he walked down the streets of Bern. But the quality of his portraits was such that King George IV bought one of them. Over the past century there are the twins George and Charles, unable to add simple figures but able to give the day of the week for any past or future date within a span of forty thousand years. There is Kenneth, in his late thirties with a mental age of eleven and a working vocabulary of fifty-eight words, who can give the population of every place in America with five thousand or more, as well as the names, room capacity, and location of two thousand hotels. There is Jedediah, unable to write
his name, with a mental age of ten, but able, after a five-hour computation, to give the correct twenty-eight-digit answer to the following question: In a body whose three sides are 23,145,789 yards, 5,642,732 yards, and 54,965 yards, how many cubic eighths of an inch exist?

  There is Kim Peek, the model for the Dustin Hoffman character in the film Rain Man, who memorized twelve thousand books. He read Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October in one hour and twenty-five minutes and four months later, when asked to name the obscure character of a Russian radio operator mentioned once, not only knew the name but the page on which he appeared. There is Steven Wiltshire from England, who is autistic with limited social skills but a brilliant landscape painter because of his memory for visual details. For a segment on him by a production company, he was taken up in a helicopter and given a panoramic view of ancient Rome for forty-five minutes. He was then placed in a room with more than five yards of sketch paper and was asked to re-create what he had seen. It took him three days to finish; he had not missed a single detail, down to the exact number of arches in the Roman Coliseum.

  The public masses first became aware of the eerie twilight zone of the savant in the mid-1800s with an African American man known as Blind Tom. As incredible as the preceding examples are, Blind Tom was even more so. Like premature infants in the twentieth century, he also became a freak show exploited for great profit.

  Mark Twain encountered Blind Tom on a train from Galena, Illinois, in 1869. He had no idea who he was and the initial impression was Twain and only Twain. “When he spoke he talked excitedly to himself, in an idiotic way and incoherently, but never slowed down on his imaginary express train to do it. He looked about thirty, was coarsely and slouchily dressed, and was as ungainly in build and uncomely of countenance as any half-civilized plantation slave. After I had endured his furious entertainment until I was becoming as crazy as he was and getting ready to start an opposition express on my own hook, I inquired who this barbarian was, and where he was bound for, and why he was not chained or throttled? They said it was Blind Tom, the celebrated pianist—a harmless idiot to whom all sounds were music.”

  Several months later Twain had an opportunity to observe Blind Tom playing the piano. He watched him one night, then a second night, and then a third, appealing to heaven for explanation, as he witnessed this dysfunctional man spinning out perfect music that he had heard only once before.

  “All the schooling of a life-time could not teach a man to do this wonderful thing, I suppose—but this blind uninstructed idiot of nineteen does it without any trouble. Some archangel, cast out of upper Heaven like another Satan, inhabits this coarse casket; and he comforts himself and makes his prison beautiful with thoughts and dreams and memories of another time. It is not Blind Tom that does these wonderful things and plays this wonderful music—it is the other party.”

  His full name was Thomas Green Bethune. He had been born near Columbus, Georgia, in 1849 to parents who had spent most of their lives as field hands on a plantation. He was blind and helpless as a child. He could be volatile and self-abusive, fond of whipping himself and repeating the sounds his mother made when she whipped her other children. He could repeat almost anything and he was enthralled by sounds—the sounds of the corn sheller, the sounds of rain and thunderstorms and wind, and most of all the sounds of the piano. It was intriguing but initially believed to be worthless. His mother believed her son could not be taught anything, but the plantation owner believed otherwise. He compared Blind Tom to an animal: “A horse or a dog may be taught almost anything, providing you always precisely use the same terms to express the same ideas. Tom has as much sense as a horse or a dog, and I will show you that he can be taught.” He was five when he composed on his own a piece he later called “Rain Storm” and played on the piano, imitating uncannily the sound of rain hitting a roof and falling off the gutters.

  News of his talent spread, and by the 1860s he was traveling the world over, advertised as “the marvelous musical prodigy, the Negro boy Pianist.” His concert stops included packed houses at the St. James’s and Egyptian halls in London, the Salle Hertz in Paris, as well as performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, among dozens of other cities. It did not matter how complex the pieces—Gavotte in G Minor from Bach, Caprice-Valse from Liszt, the Waltz in A-flat from Chopin, the “Pastorale” Sonata from Beethoven. He played them flawlessly from memory, even including any errors in what he had originally heard. His repertoire of pieces ultimately grew to more than five thousand. To guard against the idea that some scam was involved, audience members were invited to play any piece of music they wanted and then have Blind Tom repeat it. His rendition was always perfect. As a final flourish, he played three different melodies at the same time. At his peak he was making $100,000 a year, but shady promoters robbed him of much of it—tragic but hardly surprising given the era in which he performed.

  In 1887 the English doctor Down, the physician to the Earlswood Asylum in England, coined the term idiot savant to explain the abilities of Blind Tom and others like him. The term reflected what he saw as “the paradox of deficiency and superiority occurring within the same patient.” The term has since been scrapped and truncated to savant. The phenomenon itself has been exhaustively studied, in particular by Treffert, a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School. “So many questions leap up. How can this be?” Treffert wrote in Islands of Genius. “How can extremely handicapped persons possess these islands of genius? What do they share in common? Why, with all of the skills in the human repertoire, do the skills of the savant fall in such constant and recurrent narrow ranges? Why does the obscure skill of calendar calculating occur in so many of the savants?”

  The great majority of savants have perfectly normal brains anatomically. Take them out during autopsy, examine the sliced wafers of them under a microscope, search for discolorations and lesions and enlargements and the viscous gray of dead zones, and you find nothing at all to distinguish them structurally from typical brains.

  But fascinating theories have arisen to explain why savants are so different. Researchers call the condition of savants “paradoxical functional facilitation.” In plain language, a savant’s brain has overdeveloped one area to offset damage that has occurred in another area. The superhuman abilities are invariably associated with the brain’s right hemisphere, the area that as Treffert writes in Islands of Genius can be “characterized as non-symbolic, artistic, concrete and directly perceived.” The left hemisphere in contrast is believed to be “more sequential, logical and symbolic.”

  Researchers believe that the brain may compensate for the lack of left-hemisphere function with markedly increased right-hemisphere function. Some researchers theorize that the brain literally rewires itself by recruiting unused capacity from other parts of the brain, in effect appropriating areas of the left hemisphere that have been freed up since it is no longer functioning as a whole.

  The exact process by which savants perform their feats is far less well understood. Some researchers believe that savants’ fantastic memorization skills are a matter of inheritance, although the only thing I can prodigiously remember is the winner of every World Series from 1956 to 1981. I have not lived with Debra for some time, but I recall that she had a terrible memory, always in danger of setting fire to the house because she forgot she was cooking.

  III

  When Zach was eleven or twelve I bought a Nintendo console for the family. I assumed Zach would have no interest in playing, nor did I think he would be particularly good at it because of the variety of mental processes and hand-eye coordination the game required. I bought it largely for Gerry, and of course I wanted in on the action as well. At first, Zach watched us playing Super Mario Brothers with his familiar detached look, far away in his own orbit. And then suddenly he started playing on his own. I was just gratified he was doing something besides looking at maps or old photo albums, but one day I asked him if he wanted to pla
y me. I was eager to find an activity we could share, and I quietly promised myself that I would be gentle with him.

  He kicked the living shit out of me.

  He had memorized every move and every possible eventuality because the game, like calendaring, was predicated on precise, unchanging rules. As he played with robotic skill and focus, his tongue hung slightly out of the side of his mouth, the only indication he gave of being human. The look on his face wasn’t glazed exactly, but he wasn’t all there, as if he could play Super Mario Brothers without even looking at it, would know by the sounds the game made and his own internal timing exactly what to do in what sequence. He was lightning fast and machinelike, saying nothing except for a little “yea!” when he moved on to the next level. For someone who’d had terrible difficulty holding a pencil when he was younger and needed untold hours of physical and occupational therapy, his dexterity was remarkable. He knew the minute handling of all the controls, when to speed up and when to slow down to protect the rather stupid Mario, what buttons to push so Mario could jump or squash. His coordination, which he rarely showed anywhere else, was another testament to the power of his memory; it enhanced him physically.

  I played with him a couple more times, always with the same result. I barely made it past level one, and he made it to what seemed like level four thousand. My Marios died quickly, with that hideous deflating sound and subsequent poof of disappearance. His Marios were always being feted with stars and fireworks and offers of work at Goldman Sachs. I quit. Fathers never deserve to be humiliated by their sons like this. Instead I just watched. I extolled and congratulated and told him I was proud of him. He never said a word in return or altered his expression. Until he simply got bored one day and quit altogether. But I’m convinced that if he played the game today after a ten-year absence, he would be every bit as masterful, another chunk of information stored away forever on his hard drive.