The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  “Is it brain damage?” my father asked, looking at his empty page.

  “No. It may be that people with synesthesia simply pick up perceptions caused by words and sounds at a more primitive level. The rest of us have learned to block out these sensations. Some theories say that newborns up to four months blend the senses together—they hear colors and taste shapes—but later the brain differentiates at a higher level. Nobody really knows.”

  “Sometimes I get goose bumps when I smell gasoline. Is that kind of the same thing?” Whit asked.

  “Not really,” said Dr. Lansky. “A synesthete’s associations are more abstract. For example, you or I might imagine a certain kind of landscape or scene while listening to Bach, but what synesthetes experience is less elaborated—they see colored blobs, spirals, and lattice shapes; they feel smooth or rough textures, and they might taste agreeable or disagreeable tastes such as salty, sweet, metallic. All of it is quite involuntary.”

  “And this is well documented?” my father asked.

  “Yes, although knowledge is limited. There have been some well-known historical cases. Nabokov had it, so did the composer Scriabin. It’s possible Kandinsky had it and his art tried to represent the synesthetic experience.”

  My mother crossed her legs and smoothed her pleated skirt. “How does that relate to Nathan’s new memory ability?” she asked.

  “Words and sounds create a kind of visual storyboard in Nathan’s head. They’re so vivid that he can’t forget them. We haven’t been able to determine any real limit to what he can remember.”

  “I can’t remember words not having colors and tastes,” I said.

  “Now your mind forgets that words are just symbols,” my father said.

  “There’s a classic book in memory studies called The Mind of a Mnemonist in which it’s revealed how a subject named S has synesthesia and develops a prodigious memory as a result,” Dr. Lansky said.

  “This is very weird,” Whit said.

  “Predictions are that about one in twenty-five thousand Americans have synesthesia, though most of these people will never learn what their condition is called. These people always do extremely well on the Wechsler Memory Scale because of their vivid sensory associations with words and numbers. In a way, Nathan has a psychedelic experience when he hears sounds or reads words. It’s not really all that different from the synesthesia that is produced with LSD or sensory deprivation.”

  My father wrote something in his leather notebook.

  “Is Nathan ready to come home?” my mother asked.

  “That’s up to his doctor, but from my end he’s rehabilitated. Back to normal, but with a twist,” Dr. Lansky said. The word rehabilitated swept across the room—it was a streak of mercury-colored lightning, but it had no taste.

  seventeen

  The cold came early that year; the hospital windows took on a chill. Everything was muted and white. The only colors were the words inside my head, sans serif font emblazoned across a colorless sky. My feats of memorization continued: mechanic’s manuals, old magazines, Bible verses, stock market figures. I discovered new things about my gift. If I read the menu when my parents took me to a restaurant near the hospital, the words got in the way of eating. If the menu was badly written or printed, I was convinced that the food was inedible. If the waitress said the words ice cream nasally or flat-toned, then the whole experience was ruined—I saw the ice cream as a pile of ash. If I ate while I was reading, the taste of the food got in the way of the words, drowning out their sense. One day, as I sat with Whit and my father over a restaurant meal, I said, “You know why they have music in restaurants?”

  “Tell us,” Whit said, thinking maybe it was a joke.

  “Because it changes the taste of everything. The water here tastes salty in these glasses,” I said, holding up an aqua-blue tumbler.

  Whit stopped midchew. My father sipped his water and held a swallow in his mouth, then said, “You’ve reinvented your mind. Music changes the taste of things. It’s quite wonderful.” He smiled, allowing his own words to charm him a second time. “I wonder what listening to Thelonious Monk would do to the taste of water.”

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE I was released from the hospital, my father and Whit took an unexpected trip. After telephoning various research centers and university psychology departments, they visited a psychologist at the University of Iowa who had done extensive work on memory and limited work on synesthesia. Dr. Terrence Gillman also directed a program called the Brook-Mills Institute for Talent Development, located about an hour from Iowa City. My father and Whit had visited the institute and brought me back a pamphlet. The front of it read: “The mission of the institute is to recognize, support, and research those with profound intelligence or prodigious skills, and to help them apply their talents at an optimum level.” Below this inscription there was a bucolic scene of some Iowa farmland, an old Victorian house, and two teenagers and an old man gathered on a sunny lawn. One of the teenagers, a boy about my age, sat reading while the old man and a girl were posed in what appeared to be a debate. Inside, there was a photo of hundreds of eggs, all of them lit from above, and a lone blue-tinted egg in the middle. Below, it said that one in ten thousand people were in the range of profoundly intelligent, and one in a hundred thousand people had some highly developed gift or skill that was not easily explained. These were the institute’s target populations and accordingly it attracted gifts of every stripe—child geniuses, phenomenally talented artists, daring inventors, but also people with extraordinary psychic or intuitive abilities. The institute believed that all these talents could be nurtured and studied for the betterment of society. Individual researchers, mostly educators and neuropsychologists, came from all over the world to study these esoteric talents.

  My parents and Whit stood around my hospital bed.

  Whit said, “It’s a big brain camp down there.”

  My father said, “We heard about a mechanical genius who makes perfect scale model buildings from a photograph and some twin boys who are devising a new mathematical model for ethanol combustion. There’s even a girl they call a medical intuitive who can diagnose diseases just from talking to a patient on the phone.”

  My mother seemed wary of the whole thing.

  Whit said, “They don’t seem to care how weird the talent is. They study it all. We had a psychic in the air force. We used to call him Déjà vu.”

  My father said, “But it’s serious science and education they’re interested in. How the brain manufactures these skills and how to make the best use of these talents. Those are the two questions before them. We told Dr. Gillman about you and he seemed very interested to have you stay for a while. He’s known some cases where synesthesia develops after some kind of brain injury or traumatic event. One boy he mentioned developed it after encephalitis.”

  “We said why not, let’s take a look under the hood,” Whit added. He lifted his Yankees cap and groomed his flattened red hair with one hand.

  “What about his senior year of high school?” my mother asked, crossing to the window. She was happy for me to come home, to bundle me as an invalid and fill the house with soup steam.

  “They have regular academic classes as well,” my father said. “They have teachers and tutors who work there.”

  “What if I don’t like it?” I asked.

  My mother came back to the bed and touched my arm. “Then you can come home. If you want to think about it you can. Whit and your father wish they were going there themselves.”

  “Yes,” Whit confessed. “I love Iowa. All that open prairie…makes me want to eat large breakfasts at dawn.”

  “It does sound good,” my father said. “Let’s find out how deep this thing goes.”

  “Do they have television?” I asked.

  Whit and my father looked at each other, trying to remember if they had seen one.

  “I’m sure it could be arranged,” my father said. “Especially in your case.”

  “I
’ll go,” I said. “As long as there is a color television.”

  My father nodded, satisfied. He’d lost a father and nearly a son, but maybe he had another chance at a child prodigy. If he were ever likely to believe in God, it was probably right then—in that hopeful-blue room, the windows spilling wintry light, his hands resting calmly in his lap, thinking about me naming a thousand words and definitions from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

  eighteen

  The Brook-Mills Institute for Talent Development stood on an old corn and soybean farm in the middle of Iowa prairie. It was five miles from Selby, a small college town with a drugstore and public library. The original farmhouse—a humble green box with a basement—stood toward the back of the farm, near the fields, and was now used as a workshop. The main building was a large Victorian house that had been built after the farmer made his fortune leasing easements to railway companies. It stood high-windowed and shuttered, shingled on the roof and overhangs. The house had a walk-up porch and a spire at the western end that gave it an elevated feel, as if the old farmer-turned-real-estate-tycoon had wanted more distance from the soil when he built his new home. The house and the farm had been donated to the institute when the farmer’s savant daughter—a musical prodigy—died at an early age and the man quit Iowa for the Florida Keys.

  Whit and my father dropped me off late one Sunday while my mother stayed in Wisconsin to oversee repairs to our leaking basement. I suspect, also, that at first she didn’t want to be drawn into my father and Whit’s scheme; she had been at peace with my normality for some years now. It was arranged that I would stay for an initial period of six weeks. During this time they would study my memory and synesthesia before recommending how I best develop and apply them. It had been a long drive. I was over my fear of being in cars by now, could hear the engine turn and not think of shattered glass. We pulled into the parking lot beside the old farmhouse and walked up a gravel path toward the house. The light was gray. Harvested corn stalks stood like crosses in the open fields. A rim of bare trees separated the fields from the acre of kept lawn.

  My father carried my suitcase in front of him, with both hands. We climbed the stairs to the front door and Whit pressed the bell. A middle-aged woman appeared.

  “We’ve come to drop off my son,” my father said.

  “Nathan Nelson,” Whit offered.

  “Please come in,” the woman said. “I’m Verna Billings. I look after guest accommodations.” I liked the wheat-colored word guest much more than the canary-yellow patient or slate-gray subject. She turned to me and reached for my coat, “You must be Nathan.” She was pale and thin, her lips a deep red. “How do you do?” she asked. “You’re all just in time for dinner.” She led us inside and down the hallway.

  Persian rugs lay on the floor and old portraits of farm life and trains hung on the walls. Steam engines billowing smoke as they came out of mountainside tunnels, weathered men standing beside John Deere tractors. Everything belonged to a different age. I thought of my mother. Here was a house where living room would never apply—muscat-colored drapes, glass-fronted cabinets, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a slightly disheveled and dank feel to the corners. A house of nooks.

  We followed the long hallway and entered a dining room where five people were seated at a table in high-backed chairs. The table was laid with linen napkins, silverware, and a vase of carnations. Their conversation—hushed and stilted—came to a sudden stop. They all looked at us.

  “Everyone,” said Verna, “I’d like you to meet Nathan Nelson, his father, and—”

  “Whit Shupak, retired astronaut,” Whit volunteered, taking off his baseball cap.

  Verna said, “And let me introduce our current guests. Roger is here from Vermont and he specializes in mechanical reproductions.”

  Roger, an old man with a five-day growth, nodded at me. “And Dick and Cal Saunders are from just up the road in Iowa City and are both studying mathematical models for better ethanol combustion.” The identical twins had sandy-blond hair and wore plaid shirts. They looked about fifteen.

  “Nice to know you,” one of them said.

  “And Toby is our musical wonder of the moment,” Verna said.

  A boy with dark, hooded eyes grinned in our direction and said, “A pleasure. By way of introduction, I’m blind,” Toby said. “The lack of eye contact has nothing to do with my self-esteem.” Toby smiled to himself and tapped at his silverware.

  Verna said, “And Teresa is a medical intuitive. She helps diagnose disease in the early stages.”

  “And not so early,” Teresa added. She was a pretty girl, my age, with black hair and a cryptic smile.

  “Owen is not eating with us tonight. He’s a calendar calculator,” Verna said.

  I had no idea what that meant but I smiled and nodded.

  Verna said, “And there are others that you will meet, but they only come when a researcher flies them out here for a study.”

  Verna seated us at one end of the table and sat nearby. Cal Saunders was staring at me, probably trying to guess my talent. A mind for trivia and rote memorization sounded hollow next to redesigning ethanol combustion. My father took a sip of his water, his eyes scanning the room above the glass rim.

  “Dr. Gillman should be here any second. He just got in from Iowa City and will be staying a few days,” Verna said.

  “Excellent,” my father said.

  A moment of uncomfortable silence took hold of the table. Roger, the old man who made replica basilicas and skyscrapers, had one eye cocked at me as if through a gun sight. I affected a smile at Teresa but realized she was probably looking at the row of windows that overlooked the fields behind me.

  Finally, Dr. Gillman arrived. He was in his sixties, with dark, thinning hair and salt-and-pepper sideburns. Dressed in a worsted blazer, he had an air of tired academia about him.

  “Good to see you, gentlemen. Quarks, right?” he said to my father at the table. His face was pale and papery, his eyes a washed-out and nostalgic blue.

  My father and Whit stood to shake his hand.

  “Astronaut,” he said to a beaming Whit. He sat down and whisked a linen napkin onto his lap in one fluid motion. “And you must be Nathan. Very nice to meet you.”

  I said hello and he passed the breadbasket around. He picked up a corked wine bottle and poured red wine for himself and then for Whit and my father without asking. “Another day,” he said brightly. “I assume Verna has introduced you gentlemen around.”

  “Yes, thank you,” my father said.

  Gillman tore off a piece of bread and popped it into his mouth.

  A woman in an apron began to bring out meals from the kitchen. There was a gap of several seats between the other guests and us. Whit leaned close to Dr. Gillman and said, “So they’re all geniuses?”

  My father was sipping his wine gingerly. His eyes locked on Gillman at the word geniuses.

  “That depends on your definition,” Gillman said. “Geniuses have the ability to learn in great intuitive leaps. They trust their ideas, however strange their source. Einstein used to compose theorems in…” He ate another mouthful of bread. I would learn later that he was infamous for his mid-sentence pause. “…in his dreams and when he walked his dog. Those ideas revolutionized our worldview. That’s genius.” He carefully layered butter onto another piece of bread. Cal Saunders looked at our end of the table, trying to make out the thread of conversation.

  “Einstein had the bases loaded,” Whit said, staring into his wineglass. “He was the full deck.”

  “You’re saying that relativity came to Einstein in a dream?” my father asked Gillman.

  “The experience of time can change with motion. That sounds dreamy to me,” Gillman said, setting his bread roll on his plate.

  My father angled his chin cautiously. “Do you know about physics?”

  “In the beginning Newton created heaven and Earth and…” A sip of wine. “…falling objects and then Einstein said let us
understand light. Light and movement. Modern physics is a bit of a smoke-and-mirrors show, don’t you think?” Gillman was enjoying his own conversation; he chuckled—there was no other word for it—and angled his wineglass toward his mouth. My father, who essentially had no ear for irony, squinted at Gillman, trying to comprehend a hidden layer of antagonism or meaning.

  Whit laughed and looked eagerly at my father. “A smoke-and-mirrors show. A horse-and-pony show. I think this guy does know physics.” Only Whit could ever call a man who brought to mind Arthur Rubenstein a guy. My father, falsely affronted, shifted his eyes between the table ornaments and the high windows, between substance and reflection. Gillman sensed my father’s displeasure and turned toward me.

  “I’m very interested to find out more about your synesthesia. How’s the memory?”

  “Fine, I think,” I said.

  “We had a young man here not so long ago who memorized the entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica.”

  “What happened to him?” my father asked, casually but still miffed.

  “He works on a game show. Helping with the questions.” My father visibly deflated. There was no chance I had been resurrected to work on a television game show. Gillman swilled the wine in his glass, held it up to the light. Somebody placed a plate of beef Stroganoff in front of him and he whistled with delight.

  “Ah, Doctor,” my father said. “There is one thing I wanted to discuss.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Nathan has quite an attachment to television. He’s concerned about watching plenty of it during his stay. Myself, I don’t see the point, really. Scattered photons in a tube…”

  “I love television. Cheers and Night Court,” Whit attested.

  “Television is just information. Info-bytes masquerading as entertainment. Nathan can watch whatever he wants,” Gillman said, almost dismissively.

  “See,” Whit said to me. “Nothing to worry about. What a life!”

  My father nodded and turned his attention to his plate. I ate several bites of my beef Stroganoff. Beef tasted exactly the way the word suggested—dense, bovine, salty.