“Breast size?” he said, peaking his eyebrows.
“You’re a pervert.”
“Nonetheless.”
“Average. But she’s old enough to be your grandmother.”
“See, that’s where I have one advantage. Looks and age are less important to me. Life is simpler when you can’t see. My biggest nightmare? Bad breath and sweaty hands.”
He stopped talking when a melody seized him, plunging him into an intermezzo. He rendered concertos and arias in a low-toned, gold-and-russet hum. Measured silences and beats. Perfect inflection. His breathing had the intake of a bassoon player. One decibel above a whisper. I leaned back on my pillow and watched the colors unfurl.
We also spoke about our families. I mentioned my parents’ desperate search for my talents, that my father knew jazz but was incapable of talking coherently about baseball or any movie that wasn’t a screwball comedy. He told me about growing up in New York City, where his parents were both involved in music. His father was a conductor and his mother an oboe player.
“I grew up on the Upper West Side, you know, one of those big condos with views of the river.” We lay in our beds, facing the windows.
“I’ve never been to New York,” I said.
“My parents home-schooled me. They thought regular school was dull. They bought me records and had music scores turned into Braille. A guy in Chicago converts treble clefs into bumps.” He turned on his side, held his head in one hand. “When I was a kid they’d take me into Central Park and let me play with dogs. We’d have picnics and my dad would bring this little transistor radio. There was always music playing, even in the shower.”
“You were born into it, then.”
“Yeah,” Toby said. “One time my father took me to a concert he was conducting at Carnegie Hall. He sat me up onstage, next to the violins. I was probably six at the time, already playing Mozart—the easy stuff, he used to call it. Without ever seeing him, I knew how he conducted. I could tell from the music. He kept his elbows at his side, like he was tied up. His wrists did all the work.”
“Did you ever play piano for big audiences?”
“Nah. Stage fright. I go to pieces if more than three people are watching me.”
“How can you tell how many people there are?”
“I can tell, man. Little sneezes and coughs, the way people breathe. I know they’re waiting for something and I go to pieces.” Toby conducted the air while humming a burst of operatic scale.
Owen stirred in the corner and spoke in his sleep. “…it’s a Tuesday…”
Toby said, “Everyone has a trick. The calendar kids memorize patterns and cycles and codes. Right now Owen is dreaming about formulas. Any normal kid his age is having wet dreams. He gets a boner thinking about leap years.”
“What’s your trick?” I asked.
“To memorize a piece of music, I hear the root note and imagine it as a straight line; every other note is either above or below it and I visualize the dots.”
“That makes sense.”
“Also my trick is I don’t try too hard. That’s the real secret.” Toby inhaled heavily, as if he were about to sing, then said, “Who the hell knows why we do it?”
I JOINED THE HIGH SCHOOL class and sat in a musty room with Teresa, Toby, Cal, and Dick. Owen had his own special ed instructor who came to the institute several times a week. We followed the Iowa curriculum. During math the Saunders twins—who were younger than the rest of us—went off on their own, while Teresa, Toby, and I struggled with senior algebra and geometry. I stared at Teresa the whole time and Toby leaned in her direction. Each night we replayed and deciphered her every word and gesture, ran it through a process of speculation. Sixteen and a late bloomer, Teresa was a mystery to both of us. For Toby she was a soft bustle of cherry-smelling gum and herbal shampoo, a throaty, ironic voice cutting toward him. Meanwhile, I watched as a girl who was all elbows and wrists was felled by womanhood. It seemed to happen in a single day. Her hip-slung jeans tightened. Her T-shirt swelled beneath an army surplus jacket. Walking under an elm, striding down the corridor, Teresa would suddenly become aware of her burgeoning body and fold her spindly arms across her chest. It was a warding-off stance, the icy pose on a sarcophagus.
She triggered something in Toby and me. We smuggled a copy of Chick Fest into our room. Once Owen went to sleep I flipped through the pictures with a flashlight, narrating the poses. I remembered my pornography phase with some fondness, when Max, Ben, and I had whiled away our early adolescence gawking at busty women in poorly composed photographs—shoddy light, loose focus, indistinguishable objects looming in the background. We were aficionados back then, untouched by real-life experience. Max and Ben were now high school seniors in Wisconsin and, I felt sure, no longer virgins.
Rote passages from Gray’s Anatomy came to me.
the external organs of generation in the female are the mons veneris the labia majora and minora the clitoris the meatus urinarius and the orifice of the vagina
“…okay, in this one the blonde woman—”
“Which blonde? The leg-spread?” Toby asked.
“No, the other one…”
“Okay.”
“She’s got her legs up on this old-fashioned bed, but she’s like lying on the floor on this rug…”
“What kind of a rug? Are we talking Persian, Turkish? Details are everything.”
“I don’t know. Persian, I suppose,” I said.
“Of course, Persian. Does she have clothes on?”
“Sort of.”
“What?”
“This little lacy thing. Underpants.”
“Panties,” Toby said gravely.
“What?”
“They’re called panties.”
“…and her tits are kind of pushed together.”
“She’s holding them?”
“Yeah.”
Toby sighed. “I’m never going to be able to see a centerfold,” he said. “I’ve felt breasts, though.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“One of my nannies. One time I asked her if I could feel her breasts, just like that. Like I was asking for a sleeping pill.”
“You’re pathological.”
“I told her that I’d never be able to see a woman’s breasts. She offered, actually. She asked me if I wanted to see what they felt like.”
“And?”
“She leaned over my bed and I put my hand inside her shirt. At first I felt them the way blind people feel faces, then I started squeezing them and she got embarrassed, I think…”
“You horny bastard,” I said, a little incredulous.
“I’m going to get chicks out of sympathy. I have it all planned out.”
A short silence.
“I don’t think my parents have sex anymore,” I said. “I think my mother finds sex a little disgusting.”
“Nah. They all do it.”
“Not everybody.”
“I can smell Teresa when she has a shower. Rosehips is what I smell.”
“You couldn’t smell your own shit.”
“I’m telling you, it’s shampoo with rosehips.”
I got up and turned out the light.
NOT LONG AFTER THAT CONVERSATION, we found ourselves spying on the diagnostic session Teresa and Dr. Gillman had every Friday afternoon. We had tracked their schedule and movements for a week and now, ten minutes before they were due to meet, quietly entered Gillman’s office on the second floor. There was a mahogany desk piled with folders and books that smelled like old churches. Like my father’s study, it showed no signs of an orderly mind. We huddled inside a large coat closet, a hiding place I’d noticed during one of my meetings with Gillman, and waited in the dark, amid old raincoats and jackets. Eventually Teresa and Dr. Gillman came into the office and sat down. Somebody picked up the telephone and dialed a number: 308 long distance—I knew touch-tones by their sound-colors.
“Dr. Shavim, please,” Gillman said. Several seconds of sile
nce, then, “Good morning, Sean. Hope all is well. Now then, what do you have for us this morning?”
I could hear Teresa shifting in the leather chair. Gillman said “I see” a couple times and after a moment said, “Teresa, we’re going to have you speak to a Mrs. Charnetsky. She’s eighty years old and has been complaining of a sore throat. Lately she’s found it hard to speak. No tests have been done yet.”
“Let me talk to her,” Teresa said. I heard Gillman walk around to the front of his desk. “Hello. How are you, ma’am?” A pause. Teresa probably covered the phone’s mouthpiece because she said to Gillman, “She’s just breathing. Is she going to speak?”
“She might be nervous,” Gillman offered. “Do you get anything on her throat?”
“Mrs. Charnetsky? Hello? Yes. What? Me? I’m a teenager…No…I don’t go to school exactly.” Teresa sighed. “I’m sure he was a nice dog. No, that’s okay. No. My grandmother is in a nursing home in Nebraska. We write letters sometimes.”
Teresa continued to speak for a few minutes, about her grandmother’s beagle named Scout and how cold the winter could get in her hometown of Chicago. Then she handed the phone back to Gillman, who told the doctor that he would call back shortly.
“Teresa, are you okay? Did you get anything?” Gillman said. “Usually you ask how they’re feeling.”
“No need,” Teresa said. “It’s in her throat and mouth. Looks like a water stain, all up behind her tongue.”
“What is it?” Gillman asked slowly.
“Throat cancer.”
I could feel Toby beside me, trying hard not to breathe heavily. We stood pressed against Gillman’s overcoats and corduroy jackets, listening as several other phone calls were made. A Dr. Winthrop, a man named Rodney. Gillman asked about weather and wives in Philadelphia and Texas, then the phone was turned over to Teresa. She spoke to the patients without expression, asked them about their aching limbs and fear of sleep, listened to their complaints. Then she would say to Gillman things like “She has a lump in her head” or “I see a black cloud in his lung.” Gillman would call the doctor back and translate the information into medical advice: “Do a CAT scan” or “Look for risk of pneumonia and X-ray the lungs immediately.” I pictured Teresa spending time here, listening to cancerous men long-distance, tumor-riddled bones and disease-riddled kidneys coming in over the wire. How was this a gift? It seemed like a curse. She saw fatty tissues and clogged arteries wherever she turned.
The hour passed and finally Gillman and Teresa left. I opened the closet door and we edged out into the office. We went downstairs and took up our afternoon routines—Toby to the music room to play Bartok and me to the TV room. Out in the hallway, I heard Gillman strolling along, humming “ Fly Me to the Moon.”
twenty-three
For a while Gillman allowed my memory to drift in the shallows, among the islands of daytime television, reference books, and the small ads. I found it hard to forget a detail, no matter how insignificant. I was dogged by the irrelevant. Even my dreams were full of trivia. In the middle of a strange dream—riding a bicycle inside a linear accelerator, kissing a girl in my parents’ bed—I’d see fuchsia trapezoids and remember the words to the Treaty of Nations, or the chemical reaction resulting in sulfuric acid. If numbers banged at the windows for Dick and Cal Saunders, then random words broke through my bedroom door, determined as assassins. Gillman said it was time to develop context and interpretation.
“Sometimes I just want to hear the silence,” I said to Dr. Gillman. We were sitting in his office.
“What silence, exactly, is that?” he asked, cocking his head to one side.
“The sound of not remembering.”
“You mean forgetting?” he asked.
“I don’t know. What’s the difference?”
“Forgetting is when things slip. Not remembering is when you filter things out.”
“Oh.”
“I think it’s time we made your gift relevant. It needs an application.”
He told me a story about the Genius of Earlswood Asylum—one of the first documented savants. He was an Englishman who had rare talents in drawing and building models. He once built a scale model of the ship the Great Eastern, complete with miniature brass pulleys, copper paddles, and a million wooden pins that attached the planks to the ship’s ribs. It made me think of Pop Nelson.
As Gillman told the story he moved his eyes between the windows and the bookshelves in his office. “…so old Pullen fell in love with this woman. Someone he met by chance at one of his exhibits. An admirer. Savants all have one weakness: vanity. If you don’t praise them they dry up. Anyway, he wanted to leave Earlswood and marry this woman. Who knows what her intentions were. He was a genius, but I doubt he could order a meal in a restaurant. He demanded to be let out and refused to do any work until his demand was met. So the head doctor came up with a plan. He obtained an admiral’s naval uniform, with the gold trim and the white gloves, the whole bit. The release committee brought Pullen before them and told him he was free to go. Then they said how sorry they were he was going, that his services would be missed, and that if he stayed they would give him a commission in the navy.”
“They lied to him,” I said.
“They made him an honorary admiral and he stayed. But they probably saved his life. His marriage might have lasted a month, then he would have turned catatonic. He wore that admiral’s uniform every day until he died.”
I leaned back in the leather chair, ran my hands up and down the armrests. “What’s this got to do with my memory?”
He nodded slowly. “The gift demands loyalty. It also demands relevance.” He swiveled in his chair. “The Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island…they’re hardly worth memorizing. And even when you memorize reference material, you don’t have any context for it. What’s the point of knowing the bones of the human skeleton unless you do something with that knowledge?”
“Why does information have to be useful?” I said. “Does music need to be useful?”
“I don’t think that’s the point. Your father and I thought you might take a break from watching television for a while and focus on learning information with a purpose.”
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Outside the office window a cardinal sat on a ledge, pecking at some seeds Gillman had placed there. I looked out onto the trimmed lawn where the Saunders twins were playing Frisbee; Cal was running like a man resurrected, his arms flung wide, a half skip in his step. I was paralyzed by the thought of life without television. It had been my thread back into the waking world and was sometimes more real to me than my own thoughts.
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“But you said—” I began.
“It’s time to learn how to use what you do.”
“What if there is no use?”
“Everything has a use, Nathan. Your synesthesia allows your brain to be coded for retrieval. The miracle of recall.” He leaned forward and handed me a large textbook entitled The History of the World. “For tomorrow, I’d like you to memorize the chapter on agriculture.”
I held the book in my hands, the size and weight of the Bible.
“You can memorize the entire book. Imagine that. You will have at your disposal the main facts of history. Now, that’s an achievement.” He smiled, indicating the end of our meeting.
I carried the book from his office and descended the stairs. Back in my room, I slumped on my bed and pulled a pillow across my stomach. I threw the book on the floor and it hit the carpet with a dull thud. I stared at it. I knew, eventually, I would give in and open it. I couldn’t resist the seduction of information, the indelible colors and shapes trapped like watermarks in each and every page.
MAN AS HUNTER, MONARCHIES AND irrigation; the invention of money was treated under a heading called “Early De
alings Between Peoples.” The book traveled from prehistory and the emergence of speech to the Cold War and beyond in seven hundred pages. The arrogance of trying to capture the entirety of recorded history in a single volume escaped me at the time. It seemed like a catalog, an inventory of dates and names, and to begin with I read it exactly the same way I would read a printout of stock prices. Every now and then my gaze slowed enough to wonder at the stylistic choices of the author: “Robust historians of the past deigned to speak of an agricultural revolution,” and, “History is a fickle science left mainly to those who wish to enshrine the past.”
Mornings, I read in bed, the book propped by pillows. In the hands of the author, history and prehistory were melodramatic—full-bellied narratives alive with hairpin turns and unlikely resolutions: ice bridges connecting continents, flint tools leading to fire and migration, coffee and tea transforming Europe, keeping the itinerant workers awake in the factories of nineteenth-century England. Occasionally I burst through the net of words, into the sweep of voyages and monuments: men peering out of oaken wheelhouses at desolate shores, claiming spice routes and jade territories; the keelhauling of pirates; the mead-drinking Vikings; the places of the holy and the poor, the buttressed cathedrals, the minaret-and-dome mosques; the broadloom cotton mills; the squat, thatch-roof houses smelling of mulled wine; the fields of barley and ryegrass; the pagan stone artifacts; the assemblages of the God-fearing. But much of the time history was a psychedelic parade of sketchy neon lines, of rusty iron tastes and ammonia smells.
I studied the author’s portrait on the back cover: Thomson Weavill, sitting in a library, a wig of gray hair, eyebrows like archer’s bows, a scholarly frown as if the roil of history had unsettled him. Now I realize that his tome was less about interpreted facts of world history and more about his views on nationhood and progress. It was, in fact, his story. How some nations conquered others, the rise of the intellect over brute impulses, all of it according to some cosmic plan, a guiding hand that favored white people over lesser breeds. Surely that was part of Gillman’s plan—to teach me not to accept words on paper as irrefutable fact—but he never said anything to this effect. At our meetings, he asked how Mr. Weavill was doing, blandly, as if Thomson were an institute guest with a propensity for dates.
The Beautiful Miscellaneous Page 11