Tripping the Tale Fantastic

by Christopher Jon Heuer

  But it was worth it when you saw the huge smile on a previously-struggling student’s face, reporting that his GPA went up or that he found a decent job after graduating. For most cases, I had found, it was a simple matter of adjusting their aids and showing them how to consult an audiologist out in the real world for periodic adjustments. The notetaker, for them, was a short-term need.

  Then there were a few cases like Bryant. Many didn’t have aids. Some got by with a long-term notetaker. So many struggled out in the real world. I’d had some of them contact me again later on, desperate. For the difficult cases, there was a drastic solution, one that involved leaving Milan.

  The next week Bryant returned. “Hi,” he said. “What will we do today?”

  I said, “Let’s have a discussion. What do you know about nonverbal language?”

  He squirmed, a typical response. Lanners had been taught from infancy that verbal language was of the utmost importance and never to acknowledge nonverbal language. This would be difficult. Finally, he managed, “… um, expressions?”

  “Expressions! Very good! What kind?”

  “When you’re happy, you …” Bryant forced a rictus. “When you’re sad, you ...” His lips bent into a cartoonish frown. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Basic expressions. I don’t think you realize this, but Lanners here in Milan have subtle expressions compared to other people on Eyeth. I’ll show you what non-subtle expressions look like.” I expanded my screen to fill a wall and set the program I brought up on interactive mode. “Take a look.” The program showed a blank human face. To its right, there were six slider bars, each representing a specific universal expression: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. “Come up here,” I encouraged him.

  Bryant walked up to the projection, hesitating. “What do I do?”

  “Try it out. Move a slider.”

  The expression on the face changed from blank to a Lanner’s happy expression: corners of the mouth turned up slightly, eyes barely crinkled. “Oh!”

  “Move it back. Try the others.”

  He tried each one in turn, moving the sliders enough to see what he recognized. “Okay. Six expressions. So?”

  “Emotions are complicated. Why don’t you try two together, see what you get?”

  Bryant tried “disgust” and “happiness” together. He struggled with this for a while. “Huh?”

  “Did you ever make jokes about disgusting things when you were young?”

  Bryant thought for a moment. “Yes! My friends and I once got in trouble because we were laughing too loudly at a squashed bug and we made faces like that, but bigger.” He pointed to the cartoon face. “The teachers told us not to open our mouths so wide when we laughed. Then they had us sit with clothespins on our lips to be sure they wouldn’t open so wide again.”

  “See? You’ve experienced showing non-subtle expressions like this before. Why don’t you try mixing some others? If one brings something to mind for you, tell me.” I was impressed with how quickly he caught on.

  “Okay.” He moved around the slider bars. “You’d be surprised and angry at the same time if you saw a burglar in your house.”

  “Very good! Why don’t you try moving the sliders all the way, see how extreme each expression can get?”

  He made a lot of progress in that session. At the end, I told him, “Bryant, this session was the first in a course that I teach to a few of my students.”

  “What kind of course?” His eyes narrowed.

  “It’s designed to teach you how to better understand all aspects of communication in order to improve your comprehension. The first part deals with facial expressions, and the second deals with unconscious gestures. We’ll discuss the third part if you decide to continue down that path.”

  “How will this help?”

  “Suppose you saw someone who was angry and you couldn’t understand what they were saying. Would you start a fight with them?”

  “No.”

  “One of my students came to me with that problem. Many students who have comprehension difficulties haven’t picked up on the finer points of body language. If you can read someone, then it’s easier to get the gist of what they’re saying.”

  “What else do I need to do for this course?”

  “Nonverbal language is more important than you think. Homework for next week is to name five incidents where you show an emotion or someone tells you not to do something like making a face. Next week, same time.”

  A week later Bryant returned with eight incidents. “First, I wanted this new food for dinner, but I couldn’t catch what the cafeteria lady said it was since she was wearing a facemask. I got frustrated because I couldn’t point at it so I had to ask for something I knew instead. Second, I noticed that one of my friends always sits on his hands. I asked him why. He said everyone in his family gestured before Milan banned it generations ago, so now it’s a weird family quirk. Third, I shrugged my shoulders instead of raising my eyebrows and a teacher called me out for it. Fourth …”

  I smiled internally as he described the other incidents. I’d had some stoic students who struggled with showing their emotions and could take weeks before we could work through the first part of the course. “Good job, Bryant!” I told him. “We’ll keep working on nonverbal concepts. Let’s talk about gestures … Yes?”

  Bryant had stood to indicate he had a question, as was typical in the Lanner classroom, since teachers forbade students from raising their hands. Then he sat down. “Um, what does nonverbal language have to do with comprehension?”

  “You can pick up on more body language cues from people. Subtlety is everything in comprehension.” I didn’t need him reporting me to faculty. Lanner teachers from preschool on forbade all forms of gesture. If a teacher needed to point out something, they would verbally describe it. I’d had students tell me stories of grade school teachers hitting their hands with a ruler if they went beyond the boundaries of their desk.

  At this point, anything he learned about nonverbal language would be beneficial. Some of my students had been willing to learn comprehension of facial expressions but refused to learn gestures. Years later these students thanked me for helping them learn how to cope better in Milan.

  He accepted this. We discussed natural gestures that still occurred to a small degree in Lanner society. I asked Bryant to expand on those. Young children who didn’t have experience with descriptions were the only ones allowed to point. Bryant described the subtler pointing practices he knew of, like his buddy saying he saw a hot girl at three o’clock.

  I decided to address a problem often seen in my students. “How do you get people’s attention?”

  Bryant chewed on his lip. “When I was a kid, I used to wave a lot. I got in trouble for that up to the end of elementary school, so I stopped. I still forget that I have to yell instead of wave sometimes.”

  “That’s all right.” Gestures came so naturally to Bryant that I was confident he would go through with the full course. But there was no need to mention that to him yet.

  We then discussed body language, like how people tensed when they got nervous. Eventually I said, “Next week, same time?”

  “Sure.” He gave me a tentative smile. “I can’t wait to see you again. This helped a lot.”

  “That’s great to hear.”

  The next week, however, he never came. Concerned, I sent a reminder.

  He got back to me a week later: “I think I got enough.”

  I sent another reminder.

  It took him three weeks to respond: “Thanks. My notetaker helps now.”

  I was patient, having seen this in other students. Some completed the first two parts of the course and felt they could get by. Within six months to a year, those students would return, frustrated because they weren’t.

  So I waited. I took on other students who needed help with comprehension and attended staff meetings. A month later, I met with other comprehensio
n professionals across Milan in a virtual conference to help them design a listening comprehension test for elementary-school aged children. A teacher from Braidwood thought if the comprehension problem was caught and corrected early enough, they wouldn’t struggle later. I argued for those who may not benefit from early intervention. “What if oral methods don’t work at all?”

  “Then what? Foster them out to a manual family?” was the response from the Braidwood teacher. His virtual face raised an eyebrow a few milliunits, as if to say, “Who do you think you’re kidding, interloper?”

  I gritted my teeth and remembered why I had left a great country like Pegasus, which used multiple modes of communication. The people in one-method countries, like Milan, were so inflexible that they didn’t understand. And I didn’t have time for their nonsense. I said yes, that was one possibility, but we also had to design options that worked for the student’s family. That didn’t involve resorting to separation.

  I didn’t see Bryant again until a full year later when he burst into my office in tears. He sat down, unable to speak for a few minutes. Then he cleared his throat, wiped his cheeks, and said, “One of my professors refuses to let me use a notetaker.”

  That was a difficult situation I’d seen with many of my students. It drove most to complete the course with me. “I see. Do you need more help?”

  Bryant looked at me, his eyes red. “What else is there?” He rubbed at his eyes, one at a time.

  “There are non-oral methods you could look into.” Making the leap was always difficult, but it was something that had to be done slowly.

  “How will that help with oral comprehension? Manual isn’t allowed in Milan.” Now he was starting to understand.

  I started with diagnostic questions. “Do you have to look at people to understand them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you use the Telfono system?”

  “Not with voice only.”

  “Can you understand what a person says if their back is turned to you?”

  “Not really.”

  “All right.” I turned to my screen and typed out my hunch to one of my co-workers. “I want to have someone else in my department diagnose you before we go further.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to make sure you don’t have anything else blocking your abilities. Go see Dr. Truzone, who’s a few doors down from me. He’ll give you a few tests.”

  Bryant hesitated, leaning back in his chair.

  I smiled warmly. “I promise you, since he’s in my department, he won’t bite your head off if you don’t understand him right away. He’s seen many students struggle like you, and he’s also seen many of them give up. Believe me, Dr. Truzone would hate seeing a promising young man like you not be able to succeed, and so would I. Can you go see him tomorrow?”

  Bryant nodded once.

  “Great. Come see me next week, same time!”

  A few days later Dr. Truzone came in, making the floor vibrate. I looked up from my holoscreen, and he held out a small thick metal disk. “I think you’re right.”

  I took the disk and tapped the center to bring up a holoprojection of the results. As I suspected, Bryant had auditory verbal agnosia, also seen in previous students. All of these students struggled with comprehending others’ speech, so they were assumed to be profoundly deaf, even if their audiograms said otherwise. “Thank you.” I put it down on my desk. “What do you think?”

  Truzone laced his fingers together. “I talked to him. He’s been adapting for years. He had an accident when he was young, creating the lesion that caused his agnosia. He said he could understand more when he was little, but he didn’t know why his parents and teachers yelled at him more and more about not understanding as he got older, since his hearing hadn’t changed.”

  I nodded. “And it’s progressive, his agnosia?”

  “Yes. No reversal possible right now. Most Lanner doctors aren’t interested in agnosia, or even believe that it’s an actual condition. They think the patients with agnosia aren’t trying hard enough to understand.” He twisted his mouth at this and shook his head. “I heard of a surgeon who wants to do research with stem cells to fix the lesions that cause it.”

  “It’d need widespread support before surgery is possible. Good to know for future students.”

  Truzone raised his eyebrows for his gimme-something look. “Any other new cases for me?”

  “No.” I paused to think. “Bryant is interesting. He saw me for a few weeks last year before giving up.”

  Truzone’s eyes crinkled. “I think he’ll stick around.”

  “Yes, he will. But he needs to follow through.”

  Bryant came back for his next appointment and sat down in the chair, getting to the point. “What’s my diagnosis?”

  “You have auditory verbal agnosia.”

  The space between his eyebrows creased. “What does that mean?”

  “Your brain has difficulties with processing what other people say. In plain English? It’s hard for you to understand words.”

  “So I wasn’t an idiot because I didn’t try hard enough to understand? It wasn’t me, it was my brain?” Bryant sat there, processing this, his face blank. “What does that mean for me?”

  “There’s an experimental procedure opening up in a few years. This surgeon wants to use stem cells to repair lesions in the brain, including the ones that cause agnosia. You’d be out of university by the time he’s ready to start trials.”

  Bryant scowled, his mouth turning down more than a Lanner’s would. He was young and impatient, but he was making progress with nonverbal language. “What else?”

  “You did very well with recognizing expressions and using gestures … That’s only the surface. You have the option to go further, learn manual methods of communication, and then transfer to a university where you will do better.”

  His face twisted. Lanners weren’t subtle when it came to the dislike of their former signing masters. “I don’t know. Do I have to learn another language?”

  “No, you don’t,” I told him, leaning forward. “You can learn manual English. Some of my students chose to learn Ameslan, but it’s up to you.” American Sign Language, shortened to Ameslan, was the language of the animals in Clerc. The rare few Lanners in this country with family or friends who already knew the language were usually the only ones willing to learn it.

  Bryant leaned back. “I don’t know.”

  “I know you like Milan.” How could he not? He didn’t know any better. “I have to warn you: your adult life here will be difficult. It will be like living on Old Earth. Milan is not happy about citizens who struggle with their way of life, so you will have little support. Think about the notetaker you have—that is the only support you will receive in your entire adult life. Unless you get lucky enough to find someone else who’s patient enough to write back and forth with you or will face you while talking clearly. For a better life, you must learn a better way of communicating so that you can go to a country that will accommodate you.”

  He thought on this for a long time, his chin resting in his hands. Then like most of my students, Bryant chose the safer option: “I want to learn manual English.”

  “Very good.” I brought up a form on the screen and handed him a silver stylus. “Read this carefully before you sign.” It was a nondisclosure agreement, saying that he wouldn’t tell another faculty member what I was doing unless they were in my department. It also warned him of the various dangers he could encounter through taking the remainder of this course: bullying, expulsion, deportation, and so on. I created this form after my first three years of working here and encountered much less trouble afterward.

  Bryant read it, his eyes widening at the consequences, but signed anyway. “Where do we begin?”

  We started with the alphabet. I gave him the homework of memorizing the alphabet and sent him a form with the handshapes on it.

  His fingerspelling was satisfactory at the next session, so we m
oved through various levels of manual English over the next several weeks. His hands were slow at first, but I could tell he would be a good signer. Pity he had shackled himself to manual English.

  As we progressed, he spoke less and signed more. There were a few times where he signed and spoke at the same time, but I always reprimanded him for that. “Don’t mix your methods,” I warned him. “Some people look down on those who use any form of oral. I don’t want you making enemies.”

  He got it. From then on, he only spoke when he absolutely had to. Bryant seemed very enamored by manual English. Once he signed to me, “I love those times—it’s when my hands can be free.” I’d seen him around campus fingerspelling to himself, so I knew his time here was limited.

  Near the end of the first half of that year, my department head came to see me. “I’d like to talk to you about Bryant Thomas.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve received several complaints from his professors about ‘twitchy hands’ in class. Is he almost finished with the full manual course?”

  “Yes. We haven’t discussed transitioning yet, however.”

  He grimaced. “Make it fast. They’re talking about throwing him out if he keeps this up. You want him ready when that happens.”

  At our next appointment, I told Bryant, “We need to talk about where you will go after you’re out of this university in a few weeks.”

  “Out? I thought I had until the end of the year.”

  “I’ve received some complaints that you’ve been signing in class.” I switched to signing. “Practicing outside of your dormitory?”

  He slumped over. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Then he sat up. “I can’t help it. It fits so well.”

  “I know. That’s why we need to talk about your transition. You need to emigrate.”

  “Where would I go?”

  “To a country that signs English, meaning you have the option of either Fence or Pegasus. Fence is all manual English, but Pegasus is a melting pot of communication methods. They have a large community for manual English there.” I spoke since it was complicated and I needed him to understand.