by Reif Larsen
“It’s not as simple as that. You cannot ascribe a timeline to understanding. When we learn, when we act, when we speak—we draw upon a lifetime of experience. Who knows the origin of our thoughts? They come from deep places, from before we knew what to call them. I’m merely enriching the foundations of the subconscious from which Raksmey may draw his later conclusions.”
In the nursery’s newly installed bookshelves, Jean-Baptiste began to assemble the library for Raksmey’s education. He also selected objects from his past projects and placed them around the room: the telegraph switch, the Tesla coil, a small telescope, a copper-wire mobile, a shortwave radio. He filled the nursery with exotic succulents and orchids from their botanical garden and installed a portable Victrola that alternately played Bach and several rare shellac recordings of Khmer and Vietnamese stringed music. On the mosquito netting above his son’s bed, Jean-Baptiste painted Greek constellations and famous equations from physics:
“He is sleeping in his father’s museum. You’re going to suffocate him.”
“Not suffocate. Elucidate. Illuminate. You remember I spent my own childhood trapped in a bedroom, but my mind was able to roam free.”
Luckily, Raksmey, unlike the youthful Jean-Baptiste, was not bound by illness and could flee the confines of his bedroom. Though unusually small, he overcame the sickness that marked his birth and grew into a bright-eyed, curious toddler. As soon as he gained bipedal mobility, he could not be corralled for long. There were many times that Eugenia or Jean-Baptiste turned their back only to find that Raksmey had run outside, deep into the gardens. And soon they had no choice but to let him run.
Jean-Baptiste’s black notebooks began to gather on the shelf in his study, at the rate of two per month, which later became three and then four. Either there was more to look for or Jean-Baptiste was learning how to look.
Tofte-Jebsen includes a sample of his observations:
– RR’s eyes are a light shade of brown, like almond paste. Seem to be lighter than when he was born. As far as I can tell, both are the same color, though the outer ring of his right iris is darker, giving the illusion of a protruding pupil.
– RR’s hair is almost jet black, natural counterclockwise swirl, splotch of lighter hair on the back/left side of his head, about 4 cm down from crown. present since birth.
– food preference (at 1 year) rice w/ pork, bananas, and jackfruit. will refuse water spinach, bok choy, and most greens. (I don’t blame him.)
– a mole. nape of the neck, recent. possibly where the needle went in?
– always sneezes in twos, half-second interval between. never three, like me.
– birthmark on left ankle, just above the talus bone, in the shape of a longtail boat w/ square sail. simple. beautiful.
– RR can wink his left eye, but not his right, seems to happen more frequently when tired.
– his first word is not a word: a salute, as in “hello” in sign language, which he performs when E. walks into room. she returns the sign, cups hand to face, then rocks, “my lovely son.” he giggles. for him, gestures are words, words are gestures. (131)
At two years, Jean-Baptiste took his son’s measurements with a tailor’s tape:
1.Length: 78cm tall.
2.Weight: 10.3kg.
3.Left pinkie: 2.75cm.
4.Right pinkie: 2.7cm.
5.Penis: 2.1cm.
6.Circumference of head: 53cm.
This last measurement Jean-Baptiste found particularly interesting, for it was slightly above average, which was quite incredible, considering the diminutive size of the boy’s body.
“It’s a good thing. We must put the entire universe inside of it,” Jean-Baptiste said to his mother. “Lemaître says it’s expanding.”
“His head or the universe?” Eugenia signed.
“The mind is the last frontier, Mother.”
“How about we leave his head alone?” she signed. In her language, the sign for head, a sweeping of the pointer finger around the face that ended at the temple, was very similar to the sign for dream, except that the circle moved away from the head, ending with the fingers pointing toward the heavens. Her gesture fell somewhere between the two, an ambiguity that Jean-Baptiste did not ask her to resolve.
“I cannot stop,” he signed. “This is like asking a man to stop breathing.”
Raksmey became trilingual and bimodal: Jean-Baptiste instructed Suong and Tien to address Raksmey in Khmer, while he spoke in French and occasionally English to the child, and Eugenia communicated with him exclusively through sign. By 2.5 years, Raksmey already had a working vocabulary of four hundred fifty words in French, one hundred words in English, at least three hundred signs, and sixty words in Khmer, though this was only an estimate, given that Suong and Tien were less than exact with their observational notes and exit interviews. Raksmey put what he knew to good use: he was already utilizing sophisticated, multi-morphemic constructions (“Tien go to work, he cut the tree when it cold”). Jean-Baptiste noticed that Raksmey had developed a subtle stutter when speaking in French, such that when he would stumble on a word, he would often introduce Eugenia’s sign language to talk around it.
Throughout Raksmey’s fourth year, Jean-Baptiste began to engage him in a series of science experiments usually done only in primary and secondary schools—measuring the point of vaporization, testing Hooke’s law with springs, mapping electrical fields using a voltmeter. In the half hour before lunch, they would go out into the forest and Jean-Baptiste would drill Raksmey on various species of plants in the garden. Together they would do drawings of leaf structure and take rubbings from the bark. Raksmey was left-handed, though Jean-Baptiste purposefully trained him to use both hands during his writing and experiments. He continuously used advanced-level vocabulary around the child and noticed a 15 percent retention and reuse of new terms within a week of their introduction. Soon Raksmey began acquiring vocabulary at an exponential rate, beginning with five to ten words per week and quickly advancing to twenty to twenty-five words per week by year’s end.
Eugenia, at first disapproving of Jean-Baptiste’s neurotic methods, eventually acquiesced. “Thus, they settled into their de facto roles,” writes Tofte-Jebsen. “He became the instructor of the mind, while she became the silent nurturer of the heart” (140).
“You can’t hear sounds?” Raksmey asked her once. It was a watershed, duly recorded in Jean-Baptiste’s notebook. Evidence of a theory of mind: he understood his grandmother as a being unto herself, one who operated under a different set of rules.
Fig. 4.6. “Sign for Machine”
From Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 149
“No,” she signed. “That’s why I have you.” Thereafter, she and Raksmey played a game in which she asked him, “What do you hear now?” and he would tell her, in sign and spoken words and also movement, like a little play.
“There are machines in the rubber house,” he said, signing the word for machine—interlocked fingers, palms turned to the chest. “They sound like . . .” And then he danced up and down with his arms in the air and shook his head back and forth, blubbering air out through his lips.
“Thank you,” she signed, laughing. “I understand now.”
When he was not working with his father or explaining the world of sound to his grandmother, he spent much of his time alone. He had trouble relating to children his own age, and most were not sure how to approach him. He looked like them, but he was clearly not one of them.
One day Raksmey came home crying.
“What is it?” said Jean-Baptiste. “Are you injured?”
“He’s not injured,” Eugenia signed. She got down on one knee. “What did they say?”
Raksmey wiped his eyes. “Prak called me barang.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Jean-Baptiste said as he noted this in his b
ook. “Do you know what this means?”
Raksmey shook his head.
“It’s a butchering of the word français. It’s spoken by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Barang means anything which is not them. Are you a Frenchman?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you aren’t. You’re as Khmer as they are.”
“But he called me that.”
“You must learn not to hear them,” Eugenia signed.
“No,” said Jean-Baptiste. “You must learn why you are right and they are wrong.”
Later that evening, Eugenia brought up the idea of sending him to the regional lycée, which had shut down during the war but had recently been reopened by a pair of American missionaries.
“It might be good for him to be around more children. We don’t want him to grow strange.”
“You don’t understand the project at hand,” Jean-Baptiste signed. “Raksmey’s not going to be just another boy sitting on a mat, repeating his times tables to some Bible-thumping American from Texas. He’s destined to become the most famous person Cambodia has ever produced.”
“He’ll certainly be the most famous person you have ever produced,” she signed, fingers slapping palms.
“I can see your sarcasm, thank you. But we cannot trust his future to a middling lycée in the middle of nowhere. We must control as much of the input as possible. These are the critical years.”
“You’re mad, Jean-Baptiste!” she signed. “You cannot control him like this! Why must you try to control everything?”
“I’m not trying to control everything. Only one thing. And if I can’t determine the outcome . . . well, then this is almost as interesting as if I can.”
“He’s a child! Not an experiment!”
“All children are experiments, whether they like it or not. Most are just very sloppy experiments.”
“You’re a selfish man, Jean-Baptiste!” she signed. “When did you become so egotistic? You were not like this as a boy.”
But the experiment continued. There could be no stopping the experiment. At 3.2 years, Jean-Baptiste noted, Raksmey had developed an imaginary companion, Rasey. Initially Jean-Baptiste thought of informing his son of the nonexistent nature of Rasey, but Eugenia pleaded with him not to. “He doesn’t have anyone else; at least let him have this.”
“But it’s no one! He doesn’t exist!”
“He exists for your son. Who are we to argue? To him, Rasey might be more real than we are.”
And so, real or not, Rasey became part of the household. They even laid out a place at the dinner table for him, making sure never to serve him any vegetables, for apparently Rasey was allergic and could die if he accidentally ate even one. Like Eugenia, Rasey was also deaf; he did not speak, but he could (conveniently) read minds. As they learned from Raksmey, Rasey had a habit of getting into trouble—he would often get lost in the jungle, fight tigers, hop on the backs of eagles, and dive with sharks in the ocean. It was difficult to tell Rasey not to do these things, because he would pretend he couldn’t hear you (which he couldn’t).
“It’s very frustrating,” Raksmey told them. “He’s like a child.”
“Isn’t he a child?” Eugenia asked.
“No,” said Raksmey. “Rasey is forty-seven years old.”
Jean-Baptiste reluctantly recorded Rasey’s many adventures, recounted in exquisite detail by Raksmey, who had realized long ago how to take advantage of having a resident scribe registering his every move. Jean-Baptiste did not like including such fictions, but he came to accept them as psychological data rather than simply fantasies. It was a slippery distinction: everything was data, yet not everything could go into the notebooks.
On one occasion, Raksmey came into his father’s study and pointed to one of the first medical mannequins.
“Who is that?” he asked.
“Well, I suppose . . . I suppose that is me,” said Jean-Baptiste. Indeed, there was a distinct resemblance.
“And what are those, Papa?” Raksmey asked, pointing to the shelves of notebooks. There were now hundreds of them, stretching from floor to ceiling, an intimidating fortress of black spines.
“Those are you,” said Jean-Baptiste.
Raksmey seemed content with the answer. “There are many more of me than you, yes?”
When he was not busy with his studies, Raksmey would roam the property, often following Tien around like an obedient dog, watching carefully as he tapped the trees and collected the sap. Tien showed him how to apply just enough pressure to the curved blade with the pad of his thumb to slice through the bark into the soft layer of phloem that lay beneath. A streak of white fluid would appear in the wound and run down the spiral groove.
“The tree must bleed, but not bleed too much,” Tien said, and Raksmey would nod.
Tien even made Raksmey his own little bucket so that he could take part in the collection. Despite his heavy load of latex, Tien always found a way to hold the boy’s hand wherever they went. Jean-Baptiste noted this bond with a touch of envy. Their connection was easy, gentle, unspoken—everything that he and Raksmey were not. Sometimes Jean-Baptiste saw them resting their heads together, talking softly in Khmer.
“What were you two speaking about?” he asked Raksmey once.
“Nothing so important,” said Raksmey. “Tien was telling me stories about the beginning of the world.”
“You know those stories aren’t true.”
“Yes,” Raksmey nodded. “But I didn’t want to make Tien sad.”
When it was too hot to do anything else, he would lie on his back in the river as the women chattered and washed their clothes. There was an old rope swing tied to an ancient bombax tree that allowed him to swoop out and release into the deeper part of the river. He would expunge all breath from his lungs and let himself sink and sink until his face came to rest on the bottom, and sometimes he would even let a bit of mud come in between his lips. A part of him wanted to live down here forever, to never go back up to the world of his father’s constant observation.
Fig. 4.7. “The Island of Rak”
From Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 153
When Tien was in a good mood, he would take Raksmey across the widest part of the river on a bamboo raft to a thin little island that Raksmey had dubbed Rak—the one place on earth where he could make all the rules. The trouble with making rules was that you then had to follow them. On one of his first visits to the island, Raksmey had decided that only Rak could be spoken on the island of Rak. Rak was a language consisting of just one word—Rak—which stood for everything. At first, this limited their conversations.
“Rak,” said Raksmey.
“Rak,” Tien agreed.
But after a while, a certain freedom and understanding came from such limitations. There was no need for any other word.
“Rak,” said Raksmey.
“Rak,” Tien agreed.
A river carp that Raksmey had named Rak could usually be found lazing in the shallows of this island, pecking at the insects that skittered across the surface of the water. Raksmey sometimes wondered if it was the same fish that he saw each time or whether there were many Raks inhabiting this role. He wondered if this mattered.
When he was not out on the river, Raksmey particularly enjoyed climbing the bony lattice of a strangler fig that had engulfed an old rosewood tree in the lower gardens. Thirty feet off the ground, he would call down to them, “Ha-ha! You can’t get me!”
“We can get you,” Jean-Baptiste said to him from below. “But we’re choosing not to at this very moment.”
“Rak!” Raksmey yelled.
“What did you say?” Jean-Baptiste called.
“I think you may have a little athlete on your hands,” said Renoit, coming up from behind him.
“No,” sai
d Jean-Baptiste, shielding his eyes from the sun. He made a notation in his book. “We do not have a little athlete.”
“He climbs like a monkey.”
“Bodies wither. Intellect persists.”
“All I know is you can’t keep a good man down. If he wants to be a climber, he’ll find a way to be a climber.”
“You’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Be careful up there, Raksmey!”
“Rasey says he won’t come down,” Raksmey yelled from above. “I must observe him and make sure he doesn’t fall.”
“Rasey does not need to be observed! Come down right now,” Jean-Baptiste called up.
“Or maybe a wrestler?” said Renoit. “The little man would be a son of a bitch to bring down in a match—”
“Claude!” Jean-Baptiste turned upon him. “Don’t joke about this. This isn’t a kind of game. This is my son.”
Renoit held up his hands. “I’m envious of such possibility. To think: a lifetime of mobility. How quickly it fades when that which is dear is stolen from us.” He slapped at his wounded leg. “La liberté est un fugace don.”
Despite Raksmey’s inclination to spend his days in the trees, Jean-Baptiste’s rigorous methods of education had created a brilliant mind. Or rather allowed an already brilliant mind to blossom. By the time he was seven, Raksmey was reading well beyond his age. He, like his father, was a swift reader, who could take in books just as quickly as they were put before him. And yet he appeared indifferent to their contents.
“What did you think?” Jean-Baptiste asked after Raksmey had devoured Saul Bellow’s new novel, Henderson the Rain King, in a day.
“Boring,” Raksmey said with a shrug. “Too much talking.”
“Human discourse is important. It cannot all be chasing lions and such.”