I began remarking to friends that my brother was becoming the most bizarre person I’d ever met. Most of them dismissed it and said, “Oh, I know someone like that too,” until they actually met John and decided he topped them all.
John did get it together for a time, and he joined the navy. But when he got out, things went bad again. He became friends with a crowd of martial-arts-trained, very sexy women. Despite John’s strange behavior, women liked him; he was very good-looking and quite athletic. One of these women, Keri, was his favorite, and he fathered a child with her. But there was a rival for her love, and this man reportedly threatened John on more than one occasion.
In those first months after the mugging, while I holed up in my house, I spent a lot of my time thinking about our lives. One of the women my father had married after Pam secretly beat us when he wasn’t home. I coined a term for the behavior of some of my stepparents: kill-the-cub syndrome. When lions and other animals take mates, they often kill the offspring from their new mates’ previous couplings, and I felt like those ill-fated little cubs, stuck in the mating cycle of human animals.
John and I finally spoke up about the secret beatings, and we came home from school the next day to find a truck in front of our home and a crew of movers getting our stepmom’s stuff out. At that point, telling my father what had happened was all it took to get him to respond to us. He grew lonely in middle age, however, and made another bad choice. The beautiful younger woman he fell in love with had a crack-cocaine problem. He knew this when he moved her into our home. She stole a gold ring from my room as well as checks out of my checkbook. I figured this out when a check I wrote bounced and I realized the two before it were missing. I confronted her about it and she admitted she’d stolen money from my account, saying, “I did something stupid.”
“You know you shouldn’t leave stuff like that lying around” was all my dad would say. I was so grateful when they finally broke up and she moved out. Instrumental in that breakup was my current stepmom, Helen. She was working for my dad at the time, and with a lot of patience and love, she convinced him he could find someone better; namely, her. They’ve been married for some twenty years now and have a large family of stepchildren and stepgrandchildren.
Things at Mom’s place weren’t much better when we spent time there. She divorced again and married a Canadian man named Bill. He hit me so hard one time that my back hurt for two days.
All of these experiences did damage to John’s already fragile psyche. At some point he changed from being a playmate and coconspirator to being a menace, even to me.
He convinced me one day that a man up the street had stolen the 1967 rally sport hubcaps off his new car. It was true that the Corvette a couple of driveways up did have the same accessories my brother had lost to a thief. John ordered me to sneak over there and remove them. I was more afraid of my brother than of whoever owned that Corvette. I was only fourteen; John was sixteen. As I didn’t have a growth spurt until my late teens, I was under five feet tall and only ninety pounds at that point. I went to get the hubcaps.
I approached the house stealthily and leaned down next to the sports car. I was just getting a bolt off one of the tires when a man came out swinging. He hit my face so hard that my eyes were blackened and I had to pull my lips away from my braces. When I explained to him the same tires had gone missing from my brother’s car, he told me he had just picked his own car up from the dealership and the similar make of the hubcaps was only a coincidence. My brother mocked me when I returned, beaten, and admitted that he knew the man hadn’t stolen them but he wanted them anyway.
During my period of reflection in the wake of the discovery of my brother’s body, I worried for several weeks about whether the mental illness that might have afflicted John was actually what was wrong with me. Maybe I was just hallucinating all the stuff going on in my brain and body. John had always been so different from me that I never worried about my mental health this way. I tried to reassure myself that my behavior was still quite different from John’s. And my cognitive abilities were still growing, not degenerating. The fact that these visions and thoughts were due to a remarkable change in my brain and were actually new gifts would be borne out by scientific testing one day, but at the time, I occasionally worried that I had the same devastating disease as my brother.
It was, in the end, my stomach that came to my rescue. One afternoon four years into my solitude, a simple craving inspired me to break my seclusion. My heart was set on a roast beef sandwich from Subway, located in the Tacoma Mall food court. I opened my front door for the first time in six weeks, squinting in the sunlight and clutching my entire portfolio of drawings to my chest. My greatest concern was that someone would break into my house and steal my work while I was away. The sight of my own pale skin in the side-view mirror distracted me every time I changed lanes, but I made it to the mall without incident. A few minutes after I sat down to lunch, a balding man wearing glasses eating at the next table over leaned in and asked about my illustrations.
Evangelistic as ever, I launched into a spirited retelling of my story and did my best to explain what each of my drawings represented. The man—whose name I never learned—was stunned. He introduced himself simply as a physicist from a local university and said to me, “You don’t have the vocabulary yet because you haven’t been studying in a formal setting, but you understand some pretty complicated concepts. If you can, you really should go back to school.”
Somewhere in my brain, a switch was flipped. Half an hour later, I took the first, miraculous step toward recovery. I drove to Tacoma Community College to sign up for some classes. I found a professor in the math department’s office who told me the current semester had started a week earlier and registration was now closed, but seeing my determination, she relented and gave me a quiz to take home over the weekend. If I passed, she’d let me in.
I worked day and night on my ticket back to civilization. I scored a perfect 100 and started classes the following Monday.
Chapter Nine
Joe College
THE WEEKEND BEFORE I started classes, I took the blankets off my windows. Sunlight flooded the interior of my home and I caught a glimpse of myself in the living-room mirror. Though the image didn’t change my new, hopeful mood, I realized I looked pretty frail. I used to spend hours on tanning beds, bronzing my skin to better show off my muscles. Now, my arms were thin as rails, and I was as white as a ghost. I decided to make an appointment with my doctor for a checkup in preparation for starting school. He drew some blood. He called me later and was very concerned—I had the lowest vitamin D level he’d ever seen. Four years of self-imposed exile had taken their toll. The doctor prescribed a weekly megadose of the vitamin to take orally. The pharmacist took a look at the scrip and asked if there’d been some mistake. I encouraged him to call the doctor, which he did; the dose was correct. I took my first pill the morning I got ready for my first day of school. I was taking two classes: chemistry and math.
I looked out the window that Monday morning, and I felt as though I were watching the sunrise for the first time in my life. It was the most beautiful daybreak I had ever seen. The sky was pink and orange and there were clouds of the deepest indigo streaking through the sherbet-colored air. My vitamin D deficiency reminded me how long it had been since I’d spent any time in daylight. What else had I missed these past four years? I wondered. I decided before I went to school I’d head out and take some pictures of the sky. As I walked toward the east, pointing my camera here and there to get the most of the sunrise, early-morning commuters looked at me curiously and then up at the sky. They must have thought they were missing some rare celestial event, because it was only a sunrise, their glances seemed to say. How could they be immune to this? I wondered. It was the most glorious beginning of a very important morning—truly a new dawn.
I stuffed my textbooks into a rolling suitcase and tucked my prized drawings under my arm and made my way to the beginning course
of the Introductory Math series at Tacoma Community College. As I walked through the throngs of people on campus, I felt, for some reason, like I was coming home. After spending the entirety of my twenties in a perpetual bar crawl, I was now surrounded by (mostly) serious, studious adults for the first time in my life. I felt a little self-conscious because I noticed that, at thirty-five, I was more than a decade older than most of the other students, but I was really excited.
I knew I’d gone there to study math, but what it felt like was a foreign-language immersion course. My previous “school of life” education was five days a week in the nine-to-five world and seven nights a week in the social world, and I was never at a loss for words. But now I needed the right words—a new set of tools to better express myself and all the new thoughts I was having. I remembered the observation the physicist had made that inspired me to go back to school: he’d said I needed to acquire the vocabulary to explain myself. Instead of just drawing what I saw, I had to learn how to explain it and become fluent in the language of math as well as the everyday language of research.
The minute I stepped onto campus, I heard snippets of conversation from the students and faculty walking by. I listened carefully, hoping to catch these precious, new words like fish in my net. I trawled for them even there on the walkways and hoped they would help my tongue catch up to my racing mind. I fantasized for a moment about the day I could have a smooth, satisfying conversation about math without stopping every other sentence, struggling to explain what I meant without the associated accepted theories to back it up and the proper vocabulary to express it. Words are powerful and illuminate so much when you have the right ones at your disposal. My words then were wrong and lacking in specificity. I relied on long-drawn-out explanations of my ideas, and I’d never seen anyone react with the bright light of understanding in his eyes that I saw when I drew it for someone. When I got frustrated, I would just blurt out, “Let me draw it for you.” I felt like an immigrant to a foreign land where people spoke a different language. I was so new to it all. I wanted to become one of them, a citizen of my new land.
But first I had to make it past the men mowing the lawn on campus. Seeing them stopped me in my tracks. I was fascinated by the angles of the mowers, how they changed as the ground’s slope changed. I thought about the blades of grass, and then my mind automatically cut everything around the area into slices of the grid structure of space-time as I saw it—all webby, with lines extending as far as I could see. I saw these strange little fuzzy moving particles everywhere on the grid; more in some areas and less in others. I paused for a moment, as I was not sure why the air was so filled with those particles. I noticed the strong, sweet aroma of cut grass as I saw the particles in that magnified grid, and then I finally realized they were the pieces of cut grass floating through the air. It’s interesting to me how that happened, how I was momentarily lost. When I focus on something, it’s as though my mind is a camera and that camera switches to autofocus and zooms in. It’s not something I can control and I don’t always know how the tiny patterns I see at this level translate to the environment around me. I lose perspective. Have you ever seen a bird on the branch of a tree in the distance and wanted to capture it with your camera? Then you zoom in and it’s just a jumble of branches and you have to search around for the bird with your new focus. This is what my brain is like.
My zoom lens then pulled back so I saw things as they were and gained the perspective I needed to keep walking through this plane. I saw the particles swirl and imagined the tiniest of them going up my nose. This startled me, as I’m allergic to grass, and I tried not to panic. My brain switched to a sort of computational mode as it looked at this large, vivid grid pattern with the grass swirls. I determined the path with the fewest grass particles and walked through it like a maze.
Though I’d managed to map out a path to class, I was distracted yet again when I noticed the geometry of the plants along the way. The way the leaves and blossoms fanned out, the leaves or petals subdividing a circle with multiples—say, four leaves or eight petals—sent my mind into overdrive as it tried to calculate the geometry of flowers. It occurred to me that the number of petals or leaves in a group was seldom a prime number. And then I started thinking about how that number of petals or leaves might be an evolutionary advantage in terms of how the plants used light and space; perhaps that arrangement made the most efficient use of the space-time grid and better captured light for photosynthesis.
I hadn’t been outdoors in daylight for such a long time that I was seeing nearly everything around me with new eyes. It was all I could do to keep walking to class. The great beauty of nature’s mathematical truths was all around me, and I realized that I was experiencing the reality of living mathematics, whereas most people saw only its map and then confused the map with the actual territory and got misled. I knew that mathematicians described nature with their formulas. But to me, there was something deeper than that going on. I thought there was more to the nature of the universe than equations—I thought perhaps the universe spoke in its own form of math. And that math was geometry. Equations were symbolic; numbers were symbolic. But to me, geometry was real.
Being outdoors and looking so closely at everything made me aware of the microscopic world, and the campus struck me as a giant petri dish crawling with bacteria. There were so many people, and I was certain that they carried countless germs. I was also feeling assaulted by the cars going by on campus, the exhaust spewing from them. I’d been cloistered for so long that I’d almost forgotten cars had exhaust. I made my way to the building where my first class was and was similarly affronted by the smokers huddled by the stairs at the entrance. I walked to their extreme left, hugging the railing as I climbed the steps, and I held my breath the entire time. I was concentrating so hard on not breathing that I inadvertently touched the railing. My hand felt warm and I was overpowered by a gross feeling of filth. I found a restroom to wash up before continuing on.
Though it was really cool to see the world in such great detail, the result was that I felt quite overwhelmed and exhausted before I even got to the classroom. There was so much to keep track of—the grass particles, the petals, the bits of interesting conversation, the clustered smokers, the spewing exhaust pipes, the potential lurking germs. I mapped them all out in my mind and found it hard to snap out of thinking about each obsessively. That promised land, that campus of my dreams, was also for me a forest with many hazards.
I stumbled down the hallway with my book bag, opening the doors with my feet or my elbows to avoid touching the handles with their millions of microbes. As terrified and overstimulated as I felt, I made a promise to myself that day that I would not drop out. I began to think of ways to avoid letting my discomfort with germs stop me from reaching my goals.
From then on, I brought a large number of hand wipes to school with me. In every classroom, I zipped open my rolling suitcase and took out a handful of wipes to sterilize my desk and chair before sitting down. The few students who shot me dubious looks as I did that got treated to the sight of a grimy, blackened cloth. They lost their skepticism with a chorus of “Ewww!” and some of them even introduced themselves. One day we all had cupcakes to eat in class, and people actually waited for me to wipe the table down before they started eating.
I was pretty sure my fellow students, as nice as they were, regarded me as a curiosity. But I didn’t care. I was so happy to have human companionship after so long in isolation, I’d have wiped down the entire school if I’d had to.
As I was heading toward class one day, it started raining cats and dogs. Even for the Seattle region, this was an extraordinary amount of rain. As I made my way through the courtyard, I noticed an enormous puddle, and it brought me up short.
The thousands and thousands of raindrops hitting that puddle were creating ripples, and as the ripples fanned out, they made an interference pattern with the other ripples. I was transfixed by that beautiful example of the nature of thin
gs and found myself staring down as the ripples made their circular peaks and valleys and thousands of new raindrops erased them and made more. It reminded me of the inverse-square law of physics that I’d begun to learn about through my own research—in fact, it was a perfect example of the law that applies when some force or energy is radiated outward from a single point into three-dimensional space. As the energy gets farther from the source, it is spread across an area that is increasing proportionally to the source—and the energy is inversely proportional to the radius of the space. Though the concept was usually applied in the context of gravity, light, sound, radiation, or electricity, I saw the distribution pattern on the surface of the water as well.
I didn’t have an umbrella, but I didn’t care that I was dripping wet and that water was cascading off my head. It was not unpleasant at all. This was a late-summer day and the rain was lukewarm. I took a camera out of my suitcase and hunched over it to keep it dry. I stood photographing that remarkable display for some time, a huge grin on my face. I wanted to always remember it.
I don’t know how much time had passed when I heard rapping on glass nearby. It was loud; I could hear it over the rain. When I looked up, I saw a group of students gathered behind the large glass wall ahead of me, laughing and talking and pointing at me. It looked like an entire class, including the professor, had interrupted their lesson in order to watch me.
It occurred to me how wet I was at that point and how strange I must look. One of the students snapped a picture, the flash briefly illuminating that gray afternoon. A bunch of students started waving at me. I waved back, and more pictures were taken. I smiled at them and laughed along with them, then continued on to my class.
Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel Page 10
