A Sharp Intake of Breath. Джон Миллер
methods that did the trick but aesthetically weren’t very satisfying. Even fifteen years later, when I had that operation, the techniques hadn’t significantly improved.
Nurse Grace fussed over me during my recovery. When Ma and Pop weren’t there, she told me stories of England, of her husband’s exploits in South Africa, and of a beautiful amber diamond called the Orange Sunset, which he brought back for her as a wedding present.
Nurse Grace stroked my hair when I complained about the pain. Her voice was a soothing balm. I listened to her lilting tones while I stared at ceiling tiles or at a tiny spider spinning her web in the corner of the room, or considered the gurgling radiator in the background, a counterpoint to the gurgling in my throat.
Eight days later, they removed the splint, and I was home. I remember a marked increase in toys, and being doted on by Ma and my sisters and various relatives and neighbours. Even by Pop.
MY PARENTS HAD NEVER SAID IT ALOUD, but they believed I was slow. It didn’t help that the doctors told them I might be, that Mrs. Debardeleben had confirmed it. It didn’t help that I barely spoke, so afraid was I of what would come out. It was in this context that at breakfast that morning, my memory of Nurse Grace had made an impression.
It made a bigger one, a few months later, when the neighbours had a small fire in their shop. It was quickly extinguished, but all of our merchandise had to be removed from the shelves and triaged: aired out, washed, or thrown away. When it was time to put the salvaged stock back, I told Pop he’d gotten the order of the silk bolts wrong when he’d rehung them.
“They go blue-red-pink-beige-white, not red-blue-pink-white-beige,” I said.
“You can’t possibly remember that.” “You should listen to him,” said Bessie. “He remembers things he sees.”
Years later, I’d be told that scientists didn’t believe in photographic memory. All I knew was that I had an ability others didn’t have to remember things I saw—the location and sequence of objects and the placement of words on a page. When I spoke, my words sometimes came out unformed and escaped here and there, but every word I read, every image I saw got ensnared, as if in a sticky web, waiting to be retrieved.
Pop stood back and took direction from me as I reassembled the merchandise, placing rainbows of fabric in exactly the right order on the display tables. When I saw how pleased he was, I became excited and told him I knew our whole inventory off by heart. Then, my parents were impressed. They were relying on me for something.
My excitement was short-lived.
Rather than deciding I was smart, they pigeon-holed me. I was still a freakish, deformed idiot, but now I was an idiot savant who could briefly be relieved from his plodding stupidity to do parlour tricks or menial tasks. Bessie knew that I remembered things I saw, but she hadn’t told my parents before then because to do so would have been to relay information that would have blown her cover as the perfect daughter. Even though Lil probably would’ve gotten in much more trouble, and she could’ve had the pleasure of taking Lil down with her, Bessie resisted the temptation. I didn’t fully understand, until then, how much my parents’ approval meant to her.
Until they discovered my special gift, Ma had delegated the keeping of the inventory solely to Bessie, who had shown some promise in arithmetic at school. It was the only subject she excelled in, and our parents wanted to encourage her. I used to follow Bessie around when she did her duties, looking at the lists she made and noting the monthly changes, how she reconciled them with the sales records. It was hard to account for a few yards of cloth—the fabric our parents sold was kept on large bolts and sold by the foot or the yard, so to be precise in the inventory would have meant unravelling and measuring, and who had the time or space for that? Another method was weighing the bolts, but we didn’t have a scale. Consequently, we counted the layers at the top of a bolt and estimated roughly that two layers was one yard. In addition, Ma asked Bessie to make a list of the number of ends—the bolts with fewer than four yards on them—and to note which colour and type of material they were.
One day, I saw Bessie checking and re-checking the list, wearing her eraser to the nub, and going back into the storefront three times to start over.
“What’s wrong?” I kept asking, following behind as she ignored me and became more frantic.
“Ma’s gonna kill me,” she eventually muttered, walking and counting with her fingers. “I think I messed up the ends count—again. There are fifteen fewer this month, but I can only account for fourteen when I look at the sales record. I think I might’ve counted wrong again. This is the third month it’s happened. I thought there were twenty-four last month, but maybe there were only twenty-three. Promise you won’t tell Ma; she’ll have my head.”
“I promise,” I said. Then, after a minute or two, “You didn’t count wrong, you know. There were twenty-four last month. You wanna know which colours?”
“Don’t bother me right now, Toshy. This is important.”
“I’m telling you, I know the colours.”
She stared at me and folded her arms. “You remember the colours. Sure. I’d have to look at my notebook to know that.”
“I just remember. I’ll show you.” I proceeded to walk the perimeter of the store, pointing out the precise locations where those fifteen bolts had been and also naming their colours, including the missing one, and ignoring this month’s new ends. Bessie followed me and checked off the ones I called out against her list. “And the missing one was a kind of blue.”
“How did you do that?” She scrutinized me like you would a magician if you were trying to see where up his sleeve he’d hidden the rabbit.
“I just remember things when I see them.”
“What kind of things?”
“All kinds of things...” I searched for an example. “Oh! Like the Tarzan comic!”
“Well, that’s not too hard. It has four panels at most, and you just read it an hour ago.”
“No. I mean I remember the words from every one of them. Every day.” I was crazy about Tarzan. I loved how strong he could be without ever speaking a word. I loved that people didn’t mock him for being like the animals. They thought he was mysterious. I would’ve cut out the comic strip if Ma hadn’t wanted the paper intact, in case she needed to wrap things. It didn’t matter; I could retrieve the images any time I wanted.
“Prove it.”
“Okay.” I closed my eyes and chose a day from December, the last day of school before the holidays. An image flashed in my mind, and I started reciting the words in the dialogue bubbles. I made the sound effects too, waved my arms like the gorillas, and jumped up on the tables in the store to act it all out. Bessie laughed. I retrieved the next image, and so on. I played all the parts, Tarzan, Jane, the animals, and stray hunters and villains that entered the storyline, until Bessie said, “Okay, stop it! I believe you. Holy smokes, that’s really weird.”
“It is?” Great, I thought, just great. Another weird thing about me. That was exactly what I needed.
“In any case, this doesn’t help me figure out what happened to those extra bolts.”
“Did you count the ones Lil takes into the backyard?”
“Excuse me?”
“Sometimes I see her taking an end and giving it to a man she meets in the backyard.”
Bessie’s eyebrows lifted. “No. No, I did not count those ones. Thanks, Toshy.” She patted me on the head. I was proud that I’d solved the mystery. “I think I’m going to have to have a little chat with our sister when she comes home.” There was a sharpness to Bessie’s voice. Later, I overheard my sisters arguing in their bedroom. With an ear pressed to the door, I couldn’t make out everything, but I did catch the crucial bits.
Bessie said, “I don’t care who needs clothes, Lil. You can’t