Simple Simon (2 page)

Number 6601 required only five minutes to recover from surgery, just long enough to recalibrate itself with controllers on the ground at several secret installations across the United States. The first thing it did was spit a stream of electronic gibberish toward the earthbound receiving stations. All of them answered back with the same gibberish. They understood each other. But no one else did.

Number 6601 had just been taught a new language.

*  *  *

It was very late when the father sat in the rocker in the corner of his child’s room and helped his son onto his lap. The son wore white flannel pajamas highlighted with tiny blue snowflakes, and when he curled up in the strong arms his nose pressed into the crook of his father’s neck. The son detected the faint scent of motor oil, and this comforted him. He slid his thumb into his mouth and closed his lips around it.

“Wander boy, wander far, wander to the farthest star
,” the father began to softly sing. His pitch was off, his rhythm tortured. The son found assurance in the song sung his father’s way; it was the only way he knew.
“Wander boy, wander far, dreams are what you’re made of
.
”

Eyes closed, and the son began to suck his thumb. The father stared blankly at a bare wall and continued the melody. He had long ago stopped asking God to heal his son. He accepted him now.
“Under a tree by a house, by a field washed with rain, lies a boy all alone with his thoughts and his dreams
.
”

The father loved his son. He had sung to him every night of his life but one. It was their special time.
“Wander boy, wander far
.
..”
At this point he continued only in a hum. “
Hmmm-hm-hm-hmm hmmm-hmmm-hm-hm-hmmm
.”

The son fell asleep in the safety of his father’s arms.

Half a world away there was no safety for the son of another father. His body was already cold.

But in the quiet of this Midwest home, there was only peace as the father hummed the lullaby, his son resting serenely as the night marched on. The ritual was unchanging.

For now.

The Sky is Falling

Simon Lynch sat alone in the small room at a square table, chair back from its edge, hands folded on his lap, his upper body swaying forward and back in a precise, measured motion, the equal of any metronome. His eyes, green and cautious, darted about the bare tabletop, focusing on no one spot for more than a second. A few blonde hairs hung loose over his forehead. His lips moved quickly, incrementally, in some silent recitation.

The four walls of the room were off-white. Except for a door they seemed bare. One wasn’t.

“How old is he?” Dr. Anne Jefferson asked as she watched the image on the large television monitor. The subject was fifteen feet distant in a soundproof observation room. A perfectly hidden camera was bringing the pictures to them.

“He turned sixteen two weeks ago,” Dr. Chas Ohlmeyer answered. A clipboard rested on his knee. A notebook computer glowed on Anne’s lap. “How can you do observations on that thing?”

“This?” Her head shook with a smile. Her smile was her most striking feature, or so her new husband had told her. When she wasn’t smiling she was merely a classic beauty, skin the color of light chocolate and smooth as a newborn’s, eyes translucent in the right light, black hair pulled into a loose ponytail because of the storm blowing in off Lake Michigan. “You still have a couch in your office, don’t you?”

Ohlmeyer accepted the friendly jab. “And Freud is my idol.”

Anne chuckled, then gave her attention back to the monitor. “So, Simon Lynch. You think he’s a Kanner?”

Ohlmeyer’s face did the equivalent of a shrug. “I’m hoping you can help in that determination. He’s only been coming to Thayer for a couple months. It’s taken about that long to acclimate him so he’d open up a bit. Then last week…well, you’ll see.”

She studied the young man on the screen. At first blush an untrained eye might see a case of nerves. The scene did, she had to admit, look like something out of a police drama; the interrogation room, a bland cube with one door and a light fixture in the ceiling’s center, suspect at the table, waiting for the good guy-bad guy team of cops to come in. It was not that, though, and the behavior was not a case of nerves. The reason was far more profound.

From the left of the screen the door opened. Anne noted immediately that the pace of Simon’s rocking picked up a bit. A young woman entered, spoke a few comforting words to the subject, and set a box on the table before retreating. The door closed with a soft click.

“What is that?”

“A puzzle,” Ohlmeyer answered. His lined face bore a subtle grin. “We’ve discovered that Simon likes puzzles.”

Anne’s fingers tapped at the condensed keyboard, recording the beginnings of her observation. Thirty seconds into the session the pace of her typing slowed, then stopped, and she leaned in close to the monitor, her eyes wide. “Oh my.”

Simon Lynch had the contents of the box, five hundred jigsaw pieces of random size and shape, spread out upon the table, none touching another. The top of the box, emblazoned with a picture of a covered bridge in a pastoral setting, he laid face down on the floor without as much as a glance at it. The plain bottom of the box followed. Then he went about starting the puzzle.

“Chas, he is…”

“I know.”

First Simon had to get all the pieces turned the same direction…without letting them touch. They could only touch when he placed them together. And they could only go together when the picture side of each was face down. When the table top was nothing but a jumble of gray jigsaw piece backs, Simon’s rocking stopped. He leaned further forward and, eyes still dancing, began interlocking the pieces. Perfectly. With nary a test fit.

“My goodness, Chas,” Anne commented in a hushed, almost reverent tone. She was no longer an observer—she was a spectator.

“Amazing, isn’t it.” Ohlmeyer glanced at his Rolex.
Twenty-five seconds
. Simon was a quarter of the way done, easily at the pace he’d set in previous sessions. More than two pieces a second. Dr. Chas Ohlmeyer, dean of the University of Chicago’s school of psychology and director of the Lewis Thayer Center for the Developmentally Disabled, smiled fully at the brilliance he was witnessing. Not a brilliance many would ever see, nor that anyone—including him—could fully explain, but brilliance all the same.

Anne nodded to the screen. ‘Amazing’ began to convey her assessment of the scene. “How many times have you done this with him?”

“The puzzle? In a test situation, three. It wasn’t something we planned. Simon just sort of happened.”

“Come again?” Anne asked, keeping her eyes on the screen. Half the pieces had been absorbed into a lopsided triangle of gray.

“When I say ‘just happened’ I mean more than just this talent you’re seeing,” Ohlmeyer explained. “He might never have come to us—or to anyone—if he hadn’t gotten a nasty viral infection. His parents had kept him pretty much sheltered since he was about one year old. By that time it was apparent to them, and to his doctor, that there were some serious deficiencies in his development. His parents thought one thing: retarded.” For a moment Ohlmeyer’s expression soured, adding years to his 55 year-old face. “So when they brought him to Uni for treatment of the infection a few months back, the attending—you know him: Larry Wollam—recognized the behavioral and developmental symptoms. He convinced Simon’s parents to bring him to Thayer for an assessment. When we gave them the results, they kind of shrugged; they’d never heard of autism.”

“You’re kidding,” Anne commented, glancing away from Simon’s progress for just a second. When she looked back three corners were complete.

“They’re simple people,” Ohlmeyer continued. “The father’s a mechanic, the mother’s a housewife, both in their late forties. I was the one that explained it all to them.” He paused briefly. “The mother understands it more than the father, I think. He still believes that he has a retarded son.”

“But he’s here,” Anne added as a reminder that begged more explanation.

“Yes, he is. His first day here one of the staff put a twenty five piecer in front of him. Real simple; a blue cow and a red pig, I don’t remember exactly. Simon never touched it. The next day he took a five hundred piecer from a shelf and, well…”

“On his own?”

“Entirely,” Ohlmeyer answered proudly. He felt pride in the progress of any patient, and in this instance it was like watching a flower blossom in the dead of winter. “The staff gave him a thousand piecer…nothing. Another five hundred..
.voila
! He only does puzzles with five hundred pieces, and always after turning the pieces face down.”

“Any other abilities?” Anne inquired. The fourth and final corner was about to appear.

“Instant recognition and calculation, we’re certain. We gave him a five hundred piecer with one piece removed. He started to turn the pieces over, then stopped within seconds and started rocking nervously.”

“The uniform out of sorts,” Anne commented. “How soon were the symptoms noticed after he was born?”

“Within months,” Ohlmeyer replied with a nod. “Early infantile autism. And, yes, he can communicate verbally and has since about the age of two.”

The loose pieces dwindled until only one rectangle of gray paper, broken by the odd lines of a jigsaw cut, was left. Simon let a hand hover over it briefly, then returned it to his lap and started rocking easily again.

“The indications are that he’s a Kanner,” Anne said, confirming Ohlmeyer’s suspicion that Simon Lynch probably fell into a portion of the autistic population, numbering approximately 10% of the total, known as the Kanner’s syndrome subgroup. These individuals exhibited similar advanced abilities in memory, computation, and insistence on sameness in their environment. Some exhibited remarkable abilities in math, art, or music. An even smaller percentage of the autistic population showed almost unbelievable talents in certain areas. Dr. Anne Jefferson, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, gazed wondrously at the monitor, watching a young man of remarkable—yes, she told herself,
maybe even
that
—ability sway lazily back and forth. “Or more.”

Ohlmeyer nodded. “I didn’t want to predispose you.”

“Ever the scientist, Chas, aren’t you?” She switched off her laptop and closed the lid. “Have you done a right brain/left brain yet?”

“Cursory, but I think now we’re going to need to do that and a full protocol. Of course I have to convince his father to allow it. The mother’s on our side, but it was a major effort to get pops to let him come to Thayer three days a week. We had to work out transportation, arrange for the fees to be waived, yaditta-yaditta…” Ohlmeyer set his clipboard aside and took a magazine from the viewing room’s desk. He rolled it tight in one hand and pointed it in mock accusation at Anne. “You’re thinking it, aren’t you?”

“That he could be a savant? Aren’t you?”

Ohlmeyer demurred with a tilt of his head. “Would you like to meet Simon?” He held the magazine up. “I have to give him this before he goes home.”

Anne reached out, took the magazine, and uncurled it. “
The Tinkery
?” She noted the address label. “
You
are a member of the Tinker Society?”

“Is that impossible to believe?” Ohlmeyer asked with a grin. “My intelligence is up there, and has been for a very long time.”

She gave a friendly roll of her eyes in response and paged through the slick pages. The Tinker Society was a loose gathering of those with verifiable genius level IQ’s, and this was their bi-monthly publication, though a dated one she could tell from the cover. “Why are you giving this to him?”

“Simon doesn’t like only jigsaw puzzles, Anne. His mother told me that he’s been doing crosswords, word searches, sequences, all sorts of puzzles since his early teens. That’s when he found a fascination with them. Funny, though, she said he never had an overt fondness for jigsaws.” Ohlmeyer boosted his shoulders in wonder and stood, taking the magazine back from Anne. “Anyway,
The Tinkery
has a puzzle section at the back. I thought I’d let him have a look at one of mine that was gathering dust. A purely
un
scientific exercise, I will remind you.”

“Of course,” Anne said with a slow nod.

“Come.”

They left the viewing room and made the short trek to the observation room. Chas Ohlmeyer held Anne up there. “There’s one other minor thing you should know before meeting him.”

“Yes?”

“Until about a month ago he had a tendency to wet himself whenever he was around a…well…person of color.”

Anne’s eyes bulged.

“He grew up in a very…insulated environment, Anne. He’s white, his parents are white, his neighborhood is white. Anyone he’s seen in or near his home is likely white.”

“I see.”

“It hasn’t happened recently, but since you will be a new face to him, well, I wanted to prepare you.”

Anne giggled quietly.

“What?” Ohlmeyer inquired, his eyes narrowing.

“To think that I could scare the piss out of anybody is a bit on the laughable side, Chas.”

“Anne… Come on.” Ohlmeyer twisted the knob and let Anne enter before he followed and closed the door behind. The pace of Simon’s rocking increased, but he did not look up. “Hello, Simon.”

A boyish face rose in a flash, and fell as quickly. “Hello Doctor Cha
zzz
.” His voice was young and tinny, and he over enunciated the last sound in Ohlmeyer’s given name. It was intentional, but not mocking.

“Simon, I have someone I’d like you to meet. Her name is Anne. She’s a doctor, also.”

Another glance at the face. Anne noted very fair skin this time before it retreated to ponder the nearest edge of the table. There was little color in the cheeks, maybe a hint of natural blush, and bright white teeth gleamed through a chance part in thin lips. “It’s nice to meet you, Simon.”

“It’s nice to meet Simon,” Simon said as though parroting her greeting, but he was not.