a story in n parts, part 3

The encounter with the psychologist was so close or, rather, the psychologist’s encounter with the Great White Flame was so powerful that the psychologist, being completely unprepared and far too normal to even experience the Great White Flame became immediately and permanently blind. The light also bleached all of the melanin in his facial skin and hair. The child was deeply upset by this, and by the crap in his pants, and consequently decided to stop exercising his abnormal intelligence forever.

Instead of quitting cold turkey as before, he decided to slowly phase out his abnormality. His first goal was to match the intelligence of his parents’ by the time he went to school. The most productive method, he quickly learned, was to stop caring about any one thing for more than a few minutes at a time. Some things, though, he allowed his attention to hold for up to several hours. One of these things was the ceiling fan above his playpen in the living room. He would lie on his back, silently, and stare at the blades slowly rotating for hours, usually not thinking of anything more than matching his breath to their rotations.

Over the next few years he became merely fodder for tabloids, his apathy grew inversely proportional to the decline of his apparent intelligence, and he drifted from the ceiling fan to the pattern of the bathroom wallpaper to his meandering model trains. By age five he scored a very respectable yet disappointing to his parents and their doctors, 151 on a standardized IQ test, the doctors left entirely and dismissed the child’s apathy and apparent self-absorption on his above average intelligence and the over stimulation he received as an infant. He was awarded a clean bill of health, and his parents were advised to enroll him in a good school.

They did. Through most of grammar school the child seemed to follow his parents’ footsteps. Like his mother he entered middle school at the age of eight, had few friends, and received perfect scores on all of his work, but unlike his mother, who cried for sixteen hours the first time she got a B, he was not at all upset with his first less than perfect grade. Like his father he always did the assigned work that influenced his grade and not a drop of any other work, he always swang on the swings silently for the whole of his recess, and read nothing for pleasure. “I don’t like books, why’d you re-wallpaper the bathroom?” he once said.

By middle school his grades and IQ began to drop. He still had never given an incorrect answer. He merely stopped completing assignments. His parents tried passively to influence him, to encourage him to complete his assignments, to make him understand that they would like him more if they had a reason to be proud of him. But he didn’t care about them, and honestly his parents never got over the disappointment of his normalness. He didn’t really care about anything anymore. He didn’t care if he was alone, he didn’t care to be alone.

On the IQ test administered for acceptance at the prestigious private high school his parents went to he scored a 138 and left the last third of it blank. The school admitted him gleefully and he convinced his parents to let him live in the dorms.

Both High school and his four years at college, William and Mary, went by rather uneventfully. His IQ dropped another 10 points on paper, he had sex a total of 19 times with four different girls, none of whom he loved, he smoked marijuana six times, tried cocaine twice, smiled 17,632 times, only once was accidentally, he got drunk a lot, especially in college, and he began smoking cigarettes on his eighteenth birthday when a friend suggested he buy a pack. He chain smokes to this day.

On his thirtieth birthday he found himself living alone in a three-room apartment with eleven dead houseplants all given to him from his mother. He designed web pages for a living for the last eight years, and drank half a pint of Jack Daniel’s to wash down his last four cigarettes every night for the last three and a half years. But on the seventh of June, thirty years after he was born he wasn’t drinking or smoking, he was thinking for the first time, how unsuccessful his plan was. So, he began to devise another.