matters of design
The shock of recognition struck Kyle as a cold finger poking out of (not at) his spine. Spring, 1997. Class discussion---a malcontent ruffle of paper as he sorted ungraded reports and pretended to listen, nodding at almost musical intervals, to a sullen, black-garbed, heavily made-up young man who had clearly not read the assigned text but seemed intent on trailing off into... Into what?
Today, the blather washed over Kyle as welcome white noise, screening out another sullen face, splashed with carbuncles, glaring at him from the far right corner of the classroom. She must be seventeen, he thought, if not a year or two younger. Fat cheeks. Bright, terribly familiar eyes. He craved a cigarette for the first time in eight (was it eight?) years, and gave a final nod to the young man, and rose, and wrote down a word or two on the chalkboard and, aghast, erased a superfluous letter, and talked about the mechanisms governing coincidence in 19th century fiction (which he’d soon tie to the reading), thinking, Jesus H. Christ.
He would steal darting glances at the girl with the fat cheeks. That she should be here, that she should be appear now, in his first year as adjunct professor in the community college from which he had gotten his AA some five years ago---Jesus.
Somewhere round the middle of the lecture he broke his chalk and accidentally scraped fingernail against board. He heard the class shudder behind him. The clock struck one. One more hour to go.
A long time ago someone taught her how to play chess. Then she went to the library and picked up a book on chess, or rather had someone pick it up for her, and she read it, and she became quite good at it.
Be specific.
OK, her mother taught this five-year-old how to play chess.
Was she bright?
Yes.
Very?
She was insanely bright.
Was she very pretty?
As pretty as a five year-old could be---which is, pretty but bearing a resemblance to a certain English statesman, as all infants do: baby fat.
But was she bright, insanely bright?
Yes. And she had dark hair, cropped short.
The nine year-old flickered in and out of Kyle’s living room through some quirk of the UHF antenna. The blinds were shut, so the TV changed the illumination of the room to the whim of the reception. Also: if he moved from the center of his couch the popcorn crackle and blind static would start up again---he stayed put and brushed Cheez Doodles crumbs from his fingers onto his shirt, said shirt glowing faintly with the silk-screened image of a heavy metal hair band popular in 1987. Car sounds faint and fading outside, seeping in. And it was 1987, three in the afternoon, with Donahue on the tube.
And he was smoking pot. The show featured child prodigies, where a whiz-kid mumbled the capitals of states, some other beamed while the white-haired host complimented him on his neo-Abstract-Expresionist paintings, and then there was this kid, sort of chubby, rattling off the scientific names of her favorite wildflowers, also an incomprehensible monologue on the nature of labeling in scientific research, and then she played the violin, which wasn’t great but for a nine year-old it was pretty good. He remembered someone saying something about Mozart’s earliest compositions -- that (face it) they were astounding for a pre-pubescent but no big deal.
"You wrote that?" the host asked.
She said yeah, and the audience applauded. To him the audience had seemed pretty bored till then.
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