Method 15 33 Read Free

beams, parallel to the door: one over the threshold, the other cutting the rectangular room in two, and the third running over my bed. The ceiling was cathedral and so, with the exposed beams, one could surely hang—if they so chose. There was nothing else. Eerily clean, eerily sparse, a quiet hiss was the only decoration. Even a monk would have felt bare in this vacuum.
    I went straight to the floor mattress, as he pointed out a bucket as a bathroom if I had “to piss or shit” in the night. The moon pulsed upon his departure, as though it too let out the air it was holding in its galactic lungs. In a brighter room, I floppedbackwards, exhausted, and schooled myself on my roller-coaster emotions.
From the van, you went from anxiety, to hatred, to relief, to fear, to nothing. Get even or you won’t win this
. As with any of my experiments, I needed a constant, and the only constant I could have was steady detachment, which I endeavored to keep, along with copious doses of disdain and unfathomable hatred, if those ingredients were needed to maintain the constant. What with the things I heard and saw in my confinement, those additives were indeed necessary. And easy to come by.
    If there is one talent I honed in captivity, whether seeded by divine design, by osmosis from having lived in my mother’s steel world, by instruction from my father in the art of self-defense, or the natural instinct of my condition, it was akin to that of a great war general’s: a steady, disaffected, calculating, revengeful, and even demeanor.
    This level repose was not new to me. In fact, in grade school, a counselor insisted I be examined due to the administration’s concern over my flat reactions and apparent failure to experience fear. My first-grade teacher was bothered because I didn’t wail or jump, screech or scream—like everyone else did—when a gunman opened fire on our classroom. Instead, as the video surveillance showed, I inspected his jerky hysterics, slicks of sweat, pockmarked complexion, enlarged pupils, frantic eye movements, track-lined arms, and, thankfully, fruitless aim. I recall to this day, the answer was so clear, he was drugged, skittish, high on acid or heroin, or both—yes, I knew the symptoms. Behind the teacher’s desk was her emergency bullhorn on a shelf under the fire alarm, so I walked over to both. Before pulling the alarm, I shouted “AIR RAID” through the horn, in as deep a six-year-old voice I could muster. The meth-head dropped to the ground, cowering in a puddle of himself as he pissed his pants.
    The video, which placed the issue of my evaluation on the front-burner, showed my classmates bawling in huddles, my teacher on her knees imploring God above her, and me atop a stool, trigger-fingering the bullhorn at my hip, and hovering as though directingthe mayhem. My pig-tailed head was cocked to the side, my arm with the bullhorn across my baby-fat belly, the other up to my chin, and I had a subtle grin matching the almost wink in my eye, approving of the policemen who pounced upon the culprit.
    Nevertheless, after a battery of tests, the child psychiatrist told my parents I was highly capable of emotion, but also exceptional at suppressing distraction and unproductive thoughts. “A brain scan shows her frontal lobe, which supports reasoning and planning, is larger than normal. 99 th percentile. Well actually, frankly, 101 percent, if you ask me,” he said. “She is not a sociopath. She understands and can choose to feel emotion. But she might choose not to, too. Your daughter tells me she has an internal switch that she can turn off or on at any given moment to experience things such as joy, fear, love.” He coughed and said, “ahem,” before continuing. “Look, I’ve never had a patient like this before. But one need look no further than Einstein to understand how much we don’t understand about the limits of the human brain. Some say we have harnessed only a fraction of our potential.