book—Lou, you’ve been holding out on us. You’re a genius.”
“It may be a splinter skill,” I say. Tom’s expression scares me; if he thinks I am a genius maybe he will not want to let me fence with them.
“Splinter skill, hooey,” Lucia says. She sounds angry; I feel my stomach clenching. “Not you,” she says quickly. “But the whole concept of splinter skills is so… antiquated. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses; everybody fails to generalize many of the skills they have. Physics students who make top grades in mechanics mess up driving vehicles on slick roads: they know the theory, but they can’t generalize to real driving. And I’ve known you for years now—your skills are skills, not splinter skills.”
“But I think it’s mostly memorizing,” I say, still worried. “I can memorize really rapidly. And I am good at most standardized tests.”
“Explaining it in your own words isn’t memorizing,” Tom says. “I know the on-line text… You know, Lou, you haven’t ever asked what I do for a living.”
It is a shock, like touching a doorknob in cold weather. He is right. I did not ask what his job was; it does not occur to me to ask people what their jobs are. I met Lucia at the clinic so I knew she was a doctor, but Tom?
“What is your job?” I ask now.
“I’m on the university faculty,” he says. “Chemical engineering.”
“You teach classes?” I ask.
“Yes. Two undergraduate classes and one graduate-level class. Chem-E majors have to take organic chemistry, so I know what they think of it. And how kids who understand it describe it, as opposed to those who don’t.”
“So—you really think I do?”
“Lou, it’s your mind. Do you think you understand it?”
“I think so… but I am not sure I would know.”
“I think so, too. And I have never known anyone who picked it up cold in less than a week. Did you ever have an IQ test, Lou?”
“Yes.” I do not want to talk about that. I had tests every year, not always the same ones. I do not like tests. The ones where I was supposed to guess which meaning of the word the person who made the test meant from the pictures, for instance. I remember the time the word was track and the pictures included the mark of a tire on a wet street and some cupolas on top of a long, tall building that looked—to me, anyway— like the grandstand at a racetrack. I picked that for the word track, but it was wrong.
“And did they tell you the result or just your parents?”
“They didn’t tell my parents, either,” I say. “It made my mother upset. They said they did not want to affect her expectations for me. But they said I should be able to graduate from high school.”
“Umm. I wish we had some idea… Would you take the tests again?”
“Why?” I ask.
“I guess… I just want to know… but if you can do this stuff without, what difference does it really make?”
“Lou, who has your records?”Lucia asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I suppose—the schools back home?The doctors? I haven’t been back since my parents died.”
“They’re your records: you should be able to get them now. If you want to.”
This is something else I never thought of before. Do people get their school records and medical records after they grow up and move away? I do not know if I want to know exactly what people put in those records. What if they say worse things about me than I remember?
“Anyway,” Lucia goes on. “I think I know a good book for you to try next. It’s kind of old, but nothing in it is actually wrong, though a lot more’s been learned. Cego and Clinton’s Brain Functionality . I have a copy… I think…” She goes out of the room, and I try to think about everything she and Tom said. It is too much; my head is buzzing with thoughts like swift photons bouncing off the inside of my skull.
“Here, Lou,” Lucia says, handing me a book. It is heavy, a thick volume of paper with cloth cover. The title and authors are printed in gold on a black rectangle on the spine. It has been a long time since I saw a paper book. “It may be on-line somewhere by now, but I don’t know where. I bought it back when I was just starting med school. Take a look.”