Read Online The Song is You (2009) by Arthur Phillips - Free Book Online
Authors: Arthur Phillips
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whirring gears stamping the analogous coin before he could stop himself. “Rachel sends her love,” he concluded, clumsily collaring a new subject and prematurely mumbling the message he’d meant to lay out later, with more finesse and alcohol.
Aidan had come for lunch with Julian as a tentative ambassador, empowered to discuss semi-reconciliation by the sister-in-law whom he had loved since she nursed him after the Incident. But the inadvertent Bobby Fischer reference brought to his mind the Incident brought to mind the woman he credited with saving his life afterward brought to mind that she had asked him to test the waters in Julian’s home, and then the words were out—”Rachel sends her love”—self-revelatory in a hundred ways, the embarrassing autonomy of his intricate and rigidly trained mind.
“You see her much, do you?” Julian changed direction, flopped in a towel onto the chair across from Aidan, feeling almost equal to the task of mapping his brother’s patterns of thought.
The pejorative “know-it-all” is no more fair than any other applied to some poor outcast who did not choose and cannot control an unpopular trait. Aidan had liked producing the answers since as early as he could recall; he couldn’t help it. A rare question he could not answer: When did you first feel that perfect inner completeness that comes from answering a question posed by a teacher, a parent, another child, a TV-cartoon professor?
Aidan could not relax in the presence of unanswered trivia, and to be cut off mid-answer was
physically
uncomfortable, a sour taste in the throat and an ache in the rectum. (Julian, age six: “How do you spell
parrot?”
Aidan, age sixteen: “P-A-R-” Julian: “Wait, no, I know it, R-O-T, right?” Aidan: “Please don’t do that. Please don’t ask me if you know the answer.”)
Considering some people’s negative reaction at being shown up by a child, Aidan could never be certain of receiving praise for being right. The only unwavering approval came from his mother and, later, from Julian, but only when Julian was between four and thirteen years old and saw in the giant genius an almost unearthly being. (Julian, age twelve, puzzling over a biology textbook: “How do we know Lamarck is wrong and Darwin is right?” Aidan, age twenty-two: “Cannonball, if Lamarck was right, we’d both have one leg.”) So, in an environment usually annoyed by him, it must have been genetic, this pleasure in knowing something about everything. If, by the way, Lamarck is wrong and the other fellow right, then Aidan’s genetic mutation might have shown some usefulness, either for earning or for mating. It didn’t. His dominant personality trait was therefore dismissable by evolutionary biology as irrelevant (one of the reasons that for many years Aidan tried to defend intelligent-design theory; it would have been nice to feel he existed for a good reason).
By the time he was fifteen, having the facts at his fingertips was so essential and habitual to him that he defined himself as that—knowledge itself, a superhero or Greek god of data. And with that conscious self-identification, a loop began to carve itself in his mind. As with dance students who feel, as they improve, that the music they have long practiced to must be slowing down, so Aidan’s speed of recall and reply had always to accelerate or he felt not just his quirky powers failing but he himself, his soul, melting away from inside him, as if he were being deboned, leaving only a heap of flabby skin and spotty beard to be stomped on and torn by all the world’s passing cleats and high heels. When he moved to New York in his early twenties, when speed was still paramount to him, he was answering all questions—even from strangers asking directions in the subway—as if he not only had the answer but had even known that
that
question was going to be asked. His reply would begin most pleasurably before the question finished.
And so, the
Aidan had come for lunch with Julian as a tentative ambassador, empowered to discuss semi-reconciliation by the sister-in-law whom he had loved since she nursed him after the Incident. But the inadvertent Bobby Fischer reference brought to his mind the Incident brought to mind the woman he credited with saving his life afterward brought to mind that she had asked him to test the waters in Julian’s home, and then the words were out—”Rachel sends her love”—self-revelatory in a hundred ways, the embarrassing autonomy of his intricate and rigidly trained mind.
“You see her much, do you?” Julian changed direction, flopped in a towel onto the chair across from Aidan, feeling almost equal to the task of mapping his brother’s patterns of thought.
The pejorative “know-it-all” is no more fair than any other applied to some poor outcast who did not choose and cannot control an unpopular trait. Aidan had liked producing the answers since as early as he could recall; he couldn’t help it. A rare question he could not answer: When did you first feel that perfect inner completeness that comes from answering a question posed by a teacher, a parent, another child, a TV-cartoon professor?
Aidan could not relax in the presence of unanswered trivia, and to be cut off mid-answer was
physically
uncomfortable, a sour taste in the throat and an ache in the rectum. (Julian, age six: “How do you spell
parrot?”
Aidan, age sixteen: “P-A-R-” Julian: “Wait, no, I know it, R-O-T, right?” Aidan: “Please don’t do that. Please don’t ask me if you know the answer.”)
Considering some people’s negative reaction at being shown up by a child, Aidan could never be certain of receiving praise for being right. The only unwavering approval came from his mother and, later, from Julian, but only when Julian was between four and thirteen years old and saw in the giant genius an almost unearthly being. (Julian, age twelve, puzzling over a biology textbook: “How do we know Lamarck is wrong and Darwin is right?” Aidan, age twenty-two: “Cannonball, if Lamarck was right, we’d both have one leg.”) So, in an environment usually annoyed by him, it must have been genetic, this pleasure in knowing something about everything. If, by the way, Lamarck is wrong and the other fellow right, then Aidan’s genetic mutation might have shown some usefulness, either for earning or for mating. It didn’t. His dominant personality trait was therefore dismissable by evolutionary biology as irrelevant (one of the reasons that for many years Aidan tried to defend intelligent-design theory; it would have been nice to feel he existed for a good reason).
By the time he was fifteen, having the facts at his fingertips was so essential and habitual to him that he defined himself as that—knowledge itself, a superhero or Greek god of data. And with that conscious self-identification, a loop began to carve itself in his mind. As with dance students who feel, as they improve, that the music they have long practiced to must be slowing down, so Aidan’s speed of recall and reply had always to accelerate or he felt not just his quirky powers failing but he himself, his soul, melting away from inside him, as if he were being deboned, leaving only a heap of flabby skin and spotty beard to be stomped on and torn by all the world’s passing cleats and high heels. When he moved to New York in his early twenties, when speed was still paramount to him, he was answering all questions—even from strangers asking directions in the subway—as if he not only had the answer but had even known that
that
question was going to be asked. His reply would begin most pleasurably before the question finished.
And so, the
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