Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel (13 page)

My best memory of the house was hiding up in my loft, enjoying the sound of rain on the roof or feeling the awe of the sound of snow sliding off it and down to the ground. First you would hear
crack!
Then:
whoosh!
Then:
boom! Boom!
and as many booms as it took to get all the large chunks of snow off the slope at the top of the house.

Living in the wilderness proved to be too boring for John; he was so bored, he decided to call in a false fire alarm one day. I admit I aided him in that foolishness. When he handed me the phone after calling in the fire, I whimpered, “Help!” The operator sent emergency vehicles in a flash over treacherous terrain, only to find us cowering and already feeling guilty about what we’d done.

But there had once been a real fire at our place. We had carelessly thrown a bunch of newspapers we’d used to catch paint drippings into the fireplace, and they ignited the twenty-foot chimney. My mom, Toni, is now a frail lady, owing to the losses in our lives, but back in the day, you could give her an emergency and watch some sort of superhero reserve come into play. She’s still remarkable and I seek her advice a lot. I remember her evacuating us and simultaneously fighting the fire with an extinguisher, getting us to safety and saving the house in the process.

I remembered the time a bully in our town began riding his motorbike up our driveway really aggressively, harassing us with countless revs of his engine just under our windows. John had no problem when I dug a trench in the road out in front of our house and filled it with gasoline and put in a fuse. I waited to hear the sound of the approaching speed demon, and as soon as I did, I set it ablaze. He came screeching to a halt in front of the wall of flames and never bothered us again. Sometimes I laughed to myself through tears at these memories. I had been a survivor at a very young age.

And then my time in Alaska ended. Our father called to ask if John and I would like to visit him in his new home in Seattle. I said yes. For some reason, John said no. When I reflect on it now, I think the divorce must have been more disturbing to John than it was to me. He was older and more aware of events, and in the way that firstborns often bear the brunt of things in a family, he took everything much harder than I did.

My plane approached Seattle, and the Space Needle might as well have been a giant exclamation point. I couldn’t believe the city, with its perfect balance of nature and development: the wide expanses of the blue sound, the glittering new buildings of downtown, all interspersed with green spaces. I’d been living in the woods, after all. At the summer’s end, my father and his new girlfriend, Pam, asked me if I wanted to stay and go to school there. I didn’t hesitate to say yes. That was the beginning of something wonderful and new for me—a second chance in a way—but it was also the beginning of a rift between me and my brother.

Later, John did move to Seattle, but he was different, and things were never the same between us. John would like a girl, and she would like me better; we’d play a board game and I would win; I made friends more easily; and Pam chose me as her favorite. And worse, I was blissfully unaware there were hard feelings until I was about sixteen. By then John was exhibiting signs of bipolar disorder, though we didn’t know what it was at the time.

What we were aware of was that John had withdrawn deep inside himself. He was distrustful of people and developed an abiding interest in animals, almost as a substitute. He would walk around in a trench coat filled with martial-arts weapons and sugar gliders, these tiny rodent pets he kept with him all the time. He always had the right leg of his pants rolled up to the knee—even in cold weather—to display a tattoo he’d gotten: a ferret in an attack position, standing on its hind legs. He grew violent. More than once, I had to pretend to pass out when he had me in a chokehold, to get him off me. John fought violently with Pam.

I began remarking to friends that my brother was becoming the most bizarre person I’d ever met. Most of them dismissed it and said, “Oh, I know someone like that too,” until they actually met John and decided he topped them all.

John did get it together for a time, and he joined the navy. But when he got out, things went bad again. He became friends with a crowd of martial-arts-trained, very sexy women. Despite John’s strange behavior, women liked him; he was very good-looking and quite athletic. One of these women, Keri, was his favorite, and he fathered a child with her. But there was a rival for her love, and this man reportedly threatened John on more than one occasion.

In those first months after the mugging, while I holed up in my house, I spent a lot of my time thinking about our lives. One of the women my father had married after Pam secretly beat us when he wasn’t home. I coined a term for the behavior of some of my stepparents:
kill-the-cub syndrome.
When lions and other animals take mates, they often kill the offspring from their new mates’ previous couplings, and I felt like those ill-fated little cubs, stuck in the mating cycle of human animals.

John and I finally spoke up about the secret beatings, and we came home from school the next day to find a truck in front of our home and a crew of movers getting our stepmom’s stuff out. At that point, telling my father what had happened was all it took to get him to respond to us. He grew lonely in middle age, however, and made another bad choice. The beautiful younger woman he fell in love with had a crack-cocaine problem. He knew this when he moved her into our home. She stole a gold ring from my room as well as checks out of my checkbook. I figured this out when a check I wrote bounced and I realized the two before it were missing. I confronted her about it and she admitted she’d stolen money from my account, saying, “I did something stupid.”

“You know you shouldn’t leave stuff like that lying around” was all my dad would say. I was so grateful when they finally broke up and she moved out. Instrumental in that breakup was my current stepmom, Helen. She was working for my dad at the time, and with a lot of patience and love, she convinced him he could find someone better; namely, her. They’ve been married for some twenty years now and have a large family of stepchildren and stepgrandchildren.

Things at Mom’s place weren’t much better when we spent time there. She divorced again and married a Canadian man named Bill. He hit me so hard one time that my back hurt for two days.

All of these experiences did damage to John’s already fragile psyche. At some point he changed from being a playmate and coconspirator to being a menace, even to me.

He convinced me one day that a man up the street had stolen the 1967 rally sport hubcaps off his new car. It was true that the Corvette a couple of driveways up did have the same accessories my brother had lost to a thief. John ordered me to sneak over there and remove them. I was more afraid of my brother than of whoever owned that Corvette. I was only fourteen; John was sixteen. As I didn’t have a growth spurt until my late teens, I was under five feet tall and only ninety pounds at that point. I went to get the hubcaps.

I approached the house stealthily and leaned down next to the sports car. I was just getting a bolt off one of the tires when a man came out swinging. He hit my face so hard that my eyes were blackened and I had to pull my lips away from my braces. When I explained to him the same tires had gone missing from my brother’s car, he told me he had just picked his own car up from the dealership and the similar make of the hubcaps was only a coincidence. My brother mocked me when I returned, beaten, and admitted that he knew the man hadn’t stolen them but he wanted them anyway.

During my period of reflection in the wake of the discovery of my brother’s body, I worried for several weeks about whether the mental illness that might have afflicted John was actually what was wrong with me. Maybe I was just hallucinating all the stuff going on in my brain and body. John had always been so different from me that I never worried about my mental health this way. I tried to reassure myself that my behavior was still quite different from John’s. And my cognitive abilities were still growing, not degenerating. The fact that these visions and thoughts were due to a remarkable change in my brain and were actually new gifts would be borne out by scientific testing one day, but at the time, I occasionally worried that I had the same devastating disease as my brother.

It was, in the end, my stomach that came to my rescue. One afternoon four years into my solitude, a simple craving inspired me to break my seclusion. My heart was set on a roast beef sandwich from Subway, located in the Tacoma Mall food court. I opened my front door for the first time in six weeks, squinting in the sunlight and clutching my entire portfolio of drawings to my chest. My greatest concern was that someone would break into my house and steal my work while I was away. The sight of my own pale skin in the side-view mirror distracted me every time I changed lanes, but I made it to the mall without incident. A few minutes after I sat down to lunch, a balding man wearing glasses eating at the next table over leaned in and asked about my illustrations.

Evangelistic as ever, I launched into a spirited retelling of my story and did my best to explain what each of my drawings represented. The man—whose name I never learned—was stunned. He introduced himself simply as a physicist from a local university and said to me, “You don’t have the vocabulary yet because you haven’t been studying in a formal setting, but you understand some pretty complicated concepts. If you can, you really should go back to school.”

Somewhere in my brain, a switch was flipped. Half an hour later, I took the first, miraculous step toward recovery. I drove to Tacoma Community College to sign up for some classes. I found a professor in the math department’s office who told me the current semester had started a week earlier and registration was now closed, but seeing my determination, she relented and gave me a quiz to take home over the weekend. If I passed, she’d let me in.

I worked day and night on my ticket back to civilization. I scored a perfect 100 and started classes the following Monday.

Chapter Nine

T
HE WEEKEND BEFORE
I started classes, I took the blankets off my windows. Sunlight flooded the interior of my home and I caught a glimpse of myself in the living-room mirror. Though the image didn’t change my new, hopeful mood, I realized I looked pretty frail. I used to spend hours on tanning beds, bronzing my skin to better show off my muscles. Now, my arms were thin as rails, and I was as white as a ghost. I decided to make an appointment with my doctor for a checkup in preparation for starting school. He drew some blood. He called me later and was very concerned—I had the lowest vitamin D level he’d ever seen. Four years of self-imposed exile had taken their toll. The doctor prescribed a weekly megadose of the vitamin to take orally. The pharmacist took a look at the scrip and asked if there’d been some mistake. I encouraged him to call the doctor, which he did; the dose was correct. I took my first pill the morning I got ready for my first day of school. I was taking two classes: chemistry and math.

I looked out the window that Monday morning, and I felt as though I were watching the sunrise for the first time in my life. It was the most beautiful daybreak I had ever seen. The sky was pink and orange and there were clouds of the deepest indigo streaking through the sherbet-colored air. My vitamin D deficiency reminded me how long it had been since I’d spent any time in daylight. What else had I missed these past four years? I wondered. I decided before I went to school I’d head out and take some pictures of the sky. As I walked toward the east, pointing my camera here and there to get the most of the sunrise, early-morning commuters looked at me curiously and then up at the sky. They must have thought they were missing some rare celestial event, because it was only a sunrise, their glances seemed to say. How could they be immune to this? I wondered. It was the most glorious beginning of a very important morning—truly a new dawn.

I stuffed my textbooks into a rolling suitcase and tucked my prized drawings under my arm and made my way to the beginning course of the Introductory Math series at Tacoma Community College. As I walked through the throngs of people on campus, I felt, for some reason, like I was coming home. After spending the entirety of my twenties in a perpetual bar crawl, I was now surrounded by (mostly) serious, studious adults for the first time in my life. I felt a little self-conscious because I noticed that, at thirty-five, I was more than a decade older than most of the other students, but I was really excited.

I knew I’d gone there to study math, but what it felt like was a foreign-language immersion course. My previous “school of life” education was five days a week in the nine-to-five world and seven nights a week in the social world, and I was never at a loss for words. But now I needed the
right
words—a new set of tools to better express myself and all the new thoughts I was having. I remembered the observation the physicist had made that inspired me to go back to school: he’d said I needed to acquire the vocabulary to explain myself. Instead of just
drawing
what I saw, I had to learn how to explain it and become fluent in the language of math as well as the everyday language of research.

The minute I stepped onto campus, I heard snippets of conversation from the students and faculty walking by. I listened carefully, hoping to catch these precious, new words like fish in my net. I trawled for them even there on the walkways and hoped they would help my tongue catch up to my racing mind. I fantasized for a moment about the day I could have a smooth, satisfying conversation about math without stopping every other sentence, struggling to explain what I meant without the associated accepted theories to back it up and the proper vocabulary to express it. Words are powerful and illuminate so much when you have the right ones at your disposal. My words then were wrong and lacking in specificity. I relied on long-drawn-out explanations of my ideas, and I’d never seen anyone react with the bright light of understanding in his eyes that I saw when I drew it for someone. When I got frustrated, I would just blurt out, “Let me draw it for you.” I felt like an immigrant to a foreign land where people spoke a different language. I was so new to it all. I wanted to become one of them, a citizen of my new land.