young; my imagination leapt ahead. Would she be like that, grown too old to be charming, still mumbling? If I felt fear, what could I expect from others? Higher-functioning people can learn from experience the necessity to control bizarre behavior — experience unlikely to be pleasant. Jessy needs explicit teaching. „You don’t want people to think you’re crazy, do you?“ I didn’t even know then if she knew what „crazy“ meant. Enough that she knew it was bad, that it included mumbles, and that if she tried hard she might learn to control them. And over years, she did.
Today, however, she is enjoying herself. She volunteers a mumble I’ve never heard her say, noting, with her usual precision, that it is „out loud, which is not really mumbling“. It’s out of the same bag of mysteries, though: „You caught my name“. Call?» I ask — her pronunciation is ambiguous and I know she hates us to call her name. But she’s definite; the word is «caught». Keep me from crying, she adds. «Crying makes my face all stuffy. I’m pleased. I’m proud». At forty, she’s developing her own method of control. If it works, who cares that it’s bizarre? For «crying» means the banshee wail, of all Jessy’s sounds the climactic worst. «Wee-alo, Wee-alo» it goes, up and down, up and down, in an ecstasy of desolation. It’s rare now, and brief, but still the same syllables, the same piercing, tuneless tune: our own domestic air-raid siren.
In the weeks spent writing this chapter, listening more closely than ever before, I’ve heard sounds I never noticed — within the squeal, for instance, the occasional squeak when Jessy’s task requires an extra application of force. How much else have I not registered? Her prosody is more complex than I thought. Experience must qualify those opening adjectives; her communications are not so much flat or atonal as unvarying; the impression of monotony is less a matter of unchanging tone as of tone that changes always in the same way. Tone and phrase are one package, inseparable. «Here’s the local forecast». It’s high on «Here’s», to catch our attention, then drops almost an octave. The prosody is as stereotyped as the language, as stereotyped as the situation (breakfast means we watch, must watch, the Weather Channel). «Mother». She’s brought my tea. That’s routine too, but to her mind less urgent; the tone drop is less marked, more like a major second. Her bedtime «Good night» is relaxed, almost musical; up on «Good», on «night» it descends to rest.
Every utterance has its own tune. «Ups-a-daisy doo doo doo!» marks annoyance. The voice waves up and down on «Ups-a- daisy», flattens out on the «doo’s». This exclamation point transcribes emphasis, not the confident enthusiasm of «Guess what! What happened? No big deal; she’s cooking, and „the bacon didn’t flip over“. A less transitory irritation yields something stranger, its tone blending annoyance with resignation: «Oh well, hang hang!» Then there’s «Oh I’m so sad!» There’s emphasis, but her voice is calm. She’s a little sad, but it’s under control. Another expression of sadness isn’t really an expression; it’s more like a claim. «Oh no!» This is Jessy’s regular response to disaster — earthquake, hurricane, train wreck, death. It may be in Canada or China; certainly it involves no one we know. Nevertheless, touchingly, Jessy will reach for the appropriate verbal package. Yes, it sounds fake. But it’s the best she can do.
Though disasters are common, oh no’s are relatively rare. Mostly they are elicited by newspaper stories, or conversation only partially understood. Jessy’s around during the TV news, but she pays no attention to the screen’s vivid horrors. They cannot pierce Nirvana. Yes, she may express irritation or sadness, she may experience the transitory desolation of wee-alo’s. But her language is who she is; I must insist on the primacy of that shining «Guess what!»
Yet this week I heard something even better. I heard her say, «Come see!» Common words, ordinary sounds, nothing bizarre about them. Words I had to wait forty years for. Come see. Share this experience with me. Together we will look at something with joint attention. It doesn’t matter what. I’ll write it down. And we will share the exclamation point.
Part two
Thinking
Chapter 5
«All different kind of days»
Scraps of paper are enough now, and a kitchen folder. In those days, though, the house was full of paper — notebook paper, construction paper, and more and more computer paper, the old n-by-14 sheets, lined or faintly striped, brought home by her father for a child who drew so much more easily than she talked. There was still little speech in those days; my language notes are largely from Jessy’s last twenty years. It was paper that allowed us to glimpse her mental experience, that assured us that though she might not talk, might not understand, she thought.
The records of her thinking fill not a folder but a heavy suitcase, and they are far from complete. Many disappeared at once into the whirlpool of a busy household. Some she cut up into the tiny squares we called her «silly business», to be sifted up and down, up and down, between her fingers. Still, opening that suitcase now, exploring it anew, trying anew to comprehend it, I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of its contents. Alone, often by choice, sometimes by necessity (for however we worked to breach her isolation, someone could not always be with her), year after year she drew, she painted, she penciled her scraggly capitals and numbers, applying the simple skills we’d taught her to the materials we provided. I would come home, find new sheets, save them or lose them. It didn’t matter. Next day there would be others.
The suitcase records the critical years of Jessy’s growth — roughly from age nine to sixteen. Revisiting it, exploring it not a sheet at a time but in its full accumulation, I am overwhelmed by more than volume. To write the past is to discover it. I am overwhelmed by the expenditure of mental energy it represents, by the sheer activity of a mind that in its inaccessibility could seem so empty. At three, wordless, Jessy had lined up objects in rows and we had thought that must, must be a sign of intelligence. Now we could see intelligence’s paper trail. The pages that follow are an attempt to unpack the contents of that suitcase.
Imagine finding this on a piece of paper:
NO
KNOW
YES
KYESW
It’s logical, isn’t it? It figures. It is no weak or torpid mind that spontaneously processes KNOW into KYESW. It is a mind that has searched for a rule and found it. Language doesn’t work by logic, but Jessy at eleven wasn’t interested in language. She was passionately interested in logic, in principles that could introduce order into a world still largely incomprehensible. The purest logic, the surest, is the logic of number; Jessy’s numbers came from the same period. They have their own box, almost as big as the suitcase; I'll unpack it — some of it — in the next chapter.
The suitcase drawings too displayed numbers — everything was connected in that busy mind. But the pictures and letters moved beyond the abstract numbers and shapes that had formed her early kingdom, into a world rooted, however strangely, in her daily life, a world recognizably human.
Even KNOW and KYESW impinged on meaning; Jessy, perforce, had long understood NO, and (though it took more teaching) YES. She was using letters more and more. Even three years earlier she had written MAMA, and formed — logically — the plural MEME on the model of MAN and MEN. I was delighted with KNOW and KYESW, as I was delighted with every sign of intelligence, but I didn’t think much about it at the time. Later I recognized it for what it was: a written record, one of the first, of the systematic quality of Jessy’s mind.
To systematize is to discover regularities and organize them. Like MAMA/MEME, this system was still very simple. Jessy’s interests then were focused on numbers, systematizable in so many more ways. A few years later, however, numbers were receding in favor of words. She was fifteen. She talked more, and more clearly. She was
