What are we going to do with our genius kid who can’t tie his own shoes? He did it again. You’d think once would be enough to learn his lesson, but it’s like the kid doesn’t remember from one minute to the next, head in the clouds, and I’m not sure that test got it right. Who scores those tests anyway? I’m just afraid we’ll have this kid who is so lost in books he won’t be able to live in the world. He already moves through the world like a ghost. It’s like he doesn’t see anyone clearly, like the world is out of focus. We got him glasses, but they don’t help. If anything, they make him even one step more removed, like there’s a fishbowl between him and the rest of the people swimming through the air. What are we going to do with little Tiger? 

 

He uses his fingers to find the outlet in the dark when he’s trying to plug in his Lite-Brite. Not just once or twice but all the time. Then he snaps his hand back and acts surprised, looks around dazed and hurt. He shakes his head and looks like he’s scolding himself, as if he should have known better, should have realized, and should have remembered. Most of the time he’s angry with himself, sometimes he looks like he’s about to cry. But the other day I caught him sitting on the shag carpet laughing to himself. He didn’t know I was there. Maybe he realized something no one else has been able to yet. Like how a kid can score off the charts in reading, throw the curve off till the other kids don’t want him in their group anymore, can freak the teachers out, be lost in school, and be called gifted, interesting and spooky. Yet at the same time, can’t seem to remember that if he uses his finger to find the electrical outlet in the dark, to guide the prongs of the plug into the socket, he will get a jolt. Possibly, a memory which can look at a list of vocabulary words in English or Spanish and remember it for days or weeks or months afterwards is the same memory that can’t seem to process a simple fact that will slip away and cause physical pain the next day, over and over again. Well, that’s enough to make him laugh at himself, just this once. 

 

That’s how Tiger, at a young age, discovers the meaning of irony, while all the adults around him can do is feel confused and afraid and ultimately do nothing and hope his problems will go away. They don’t. He eventually stops sticking his fingers into sockets but he keeps putting the cereal into the refrigerator and the milk into the cabinet after he’s done making his breakfast in the morning. After the milk goes bad so many times we learn to just replace it and leave him alone, to let him live in the world he lives in and to keep living in ours. To hope he finds a way to survive, because there’s no way we can help him, because we can’t find a map to guide him. We don’t speak his language and he doesn’t speak ours.

 

About the Author James Joseph Brown’s writing has appeared in The Whistling Fire, Red Rock Review, Connotation Press, Hot Metal Bridge, and other journals.  Currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he is a former Hard Rock Hotel casino dealer, ESL teacher, Peace Corps volunteer, and go-go dancer.  He has lived and worked in Russia, Spain, Korea, Thailand and Lithuania.  His website is www.jamesjosephbrown.com