(You’ve probably noticed that I interrupt myself a lot. Since I live alone, I have no one to interrupt me, so I have to do it myself. I know it’s irritating and I apologize.)
Anyway, J.P. not only looks Normal, he is tall and almost handsome. In his late forties and just starting to gray around the temples, he could pass for a junior senator. I don’t know what his story is—they don’t usually tell us—but he came to Good Shepherd as a boy and has been here ever since.
J.P. is reticent and painfully polite. He learned early not to arouse disapproval. He wants to make you happy.
So when in teaching him time telling I ask if he can count to twelve, he smiles his small, suppressed smile and counts to twelve. He looks at me expectantly, hoping he has done well.
“Good, J.P. That’s right. Now, do you see this clock?”
I hold up a big, round wall clock for him to inspect.
“Um . . . yes, Jon. I see it.”
J.P. often starts his sentences with “um” or “mm,” a delaying strategy, I think, to allow himself a moment to consider what will please you. And he barely opens his mouth when he talks—or eats, for that matter. I’m not sure why.
“Can you point to the twelve?”
He does so and then looks at me.
“Can you point to the three?”
He does so again without problem. This is not the first time we have done this. It is maybe the fifteenth or fiftieth time (and others have tried before me). He always gets this far.
“Do you know what the hands of a clock are, J.P.”
“Yes.”
“What two kinds of hands are there on a clock?”
“Um, a big hand and a little hand.”
“Excellent. And which is the big hand?”
He points to it.
“And which is the little hand?”
He points to it.
“Now J.P., if I make both hands point to the twelve, like this, what time is it?” I move the clock hands.
“Twelve.”
“Twelve what?”
“O’clock, Jon.”
“Excellent.”
I don’t want to ask the next question. I never want to ask the next question. But the individualized learning plan (ILP) says J.P. must be able to tell time—like a Normal Adult—and so I ask the next question.
“If I leave the big hand on the twelve and move the little hand to point at the number one, what time is it then, J.P.?”
He looks at me. He knows this is where he fails. He doesn’t want to make me unhappy. So he just smiles and says nothing. I try my best to be nonthreatening.
“Just give it a try, J.P. It’s okay if you don’t get it right. Try to remember what we said last time about the big hand being on the twelve and the little hand pointing to another number. It’s okay if you don’t remember, but just try.”
He starts to rock a bit but doesn’t say anything. He knits his brow to show me that he is thinking hard, that he is trying. I repeat the question.
“If the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the one, what time might that be?”
“Mm, twelve-one o’clock?”
“No, not twelve-one. Try again.”
“Um, one-twelve o’clock?”
I have read the articles on teaching time telling to people like J.P. I have tried all the techniques they suggest. They don’t work. J.P. does understand time, better than most of the other residents, but he doesn’t understand measurement, or clock faces—not traditional ones, not digital ones. He just doesn’t understand and a thousand years of instruction will not make him understand.
And I got in trouble for saying so.
Everything at New Directions—from individualized instruction to haircuts—has to be documented. For every minute you spend with the residents, you spend two minutes filling out forms to indicate what happened in that minute. And so when I filled out the form that documented our session that day, I made the mistake of writing that I didn’t think J.P. would ever learn to tell time and, even more offensive, that I didn’t think he needed to.
Cassandra Pettigrew was not happy with that assessment (who knew that she read them?), as she made clear the next time she saw me.
“It is not your job, Mr. Mote, to evaluate the appropriateness of our ILPs for each of the residents. Those are determined by professionals, including myself. James’s CPE tests show that he should be able to master the telling of time. The data are clear on that. Your job is to teach him to do so, not to question the appropriateness of the goal.”
“Appropriate” is a favorite word with Cassandra. The world for her is divided into two spheres—appropriate and inappropriate. It is inappropriate that J.P. cannot tell time and it certainly is inappropriate for me to say that he doesn’t need to.
“Do you understand, Mr. Mote?”
I didn’t say anything, but I gave her a small, suppressed smile. I wanted her to be happy.
three
I claimed to be better, but I’m thinking that maybe I’m only different. As I say, the voices haven’t come back as yet, though they’ve orbited away before, only to return. But I’m not so much worried about that. It feels like maybe they’re gone for good this time. The question is, “What takes their place?” They filled a space that now is simply a void. It does little good to get rid of an evil if you don’t replace it with a good. There are plenty of other doubtful things to rush back in. (There I go again, using the exhausted terms of bankrupt ideologies—good and evil, and their siblings true and false, beautiful and ugly. Hopelessly binary. Spray all the herbicide you want, some dandelions keep coming back.)
“More purposeful action,” I claimed. (I love quoting myself.) But action for what purpose? Action without purpose is just activity—Brownian motion. And purpose has to be deeper than survival, than outlasting the circling sun of another day. There needs to be at least a baseline purpose for living, on which the merely pragmatic purposes of this minute and that are set. Don’t you think? (I’d be a heck of a philosopher if I could just develop the philosophical squint.)
No voices, yes, but silence instead. Is that progress? The big threat now is not Disintegration but Normality. Normal—the usual coupled with the meaningless. Alive but trivial. A brief coalescence of electrified matter, soon dispersed. Coagulated pointlessness. Why hang around?
I depress myself. (Therefore I am?)
I got my first taste of Being with Specials in Public only a few days after starting work at New Directions. In an upscale public space no less. You might say it was in obedience to a government mandate, but that requires a bit of explanation.
Government is a wonderful contraption. I think of it as a vast system of interconnected feeding troughs—as in a stockyard. Every branch, bureau, agency, center, department, headquarters, and office gets a trough. And each trough is presided over by a politician, manager, director, chief, supervisor, administrator, officer, controller, overseer, inspector, examiner, or head. All of whom need assistants, underlings, lackeys, workers, enforcers, advisors, consultants, counselors, subordinates, associates, aides, and, of course, secretaries. Needless to say, every one of these people needs offices, furniture, machines, transportation, security, heat and light, computers, and, not unimportant, wall art. Of course “trough” is too static a metaphor to describe what is more an organism than a contraption. These