All That Was Lost Is Found

            The baby was the scariest thing I had ever seen. He looked like Jimmy Dean, which was too much expression for such a small face. I wanted to box with the baby, I wanted to see what the baby looked like boxing, but everyone knows you can’t box with a baby. His grandmother had a better beard than I did, white and sharp, and I dreaded seeing her but also loved it because of how smart it made me feel, and because of the unsaid wit that sprang up in my brain. The mother’s name was Eleanor, and she was big and strong and knew me better than I did. She was always telling me what I wanted.
            “You want to go to the store. And get some tomatoes and butter.”
            And I realized I did want to go to the store. I wanted to get the hell out of there. I figured she was a witch and she put curses on me, but I liked her curses because sometimes there were nice pleasant curses that involved a bedroom.
            When I became a man and became aware of all things around me, I was aware most of all that I was a genius, set apart from the crowd that was governed by a bunch of sheep. It became a harder sadder world, alone with smiling crying faces that ate air and did nothing else. But I found Eleanor or she found me, and somehow that Jimmy Dean baby, with brilliant expressive eyebrows and questioning eyes came along, and felt like he needed to be heard.
            The first weekend of each month was a visit to the bearded grandmother and Eleanor drove while I sat in the back seat talking physics and watermelons with the baby. I asked him all sorts of questions and got the most fantastical answers; if he wanted to cry, which showed on his mouth before the noise, you only had to ask him a question and he was back, thinking and agreeing and questioning. To prove a point he kicked me in the jaw and I knew he was right, and I thought “If only…” and it seemed to mean a lot.
            The grandmother’s name was Grandmother, and no one called her anything else, except for the Jimmy Dean baby, but that was his prerogative. We pulled up to her driveway and there she was, standing looking at her daisies and black-eyed susans and lilies and other nice looking things that came out of the ground. She turned when we got out of the car and said to me, “I got some things I want to show you.” I said fine and gave the Jimmy Dean baby to Eleanor and he wanted to cry again but burped instead. I feel like that sometimes. A little release is necessary.
            Grandmother led me into the house and I was surprised by the smell. The smell would always surprise me. It was the smell of old blankets and old brains. She said, “Look at this.”
            “What is it?” I asked. She was pointing at something on her computer.
            “It’s the internet.” She said it without sarcasm.
            “I know, but what is it?”
            “It’s a website.” I started thinking this could take a long time.
            “Go on,” I said.
            “It is. That’s what they call it… This is an IQ test. Take it. You just have to click this place here.”
            “Did you already do it?”
            “Why would I take a silly test? I know how smart I am. You take it.”
            “How long does it take?”
            “They say it’s thirteen minutes. Shorter if you’re smarter. You can do it as fast as you’d like.”
            “I don’t really want to.”
            She looked at me a long time. I tried not to look at the sharp white hairs that came out of her chin. I tried not to look at their source, and tried not to picture the root. I tried not to think of what she would say if I reached over and plucked that long one out. I tried not to think of what Eleanor would say if Grandmother was screaming that I was killing her, and tried not to think of how guilty I would look with that long white sharp hair in between my fingers.
            “Do you know that I get this internet business for free?” she asked.
            “No.” I did know. She told me last time. And Eleanor told me too. Everyone was talking about it.
            “I get it on account of the fact that I’m so old that nobody cares if I get something for free at this point. They figure I’m going to go at any minute. So nothing matters.”
            “Where are you going to go?” It just came out. My brain was smiling, but my face was poker.
            “Just take the test. I’ve got something else I’m going to show you when you’re done. Some pictures.”
            She knew that I was a sometime artist, and she enjoyed showing me all sorts of horrid things she bought from garage sales and the backs of department stores. She would say, “What do you think of this?” and in the early days I would nod and smile. It would be a coloured-in picture of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on a plate, and I would say, “Nice.”
            I took the stupid test, sweating and nervous the whole way through, with a little timer in the corner counting away my death. I answered the questions fast and if I thought I was taking too much time on one question, I’d guess and move on. I finished the test with five minutes to spare. My IQ was 117. I stared at it, thinking, that’s the IQ of a monkey. Monkeys have higher IQs; and by the way how the hell did they retroactively guess the IQ of people like Mozart before there ever was this goddamn stupid test? They just did it to validate a stupid test. I heard the Jimmy Dean baby crying somewhere so I followed the noise and found him. They were trying to feed him some baby food.
            “He doesn’t like that stuff. He likes real food.”
            “This is good stuff. Have you ever tried this stuff?”
            “No.”
            Eleanor gave me some baby food to try and the Jimmy Dean baby looked on, curious, all done crying now. It didn’t taste too bad but I wouldn’t want much of it. A little jar for a baby looked fine because it was so small. But if you magnified the baby to the size of a man and magnified the jar with him, that’d be a lot of slop to eat. A baby needs variety. If you got a whole jar of slop to eat, and they said, “Look, this is good stuff,” you’d also shed a tear or two to prove that they were lying.
            “Did you take the test?” Grandmother asked.
            “Yeah.”
            “Good. What was your score?”
            “Can’t remember. There were a lot of blinking lights and they said, Congratulations, you’re a genius, you won a trip to Mexico.”
            “Did you take the trip?”
            “No, I’m still here.”
            “You’re a genius?”
            “That’s what it told me. I have no reason to believe they’re lying.”
            “I do.”
            “Hm?”
            “I got some pictures to show you.”
            She took me to the living room and pulled out two pictures, already framed. Perhaps they came that way. One was of a woman doing some sort of yoga pose that gave a good view of her backside, and still the woman managed to be looking toward the painter. I liked it.
            “I like it,” I said.
            “Look at her face,” She said.
            “What about it?”
            “Her nose is on crooked. What does that mean?”
            “That doesn’t matter. There are more important things than a nose.”
            “Oh. Well what about her eyes? This one doesn’t have a pupil. What does that mean?”
            “Sure it has one. It’s right there.”
            “Where?”
            Brilliance sprang upon me when the Jimmy Dean baby distracted her cleverly with a cry. I took out my pen and gave the yoga lady a pupil. The pen was already in my pocket when she looked back, and I was pretending to be distracted by the baby. She looked confused and I thought that was marvellous. She decided to show me the other picture. I didn’t like it as much. It was a shrivelled wet chicken that just came out of its egg.
            “That’s a terrible picture,” I said.
            “Why? Look at this chicken.”
            “I know. I can’t not look at the chicken.”
            “What do you mean?”
            “The whole thing is about the chicken.”
            “Oh… I know.”
            “Yes.” I’ve learned to end conversations with the word Yes.
            I was sitting brooding over the IQ score when Eleanor came in, looking wild and upset.
            “What are you doing?”
            “I’m…”
            “You want to go the grocery store and pick up some vegetables for the dinner. It’s almost dinner time.”
            “Okay. What kind of vegetables?”
            “Vegetables, vegetables.” She was already in a different room.
            “Should I take the baby?”
            “No. He’s sleeping.”
            I left, feeling like I could use the Jimmy Dean baby’s input on this one. Sometimes a good scream could set you back on track. I walked slowly; the world felt small and dull which put the same sensation in my stomach as when the world feels big and frightening. I walked the whole way to the grocery store, most people would have taken the car, but I needed the air and I hated driving anyway.
            I looked at the rows of vegetables and waited for that little spray sprinkler to come on. It did. Ptss. It was great. I picked out five different kinds of vegetables, to give Eleanor and the grandmother some variety. If I picked only one type, I would surely be wrong, whatever it was. Often, the more money I spent, the more I impressed them, and it never mattered that if it was up to my budgetary brain, I would only buy one type of vegetable because in the long run that was all I could afford. I saw someone I recognized as I was about to get in line to pay for the vegetables, and I was about to swerve to another cashier when he saw me too.
            “Hey Harry, how the hell are ya?” I didn’t like talking to him because I could never remember whether his name was Chuck or Buck; all I knew was that it rhymed with duck, among other things. I passed my hand over my mouth as if I was scratching my chin just as I said his name so that it sounded like this: “Hey …–uck, I’m good, how are you?” And I scratched my chin once more as if I didn’t get the itch out the first time. Chuck or Buck bothered me because I didn’t understand his rationale. He used to deliver the mail to the grandmother and she would wait out on the steps in the morning for him. They would strike up a quick conversation, and it became a regular thing, and one day he invited us all over for dinner and drinks. After dinner he and I went into what he called his study, but was really just a smaller bedroom that had several bad books, including some high school textbooks. I was a little drunk and I said something about the whiskers on the grandmother’s chin, how I couldn’t stop staring and didn’t know what to do. He said, “That doesn’t bother me. I understand that kind of thing. I understand how she probably feels about it. I mean, I had hair on my back a long while before I got hair on my chest. Things like that happen.”
            I was stupefied. And disgusted.
            “Got some vegetables, I see,” he said. I looked down and indeed, I had some vegetables. I almost made a comment on the groceries he picked out, but that would have turned into a conversation.
            “You out visiting Grandmother?”
            “Yes. Just getting some vegetables for dinner. You want to join us.”  Sometimes I accidentally did what Eleanor did, said questions as commands. I didn’t really want him to come. I knew it was a bad idea. Eleanor would hate it too, but the grandmother would have been pretty happy about it; she might call it a party.
            “Oh no, no. I would like to. But I can’t,” then a little quieter and with the smile of a goat, “I’ve got a date tonight.”
            “Oh?”
            “Yup. She asked me! At first I didn’t like that. But now I like it fine. I’m going to make her some dinner.”
            “Spaghetti?”
            “Yes, how did you know?” He looked a little worried. I pointed down at the spaghetti he was buying. “Oh yeah. It’s right there,” and he laughed.
            117, 117, 117. What a stupid test. That’s all I thought on my way back to the grandmother’s. It turned into a song with no meaning, but lots of heart. The song was slow and languorous, and warbled when it needed to. I danced a waltz to it. 

             I got home feeling depressed and lonely, and Eleanor burst out of the front door when I walked up the driveway. She wasn’t exactly angry. But she sure as hell wasn’t happy.
            “We finished dinner. All we had was meat.”
            “I got some veggies.” I held up the bag for proof.
            “You were too slow. Grandmother was hungry.”
            “Anything left for me?”
            “No. But you can cook yourself a hotdog in the microwave.”
            “I hate hotdogs. They taste like crumpled lips.”
            “Well you can have those vegetables.”
            In the car on the way home, I sat again in the back seat with the baby. I was upset and tired, and still the number 117 plagued my soul. The baby was sleeping, and we three were all quiet. Eleanor made a move as if to turn on the radio and I told her, “No, let’s just ride like this.” She would have turned something on that had a drum. The baby wouldn’t have liked it, and neither would I. The car drove on, and with the windows shut, the highway seemed a slow-moving eternal thing. And, afraid that I would cry, I looked at the Jimmy Dean baby, and he was awake, looking back up at me. We looked at each other for a long while, neither of us breaking away, neither of us making a sound. His questioning eyes had a full life in them, whereas my eyes reflected back something faded and dimmed. Then the Jimmy Dean baby smiled and I smiled back, and he sang me a song, and all my worries were burned to wayfaring ash.

-Daniel Harley