Nobody can remember what time of day I was born, a deficiency that has perturbed my potential astrologers to no end and made me wonder if the blessed event occurred at all or if I oozed into the world by other means. My mother does, however, claim to recall that I could read before I ever went to school, which strikes me as correct, and if I stitch the stray patches of my own early memories together, I come up with a quilt of voracious proficiency in the art. Which is why that day in Mr. Nordfjord’s third grade class is so perplexing: when asked to read aloud from the textbook—something about christening a newly discovered seashell after an old man—I suddenly couldn’t. That is, I could perceive the words with my eyes, my brain processed them effortlessly, but my tongue and lips stumbled over them as if shot full of novacaine. This disconnect was perhaps the first instance of my brain misfiring, something that happens hourly now as I confuse people’s names, choke on random words, and type entire sentences when I mean to type completely different sentences. Sometimes I wonder if it’s my own brain that’s the problem or if something else that’s trying to communicate through me is gumming up the works. I don’t, for example, remember writing the first half of this paragraph, although it must have happened mere seconds ago. I’m not on drugs, merely in a “zone,” but what else happens in that zone? If I traverse it from this end back to its origin, will I discover my true self or something of alien origin signaling for help?
That moment in the third grade, incidentally, must have also been when Mr. Nordfjord decided I was an idiot. When I had him again for fifth grade, he pulled me aside for a helpful lecture about how no one liked me and how I had to pull my head out of the clouds and learn about real life. He recommended a book called What Every Kid Should Know, which I checked out of the library expecting to unravel the great mysteries my sheltered upbringing had kept mysterious but instead prescribed such prosaic cures as getting a bank account of my own (something I already had) and keeping secrets (something I already did). One of my biggest secrets at that point was that I wanted to go to bed with Mr. Nordfjord, but the bloom did not stay long on that particular rose.
