Between the ages of about 10 - 14, I was utterly obsessed with finding out what my IQ was. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I'd picked up the notion that Smartness in quantity was the most important thing a person could possibly have.
And it drove me frankly batty not knowing how much Smartness I had, because:
(a) I was (very) insecure and felt like I needed to find out I had a "high enough" number in order to permit myself any sense of self-worth, and
(b) I had an idea fixed in my mind that only "geniuses" with IQs 150 or above could have any hope of addressing any of the interesting questions and topics that dominated my thoughts as a geeky little kid: faster-than-light travel, Grand Unified Theories, etc.
I was terrified of the idea that there might be some cool thing out there that, no matter what I did or how hard I studied, I simply wouldn't be able to grasp it.
Seriously. If you'd asked me what was worse when I was twelve -- not being "smart enough" or being dead, I'd have seriously had to think about it for a moment.
(Mind you, I'd never gone around thinking that other people were somehow "less valuable" or "less deserving of existence" based on their supposed (lack of) Smartness -- that strange, stringent standard I reserved for myself alone.)
So, I both wanted to know and didn't want to know what my IQ score was. I wrestled with this in my head a lot, wondering if I'd just be better off forgetting about it and "doing my best" the way my parents advised me to -- but perhaps on account of my then-desperate need to structure the world around me and figure out how I fit in it, I just couldn't leave that unknown alone. How, after all, was I supposed to know what my best was, if I didn't know what my test scores revealed?
My notion of intelligence testing was very naive then -- basically I thought that an IQ test was some sort of "window" into a person's actual cognitive potential that was every bit as definitive as, say, a test for blood type or a stethoscope reading of a person's heart rate. I know now that it's a lot more complicated than that, and that you can't measure things about brains the way you can measure things about other aspects of physiology, but as a kid I didn't really know to draw that distinction.
Hence, I spent a lot of time trying to find any papers/reports/test scores my parents might be hiding away, hoping that I'd be able to discover through doing this some idea of the quantitative value stamp I was convinced must be on my brain somewhere (though not directly viewable by me).
I didn't actually find any of these papers until I was in my late teens. And when I did find them, I noted with some surprise that I didn't care all that much what they said. At some point between the ages of 14 and 17 I'd managed to get over my IQ obsession and move toward a different brain-related obsession (one considerably less worry-inducing): that of how brains, and in particular mine, worked at all. I got very into trying to push the limits of the brain I actually had, rather than lamenting the probable lack of the imaginary, idealized brain I'd long thought I wanted.
(I'm sure my parents would have been happier if this new fixation had somehow compelled me to get perfect grades, rather than zoning out in class trying to visualize four-dimensional shapes, but looking back I do see there was some value in that -- I did do very well in geometry!)
The bottom line here is that, in ceasing to be obsessed with quantitative test-based measurements, lo and behold, I found it far easier to actually think about things and just plain learn. No longer was I coming upon interesting problems and stressing over whether I'd be able to solve them or not based on some number on an as-yet-unseen yellowing paper -- instead I was coming to terms with what my actual strengths and weaknesses were. I did have some setbacks here (such as when, at 18, I came close to wanting to drop out of college because I thought I was "too stupid for engineering after all"), but overall I'm way more comfortable in my own brain than I used to be, and this has not led to anything like "stagnation". Quite the opposite, in fact.
I do now know what my age-4 Weschler score was, and it wasn't 150. Not even close. I took another Weschler (the adult scale) in college, and while that score ended up being quite a bit higher than my age-4 score, it was still lower than I'd originally hoped it would be, back when I started worrying about it. But it didn't matter to me in the least from an emotional standpoint by then, because I'd already managed to accomplish things (like getting an A in calculus) that I'd have considered the province of people with far higher IQ scores than I actually had.
Not to mention the fact that when I looked at my subtest scores, they were all over the map -- I had a higher than average Block Design, but lower than average Picture Arrangement, for instance. I'd not even considered the possibility prior to seeing that that my brain might very well be more optimized in some areas and less optimized in others. Realizing that fundamentally changed the way I looked at cognition, and I've never looked back since.
At this point I tend to see IQ (at least as measured on tests) as being very limited in terms of what information it actually tells you about what someone is capable of doing. E.g., I don't think IQ scores can definitively tell you when someone is going to "hit a wall", so to speak, in terms of what mathematical theorem they will absolutely get stuck on when they encounter it (or what engineering problem they might be able to solve, etc.).
So, I guess what I'm trying to say with all this is: all we humans can do in trying to make our world (the real one we all actually inhabit) less precarious for its denizens is our best. And, yes, we have to do this without even knowing what our "best" is in advance! In acknowledging that, while of course it is critical to acknowledge certain limits (as reality is defined as much by what it is not as by what it is; no amount of smartness will make square circles possible or comprehensible), it is equally critical to not place arbitrary, prejudice-saturated, assumption-heavy limits on the capacities of ordinary people to both have a say in decisions that affect them/us and participate in productive projects.
14 comments:
Interesting, any connection with the currently on-going series of "intelligence uber alles" Eliezer's got going on over at Overcoming Bias?
Yep, was actually adapted from a comment I left there. I'm not really comfortable saying much over there, though. Every now and then I will poke my head in, but that realm of discourse tends to get on my nerves due to the way it seems to attract creepy Bell Curve enthusiasts and overly sycophantic fanboys.
I was given an IQ test at that age, and I remember being very annoyed when I saw how much subjective guesswork there was to it. For example, there was a puzzle of an animal that could have fit together as either a cow or a black-and-white picture of a giraffe.
Later I took a few introductory psych classes in college, which confirmed my suspicion that the entire field was woefully unscientific...
What people forget, or don't understand, is that an IQ score is an *average* of several scores, and can be completely misleading about your abilities if you don't pay attention to the subtests. Very much the same with agonizing over the aspie quiz, which seems to go on a lot. My subtest scores told me much more about my aspieness than the total score did.
@annec
I too avoid posting there, partially because I've got better things to do than be sneered at, and partly because it feels too much like a confirmation culture over there.
Especially lately, things seem to be slipping from more rigorous attempts to analyze mental biases to self-congratulatory "story" posts, and annoying political nitpicking.
Robin Hanson has gotten particularly bad about it, putting up ridiculous substudies that supposedly 'call into question' entire policies or opinions he apparently objects to.
abfh said:
I was given an IQ test at that age, and I remember being very annoyed when I saw how much subjective guesswork there was to it. For example, there was a puzzle of an animal that could have fit together as either a cow or a black-and-white picture of a giraffe.
I think there might have been a section like that on the test I took too. But the one that really got me, as a 4-year-old, was the "mazes" subtest. I scored a 6 on that section, which is quite a bit below average. The examiner commented that I "...seemed more interested in following every route in the maze than taking the one that would get the boy out, etc." So in some respects, how someone scores on those sorts of tests (particularly in childhood) depends upon what aspects of the task, if any, interest them more.
(I was amused recently to read that when people have tried to give intelligence tests to cats, they've found that many cats tend to do exactly what I did when presented with mazes -- they "follow blind alleys" and sort of explore, rather than trying to reach the "goal" the examiner considers to be the point of the exercise.)
Also, the examiner who tested me as a kid wrote in the report, "[Anne] is not a child to fit comfortably into someone else's agenda." I don't seem to have changed much in that respect. :)
Catana said:
What people forget, or don't understand, is that an IQ score is an *average* of several scores, and can be completely misleading about your abilities if you don't pay attention to the subtests.
Well, there are various different IQ tests out there -- the Wechsler (and, I think, the Stanford-Binet, which I've not taken) have subtests that get averaged. But there are also tests like the Raven's Progressive Matrices, which employ the same type of task throughout, at increasing levels of difficulty. I've not delved too deeply into the statistical analysis stuff here, but I've read that performance on certain subtests (of tests that use subtests) tends to strongly correlate with performance on single-task tests which are considered to be highly "g-loaded" (such as the Raven's -- though I should note that I find the idea of g as statistical myth pretty compelling).
Incidentally, there's a Raven's test (or at least a version of it) online here. (The site itself is in Spanish, but the Raven's test is designed to be culture-fair and hence is not language-based, so it's pretty easy to figure out what to do even if you don't know Spanish). I like those sorts of tests and will sometimes just take them for fun -- they're such neat puzzles. :)
There have also been some studies (though probably not enough to claim the findings as totally definitive) indicating that for autistics, scores on the Raven's tend to be significantly higher than scores on other (often more language-loaded) tests, whereas for nonautistics, scores tend to be more constant across different types of tests.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of that research, but all in all, I still see that sort of thing as mainly leading to curiosities rather than to anything which can or should be used to try and determine a person's "potential" at a young age.
catana: Gah, I realize I completely tangented away from talking about subtests. I do think that they can tell you interesting things about an individual's relative strengths/weaknesses, and can also signify neuro-atypicality -- i.e., a person with atypical neurology may have less "even" scores across subtests.
But even that requires that a person is "testable" to begin with, and I know that it's perfectly possible for people to be very good at certain things, while still not understanding the point of, or cooperating with, testing. It's a really weird, messy field.
We often do set the highest standards for ourselves. We are sometimes our own worst enemy. Sigh.
Good post, Anne.
During my lengthy career I've come across a number of members of Mensa. I think it's a fair generalization to say that the main thing they had in common wasn't that they were good at what they did, but that they were eccentric. There was one who thought mineral crystals had power to influence her mental acuity, another who pulled a child's cart loaded with boxes of paper files around everywhere he went, and every shade of weirdness in between. I came to the conclusion that smartness on its own is not a survival advantage, and people who care enough about their IQ to join such groups and brag about it have a Common Sense Quotient (CSQ) of 60 or less, at least 2 SD below the mean.
marla: Yep. And one thing I've noticed as well, which is kind of strange, is that sometimes by holding my standards too high in one area, I'm actually preventing myself from meeting higher standards in other areas. Sort of like how it would be silly to keep jumping off stairs trying to fly -- this would prevent one from doing other things!
PT: Hmm. Well, eccentricity isn't exactly my concern -- I mean, you are talking to someone who generally has hair in some shade of blue or green, and who thinks it actually looks "normal" that way. :P The thing about mineral crystals isn't eccentric so much as irrational, and the thing about pulling papers around in a cart sounds like stuff I have actually done.
I'm more worried about people in general putting so much stock in measuring intelligence that they end up contributing to social structures/systems that write people off needlessly.
AnneC wrote:
> Somehow, somewhere along the way,
> I'd picked up the notion that Smartness
> in quantity was the most important
> thing a person could possibly have. . .
> I had an idea fixed in my mind that
> only "geniuses" with IQs 150 or above
> could have any hope of addressing any
> of the interesting questions and topics
> that dominated my thoughts. . .
> If you'd asked me what was worse when
> I was twelve -- not being "smart enough"
> or being dead, I'd have seriously had
> to think about it for a moment.
When I was high-school age, I was visiting my grandparents' house and came across the December, 1968 issue of _Playboy_ magazine containing an article about artificial intelligence by none other than Arthur C. Clarke. (You might wonder who in my family read _Playboy_ magazine. I'm pretty sure it must have belonged to my older cousin, who was staying with my grandparents while attending college nearby. I must've been snooping either in his room or in the attic.) Anyway, the article contained a comment about an IQ of 150 being used as a cut-off point that stayed with me for a long time.
The article was entitled "The Mind of the Machine" (and was reprinted in _Greetings, Carbon-based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998_ by Ian T. MacAuley [Arthur C. Clarke, ed.]
http://www.amazon.com/Greetings-Carbon-
Based-Bipeds-Collected-1934-1998/
dp/0312267452 ,
Part III. The 1960s: Kubrick and Cape Kennedy, Chapter 12, pp. 272 - 273):
"'If men were intended to. . .' is of course a game that everyone can play. Yet now, with the ultraintelligent machines lying just below our horizon, it is time that we played the game in earnest, while we still have some control over the rules. In a few more years, it will be much too late. The astronomer Fred Hoyle once remarked to me that it was pointless for the world to hold more people than one could get to know in a single lifetime. Even if one were president of United Earth, that would set the figure somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred thousand; with a very generous allowance for duplication, wastage, special talents, and so forth, there really seems no requirement for what has been called the global village of the future to hold more than a million people scattered over the face of the planet.
And if such a figure appears unrealistic -- since we are already past the 3 billion mark and heading for at least twice as many by the end of the century -- it should be pointed out that once the universally agreed upon goal of population control is attained, any desired target can be reached in a remarkably short time. If we really tried (with a little help from the biology labs), we could reach a trillion within a century -- four generations. It might be more difficult to go in the other direction for fundamental psychological reasons, but it could be done. If the ultraintelligent machines decide that more than a million human beings constitute an epidemic, they might order euthanasia for anyone with an IQ of less than 150, but I hope that such drastic measures will not be necessary."
:-0
And earlier, in the same essay, a familiar refrain (_Greetings_, p. 268):
(Chapter 12 epigraph: "Clarke recounts here that the twentieth century has been the one in which all of man's ancient dreams appear to be coming true. The conquest of the air, the transmutation of matter, journeys to the Moon, even the elixir of life. Among them, he says, the one most fraught with peril is the machine than can think.")
"In some form of another, the idea of artificial intelligence goes back at least three thousand years. . .
Over these tales there usually hangs the aura of doom or horror associated with such names as Prometheus, Faust, and -- above all -- Frankenstein, though that unfortunate scientist's creation was not a mechanical one. Perhaps the finest work in the genre is that little classic of Ambrose Bierce's, 'Moxon's Master,' which opens with the words 'Are you serious? Do you really believe that a machine thinks?'
Critics of this viewpoint (who are probably now in the minority) may argue that the brain is in some fundamental way different from any nonliving device. But even if this is true, it does not follow that its functions cannot be duplicated, or even surpassed, by a nonorganic machine. Airplanes fly better than birds, though they are built of very different materials.
For obvious psychological reasons, there are people who will never accept the possibility of artificial intelligence and would deny its existence if they encountered it. . .
Though one can sympathize with this attitude, to resent the concept of a rational machine is itself irrational. We no longer become upset because machines are stronger or swifter or more dextrous than human beings, though it took us several painful centuries to adapt to this state of affairs. How our outlook has changed is well shown by the ballad of John Henry; today, we should regard anyone who challenged a steam hammer as merely crazy -- not heroic. . .
It is, of course, the advent of the modern computer that has brought the subject of thinking machines out of the realm of fantasy into the forefront of scientific research. One could not have a plainer answer to the question that Ambrose Bierce posed three-quarters of a century ago than this question from McGowan and Ordway's recent book, _Intelligence in the Universe_: 'It can be asserted without reservation that a general purpose digital computer can think in every sense of the word. This is true no matter what definition of thinking is specified; the only requirement is that the definition of thinking be explicit.'
That last phrase is, of course, the joker, for there must be almost as many definitions of thinking as there are thinkers; in the ultimate analysis they probably boil down to 'Thinking is what I do.' One neat way of avoiding this problem is a famous test proposed by the British mathematician Alan Turing. . .
We are certainly nowhere near building a machine that can fool many of the people for much of the time; sooner or later, today's models give themselves away by irrelevant answers that show only too clearly that their replies are indeed 'mechanical' and that they have no real understanding of what is going on. As Oliver Selfridge of MIT has remarked sourly, 'Even among those who believe that computers can think, there are few these days, except for a rabid fringe, who hold that they are actually thinking.'
Very few, if any, studies of the social impact of computers have yet faced up to the problems posed by the ominous phrase 'assuming that we would want to.' This is understandable; the electronic revolution has been so swift that those involved in it have barely had time to think about the present, let alone the day after tomorrow. Moreover, the fact that today's computers are very obviously not 'intellectually superior' has given a false sense of security -- like that felt by the 1900 buggy-whip manufacturer every time he saw a broken-down automobile by the wayside. The comfortable illusion is fostered by the endless stories -- part of the transient folklore of our age -- about stupid computers that had to be replaced by good old-fashioned human beings, after they had sent out bills for $1,000,000,004.95, or threatening legal action if outstanding debts of $0.00 were not settled immediately. The fact that these gaffes are almost invariably due to oversights by human programmers is seldom mentioned.
Though we have to live and work with (and against) today's mechanical morons, their deficiencies should not blind us to the future. In particular, it should be realized that as soon as the borders of electronic intelligence are passed, there will be a kind of chain reaction, because the machines will rapidly improve themselves. In a very few generations -- computer generations which by this time may last only a few months -- there will be a mental explosion; the merely intelligent machine will swiftly give way to the ultraintelligent machine.
One scientist who has given much thought to this matter is Dr. John Irving Good, of Trinity College, Oxford -- author of papers with such challenging titles as 'Can an Android Feel Pain?' (This term for artificial man, incidentally, is older than generally believed. I had always assumed that it was a product of the modern science fiction magazines and was astonished to come across 'The Brazen Android' in an _Atlantic Monthly_ for 1891.) Dr Good has written: 'If we build an ultraintelligent machine, we will be playing with fire. We have played with fire before, and it helped to keep the other animals at bay.'
Well, yes -- but when the ultraintelligent machine arrives, we may be the 'other animals' -- and look what has happened to them.
It is Dr. Good's belief that the very survival of our civilization may depend upon the building of such instrumentalities, because if they are indeed more intelligent than we are, they can answer all our questions and solve all our problems. As he puts it in one elegant phrase, 'The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need make.'"
;->
AnneC wrote:
> The bottom line here is that, in ceasing
> to be obsessed with quantitative test-based
> measurements, lo and behold, I found it far
> easier to actually think about things and
> just plain learn. No longer was I coming
> upon interesting problems and stressing
> over whether I'd be able to solve them or
> not based on some number on an
> as-yet-unseen yellowing paper -- instead
> I was coming to terms with what my actual
> strengths and weaknesses were.
There's been a bit of a backlash against perfectionism lately, if magazine articles and the new-arrivals table at Barnes & Noble are any indication.
E.g., a recent _Psychology Today_ (March/April 2008) article "Pitfalls of Perfectionism" (by Hara Estroff Marano, author of _A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting_).
http://psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=20080225-000002
An excerpt:
"The conditionality of love doesn't have to be stated. It can be communicated in simply 'the way the whole environment is structured,' says [Randy O.] Frost [of Smith College]. 'If the parent is enthusiastic only when the child accomplishes something or spends a lot of time working at something, then it's unspoken yet demonstrated by the environment.'
Pushing for perfection clashes with children's developmental needs. If a child's sense of self comes to rest on accomplishments, they buy into the idea that they're only as good as they achieve. Driven from within to reach that impossible ideal, perfection, they become compliant and self-focused.
'There's a difference between excellence and perfection,' explains Miriam Adderholdt, a psychology instructor at Davidson Community College in Lexington, North Carolina, and author of _Perfectionism: What's Bad About Being Too Good?_ Excellence involves enjoying what you're doing, feeling good about what you've learned, and developing confidence. Perfection involves feeling bad about a 98 and always finding mistakes no matter how well you're doing. A child makes all As and one B. All it takes is a parent raising an eyebrow for the child to get the message.
The truly subversive aspect of perfectionism, however, is that it leads people to conceal their mistakes. Unfortunately, that strategy prevents a person from getting crucial feedback—feedback that both confirms the value of mistakes and affirms self-worth—leaving no way to counter the belief that worth hinges on performing perfectly. The desire to conceal mistakes eventually forces people to avoid situations in which they are mistake-prone—often seen in athletes who reach a certain level of performance and then abandon the sport altogether."
Another recent book is _Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety_ by Judith Warner.
Ms. Warner explicitly eschews the term "narcissism" -- she explains that she sees no advantage in labelling people with diagnostic categories out of the DSM -- but narcissistic parents and their narcissistic offspring are clearly the targets of her criticism. In the _New York Times_ she wrote
( http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/
2006/02/02/stealing-childhood )
"How many 'genius' kids have to commit suicide before we acknowledge that there are many things more important in life than realizing your full academic potential at 9 or 12 or 14 – the age at which a child prodigy named Brandenn Bremmer blew his brains out in western Nebraska last March? How many articles do we have to read about skin-cutting and binge-drinking and Ritalin-snorting before we recognize that something has gone very much askew in the hyper-performative world of non-childhood we’ve created for our kids — this souped-up existence, which fewer and fewer of us, kids or adults, can manage to negotiate without speed or, alternately, Ambien?"
And from the fiction table, here's an e-mail review I wrote about five years ago:
I ran into a newish hardcover of the "thriller" genre at Barnes & Noble a few weekends ago: _Gray Matter_ by Gary Braver
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312876130
http://www.numag.neu.edu/0209/books.html
(The name is a pseudonym for Gary Goshgarian, a professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston; greater Boston is where the novel is set.)
I gather this isn't the author's first crack at transhumanist themes -- an earlier novel _Elixir_ (which I haven't read) is about life extension. This one is about intelligence amplification, and manages to make the process seem quite plausible in a more-or-less contemporary context (which is, I guess, one of the criteria that distinguishes the Michael Crichton-esque thriller as a distinct literary genre: unlike SF, everything in a thriller is contemporary life-as-we-know-it except for the story's mcguffin, whether it's resurrecting dinosaurs or surgically enhancing kids' IQs.
SPOILER ALERT for the rest of this message!
Like _Flowers For Algernon_ (to which there is actually an homage in _Gray Matter_ on page 337), Braver's novel focuses on the unpleasant side effects, neurological, psychological, and social, of a clandestine procedure developed by an ex-Soviet neuroscientist (who turns out to be a psychopath) marketed by word of mouth to well-heeled, competitive, upscale yuppie parents with disappointingly slow kids. I found the portrayal of the enhanced kids' personality distortions chillingly plausible; what threatens to push the book into over-the-top silliness is the fact that the Luciferian and malevolent Dr. Lucius Malenko is not just implanting embryonic stem cells and nerve-growth factors when he inserts his stereotaxic needles into Wernicke's area in the left cerebral hemispheres of his dumb-but-rich recipients' brains, but that it is gradually revealed that he has to extract mature neurons from age-matched smart-but-poor kids he has located by means of his association with an educational center for gifted children and then kidnapped with the assistance of a couple of talented but equally psychopathic thugs recruited from the demimonde of black-op government intelligence agents and private investigators gone bad. After extraction, the donors are dumped into the ocean off the coast of New England; despite all precautions to dump them into deep water beyond the reach of storm surges, a peculiarly-perforated skull has washed ashore at a public beach and attracted the obsessive attention of a police officer who has recently lost his own wife and unborn child in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. And thereby hangs a pretty damn nasty tale.
There are lots of monsters in this story -- the upscale, high-IQ, country-club-competitive parents (dark side of _Gilmore Girls_), as clueless and self-absorbed as Henry and Monica Swinton in Spielberg's _A.I._ (which also gets an homage, on p. 310); the brilliant but remorseless Dr. Malenko, a Soviet Jew from Kiev brutalized by the circumstances of his own past; and the affectless, ruthless, and obsessive-compulsive enhanced kids. There's a nebulous suggestion of social commentary on the IQ debate -- how political correctness and envy disguised as democratic liberalism distort intellectual discourse about human abilities while at the same time educated people obsess about their own standing in the IQ pecking order, and that of their kids, leading to stop-at-nothing competitive scrambling to get the kids into the best nursery and prep schools, and the willingness to spend any amount of money to extract the last increment of competitive advantage held out by any semi-plausible and expensive SAT-coaching scheme. Shades of Pinker's _The Blank Slate_, here, as well as of the recent publicity about the Asperger's-ridden offspring of geek/geek marriages. Braver goes for maximum ugliness while spinning a high-adrenalin tale (wouldn't be surprised to see a movie), though the guns-in-the-operating-theater climax is a bit cliched.
Here's a sample scene between one of the enhanced kids and his mother (the kid's name is Julian Watts; the enhanced boys in the story, Julian Watts and Brendan LaMotte, are not nearly as scary as the enhanced girls -- Lucinda MacPhearson and Nicole DaFoe; in fact Brendan is the one enhanced character for whom the author holds out some hope at the end that he might manage to turn into a more-or-less acceptable human being):
In the following scene, the mother Vanessa Watts is a college professor who has just returned from a party celebrating the release of her new book about George Orwell, at which a congratulatory video message turned out to have been mysteriously edited into an accusation by a former graduate student that large chunks of the new book had been plagiarized from his PhD thesis. Apart from the ruin of her academic and authorial career, and the prospect of financial ruin by a lawsuit from her publisher, she needed the book money to pay off the debt incurred by her son's million-dollar enhancement by Dr. Malenko. She also suspects that her exposure was set up by Malenko himself to punish her for threatening to get outside assistance for the increasingly severe side effects her son
has been experiencing as the result of his enhancement.
pp. 268 - 274
"Vanessa's insides were wracked with agony, but she did not go directly home. Instead she drove in the dark talking into her portable tape recorder, the one she kept in her car and used while working on her book. Her remarks were brief and pointed. When she was through, she drove to the home of the Whitmans and dropped off the recorder with tape in the glove compartment of Rachel's Maxima. Luckily the car was unlocked.
She then drove home.
Brad had left the downstairs light on, but the rest of the interior was dark. All but Julian's room.
**Shit.**
She didn't want to see him. She didn't want to see anybody. All she wanted to do was go into a deep sleep and not come out of it. Thankfully, Brad had probably given up waiting and gone to bed.
She looked up at Julian's bedroom.
**What the hell is he doing up at this hour? Christ, it's nearly two.**
She pulled the car into the garage. Julian's skis were hanging up along the back wall. New parabolics that had cost over seven hundred dollars. They had been used once, on their winter vacation in Vail last year. He had no interest in skiing, and the entire week he spent inside the condo doing his pictures -- stippling away like some crazed gnome. He had gotten soft and flabby, and given up everything physical. At school he was known as 'Dots.'
She unlocked the door and pushed her way inside. Except for the hum of the refrigerator, the place was dead quiet. The only relief from the dark was the light strip under Julian's door at the top of the stairs.
Vanessa climbed the stairs, feeling old and weary. On the landing she looked into the master bedroom. Brad was asleep. She then stopped just outside of Julian's door and listened. Nothing. No CD, no television, no sound of some mindless video game. He had probably fallen asleep on his bed. Good. She'd just flick off his light and let him sleep out the night.
She tapped quietly. Although he slept little, he would occasionally pass out from sheer exhaustion. She tapped again, and still nothing. Gently she turned the knob and pushed open the door.
Julian was not in bed but at his workbench.
The halogen lamp glowed brilliantly over the tilt board. His back was to her and his head was hunched below his shoulders. For a moment she thought that he had fallen asleep in place, because he did not move as she entered. But as she moved closer, she noticed his left hand.
'You're still up.' She tried to sound pleasant, but the effort was strained. The public humiliation had its source in him; and at the moment it took every fiber of her being to feign civility.
Her eye fell on a photo of her and Julian at his music summer camp last year in the Berkshires. He had just finished his recital to a standing ovation. They were posed at the piano, she with her arm around his shoulder and smiling proudly, he standing limp and glowering at the camera with one of his pained grimaces. That photo was so much them, she thought: her needy pride, and his refusal to give. Such a pathetic symbiosis. To think what she had sacrificed to get him in that picture -- the money and years, the leave of absence -- just to be available to guide him, to drive him to his music and art lessons, getting him into one of the best prep schools in the country. And what does she get back at the height of his achievement? A fucking scowl. He had perfected the art of rejection. **The ungrateful little prick**.
Looking at him frozen in that old-man hunch, she could feel her blood pressure rise. To think what he had put her through to raise him up from the quagmire of mediocrity. To think how she was ruined because of him. King Lear was right: 'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child!'
'Julian, I'm talking to you.'
Still nothing.
She took a deep breath. The only thing keeping her from exploding was a voice in her head: **He's your son. He's your own flesh and blood. Love him for what he is.**
But another cut in: **Would this still have been my Julian?**
The question was unanswerable.
'It's rather late,' she said, straining to keep her voice neutral.
But Julian still did not respond -- not even a stir. That was strange. Ordinarily he would tell her to leave his room. For whatever reasons, he never allowed her to see what he was working on. Even with a vacation school project, he'd lock himself in here, then wrap it up and take it back to school, never once allowing her a peek. That's the way he was: self-absorbed and totally ungiving.
Only once did he let Vanessa see a work-in-progress. It was a year and a half ago when out of the blue he called her upstairs into his room.
'Well?' he had said in a flat voice, letting her look over his shoulder. Vanessa remembered her surprise at the subject matter: a bowl of fruit on a table by a curtained window. His subject matter back then -- and still -- had been fantasy superheroes with massive bodies of rippling musculature, swords, gee-whiz weaponry, and disturbing bug-eyed alien heads, all done in garish color. While Vanessa had spurned the subject matter, technically his work was extraordinary, given that it had been done completely in pinpoint dots. So a simple bowl of fruit was a delightful departure. Maybe at last he was moving into his postimpressionist phase, she had thought.
'It's beautiful,' she had said, tempering her praise so as not to take it away from him. 'Is it a class project?'
He flashed her a hurt, truculent look. 'Why do you say that?'
'Well, I don't know, it's just different from what you usually do. That's all.'
'You mean, the usual **crap**.'
'I didn't say that.'
'It's your birthday present,' he said in a dead voice.
'Oh, Julian, how sweet of you.' She was taken aback and felt tears rise. 'How considerate.'
'You don't like it.'
'What do you mean? I love it. I love it. I'm telling you, it's beautiful. Really. And I'm flattered, I'm touched.' And she was. This was the first time in years that he had even remembered her birthday, let alone given her something that he'd created. Last year she had to remind him, and he went out and bought her a key chain.
'Well, I don't like it,' he said. 'It's stupid.'
'No, it's not.'
'It's stupid!' And with that, he slashed the drawing with his razor knife.
'What are you doing?' she had cried, trying to stop him. But he slashed and slashed the paper until it was hopelessly shredded.
Then without a word he pushed himself up from the bench and went downstairs, leaving Vanessa standing over the torn-up picture, crying to herself.
'Do you know what time it is?' She moved deeper into the room. 'Two-fifteen.'
Still nothing. Not even a turn of the head to acknowledge her presence. He was pulling his silent treatment on her again. She didn't need this shit. She didn't need his sour, precious fucking rejection routine. Not after what she'd been through.
'Julian, I'm speaking to you.' She crossed the room.
He was wearing that awful black shirt with the hideous Roaring Skulls picture on the front and their disturbing slogan on the back: LIFE SUCKS scribed in ghetto scrawl, as she called it. God! When the hell was he finally going to grow into his own talent? Here he was an accomplished musician who could play Shostakovich and Liszt, and he went around in heavy-metal shirts emblazoned with unseasoned nihilism. (Thank God Bloomfield had a dress code.) Moreover, his artistic talent was such that he could get into the finest art schools in the nation, and he wasted his hours on testosterone brutes. 'It's time you went to bed.'
He still did not respond, and she felt herself heat up.
**You bastard.**
'Lights out.'
She marched up to him. Still he did not turn or say anything, but continued stippling away. She glanced at the easel.
At first, she thought it was another of his fantasy characters. But as her eyes adjusted to the figure on the sheet, she felt a shock of recognition. It was a self-portrait, except that Julian's face looked like that of a snake or lizard. The thing's head had the same general shape as his own, just as the mouth and eyes were clearly Julian's. But the features were all somehow stretched into a distinctly reptilian impression. The face was elongated, and there were scales covering its head and body. But it was Julian for sure. It was grotesque, but like all of his works it was precisely crafted.
What struck her was the color -- reddish-brown, not black, his usual color.
He took out his mouth guards and laid them on a dish. 'It's a self-portrait,' he said. 'Like it? I mean, it's not _Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte_ or anything, but it has a nice likeness, don't you think, Mother?'
He had said **Mother** as if he'd spit something up. She was forming a response, when Julian slid back.
Vanessa let out a gasp. Julian's right hand was a bright red mess of pin-pricks from his knuckles up to his elbow. He was stippling the portrait with his own blood.
'What are you doing?' she screamed.
'Ms. Fuller says that I should work in different mediums.' And he took his point and jabbed it into the back of his wrist.
'Stop that!'
But he continued stabbing himself with the point so that beads of blood rose up. He then dipped in the pen tip and began tapping away at the picture.
'I said to stop that!'
But he continued.
'STOP THIS MINUTE!'
Slowly Julian turned his face up toward hers. And in a scraping whisper he said, 'I can't.'
A bright shock froze Vanessa in place.
'Because of what you did to me, Mother.'
'What? What do you mean what I did to you?'
'What you let them do to my head.'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'My head, Mother. They did something to my head. My brain.'
'I don't know what you're talking about or why the hell you're doing that to yourself. But I want you to stop. Do you understand me, Julian? It's goddam sick, and you're going to give yourself blood poisoning.' It crossed her mind to tell him not to drip on the wall-to-wall carpet she had spent a fortune on.
Julian laid down the pen and raised his bloody hands to his head and parted a section of hair above his hairline. Then he stuck his head under the lamp. 'Look. Look at the scars, Mother.'
Vanessa felt as if she were suddenly treading on barbed wire. 'What about them?'
'Where did they come from?'
'You know perfectly well. I told you that you fell off your stepstool in the bathroom and hit your head on the radiator when you were two.'
'These are little spots, not a regular scar,' he said. 'You're lying, because I remember. Besides, how could I fall from a six-inch stool and land on the top of my head?' His eyes fixed her.
'You don't remember anything.'
'I remember going to a hospital and having some kind of operation. I remember being bandaged up and seeing things. And taking tests and stuff. And other kids.' Then his voice became a bizarre falsetto: '"**Mr. Nisha wants you to be happy. Just relax and watch the video. For Mr. Nisha.**"'
'I don't know what the hell you're talking about. You took tests to see if there was any brain damage. And, thank goodness, there wasn't,' she added, feigning motherly relief.
'But there was, and it wasn't because I hit my head. It's because you had me fixed.'
'Julian, I'm in no mood for your crap, okay? This conversation is over.'
As she started to leave, Julian shot to his feet. Because he was still small for his age, Vanessa towered over him by a foot.
'What if I did that to your head, huh? What if I operated on your head to make you smarter? Huh?'
'What are you talking about?'
'I remember being tested. Aptitude tests -- intelligence tests. Three years straight of tests. I'm still taking them. And why? Well, I put it all together. I wasn't supposed to remember, but I did. How would you like it if I did that to you?'
She did not respond.
'I asked you a question, Vanessa.' he said, in perfect mimicry of her. 'I'm **speaking** to you. Answer me. Count back from twenty, Vanessa!'
She turned. He was standing there with one of his pens in his hand, the point aimed at her. 'Don't you threaten me, you little --' But she stopped short.
'What? Say it. "Little creep," right? Is that the expression you're searching for, huh? **LITTLE CREEP.** That's what they all say. "Julian the little creep." Why should you be any different?' He took a step toward her. 'How would you like it if I operated on your head because I didn't like how your brain worked? Huh? How would you like it if I cut you up to make you smarter? HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF I MADE YOU A FUCKING LITTLE CREEP?'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' she said, her voice like acid. 'And don't you speak to me that way. Not after what I've put myself through for you.'
'You know what I'm talking about. You had me fixed because I wasn't good enough for you and your fancy friends at the club and university. You wanted a little superstar to parade around. Well, you got him, Vanessa! You got yourself your little genius, and his teeth are all ground down, and he's taking five different medications because he's a little GENIUS.'
As he screamed at her, his tongue flashed against the row of yellow stumps in bright red gums and spittle shot from his mouth. His face filled with blood and his eyes bulged like hens' eggs. He looked positively grotesque. 'How would you like a little brain surgery, Mother? Then you'd know what a miserable hell it is to be me -- what it's like to be possessed. What it's like to hate you the way I do.'
As he approached, his face filled her vision. 'HOW WOULD YOU LIKE THAT, MOTHER?'
As if to the snap of her own mind, Vanessa felt herself lurch forward.
'You little bastard!' she heard herself scream. 'Because of you I'm ruined. They did this to me. They set me up. Because of you. Yes, because you're such a fucking monster. BECAUSE OF YOU!'
Her hand shot to the jar of tools and pulled up a long sharp metal ice-pick thing. The next instant, she buried it in the crown of Julian's head.
Instantly blood geysered out of the boy's skull as he let out a faint cry.
For a telescoped moment, she watched in numbed horror as Julian jerked about and rose in place on his toes as if trying to follow his own blood, his eyes widening in utter dismay, his mouth slack-jawed and moving wordlessly like a marionette's trying to form a question. An involuntary pocket of air bubbled out of his throat as blood streamed down his face and onto his shirt. Then just as he seemed about to gain stature, he mouth spread into a hideous grin, and he collapsed backward onto his tilt board, the long instrument still stuck in place. Because of the internal pressure, blood shot out across the self-portrait picture, bedewing the paper in a postimpressionist spray.
Panting uncontrollably, Vanessa tried to comprehend what her hand had done. She did not cry out, nor did she touch her son. She just stood there gasping for air and watched him die.
When she heard the deep-throated gurgle, she turned. Without deliberation, she removed a razor knife from the scattered implements.
**They did this to me,** she told herself.
She didn't know how they knew about Blake's paper, but she knew they had set her up tonight, contacted the prick and arranged for that video. It was their doing. Because she had wanted her son back. Because she had insisted they undo what they'd done to him. Because she threatened to blow the whistle when they refused to even try, filling him full of useless chemicals that made him even worse.
'**When dealing with the human mind, there's no way to predict the collateral effects.**'
Such bullshit. Collateral effects! He was a freak. She had threatened to take him elsewhere, so they brought her down in public. On her night of nights.
She moved to Julian's bed and sat against the bolster. She glanced once across the room at her son dead on his tilt board, his blood streaming onto the carpet.
For a second, the image of him nursing at her breast flitted across her mind. She let out a long pathetic groan.
Then she slashed her wrists.
For the next several minutes, with her knees clutched to her chest, and her wrists bleeding into a pillow, she whimpered softly and rocked herself to death."
This is one of a couple of similarly lurid little vignettes I could've chosen. Like I said, pretty nasty! But also quite readable.
[Shudder.]
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