5

Alexander Daugherty was strange.

Even his mother acknowledged the fact that her only child was strange. And mothers, considered as a group, are steadfastly impervious to the existence of strangeness in their kids.

But Helen Daugherty realized her little boy was strange, alright; nearly from the nursery she did. After all, you can hardly argue with the obvious when it steps right up and smacks you in the face. And Alexander’s strangeness was, as only-offspring strangeness goes, well up in the ninety-ninth percentile of that singularly unamiable trait.

For one example, one among the many, Alex didn’t start to talk at the normal talking age. Not a sound when he rounded one, not a word by two, not a ‘mama’ or a ‘papa’ or even so much as a gurgle or a goo-goo by the time he got to three. Helen and her worried husband Lester took him to a specialist to have his hearing checked. But his hearing was OK. His vocal apparatus came out normal too, as far as anyone could tell. He seemed alert enough to things that drew his interest—namely things that didn’t breathe or move—He seemed healthy enough, nourishment-wise; his growth proceeded at a normal pace. But talking? Forget it. Not a thing in that regard—until…

Until one night, very late, after the baby sitter had left for home just down the block with her thirty-seven bucks in hand—Once nice pert blonde little Becky Bilsky had trotted off, and mom and dad were all alone at home and happened to be passing by their little Alexander’s room, they heard through the just-cracked door a regular one-part dialogue in an unfamiliar voice, a little infant’s unfamiliar voice, that is. They listened closely, stared incredulously back and forth at one another for quite a lengthy while. And it finally dawned on them that Alex was talking, all right, in clear and sonorous tones. He was talking just splendidly. He just wasn’t talking … to them.

All right, way better than the alternative; at least their little Alex wasn’t deaf or mute or cerebrally deranged. He was normal enough, physically at least, and therefore gave some promise to amend. Good, thought Helen. Great, thought hubby Les. So they sent him off to a top-notch pre-school, best one in the town—this now just a little past the age of three. And when they did, and the school staff met him, the psychologist who got consulted ASAP by the conscientious teacher Mrs. Gould, diagnosed the boy as being, in his consultative print-out summary, ‘minimally autistic’. Lester didn’t find the modifier ‘minimally’ all that apt; but his instinctive optimistic bent provided hope. And—thank the Powers-That-Be—Lester’s hope was ultimately proven to be justified.

For, as things turned out, the incommunicado Alex was tested by the school for intellect and discovered (to mom and dad’s unspeakable relief) to be bright—Very bright, in fact; off the charts in brightness, to be specific. Tested non-verbally, of course, Alex being scrupulously selective about which human beings he would verbally engage. But the non-verbal testing ranked his intellect way up there in the super-genius range. You just wouldn’t know it if you wanted him to talk.

But that was a positive finding anyway, the IQ testing was. So far so good. And by the age of five, the boy was actually speaking right out loud—even to those of lesser intellect than his own—and doing so in compound, complex sentences filled to their very periods and semi-colons with participles past and present, dependent clauses, subjunctives even—the whole nine-yard ball of wax. He spoke these complex iterations primarily to the patient Mrs. Gould during those happy years of pre-school—she was pretty bright herself, thus worth the trouble of talking to. Unfortunately Helen and Lester heard nothing of his musings—their IQ’s sadly didn’t make the cut.

Right around that time, and in that self-same pre-school room, as well, Alex, while engaged in conversation with the clever Mrs. Gould, looked up at her desk and rapturously beheld—the classroom computer. It was the very sort of thing that had drawn his interest as a toddler, but nowadays he had the use of arms and fingers to work the keyboard with, a newfound voice to ask the how and why as well, and Mrs. Gould’s permission to hop right up and have a go—Well sure: What would you have the poor gal do? Wasn’t she happy as anything to get the little weirdo off her back for once, at last!— And once she helped him up onto her seat, once he tapped those magic keys and watched the multicolored screen take life, and realized what the splendid newfound toy could do….

Well, that was it—Bam! Pow!—Love at first sight. The boy took to that keypad and monitor like a remora to a shark, adherent, absorbent, inseparable. From the very instant of discovery, there on Mrs. Gould’s chair and at her pedagogic desk, it was as though the little fellow’s fingers had found their destined adjuncts in the lettered keys, as though his eyes had gotten set into his head solely to fix their focus on that screen and nothing else. The computer at home got expropriated in the same determined way: Helen and Lester didn’t dare interfere any more than kindly Mrs. Gould had done. Alex had found his raison d’etre; and no cosmic force, however powerful, could summon up the wherewithal to muscle him away.

Fast forward, then, to high school and then to college and finally to grad school at OSU. Alex still didn’t talk very much to anyone other than himself; but he didn’t really need the boon of conversation; his vocal apparatus was vestigial, you might say, a little-used appendage to the respiratory lungs and mouth. Those eight un-thumb-like fingers did the talking for him, his eyes took care of whatever listening he had to do. The computer was his friend—and really it was his best friend, his only friend, ever…. Until he met Rajiv, that is. Rajiv was the single human being in Alex’s early life—well, after Mrs. Gould perhaps—who ever succeeded in truly breaking through.

Now as to Rajiv: Poor Rajiv had gone through his own trials and tribulations in life and had felt the sting of unpleasantness at school no less than Alex must have done. The son of immigrant parents who spoke with the lilting liquidity of the Gujarati patois—well, let’s just say about the boys and girls who happened to wind up in his home for snacks of puri bhaji, say, or some other volcanically pungent dish—such kids, unthoughtful as such kids most often are, were prone to chuckle, sneer, and imitate. And Rajiv himself, swarthy, exotic-featured in a not unhandsome way: The native schoolboys of Columbus, Ohio, looked at the brown-skinned youngster as one not entirely of their kind, a sort of alien, a sort of weirdo. Dark complexion and an exotic-sounding name—the perfect combination for teasing and rejection. He got it early on—And Rajiv Patel really got it good.

But one thing about Rajiv: Let’s give him credit where credit was his due—the kid was resourceful. And smart as well. And, more than even resource and intellect, Rajiv was a fellow with a strong and sanguine personality. He teased the mean kids back and fought them tooth and claw and often won. And when he lost, he licked his wounds and knew he’d given back ninety-plus percent of what his foe had given him. He might have lost a few mere skirmishes along the way—but he ultimately won the war. By ninth grade, he was accepted, respected—honored, even, for he was an honorable kind of guy. But he’d suffered an awful lot in getting where he’d finally made it to. And when he met poor Alex, his battle-hardened heart went out to that similarly tortured soul.

Right off the bat, straight out of the gate, Rajiv felt viscerally for Alex. So, just as you might guess, he began to shelter him, to run his interference, to fight his battles as a proxy when battles turned out to be a must. Alex didn’t thank him, not really—not in spoken words. But those moist, brown, puppy-dog eyes that Alex wore! Alex looked at Rajiv, widely and fetchingly, like the grateful maiden from the tower once her feet were safely on the ground: A look not too awfully different from the look mute Alex had always given his computer screen. And Rajiv saw that grateful look and knew in his inmost heart, that a look like that was the greatest thank-you gift of all.

From ninth grade right up through graduation, and on to OSU, and from there to OSU’s impressive grad school, the two of them were inseparable, Rajiv always in the van, Alex invariably coming up behind. Rajiv arranged to get him laid once or twice—not a pretty sight, and not much satisfaction to the girls on the receiving end. Sometimes Rajiv forked out a bit of cash behind his buddy’s back to lubricate the reluctant damsel’s will, but no matter. Alex seemed content with the experience—at least he looked content after the deed was done, that is; he never had a lot to say. When Alex got the idea for a facial recognition web site, an outgrowth of the project for his PhD—well, who but old Rajiv Patel to give the concept life?

And so he did just that, and it had brought the two of them here at last, after last night’s unanticipated phone call, here to Red Bank, New Jersey, where they would get the seed money requisite to take their great idea to the finish line. Here, at last, at that long-awaited finish line, the two kids had finally arrived.