Requiem for a Wonder

The first thing they tell you about Simon is that he can multiply seven-digit numbers in his head, backward. By four he speaks three languages and runs conjugations while other kids chew crayons. At five he writes a paper on black holes, and a Harvard professor reads it, locks his office door, and sobs into a stack of peer-reviewed journals. At seven he composes a piece for piano, and the first time he plays it his mother walks out of the house with a dish towel in her hand and stands in the yard until it stops. A writer from Time calls the piece a requiem and asks who died. Nobody has died. The magazine prints the word anyway, and the cover hangs framed in the upstairs hall, where Simon passes his own face every night on the way to the bathroom.

He is ten now, and the multiplication trick still opens the show.

The show this morning is Rise and Shine Ohio, and the studio keeps its air cold for the cameras. A woman with a sponge has powdered his forehead twice. The host is a man named Chip with orange hands, and he holds a Casio calculator the size of a paperback so the people at home can see the buttons.

"Seven digits," Chip says. "Any seven. Mom, you pick the first one. Dad picks the second."

Simon's mother sits on the couch with her knees together and her hand low on his back where the camera can't find it. She gives a number. His father gives a number and laughs in the middle of it, because the last four digits are the phone number of the shop.

"And backward," Chip says. "He does it backward, folks. Don't ask me why. I can't do it forward."

The answer is already there. It came in while his father was still laughing, like bees out of a kicked box, and Simon reads the digits off from the right-hand end. Chip pecks at the Casio with one finger, tak, tak, tak, and falls behind, and Simon slows down for him. He has slowed down for a lot of adults. They like to arrive at the end together.

"That is correct," Chip says, and he holds the calculator up to camera two. "That is correct! Gloria, Dale, what do you even call this?"

"We call him our little miracle," Gloria says.

"Our little miracle," Dale says. His mouth starts after hers and catches up by the last word, which is how he gets through hymns.

Her thumb presses twice between Simon's shoulder blades, and that means smile. He smiles. Chip tells the camera the smile is quaint, and after the break there is a man who carves presidents out of butter.

You have probably seen the clip. The butter man is in it.

At four the microwave clock is the only light in the kitchen. Simon comes down in his socks. His room smells of talcum powder, and of the Windex his mother uses on the trophies, and of the Capri Sun that leaked behind his desk in March and dried there, and he carries all three down the stairs in his pajamas.

The calendar hangs on the refrigerator, and Gloria keeps it in pen. Every square holds her capital letters. Each day opens with 4:00 PIANO, then 5:30 MANDARIN (MR. QIU), then 7:00 PROOFS. Near the end of the month she has drawn a box around one square and written DR. TALLY 9:00 inside it, and under that, ELLERY!!

Every object in the house wears an index card. Gloria wrote them when Simon was two, in three colors of marker, one for each language, and she taped them at the height of a toddler's eyes. The refrigerator still says REFRIGERATOR / REFRIGERADOR / 冰箱 under the calendar. The tape has gone the yellow of apple juice. Nobody takes the cards down.

Gloria is already at the piano in the front room with the lamp on. The piano is a used Yamaha U1, and the payment book lives in the bench with the sheet music. She holds the white bottle.

"Hands," she says.

He holds them out with the palms up. She shakes the talc into them, fft, fft, once for each hand, and rubs it in with her thumbs, down each finger and into the webbing. Her hands are warm from the coffee mug. She has done this every morning since he was five, when his palms began to slide on the keys. She tugs the end of each finger the way a person checks a glove for holes.

"From the top," she says. "The Ellery people will ask for it. They always ask for it."

He plays the requiem. His fingers go where they have gone for three years, and every note lands in its place, and the piece lies there on the keys like a coat on a bed. He hears it. She hears it. The first time he played it she went out to stand in the yard. Now she stands in the doorway with the bottle against her chest and stays for the whole thing.

"Again," she says. "You're playing the notes."

"Those are the notes."

"Again, Simon."

He plays it again. A truck goes by on Larkmoor, and its headlights cross the wall and the framed programs on it. In the middle section, where the left hand has to cross over the right, he lets the left hand arrive late. Nothing moves in the doorway. He gets to the end and keeps his hands on the last chord until the strings quit.

"Is it me?" Gloria says. "Is it the hour? Tell me what it needs and I'll get it."

Simon turns his hands over. The powder has gone gray in the creases.

"Can I have a Capri Sun?" he says.

She looks through the kitchen door at the refrigerator and the squares on it.

"One," she says. "Then Mr. Qiu."

The Capri Suns live in a Costco box with the flap torn off, and the box lives in the old refrigerator in the garage. The concrete is cold through his socks. His father's side of the garage holds a rolling jack, a wall of tires in their paper sleeves, and an air compressor with WICKS TIRE & BRAKE stenciled on the tank. Above the tires a bicycle hangs by its wheels from two rubber hooks. It is a green Trek, a birthday present from two years back, and the price tag is still zip-tied to the brake cable. The tag says $419.99. The calendar has never had a square for it.

Simon stabs the straw through a Pacific Cooler and drinks it standing under the bike. He reaches up and presses his thumb into the front tire, and the tire pushes back as hard as the heel of his hand. He tries the rear one. The rear one is the same. His father tells customers a tire goes soft just from sitting; he has said it into the shop phone a thousand times. On the floor below the bike the red air hose lies coiled, and someone has wiped the dust off the brass at its end.

He flattens the pouch and leaves it on the workbench with his fingers printed on it in white.

Dr. Lois Tally's office sits over a dentist's in a brick building on Far Hills. Simon has sat across from this test four times, and the last time he was eight. He could draw the inside of its case: the spiral books that stand up like tents, the nine red-and-white blocks in their box, the stopwatch on its lanyard, the pencils with no erasers.

"Your mother tells me the Ellery Program wants a current number," Dr. Tally says. She is a wide, slow woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and a turkey sandwich waits in foil at the corner of her desk. "You know how this goes. Some of it will be easy and some of it will be hard, and all I want is your best."

"Okay."

"Do you need the bathroom? Water?"

"No, thank you."

She sets four blocks in front of him and opens the first book to a square made of red and white triangles. She tells him to make his look like the picture. She says go and thumbs the stopwatch, click, and lays it face up by her elbow.

Simon builds the square before her pencil is off the desk. He builds it with the top at the bottom. From his chair the blocks show the picture the way a spoon shows a face. From her chair they are perfect.