Originally published in Tevun-Kruss No. 28, May 2016.
My parents told me not to worry. Not to frazzle and roil and dread about my disability.
”Don't let it bother you,” Mom said. And she’d elaborate at length: "The other girls may be able to do things that you can't do, but that doesn't mean that you're not as good as they are. And they can't do all the things that you can, by the way. You are so much better at art and music than they could ever hope to be. And who ever said that we all need to be the same?"
I said so. All the other girls can use a tablet. They can control the touchscreen by running their fingers across the screen, or jabbing at it with their thumbs or index fingers or sometimes with their middle finger, but never the ring finger or the pinky. The touchscreen responds to them. It does what they tell it to. But if I try to use a tablet, no way. Nothing happens. It just sits there unresponsive and lifeless.
So I insisted and mom relented: she took me to the doctor. His office was in one of those shiny buildings on University Avenue – one of the older ones from the nineteen-seventies that looked like weird concrete bunkers with glass slits for Windows. Why should a bunker have windows? Either go all in and have none, or don’t be a bunker at all. But a bunker with windows? That’s just a cheap simulation.
The chairs were covered in faded blue corduroy upholstery. Gold colored flecks had been sprinkled on them. It made them look like someone had gotten sick all over them and that it could never be washed out. I sat down while my mother talked to the receptionist. They spoke in hushed tones. I don’t know why – we were the only ones there.
The doctor came in through the front door. He hung his overcoat on a peg, and he removed his hat and placed it on top of the coat. It was a fedora or a Stetson - I’m not exactly sure. But it was an old style that nobody really wore anymore, and was last popular in the classic films from the first half of the twentieth century. You know the films – the ones without any colors in them that they show at school, to demonstrate how people lived decades ago, to prove how much more evolved we are now. It seems these old hats were a relic from a more brutal time.
“Are these the first patients, Sally?”
Sally handed the doctor a tablet. He used his fingers to elegantly navigate what must have been my medical information, because he spoke to me without looking up from the screen.
“Ginny, I’m Doctor Theodorus. Would you follow me?”
He turned and walked into the examination room without looking at me.
Mom said, “Let’s go,” and we went in after him.
“Have a seat Ginny,” he said. He pointed at a bed. I went to sit.
“Oh wait, hold on.”
I stopped. He quickly pulled some sanitary paper from a cupboard and spread it onto the bed.
“Go ahead.”
I sat on the bed and he continued studying my medical information on the tablet.
“So, Ginny, tell me what brings you here today.”
“I can’t control touchscreens.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when I touch them with my fingers, nothing happens.”
“Is that so? Show me,” he said. He closed my medical file so that the tablet was just on the home screen. He handed it to me, and so I attempted to use the tablet. It was useless, as always.
“See what I mean?” I asked. I handed the tablet back to him.
“I do.”
Doctor Theodorus returned to studying my medical information. I could see a look develop on his face while he read. I wasn’t sure what it was. Concern, maybe. He went to the cupboard and retrieved a stethoscope. He lifted the back of my shirt and pressed the cold tool against my skin.
“Take a big breath in.”
I took a big breath, as much as I could fit, until my chest felt tight and I thought I might burst.
“Let it out. You don’t have to work that hard at it. Good. Take another big breath.”
I inhaled again, but not as hard this time. He asked me to do this a few more times while he moved the stethoscope to different parts of my back.
“I have good news, Ginny.”
“Really?”
“Yes. You’re a perfectly healthy six-year old girl. You’re just different. You just can’t control touchscreens. I’ve seen it a few times.”
“I’m not sick?”
“No, there’s nothing wrong with you. Some people have blue eyes, some have brown. It’s the same thing here. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Okay,” I said. I could feel tears start to break the surface.
“Ginny, would you like to be able to use touchscreens?”
“Yeah, lots and lots.”
“Okay. I can have special gloves made for you. They’ll have a material in the finger tips that will let the touchscreen react to your touch.”
“Really? Oh, wow!”
Mom thanked the doctor, and she told me to thank him too, then she took me by the hand and led me from the office. The next week we returned to the Doctor’s office and he gave me my gloves. They were a dark cream color, similar to my own skin tone. But on the tip of each finger there was a little black spot, and that spot gave me the power to control touchscreens.
I wore the gloves to school the next day, and I showed all of my friends my newfound ability to use computers just like they could. They crowded around and examined the gloves and patted me on the back and told me how cool I was. I felt so proud, and so happy. For the rest of the school year I played computer games with the other kids, the same way that they did. I even started getting better at things like math, because I could participate in the class exercises.
Summer came, so I took the gloves off and played outside with my friends. I was always the smallest and slowest of the kids. They would slow down for me, or let me play the parts in the games that didn’t depend on strength or speed. I was the runt, but I didn’t mind. I think the fact that I could use touchscreens in school meant that they treated me with more respect during the summer.
That October, my mom got a new job. It was in Montreal and we needed to move right away. My school friends held a goodbye party for me in class. I was very sad, but mom promised me that I’d make new friends and that Montreal was a wonderful place.
It really was wonderful, and in my new class I found new friends. And they liked my gloves and thought that they were neat. Even my new teacher, Madame Flaubert, took a liking to me and encouraged me to be more social and told me that I was good, even if I was smaller and slower than the other kids my age. So things were pretty great. I even started to learn French, and I used my gloves to navigate my lessons, just like the rest of the kids.
A new girl came to the class after the break in March. She was big, and tough, and strong, and she had her own gloves too. She took one look at me and my gloves, and she frowned and turned away. Jetta had it out for me from that first moment, and from then on she took pains to show the class how cool she was, and how uncool I was. She had my awesome gloves, plus she was also as big as they were and as strong as they were. She could hold her own with the best of the kids, and her gloves just made her look bigger and better still. Whenever she had the chance, she pointed out my shortcomings to others.
At some point after that, Madame Flaubert noticed how Jetta was treating me, and she publicly reprimanded Jetta.
“You’re not better than Ginny, Jetta.”
“I know I’m not better. But she’s less awesome than I am.”
By that time a lot of the other kids had started to come about to Jetta’s way of thinking. They even came up with a nickname for me: Less.
By summer, all the kids were calling me Less. Madame Flaubert took me aside and told me not to worry. She said that this was temporary and that the statistics showed that by the time I grew up, I’d be the successful one and Jetta would be languishing in a dead-end job with eight children. It didn’t ease the sting, and at the time I thought, “Why does she get to reproduce?”
So all summer I was Less in the park and Less on the playground, and Less on any of the online games that I played with my friends. They all called me Less. Ginny was dead, in a sense.
By the end of summer I had grown a bit, and I had turned seven. I somehow thought that the start of the new school year would bring about change. But Jetta had grown too, and so had the rest of the kids. So I was still the smallest, and the slowest. I was still Less.
I started to take it out on myself. I ate less. And even though logically speaking I should have been eating more to try to make myself grow, I just didn’t have the appetite. I cried a lot. I stopped participating in class. I mostly lolled about at home, and I didn’t want to go outside to play, even when the weather was still warm. All of this just made my reputation as Less grow. It suited me.
After a few months of this, mom took me on a trip to Toronto to go see Doctor Theodorus. It was after a weekend of lying on the couch and wheezing whenever I got up to walk around.
“Ginny, you’ve lost six pounds,” he said after weighing me. Six pounds is a lot when you’re seven years old. He looked at my arms and legs.
“How did you get these bruises?”
“I don’t know.”
“You need to take care of yourself, Ginny. If you don’t eat you’ll start to waste away. You’ll bruise more easily because your body is weaker. It’s not good for you. You need to eat. I’m going to listen to your lungs now.”
The doctor got the stethoscope from the cupboard, and he listened to all the parts of my back that he checked the last time. There was a gurgling sound every time I breathed out. He looked at my medical data on his tablet.
“Ginny, you’ve developed pneumonia. Not getting proper nutrition has weakened your immune system, and an infection has set in. I’ll write a prescription for you. It’s easily treatable. But you need to eat properly.”
Mom got the prescription filled and I started to take it that night. There must have been some sort of side effect, because I became feverish and I had nightmares and all kinds of scary thoughts. I had a dream that I was defective somehow, and that whenever Doctor Theodorus listened to my chest with the stethoscope, he was really listening to the defects, and telling my mom, and they were secretly agreeing with Jetta that I really was Less.
So in my delirious state I decided to build my own stethoscope, so that I could figure out what my own defects were. I found a little paper cup –mom always had paper cups around the house, I’m not sure why – and I found a small plastic hose. I jammed the hose into the back of the cup. I placed the cup on my chest and I put the end of the hose against my ear. I heard a repeating ker-thump, ker-thump drum beat coming from my chest. Was that normal, or was that sound a defect? I didn’t know, and I wanted to find out. But I fell asleep, because I had foolishly done all of this while suffering from a fever.
The next day I woke up determined. I decided to test my stethoscope again. Ker-thump, ker-thump. I just didn’t know if this was normal or not, since I had never heard my own chest before and I was never taught anatomy. I had the smart idea that if I listened to other people, then maybe I could tell if I sounded right or not.
So as soon as I was better and able to return to school, I brought my little experiment with me. I still had a few friends who didn’t bully me, so I asked them if I could listen to their chests. Two friends let me do it, but when I listened to them all I heard was a continuous flowing sound. I didn’t know what this meant, but I was sure that it somehow indicated that I was bad. I hid my fear and anger as best as I could. That night I got out of bed late. I went to my mom’s room and I found her sleeping. As gently as I could, I pressed the stethoscope against her. I heard only a whooshing sound. I was so sad. Even my mom sounded normal. I probably had some sort of disease, and the ker-thump was the sound of my system failing.
I held this in and kept it all to myself, until one day Jetta ridiculed me and called me Less five times in a row. I completely lost it – I screamed and I ran at her and I attacked her. I didn’t hurt Jetta at all, but Madame Flaubert pulled me off of her. She held me while I wailed and flung my arms and legs all around.
“Why do you hate me? We’re the same!” I screamed as I waved my gloves at Jetta.
“I’m nothing like you,” Jetta said. She leered at me.
I was hysterical, so Madame Flaubert called in another teacher to supervise the class while she took me to the nurse’s office. She sat with me until mom showed up.
Mom picked me up and hugged me with her strong mom arms. I felt so safe to be in her arms, but I was still scared. I went home and straight to bed. Mom sat with me, and I slowly calmed down.
Finally, I said, “Mom, I listened to my chest with my strath-o-scope.”
“Did you? How did you do that?”
“I made one.”
“Really? I’m so proud of you, Ginny. What did you hear?”
“I heard ker-thump, ker-thump.”
Mom’s eyes started to get tears in them.
“Mom, I listened to the other kids at school too. And I listened to you when you were asleep. I don’t sound like anyone else.”
“What did they sound like?”
“It was like, whooooosh. Mom, am I broken inside?”
Mom scooped me up from the bed. She hugged me and she wouldn’t let me go. I knew this must mean that something was really wrong. So I began to cry again.
“I’m dying!” I said as I clutched at her as hard as I could.
“No, Ginny. You’re not dying. You’re human.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ginny, I was hoping you’d be a little older before I told you this. There are two types of people on Earth. The first type were made by nature. That’s you and a few others. The second type were made by humans in laboratories. They were made to be exactly like humans except for a few changes, like hearts that work differently.”
“There’s two types of people?”
“Yes. You’re the first type. I’m the second type.”
“But you’re my mom.”
“I am, and I love you very, very much.”
“But I don’t understand.”
“Ginny, before you were born there was a disease that spread around the world. It infected only the first type of people, because it attacked one of the things that only they had. So the second type, the ones made in labs, didn’t get sick. Eventually all of the first type of people died from the disease. But there were unfertilized eggs and sperm in storage. So about eight years ago, after decades of sadness and missing them terribly, we decided to try to bring back the first type of people.”
I was scared, but mom kept hugging me and she wouldn’t let me go.
“Is this why I can’t use touchscreens?”
“Yes, Ginny. Touchscreens were invented by the second kind of people only ten years ago. The screens respond to the metal in our skin. You don’t have any metal, so that’s why they don’t work for you. One day our scientists will figure out how to make the touchscreens work for everyone, but for now the gloves do the job.”
“Why did the second type of people bring back the first type of people?”
“Because we were sad. We missed your art, your music, your religion, your passion. We all loved and appreciated these things about the first type of people so, so much. We tried to live on our own, but none of us could do it with the same kind of grace and spirit. We just felt not quite alive without our creators by our sides.”
I still felt terribly confused. I shivered like I was cold. Mom wrapped me up in a blanket and held me. When I had calmed down a bit, she made me some hot cocoa. It tasted so good. She rubbed my back while I drank it. It started to dawn on me, as I sat there, wrapped up in a blanket and drinking mom's cocoa, that I really wasn't Less. I was just different. I had a ker-thump instead of a whoosh. No big deal.
END