Chapter 2- Memories
The rain continued throughout the night and well into the morning hours, but I had hardly moved in all that time. I sat on the floor at the foot of the bed surrounded by an assortment of books in stacks. I found that this new ability had a hunger all its own, I was now driven to accumulate knowledge.
I closed the book I was reading on Greek mythology and stretched. My eyes were tired and my muscles ached from sitting in a hunched position for hours on end. As I lay stretched out on the floor with my arms over my head, I couldn't help but smile.
This new ability combined with my intuitive aptitude made me a formidable threat. The government has spent millions on computers that compile and analyze data looking for patterns, and I could probably do it with much more accuracy than anything the Department of Defense could come up with.
My smile faded as my mind drifted back to the small, dingy apartment in Queens. My mother meant well, but she never really understood me. I never told her what I could do, how could I explain it when I hardly understood it myself? Maybe I could have saved some money I made from the watch repair shop and invested it if I studied the stock market, then she wouldn't have been so unhappy with what little we had. She was so very unhappy and I always felt like a burden to her even when she would look into my eyes, take my face in her hands and tell me how much she loved me.
I couldn't help but think that all that time she was looking to me to make her life better. I, as the man of the house, did have a responsibility to watch over her. God knows Martin Gray didn't. What kind of a man would leave her with a young child in the middle of the night and never come back? I couldn't bring myself to call him Dad; he was no father to me and a poor husband to my mother. Growing up without a male figure was hard, I had to learn how to do the things men do by trial and error, or by piecing together clues from television or books.
Shaving and puberty were nothing short of traumatic. "The Talk" was embarrassingly awkward, although my mother approached it the only way she knew how; to act it out between two stuffed animals she had on the living room shelf. A bit strange to wait until I was 14, but perhaps she couldn't conceive of the thought of her thin, painfully self-conscious, slightly clumsy boy with limbs that always seemed way too long to effectively control as being aware that a second gender existed. I sat quietly with my head down, I didn't have the heart to tell her the whole sexual process was pretty simple and straightforward logic that I had figured out the summer before based on Calvin Klein ads for underwear that I saw on the subway.
With such patchwork information, I sometimes had antiquated ideas of etiquette compared to modern day New York standards, but I adapted as well as I could. I learned to stop standing up when a woman entered the room or even opening doors for them. I can't tell you how many odd looks I got during my teenage years from women, but I got just as many compliments from elderly ladies on my manners. It was painful, but quietly I watched, waited, and learned until I could approximate current metro male habits with ease and blend in with everyone else.
The great pretender.
My eyes felt heavy and the pain in my lower back had subsided to a dull ache. As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered what Martin would think of me now, wherever he was. Would he be proud to see the boy he was never really interested in become a man despite his absence? Would he be impressed with my abilities? Would I be someone he would tell his friends or coworkers about? I didn't know why I cared, he left us a long time ago. I shouldn't care…but I did.