The Memorist
3.
I wake up and my heart is already racing. For a moment I don’t remember why, but soon I locate the source of my anxiety: today I will attempt to earn a place in the Guinness Book of World Records by reciting pi to more than 28,300 digits from memory.
1
The day when we discovered my strange ability is only a bare sketch in my mind. A few details stand out in full color, but the rest is made up of scant outlines, filled in and shaded in places by Amma’s many retellings. I was 4 and a half, she says, and it was a warm Sunday in early June.
That morning, Papa sat down to grade a pile of problem sets, and Amma and I walked from our tiny apartment to the farmer’s market in Harvard Square. Oddly, what I remember most vividly is the cantaloupe that someone had dropped in the middle of the market. We had to step over the remains splattered across the asphalt, and I stared intensely at the wet stain with blobs of orange flesh and little yellow seeds, wondering if that’s what my insides looked like, too. The scent of the trampled melon lent a rotten sweetness to the air, overpowering the familiar smell of warm plums and onions sitting in the sun. I wandered through the stalls amidst the yuppies and the hippies and the plain mothers wrapped in saris as Amma collected paper bags filled with chilies, potatoes, carrots, and mint leaves. As we walked home, I carried one bag for Amma while she struggled with two or three others. I swung my bag back and forth, watching the potatoes bump each other inside.
The next part gets fuzzy in my head. Amma tells me I was rebellious and running ahead of her on the sidewalk. She says that I was weaving in between the cars parked along the gutter of the road, and she was shouting at me: “Hey, Rajan, get out of there!” I stopped and studied the license plate of a rusting station wagon. Then I ran to the next car and looked at that license plate. And so on and so on, all down the road. Amma says that she was furious with me, sweating under her sari and shuffling her heavy groceries from one hand to the other, so that she would have a free hand to slap my bottom when she got close.
But then I stopped at the end of the row of cars, and started reciting every license plate from memory, 15 cars, just as easy as that. And then she stopped thinking about slapping me and started wondering if a 4-year-old should be able to do something like that. And then she realized that she couldn’t even remember that many license plates. And then, two days later, Amma and Papa told me I needed to see the doctor.
4
Of course, I know I’m not going to forget the number of the place, but I have to double-check to make sure I remember the street name.
4783 Boylston Street was the address given to me by Linda, the Guinness Book secretary. She gave me the address at the end of our third phone conversation, after she was certain that I was indeed serious and not going to waste their time. Linda was professionally friendly, suggesting places to eat while I was in Boston and uttering an “oh, how nice” when I told her that I was from Cambridge. Yet her voice could never rouse itself beyond politeness, and she was quick to hang up after the logistics were arranged. Talking year after year to the man with the world’s longest fingernails and the bakers of the universe’s largest crème brulée must have dulled her to the excitement of a world record.
1
Dr. Goldberg looked up from the chart in front of him, smiling.
“First off, let me tell you that Rajan scored off the charts in terms of numerical memory.” He took his glasses off, shined them quickly, and put them back on. “In my 24 years of practice, he has the best… I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. We’re going to want to run several more scans, and we’ve got to do a more in-depth Schaeffer test…”
My parents had been sitting in the waiting room of Mass General Hospital for three hours while I played with blocks and multicolored number cut-outs in different doctors’ offices. Now Papa grinned, ruffled my hair with a soft hand. Amma looked anxious.
“What about the rest?” she asked. “Is he a genius?”
Dr. Goldberg looked nervous. “We don’t use the term ‘genius’ here. It has too many different definitions. Besides, there are so many areas of intelligence, and the relationships between the different areas are complex. It remains to be seen whether Rajan’s numerical memory will have any significant impact on his other mental abilities.”
“But should he go to a special school? Should we hire a math tutor?”
“I think that’s up to you. I’m not sure that Rajan’s ability will have much bearing on his performance in school…”
Seeing her face, Dr. Goldberg quickly added, “But Rajan certainly is a smart little boy. He scored above average on our IQ measures. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets all A’s in kindergarten.” He chuckled heartily.
Papa cut in. “Thank you, Dr. Goldberg. We’re very grateful for your help.”
“Thank you for bringing him here,” said Dr. Goldberg. “He’s one of the most fascinating patients of my career.” He stared down at me. He was grinning, but there was something I didn’t like behind his smile.
Lying in bed that night, I heard my parents arguing loudly. It sounded like Amma was crying. The next morning, Papa informed me that I would be attending kindergarten at Kennedy, the public elementary school down the street, when September came.
5
When we arrive at 4783 Boylston, we find a bland brick office complex. There are no signs on the outside of the building, only the number painted on the smudged front window. Inside the lobby, I consult a black directory sign with moveable white letters:
Floor 1: Churchill Furniture Reupholsters, Inc.
Floor 2: Digimix sound editing suite
Floor 3: Universal Society for Psychology and Peace
Floor 4: Guinness Book offices
My stomach lurches as the elevator jumps into action, taking us upwards toward the room where I will reveal my talent to the world.
9
My parents are normal people, relatively speaking. Papa won a prize for spelling at his British boarding school when he was a 6th year, and Amma learned English quite quickly for a 25-year-old Indian immigrant, but no one would say that they are out of the ordinary.
For a while I was obsessed with studying genealogy to find out where my peculiar ability could have come from. I eventually found that my great uncle twice-removed, now dead for 20 years, was a famous mathematician in India. He too had an incredible numerical memory, but he could also mentally manipulate the numbers and earned his reputation by solving several “impossible” problems. I read in a neuroscience textbook that when he was bored, he would do proofs in his head, and that he considered every number “a personal friend.”
Why did I inherit only part of this gift? While I’ve always taken the most advanced math courses in school, my mind lacks the ability to push beyond what I’ve already been taught; my memory locks me into the concrete aspects of numbers, rather than the abstract. Somehow I missed the parts of the talent that were really worth having.
Somewhere out there, in India, America, who knows where, a distant cousin of mine is walking around doing natural logarithms in his head as easily as a calculator can. I’ve thought, from time to time, of how interesting it would be to find him and ask him what it’s like – whether it’s fun always playing with the numbers in his head. Most of the time, though, I’m glad I’ll never meet him. It's hard enough having half a talent without being confronted with the living, breathing incarnation of the half you really want.
2
Linda meets us in the reception area. She is petite with brittle blond hair. “So nice to finally meet you,” she says, prodding the corners of her mouth upward.
“You, too.”
“Dr. Cavanaugh will be sitting in today as your official witness. As we discussed, there will also be a panel of counters who will record each set of ten digits. You can have breaks for food, water, and naps if you need them, but you will not be allowed to leave the room at those times. The only time you will be permitted to leave is for the bathroom. Do you have any questions?”
Why am I not asleep in my dorm room instead of here in Boston trying to prove... something? What am I even hoping to accomplish today?
“No, not really. I think I’m ready to start.”
6
These are the numbers that make their way into my head in the space of a T ride from Central to Park Street:
1570 – score of the girl in the ad for Kaplan test prep
2113024699 – serial number on the can of Dr. Pepper I’m drinking
16.99 – price tag on the shirt the woman sitting across from me takes out of her Filene’s Basement bag to show her friend
21 – percentage of your daily saturated fat in one Snickers bar, read from the back of the discarded wrapper on the floor
7 – number of people killed in a fire in Somerville last night, according to the front page of the Metro
978-369-7826 – phone number on the business card of the man in a trench coat sitting next to me. I don’t remember what his profession is.
5
The room is spacious and nearly empty, except for a table and 7 chairs. By the door, I notice a wastebasket with a fresh banana peel at the bottom. Two men holding stopwatch-like counting devices are seated along the far wall. Both have bald heads and oversized glasses. A third, more elegant man jumps up from his seat to introduce himself.
“Dr. Cavanaugh,” he says, extending his hand, “I’m the director of the Boston location. I don’t usually act as a witness for these things, but I just couldn’t pass up an opportunity to see that brain in action.” I nod, unsure of what to say. Dr. Cavanaugh clears his throat. “Anyway, we’re so glad you could be here today.”
His white hair is slicked back with fragrant pomade, and he wears a crisp blue dress shirt, khakis, and Birkenstocks. As I shake his hand, I see the curiosity in his eyes as he meets mine, seeming to look through them to the odd lump of gray matter that brought me here. I feel my nervous excitement bubble. Linda gestures for my small audience to take their seats.
“Alright,” Dr. Cavanaugh says, clapping his hands briskly. “Let’s begin.”
3
I wasn’t doing well in sixth grade math. Every Monday, Mr. Boardman handed out worksheets with problems covering the week’s material. Every Friday, we took a quiz on the material. Despite my ability to remember every problem on the worksheets and their solutions, I couldn’t remember the logic behind the intermediate steps.
“Alright guys, settle down. Ok, we’re talking about circles today. If you look down at your worksheets, you’ll see the symbol for pi. Yes, it’s pronounced like ‘pie’ – go ahead and laugh if you want. But pi is a really important number and you’re all going to learn it. On Friday, I’m going to ask you all to recite the first 10 digits of pi.”
I lifted my head from my desk. Pi was starting to sound like something I’d be good at.
5
It starts off easy: 3.141592653589793238462643382795028841971693993…
The first 1,000 digits are so familiar to me by now that I don’t even have to think. I just go, reflexively, the way experienced dancers perform figures without consciously remembering the steps.
This comfort never meant much to me. I often take it for granted, the way I know that I’ll remember my name and the apartment where I grew up with Amma and Papa. Today, though, I feel the pleasure of doing something that comes so naturally to me. I let my conscious mind drift off while the neural connections between my brain and my tongue perform their own kind of dance.
8
Pi goes on forever. I discovered this in my sixth grade math textbook. The numbers never run out, but even stranger, there is no logic to their order – at least that mathematicians have been able to discern. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, if they were missing something. Bored on the weekends, I started playing with computer generations of pi. I made up a little game for myself: I would memorize the digits in sets of ten, and reward myself by memorizing another ten every time I succeeded. Then I would run through all of the digits in my head, looking for some elusive meaning.
One day, Amma came in while I was huddled in front of the screen. She carried a stack of clean laundry, fresh from the washer, under her arm.
“What are you doing, Rajan?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Just looking at some numbers, that’s all.”
“Why? Don’t you get enough numbers in your head as it is?”
“Well, yeah, but these are fun…”
“All these numbers! They are taking up too much room in your head. Maybe you would be doing better in math class if you didn’t have the numbers in there instead.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works, Amma.”
She sighed. “I know, Rajan. But sometimes I just don’t understand. You are so smart at numbers, but…” she trailed off. “Anyway, here are your clothes. Make sure you don’t lose yourself in that computer.”
That night I pushed myself to remember more and more digits of pi, trying to work my mind so hard that it would snap and the gift would disappear – poof – back to wherever it came from. But there seemed to be no limit the string of digits I could cram into my brain. I could recall every one of them, one meaningless number after another, as easily as if I were reading from a long roll of paper unfurling before my eyes.
9
The 10,000th digit of pi is 8. The bald, bespectacled men look thoroughly bored, although they dutifully click their devices every time I finish a set of ten. Even Dr. Cavanaugh looks slightly sleepy.
I look at the clock. It’s been 2 hours and 43 minutes. My throat is starting to itch and my jaw is tired. I suddenly realize that this is the longest I have ever spoken continuously, just me, my own voice filling up the room. I guess numbers are the only subject that could keep me talking for so long.
7
When I got the acceptance letter from Yale, I was terrified that they had only let me in because they thought I was an oddity. At Amma’s urging, I had written about my memory in the application essay.
On a hot day in late August, my parents helped me lug suitcases and boxes up the stairs of my gothic dormitory. After we said our goodbyes, I watched them walk farther and farther away, disappearing across the quad. The grass was lushly, unnaturally green and I felt sick.
No one knew who I was. The other freshmen on my hall were oblivious to the fact that they were living next to an incredible memorist. My roommate acknowledged me with a slight nod when I entered the room, but other than that was lost in front of his computer most of the time. I heard rumors that he was one of the best CS programmers on campus, so I surreptitiously watched him from across the room sometimes. He leaned in toward his screen, stroking his eyebrows and typing out gibberish that could perform amazing stunts on command.
The guys who lived next door were both musicians, and I listened, paralyzed with panic, to the harmony of guitar and violin that drifted through my doorway during those first fall weeks. I never knew what to say to them; I was too in awe of how smart everyone was, how unbelievably self-confident. In my classes, I felt oppressed by the people who were going to create AIDS vaccines and change the education system in Vietnam. I could remember numbers. How spectacularly useless.
9
I can see the old record of 28,300 digits looming from thousands of digits away. By now I'm a runner feeling the exhaustion of all the laps already behind him. But I just need to push a little bit farther, through 4 and 6 and 2 and 9, on through another set of ten, and another after that.
When I ran cross-country in high school, I hated running most of the time. My lungs burned and my legs felt numb after the first few minutes. I would fantasize about turning my ankle or fainting of heat exhaustion – anything that would allow me to stop running. But something always prevented me from throwing myself down on the side of the road and giving in to the sweet rest I craved. Even now, I’m not sure what it was: Determination? Pride? The sheer force of inertia, reminding me that a body in motion wants to stay in motion? Probably all those things, but most of all knowing that the finish line is out there, somewhere, and if I keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll eventually cross it.
I’m reaching for that knowledge as I round the bend to 27,000 digits. The counter clicks and announces the milestone. Just 1,300 to go.
3
One night, my roommate broke down. I had never heard him so much as raise his voice, so I was shocked when I heard the angry stream of words coming out of his mouth as he howled into the phone.
“Why?” He kept on asking. “Why, why, why?”
After he hung up, the desperation of his sobs made me realize I had managed to stay a stranger to him for 3 months. “I fucking hate programming,” he wailed. “My parents won’t listen to me. They will never let me stop. They will never let me stop...” He rocked himself in his bed.
I cautiously tried consoling him. “Why don’t you take some other classes, too? Then they’ll see that you’re good at math, or English, or whatever, and maybe you could do that instead.”
He looked at me as if I had suggested that he take a trip to the moon to escape his troubles. “But I’m not good at those things.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “The fucking worst part is... they’re right.”
The next day, he appeared collected, if slightly rumpled and red-eyed, and continued on with his CS44 project.
I began to wonder whether all of our talents were arbitrary, unasked for. The girl who stayed up half the night writing poetry that crackled with anger seemed seized against her will by the language and appeared the next morning with bluish bags under her eyes. The star of the crew team had been born with a predisposition toward lean muscularity and felt obligated to strain his body for hours every day to prove that he deserved his gift. There wasn’t anything any of us could do to give these things back.
2
28,270… 28, 280… 28,290… I blow through these marks. In 11 digits, I will have a world record. I will have done something that no one in the world has ever done before. I will have my name written in a book that millions of people might peruse when they’re bored, then put on a shelf and forget. I will know, for myself, in my own mind, that I did it.
“3811563470,” I say.
Click. “28,300,” the counter says wearily. The world record is right there, waiting for me to claim it.
“Four,” I proclaim. I want to shout it at the top of my lungs, to hear “four, four, four” echoing off the white walls of the room.
Dr. Cavanaugh looks pleased, relieved. He starts jotting things down on his yellow legal pad. Then he looks up questioningly. Is this the end? It could be. I did what I came here to do.
Still, I think, I should at least do one more row. I can see the next number, and the next ten after that…
“3243352617... 8901763456…1726245680…” Click, click, click…
3
Halfway through spring semester of my freshman year, I started dating a girl. It happened so subtly that afterward I wondered if there had been some kind of mistake. Her name was Doree, and I noticed that she would drop by every other day to borrow my philosophy notes and argue about what we had learned in lecture. No matter what I said, no matter how carefully I tried to state my point of view, she never agreed with me. At first I was frustrated, then intrigued. I noticed that she had green flecks in her blue eyes, and that her brown hair looked red in a certain light. When I asked her if she wanted to go to freshman formal with me, she said yes. At the end of the night, she cupped my face gently in her hand and kissed me.
It took me a month to decide how I would tell her about my bizarre brain. I hadn’t told anyone at Yale about it, and I was unsure of how to explain. The best analogy I could come up with was a sieve: my mind lets almost everything pass through to the places where normal memories go, but the numbers get trapped. It doesn’t want to let them go. It just collects them there at the bottom of the sieve and stacks them in different configurations and never loses them. Sometimes I feel like my brain does this all on its own, without even stopping to ask if I’m interested.
Praying that Doree wouldn’t find me pathetic, I started: “So there’s something I haven't told you...” Then I explained. She dissolved my anxiety with a single gesture: she shrugged.
Then she started laughing. Her giggles started out quiet but grew into genuine guffaws.
"I thought you were going to say that you're really a woman or something," she gasped between howls. "I thought you were going to tell me that you're wanted for murder in six states and then whip out an axe and chop me up right here."
As I realized the ridiculousness of it all -- my brain, my anxiety over telling Doree -- I too managed a laugh. But another part of me didn't feel like laughing. Was that it? Could my freakishness really be that trivial? I wasn't sure I wanted to be so normal all of a sudden, after years of carrying my gift around like a hump on my back.
8
Pi goes on forever. Pi has no patterns, only randomness followed by randomness. There is no place to stop that is any better than another.
I’m up to 31,760. As the runner, I can feel that my hill is growing steeper; each number is taking slightly more effort to remember than the last. Pi might go on forever, but perhaps, just perhaps, my memory does not. This possibility has occurred to me before, but never seemed remotely real. I've faced limitations in many areas before -- I'm used to plenty of those by now -- but never here, the one place where I am special. And yet here I am, with tiredness and hunger and (could it really be?) boredom pressing down on me, and I'm not sure I want to keep running to the end of my ability.
4
“Still, that’s a gift, you know,” Doree said, after she recovered from her fit of mirth. “You could do something with that.”
“Like what?” I asked, smoothing her hair absentmindedly. “I’ve thought about this my whole life, and I’ve realized that there’s nothing I can do with it. Computers can do everything I can, except ten thousand times better.”
Doree disagreed. “You know, I think the fact that you’re a human with this ability is special. I think that that’s worth something, the fact that you’re not a machine. You can think about these numbers. They mean something to you. They don’t mean anything to a computer.”
“All it means to me is that I’m a freak.”
“Well, then,” Doree said, kissing my forehead, “Enjoy being a freak.”
A week later, I decided to contact the Guinness Book of World Records. A book full of freaks, I thought, is the one place my talent might take me.
6
I must recognize that by now they’ve all seen my talent for what it is: useless but amazing, amazing but useless. I can’t decide which to put first, which word should qualify the other. Maybe, in this moment, it’s enough to know that they are both true.
“Five,” I say. This is the 31,811th digit of pi, and the last one I recite.
2
Every memorist has his own specialty, and sometimes I think that others were luckier than I was. The most famous memorist was a man named Shereshevskii, who had an amazingly rich photographic memory. He could recall the number of dots on the ceiling tiles above his crib.
If I could have chosen, I might have remembered tastes. Then I could indulge myself in the chocolate cake from my ninth birthday party, or the first sip of alcohol I took when I was 16, sneaking some bourbon from my father’s stash. Or I might want to recall how it felt the first time I walked barefoot on grass, or the touch of a girl’s hand on my neck while we danced. I wish I could remember the way I felt when I found out that my grandfather died – whether I was sad or indifferent or relieved that Amma’s father, who lived in India and whom I had never met, had passed away. These are the things that make up a life – not numbers. What’s the purpose of memories that won’t allow you to look back on your life when you’re old and decide if you’re happy with it or not?
Then I wonder if any of that would have made me better off in the long run. The world is full of people with strange talents, glaring peculiarities, hidden scars. You try to get through life by making a bargain with what you’re given at the start. Some people are more successful than others; Shereshevskii committed suicide, while my genius great-uncle defined his life by his gift. I don’t know where I fall on that spectrum of rebellion and acceptance. I’m still trying to make peace with my own mind.
6
Dr. Cavanaugh steps forward to shake my hand. “Well done,” he says. “I’d love to know how that brain of yours works.” But before I have to attempt any sort of explanation, Doree leaps out of her seat to give me a hug. “I knew you could do it,” she says, squeezing my hand. We don’t kiss. We’re still trying to give my parents time to get used to the idea of me dating a girl who’s not Indian.
Amma and Papa stand up.
“Good job, Rajan,” Papa says. He pats my head in his familiar gesture of affection.
Amma lingers behind him. She looks tired. It has been 9 hours and 34 minutes since we started, after all.
“Congratulations,” she says. “You got the numbers out of your head.”
“I don’t think it works that way, Amma,” I say, afraid that she still doesn’t understand. Then she breaks into a silly giggle, and I realize she was joking.
“I know, I know. It was a good effort. I have to write your auntie and uncle about this. They’ll be so jealous.”
“Yes, Amma.” I hug her close to me and breathe in her scent – fresh laundry, cinnamon, and sweat. The barrage of smells gets mixed up in my head with my own fatigue, relief, and sadness, and I’m overwhelmed everything this moment holds, folded within it.
posted by Fuzzy @ 9:14 PM
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