Soulmates
4
A Scary Man
Jaime and the Stranger
JAIME’S ABILITY to block out others got better as he got older. He couldn’t avoid some of his classmates’ thoughts and by the end of the day, he was tired of blocking things and let much more slip through.
David still worked from home with occasional daytime visits to his office. He’d changed jobs to have a more flexible schedule so he could be with his son when needed. He was happy Jaime had made some friends and visited them at their houses or invited them to his house. David noted that all Jaime’s friends had been ESL students in kindergarten and were fluent signers.
One day after school, the two went to the grocery store for their weekly shopping trip. Jaime was tired and immediately put his headphones on to begin playing music and blocking out the thoughts of others. He wasn’t really paying attention to much else and wandered up an aisle in the store without his father.
Oh, yes. There’s a good one, he heard in his mind. It so shocked Jaime that he came to a dead stop and looked around him. At the end of the aisle he saw a man in a dark suit staring at him.
We have to get the rooms set up. And I can’t handle a little kid yet. But he’s perfect. I can tell by his eyes and the headphones. He has trouble blocking people out. I’ll have to let him pass for now, but I’ll be back. He’s one of the gifted ones. Together, we’ll rule the world.
Jaime wanted to shout at the intruder with his mind, but instead, he reflexively clamped down on all his own thoughts, burying them in the music that played through his headphones. He turned and ran back up the aisle, looking for his father as the stranger seemed to laugh in his head.
He was blinded to reason, not knowing where his father was. He saw the heavy door of the meat department ahead and rushed through it. The thoughts of the man, and everyone else in the store, were immediately muted. He decided to stay there until he could locate his father.
That presented a problem. He couldn’t hear anyone in the store and the cooler he’d rushed into was cold. Packages and haunches of meat lay on shelves and hung from hooks. And once the door was closed, it was dark.
He thought the man would probably leave the store once he’d disappeared. He would wait a few minutes and then push open the latch from the inside of the cooler to find his father.
By the time Jaime had managed to throw his entire weight against the plunger that would open the cooler door, his lips were blue and he was shivering. He stumbled out of the cooler and practically into the arms of a butcher.
“Here he is! I’ve got him!” the butcher called out. A flood of voices erupted in Jaime’s mind. Many were calling his name in his ears. Then he located his father and called out to him in his head. His father ran toward the meat department and caught his son in his arms. Jaime quickly scanned the thoughts he could hear in the store, but found no sign of the man he had heard in his head.
Had the man been talking to him? Or was he just thinking? Jaime couldn’t tell.
Jaime
Jaime hid in his room. The man in the grocery store had frightened him. Jaime’s closet offered some refuge from intruding thoughts, especially when he put on his headphones and concentrated on the music. He knew metal walls were the most effective at blocking others’ thoughts. When he rode in the car, he only ever heard his father’s thoughts beside him. With the creativity of a nine-year-old, he had ‘borrowed’ aluminum foil from the kitchen drawer and taped it to the walls of his closet. He believed it helped.
In the sanctuary of his closet, he slowed his speeding heart and thought about what had happened.
He had read a stranger’s thoughts in the store. They frightened him. But Jaime had to wonder how those thoughts had cut through the barrier of the music he was using to block others. Either the man simply broadcast his thoughts more loudly than most people, or…
Jaime’s heart nearly stopped beating. Or he had been broadcasting specifically to Jaime.
In all his life, he had experienced only one time that a person spoke to him in his head. His mother had directed her thoughts in response to his declaration that he loved her, just before she died. He had certainly experienced people thinking about him. It wasn’t that unusual. When he was introduced to teachers and other students who were told he didn’t speak, they always wondered what kind of kid he was and what caused his muteness. But no one tried to inside-voice speak to him.
As long as he could remember, Jaime had thought this was simply because other people didn’t like him and wouldn’t acknowledge him when he spoke to them in his head. When he began to learn sign language, he realized that other kids spoke to him in sign while their brains thought about what they were saying. Their thoughts were focused on their hands, though, and not on Jaime.
Jaime slowly came to the conclusion that other people were deaf in their heads. If he hadn’t learned sign language, he would eventually have had to use his out-loud voice or people would continue to just ignore him. At least now he had friends and could talk to them. They still ignored him in their heads, but they spoke with their hands.
What shocked him to silence when he heard the man in the store was the direction of his thoughts and the malevolence behind them. He was not a nice man. If the man had been ‘ready’ and Jaime had been older, Jaime knew he would have been kidnapped. But why? What did he need to be ready for?
And had the man been able to hear him?
Jaime had closed out most of the world with his headphones but he’d been thinking his own thoughts, mostly about school and Halloween coming soon. He’d already begun to meet new people in classes, but most of his classmates didn’t know sign language. Had the man heard his thoughts? Jaime had automatically closed himself off to other people when he heard the man in his head. He’d never felt the need to do that before. No one had ever heard him. He realized now that it was a skill he needed to practice regularly. He just needed to figure out what he had done to block anyone else from hearing him. What was it?
This problem occupied Jaime until his father found him for dinner.
Kenton
Kenton desperately wanted to be a telepath. He knew it was possible. He’d run all kinds of tests on students at the university. So much so that he’d gained a bit of a reputation as a crackpot. He’d only verified one actual telepathic case, but she had insisted on complete anonymity. He couldn’t use her data in any summary paper. He’d decided to carefully alter his findings in other instances for his dissertation.
It was real data, after all. It simply wasn’t the data from the subjects he cited. He felt justified in it. He barely passed his defense. His professors acknowledged his research but were all of the opinion the evidence cited was an outlier. He’d couched the material in an investigation of inner monologue and inner dialog. He explored some new data indicating that some people could not recognize their own inner monologue and believed they heard voices from outside their own head.
He speculated on all kinds of reasons for this, but his firm conclusion was that it was dangerous in the treatment of a person to ignore the idea that they might actually hear voices that emanated from external sources. The university had granted his doctorate, though there were committee members who still considered his study to be paranormal and not within the realm of real science.
What he needed was more examples, and there was no better place to get them than in his counseling practice. It was slow to gain momentum, but eventually he would get there.
Part two of his plan was to create a refuge where he could study people he identified as legitimately hearing voices in their heads without the interference of outside influences. This was sped along by two external factors.
The first was a visit he received from two men who identified themselves only as Smith from the FBI. They had read and studied his dissertation! Kenton immediately tensed up when they began discussing the possibility of his participation in studies they were conducting themselves. It was soon obvious they were not considering him as a researcher, but as a subject.
Kenton immediately left the country. He stayed in seclusion in India for two years, pretending to be a monk. He believed, rightly, that having this on his resume would shield the seriousness of his research. No one had seriously come to India to study the paranormal since the Beatles found enlightenment sixty years earlier.
He returned to Portland and immediately rented an office that was in the build-out stage. He had very specific requirements regarding the materials to be used, and special features to be added. He told the contractors that he wanted his office to be fully shielded so that clients could not be distracted by cell signals or WiFi. The contractor considered this reasonable for psychological counseling and built the Faraday cage-like structure around his entire office. The only access to the outside world was a wired internet connection and a landline phone.
The other thing that happened at that time, and was the reason he was able to afford the extraordinary adjustments to his office, was his inheritance. A rich old aunt had passed away and when all was said and done, Kenton discovered he was the sole heir to both her fortune and her property.
The property was a historical residence and he was able to update the interior, but was forbidden from altering the appearance of the property in any way. He did all the modifications internally, hiring subcontractors to follow his plans.
He wondered why there was only spotty cell phone service in the old buildings when it was fine and strong outside. His discovery was that the original lath and plaster walls were covered in chicken wire to help hold the plaster. It created a natural Faraday cage and inspired Kenton to enhance that feature throughout the renovation.
Only the upgrades to electrical and plumbing lines and the heating system needed to be permitted and inspected. And he had plenty of money and time to get things done over the course of a few years. Soon now, he would have his refuge of absolute silence where he could both study his subjects and be free of spying by the government’s microwaves.
Jaime and Mrs. Chapman
For Jaime, third grade was an important year of self-discovery. He learned arithmetic, conducted science experiments, read interesting stories, used a keyboard, and learned to read maps. With his best friends still in his class, he learned more sign language, Spanish, and handwriting.
Oregon did not require the teaching of cursive handwriting in elementary school, but their teacher felt it was a valuable skill and invited her students to stay in the classroom during recess one day a week to practice the skill. The six friends took advantage of the class and soon were writing in a beautiful script.
Cursive writing, Mrs. Chapman felt, had several benefits. She wished it was taught in elementary school, or even kindergarten when letters were taught. Writing in cursive was more natural because it made each letter a single continuous stroke. Printing disrupted the pattern recognition for children. The strokes were separate and children often forgot what stroke came next when their hand stopped still. It prevented much letter reversal. In printing, for example, both ‘b’ and ‘d’ began with a single vertical stroke. Then students had to stop and determine whether the circle belonged on the left or the right for the letter they wanted. With cursive, the flow of the two characters was different, one starting with the vertical loop and the other starting with the circle.
She’d also noted improved motor skills and word recognition when students learned cursive writing. Cursive writing required students to cross the midline of the body with their hands, improving their coordination. Words were connected together and were not seen as a string of individual letters.
Of course, students had to learn to read printed words, but she felt something vital was lacking in their education if they did not learn to write in cursive.
A key element was fostering artistry, and that is how Mrs. Chapman positioned teaching script. The six friends who took advantage of the class were soon writing in a beautiful script. Unlike the standard script that had been taught in schools until the twenty-first century, Mrs. Chapman taught her students to write Spencerian script. She called the class ‘calligraphy’ and her students worked hard to create the artistic letterforms.
At the end of the school year, half a dozen students had mastered the careful shaping of letterforms into the elegant script. And their classmates, who had not taken the one recess a week instruction, couldn’t read what the six had written! It was like they were a secret club.
Of course, they already had a secret language as few of the students knew sign language. Mrs. Chapman used her instruction time in handwriting to learn more sign language in the absence of the interpreter. She was soon able to hold basic conversations with them in sign. She wasn’t sure what set these students apart from others. Five were ESL students who spoke better English than most of her native English speakers. And one was the strange boy who didn’t speak at all, but constantly showed his intelligence in his writing, math, and science skills.
Jaime liked Mrs. Chapman. His first and second grade teachers mostly ignored him and his ESL friends in the classroom and let the interpreter take care of including them. Mrs. Chapman actually talked to him and waited for the interpreter to speak his signed response. She made sure the rest of the class paid attention to each person who was called upon to speak.
When he and his friends were promoted to fourth grade, they all missed Mrs. Chapman. While they were still in the same class, the teachers paid less attention to the group. They continued to meet once a week to practice their calligraphy, and often sent notes to each other that no one else could read.
Jaime and David
Things changed drastically in middle school. Students came from three different elementary schools and were thrown together in a mix that did not acknowledge existing friendships. With three times as many students, the clique of six friends was broken up into different home rooms and then moved between classes. They did not always stay with the same group of students all day.
For Jaime, this created even more issues. The school had two deaf students in Jaime’s grade. The school was legally obligated to provide an interpreter, but to economize, they lumped Jaime with the two deaf students so they would only require one interpreter. They were told they needed to take the same classes because the interpreter could not be in two places at once. More of their instruction was delivered by computer to cut the costs of the interpreter even further.
One of the deaf students was considerably behind their class in just about everything and really didn’t care. If Jaime had thought everyone ignored him, it was nothing compared to Samuel. Even his sign language was sloppy. Jaime didn’t think he’d ever handed in an assignment and he didn’t pay attention to the interpreter.
The other deaf student, Belle, was bored to tears by the classes. She’d already studied many of the things they were learning on her computer and was way ahead of the class. But, like Jaime, she was held back in the slow learners class by virtue of the other student.
The number of students running and laughing in the halls and trying to focus on classes created a non-stop mash-up of thoughts bombarding Jaime’s head. It taxed all his skills for blocking out the thoughts of others. The first two weeks of classes were exhausting for him, not because of the workload, but because of the effort it took to block so many voices. In middle school, he was not allowed to use his headphones at all—even during breaks. Neither teachers nor the administration would budge on the policy.
The operating assumption among most students and the faculty alike was that the deaf students and the mute boy were stupid. No one bothered learning sign language and other than the scattered few who had shared his kindergarten class, students shouted at them, if they bothered to recognize them at all. Jaime didn’t need the increased volume and the two deaf students still couldn’t hear them, so it was a wasted effort.
Jaime also recognized that the interpreter they were assigned was not very good. She frequently simplified things too much, did a lot of fingerspelling, and just got things wrong. Since all three of the sign language students had to sit together for the convenience of the interpreter, Jaime often got their attention and corrected the signs. Since he could hear the thoughts of the teacher, he could clarify some of the things he or she said.
By the end of the first term, however, it was difficult for any of the teachers to deny Jaime and Belle had established themselves at the head of the class in all areas except class participation. It was obvious that something had to be done.
Jaime and David were called into the principal’s office with the interpreter to discuss the problems he was creating in class by signing to the other deaf students during class.
“I’ve talked to my son about the classroom situation,” David said. “He has explained that the sign language interpreter is really not very good and he has to clarify what she has signed for the deaf students. He can hear the teacher and knows when it is not being interpreted correctly.”
“I beg your pardon,” the interpreter said. “I do a perfectly fine job of signing and he can’t possibly understand more of what the teacher says than I do!”
“You don’t understand it either. That’s why you get it wrong so often,” Jaime signed. David interpreted for the principal.
“Okay. Let’s calm down. Gladys, I don’t think you are needed in this discussion. I don’t want you feeling like you need to defend yourself in a discussion that is really about Jaime’s progress. Mr. Stackhouse can interpret for his son. We’ll talk about the arrangements later,” the principal said.
The interpreter huffed and left the room. Everyone else breathed a sign of relief.
“Jaime, I’m aware that you are a hearing student, and that you are attempting to help. Your deaf classmate, Belle, has transferred to an all-online learning program. Samuel is not improving even with your help. So, I don’t think you are needed as an interpreter and I don’t think you need an interpreter. Your grades from the previous semester are superb. You should be very proud of them.”
“Thank you,” Jaime signed.
“We will have an independent evaluation of the interpreter who has been in your classes to determine if she is doing the job she says she is. But that will take a while. I know the classes you’ve been in are not challenging you any more than they did Belle. But if you are transferred into the classes you’d like to be in, you will have to depend on your ears for instruction.”
“That’s fine,” Jaime signed. “I like that better. The interpreter was a distraction.”
“There is a downside for this. Any communication you have for your teachers will need to be in writing. That will limit class participation.”
Jaime carefully penned a note on a pad of paper in elegant Spenserian script.
The principal read the note and laughed.
“You may need to print your communications. I’m not sure your teachers can read this script—lovely as it is.”
“It seems the school system is not living up to its legal responsibilities,” David said. “I’m not sure that passing notes is the same assistive technology as having a competent sign language interpreter.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Jaime signed.
The principal sighed.
“I’m not an enemy here,” the principal said. “I want Jaime to succeed. He is at the head of his class in terms of his grades this term. Belle chose to move to all computer-delivered instruction because she works so far ahead of her class. I would guess she will graduate a year or possibly two years ahead of her class. I can offer the same alternative to Jaime. I have to say, though, my personal observation is that Jaime does quite well in the classroom environment. Most of his teachers agree, though not all teachers are as effective as others. How about if we try this for a term and I’ll hand-pick the instructors to match Jaime’s subject matter. They will be instructors who are the most open to a diverse student body. Perhaps the whole class will learn something new.”
“This is great, Dad,” Jaime signed. “Let’s try it!”
“My son believes it is a good opportunity. He’s willing to try it.”
“Let’s take a look at your requested classes,” the principal said.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
