Jupiter the Stupider E-Book

Brian Prousky

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

An underachieving young man who accidentally discovers he’s the world’s most talented athlete.

A humble school photographer who sees her life transformed into a fairy tale.

A rabbinical student whose regimented existence is turned on its head after beginning an affair with a woman outside his religion.

A novelist who abandons motherhood because of the burden it imposes on her writing.

A mountain climber whose fame is matched only by his reclusiveness.

A waitress whose self-esteem rises or falls each time a certain stranger visits her restaurant.

A woman who leaves her comfortable home and successful business to work in a faraway slum in the belief that, only there, can she repair her broken life.

An abhorrently behaved physicist who, in all likelihood, has proven the existence of God.

These are only some of the unforgettable eccentrics, loners and misfits who populate the pages of Jupiter The Stupider.

Mixing folklore, satire and stark realism, Brian Prousky has created a wide-ranging and uncommonly enchanting collection of stories.

Leseprobe

JUPITER THE STUPIDER

BRIAN PROUSKY

CONTENTS

The Legend of Gideon Marx

Monument

The School Photographer

Clara Too

The Legend of Eli Elman

Awake For Mourning

The Point of All This

A Question of Happiness

When Lester Fish Stopped Floating

Isabel

Abel Green’s Miraculous Tie

Jupiter the Stupider

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2023 Brian Prousky

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter

Published 2023 by Next Chapter

Edited by Graham (Fading Street Services)

Cover art by Lordan June Pinote

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

If this is the best of all possible worlds,

what are the others like?

– Voltaire

For Erynn, Jonathan, Carolyn and Allison

THE LEGEND OF GIDEON MARX

Once upon a time there was a Jewish physician, named Pavel Marx. He was the most talented doctor in the Ukraine and Russia, perhaps the world, and travelled between shtetls treating people who were very sick. When another doctor was unable to cure a patient, Pavel was summoned for a second opinion. More often than not he found a cure. Some patients he treated were so close to death their families had already built caskets and dug holes in the ground. Pavel saw things other doctors didn’t, symptoms that were almost invisible. Unlike them, he examined every inch of every patient he saw. It wasn’t unusual to find Pavel examining the toes of a patient suffering from head pain. And he asked many questions. If the patient could still speak, he questioned the patient and those who cared for him about things seemingly unrelated to the patient’s aliment. And if the patient couldn’t speak, he questioned only those who cared for him. The people in the shtetls thought Pavel was a sorcerer, a man with unexplained magical powers. But he wasn’t gifted that way. Pavel’s gift was that he could quickly take in dozens of pieces of information and put them together in his mind to solve a problem—a problem other doctors thought was an unsolvable mystery. In truth, he was a gifted problem-solver. Today he would be known as a gifted diagnostician.

One day the daughter of a wealthy man in St. Petersburg, a cousin of the Czar, became very sick. So sick she couldn’t eat or drink or lift her head off her pillow. The wealthy man summoned his family doctor who came to examine her. The doctor spent an hour with her, doing all the regular things doctors do, but afterward told the wealthy man he had no idea what was making her sick. The wealthy man summoned another doctor who reexamined the girl. He also said he was puzzled by her symptoms and had no idea how to treat her. The wealthy man summoned three more doctors. All of them admitted they too were stumped. Meanwhile the girl was getting worse. Her skin was turning grey. Her lips were turning blue. Her breathing was shallow and weak. The wealthy man was becoming desperate. He summoned all the doctors in St. Petersburg, including the five who had already seen his daughter. There were eleven of them. He sent them into her room to examine her together. Every hypothesis one of them came up with, another discredited. After eight hours they told the wealthy man they were no closer to discovering what was wrong with his daughter than they were when they first laid eyes on her. The wealthy man was angry and distraught. As the doctors prepared to leave his house, he wondered aloud about their abilities and qualifications. He didn’t care if his words were insulting. He wanted them to feel his pain. One of them, the youngest and bravest, lingered for a moment after his colleagues had left. He approached the wealthy man and said, “There’s another doctor you might try. A fish salesman told me about him. Though I haven’t actually met him. He’s a Jew who lives in a shtetl called Derazhnia. He has a wife and young son. Apparently he’s so talented he can cure a patient who already has his foot in a grave.”

With no time to waste, the wealthy man sent two soldiers in a carriage to fetch this miracle worker. It was normally a six-day return trip, but they travelled at incredible speed from the moment the sun rose to the moment it set, exhausting the horses, which twice they had to trade for rested ones. They reached the shtetl and fetched Pavel and brought him to St. Petersburg in only three days.

The wealthy man was waiting in the doorway when they arrived. Without introducing himself, he rushed Pavel upstairs to the girl’s bedroom. She had the appearance of a skeleton. Pavel bent over her and put his ear to her mouth to listen to her breathe. He put his hand on her chest. Just as he was about to tell the wealthy man there was nothing he could do to save her because her illness was incurable, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she stopped breathing. Pavel straightened up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She had cancer. In her lungs.” He expected to see inconsolable grief in the wealthy man’s eyes. Instead, he saw them fill with rage.

“You put your hand on my daughter and a second later she’s dead!” The wealthy man shouted. “I suppose you only cure Jews and kill everyone else!”

Because of his work, Pavel had met men who expressed their grief in anger. Though it was God, not him, they’d expressed it at. He wanted to defend himself but couldn’t think of the right words—words that in his mind wouldn’t further enrage the wealthy man.

“You have nothing to say for yourself? Has the angel of death lost his tongue?”

“I know how—”

“You know how to kill people! That’s what you know!”

The wealthy man picked up a marble statue of a ballerina from the dresser and smashed it against Pavel’s head, knocking him to the floor. A second later Pavel felt a heavy weight on his stomach and hands around his neck. They were the last things he felt.

Now one might assume the wealthy man was worried about getting arrested by the police. But back then relatives of the Czar didn’t get arrested. And they especially didn’t get arrested for killing Jews. The police would have been happy to accept any story the wealthy man told them, for example that Pavel accidentally slipped and banged his head.

Now one might also assume that that was the end of the wealthy man’s anger. After all, he’d just killed a man with his bare hands. But in his mind he still wasn’t even. Pavel had taken the life of his child. In return, he was going to take the life of Pavel’s child.

The next day he sent two soldiers—the same ones who’d originally fetched the doctor—back to the shtetl. Though this time with very different orders—to break into the doctor’s home at nightfall and murder his only child, Gideon, who had just turned two.

Those orders, of course, were never carried out. If they were, there would be no legend to speak of. Gideon’s story would have ended before it began.

Gideon and his mother, whose name was Sofia, were fortunate in one regard—many people felt deeply indebted to the doctor. One of those people happened to be the wealthy man’s groundskeeper. He was half-Jewish and had a nephew living in Kiev who was cured by Pavel of a near-fatal skin disease. After learning of the wealthy man’s plan for vengeance, the groundskeeper risked his own life and stole a horse and set out for Derazhnia. It was dark and the paths were hard to see but he travelled all night and got a head start on the soldiers. When he arrived at the shtetl he told Sofia and all the townspeople what had happened to Pavel and what was going to happen to Gideon if the wealthy man had his way. Waves of overwhelming grief washed over Sofia. Her knees buckled under her, and she fell to the ground sobbing. The townspeople, most of whom knew someone who was cured by the doctor, hid her and Gideon in a covered wagon and transported them in the middle of the night to a neighboring shtetl, where the townspeople also knew and revered the doctor. They too hid the pair in a covered wagon and transported them to the next westernmost shtetl. And the two kept moving like this, from shtetl to shtetl, until they were in Poland. But still Sofia feared the wealthy man’s quest for vengeance. It was possible he’d put a bounty on Gideon’s head. And it was possible he had friends and business associates in all the countries of Europe who would happily take the child’s life not just for the bounty but also to win favor with the wealthy man, which, if you were a trader or importer and exporter, could prove quite lucrative.

So they kept moving westward, sometimes by carriage and sometimes by train, all the way to England. And because she still didn’t feel safe, she spent all her remaining money and purchased a cabin aboard a ship to Canada.

It was a slow and tedious journey. Sofia and Gideon were both seasick the whole time. The food was the same every day, lukewarm porridge in the morning, stew and potatoes in the evening. Neither could eat more than a few bites without becoming nauseous. The cabin had enough room for only one narrow bed. Gideon slept against his mother’s side and woke up crying every couple hours. She gave him sips of water and comforted him until he fell asleep again. She hardly slept at all and cried silently most of the night thinking about Pavel. “Your father was a great doctor,” she whispered to Gideon, wiping tears from her eyes. “One day you will be too. You’ll solve the most difficult medical mysteries. Other doctors will marvel at you.”

When the ship reached Canada they were thin and pale. The port they docked at was in Halifax. They went into a big stone building. Their suitcase and coats were taken from them. The first person they met was a nurse. She was wearing a white uniform and had four interpreters with her and was surprised to hear Sofia speak English. It was in fact one of many languages Sofia spoke. She was raised speaking Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish and German. Pavel had taught her English and French. Gideon was being raised in a house of six languages and spoke in sentences that mixed two or more together. The nurse looked in Sofia and Gideon’s mouths and ears, took their temperatures and put on white gloves and checked their hair for lice. Afterward she gave Sofia two oranges and told her to eat one and feed one to Gideon. Both had never tasted anything so sweet and wished they could have eaten twenty more. The next person they met was an old woman in a blue jacket and skirt. She also had four interpreters with her. She too was surprised to hear English spoken back to her. “Do you have a passport or birth certificate or any official papers?” she asked Sofia, who had none of these things. The old woman asked Sofia her full name and religion and Gideon’s full name and why they had come to Canada and many other questions. She wrote down Sofia’s answers on long sheets of paper. Despite how harrowing Sofia’s story was, the old woman didn’t express any emotion. Sofia was afraid she would be sent back to Europe and asked the old woman if this was a possibility. “It’s unlikely,” the old woman said. “The Jews sponsor everyone.” Sofia wasn’t sure what that meant but felt some relief in hearing there were other Jews in Canada. After the interview, Sofia was handed a thick rectangular card, with the words Border Inspection across the top, with her and Gideon’s full names and a red circular stamp on one side and an unrecognizable signature on the other and the words Jewish Person on the bottom.

“This isn’t a visa,” the old woman said. “You have to apply for one in the next six months.”

She waved her hand in the air and a man appeared carrying the suitcase and coats that belonged to Sofia and Gideon. They followed the man into a small room with wooden benches against two of the walls and a door to a washroom in the other. He set down the suitcase and coats and left and came back with two glasses of water and handed them to Sofia and left again. They were the only passengers in the room. They waited an hour. During that time, Gideon slept on one of the benches. While he slept, Sofia noticed that the door to the washroom had a sliding lock on it about three-quarters of the way up. She locked the door and placed one of the chairs directly beside the frame. After Gideon woke, she told him to go use the washroom. He went over to the door and pulled and pushed the handle. The lock prevented it from moving. He pulled and pushed again. He looked back at Sofia. She told him she wasn’t going to help him. “You have to figure it out yourself,” she said. “There’s only one way.” He pulled and pushed the handle with more force and for a longer time. The door wouldn’t budge. “For God’s sake, look around you.” Sofia’s voice had a hint of anger in it. Gideon did what he was told but still had no idea how to open the door. He started to cry. “Use your brain,” Sofia said. He didn’t understand. “Your brain,” she repeated. He still didn’t understand and cried louder. She walked over to him and lifted him onto the chair. “Now open it.” He bent down and grabbed hold of the handle. “No,” she said. He let go and his crying grew even louder. She took his hand and lifted it over his head and placed it on the lock and told him to look up. His body was shaking. When she released her grip his hand fell to his side. She took hold of it again and using his fingers slid the metal bar to the right unlocking the door. “If you want to solve great mysteries like your father,” she said, lifting him in her arms and wiping tears from his eyes, “you have to use your brain.”

She held him until he stopped crying then set him down and sent him into the washroom. He came out two minutes later. His eyes were still red and teary. Shortly after that a man and woman entered the room. They were both large and dressed in expensive-looking clothes. The woman hugged Sofia. “We just heard your story,” she said. “How horrible.” Gideon was standing on the chair next to the washroom door playing with the lock. She walked over to him and hugged him too. “You poor, poor boy,” she said. The man asked Sofia for the card she was given. She handed it to him. He studied it and put it in his breast pocket. “You’re safe now,” he said. “Here, the Czar’s cousin has as much power as a flea.”

The man and woman took Sofia and Gideon to an Inn. There the two bathed and ate dinner and slept in separate beds for the first time in weeks. The Inn was filled with Jewish families, some of which were missing mothers or fathers. They’d come in on a ship the day before from a port in Odessa, a more usual place of escape for persecuted Jews. On that day, the room in which Sofia and Gideon had waited was overcrowded with twenty-five people.

They were awoken the next morning by a knock on their door and voice telling them to pack and come downstairs. After breakfast, the large man and woman led all the immigrants on foot to a train station, gave them back their inspection cards and told them where they were going and who to ask for. Half were being sent to Montreal and half to Toronto. Sofia and Gideon were being sent to Toronto. The train ride was twenty hours though unlike on the ship they were served meals that included fruits and vegetables. Another man and woman met them at the station. They were also large and wore expensive-looking clothes and bore a striking resemblance to their counterparts in Halifax. The two led the group to a row of carriages waiting outside the station. Half the carriages, including the one in which Sofia and Gideon entered, were driven to a rooming house that resembled a long barn with small dusty windows. It was near the city’s business district on a wide dirt road called Spadina Avenue.

Sofia and Gideon lived in their new residence for less than a year. Because Sofia was still young and pretty lots of men were willing to overlook the fact that she had a child and expressed an interest in dating her. It wasn’t the type of attention she cherished. In her heart she knew she would never love anyone as much as the doctor or meet anyone as extraordinarily gifted. But she also knew she was in a strange country, and in a dark and airless building crowded with immigrants, and that if she ever wanted to get ahead she would need to find someone to support her and her child.

The man she eventually chose was a pharmacist and drugstore owner named Ezra. He was decent and hardworking and fell head-over-heels in love with Sofia at first sight. Ezra’s apprentice delivered diapers and medication to the rooming house. One day the apprentice was ill and Ezra brought the items himself. That’s when he first saw Sofia. He asked her out and she asked him if he could afford a wife and child. He said he could and she accepted his invitation. He was ten years older than her but had a youthful face. He was a secular Jew and kept his store open on Saturdays. He asked her if this was a problem and she said it wasn’t. “Not acting Jewish is wise,” she said. They were married in less than a month and she and Gideon moved into his house.

She didn’t love him but loved his kindness toward her and her son and that made her happy most of the time. Most, but not all, of the time—not when she was thinking about Pavel and how much she missed hearing his voice and lying in his arms. Eventually her English improved to the point where she had just a hint of an accent. And Gideon’s improved even more, and he sounded like a child born in Canada. Both also made friends, Gideon with his new cousins and the boys he went to school with and Sofia with her new adult relatives and neighbors. And, at the same time, they learned the mannerisms and customs of their new countrymen.

For Sofia, her reconstructed family enjoyed a degree of security she never thought possible for Jews anywhere in the world. In the next three years she had two more children, both daughters. She gave them popular Canadian names, dressed them in the same clothes gentile children wore and taught them to speak only English.

For Gideon, growing up in Canada hadn’t afforded him the same degree of security Sofia enjoyed. That’s because his security wasn’t measured in the distance between him and countries where people were intolerant of Jews. Increasingly, it was measured in the distance between him and the person he loved and relied on most—his mother. Or, more to the point, in the distance between him, as he was, and him, as she expected him to be.

To his inescapable detriment, as he grew older, the more he resembled his father in both appearance and disposition. And because his father was a man with an extraordinary gift, Sofia fully expected Gideon to have inherited that gift and to go on to become a great doctor. At home, Gideon gave the impression of wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps. He did his homework without complaining. He liked to read. He was curious about things. But in school his efforts weren’t rewarded. His teachers saw no signs of superior intelligence in him. They gave him average or slightly above average marks. On tests and exams he did well enough, sometimes better than well enough, though the most difficult or challenging problems were always beyond his comprehension and kept his marks from improving.

Everything about Gideon’s performance in school drove Sofia crazy. How could he have inherited all his father’s physical and behavioral attributes but not the single attribute that mattered most? One evening, when his homework was finished she told him she didn’t care what his teachers thought of him, she knew he was destined to become a great solver of medical mysteries like his father, a discoverer of cures and healer of diseases that eluded other doctors. “This is why your life was spared,” she said, squeezing his arm. “This is your destiny. There is no other.”

That was also when she took matters into her own hands and started testing him herself. After school and on weekends. With wooden and mechanical puzzles for him to take apart and put back together. With toy locks for him to unlock. With complicated knots for him to untie. With model ships inside glass bottles for him to build. With brainteasers for him to decipher. With scientific and mathematical problems for him to solve. With books, borrowed from her doctor, about various common and uncommon diseases and how they were diagnosed and treated, which she expected Gideon to memorize and recite back to her.

Unfortunately, he had no aptitude for her tests. Even worse, he mispronounced the names of diseases, especially those with multiple syllables. He became her unsolvable puzzle. Each time he failed she became increasingly frustrated, increasingly obsessed with unlocking the brilliant deductive mind she was certain he inherited from his father. If he could pass just one of her tests, she believed, he would realize his potential like a chess or piano prodigy and then there would be no limit to what he might accomplish. She tried to hide her frustration beneath inspiring words, telling him there was no better feeling in the world than the feeling of possessing singular intelligence and that all that stood in his way was a bit more focus and determination. When that didn’t work, she resorted to fear, telling him that if he continued to fail her tests he was headed for a career as a common labourer, earning such a small wage that no woman would marry him. And when that didn’t work, she resorted to guilt, telling him of the lengths to which she’d gone to save his life and how little she asked of him in return. And when that didn’t work she resorted to bribery, telling him that once he succeeded he could spend extra time playing with his friends, listening to the radio, doing nothing.

Having run through her strategies, she tried them all again. But the only effect they had on Gideon was a mounting frustration mirroring her own.

“I’m not good enough,” he complained, more and more often. “I want to give up.”

“I’ll hear nothing of it,” she always shot back. “You’ll never give up. And I won’t either.”

Finally, one evening, Ezra intervened. Until then the force of his wife’s conviction appeared to him like an impenetrable wall—one he hadn’t tried to breach for fear of her anger and withdrawal of intimacy. But now he was equally fearful she was losing her mind. “You need a break,” he told her. “Before you both go crazy. Let the boy go outside and play with his friends.”

Gideon’s friends were outside playing hide and seek. For the last hour, their screams and laughter had entered the house through the dining room window.

After he failed twice more to diagnose an illness, she let him go. Though not before telling him, “You can hide from your friends in that silly game, but you can’t hide from your destiny.”

From then on Ezra intervened whenever the tension between Sofia and Gideon escalated to a level he found unnerving. But because he worked long hours at the pharmacy and wasn’t around most evenings and Saturdays, Gideon, from grade one to nine, was still force-fed a diet of puzzles and problems he tried to, but couldn’t, solve.

As for his marks, they improved a bit because, like his stepfather, he too worked long hours. However he wasn’t an above-average student, and he certainly wasn’t exceptional. His sisters, on the other hand, whose schoolwork received much less attention from their mother, excelled in all their subjects and were justly rewarded by their teachers.

Though, by far, his worst day of school each year was his last, when he was given his final set of marks. It was a somber and dreadful day for Gideon. And grade nine was no different. On his way out the door he was handed his report card. Predictably, it was good, not great. Afraid of his mother’s reaction, he left it on the kitchen table and hid in his bedroom. Upon reading it, Sofia threw her arms in the air in frustration and said she was out of ideas and exhausted and needed a break. She wasn’t going to put either of them through a summer of seven-hour days trying to ignite his brain. She needed to rethink her strategy, consult with experts in the fields of education and psychology, rest and regain her energy. She went upstairs and informed Gideon of her decision—that she was close to giving up, close to realizing she was never going to mold him in his father’s image, close to leaving him to his own destiny. She needed a timeout from teaching him to decide once and for all if he was salvageable. It wasn’t what Gideon had expected to hear. And though he felt shamed and humiliated, it was still a welcome development.

That night, Sofia and Ezra made arrangements for Gideon to spend the next two months with Ezra’s brother and sister-in-law, who owned a small winery in Kelowna, British Columbia. Their names were Nathan and Ruth. They had two children around Gideon’s age and a big home that could easily accommodate another person. It was Ezra who came up with the idea for the trip. He’d told Sofia, “The fresh air will do the boy good.” He didn’t tell her what he really thought, that simply being apart from her would do more good for Gideon than fresh air or anything else in the world.

A week later Gideon travelled by train to Kelowna. It took four days to get there. The length of the trip didn’t bother him. Between meals and the occasional conversation he had with other travelers, he found he could stare for hours at the unchanging landscape—at the big squares of yellow, green, and brown that appeared to him like a giant quilt made by God and spread over the land. Though what he appreciated most about the train ride was the peacefulness he felt inside himself, the respite from unreasonable expectations imposed upon his mind. For four days he was expected to do nothing more than eat and sleep.

When he arrived at the final station, Nathan and Ruth were waiting for him. They owned an automobile, the first in which Gideon would ever ride. The drive to the winery was noisy and exhilarating. The half-open windows rattled, and wind blew wildly through his hair and clothes.

Almost immediately, Gideon felt at home in his aunt and uncle’s company. And over the next two months this feeling wouldn’t change. Like Ezra, they were kind and generous, treating Gideon as if he was their own child.

Not surprisingly it was the happiest summer of Gideon’s life. He learned to pick and crush grapes. He learned to till and irrigate soil. He learned to care for animals. He swam in a lake, napped under trees, ran through fields of high grass, walked through forests. He was inseparable from his cousins. They played and laughed every day. From all the exercise, his hunger and thirst were constant, but food and drinks were abundant. Huge bowls of fruit and pitchers of water and lemonade were always nearby. The meals the family ate were extravagant with many courses. At dinner, at least three different types of wine were served. Conversations were far-reaching and interesting. Often there were guests who had travelled from different parts of Canada and the United States to purchase cases of recent vintages and who told exciting stories about their lives.

Every day Gideon had the same feeling he’d had on the train, a complete absence of tension. His whole body seemed to unfurl in the fresh air and sun, as if it had shed a heavy coat. During his third week at the winery he noticed his pants no longer reached his ankles, his shirts no longer covered his stomach, his shoes no longer fit. He started wearing his uncle’s clothes, which at first were too big, then fit perfectly, then were too small. Fearing he would hurt his feet, Ruth cut open a pair of shoes and reconstructed them with extra leather and tire rubber and small nails. She and all the people around Gideon thought he was having a growth spurt, an accelerated and not-quite-normal growth spurt but a growth spurt, nonetheless. Though Gideon knew better. Out from under the weight of his mother’s enormous expectations, every part of his being was expressing its freedom. His mind too felt ample and uncluttered. He discovered he had a sense of humor, a memory for small details, and an aptitude for learning the winery business. He made clever suggestions to his uncle about how the vineyard might run more efficiently and his uncle was surprised and grateful for the advice and because of it made changes to how seeds were stored and planted and what chemicals he used to treat grapes to keep insects away.

Inevitably, when the summer came to an end, Gideon didn’t want to leave. He cried into his pillow on his last night at the winery and on and off during the long journey home. In Toronto, when he stepped off the train, his mother had trouble believing it was him. She thought she was looking at a different person than the one who’d departed a couple months ago. He was almost a foot taller. His arms and legs were longer and more muscular. His hair was wild and reached his shoulders. His skin was deeply tanned. Even his neck was larger and straighter. Only his face was vaguely familiar to her. Though what she found most astounding, and equally disturbing, was the loss of his resemblance to his late father, who, his whole life, had been thin and pale and average in height.

After they left the station she realized he would need a whole new wardrobe before school started, which was in two days, and probably a new bed. Instead of going directly home she took him to Zimmerman’s, the store where Ezra bought his clothes. Inside the store there was very little space. It was narrow and crowded with merchandise. Gideon left his suitcase at the front door. A salesman measured him from head to foot and brought out three pairs of pants, seven pairs of underwear, two undershirts, two pairs of shoes and a belt. The collared shirts, which he hadn’t brought out, were hanging among dozens of others on metal bars close to the ceiling. The salesman picked up a wooden stick with a curved prong at the end of it and raised it over his head and attempted to lift two of the items Gideon still needed off a metal bar but accidentally hit the bar itself breaking the prong from the stick. It fell to the floor and the salesman bent to retrieve it and said there was a spare stick in the backroom he was going to get. Before he had a chance to leave, Gideon, who hadn’t spoken except to say hello, suddenly announced, “It’s OK, I’ll get them.” The salesman looked at Gideon then up at the row of shirts, which were hanging quite high. A moment later, Gideon bent his legs and jumped in the air and reached toward the ceiling but because he only rose a few inches off the ground, failed to grab hold of anything and landed unsteadily. The salesman said, “Nice try, kid,” and smiled at Gideon’s mother, who turned to her son and added, “Now let the man get another stick.” Gideon, though, wasn’t paying attention to either adult. He was looking quickly back and forth between the shirts and his legs, perhaps as many as ten times, until an expression of surprise and excitement appeared on his face, the kind of expression associated with solving a mystery or making significant discovery. He bent his legs again, crouching down lower than he had before. Then he swung his arms over his head and pushed off with his feet and sent his body shooting into the air. He didn’t just go higher, he went a lot higher. So high his head brushed the ceiling, which was many feet above the ground. And when he took hold of the collared shirts he was looking slightly down at them and seemed to hang in the air for a couple seconds, which gave him plenty of time to remove them from the bar. He landed with a loud thud that echoed through the store. Though unlike his first landing, he didn’t keep his legs straight—if he had he might have broken his ankles—and instead, absorbed the blow by bending his knees the instant his feet hit the floor and crouched down like a baseball catcher but still with the shirts held high enough in the air, so they didn’t get dirty.

Both Sofia and the salesman were stunned by what they just saw. Though both had different reactions. Sofia dropped her purse and had to grab hold of one of the clothing racks to steady herself. The salesman, after a moment of staring at the metal bar from which Gideon had just removed the shirts, ran into the backroom and brought out a tall stool and set it down and, with some difficulty, stood on his tiptoes on the top of it and used a tape measure to measure the distance between the ceiling and floor, which turned out to be twelve feet.

“Incredible,” he said, climbing back down. You must be a basketball player.”

Two other customers and another salesman were in the store. They’d remained frozen in disbelief—until now when they started walking in Gideon’s direction.

Gideon had heard of basketball but had never played. He was about to reply to the salesman when Sofia snatched the shirts from his hand and grabbed his arm, which felt oddly large to her, and led him quickly to the cash register. In an almost frantic voice, she said, “What do we owe you?”

The salesman sensed her discomfort and looked at the approaching people in a way that suggested they shouldn’t come nearer.

“Nine dollars,” he said, wrapping the clothes in a large brown paper package and tying it with string.

Sofia left the money on the counter and handed Gideon the package and took hold of his arm again. At the entrance he picked up his suitcase and she rushed him out of the store.

They walked quickly for two blocks, with Sofia walking ahead of him the whole time. When at last she slowed down, he caught up to her. “You made a spectacle of yourself in there,” she said. "Like a circus animal.”

Gideon was preoccupied with his own thoughts and only half-listening. After years of feeling inadequate for failing to solve the problems she’d put before him, he’d solved a problem, not because his mind told his body what to do but because his mind and body knew what to do, as if they were suddenly blended together and simultaneously capable of a type of deductive reasoning that was instantly translatable into any motion or movement he desired. Every part of him felt like a brain.

“Gideon, are you paying attention?”

“Yes.”

“Then what did I say?”

He thought for a moment and realized his only option was to apologize.

“I’m sorry.”

She repeated what she’d said, with more anger this time, and added, “Do you know what circus animals get paid? Peanuts.”

They walked in silence for a minute. The package and suitcase, though both large, felt light in his hands. The street was crowded with slow-moving or parked carriages and automobiles. The automobiles were still a novelty but growing in number every week. People carrying wrapped objects of different sizes and shapes were going in and out of shops.

They turned onto a wider street. Wagons filled with fruit and vegetables were lined up on one side and male vendors in long stained aprons with big pockets were watching old and young women, some with children, carefully make their selections. In a softer and more conciliatory tone, she said, “You became much taller and stronger while you were away. Obviously, you can jump very high. And you can probably run very fast too. And lift heavy objects. And maybe you’d be a very good player of that game the salesman mentioned. But remember none of those things will help you fulfill your destiny. None of those things would have made your late father proud of you.”

Arriving at home, Gideon’s sisters and Ezra, and people in the neighborhood, had reactions to him that were similar to Sofia’s. A friend who lived nearby, and who saw Gideon walking with his mother, ran over to him and looked up and asked, “What happened to you?” The two were the same height before the summer. “I grew,” he answered. And for a moment the friend appeared unsure of what to say or do next before racing across the street and into his house, apparently eager to tell his family.

Unfortunately for Gideon, what Sofia and everyone else around him failed to comprehend was the lone circumstance that allowed his transformation to occur. Like his relatives in British Columbia, his family and friends in Toronto were blind to the un-stifling effect of his brief emancipation from his mother’s unremitting pressure and believed he’d simply had a growth spurt, which boys his age were prone to have and even more prone to have during summer months.

They were wrong of course. And Sofia was doubly wrong because not only did she fail to comprehend the message Gideon’s suddenly liberated body was sending her, but misinterpreted it as sign she should renew her efforts to properly train his mind, believing it capable of the same extraordinary growth as the rest of him.

That evening after dinner she gave him a haircut in the backyard. He liked his hair long but was tired from his five-day journey and decided the quickest path to bed was the path of nonresistance. He sat on a small wooden chair with a sheet wrapped around him and struggled to stay awake while she did her work. Soon his hair was short and resembled the style he’d had before the summer. Afterward he went immediately to his room and in minutes was in bed and asleep, his feet jutting out well beyond the end of the mattress.

Sofia, on the other hand, was too excited to sleep. Her mind was filled with hope—hope about what Gideon might now be capable of. She lay awake, listening to Ezra’s steady breathing and at midnight slipped out of bed and went downstairs. She opened a closet and removed all the teaching aids she’d packed up before the summer—the wooden and metal puzzles and knotted ropes and sets of oversized cards containing brainteasers and books containing science and math problems and medical diagnoses—and arranged them on the dining room table. When she was done she went back upstairs but her anticipation kept her awake and she got out of bed again a few hours later and read a magazine and cleaned the kitchen counters and floor and went for a walk through the empty streets before finally preparing breakfast.

Gideon didn’t wake until midmorning. Though he towered over his mother now and felt he could shift the balance of power in their relationship at any moment, he wasn’t free of the feeling of not wanting to disappoint her. Following breakfast, he sat dutifully at the dining room table and tried to solve the first puzzle she put in front of him. It was a chain wound several times through three hoops, all made of metal. The object was to free the hoops. There was only one solution—and it eluded him. After thirty minutes the chain was wound around his fingers and wrists, with all three hoops still attached. He was like a large animal caught in a trap and she had to help untangle him and despite how careful she was the back of his left hand was cut and bruised.

Over the next day and a half the drama of that initial failure was replayed in more and more stress-inducing ways. Some of the tests she administered ended with her expressing disappointment or bewilderment that his growth appeared to be an exclusively physical phenomenon. “How is it possible for your brain not to have grown along with your head?” she would ask him. Others ended with one yelling at the other or with one storming out of the room.

Tension seeped into the walls of the house and enveloped the whole family. At various times Ezra suggested to Sofia that she stop torturing Gideon with unrealistic expectations. To him it appeared Gideon’s newly enlarged stature was being diminished, that he was actually shrinking beneath the pressure. Sofia refused to listen, telling Ezra to mind his own business. The drama being played out was between her and Gideon, no one else. “I didn’t save his life so he could waste it,” she said.

As for her main adversary in this drama, while he continued to subject himself to repeated acts of humiliation, mostly out of habit but partially out of a dwindling hope she was right all along, his mounting awareness of how much stronger he was than her, and frankly anyone else he’d ever met, and how easily he could rewrite the long-understood terms of their relationship was playing like a broken record in his mind. It took a full day and half but on the evening before he returned to school, while Sofia paced behind him, and while he stared into a medical book, trying and failing to identify a disease based on four pages of complex and seemingly unrelated symptoms, he’d finally had enough. Her arsenal of hope and guilt, once so imposing to him, was now just a spent force of hollow words.

Without explaining himself, he rose from the table and started toward the door. She yelled at him to sit back down and ran around him and blocked his path. Ezra and Gideon’s sisters were drawn toward the noise. They entered the room and stood next to one another watching the standoff. Gideon reached out and silently lifted his mother up and set her down a couple feet to his right. He left the room and then the house and took a long walk until the city receded behind him and he was in a field of tall grass and trees. He lay down in the shade and breathed deeply and stretched his long arms above his head. The weight of his mother’s expectations gradually escaped his body and he felt as relaxed and free as he had in Kelowna.

He stayed there, falling in and out of sleep for the remainder of the day and returned home after dark. His mother heard the door open and close and his footsteps on the floor. She rushed from the kitchen with the rest of the family following close behind. Before she reached him, she was already yelling, enraged by his disloyalty to their shared mission. He listened for a moment and once again lifted her in the air. She wasn’t as passive or surprised this time and kicked her legs and swung her arms. After he set her down, she grabbed his shirt and ordered him to return to the dining room table and to the puzzles and problems he hadn’t yet solved. Her actions and words had no effect on him. Holding onto his shirt, she was pulled along behind him. His sisters and stepfather remained silent, mesmerized by the scene unfolding before them. Ezra, inadvertently, also stood in Gideon’s way and he too was lifted up and set down a couple feet to the right. Gideon pulled Sofia into the kitchen. He ate from a bowl of potatoes and chicken, leftover from dinner. She tugged harder on his shirt and yelled at him to turn and face her. He finished eating and pulled her back through the doorway. He took three more steps and reached around his side and grabbed hold of her hands and forced them open. She cried out, exaggerating her pain. He knew without looking he hadn’t hurt her. She cried out again as he climbed the stairs to his room.

No one spoke to Gideon the next morning during breakfast. Depending upon who he looked at, he was met with a curious or contemptuous gaze. Though it was somewhat comforting to him that the ratio of benign to malignant gazes was three to one. His mother silently handed him his lunch and he left for school. Despite his long walk the day before, the new clothes he was wearing, particularly his pants, were still stiff and unyielding. Following his last class, the school’s basketball coach was waiting for him in the hallway. He invited Gideon to the team’s first practice, which was now taking place in the gym. Only an hour ago the coach had heard about Gideon’s extraordinary jumping ability from one of the teachers. She had heard about it from her older brother, a salesman at Zimmerman’s. Gideon had never played basketball but was curious about his own athletic potential after retrieving the shirts in the clothing store. He thought about how high he’d jumped and wondered if that skill alone was enough to make him a good player. The coach assumed Gideon’s silence meant he was reluctant to join the practice. And that the likely reason was because he feared embarrassing himself in front of the other boys. “You can refuse to participate in any drill that seems too difficult,” the coach said. “And you can leave any time.” Gideon accepted the coach’s offer and followed him to the gym. Unlike the other boys, Gideon didn’t have a proper uniform and instead wore his undershirt, pants, and shoes. The coach shouted out a number of mysterious instructions and blew a whistle he wore around his neck and the boys began practicing on the court. “Come with me,” he said to Gideon. The two walked to the far end of the gym, beyond one of the baskets and backboards that hung from a tall pole. He began explaining the game to Gideon, who took in only fragments of what he was being told. “You can’t move without dribbling the ball. When you’re on offence you try to shoot the ball through the other team’s basket. When you’re on defense you try to prevent the other team from shooting the ball through your basket.” The coach went on to explain the different types of passes, including the bounce pass and chest pass, and the different types of shots, including the layup and jump shot. “If you can jump half as high as Mrs. Walker’s brother says you can,” he added. “You can slam the ball right through the basket.” While he explained the game to Gideon, Gideon was focused on the boys on the court. They were all older than him though only one was taller. None were Jewish. Half were wearing shirts and half were bare-chested. There was a pattern to the way they moved that was straightforward to Gideon. And even when their movements varied, the pattern remained relatively stable—the whole game seemed finite and simple. “This is how you dribble,” the coach said. He was bouncing a dark leather ball with his right hand.

Every now and then Gideon’s eyes were met by one of the players staring back at him. As a collective they couldn’t make sense of what was transpiring at the far end of the court. They were engaged in a practice, but their attention was split. Occasionally they whispered things to each other and laughed. It wasn’t difficult for Gideon to guess that they were making fun of him. The tallest and most talented player on the court was a blond-haired boy named Christopher. He seemed more captivated by Gideon’s presence than anyone else. “Give him a penny to play with!” he suddenly yelled out. “That’s something he’ll know what to do with!” The other boys laughed. The coach told Christopher to keep his mouth shut. He then told all the players that the next one who made a rude remark would have to do seventy pushups. He handed Gideon the ball and said, “Try dribbling.” Gideon was still staring at Christopher. He realized the only differences between Christopher and the other players was speed—Christopher was faster—and height—Christopher could see over his opponent’s heads and had better sightlines. “Try dribbling,” the coach repeated. Gideon bounced the ball once and caught it. The coach said the idea was to keep bouncing the ball. Gideon said he understood but again bounced it only once and caught it. The coach looked confused. He asked Gideon what was wrong. “I understand,” Gideon said. The coach looked further confused. “What do you understand?” he asked. “Basketball,” Gideon replied. It was one of the most absurd things the coach had ever heard. He laughed and said, “Ok, big shot, let’s see how much you understand.” He blew his whistle and almost immediately the boys on the court were standing still. He told a player wearing a shirt to take a seat and then told the whole team that Gideon was going to play. “You can’t be serious,” Christopher said. A few of the players started laughing. “One more word and you can all do pushups,” the coach said. He blew his whistle and shouted, “Play!”

Gideon’s team had control of the ball. A teammate thought he could catch Gideon off guard. He used all his strength and sent a chest pass streaking through the air toward Gideon’s head. Gideon calmly raised his hands and caught the pass as if the ball was lobbed slowly toward him. He glanced at the configuration of players on the opposing team. They had the shape of an hourglass—two in front, two in back and one in between. He understood right away what each would do to try to prevent him from scoring. He ran forward and around them, dribbling with whatever hand best protected the ball. They’d never seen anyone move so fast or so cleverly. With little effort he avoided every attempt they made to impede his progress. He arrived at the free throw line and jumped in the air and soared so high and far he was looking down at the basket, which was fifteen feet from where his feet left the floor, when he dropped the ball through it.

The players and coach were awestruck. How was it possible that someone who’d never held a basketball until a minute ago was able to do something no other player, with years of practice, could ever dream of doing? How could someone have learned the game in his mind alone? Weren’t there an infinite number of ever-changing variables to take into consideration? The awestruck feeling Christopher and the other boys felt gave way to resentment and anger. None thought Gideon was a joke any longer. When the coach blew his whistle again they were more determined than ever to stop him. The problem was that each time one of them started dribbling down the court or tried to make a pass or take a shot, Gideon raced over and stole the ball and ran circles around them until they were dizzy and stumbling into one another and out of breath. And then, when he shot the ball, he jumped so high in the air that no one could defend him. He took his shots from all over the court and never missed. Or he went directly to the painted area and jumped even higher and threw the ball down through the basket.

After fifteen minutes the coach blew his whistle a final time and told the players the practice was over. They walked off the court exhausted, gulping air. Gideon was the lone contrasting figure. He wasn’t breathing heavily, having figured out the most efficient and economical way to use his body to outmaneuver his opponents and score at will.

The coach, with excitement in his voice, asked Gideon to join the team. “You’re the best natural athlete I’ve ever laid eyes on,” he said. “If you play with us, we’ll win the city championship. We might even be as good as a college or professional team.”

But Gideon had other thoughts about how he might use his newly discovered talent. An idea had taken root inside him after he’d figured out how to jump unusually high in the clothing store. Now, after rapidly mastering basketball, the idea had grown deeper roots. He thanked the coach but declined the offer.

“I could make you one of the best players ever,” the coach said.

Gideon didn’t believe he could become any better. Or, for that matter, any worse. Regardless of how many hours he played. Basketball was a geometry problem he’d already solved. He explained this to the coach, who shook his head forcefully.

“Every game is unique. Every minute of every game is unique. Every opposing player creates unique challenges. Every combination of opposing players creates more unique challenges.”

Gideon considered the coach’s words. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful. But there are only nineteen unique challenges facing every player trying to score and only twenty-three unique challenges facing every player trying to prevent another player from scoring. These challenges might vary slightly from minute to minute, and even from second to second, but they remain essentially unchanged.”

The coach wanted to refute everything he’d heard, believing it was nonsense. However he feared his opinion would only offend Gideon, whose serious tone implied he was convinced his statements were accurate.

Instead the coach returned to the matter that was most important to him. He asked Gideon a second time to join the team, adding, “Please give it some thought.”

Gideon was used to dealing with stubborn adults and knew how to placate them. He had no intention of joining the team but said he would think about it. “I’ll let you know by the end of the week,” he promised, watching a smile form on the coach’s face.