Reif Larsen - I Am Radar

2) To this end, I shall document my raising of him henceforth in the utmost detail, the sum of which I hope will provide a valuable resource for future researchers. Every bit of input — be it gastronomic, intellectual, or spiritual — shall be entered into the ledger. Time will tell if this equation will eventually lead to the output of a physicist — not just a meddling scientist, but a great one, one who changes the very course of history.

Signed and witnessed by me alone,

JBdB 9/3/195312

He creased the paper twice with his thumb and sealed it inside an envelope using the plantation’s wax stamp. He then placed the envelope into a carved wooden box that he hid beneath a loose floorboard. He went to bed that night and slept soundly for the first time in days.

Jean-Baptiste decided to tell no one of his intentions; he only let Eugenia know that he would be keeping a detailed journal of the child’s behavior.

“His behavior? How can you think about such things when we don’t even know if he will survive?” she signed.

“We all have our ways,” he said. In his notebook, he entered:

09:04, R.R. REFUSES MILK, FLEXES TOES.

The following morning, Tien brought the kru Khmer over to the house. To both of the men’s surprise, Eugenia embraced the shaman.

“Please help us,” she said aloud. “Please.”

She turned to Tien. “Thank you,” she said.

He bowed. When he looked at her again, there were tears in his eyes.

The kru Khmer determined that the baby’s wind had grown cold from a premature birth. He was trying to grow smaller so that he might be able to crawl back into the womb. The forces inside him must be warmed, to reverse this trend and encourage the child to start eating the food of this world. This was done with a hot green liquid smeared across his body and a single needle, exposed to the heat of a flame and then plunged into the bottom of his neck, just above the small lump of his seventh cervical vertebra. Eugenia, clearly taken aback at the sight of the piercing, did not protest. A prayer was intoned. Incense lit. More prayers. Another coin was produced, this time of ambiguous origin, and rubbed in spirals down the child’s back. From somewhere outside, a monkey squawked in surprise. The smoke from the incense shivered and righted itself again.

All of this was recorded in Jean-Baptiste’s little black book. Life happened twice: once in real time and again in the book.

The next day, the child took Suong’s breast into his mouth and began to nurse. This, too, was noted. Eugenia, previously never one for celebration, hiked up her skirts and began to dance with her son in circles, her old body flush with new life.

The kru Khmer returned, but unnecessarily so. The sickness had been lifted. Raksmey grew stronger; his skin shifted from yellow to a shimmering light brown. By the third week, he had gained a voice and begun to cry like a normal infant, on average 16.5 times a day, Jean-Baptiste noted. He also noted at what point Raksmey could follow a finger across his field of vision (2.5 months), at what point the baby could recognize movement and then a specific object at ten feet (3.5 months), fifteen feet (3.9 months), and twenty-five feet (4 months). He recorded precisely when Raksmey sat without aid (6.2 months), gained independent dexterity of his limbs (7.3 months), began to crawl (9.8 months), stood without assistance (12.5 months), and then began to walk (13.9 months).

He bought an unwieldy German reel-to-reel Magnetophon left over from the Japanese occupation and recorded hours of Raksmey’s sounds. High-pitched squeals, exploratory ohs , and wet, boneless words, not unlike his grandmother’s speech. All of these he categorized according to frequency, length, vowel type. Using this data, he created a massive wall chart of Raksmey’s preverbal musings, a flowing sea of intonation. The chart would survive until the very last days of La Seule Vérité.13

Fig. 4.5. “R.R. Sounds & Noise, 0.5–1.5 years”

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 588

When he was not recording, Jean-Baptiste would sit and read to Raksmey from the great novels of his youth. Les Misérables. A Tale of Two Cities. Gulliver’s Travels. When he felt the narratives were growing too fantastical, he would switch to papers on quantum mechanics, though often he could barely grasp what he was reading himself.

“Why read to him like this?” Eugenia signed. “I can understand more than he can, and I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

“Information is conserved,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Everything I say finds its way in there, and everything that goes in will eventually come out. We may not fully understand it yet, but I’m convinced that nothing can be lost.”

“The child cannot even speak!”

“Speech is not a prerequisite for comprehension. I think you, of all people, would be the first to agree.”

“If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that comprehension is not an idea, it’s an act,” she signed, her hands shimmering back and forth. “You must be able to use what you understand.”

“It’s not as simple as that. You cannot ascribe a timeline to understanding. When we learn, when we act, when we speak — we draw upon a lifetime of experience. Who knows the origin of our thoughts? They come from deep places, from before we knew what to call them. I’m merely enriching the foundations of the subconscious from which Raksmey may draw his later conclusions.”

In the nursery’s newly installed bookshelves, Jean-Baptiste began to assemble the library for Raksmey’s education. He also selected objects from his past projects and placed them around the room: the telegraph switch, the Tesla coil, a small telescope, a copper-wire mobile, a shortwave radio. He filled the nursery with exotic succulents and orchids from their botanical garden and installed a portable Victrola that alternately played Bach and several rare shellac recordings of Khmer and Vietnamese stringed music. On the mosquito netting above his son’s bed, Jean-Baptiste painted Greek constellations and famous equations from physics:

“He is sleeping in his father’s museum. You’re going to suffocate him.”

“Not suffocate. Elucidate. Illuminate . You remember I spent my own childhood trapped in a bedroom, but my mind was able to roam free.”

Luckily, Raksmey, unlike the youthful Jean-Baptiste, was not bound by illness and could flee the confines of his bedroom. Though unusually small, he overcame the sickness that marked his birth and grew into a bright-eyed, curious toddler. As soon as he gained bipedal mobility, he could not be corralled for long. There were many times that Eugenia or Jean-Baptiste turned their back only to find that Raksmey had run outside, deep into the gardens. And soon they had no choice but to let him run.

Jean-Baptiste’s black notebooks began to gather on the shelf in his study, at the rate of two per month, which later became three and then four. Either there was more to look for or Jean-Baptiste was learning how to look.

Tofte-Jebsen includes a sample of his observations:

— RR’s eyes are a light shade of brown, like almond paste. Seem to be lighter than when he was born. As far as I can tell, both are the same color, though the outer ring of his right iris is darker, giving the illusion of a protruding pupil.