What Was, What Is

How does your view of your life change if suddenly your IQ is raised?

————

He had loved her since second grade. Kayla’s family had moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania and there she was, a slender little thing with her head hanging shyly, thick blond hair pulled into two ponytails and swinging prettily and big green eyes. 

Gary was tall for his age and considered kind of dopey by the other kids. Maybe they were right, but it didn’t bother him. He had what could be called “good brain chemicals” – he was eternally cheerful and looked for the good in others even if some of them teased him. A best friend appeared, David Steinberger, another kid that was “different” because he was small and dorky looking, smarter than anyone else in the class and probably the whole school for that matter. 

“Why David wanted to hang around with me is a mystery,” Gary told people, smiling while he said it. 

It was an honor nobody else could understand either, since David went on to become a prize-winning geneticist while Gary worked in a tire store but David still stopped by to visit Gary the rare times he was in town. 

Kayla was an LPN and worked in a nursing home. Gary thought she looked adorable in her uniform, which usually consisted of navy-blue scrubs - dark, she said, so body fluids wouldn’t show. She had a cynical sense of humor and half the time Gary wasn’t sure if she was being funny or not. Sometimes she said mean things, but he figured it was her weird humor and never dwelt on it. As far as he was concerned, he was extremely lucky to have her, a gorgeous woman like her who’d been head majorette at the high school, very hot looking in her short skirt tossing her baton high up in the air and popular with a lot of the kids. He found it hard to believe that she’d ever agreed to live with the likes of him now. 

“Maybe it’s because she’s using you,” said Gary’s boss Archie at the tire store. The implication being that there was no other reason someone who looked like her would want someone who looked like Gary. Archie had a mean streak.

Not that Gary was ugly, but Kayla was definitely out of his league and he knew it. Nevertheless, he thought they had fun together. Most evenings after work, unless Kayla was on second shift, they enjoyed a couple of beers and ate dinner on the couch while Kayla told him about her day, which was usually interesting. Someone at the nursing home was always dying or freaking out or letting out bodily fluids and Kayla’s fellow workers had distinctive personalities and problems, which Gary enjoyed hearing about.

“I guess I’m at least better than her ex,” Gary told Archie. “At least with me, she doesn’t get slapped around.”

“Yeah, and she gets free rent,” said Archie. 

When his mom died, she’d left the house to him. He had no sisters or brothers and since he’d lived there for all of his life, it was only natural that he continue to do so. Besides, it was all he could afford and even the taxes worried him, considering how little his income was. If something went wrong, he’d have to borrow money to have it repaired unless Kayla helped out. He just hoped for the best.

“We have a pretty good life, don’t we?” he said to Kayla that evening as they finished the news.

“It’s okay,” she said, her mouth full of Entenmann’s fudge cake. 

She could eat like a teenaged boy and not gain an ounce, while he was a little soft, maybe forty pounds overweight though he could carry it off with his height. He liked to look at her and admire her tannish skin, her toned arms and legs, her flat stomach and streaked blond hair. She looked to him like a California girl. He, on the other hand had wiry dark hair and a splotchy looking beard that he wore to cover up his weak chin. 

“I wish you’d marry me,” he told her and for the zillionth time, she laughed. “Let’s just leave things the way they are,” she said. 

It hurt him but he made an effort to not dwell on it. As it was, he felt he was lucky just to have her as is.

He hadn’t heard from David for quite some time, maybe four years? The last time was when Gary was in town for his grandfather’s funeral. Gary had gone over to David’s parents’ house when they were sitting Shiva. He found the whole thing interesting and did his best to fit in, at least for a few hours. At one point, he and David had snuck out for a hamburger at their favorite diner. “I’m not into tradition much anymore,” David had said. “I’m sort of a Buddhist now. Don’t tell my mom.” 

How Gary missed being with him and enjoying their talks. Therefore, it was something of a shock when one evening while Kayla was working second shift, David turned up at the door. “Well, if it ain’t the devil!” Gary joked as he let David in. “You look great! Have you been working out?”

David laughed. He was still short and thin and never could aspire to looking “built.”  “I play a little racquetball,” he said.  

They sat down to enjoy a beer and catch up. David wasn’t married either, though he had a girlfriend, a fellow scientist. He talked about her a little and then grew serious. “Listen, Gary, I didn’t come here just for the visit. I’m here for something very important, to make you an offer that will change your life.”

Gary laughed – was his old friend joking around? He always did have a slightly goofy sense of humor.

“I’m not kidding,” David said. “This is something that if it works will put your name in the history books. If you’re interested in joining this experiment, you’ll become different than you are now in so many ways.”

“Experiment?” said Gary. “What do you mean, David?” 

“My associate Dr. Lakewood and I have been working with a team for some time now and are ready to use a few human volunteers to try out something that will change your intellect. It’s a treatment involving infusions and genetic manipulation.”

“What do you mean?” said Gary, his voice so low he could hardly hear it himself.

David looked down as if he was thinking for a bit and then at Gary pointedly. “Gary, the treatment if it works and so far, it has on numerous animals, will raise your IQ. It will turn you into a highly intelligent man.”

Gary hung his head. “I knew you always thought I was stupid.”

“No, Gary, no! I never thought you were stupid. You were my best friend growing up.  You were the only kid around I felt I could trust. I’m grateful for you and I want to repay you. I want to give to you what you deserve.”

“To not be an idiot?” said Gary.

“I never said you were an idiot. But Gary, face reality. You’re of average intelligence. Your IQ is probably around 90. We can get it from the school to know for sure. You’re a wonderful guy, but wouldn’t you like to be smarter? Wouldn’t you like to go to college, even get your doctorate? Go into some fascinating field, make your mark on the world?  This is your chance. I can get volunteers anywhere, just snap my fingers and they’ll come running but I’m offering this to you first.”

Gary sat still for several minutes. He stared out the window at some kids on the street.  He knew who they were; they lived two doors down. Their father was no good, like his own had been and their mother was weak, easily taken in by good-for-nothing men. He’d been lucky in that regard – his own mom had done her best to take care of him even if she had liked her booze too much. Those kids would probably go nowhere. They’d end up working in a tire store or something similar, just like him. And that’s if they were lucky.

He swung his big head around to look at his friend. He didn’t feel quite the same about David now that he knew David considered him stupid regardless of how he pretended otherwise. But he felt something turn to steel inside. Why not do this? What did he have to lose?

“I saw a movie about this kind of thing once,” he said.

“Flowers for Algernon? Yes, I saw it too.”

“Remember how he ended up?”

“That won’t be the case here,” David said. “Whatever they did to him in that movie was made up, some kind of silly operation. This will be permanent. Your genes will be changed forever. If things work out, you could even pass the improvement on to your kids if you decide to have any.”

Gary considered and finally stood up. “All right,” he said. “You got your volunteer.”   

David stood up too and punched him on the arm. He was beaming. “You won’t regret this,” he said. “At least I hope not. I want you to be happy.”

Gary nodded. “When do we start?” 

The procedure involved taking time off from the tire store and Archie was not nice about it. “I can’t guarantee I’ll have a place for you when you come back,” he said, and Gary just shrugged. 

“I’m going to Princeton for a few months,” he told Kayla and she was oddly complacent about it. 

“Won’t you miss me?” he asked.

“I’ll miss you, but I’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ll paint the kitchen while you’re gone. You can help me move the stuff out before you leave.”

That’s the way she was, practical, unemotional. He moved the stuff for her. He made sure they got in some sex in before he left. What he would miss most though was their quiet evenings watching TV.

They put him up in one of David’s friend’s apartment. The friend worked all the time and was hardly ever home. Gary spent most days in David’s lab, having blood work done and receiving injections and infusions. He was given a special diet, not what he was used to, and lots of supplements. The whole thing wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t fun either. David didn’t spend much time socializing with him; he was always working.

“Holy shit, David, don’t you ever take a break? When do I get to meet your girlfriend?”

“Oh, she’s in Japan right now,” David said. “She’s working with a professor in Tokyo.”

Gary didn’t understand people like this. What fun did they ever have?  

But then he started to feel different.

It was subtle at first. He watched a fly that had gotten into the lab, how it rubbed its little feet together and he thought how short its life would be and then started comparing lifespans of various animals in his mind and wondered, since everything was relative, what the longest lived being in the universe would be. Then he went on a mental tangent imagining what aliens would look like depending on the gravity and atmosphere of their planets.

Later, he was flossing his teeth when he suddenly stopped and looked at himself in the mirror. Why did he wear that patchy looking beard? His chin was okay, just a regular chin – why had he thought something was wrong with it? Why was his hair long and stringy? He found a pair of scissors and hacked some of it off, then shaved off the beard. He washed his hair and fluffed it out, then decided to see a barber the next day if David let him out of the lab. He thought about how hair and nails grew and then about animals who had to keep chewing to shave their teeth down. He wondered if beavers ate underwater and if so, how did they swallow?

He happened to catch the news and the station he usually watched seemed ridiculous - the women, all white skinned and blonde, attired like hookers in scanty red dresses and sitting with legs sexily crossed between old men in suits. He switched to another news channel and the women were dark haired, a few were black, and some wore glasses. They were sexy in more subtle ways than the red dress blondes; he wouldn’t have noticed this before. He listened to what they were saying and was shocked. How had he not known these things were going? Quickly, he surfed until he ran into more news channels and they were talking about events all over the world that he’d had no idea were happening. None of this was mentioned on the red dress station. Kayla must not know about these things either.

The next morning, he told David about this, though he felt shy bringing it up. David smiled. “It’s starting. I want you to tell me anything you think about. Write it down.” He gave Gary a laptop to use.

Gary had never had any urge to “write anything down,” but now he did. He wrote about a lot of his thoughts and they were growing more complicated and abstract by the day. In the evenings, he watched lectures by authors and political experts and documentaries that had never interested him before. He didn’t just watch but felt a need to analyze them and then explain all this to people in the lab. “I talk too much, don’t I?” he said to David.

David laughed. “Oh no, you keep talking. You talk all you want. And go over to the library across there (he pointed out the window) and take out some things to read. I already logged you in, just give them your name.”

Gary had never been one for reading outside of comic books, but when he stepped into the library, he felt so excited he was like a kid in a toy store. He grabbed books on every subject from astronomy to medicine to engineering and read until his eyes were dry and scratchy. To think that all this stuff had been out there all this time, just sitting and waiting and he hadn’t known. He moved from there to searching out articles online and actually writing to the authors for more information. He felt like he’d entered a great big party that went on and on and never ended.

“It’s time,” said David a few days later, “for you to take a test.”

“What kind of test?” said Gary.

“Well, to see how you’ve come along.”

“I’ve never been successful at tests,” said Gary, but he really wasn’t afraid. It might be fun, like a puzzle to solve. He had been literally craving word and number puzzles lately.

The test took a couple of hours and he actually enjoyed it. It called for logical reasoning, just figuring things out. Figures that looked alike but weren’t and you had to find what was different, designs in a sequence and it was up to you to finish the sequence, and then the way words went together or what a paragraph was really trying to say. The next day, David called him into his office and waved his hand at the chair in front of his desk. He looked very serious and official, not like jokey David out in the lab.

“Well, Gary, the results are in. That was an IQ test and you came out with a score of 153. I did manage to get your old report from school, and they’d given you two different tests at different times. On one your score was 89 and on the other 93.”  He smiled. “The treatments worked. The genetic changes are permanent. We don’t know if you’ll continue to smarten (our new word), or if you’ve stopped. We’ll give you another test in a month and then…well, it’s up to you. Princeton has offered you a scholarship. You may major in anything you like that the school offers. I will need you for interviews as researchers from all over the world will be coming to visit and talk to you. You will be paid a salary for your cooperation.”

Gary started smiling and couldn’t make himself stop. “I think I want engineering,” he said. “Combined with astronomy. Anything to do with space science. I want to work for NASA!”

David laughed. “Well, old friend, you’ll meet with an advisor this week. They’ll get you a place to stay and set up your classes and general accounts. You can keep the laptop. I’m so happy for you.” He was beaming and stood up to hug Gary. 

There was only one thing – Kayla. “David, I need to go home.”

David opened his mouth and then closed it.

“I can’t just leave Kayla like this; she wouldn’t understand. She has a job; she can’t just come here with me.”

“And what are you going to do if you go back, Gary? Work in the tire store? It would bore you to distraction. Besides, part of the original deal is that people want to talk to you here. You signed the papers.”

“I need to go back,” Gary insisted. “If only for a while.”

David sighed and looked upset, but there was no stopping his friend.

“I’m home,” Gary called as he stepped in the door and dropped his suitcase. “Are you here?”

“In here!” she yelled, and he found her in the kitchen making her dinner on a tray to carry to the living room. He had forgotten about eating dinner on trays. She had heated a couple of Hot Pockets and set this on the tray with a can of Diet Pepsi. He had forgotten about eating crap like that. “You need a veggie or two,” he said in a joking tone.

Ignoring the comment, she carried the tray to the living room and plopped down on the sofa, which looked to Gary like it probably harbored cities of germs. How had he sat on it so many years without noticing what a mess it was? And what happened to the paint job she was planning to get done?  Everything looked the same, drab and dirty, the kitchen especially. 

“Missed you,” he said. “Um, what happened to painting the kitchen? I moved all that stuff out.”

“Oh, I didn’t get to it yet,” she said, biting into a Hot Pocket.

He looked her over. Her skin, which he had thought so pretty now seemed drab and he realized that she was probably seriously deficient in nutrients. Her hair was lank and she appeared to be tired. They kept multi-vitamin bottles on the kitchen counter but forgot to take them. He had, in the past couple of months, been eating salads and other greens and many other nutritious foods in the cafeteria where David worked. He’d lost over ten pounds and felt better than ever.

“You look different,” Kayla said not particularly kindly.

“I lost some weight.” He figured he’d need to go shopping the next day for some real food.

“You shaved your beard off,” she said, mouth full. He noticed a chipped tooth when she talked. 

“Yes,” he said. 

She picked up the remote and turned on the TV to the same news channel he now considered inaccurate and ridiculous. He gently took the remote from her hand and surfed until he found BBC. 

“What?” she said. “I hate that station. All dry and boring, geesh.”

He handed her the remote. “Something else then, not blondes in red dresses news, okay?” 

“You have something against blondes?” she said, smirking. 

Normally he would have considered this sexy but now it seemed pathetic. 

She flipped the channels and stopped at something he didn’t recognize, a group of sarcastic women dressed like gangster molls, a look native to parts of New Jersey or Statin Island. On and on the ladies chatted, pointing fingers sporting hideous fake nails and wrists clattering with gold bracelets. “What the hell is this?” he said. This was what he’d come home to?

She sniffed. “Reruns of Mafia Wives, why? I thought you thought it was funny.”

“I don’t remember seeing it before. It’s trash.” He felt outrageously angry.

Uncharacteristically, he grabbed the remote back and flipped the channel to a government station where an author was lecturing on the Civil War.

“Oh my God,” exclaimed Kayla, “are you trying to kill me? This is so boring it could put a meth addict to sleep!”

He stood up. “I’m going out to get some actual food. And why does this house look like a bomb hit it? Have you turned into a hoarder?”

“Fuck you!” she said. “It’s not any different than when you left and more than half of it’s your shit! What’s the matter with you? What did you do there in stupid Princeton, get taken over by aliens?”

The truth was, he had not told her. She’d been led to believe that he’d been “helping David out with something.” And oddly, she had not been the least bit curious about what that was.

He realized now that curiosity came with intelligence and that those who did not exhibit it were, well…not too bright. It was disconcerting, indeed a bit frightening, how differently he now viewed his partner, this woman he had loved for two decades. It was strange too how the house in which he’d grown up now appeared to him as pretty much a rundown mess. And this view extended to the entire town and surrounding areas. He saw his life, if he remained there, as dull and empty. He saw it as a kind of gray hell and knew that he had to escape or he would die, figuratively and literally.

And yet he did still feel some degree of tenderness for Kayla. They had been together on and off for so long. He cared about her welfare; he wanted her to be happy. Looking at her now though, he realized that he just didn’t want to be with her. But there was no need to disparage her; she could not help being who and what she was. A very small-town girl who’d been lucky to be relatively good-looking but not very smart. Someone he’d once worshipped and had considered to be above him.

He went out and ate at a coffee shop, the only place in town where he could order a salad made of something other than iceberg lettuce and then to a bar where he sipped a Manhattan while he figured out what to do. Telephoning David, he left a message. “I’m coming back,” he told him. “I’ll take that offer and I will fulfill my obligations.”

“Kayla,” he said when he got back home. “I am going to have to leave. It’s nothing you’ve done; it’s not your fault.” He felt like crying.

She was still on the couch, now slumped and sleepy looking, hair hanging in her eyes. He sat down beside her and gently took her hand. “Honey, I’m signing the house over to you. Everything will be yours. I’ll take some of my stuff from when I was a kid and a couple of things that belonged to my mom. You can do what you like with the place.”

She sat up, now alert. “Why, Gary? What did I do? Was it because I wouldn’t get married?”

He was so relieved now that they hadn’t done that. “No, no, not at all. I’ve just changed, that’s all. I am not the person I was before. It’s too hard to explain to you. I’m going to go live in Princeton. I’m going to college.”

Her eyes widened. “College? How? But you’re not -“

“Smart enough?” he said. He felt a bit angry that she of all people would bring this up. “Maybe things have changed.”

“Can I visit you?”

He did not want her to visit. He did not care if he ever saw her again, strange as this was to him. “Maybe later on,” he mumbled to placate her.

He wondered as he looked at her how what a person was to someone else could change so suddenly. Had it been love before or not? Now though he wanted to see her safe and sound, beyond that it was as if she meant nothing to him. This was beyond strange. He would need to discuss it with David.

“You wanna go upstairs?” she asked, trying her best, he knew, to keep him captivated. Though now he remembered that ninety percent of the time, it was he who’d had to initiate sex.

“I think I’ll sleep in my old room,” he said. “I need to look through things in there and see what I want to take.”

He was good to his word and within three months, the house was hers. 

“You’re never going back, not even to visit?” David asked him, astonished.

“Nothing’s there for me,” Gary said. “But I wonder why I’m so cold, so adamant about it. I wonder what I saw in her to start with.”

“Gary,” said his friend, “you did well by her, more than the call of duty. Now go out there and live and learn. Go be what you want to be.”

Part of Gary wanted to skip and hop, while another part stood back and wallowed in guilt.

“You have an agent waiting for you to sign if you want to be on talk shows. Not until you have some sessions with the researchers, however. Two are coming next week.”

“Not just yet for the talk shows,” said Gary. “I have too much to learn yet. Too much to do here for myself and for you.” He had more than forgiven David for once thinking him stupid. He felt ecstatically happy.

By Margaret Karmazin

From: United States

Website: http://margaretkarmazin.blogspot.com

Twitter: SpecwriterMarg