Chapter Twenty-nine
Vanessa dissected her first brain one hour before she learned the correct technique for making a moist, fluffy omelet. It was in the tenth grade at Calvin Coolidge High School, Franklin Lakes, Bergen County, New Jersey. She was in biology class, where students were divided into groups of four, each assigned a pig. They were told to stockpile their observations, and then afterward the class would discuss brains. Vanessa had been given her own brain. In the Bergen County School system, Vanessa was always being given a brain to herself. It wasn't so much that she was a round peg in a square hole it was more that she was a ticking brown-wrapped parcel in an airport waiting lounge.Treat Vanessa Humboldt differently .
Vanessa dissected her pig's brain quickly, with a forensic speed and grace that chilled her teacher, Mr. Lanark. Next came home ec, in which Mrs. Juliard demonstrated for the class the proper way to whip eggs, pour them into a buttered nonstick pan (medium-low heat) and use a Teflon spatula to gently lift up the edges of the nascent omelet to allow the runny egg on top to trickle underneath and cook. Once done, the eggy disk was folded over onto itself and presto, a neat-to-eat breakfast-time treat.
The students followed Mrs. Juliard's technique. Near the end of Vanessa's omelet creation cycle, as she folded the egg over onto itself, her life was cut in two. Vanessa stood in home ec, undoing the fold, and then folding it again over onto itself in different ways. The other students finished their omelets, ate them or disposed of them, according to their level of eating disorder, and prepared to leave, but Vanessa stood rapt. Her classmates were students who'd known Vanessa since day care, who'd seen her reject Barbies, hair scrunchies, Duran Duran and sundry girlhood manias of the era, opting instead for Commodore 64's, Game Boys and the construction of geodesic domes from bamboo satay skewers. They giggled at her.
Vanessa, honey you're not angry or anything, are you? asked Mrs. Juliard, who, like most of Vanessa's teachers since kindergarten, trod on eggshells around her. They feared an undetermined future torture that would subtly but irrevocably be dealt them should they in any way displease this brilliant Martian girl.
As for Vanessa, she looked upon high school as a numbing, slow-motion prison, to be endured only because her depressingly perky and unimaginative parents refused to make any effort to either enroll her in gifted-student programs or permit her to skip grades, which they worried, ironically, might cripple her socially. Her parents viewed high school as a place of fun and sparkling vigor, where Snapple was drunk by popular crack-free children who deeply loved and supported the Coolidge Gators football team. They viewed Vanessa'a intelligence as an act of willful disobedience against a school that wanted only for its students to have clear skin, pliant demeanors, and no overly inner-city desire for elaborately constructed sports sneakers.
But all of this was different now, because of her omelet.
Vanessa? Are you okay, honey?
Vanessa looked at Mrs. Juliard. Yes. Thank you. Yes. She looked at her dirty utensils. I'll wash up now.
She skipped her next class and waited until noon, sitting on a radiator near the cafeteria. She knew nobody would ask Vanessa Humboldt if anything was wrong for fear that the response could only complicate their lives.
The noon bell rang. She waited five minutes, then walked through the staff area into the faculty room, where teachers were lighting up cigarettes and removing lunch from Tupperware containers and the microwave oven. The vice principal, Mr. Scagliari said, Vanessa this room is off limits to but he was cut short.
Can it, Mr. Scagliari.
Voices simmered down and then stopped. A student in the faculty room was still, in late 1980s New Jersey, a rarity.
Vanessa was straightforward with them, as though she were informing them about a transmission that needed fluid changing, or the proper method for planting peas. She said that she was leaving school that afternoon, and that she was probably as happy to be gone as they would be to have her out of there. She stated what the staff had known all along, that she could ace any graduation test they could throw her way, including SATs and LSATs. She also said she would be contacting the American Civil Liberties Union, the local TV and print media, and that she would locate a hungry, glory-starved lawyer to do her dealings. She had $35,000 in savings stashed away from waitressing and playing the horses and could easily support such a gesture.
The staff masked their surprise with pleasant faces. She sounded so reasonable.
Vanessa went on to say that contacting her parents wouldn't gain them much ground, as they were more concerned about her prom dress than her future ambitions. In her own head she was already at Princeton and Calvin Coolidge High School was only a bad dream after a strong curry.
She walked out the front doors and over to the parking lot, where she got into the battered Honda Civic she'd paid for herself and put her plan into operation. Within a month she was out of the Bergen County school system, and accepted at Princeton for the next fall in a joint mathematicscomputer science program. But as she drove home that afternoon, Vanessa thought of eggs and she thought of brains. She wondered how it was that maybe twenty thousand years ago human beings didn't exist and yet suddenly, around the globe, there appeared anatomically modern people capable of speech, language, agriculture, bureaucracy, armies, animal husbandry and increasingly arcane technologies dependent on refined metals, precise tools of measurement and elaborate theoretical principles.
It all had to do with the brain which upon dissection struck Vanessa as a large flat gooey sheet of omelet elaborately folded over onto itself into the gray clumpen hemisphere. Vanessa had decided that twenty thousand years ago the human brain decided to fold itself over one more time, and it was that single extra fold that empowered brains to create the modern world. So simple. So elegant. And it also helped to explain why Vanessa was such a freakazoid, so cosmically beyond the others in her school. Vanessa realized that her brain had made the next fold that she, in some definite and origamilike way, represented the next evolutionary step of Homo sapiens Homo transcendens and that her goal in life was to seek out fellow Homo transcendens and with them form colonies that would bring Earth into a new golden age.
At Princeton she encountered fellow advanced humanoids and she no longer felt so alone. But she was disappointed to discover that such petty failings as jealousy, political infighting, fragile egos and social ineptitude were just as prominent among her new colleagues as they were among the old. Phil from the Superstrings Theory group was a pig. Jerome the structural linguist was a pedantic bore who lied about meeting Noam Chomsky. Teddy the quark king was a misogynist. Vanessa correctly surmised that her life needed balance, and one polar afternoon, when ducking into an arts building for a dash of heat, she attended a surprisingly enlightening lecture on the Abstract Expressionist paint dribblers. From this lecture she decided that balance in her life would come from the arts, and that fellow Homo transcendens must surely await her in that arena.
She sought out any artistic gesture that proposed human evolution beyond Homo suburbia . She attended The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight screenings for two years running, dressed as Susan Sarandon, which left her with a lifelong yen for midwestern twin-set outfits. She read sci-fi. She tried joining Mensa but was turned off by the bunch of balding men who wanted to discuss nudism, and women who refused to stop punning or laughing at their own spoonerisms.