The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (29 page)

Jake’s affinity for teaching wasn’t a surprise to Narnie, who, thank heaven, could be relied on to interrupt those epic teaching sessions with a pot of hot chocolate. “His whole life, he’s had to explain to people how he thinks,” she once said. “What’s the difference between that and teaching?”

As always, she was right. But I also thought Jake’s drive to teach was motivated by the same thing that had brought us to the university in the first place: He wanted a conversation. Math is a foreign language to most people, and Jake was starved for conversation. His solution was to try to teach the people around him to “speak” math. The lectures he downloaded may have satisfied his tremendous need to learn, but unless he could make these concepts understandable to others, he’d never be able to talk about them.

Unfortunately, he was stuck with Igor and me, and as he got deeper and deeper into the material, it became ever more clear that he needed a lot more in the way of conversation than we could give him. One night Michael and I were flipping through the channels, and we stopped on a movie called
I Am Sam
. In it, Sean Penn plays a developmentally disabled adult named Sam, who is the parent of a typical five-year-old girl. In one very moving scene, the daughter is reading Dr. Seuss’s
Green Eggs and Ham
to Sam, and they both realize that she has surpassed him intellectually. When the scene was over, I found I’d been gripping Michael’s hand so hard my fingernails had left marks in his palm. I could relate to what Sam felt in that scene: an odd, bittersweet mixture of pride and abandonment.

I was so proud of Jake and his achievements, and we’d been having so much fun together, but now here we were again in a situation
where he couldn’t talk to me. This time, of course, it was for a good reason. Although I wouldn’t have traded my brilliant son for anyone in the world, there was a part of me that felt a little cheated by Jake’s accelerated academic schedule.

All those progressive steps kids take toward separation and independence—their first sleepover, learning to drive, their first date—prepare their parents for the inevitable separation, too. I was experiencing some of those steps with Ethan and Wesley, but I hadn’t experienced any of them with Jake. Instead, it had happened all at once. That’s why it was so wonderful for me to sit next to Jake on the couch while he was watching a lecture by a professor at Princeton or Harvard. Even if I couldn’t understand the most basic concept under discussion, I could rub my son’s curly head and spend some time with him. I might not be able to engage in the conversation, but for a short time at least, I could be a mom to him.

The semester off was truly an astonishing period intellectually for Jake. He had time to explore everything he wanted, as deeply as he wanted, with only his rich curiosity as a guide. It was as if we’d given a powerful racehorse permission to run free after years of reining him in.

“Slow down, guy, there’s smoke coming out of your ears,” Michael would tease him. But sometimes it almost seemed as though we could hear the synapses firing as Jake experienced epiphany after epiphany, each idea igniting the next one. He was on fire, and everything he watched or read or learned served as kindling.

A lot of Jake’s ideas were equations that had already been developed and proved. Some were original, although many had flaws he’d expose two or three days later. There was no frustration or irritation associated with these false steps. In fact, he’d move on so easily that the setbacks didn’t even seem to register. He might have been following a path only he could see, but for him it was clearly marked.

This creative fugue state was his primary reality, while the stuff of everyday life seemed more like an afterthought. Without warning, he’d throw himself off the swing set at the playground across the street and run home as fast as he could, barely able to contain the
equations spilling out of him. After fleeing the dinner table one night without a word, he gouged a whiteboard with a fork: He hadn’t taken the time to trade it for a marker. The ideas came so fast and so furious, I gave him a notebook to carry around so that he could keep track, a strategy that met with only limited success. Invariably, while he was writing one idea down, another would occur to him, and he’d be off in another direction entirely.

That semester, Jake was as focused as I’d ever seen him. Always, though, his intensity was mediated by a sense of enjoyment, an excitement that felt like play. When the equations he was working on grew too extensive for paper, he began using whiteboard markers on the windows of our house. I’d often stand quietly in a doorway, watching him work. The math flowed out of him so easily, and so quickly, that it seemed more like he was taking dictation than actually thinking about what should come next. The only limit seemed to be how fast he could write.

I was reminded of watching him and Christopher shoot baskets, which they’d happily do for hours, breaking only for a sip of soda or a handful of pretzels. Some of their shots would go in; others would not. Sometimes they’d talk; other times the only sound besides the bouncing ball would be the squeak of their sneakers on the floor. But as he did math on the windows, there was an easiness, a sense of relaxed pleasure, about the activity, something I was seeing for the first time since Christopher’s death. “He’s having
fun
,” Narnie said, watching him in wonder.

One morning I was having a cup of coffee in the sunny little room where we sometimes had breakfast. Jake came in, ignored the fruit plate, grabbed a croissant off the table, and sat down with his feet in my lap.

“Mom, I need you to listen to me,” he said. “It’s math, but if you listen carefully, I’ll explain it so you can understand. I’ve found a pattern.”

Jake always had a preternaturally acute ability to detect patterns, and this, of all his gifts, was the attribute the professors he’d been studying with always singled out as the key ingredient to his success.

What he told me was truly astounding. I really had no idea what Jake was working on. I had enough sense to trust that he was moving forward on something important, but for all I knew, “something important” meant a crash course in college physics, an impressive enough achievement for an eleven-year-old boy. But it turned out to be more than that.

Jake’s theory, which was in the field of relativity, was both elegantly simple—clean and clear enough for me to understand—and superbly complex. If he was right, he’d be creating an entirely new field of physics, just as Newton and Leibniz had revolutionized math by inventing calculus.

The first breathless words out of my mouth surprised even me. “Jakey—it’s
beautiful
.”

The smile Jake gave me at that moment was beautiful, too.

Jake had started with a picture. Now he needed the mathematical notation to describe what he was seeing. I’ve come to understand that math is really a language, a way of describing what people like Jake see. He had all the rudiments already, but a concept of this complexity required a vocabulary he didn’t yet have.

I think it’s fair to say that at that point, he became obsessed. All the lightheartedness I’d admired earlier disappeared, as he struggled to put the picture he saw so clearly in his mind into the mathematical notation other scientists could understand. He began making models of space-time and dimensional models of space, and the equations on our windows grew longer and longer.

He stopped sleeping. He had always been a committed night owl, but this was different. Now he wasn’t sleeping at all. Michael would go into Jake’s room to wake him up in the morning, and he’d find Jake sitting upright where he’d left him eight hours before. “Jake! Did you forget to sleep again?” Michael would ask. He would nod off at breakfast and in the car, but at night he would be wide-awake, reading and doing math.

We took him to the pediatrician, who shared our concern and suggested that we enroll him in a sleep study. Jake spent one night in the hospital, bristling with wires and tubes and electrodes. The study confirmed
what we suspected: Jake wasn’t sleeping. But there was nothing physically wrong with him. The only thing keeping him up was the math.

Ultimately, he became so wrapped up in this gigantic equation, I became concerned. I was leaning against the doorjamb, watching Jake as he scribbled furiously on a window, filling the panes with mathematical symbols I couldn’t even begin to understand. Meanwhile, through the window I could see kids his age playing in the park across the street, chasing each other and hanging upside down on the swings.

He seemed lost in the equation. It occurred to me that maybe he was stuck. Perhaps he didn’t have the information he needed to move on to the next step. Maybe he needed to consult with someone who had a better handle on this material, someone who could see if he’d taken a wrong turn. I didn’t care one bit about the equation. All I knew was that it was insanely long and taking up too much of his time. But helping him fix it seemed like the best way to get him off the window and into the park.

“Jake, we can’t go on like this,” I said. “Let’s get you some help. Someone else may be able to see where you’re stuck.”

He looked at me, trying to figure out what I was talking about. “But I’m not stuck, Mom. I’m trying to prove I’m
wrong
.” That was what he’d been doing with that equation, checking and rechecking his work, searching for the flaw or the hole that would mean the whole theory was garbage.

I persisted. At least we should find out if there was any validity to the theory before he dedicated another six months to it. Jake conceded that it might be helpful to talk to someone, and he knew immediately whom he wanted to get in touch with: Dr. Scott Tremaine, a world-renowned astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein had taught until his death. So I called Dr. Tremaine, who listened when I told him about my unusual eleven-year-old and his theory. The last thing I wanted to do was waste his time, so I emphasized how efficient we’d be if he’d take a fast look at this equation and tell Jake what areas he thought needed work. I stressed that I was making the call not because of the
science, but because of Jake’s autism. I needed to get him off that window.

Dr. Tremaine said that he would look at a short video, which we could send him by email. Before we got off the phone, he made sure to tell me that original theories are rare in a field as crowded with researchers as physics. I’ll be honest: I was relieved! If this was already well-covered ground, I thought it would be relatively easy for Dr. Tremaine to see where Jake was going wrong.

We’d all been so caught up in Jake’s work that it was almost a surprise to get his exam results from his first official college course. As predicted, Jake had aced Multidimensional Math. His score on the final exam was 103. Nobody but his father was surprised.

“He got an A in college math, Kristine,” Michael told me in a tone of complete amazement, waving the transcript at me. “This is incredible!”

I tried not to laugh. “Babe, this is not news. What is it exactly you think we’ve been doing down there? I told you he was answering questions nobody could answer and running study groups and acing all the quizzes.”

“But an A, Kris—an A! In college math!”

Michael was so proud, he emailed everyone he knew. He even posted Jake’s results on Facebook. Now, when he came down in the morning and found Jake and me at the breakfast table, he’d clap his hands together and ask, “How is everything going at the famed Barnett Academy, home of the Fighting Moose?” (I can’t believe I’m making this public knowledge, but Igor’s full name is Igor von Moosenflüfen. With an umlaut.)

Michael’s surprise helped me have an even greater appreciation of the tug-of-war we’d gone through to arrive at the decision to allow Jake to leave elementary school. We were two strongly opinionated people, united on one principle: There was nothing more important than doing the right thing for our kids. We had pushed and pulled at each other, trying to figure out what the best decision might be for Jake, and we’d gotten there. I felt almost as proud of us as I did of Jake.

Although Jake’s performance in that first college class could not have been better, SPAN informed us that he would be restricted to just six credits the following semester, and they had to be prerequisites. That eliminated the Modern Physics he was so desperate to take. When we got the news, Jake didn’t say anything, but I saw his face fall, and Mike and I watched as he went upstairs very slowly, then quietly closed the door to his room.

I looked at Michael. “This is ridiculous,” I said. “We jumped through all the hoops to put together this application package. He got in with flying colors, and now they won’t let him go? We’re not doing this for the bumper sticker. What’s the point if he can’t take classes?”

I stewed some more, and then the lightbulb went off. “If he’s going to be a college student, maybe we should go ahead and enroll him in college.”

Once we’d thought of it, it was the simplest solution. There was a bonus, too. If Jake applied to IUPUI through the usual channels, he’d be eligible for a scholarship. There wasn’t any financial aid offered for the SPAN classes, and SPAN kids didn’t qualify for the state assistance that college students could get. Scraping together enough for tuition and books for the multidimensional math course had required us to make some sacrifices, and that was only one course. I felt bad that we weren’t in a better position financially, but realistically who has a college fund ready for an eleven-year-old?

So I started putting together a real college application for Jake. I’d already assembled a good package for Dr. Russell, but now I took the project really seriously. I wanted to make it clear—maybe even to myself—that this wasn’t my opinion, a proud mom saying, “Look at my gifted son!” Instead, I was going to compile unassailable evidence of what I had come to understand was true, which was that Jake belonged in college and that he wouldn’t be okay unless we provided this opportunity for him.

I had no idea what a college admissions office would want to see, so I threw everything in
plus
the kitchen sink. If I thought of it, we did it, which is why Jake joined Mensa, the international high-IQ society. (Narnie loved to go through Jake’s mail, which always included newsletters
from Mensa and from another, more exclusive high-IQ group called Intertel. “I swear, this kid gets the most interesting junk mail I’ve ever seen,” she’d say.)