RAY WILLIAMS - BRIAN MURPHY
1
Brian Edward Murphy was the son that Shawn had always wanted. Kate was very happy for Shawn, but she felt concerned that three-year-old Allison wouldn’t adjust well to the presence of this new male intruder. In the first two weeks, Allison got yelled at and pushed aside more times than in the whole three years preceding. Kate had taken a four-month leave from work to take care of the infant. Her mother, who usually came over during the day to watch Allison, was delighted to have the break. But Kate was starting to wonder if her mother would be able to handle two kids, especially if the rivalry didn’t stop.
Allison resented Brian with a passion and was not going to stand for his intrusion into her life. She had a plan. She decided she no longer wanted to be left alone in the basement playroom. So, while her mother tended to Brian, she hovered by her mother’s side constantly. She cautiously hid her jealousy, and she found secret ways to get even with him for stealing away all of her mother’s time and attention. Allison began playing mother’s little helper. She ran to get this or that for her new brother and smiled so nicely as her mother fussed over him. Then, whenever she was left alone with Brian, she’d hit him and push him and torment him. She particularly loved to pull his pacifier out of his mouth, and get him started crying. Then, just as she heard her mother coming, she’d put it back in his mouth to quiet him, and pretend to be doing something else when Kate got there.
It actually took Kate two full months to catch Allison in the act. Allison was quite good at deception. Kate left the room to get some diapers, and then suddenly remembered she left something in the room. When she came back only seconds later, she was stunned by what she saw. Allison was hitting the baby’s stomach with a stuffed animal. She was doing it quite hard, and the baby was wailing. Kate screamed at Allison and sent her to her room. Ten minutes later she went in to give Allison a piece of her mind, and Allison told her she wished Brian would just die.
When Shawn came home that night, Kate related the incident to him. They discussed it and decided that the two of them should have a talk with Allison. They waited until it was Allison’s bedtime, and they both went into her room. In the course of the discussion, they tried to reassure Allison that they loved her as much as always and that they loved Brian too. They told her that they understood how she felt and they would try to pay more attention to her if she would promise to be nice to her brother. She listened without saying a word, then said she was sorry. They all hugged, and Kate and Shawn tucked her in and kissed her good-night.
Allison decided she had to be much more careful not to get caught. She regularly abused the baby physically and emotionally, but only when she was certain nobody would catch her.
One day, unbeknownst to Allison, her mother set up a monitor in the baby’s room. She put the receiver in the basement laundry room so she could hear the baby if he cried. Kate was starting a load of wash, and she thought that Allison was napping. But she caught the sound of Allison’s voice over the monitor. She immediately shut off the washer so she could hear what Allison was saying. Kate could hardly believe her ears.
“You rotten little baby. What if I pull your hair?” The baby began to cry. “What if I twist your arms?” The crying got louder.
Kate didn’t wait a minute longer. She took the stairs two at a time and slammed open the basement door. She then charged through the dining room and living room and up the steps to the bedrooms. Allison must have heard the commotion, because Kate found Allison’s door closed and the baby in his room alone. She made a quick check to verify that Brian was okay, and went over to Allison’s door and opened it. Allison was pretending to sleep. Kate somehow sensed that she shouldn’t confront Allison. She was panting from the steps, her pulse was racing, and she was raging mad. She needed time to calm down. And she decided that it probably wasn’t a bad idea to keep the monitor a secret from Allison.
Kate decided to do nothing at all until Shawn came home. They had a long discussion after both children were asleep. The baby was now three months old, and Kate was starting to really worry about leaving the two kids with her mother. It was critical that they find a way to deal with Allison’s problem, and they had to have things under control by the time that Kate returned to work.
They decided to get an extra crib for Brian and keep it in the dining room. They’d keep him there during the day, and that way there would be practically no opportunity for Allison to threaten Brian. They also decided to take Allison for counseling.
Brian had been a crier since day one. Practically the only time he was happy was when he was getting fed. Kate cautiously switched from breast milk to formula in preparation for handing the reins over to her mother, and Brian seemed to accept the change. She thanked God for that, but she still worried that his incessant crying might be too much for her mother to handle. She just had to find a way to quiet Brian down.
The doctor checked Brian out thoroughly and said that the crying was a mystery to him. He suggested that they try changing his formula, adjusting the thermostat in the house a few degrees up and down, and maybe even installing a humidifier. Then he asked if there was any marriage trouble between Shawn and Kate that might be frightening the child. He was concerned about loud yelling and fighting. At this, Kate told him about the problems with Allison. He nodded and said he understood. Then he told them not to worry; that they probably had hit the nail right on the head. He suggested they go out of their way for at least a month to make certain that Brian was not exposed to any form of abuse from his sister, and to see if that did the trick.
Shawn and Kate went home feeling somewhat relieved.
.....
Ray never felt so helpless. He was stuck in a strange body, and nothing worked. The images that his eyes saw were distorted, the sounds he heard were like noise, and he was having incredible trouble thinking. He couldn’t control his bowels or his bladder, and there was excruciating pain that he felt on and off.
He was totally aware of the fact that he was reborn, but he was finding it increasingly hard to hold on to that awareness. It felt like memory was flowing out of his mind like water through a sieve. As the memories and thoughts poured out of him, it felt like they were just flowing over to someone else. In the most rudimentary way, he sensed that the someone else was he himself.
He finally let go of almost everything except his name and the awareness of a body around him. He repeatedly heard the sound of the word ‘Brian’. It became confused in his mind with the name ‘Ray’. It seemed that every thought he had was fundamental in nature. It was about hunger or thirst or pain.
When the last vestiges of previous life disappeared from his consciousness, he began to pay attention to his environment. His eyes began to unscramble the images before them, and he came to recognize three forms that appeared repeatedly. Something from his inner core of knowledge understood that two of them were his parents. The other was the little one that evoked all the fear and pain in him. The little one caused such intense pain in his body that it persisted long after his eyes no longer saw the little image.
As time went on, he began to know that his parents called him Brian, and that the little one was Allison. He struggled to learn more, but this brain of his was so reluctant to cooperate. Things just seeped in gradually and he mysteriously began to understand them. And it didn’t seem to matter how hard he tried to learn. Things just happened when they happened.
Allison finally stopped causing him pain. He didn’t know why. He was still frightened when he saw her, but she didn’t hurt him anymore. It was around that same time that things began to get clearer and clearer to him. He recognized when people were going to pick him up or change him. He didn’t know words yet that described these things, but patterns of sounds began to form. It was like magic. One moment he didn’t know something, and the next moment he did.
But, almost since the beginning, he understood a connection between Ray and Brian...Brian and Ray. When Allison stopped hurting him, his environment changed. He was no longer surrounded by the walls with the patterns on them. He was out in the open, and his mother and father were around him more.
Then, without him really knowing when, he suddenly began understanding words that they spoke. He could put mental pictures together that went with the words. He was on the verge of being able to control his mind by himself. He was on the verge of consciously controlling the learning process.
2
Brian was much better by the time that Kate went back to work. He was a happier baby, and he only seemed to cry when he was hungry or tired. Each morning Kate dropped Brian and Allison off at her mother’s place. Kate’s mother Susan kept them until around five-thirty every evening, when Kate or Shawn came by to pick them up. Susan Kern and her husband George, Kate’s stepfather, became known as Mom-Mom and Gramps. Brian loved them both and was always excited to see them.
By the time Brian was six months old, it was obvious to everyone that he was bright. Kate had several friends with babies around the same age, and Brian was well ahead of them all in development. He was already forming words and demonstrating an exceptionally long attention span. Kate’s mother wanted to do all she could to facilitate his learning, so she bought books on the subject of gifted children. She learned how to intellectually stimulate and challenge Brian, and she spent countless hours doing so. From the books, she even learned how to include Allison in the process so there would not be any unnecessary sibling resentment.
The rate at which Brian progressed caught everyone off guard. By the time he reached his first birthday, he was forming sentences and asking questions. He actually started to make Susan feel intimidated. She knew that it was only a matter of time before he would outgrow her teaching abilities.
Susan was the one who first called the University Hospital and talked to them about Brian’s exceptional learning abilities. Kate would never have given permission for that, and Susan realized that it was absolutely in Brian’s best interest. She went out on a limb, and when the confrontation finally came, Susan agreed to pay for all the special programs Brian would join. Kate and Shawn were a bit miffed that Susan had acted on her own, but they both realized that she had Brian’s best interest at heart.
At eighteen months Brian entered the hospital’s gifted children research program. It was taxpayer funded, so it didn’t really cost much more than time and transportation. The visits to the hospital were minimal. Associated psychiatrists, psychologists, and educators in the neighborhood did most of the work.
Allison didn’t handle the changes well. She was getting near Kindergarten age, and she was becoming rather introverted. The hospital advised them that they could probably help, but Kate and Shawn decided to put her into daycare instead. They figured she was just a normal kid who was being overshadowed by all the attention paid to Brian.
Now Susan could pay full attention to Brian without the distraction of caring for Allison. Brian was coming up on two years old, and he was already exhibiting the knowledge and intellect of a normal five-year-old.
The fanfare surrounding the program was deliberate. It kept the public funding flowing, and it was great publicity for the hospital. The problem was that Brian was the program’s star, and he was starting to be singled out by the news media. After all, he was a two-year-old who could read and write. Everything was fine until the local ABC affiliate came in to do a television interview with Brian.
.....
Ray felt a total change come over him when they started bringing him over to Mom-Mom’s. He was mastering the process of learning, and Mom-Mom was helping him. He formed a bond with her even stronger than with his mother. Mom-Mom was the one who understood his need to learn. And the faster he learned, the more she had to teach.
Allison no longer felt like a threat to Ray. She was right there learning things with him, and she seemed to like it as much as he did. His life was perfect. Mom-Mom simply filled his every need. He reveled in his own achievements, and his whole purpose of existence was to learn.
Then a flood of information seemed to come from within. He became aware that he knew things that he hadn’t been taught; things he shouldn’t have known. He was mastering control over his body, and he learned to speak. Then he began building a vocabulary to go with this ability. And much of the vocabulary came from within.
Thought processes were changing inside him. He was maturing at an incredible rate. He sensed the awe with which his Mom-Mom and parents viewed him. This drove him even harder, and he started to reach a point where he was getting bored. Was the information coming in slower? From within he changed the very way he operated his mind. He directed himself to search through his own memory and found the cache of knowledge that had been releasing itself within him. He was able to focus on these memories and tear loose large chunks of information at a time.
Mom-Mom began to take him to see new people who had so much more to teach him. They challenged him and developed his skills at learning and understanding. The more that he learned, the more that flowed from his inside memory. The information contained within himself was awesome. It was far beyond anything these outsiders could supply him.
And one day he simply looked at a book and found that he could read. At the same instant came the realization that nobody had taught him. He was stunned and scared. At this very point in his life he knew that he was Ray. And he knew that nobody else would ever understand. He knew intuitively that the existence of Ray must not be revealed, but he hadn’t a clue as to why not. Everything inside him felt new. But all this knowledge simply exceeded his comprehension. He knew things about Ray that he had no way of knowing. He wondered if Ray was a creation of his own mind. And then he wondered if Brian was a creation of Ray’s mind. The thoughts were far too abstract for his two-year-old mind to handle, and he was on the verge of a complete mental breakdown.
He was two years old and he could hardly walk without falling. But he could read and write. Even in his confused and immature mind he realized that something was grossly wrong with all of this.
Ray was the key to this enigma, and Ray was evading him. But why? He knew that he had to concentrate on solving the mystery of Ray or lose his very sanity. He was not prepared to learn or progress another iota until he was able to unravel the mystery of his own existence. Nothing inside him felt like Brian Murphy, yet he knew that Brian Murphy’s body was surrounding him.
Ray internally applied the brakes, and nobody in his world could even tell. He was such an oddity and curiosity to everyone that they no longer measured his progress. They were too busy just trying to measure what he already knew. He took advantage of this fact, and channeled every ounce of his energy into the task at hand. But he was up against a barrier. There was an internal wall so powerful that he could feel it. He tried desperately to tear it down, but got nowhere.
And here he was, stalled and frustrated, when the television people came to interview him and put him on public display.
3
There had to be at least twenty people clamoring about the house setting up equipment. And there sat this poor two-year-old phenomenon as if he were an adult. Nobody even gave a single thought to what Brian must be feeling. They looked and saw a five-year-old, and they treated him as such. The crew was barking orders about lights and backdrops, while Shawn and Kate were being made up to look good on television.
Susan watched from her vantage point on the living room stairs. She wondered for the first time whether she had made the right decision when she first called the gifted program people. She too had been swept up in the publicity and the wonder of this incredible child. But now, as she looked down from above him, she saw just a tiny, confused two-year-old child. She wondered what it felt like to be him.
Three doctors and a press agent from the University Hospital were talking to a reporter in the dining room. They were being briefed about how the segments of the interview would be staged. There was a brief squabble about who would say what, and then it got resolved by the press agent.
Two men were busy feeding cables through the front door and checking plugs and connectors. The large van outside filled the driveway. Two other men sat in the van fiddling with their video equipment. Somebody at the station had determined that this interview should be studio quality instead of the usual Action-Cam quality. This one might just be picked up by the network, and they wanted to project a professional image of their station.
The original plan was to do the interview in the studio, but the news editor wanted the thing to feel more homey and down to earth. When Shawn and Kate agreed to do it at home, they had no idea how intrusive it was going to be. They were having second thoughts, even as the lights went on in the dining room. The call went out for quiet, and the doctors began their portion of the taping.
With the retakes and directions, their part was over in fifteen minutes. They walked outside to get some fresh air as soon as they were done. The next segment was with the press agent. He performed well and they got everything on the first take. A call went out for the “parents”, and it was Kate and Shawn’s turn to perform.
They answered questions that they’d heard hundreds of times before. They talked about when they first noticed Brian’s aptitudes. They talked about Allison and about their own parents. They talked about how the two of them did in school, and what their education level was. They told them how they were sure Brian was their child (Shawn really loved that one) and how much he looked like Kate. They talked about the problems associated with raising a special child like this......And it seemed to go on forever.
When the lights were turned off twenty minutes later, Shawn’s shirt was soaked with perspiration, and Kate’s hair was falling in her face. They thanked God that their part was over. For the first time, Kate was concerned about Brian. She didn’t want to see him all sweaty and uncomfortable under the hot lights. She walked over to the director and asked if they could do Brian without so much lighting, but he said it was impossible. He compromised and said they’d do it in a group of three or four short sessions instead of one long one. That way he wouldn’t be too uncomfortable. Kate expressed her gratitude and went over to talk with Brian.
Kate explained to him what they were going to do, and gave him a little advanced warning about how hot he would feel. He seemed comfortable with everything, and he told her he was all ready.
The director called for Brian and the reporter sat down next to him. He whispered something to Brian to make him relax a little, then they got ready to shoot.
.....
Ray watched everything happening around him. It was really exciting to see all this activity. He wasn’t exactly sure why they were making all this fuss over him, but his parents and his Mom-Mom were there, so it was okay with him.
All three of his doctors were there in the dining room. They talked all about the program and the results it was producing. Then they talked about Brian. Nobody mentioned “Ray”, and this delighted him somehow. He knew that “Ray” was his special secret.
Then some other guy talked about the hospital and funding. He asked everyone to make sure they wrote their Senators and Congressmen and.....
Ray found it all so boring. He quietly turned his thoughts inward, and worked on the special project he had assigned himself. He was so absorbed that he never even noticed his parents doing their interviews. He didn’t even realize it was his turn until his mother came over and broke his train of thought. God, she looked so funny. She was sweating and her hair was all messed up.
She explained to him how they would ask him questions and that he should answer politely and courteously. She told him to smile nicely so everyone could see how handsome he was. Then she warned him how hot it was going to feel. She told him to speak up if he felt too uncomfortable, and that they would stop for a short time while he cooled down. She kissed him on the cheek and walked away.
Then the reporter came over and told him to relax. He turned to the camera crew and told them to start rolling whenever they were ready.
.....
The lights blinded him totally. His mind exploded in the overload of knowledge that flooded him that very moment. He knew what the blinding light was all about. He knew who Ray was. He knew who Brian was. He knew that he was both dead and alive.
He found himself thrust into a reality worse than anything his imagination could have created, and he burst into tears.
.....
Kate leaped to Brian’s side, picked him up and held him close. She shouted for everyone to quiet down, and she took Brian upstairs to his room. He was still crying uncontrollably, and Kate could feel his body shaking. It was at that moment she understood how difficult Brian’s life must be. She realized that he was only a two-year-old. Because of his abilities, she and everyone else around him had treated him as if he were much older.
Susan and Shawn were right behind Kate, and they wanted to know what was wrong. Kate shrugged her shoulders and held up her index finger to gesture ‘one minute’. The others both nodded their understanding and remained quiet.
The reporter and the director weren’t far behind, and they wanted to know what was going on. Shawn and Susan both knew that they’d better get everyone downstairs and have them all wait while Kate tended to Brian. They left the room, taking the news people with them, and closed the door behind them.
Kate squeezed Brian tightly and rubbed the back of his head as she held him. “What’s wrong, darling?” she asked.
Brian switched his crying over to sobbing, and his breath came in short gasps as he spoke. “I’m scared, Mother. I don’t want to do this television thing.”
“Then we won’t do it, Brian. You’re the most important thing in my whole life, and I won’t make you do this if you don’t want to.” She rubbed his back as she spoke. “I love you very much, sweetheart.”
“Mother, I don’t want to be in gifted stuff anymore. I just want to be like everybody else. Is that okay too?”
Kate really had to digest this last request. Her mind raced through all of the expectations she had of him, and she weighed them against the real issue of what was truly in Brian’s best interest. “Of course it’s okay, Brian. This must have been so hard for you. Why didn’t you ask before?”
“I didn’t hate it before. But now I do. Are Dad and Mom-Mom gonna be mad at me?”
“Of course not. You just leave this all to me. I’ll explain to them how you feel. We all love you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Sure. But they were always so proud of how smart I was. I don’t want to have to be so smart anymore. So now I won’t be so special.”
“That’s not true, honey.” Kate herself started crying at this point. She composed herself enough to say, “You’ll always be special to us. You don’t have to be smart to be special. You’re just special because you’re our little boy. We’ll love you no matter if you’re smart or dumb, big or little, bad or good, and.....Well, I don’t know the word I’m looking for, but there’s nothing in the world that could make us stop loving you.”
Brian pulled his head back so he could look into his mother’s eyes and told her, “Unconditional.”
The tears streamed down her face, but she managed to whisper, “That’s the word.” She saw him smile, and she said, “Why don’t you just wait right here while I get rid of all those people downstairs?”
Brian nodded. Kate placed him on the bed, wiped his eyes with her fingers, and kissed him on the forehead.
She walked downstairs and quietly told Shawn and Susan what had happened. She then asked the television people to leave. They started to object, but Kate responded with a firm order for them to leave. With no further ado, they packed their gear.
Kate walked over to the director and simply said, “I’ll talk with you later and explain. Right now I need to get back to my son.”
.....
Ray was overwhelmed. He had the knowledge of something so wonderful, yet so scary. And it was so sad too. He thought about God. Then he thought about the family that Ray left behind when he died. He had many decisions to make. It was just too much for him to handle at the moment.
He decided that it was best to keep all this to himself until he figured out exactly what he should do.
He couldn’t help thinking about one single, overwhelming concept. It was the most awesome concept that he had ever confronted in either of his two lives. It was so mind-boggling that it seemed impossible to deal with. He closed his eyes and silently spoke the words to himself. Eternal life.
