AIQ

Part 1

He had worked at this for the past ten years.

Ten years is a long time, and yet they had gone by so fast. The remnants of the past were not more than memories to Dr. Karl Frasier. The memories were fast and drunk, blurring and smudging themselves, having no real meaning except to the person who was at the helm of it all, gazing out as the recollections jumped out from the ocean and flopped all over the grimy deck, flimsy and mercury filled. A strong, seaworthy man would be the only type of person capable of sailing through the roaring ocean that Dr. Karl Frasier’s memories were. He could hardly even decipher what the difference was between five years ago and yesterday. How could anyone else?

       A good description of Dr. Frasier was a tall, balding man with pale white skin and light grey eyes, but even that was hard to pinpoint because it seemed his body was constantly adapting to his surroundings. For example, the sun (which was just rising) cast light, which, when reflecting off his skin, made him look as if he was positively golden. But when the sun eventually set, and the moon arrived in its place, Frasier would become ghost-like and eerie, with eyes that shined brightly out towards the world. At the moment, he was sitting in the driver’s seat of his black Sedan as he drove through the bleak brick buildings of Northern Queens, gazing out at the dilapidated auto body shops and the just opening storefronts with their neon signs reading, “We Sell Liquor,” or “Free cuts for kids every Wednesday.” It was really true what they said about Queens – you could form no general opinions because there were so many opinions to hear. Every sign was written in a dozen languages: Spanish, Chinese, Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean, Greek – it was like he was travelling at light speed and watching the countries fly by in seconds.

       Dr. Frasier, who had been driving for the past five hours listening to the Complete Compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, stretched out his hands as he came to a red light. He hummed along with the operatic composition, his distinguished vocal cords flying along with the romantic tunes that had come from so long ago. He rubbed his eyes and observed the crosswalk. Look at all these people, going about their silly, nondescript business, probably doing the exact same thing they did yesterday, and would be doing the exact same thing the next day. It was so very cyclical, and so very boring. Frasier hated normal people.

       After all (the green light lit up and Frasier started driving again), Frasier had grown up around normal people all his life. He had lived in a small country town in southern Vermont as a boy, and had watched as the others he grew up with did all the things young men his age were expected to do; watched as they became less young and dropped out of high school to support some girl they had met a year ago; watched, watched, watched; watched as their hair fell out and watched as they were stuck working bareback on a failing farm (if there was one thing Frasier couldn’t respect, it was failing) or begging for tips as a pizza delivery boy; watched as their children begged them for the latest technology, watched until things became worse and worse and they blew their brains out. Frasier had seen it all. Frasier was smarter than all of them.

       Frasier had studied as a kid, he had read and read and read, and studied and analyzed and done all the things boys his age were not expected to do. His father, the literary failure and drunk, had committed suicide when Karl was not much older than five. From that point on he lived in his grandmother’s house with his mother, but what he really lived with was books – and not silly, school approved books that most didn’t want to read anyway, but scientific books, books that told Frasier the truth about life; books that showed how everything worked – books that showed him how to build things, or how to say things. It was these books that gave Frasier the passion for the scientific way. It was these books that made Frasier feel he had control over his life and could do things with it.

       Red light again.

       And all the neighbors and all the bullies must have felt very stupid – the ones that told him he should have been having fun, playing football or whatever other hillbilly sport the other boys played – when after eleven years of constant reading and learning, he had been accepted into MIT at sixteen years old. He was a god there. All the teachers loved him. He was meeting people, people who agreed with him about the world and the way things were supposed to be run. It was a wonderful time. Frasier had probably never been happier up until that moment. And then…