The Instrument

I was only four the first time it happened.  I remember that now.  They’d taught me to read and then they forced me to read.  That was how I met him.

                Through my child’s eyes, he was enormous.  Giving it the context of age, while he was certainly larger than my father, he was smaller than I am now.  The curio in his living room was six feet high, and he was no taller than it.  But his presence filled a room.  Even at that young age, I appreciated the way everything went silent when he appeared in the doorway.  I could feel everyone’s attention redirect towards him, drawing my own eyes along with them, like our conversations were atmosphere and he had just opened a portal to a vacuum. 

                In my memories, he’s always wearing one of two suits.  One is dark gray, and he wears a white shirt and a black tie with it.  The other is light gray and he wears a black shirt and a white tie with it.  Neither of them fit him very well – too loose in the shoulders and chest, coming up short at the wrists and ankles.  He was slight, to say the least, and even though he was not old when I was young, he gave the impression of age, like a cartoon man meant to evoke a buzzard.  He kept a quarter inch or so of dark, straight hair on the top of his head, while shaving the rest daily with a safety razor.  I witnessed this on more than one occasion, after I had become his project. 

                “Project” isn’t the right word.  I feel like that word implies a measure of emotional investment, that when someone in a position of power takes on another as a project, they aim for that person’s success.  I don’t believe that the idea of me being successful in any fashion ever crossed his mind.  The more appropriate word would probably be “tool.”  I was an instrument through the use of which he could achieve a goal.  Recent events have convinced me of that.  But I have to confess that, as a child, it didn’t feel that way.  I felt special.

                In the room with the orange and yellow wallpaper in the paisley pattern that I traced over and over again with my fingertip, surrounded by my parents and all of my parents’ friends, looking at the dark, polished wood furniture that was nothing like what we had in our bungalow, waiting for him, I felt special.  Just the air in that room was saturated with energy, with his energy, swirling in between dust motes and crackling from the beige shag carpeting.  When he looked down at me from those sunken, pale gray eyes beneath a prodigious, smooth forehead, and when I stared back, childishly enough to be innocent but aware enough to know I was not a normal child and this was not a normal meeting, the world around me changed. 

At three years old, I was reading storybooks.  By three and a half, I’d read every book my parents owned, and could recite them word for word.  At four, I was given to Wade Burchamp and made into his personal, walking, talking library, the storage unit for all of his philosophy, his musings and meanderings, his legacy.  I was to be his living Bible, the ark of his covenant with his following, a text in the form of a boy, incorruptible.  And before everything fell apart, before I became who I am now, I was grateful for that opportunity, to be something no one else could be.  Hours, days, and weeks of reading books and fragments of books, scraps of paper, cocktail napkins, his verbal dictation, all filling my head where a childhood should have been.  And I was grateful.  And now I’m ashamed.