Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [17]
“Jesus,” said Rocky.
“Exactly. Now, doesn’t that make your number system seem a little plain? I’m sorry; I don’t mean to say that your world is plain. It’s just that I’m a synesthete out of the closet. There’s nothing as annoying as the newly converted.”
Chapter 5
Tess did not regret for one minute the uniqueness of synesthesia, only that it took her so long to know its name and that she was not alone, that there were others. There were a few kindred spirits out in the world who were touched by the cross-firing of senses, touched by the same tweak in genetics as Tess, and finding them had changed her life. As a child, she was driven to silence when she discovered that none of the other children saw numbers as colors. She would say, “The answer is number four, right next to the red three.” The second-grade teacher tilted her head as if to hear her better and squinted her eyes trying to see her better. “No, Tess. We’re only doing the numbers now, not the colors.” In one horrible moment, built up from a few months of clues, Tess understood that her teacher and her classmates lived in a monochrome world where numbers were only black lines, sad lonely things. Piano notes did not brush against their cheeks and smell like cinnamon, and most odd of all, when they fell and scraped their knees, they did not shout, “It’s too orange, now red!” They cried of course, as she did, but they could not see the pulse of the pain in great orange splats with a deep red core.
Tess was a freak and she knew it, hid it from everyone except her mother who said, “You can say it to me, but don’t let anyone else hear you. They’ll say you’re crazy.” Tess did not know until much later that synesthesia is an inherited trait, and that her mother probably struggled with and then hid her own multisensory world. But her mother’s appendix burst when Tess was eight and things got bungled up at the hospital and before Tess knew it, she was staring straight at the colorless body of her mother laid out in the coffin. She had never seen her mother without color before. She had always loved the apricot glow of her mother’s laugh and her warm, smooth touch. A body without color was the most terrifying sight of her life and she had nightmares for years of a monochrome body. Synesthesia didn’t stop for Tess when she buried her mother, but she didn’t speak of it again for over fifty years.
When she graduated from high school, the war in Europe and Japan had ended, and she begged her father to send her to college. Tess had a huge capacity for memorizing anything and she graduated at the top of her small Nebraska high school. When teachers marveled at her academic abilities, she failed to mention to them that she had a different way of remembering facts and ideas. When numbers and letters each have their own color, shape, and size, subjects like history and math fit into neat packets that Tess could pull out at will; she had constant access to a color-coded file system in her brain. Math was particularly easy for her. She was most fond of the number five, which was a metallic shade of turquoise and had a commanding sound.
Her father sent her to a teacher’s college, where, in the midst of taking as many math classes as seemed logical for an aspiring teacher, she moved on to biology. When she took a class in anatomy, she was in heaven, at last picturing the heart, the blood vessels, the hard-working liver, all the interiors of the body opened up to her in a splendor that she had not known existed. Other students agonized over the nervous system, forcing their monochrome brains to memorize an unseen world. For Tess, optics nerves were bright yellow and looked exactly like clothesline rope. The nerves that ran down the arms and spread out across the hands were sky blue and smelled like lilacs. Who could not remember them or what they did? Her anatomy professor said, “If you were a young man, I’d say you had all the makings of a fine doctor. But you’ll be married before graduation.”
Tess,