Genius and Dummy, Part II

…Thus began Alvin’s two year tenure as the official assistant to Professor Stephen W. Hawking. At first, his duties included only menial tasks, such as chauffeuring Hawking around, picking up his dry cleaning, and brushing his teeth twice daily. For Alvin, however, this initial relegation to such tedious chores was serendipitous, as it afforded him time to brush up on his particle physics (a hadron, Alvin learned, is a category of subatomic particle, and not a transposition of a colloquialism for arousal), and on his cosmology (a white dwarf, as it turns out, is not just a pejorative for Kerri Shrug).

Faithful execution of those simple duties earned Alvin the professor’s trust, and slowly his responsibilities increased: sponge-bathing Dr. Hawking, releasing press briefings on the professor’s latest discoveries, accompanying him to cosmological symposiums, and eventually, even polishing the particle accelerator (!) Among his new chores, Alvin’s favorite was maintaining the physicist’s website, by virtue of the fact that this was an arena in which he could act with confidence and speed.

“I guess I’ve always been considered a little geeky because of my interest in computers, and my programming job,” Alvin confessed to Stephen (or “Steve,” as Alvin now referred to him at the professor’s insistence) one day while debugging the professor’s laptop in his office.

“Oh…really?” Steve replied via his computer-enabled speech generator. “How…odd…isn’t your…graduate work…in…astrophysics?”

“Yes! Yes—of course! I mean, astrophysics is my life! Gotta love those hard-ons. Hadrons—I mean hadrons! But everyone’s gotta have a hobby, too, right? My hobby is computers, just a little something I like to do on the side. By ‘job’ I meant the part time job I took to help pay the bills during graduate school.”

“But doesn’t…your fellowship…pay…for…that?”

“Oh right, my fellowship…but I’ve been trying to buy all the parts to assemble my own observatory, so I can track the motions of the stars from home. So I’ve been saving up. Anyway, I was saying that I feel a little awkward around people sometimes. Communicating with them is hard, and social situations can be uncomfortable.” Steve’s eyes, one of the remaining body parts over which Lou Gehrig's disease still permitted him control, shifted their gaze to the ground as if in embarrassment. “I know…” he began, “what that…is like.” A long, deep silence of mutual understanding filled the room.

This was just the sort of personal breakthrough Alvin had hoped to induce with his comment, but from here, he was unsure how to proceed. Was it better to advance the conversation and hope to make more connections, or just let their new spirit of empathy due its work without words? Fixing upon the former course after an appropriate pause, Alvin continued, “well, I guess I’m really in no place to complain about problems with communication. Given the difficulties you face, I’m in no place to complain about anything…I mean, here you are, the brightest mind of our time, yet in this cosmic injustice, that great mind is stuck in such a crippled frame. What I wouldn’t give—what I wouldn’t give!—to trade bodies with you, to give you all the physical freedoms I have, to ease your scientific discoveries and enlarge humanity’s understanding of our place in his universe.” Alvin paused thoughtfully, then continued, “now look, I’m acting so condescending. I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have presumed to have the slightest understanding of what life for you is like.”

“No, don’t…apologize,” replied the robotic voice. “How often…have I thought…the same thing. In interviews, I say…my disability…has taught me…more about life…but if I could…I’d trade it all…for a normal life.” And for the second time that morning, the eyes that gave light to that great mind were cast downward in apology and embarrassment, as though their owner had for the first time revealed his greatest secret.

Sensing that there was little more he could say to sneak deeper into Steve’s sphere of trust, Alvin simply nodded, gave an empathetic hug, and let one tear roll down each cheek as a symbol of his commiseration.

As the days and weeks passed, the confidence Steve placed in Alvin continued to deepen, until the intimacy between the two rival even that between the professor and his wife. It was then that Alvin knew he could elicit virtually any information out from his supposed confidant without raising suspicion.