Upgrade(26)

“No.”

I was sitting at the desk in my cell facing Dr. Romero, who was seated at the exterior desk on the other side of the glass. He’d been a man in his prime when I’d arrested him, and unsurprisingly, the years had not been gentle. The skin under his eyes was dark and sagging, and there were burst capillaries around his nose, suggesting he’d been anesthetizing himself with too much alcohol. And the light in his eyes, which I’d seen in videos of his lectures in better times, had nearly been extinguished. He looked like a man in an impossible position, one whose soul was rotting inside him. Despite everything, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him—another victim of Ramsay’s famine, intellectually starving right in front of me.

A laptop was open beside him, and on my desk I had a legal pad and several pens.

We began with verbal acuity. Analogies. Letter rearrangement into words. Puzzles.

It was all exceptionally easy until the end of the verbal section, when he turned his laptop toward the glass so that I could see the final question:





Mytacism is most like which of the following words:


a. pugnacious

b. misutilization

c. poltophagy

d. levament

e. agog

f. I don’t know



It was the only question so far that had pushed me.

I could feel my neurons firing.

Scrambling to find a toehold.

I had seen this word once, and only once, in my life.

Twelve years ago, for Christmas, Beth had given me a Word-of-the-Day calendar of bizarre and obscure words.

The entry for November 12 had been “mytacism.”

I could see the little square of paper from the small calendar, which had been depleted to the last two months of the year. A magnet held it to our refrigerator in the first house Beth and I had bought together in Bethesda.

It was still early that morning when I’d ripped off the sheet for November 11 (spanghew: to throw violently into the air; especially, to throw (a frog) into the air from the end of a stick).

Ava was two, and she was already awake and toddling about, saying, “Meal, meal, meal.” Translation: “I want oatmeal.” Her favorite food at the time.

I saw a perfect image of that word entry.

    November 12

my·ta·cism | \ ?mīt-?-?siz-?m \

: excessive or wrong use of the sound of the letter m



I said, “B. Misutilization.”

Dr. Romero made a note.

“This one took you 2.3 seconds longer than any of your other answers.”

“I’d only seen the word once before.”

“When? In what context?”

I told him.

He nodded, said, “You haven’t selected ‘I don’t know’ for any of the questions yet. Can you explain to me how you’re coming up with your answers?”

“Simple. I either know the answer or I don’t, and so far, I haven’t encountered a word I haven’t seen before.”

“So you haven’t guessed at any words?”

“No.”

“Would you say you have perfect memory?”

I thought about it. “I don’t know if it’s perfect, but it’s very good.”

“Better than before Denver?”

“For sure. And getting sharper every day.”

“Can you recall what you were doing on this day last year?”

I thought about it. “Yes.”

“To what level of detail?”

“As if a camera were behind my eyes, recording everything I saw and experienced.”

“Do you remember the thoughts you had?”

One year ago today, I was in Kansas City, Missouri, with Nadine. We were there to raid the house of a man who was suspected of building and selling gene-editing kits to enhance muscle—mainly to weight lifters and professional athletes.

I found that I could “punch in” to any moment of that day. Waking up in the hotel and grabbing my phone off the bedside table to find a text from Beth:

Morning, love, how’d you sleep?



To eating burnt ends at Arthur Bryant’s barbecue joint. The smells and the sounds, right down to the conversation at the table beside ours, the woman saying…

“Yes,” I said. “I can even remember certain trains of thought.”

He tested my mathematical ability next, and I found it even easier than the verbal section.

“In an ocean, there is a smack of jellyfish,” Dr. Romero said. “Every day, the group doubles in size. If it takes ninety days for the jellyfish to cover the entire ocean, how long would it take for the jellyfish to cover half of the ocean?”

“You’re wasting my time and yours,” I said.

“Please provide an answer. We have to work up to the hard ones.”

“Eighty-nine days.”

We tackled spatial reasoning, visual/perceptual and classification skills. Logical reasoning. And finally pattern recognition.

“Logan, what is the next term in the following sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34?”

I pored over the sequence on his laptop screen.

“Fifty-five.”

“How did you get that?”

“Well, that’s the Fibonacci sequence. Each number is the sum of the two that precede it.”