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.”
“You just happen to know the Fibonacci sequence off the top of your head?”
“No, I learned it my sophomore year of college.”
“Would you have remembered this before the incident in Denver?”
“Definitely not.”
“Would you say you now have the ability to access everything you’ve ever read or learned?”
Huh. I considered it. “I don’t know if I’m comfortable saying absolutely everything, but many things. Most things.”
“Did you study a foreign language in high school or college?”
“French.”
“Before Denver, what was your fluency level?”
“I’d lost most of it.”
Romero spent the next ten minutes quizzing me on French grammar, and I found that I could now speak fluent French and read it as well.
“Everything I learned in college is available to me again,” I said. “I’m probably more fluent now than at my peak in university.”
Dr. Romero presented me with numerical sequences of increasing difficulty.
After an hour, I finally met one whose pattern I couldn’t suss out.
“Congratulations,” I said. “You finally stumped me.”
Dr. Romero closed his laptop.
“So I guess I didn’t ace it?” I asked.
“No, the test ended forty-five minutes ago. You scored perfectly. I just wanted to see how complex a sequence you could handle. And before you ask, I have no idea what your IQ is. All I know is that it’s beyond two hundred, which is the limit of what the test I just administered can measure.”
“Say that again?” I said.
I’d heard him. I just didn’t believe what I was hearing.
He leaned toward the glass. “Your IQ is at least two hundred. That’s as high as the test can measure. And your memory appears to be preternatural.”
He got up and left.
I didn’t move.
When I was fourteen, I took an IQ test before starting high school, which according to my mother, was simply a tool to help us understand how I learned.
I scored a 118. Above average. In the top fourteen percent of the world’s population.
My mother hid it well, but she must have been severely disappointed.
Her IQ was rumored to be in the low 180s.
I got straight As in high school.
Into Berkeley, the college of my choice.
I was disciplined. I tried.
And then I met O chem. Organic chemistry. I didn’t fail or anything. It just didn’t come easily. Plenty of students washed out. The top few in my class breezed through, and I should’ve been one of them considering my ambitions, but my B? was hard fought.
After completing my undergrad degree in biochemistry and genetics, I asked my mother if I could spend the summer with her in Shenzhen, working in her lab. She agreed that I could come.
So it was me, Mr. 118, surrounded by über-geniuses who were trying to change the world. The more I was around them, understanding only a fraction of what they were attempting to do, the clearer I saw the writing on the wall I’d been avoiding all my life.