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possessed a complete vocal apparatus, but assumed correctly that the neural controls need to operate it were missing.
    They had been ready to put up with sleepless nights due to their baby’s wailing. Instead, their house seemed somehow quieter than it had before Billy’s birth.
    Sometimes at night Billy’s mother and father lay in bed, awake, tensed for a cry that never came.
    Since it never came, after a while they stopped listening.
    One instinct that Billy possessed to a sufficient degree was that of suckling.
    Billy’s mother had decided while still pregnant with Billy that she would breast-feed her infant. When she came home with Billy, she remained determined to follow this course. Several times a day, then, Billy’s mother would hold him to her tit and Billy would take her sweet milk eagerly, his tiny lips and throat working silently. After feeding, he never even burped. Neither did he exhibit colic.
    Thus was Billy able to take the nourishment necessary for his survival and, indeed, his growth.
    While nursing Billy, his mother would gaze down at her child with a complex mixture of emotions. She would note how the bony pink ridge of his cranial crater—below which grew a smattering of fine hair like a monk’s tonsure—was hardening and changing color, from roseate to peachy. She refrained from looking inside.
    The doctors had decided that no cosmetic repairs were possible for Billy’s tragically grave prenatal malformation. They admonished his parents to keep the interior of Billy’s partial skull free of foreign objects (the exposed backs of the eyes were particularly sensitive), and to wash the rim daily with a mild solution of hydrogen peroxide and water, being most careful not to allow any of the solution to come in contact with Billy’s tiny, yet hard-working brain fragment. (Truth to tell, the doctors felt that Billy would not survive for long, so they were reluctant to expend much time and energy on him, when there were so many other more curable patients demanding their skill and attention.)
    Billy was supposed to wear a protective surgical cap, but his mother felt that it would do Billy’s skull good to receive fresh air, and so she soon abandoned this practice.
    Indeed, Billy’s appearance quickly came to seem so natural to his parents that they almost forgot his unique condition. After supper each night they would stand by Billy’s crib, holding hands and gazing down on their silent, motionless son, speculating wordlessly about his future.
    One night Billy’s father said, “I imagine that we’ll always have to care for Billy. He won’t ever be normal, will he?”
    “No,” admitted Billy’s mother, “he won’t ever be special, as we had hoped. But I don’t mind. Do you?”
    “No. But we must never try to have another child.”
    “I agree.”
     
    * * *
     
    When Billy was sixteen years old, his life changed forever.
    Billy had attained the normal stature of an average sixteen-year-old. His unlined, emotionless face was attractive in the manner of a well-designed mannequin. His narrow crescent of hair, kept neatly trimmed by his mother, was a common brown. His eyes remained the same empty mint-green pools.
    Each morning Billy’s mother removed him from bed. She took off his pajamas, bathed him, dressed him in pants and shirt, socks but no shoes, and fed him. (Billy had progressed to solid food at the appropriate stage in his development, mastication apparently being as instinctive as suckling, and within his limited capabilities.) Then she sat him down in a comfortably padded chair and left for work. Billy’s muscles were kept well-toned by a series of exercises which his father put him through each night, and he would maintain whatever pose he was arranged in.
    Billy’s mother knew she could leave her son safely alone while she worked, for he would make no movement of consequence to endanger himself. The only thing she worried about was a spontaneous fire of some sort, in which