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normal learning histories and normal intelligence.”
    The syndrome was not hereditary: the chances of having a second CFC child were microscopic, although Walker had a fifty–fifty chance of having a CFCer of his own. “However, by then we will know a great deal more about the condition and the mutation that causes it, and there will undoubtedly be a variety of options available to him and his wife.” Walker’s wife! I have to say, I never believed it.

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    His infant head was overlarge and shaped like an olive, but the rest of him was as light as a loaf of bread: I could carry him in one hand. I called him Boogle, or Beagle, or Mr. B, or Lagalaga (because he made that noise), or simply Bah! (He liked B sounds.) As he grew older, we developed a private language of tongue clicks that only he and I speak. All we ever seem to say is, “Hello, it’s me, I’m clicking to you, and only to you, because only you and I speak Click;” to which he (or I) reply, I think, “Yes, hi, I see you there, and I am clicking back, I like it that we speak our private language, in fact I find it hilarious.” This is very enjoyable for both of us.
    I could clap my hands and he would clap back; he especially liked it when I clapped his hands faster than he ever could on his own. It was impossible to take a decent photograph of him, except by chance, and then he looked like Frank Sinatra Jr. on a tear. He smelled warm, baked: his head to this day has the tasty whiff of a Zagnut bar. He never crawled, but began to walk at two-and-a-half.
    The house was a well-organized nightmare. You couldn’t survive as the parent of a handicapped child if you weren’t organized, and my wife was. There were the famous laundry baskets of toys on every floor; plastic activity boards hanging off the backs of chairs in the kitchen and the living room; tubs of syringes and feeding lines upstairs and down; caches of diapers in a chest by the front door; troops of medicine bottles and ointment tubes marching through cupboards and across dressers and countertops.
    He loved to touch things. The bottom three slats of every window blind in the house were mangled. His most developed consciousness seemed to live in his hands, in what he could manipulate—the genius light switch, the fascinating toilet-paper tube, anything that beeped or flickered. What he could touch, he knew.
    The best part was the way he exploded with laughter and rocked into a ball of glee at some mysterious thing, which passersby loved. (For a while, I suspected he was rubbing his penis between his thighs, a traditional source of merriment for all boys.) As he grew older, he became slyer. He loved to clear tables and flat surfaces, especially closely guarded ones. He went for glasses of wine, which seemed to catch his eye, so we called him the temperance man. He would distract you, then wipe the deck and throw his head back with pleasure, momentarily cleverer than anyone else. Was that his secret project, to show us he was sometimes smart enough to fool us? That would not surprise me. His desires were invisible, unspoken, but that did not mean he had none.
    He became a great wanderer, a lucky one. Here is one evening:
    He is five. (At his stockiest, he looks three.) I leave him in an enclosed hallway at the foot of some stairs in a friend’s elegant house while we eat dinner. I know he can’t climb stairs and I know he can’t open a door.
    Ten minutes later, I hear a tinkling sound. A beautiful sound, the noise of the air breaking, but unusual enough to go and see what it is. It’s Walker. He has done the unimagined and climbed the stairs and opened the door and is now gleefully and deliberately smashing the last of seven wineglasses on a Noguchi coffee table. Not a scratch on him. We come to call that evening Kristallnacht.
    It was not a particularly funny joke, but if you spend a lot of time with a disabled child, with a child who was not supposed to live and whose survival nevertheless