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Prologue
Brianna Smythe took one look at Joey and said to herself, Bingo. There’s my ticket to the Big Time. The young psychologist immediately knew her trip to New Harmony, Utah, and the subsequent hassle with the local rednecks over the whereabouts of the cabin that Joey and his great-grandmother lived in was going to pay off in a big way.
Brianna observed that Joey established brief eye contact with her and then looked down at the porch floor. The young boy, who was a good six inches taller than his great-grandmother, took two steps backwards to hide himself from the stranger’s observing eye. The young psychologist noted the boy’s behavior was childlike, something she would expect from an eighteen-month-old.
The great-grandmother was dressed in a pair of faded, bibbed overalls and a short-sleeved denim work shirt. Pulled down over her forehead was a man’s dress hat, the kind that went out of style in the late Forties. From underneath the brown felt, long gray hair stuck out in all directions.
Brianna thought, The last time I saw a hat like that it was on Humphrey Bogart’s head in The Big Sleep. She concluded from the worn knees of the overalls that the old woman led an active, vigorous life. She guessed that the great-grandmother had a large garden and a chicken coop near the cabin and that she had split the wood stacked at the far end of the porch.
Brianna smiled at the old woman and then asked, “Mrs. Walsh, can we speak in front of Joey?”
“Call me Granny — everyone does,” the old woman said. “The boy’s not an idiot. He understands English.”
“Ah . . ..” Brianna knew her face did not betray any emotion, even though the muscles in her lower abdomen had become tense of their own accord. She wished she did not feel so uncomfortable using terms of familiarity when addressing strangers. She forced herself to say, “Granny,” and then said, “I’m the psychologist from the University who responded to your letter. I’m very interested in Joey, and we at the University would like to offer Joey a full scholarship.”
“Land sakes alive!” exclaimed the old woman. “Why the boy cannot read or write a word!”
“No problem,” Brianna said. “That’s no longer an admission requirement. Half the students at the University cannot read or write — and the other half won’t.”
“Hear that, Joey.” Granny turned around and threw her arms around her great-grandson. “You’re going to college.”
Before Joey could leave for the University, forms had to be completed, signatures gotten, and histories taken. Courthouse records confirmed that Joey’s mother, Mary Hope Walsh, died from injuries sustained in a car accident when she was eight months pregnant with Joey. The birth certificate gave no father, and although Granny knew his identity, she refused to divulge the “deadbeat’s” name to physicians, social workers, or Dr. Smythe. The birth certificate, if confirmed by medical authorities, meant that Joey was a unique occurrence in the history of science.
Dr. James Hoepp delivered Joey by Caesarean section in the emergency room and later was his primary care physician. The medical report he submitted to Dr. Smythe stated that Joey had contracted no childhood illnesses and that he was in excellent general health. The two Polaroids in the report showed a five-foot, eight-inch male, with a baby face, free from scars, furrows, or other marks of personal history. The report stated that the genitals were normal for an adult male. At the end of the report, Dr. Hoepp speculated that from some unknown cause the human growth hormone gene was triggered too early in Joey, for he was only eighteen months old.
Premature aging is an extraordinarily rare disease in children, but premature growth to adulthood is not discussed in medical textbooks nor a subject in research literature. Neither Hoepp nor Smythe could find any single occurrence in medical history of a man-child like Joey.
After her extensive interviews with Granny, Brianna was convinced that, except for Dr. Hoepp, Joey’s sole contact with humanity was his eccentric great-grandmother. Granny’s cabin, fifteen miles outside of New Harmony, had neither electricity nor running water. Consequently, Joey spent his short life in nature, isolated from the modern world.
The outside world had intruded on Joey’s life only because of Dr. Hoepp. He had convinced Granny to sign a letter he had written in her name to Dr. Lewis, an old friend of his and the Chairman of the Psychology Department at the University. The letter asked if researchers at the University would be interested in studying Joey.
The battery of psychological tests that Dr. Smythe gave Joey indicated that the man-child possessed the raw cognitive and verbal capacities of an adult, although he knew virtually nothing and spoke in only one- or two-word sentences. Joey was pure potentiality, primed for knowledge acquisition and socialization.
Joey, in essence, was a human person in a state of nature, untainted by civilization. In the history of science, the only event remotely similar to Joey was the discovery in 1801 of the feral boy of Aveyron, an eleven-year-old found running naked and wild in a forest. Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, a French surgeon, thought the wild boy of Aveyron was the Rosetta stone for deciphering human nature. He spent five years trying to train and educate the boy, before concluding that the boy’s prolonged isolation from humanity rendered him incapable of language.
Before going to New Harmony, Brianna Smythe studied Itard’s scientific memoir, Rapports sur le sauvage de l’Aveyron. Smythe and Itard shared two things in common: they were both the same age, twenty-six, when they discovered their “savages,” and both had overvaulting ambitions. Itard’s research ended in failure; however, Brianna knew she had the genuine key to universal human happiness and was not interested in whether Joey was or was not the Rosetta stone for unraveling the mysterious nature of Homo sapiens.
Brianna saw Joey as humankind’s newest and best hope for happiness. She knew from experience that fifteen or so years of dependence upon one’s parents screws up virtually every human being. Because of an accident of evolution, childhood for the human species is excessively long. If an individual matured to an adult within two or three years after she was born, then child rearing could be perfected, so that all the inevitable strife of family life would not occur, and every person would be guaranteed a happy life. How beautiful that would be. After three years, an individual would say adios to his or her parents — thanks, I can take care of myself, now — and the family would dissolve.
Brianna saw a grand future opening before her, and for humanity since Joey was a turning point in human history. Under her guidance and tutelage, Joey would become the first truly happy person, and, then, biochemists and geneticists would be impelled to do the grunt work to find the defective gene that caused Joey to mature biologically within eighteen months. Once the gene was discovered and synthesized, science would correct nature; human beings, then, would have the option to have children with very limited childhoods. Furthermore, child rearing would not be the disastrous intrusion into a woman’s life that it is now. A woman could decide to set aside several years for a child or two, and then later continue to pursue the main interests of her life.
From early childhood, Brianna knew she had a special destiny, but not until she saw Joey did she guess the monumental significance of her destiny. Scientists, philosophers, spiritual leaders, and political reformers, all sought at one time or another to make humankind happy, and all failed. History, fate, who knows what, had singled out Brianna to lead humankind to universal happiness.