Chapter Seven

      Kevin spoke. In the way I had found typical of most elective mutes, he came back with full powers of speech – grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure – as if he had been speaking all along. In the very beginning, his voice was hoarse and gritty sounding from lack of use. We went through a truckload of throat lozenges and hard candies, trying to ease the roughness, but soon he became accustomed to speaking again and the soreness went away.

      Kevin was not a hesitant conversationalist. For the first few days our communications were limited while he experimented with his voice. However, he was speaking easily before the following week was out.

      Our conversations were none too brilliant in the beginning. After such an ordeal, I think one is inclined to expect profundity at the very least. Thus it was anticlimatic to have most of our conversations revolve around things like crossword puzzles or Kevin’s day on the ward or my work at the clinic. I couldn’t tell how much he was guarding from me because I just did not know him very well.

      However, simply because we had conquered his lack of speech did not mean that we had solved all problems. We were a long way from it. His fear, for example, was still of the same magnificent proportions. The only difference now was that he could make occasional comments about it. But we remained trapped under that damned table. In fact, we seemed more firmly stuck under it than before.

      I compromised on the table issue, by not always going under it myself. Instead, I pushed the chairs to one side and sat down on the carpet just beyond the table. This was more comfortable because there was more room and I didn’t have to hunch up. But it did not entice Kevin out and he would not talk to me if I got very far away from him. So mostly, I lay on the rug on my stomach, half of me under the table, half of me out.

      Kevin was able to make me captive to others of his fears, too. For instance, one morning someone had left a box of old schoolbooks sitting on the empty bookcase in the room. It was a largish cardboard carton, and when I noticed it, I could see old readers and workbooks sticking out of the top but I gave no thought to it. Kevin, however, focused on it right off.

      ‘What’s in that box?’ he asked from under the table.

      ‘Some old schoolbooks, I think,’ I replied.

      ‘What kind of books?’

      I don’t know. I didn’t look.’

      A worried expression crossed his face. ‘Go look.’ He nudged me. ‘Go look for me. Tell me what’s in it.’

      When I didn’t move, he became more agitated. His speech gave him a new power over me because now he could be sure I understood what he wanted. Sweat beaded up on his face.

      ‘There might be spirals in there,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘On notebooks. There might be spiral notebooks inside that box.’

      ‘I don’t think so, Kevin. I think there’s just old schoolbooks.’

      ‘But sometimes there’s spirals on old books.’

      ‘No, I don’t think there are.’

      ‘There might be. You said you didn’t look. So you don’t know. There might be and you just can’t see them. They might be under there. Spirals might be in that box. Go look and find out.’

      He could not concentrate. Once the terrifying thought had entered his head, he became obsessed with it. He knew those small, metal, spring like spirals were in there, lurking, waiting to shoot out and get him. All the little manifestations of fear began, the trembling, the chattering, the sweating, the shallow breathing. He wrapped himself up in a small ball way back in the safety of his table and rocked. Nothing I could say would relieve him. Tears welled up. His knuckles went white. And in the end I got up, took all the stuff out of the box, showed him all of it, just to prove that it was entirely safe with no spiral-bound notebooks to be found. Only then could he relax.

      For the first few sessions after Kevin began to talk, I told no one. I’m not sure why. It seemed a secret trust for a while. But once his speaking began to take on all the proportions of normalcy and was no longer such a special achievement in and of itself, I started the usual procedures to generalize it to include other people.

      Normally, I was able to quickly generalize an elective mute’s speech beyond the two of us. However, in Kevin’s case I soon realized that Kevin’s choice to speak had little to do with me, personally, and my techniques. Consequently, I had no ability to make him speak to other people. It quickly became apparent that I had not caused him to speak. Instead, he had simply opened his private world of one to include me.

      And Kevin chose forthrightly not to speak to anyone else. That drastically narrowed the scope of our first victory.

      It drove me mad for a while because I could do nothing. I had told Dana and the staff and Jeff what had happened, that Kevin was speaking to me, but try as I might, if Dana or someone else came into the small white room, I could not get Kevin to talk to them. I tried. There was war between us for a while. I tried my usual approach. I tried my backup techniques. I tried other methods afterward, which I had used with some success with other children. I tried other people’s recommendations, the things I read about in journals. When those all expired from overwork, I invented a few new techniques on the spot. In the end, I hoped to wear him down just by the sheer quantity of tries, if nothing else. But I didn’t. Nothing worked.

      Nothing worked for a very simple reason, I suspect. Kevin wouldn’t let it. This was a very different kind of battle than the one that first week. Then, it had been him and me against the silence. Not so now. It was Kevin against me.

      Finally I gave up. It had grown to be a power struggle between us and nothing more. I don’t know. Perhaps if I had persisted I might have worn him down eventually. But if I had, the objective would have been tarnished. To dominate, I would have had to let the real objective fall to the wayside, stripped of its integrity. So reluctantly I gave in. When the days passed and I could not generalize Kevin’s speech to other people, I had to face defeat. It was miserably hard to back down, but for whatever reason, this apparently was not the time for it to happen.

      Undoubtedly, the most irritating aspect of the lack of generalization was that I don’t think everyone believed me when I said Kevin talked to me. I took a terrible drubbing from Jeff. He was absolutely merciless for a while until I actually got angry with him over it. But with Jeff, no matter how irritating, it was pure jest. He knew that if I said the boy talked, he talked. However, the staff at Garson Gayer really got under my skin. They made half-joking remarks and clustered around the door of the small white room and grew