Schrödinger's Victory

No, really, it’s kind of hilarious that I considered myself normal for nearly the first six years of my life. In addition, back then when I was a child, all preschool education was free, and children with very different backgrounds went to the same kindergarten, where it was absolutely impossible not to believe that all people were born and raised equal. Just think about that for a moment — even if you swim in money, how will it make your child stand out? You can’t adorn them with gold, can you? You can’t bring any gadgets or toys (except for the Bring Your Toy To Kindergarten Day). Maybe it’s cool that a nanny takes you to kindergarten or a personal driver chauffeurs you about? So wide of the mark again! The coolest thing is when your parents get you to Da Garten and pick you up at the end of your busy playing, walking and sleeping day, so in this regard I was among the lucky ones. Yep, it was great there! I had a lot of friends. Now I remember that there was no best friend, someone whom you constantly tell your parents about, with whom you are inseparable, who is perceived as a part of you to such an extent that if he disappears during afternoon kindergarten outings, the teacher asks you, “Where’s Jimmy?” Yes, your childhood best friend should be called Jimmy or Sammy. But I liked everyone: fat Ben, blonde Natalie, black June, Eric who stuttered, Emma, ​​who had a cleft lip in the first year, curly-haired Guy, Ai, who always wore a headscarf, and everyone else — we were a fun bunch and a motley crew of tiny children. Not everything was nice and rosy. Sometimes I had to dodge and lie. I remember at least one incident. Apparently, we were working on oral presentation skills again (well, what else can four-year-olds do?), the topic was “Bring your imaginary friend with you and tell us about them.” This is where I got stuck! I didn’t have an imaginary friend! And here I was sitting on the carpet, listening to all these amazing stories about a talking frog Mila, a daredevil Mei (you guessed it, she was June’s imaginary friend), a pirate Ma Sha (it was such a revelation to me about the world and myself because I realized that my bunker mentality had never let me think that there were pirates who were not only girls but also Asian), a (talking) cat Tom, and even a dolphin Fifi (that’s who I was terribly worried about, because Franz brought him without any water! But when I mentioned that fish can’t live outside of their watery home, I was informed that dolphins aren’t fish — because that was the main point, right?), and I felt that my turn was nigh but… No, I would not have been punished, but all those friends were standing there in such a diverse entertaining group that I certainly wanted to contribute to this species and ethnic diversity. But I remembered how the teachers always told us about the importance of telling the truth, and I decided not to lie. And here came the moment — Martin nodded to me, all the children turned their heads in my direction, and I said in a slightly trembling voice that I did not have an imaginary friend. For some reason, Martin was very surprised and said: — Benny, are you sure you don’t want to tell us about them…him? It was my turn to be surprised. After all, I informed them that I didn’t have any, but if I had had I would definitely want to tell everything! And the teacher continued: — We are very understanding, right, guys? For example, in your situation, it is quite normal if your friend is very similar to you. I didn’t really understand what exactly he meant by “my situation” but it gave me an idea. I began telling them that my imaginary friend looked exactly like me, just like Martin hinted, only that he was stronger, more mature, and knowledgeable. It got to the point when I started to wax lyrical about how one day I was walking near the house and almost stepped on a snake in the grass. It hissed, but this imaginary superhero friend grabbed it and threw it over the fence! In the light of subsequent events, this story looks, well, I don’t know, eerie, but even then it did not pass without consequences. Martin betrayed the kindergartner-caregiver confidentiality and told everything to my parents. That same evening, at dinner, Mom and Dad kept casting glances at each other for a long time, and then Dad cleared his throat and said: — Is there anything you want to ask us? — Can I have a dog? — I got excited about this unexpected opportunity and, of course, wanted to use it. — When you get older. — Mum crushed my dream. — Where did you get this idea about a second you? — Sorry, I made it all up, — I admitted. — I see, — said Dad. — He couldn’t have made it up, — said Mom. She had already started to develop this manner of speaking as if I were not in the same room. But the discussion ended there. And now I’m thinking, maybe I actually had heard something? No, everyone would start telling it in my face only a couple of years later, but could it be that once I was sitting and playing in the corner of the room, and my mother told my father: “Benoit at his age did not play with cars but invented new renewable sources of energy”? Perhaps I’m exaggerating, but can I allow myself to be just a little biased? And then, all of a sudden, school started. You know, before I got there, I hadn’t used strong words. For example, I don’t remember saying that I hate someone or something. But here I can say for sure that I hate the person who decided that I should be marked as a special child. It is so inhumane and wild that I still do not understand how I retained at least some semblance of rationality. It would have been okay if there had been a whole class of us, or at least a dozen people, but I was the only one in the whole school who sported a patch with a test tube and the PPFU abbreviation on my jacket sleeve and shirt pocket under the school’s badge. And I was so naïve that I thought it was just, like, my coat of arms or something, because this drawing was with me throughout my kindergarten years: on my locker, my potty, my chair, my folder for drawings… But everyone had pictures there — cats, strawberries, rainbows, flowers, tricycles… I had a theory that it had something to do with the preferences of the person or their family. This theory even seemed to have been confirmed, because when I asked a caregiver (not Martin, another one) what this “jar” signifies, she replied: “It is called a test tube and it means that your dad is a scientist.” It sounded reasonable and I didn’t think about the badge anymore. But at school everything was different: on the very first day I noticed that, apparently, I again was the only one from the family of a scientist. During the first recess, a second-grader, who, unlike us, knew how to read, ran up to me, pointed his finger at my badge, and shouted: “Pee-pee phew!” I doubt he knew what the abbreviation meant, but the combination of the sounds was enough to make him want to push me too. I was in such a shock that not only failed to fight back but couldn’t even utter a single word. And yes, until the following year, the entire elementary school, including my classmates (traitors!), called me Pee-pee-phew (the ones who were ‘cleverer’ upgraded this to pee-pee-f*ck-you, geniuses, am I right?). Fortunately, I was neither particularly small nor weak. In the beginning, it was a bit unpleasant to hit people. Seriously, the first time my fist came into contact with the offender’s face, I felt so disgusted that I immediately proceeded to throw up. That became an additional reason for ridicule. I decided to avoid physical contact at all costs (just listen to it! Me, who was called Mr. Hugs in kindergarten!) and had to make do with a long inventory of swear words — the category of my vocabulary which I had boosted from two to at least a hundred in just two short weeks — hurled as my defense. It got a little worse in the second year when we started mixing with the older guys, and they began to pay attention to me (yeah, we had the elementary, junior high and high school in the same building. Remember how overcrowded it was everywhere back then?). They knew what my mark meant, and the innocent Pee-pee-phew wasn’t enough for them. Looking back at that period with the benefit of hindsight, most insults seem meaningless. Like, for example, a lab rat or an alien, and plenty of them even demonstrated the ignorance of the name-caller himself, such as spit, a necrophiliac, or corn (well, the last one allowed me to shout back: “But my corn is bigger than yours!” He-he… But everything else, seriously?!) There were ones that were more or less close to the truth (a copier) and perfectly situationally neutral (a moron, a monster, a weirdo, etc.). Some were not satisfied with insults alone and preferred comments or questions. Curious what they were? Here are some examples: — You’re an abomination to God. — Were you conceived out of a napkin that was lying around in your brother’s trash can? — Are you going to be your child’s brother too? — Is it true that you were made of poop? (applaud the masterpiece!), and much more. You know what’s the most unfair thing? If it weren’t for that damn badge, none of this would have happened, because, objectively, I had nothing to bully me for. I wasn’t too dumb or too smart, I didn’t stutter, nor did I have red hair or a big nose! Perhaps, I should have been in the ‘normal’ league or slightly higher. And the cherry on top of all this splendor — at first I did not understand what was happening, why they were treating me like that. In the end, I could not stand it anymore and asked the teacher. She looked at me incredulously. — What do you mean, you don’t understand? I mean… of course, there’s nothing to insult you for… But… you know what PPFU stands for, right? I shook my head, doing my best to remember if I missed a lesson where we studied it. — I have no right to meddle, but I will call your parents right away. Mom and Dad were called, had to leave work, and were sent to talk with a school counselor, and then they brought me there too. — What’s wrong with your shirt? — Mum greeted me. — They threw corn in ketchup at me, — I answered. The counselor frowned, and my Mum, sighed heavily and said: — Your Dad and I love you. — I love you too. — We have something to tell you. It is a pity that we are being forced to do it now when it is still difficult for you to understand fully. — Sweetheart, we don’t need to go into scientific details, — my father chimed in. — You had a brother. He had the same name, and you… you look like him… not enough… but it’s uncanny at times. During the terrible events 14 years ago, he died — my mother started sobbing, but she tried to calm herself down. — It happened three days after he won his gold medal. You know, he was a figure skater… he was very talented, our Benoit… The overwhelming grief reached out and enveloped me as well, so I started to sob, although I did not yet understand what all that had to do with me. — We had a few dark and hopeless years. We lost everything! We didn’t even have a single thing of his left… And then a miracle happened! I saw a story about the Family Reunion project, and your father and I didn’t stop until our application was accepted. And after that, I did so many things, I even took part in a talk show, despite all the hatred for such things, all to get Benoit back! And we were selected! We had two sources of DNA: blood samples taken before one of his competitions in Toronto, and saliva, which we had sent to the laboratory when we tried to find out his predispositions to genetic diseases. The second one eventually worked. Even at that stage, everything was still in limbo, because we could not afford a surrogate, and I was already in my forties. But it worked — and you were born! It was like a time machine: I was holding you in my arms, and I saw myself and Benoit more than 20 years ago. And then you started to grow, and I began to see more and more differences. — Sorry, — I whispered, although I understood only about ten percent of what was said. — You have nothing to apologize for, — the counselor assured me. — Quite right, — said Dad. — No one thought you would be a carbon copy of him. But I could see on my mother’s face that this was exactly what she had expected. And here is a question, my dear friends, how was I supposed to behave after that? Ideally, I had to try and get closer to the original. In my case, the goal was almost impossible to reach. Well, after The Revelation, my parents showed me a photo of his from the internet, some performances, and even a short video from a family get-together that happened to have been stored on my uncle’s channel. Yes, I began to devote more time to French and stopped arguing when Mom offered a specific kind of haircut, but my abilities and talents were not enough to do more, to reach higher. Okay, I confess, I even took up figure skating! I hated almost everything there, and with some difficulty persuaded my father to transfer me to hockey, where I stayed. But that was clearly not enough. All in all, the explanations didn’t make my life any easier. I still didn’t understand what was wrong with all these jerks at school found in me. Okay, I was born as a result of my dead brother’s cloning, but was it really weirder than a child born from three parents? And yet, Cassie from the third grade had been conceived this way, and she even explained it to us at a class meeting. Well, okay, she was also laughed at a little, and some jokes about her were not very kind, especially if we take into account that all three of her parents were male, but that was nothing compared to the way they treated me. Not always — sometimes a whole week passed without anything particularly terrible occurring — and not all of them took part, but all that did happen was enough for me to put my disgust away and start fighting without analyzing who was the person that said something wrong about me. And I mean everyone: juniors, seniors, girls (to their credit, I must say, girls rarely partook in that), even the kid in a wheelchair. And they can go to hell with their disapproval. If he was disabled but did not want to be different from all other cretins and allowed himself to humiliate a person five years younger than himself, he had to be hit back, just like everyone else — equality, right? My confrontation had very mediocre results, since I was just a second-grader, and my fighting technique… well, I didn’t have any technique yet, only my blind rage. And then everyone began to confuse cause with effect. Seriously! They decided that my “outbursts of aggression” were connected with “the specifics of my origin.” It was such a hasty, idiotic, and almost unfounded conclusion that I considered it beneath my dignity to refute it, or maybe I believed that it was true. And here’s just another ordinary day: I’m sprawled on the grass, not far from the football field, a knee of an eighth-grader pins me nearly crashing my spine, and my mouth is full of grass, dirt and blood because I bit my tongue when I was knocked down. The second one is standing next to him, his head thrown back, because I managed to give him a bloody nose. I think it all started with them calling me a zombie… Don’t even ask! Routinely throwing off my backpack, I replied that if I were a zombie, they would have absolutely nothing to be afraid of. They somehow quickly realized that that was not a compliment, and aggravated everything with insult #2… you know the rest of it. Just when I thought I was about to choke, they rolled me over, the bleeding nose leaned over me (dripping his nose’s contents on my shirt — yuck!), and lightly kicked me in the ribs. Then he abruptly fell out of the frame, and an otherworldly creature appeared instead of him. At least all I saw against the sun was a gigantic round head and inhumanly broad shoulders. For a second, a thought crossed my mind that I really was an alien, and my — ahem… people? — had come for me. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? Just perfect for the plot, but the reality turned out to be much better. The creature extended their hand and said in a human voice: — You shouldn’t have discarded your backpack, it can do enough damage to attackers. Especially if it’s properly equipped. — Thanks for the advice, — I said, after spitting out everything I hadn’t swallowed. — Are you a new combat officer here? — I’m Dave, a concerned citizen. I was finally able to look at him properly and saw that he was a teenager in a football uniform. I was kind of grateful to him, but at the same time annoyed that someone thought I was so uncapable of dealing with my shit myself that I needed help from a stranger. The coach yelled at him to get back on the field, and Dave shouted back: — Coach, 5 minutes. Our little brother needs help. Okay, great, now the whole team was looking at us! I did my best not to show that my tongue was still bleeding — but to no avail, and I had to spit again, muttering: — I’m fine. — Whose class are you in? — Miss Rodriguez’s. — She is going to faint when she sees you in such a state. Stay here, — and before I could protest, Dave sped off to the edge of the field and returned with a bottle of water. I tried to wash my face and rinse my mouth, mentioning matter-of-factly that Miss Rodriguez had seen me in worse states and, as if that explained everything, pointed at my badges. — Damn fascists! — Dave grumbled, adding a couple of curses. I had not yet heard this point of view, and I did not know such a word, so I looked at him questioningly. — Yes, they’re fucking Nazis! They pretend to be marking you to do research and respond quickly to your “special needs”, like, what if you all suddenly turn out to be allergic to a certain type of vegetable or medicine — but this is complete nonsense! This is shameless segregation and fascism! — And what should I do? — First of all, rip off those fucking badges. — Is that allowed? — Is it allowed to call a person a “product”? Second, don’t accidentally kill anyone. Okay, you’re not going to be legally responsible for this at your age, but it’s going to be another terrible stigma on your people. — I cannot promise anything… — I tried to dig my spit with the toe of my boot. — What’s your name? — Benois. Trouvaille. — Are your parents from There? I nodded. — The flipside of segregation. Why is their Project only for people from Over There? Maybe I want my grandmother back too? Or my dog? Okay, let’s leave that for my election campaign. How many classes do you have left? — One. Arithmetics. — Excellent. Come back here afterward and I’ll show you something. Trust me, a pair of broken fingers or one nose will dampen their spirits. Yeah, man, we’ll show them! He high-fived me and ran back to the pitch, and I just stood there absolutely transfixed. There were plenty of reasons for this. Would you like a list?       1. It was the first time that it was not a teacher who defended me. Well, the girls sometimes said, “Brett, leave him alone!”, “Derek, enough!” But to be able to set them flying with such ease? Never before!       2. A vague but real prospect of stopping the bullying started to loom.       3. The way I was treated really angered someone other than me. You can laugh, but everyone considered this problem far-fetched or exaggerated.       4. Someone was friendly with me. I don’t mean it to be more dramatic than it was in reality — I had some friends, and even, — Attention! Shock and sensation! — girlfriends in the second, third, fourth, and even fifth grade. Yes, in elementary school I was still quite a Don Juan! But I didn’t have any close friends at school.       5. Someone used the pronoun “we” about himself and me, just like this.       6. It turns out I have “my people”, like a special clan or a tribe.