“Keep pushing,” the doctor said, attempting to keep Mary Rosen calm while also trying to communicate a sense of urgency in his voice. The birthing process was taking much longer than he was used to, and although for younger and less experienced mothers – such as Mary, who was only eighteen at the time – the process tended to take longer, with every glance at the clock on his wall Dr. Sillup was becoming more and more worried for their health. Mary, on the other hand, felt like the whole this was going incredibly smoothly, and although it was only herself and the medical personnel who were present, she did not feel the need for any personal company, almost convinced that she could manage all on her own even if the professionals were to leave as well.

Eventually she succeeded in birthing Emilio, Emi for short, however the child she had brought into the world was nothing like that anyone could have expected. Approximately ten seconds after being taken out of his mother’s womb and placed in her arms, without letting out a single grunt of pain, a new voice entered the room.

“Hello mother,” said Emi. Mary, not knowing what to do when a twenty-second-old baby starts speaking – it wasn’t mentioned in any of the parenting books she read – dropped him. Fortunately for both her and the new-born, Emi landed promptly in her lap without being at all damaged from the fall.

At first Mary thought she was going mad. Perhaps the burden of childbirth and parenting was too much for her mind at such an early age, she wondered, and maybe that’s why she believed the child was speaking to her. None of the doctors present when Emi said his first words seemed to hear anything, reinforcing Mary’s conviction that she was losing her mind, but when her friend Jessica came over a week after the birth to see her and the baby, she was convinced otherwise.

Jessica was standing over the crib and couldn’t help herself from speaking to the infant in a baby voice.

“Who’s the most adorable baby I’ve ever seen?” she asked, speaking more to herself than anyone else, to which Emi promptly replied “I am! I am!” resulting in Jessica almost fracturing her skull when she fell down from fainting. When a panicked Mary rushed into the room after hearing her fall, she asked what had happened, and Jessica replied like a mad woman, “It speaks! The baby – it speaks!”

Mary was relieved – she was not going mad after all – however she definitely could not explain what was going on, which made her feel like she was going mad. The next few months of her life as a mother would consist of visits with a plethora of neuroscientists, none of whom was even close to explaining the scientific anomaly of a child being born with such a developed brain.

Or at least that’s what everyone initially thought. The truth was that once you discounted the fact that he could speak, Emi was a completely normal baby. He motor skills were subpar; when faced with molded three-dimensional geometry, he failed to lodge it into the correct holes, and it was clear he was limited by his inability since everyone knew he understood the instructions. 

Most unimpressive of all was the fact that he had the memory of a goldfish when it came to learning anything except for languages. Even basic object permanence dazzled him, and he would cry for his mother whenever she turned around and he could not see the face of the strange woman standing in front of him.

All of this both terrified as well as comforted the new single mother, but there was no equilibrium in her emotions, as the comfort only met her in blips that would disrupt her otherwise perpetually anxious life. Jessica became almost like a second parent to Emi, dropping in more and more often as time went on, and Mary was forever grateful to her for this, feeling sincerely it was truly the last thing that would tether her mind to the real world and stop her from slipping into the tight grasp of insanity.

Due to his abnormal retardation, Emi was an exceptionally troublesome baby. While you could communicate with him normally, every other task that had to be performed with him was a chore, and with time Mary learned that he was simply incapable of doing some things. 

Once he started going to school, it was clear to her that any kind of scientific subjects were out of the picture for him, including mathematics. He simply lacked the mental capacity for it, his mind quickly escaping the realm of the abstract and reconnecting to the simple and present. He didn’t care to discover the world, to know it any deeper than he already did, since in all of his linguistic excellence he felt like he already knew it inside out. He already knew what everyone was saying, so why should he care of atoms and molecules? They didn’t make up the world to him, people did, and so far he had impeccable understanding of people.

A few months later, one day upon returning home from school, Mary noticed that Emi was feeling very distraught. She asked him what had happened, and he explained to her that some students had been calling him names that day, and that no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t do anything about it. He even tried hitting them, he said, but they still wouldn’t stop, and he felt so helpless. Mary, although herself enraged, tried to comfort him, telling him that he didn’t do anything wrong and that some kids just want to be mean. When she asked him what words they were calling him, however, she was very confused. She didn’t recognise anything he was saying. When she asked him what the words meant, he explained that it was just a mean thing to say to someone, that the words didn’t really mean anything concrete. This confused Mary, but she could see that her child was upset, and decided to confront the parents of the children who were insulting her boy.

Despite Emi’s protests, she went ahead and contacted the kids’ parents, soon finding out that Emi had been being insulted in Swahili, and according to the kids who were insulting him he had previously interrupted their conversation, correcting them on their use of language or something other – Mary was profoundly lost at this point, the Swahili fact had thrown her for a loop – and that they did not take kindly to that, hence the insults.

This was the first step to the development of Emilio’s vast linguistic abilities. He was not only a lert speaker of English, but as was becoming more obvious, he could also rapidly learn fluency in any tongue spoken by humans. Unbeknownst to both Mary and himself, Emilio had by the point of being insulted already learned to speak Italian, German and Swahili, all from eavesdropping on some students in school, and was on his way to fully understanding French and Mandarin Chinese, as the school year only started and those students had only been there two weeks. 

Emilio didn’t know he could speak other languages. To him it was all just communication, all just sounds used to send messages to other people, without any distinction that certain people were limited to certain sets of sounds. Once it was made clear to him that not everyone understood what he understood, he begun to feel superior to others. His prior habit of correcting others was just the beginning, as now he realised that he must have tapped into some kind of greater knowledge which was alien to others around him, and that made him feel like he understands the world much better than everyone else.

Emi’s teenage years where a nightmare to Mary. At the age of sixteen he had not only spoken half of the worlds languages and their respective dialects, but he had also indulged in most of its most potent intoxicants. He was not limited to alcohol, as the high experienced from many narcotics pushed his heart to the top of the world, where his mind was already convinced he found himself. That feeling of euphoria, of utmost Aryan superiority above all others, was nothing to be abandoned. He was no junkie, mind you; someone so high above everything could not be a junkie, as addiction was a characteristic of those who were mentally weak, which he clearly was not.

He never got over his addiction to the stronger drugs; the incessant fever of cocaine haunted his every dream, and that was only the intermediary while he waited for his next heroin hit. He was in a deep, self-induced comatose state when fragments of Mary Rosen’s brain were found all over the wall of her bathroom. Someone had broken into the house at night when she was taking a late bath, and although attempting only to stun her, the bullet from their gun strayed far enough to paralyse her body and soul forever.

Emilio didn’t mind all that much: he had experienced his mother more as a burden, and now that he was over eighteen, with her gone he was effectively set free from all that constrained him before. In control of the entire world, he thought to himself, and only ever to himself.

He struggled to find a job. His hatred of school presented him with a lack of any kind of certification, and unsurprisingly most employers didn’t care much for someone who claimed to be able to communicate with the entire world but couldn’t even wash dishes properly. 

Attempts to contact larger companies with employment as a translator didn’t show bear many fruit either. While most companies simply didn’t respond to his messages, when on one occasion they actually did, Emilio only then realised that he hadn’t the slightest clue in the world how to translate from one language to another. He was always told that certain words existed in two separate languages, where their meanings were the same but they simply looked or sounded different, but he never understood what that meant. A word didn’t simply mean something based on other words, like some people seemed to think, but on context in its entirety. Therefore there were no words that were the same in multiple languages, because someone speaking Italian would never use English words to express what they meant, they would use Italian ones. He was promptly fired from that job too, and his polyglotic uselessness started to slowly dawn on him.

However, much like that of many great minds, Emi’s pride disallowed him to accept the possibility that he was anything less than the pinnacle of greatness. He came to the conclusion that it was society who hated him, that he would have to reclude into the depths of nature to find the meaning of the world, fending for himself without the burdens of those around him. He was absolutely certain he would find the meaning of everything, but more certain than his conviction of discovery was his conviction that once he did, he would never share it with others, that he alone would remain in his enlightenment and he would transcend all others in a way nobody ever had before.

All that remains of Emi after his departure into the woods are tales from strangers who claim to have encountered him in glimpses while travelling. The most notable of these developed into a folk legend in one of the nearby towns that Emi invaded some ten years after his departure into the wilderness. He stormed in, claiming to have truly understood the secret of the world, and yelled to everyone who could hear that he would sell it for a price. Entertained by the thought, some townspeople asked him how he derived such a secret, and he claimed that he didn’t derive it, but rather told of a time when he was walking through the depths of the forest and the wind started speaking to him. It was then that he realised not only do humans speak in sounds, but so does the wind. It became his god, listening to the words of the wind like they came from divinity, understanding that such words could come from nothing less than the creator of the world itself. The wind told him everything, all the secrets of the world, and he was willing to sell it to the right people for the right price.

The townspeople knew what they saw: a decadent homeless man with barely any clothes on his back suffering from addiction to drugs. They abandoned him quickly, before he could even state his price for what he claimed to be crucial information that could liberate the world, and in reciprocation he abandoned them as well. He had thought that he had abandoned them much earlier than that, in the promise he made himself to never share the secret of the world with anyone else, but his structure of imagined control had long collapsed on top of him and he could no longer maintain his illusions of superiority above others. He had become a junkie, willing to even sell the words of the wind for his next hit.

Some people wonder whether it truly was the narcotics that made him hear things in the air – assuming he had heard anything to begin with – or perhaps was his mind, that was so capable of comprehension, so in tune with the significance of sound that he had in fact begun to understand the wind and, as a consequence, the world. 

It’s of little significance either way, as he is long gone now, taken by the woods that he prayed to for isolation, unbeknownst to the fact he was alone from the moment he announced his inherent superiority over others.

4.IX.2020