White Rabbit

Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow

22 days to impact

Eva was composing a symphony of chaos with loud bangs, drumming pots and pans on the kitchen floor, au naturel, naked as a jaybird, wearing nothing but a red sock on her left foot.

• - Time for school, Eva!... – Maria yelled from the bathroom.

• - “Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting! – Eva mumbled to herself, quoting The White Rabbit. She continued, absorbed. - “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”

Just over five-and-a-half-years old, with two immense, mondo big round eyes, one bluish brown, the other a brownish blue, long dark-golden hair, tiny feet, weighing a miserable twelve kilograms, and of all things, an additional little boneless pinky finger on each hand. Born a couple months prematurely, she was taking her time to catch up to what we would call normal height and build for her age. Maria’s itsy-bitsy Lilliputian bundle of joy was composing her masterpiece of the day, oblivious that her Mondays were not Saturdays any longer.

Maria would have preferred her munchkin to start school the following year, but Sebastian had insisted that she begin as soon as possible. As a high school teacher, she knew that younger kids in her classes often had self-confidence issues, but her Mr. Prime Minister husband had brought home state stats indicating that more often than not younger, students excelled in comparison to their peers in the grade just before their own. Neither parent were right as rain, but both were doing their best. Also, as the First Family, they thought best to be an example.

It is scientifically arguable, although far from consensual that we all are on the autism spectrum to a degree. At the very least, according to Harvard Medical School researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital, we all share the genes and speculation on whether everyone is on the spectrum is ‘like trying to pick a point where you say someone is tall or not’. Some of us are for sure. Greta Thunberg at 15 shared that her gift of being on the spectrum helped her see things as black and white. She probably meant: obvious falsehoods from critical truths, bullshitters from the genuine. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Stanley Kubrick, Tim Burton, Woody Allen, Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Satoshi Tajiri, and the chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer have all been suspected of being on it, the spectrum. Speculation about some notable historical figures such as Michelangelo, Mozart, Picasso, van Gogh, Dickinson, Hitler, Tesla, Curie, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, abounds. Serious archaeologists have gone so far as to contend that the first prehistoric cave paintings and even the Stone Age tool revolution are to be originally attributed to these wonderfully sui generis neurodiverse beings and their natural expression of our human genome. Most children on the high-functioning side can quite manage classes in an ordinary school, requiring some occasional assistance here and there.

Maria rushed into the kitchen, head tilted as she poked her earlobe searching for her earring hole, lipstick in hand, only to be bewildered that now both her daughters were on the floor, still undressed. Eva had hypnotised Joana into reading her favorite novel out loud for the zillionth time. She possessed this magnetizing enchantment thing that somehow got ordinary people to surrender their normality unsuspectingly. Eva was selectively hyperfocused, often socially obtuse, above-average one-sided conversations, acutely clumsy-ish with cutlery and cans and had enhanced eyesight, glibly spotting stars during the day, which were only later confirmed via the family telescope at nightfall.

• - “Have I gone mad?” – Joana read on despite her mom’s hustle. – “I'm afraid so. You're entirely Bonkers. But I will tell you a secret, All the best people are.”

• - Joana, please, I expect more from you. You’re 15. She’s five! – Maria, high-strung, as usual.

• - And seven months. – Eva whispered to herself all the while banging wooden spoons on a frying pan.

• - They’ll never read her this book at that school, Mom. – Joana retorted, teenage sharp.

• - Because it’s nonsense. There’s no moral to the story. It’s just senseless silliness all the...

• - Literary nonsense is a genre, Miss Lhamas. – Joana said appealing, teasingly, to the former 12th grade Portuguese literature teacher.

• - Joana. Car. Now.

• - It’s funny.

• - Joana.

• - “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

• - Joana, please. Now. We are late.

• - Lewis Carroll was an aspie too. – Joana insisted. It’s meant to entertain, instead of pedantically brainwa...

• - Joana d’Aviz Llhamas, you have three minutes to get ready and in the car. I’ll get Eva dressed on the way. Now!

The family’s chief bodyguard, Cryptopunk Silva, dropped Maria off first at the Ministry of Education for a last-minute 8 a.m. meeting with her Danish counterpart about rolling out the Pessoa Programme Maria had created two years ago. Next off the bulletproof Model X was Joana, then Eva. Cryptopunk would guard the little one’s school until being replaced before lunch.

• - “ ‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I hardly know, sir, just at present, at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’ ” – Joana now on chapter V, entertaining her little sister in the back seat.

• - Again? Don’t you get tired of... – Cryptopunk asked.

• - She loves it. – Joana paused. - OK, we both love it. Who wouldn’t?

• - Your mother, for one.

• - She doesn’t get it. You don’t get it. This book was light years before its time. Alice, a seven-year-old brave no-nonsense heroine on a quest for adventure and finding answers on her journey, wacky crazy colorful characters, challenging comfort zones, chance taking, having fun and venturing into a bizarre magical world down the white rabbit’s hole and...

• - Like The Matrix?

• - The Matrix?

• - The Matrix.

• - The rectangular array of mathematical objects?

• - “Follow the White Rabbit.” – He looked over to her bewildered. – The movie. You haven’t seen The Matrix?

• - What matrix?

• - Maybe it’s R rated.

• - Seriously Silva?! I’m not a child.

• - His name is Cryptopunk! – Eva pitched in as her sister was typing at the speed of sound on her phone.

• - “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – Joana read from the screen. - What the hell is this supposed to mean?

• - Language, madam.

• - Hell? You think the worst I say is “Hell”?

• - Are you OK madam Joana? You’re usually not this...

• - What?!

• - White-knuckled.

• - “I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?” – Joana playing Alice, smiling getting back to her usual joyous light-hearted self, hoping to get a grin out of stiff Silva.

• - Don’t you get nauseous when you read in the car? – He asked.

• - Only if I’ve eaten. – Joana answered, as she read on to her audience of one. – “When you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will someday, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?”

• - See you at four madam Joana. – He said, in front of her high school.

• - Joana. Please. My name is Joana. I’m no mada...

• - I got my orders, you’ve got yours. School, madam.

• - OK, let me just jump to the end of this chapter, it’s one of Eva’s favorite parts...

• - Affirmative. Thirty seconds.

• - “ ‘You’ll get used to it in time,’ said the Caterpillar, as it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away into the grass, merely remarking as it went, ‘One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.’ ”

• - “ ‘The other side of what?’ ” –Eva softly quoting Alice’s line.

• - “ ‘Of the mushroom’ ” – Finished Joana, with the Caterpillar’s lasts words.

• Alice’s trip in wonderland continues a couple of chapters later as “she went to work nibbling at the mushroom, till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little passage: and then, she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flowerbeds and the cool fountains.”

High?