Curious Incident @ Chapters.

Something extremely remarkable took place just minutes ago, right here at this Starbucks in the Chapters bookstore, where I am still sitting, drinking copious amounts of coffee.
I had been here for quite a while, reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters To a Young Poet, when two young lovers sat in the next two chairs at the long bench-like table. They kissed a bit, and whispered to each other and then settled in to reading some magazines, while I intently peered into Rilke.
Soon, the girl stood up and told her boy that she was going to walk around in the store a bit.
She left.
About a minute later, a loud voice broke the silence in the room.
“My name is Mike. What’s yours?”
[I looked over at the voice, which was attached to the head of this man sitting at the far end of our table, and I was glad that he was looking at the guy NEXT to me.... the lover-guy... and not me... I quickly looked away...]
“Ben,” said my neighbor.
“Ben, when is your birthday?” Mike loudly asked.
“Uhh... November 10th,” said a reluctant Ben.
“No. What year?” asks Mike.
“.......1985.” [Even more reluctantly offered, as you can imagine. Ben is staring into his magazine as intently as I am staring into Rilke, but neither of us are reading, now that Mike has the floor.]
“That was a Sunday,” says Mike.
“Really?” says a less than impressed Ben. “That’s wild.”
“What about your girlfriend. When is her birthday?”
Ben clears his throat.... shuffles in his chair.... “November 14th.”
“What year?” the undaunted Mike asks. [Notice that he cares not a whit about the coincidence that her birthday happens to be tomorrow.]
I can tell that Ben has had enough of this, but what can he do?
He says... “1986.”
No sooner has he said it than Mike says, “That was a Friday.”

[My eyes are bulging out of my head and I am not comprehending one word of Rilke anymore....]

Then Mike asks, “How long have you been going out?”
This is surely the end of the interview I’m thinking.... and, sure enough, Ben sort of coughs and says.... “14 months. Look Mike, I think I am going to just read my magazine now. It was nice to meet you though.”
But already Mike has said, “That’s 425 days!"

And from my peripheral vision I can see that Mike is staring at (virtually) Ben and me both, looking for some sort of acknowledgment that he is correct in his figures.
He is not looking away, but neither are Ben or I looking over at him.
And how would we even KNOW that he is correct, anyway?
I am shamed to admit that I do not know how to deal with exceptional people like Mike.
He is obviously one of these people that is either autistic, or a savant-type, or both (forgive me for not knowing the correct terms even).... but you probably know what I mean.
EXTREMELY gifted numerically speaking and I’m sure, in other ways too, yet lacking in social skills or verbal tact with strangers.
Why did I not look over at Mike?
Well, mostly because I felt that he would ask me similar questions and that he would proceed to tell me of how many minutes I’ve been alive or how many hairs are on my arm or something.

All of the people that I am mentioning have since left, and I am still here, reading Rilke.
But the whole episode reminded me of the character of Christopher John Francis Boone in the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, written by Mark Haddon.
It is an EXCELLENT book. I read it with my elite book club, and we (all two of us) thoroughly enjoyed it.
In it, Christopher Boone knows all of the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. These are among his many idiosyncrasies.
He is a genius, (a savant) however, in many respects, mostly numeric, or spatial, or visual.
He has a photographic memory.

Something about Mike’s final answer to Ben got me so intrigued, that I went downstairs to the calendar section of the store to verify it for myself. And I painstakingly found that Mike’s answer is totally correct.
See... his immediate answer of “425” is all the more remarkable because it goes just a wee bit beyond merely computing in one’s head the number of days in a year (365) and then adding 60 or 61 for the extra two months.... because really, you have to know which it is? Should you add the 60 or 61?
Mike said “425”.
And he was right, but I don’t think he guessed!
In other words, because “months” do not all consist of a standard number of days.... there is the added complication that not every possible combination of 14 months is going to consist of the same resultant total number of days. The answer could have just as easily not been 425! You even must account for the possible presence of a 29th day in February. Not every answer is going to be the same.
What Mike did mentally was a result of a very SPECIFIC computation. He had to at least know if last year was a leap year, and secondly, he had to consider how many days there are in September and October.
And he accomplished this feat almost before Ben was even finished his sentence of telling the guy to basically shut his yapper!

And I sat here, at the same table as Mike, and would not even look at him.
Fearful that he would want to talk to me.
It is poor of me, to be this socially debilitated, I think.
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