I am told I did not cry when I was born.
The midwife—a woman whose name I would never learn—held me upside down by my ankles and struck my back with increasing urgency. Once. Twice. A third time, harder. My mother, exhausted and frightened on the birthing bed, asked what was wrong in a voice that trembled like wind through broken shutters.
"He won't cry," the midwife said, and there was something in her tone I would later learn to categorize as unease.
But I was breathing. My lungs functioned. My heart beat steadily in my small chest. I simply had no reason to cry.
My eyes opened—this much I remember, or perhaps I've constructed the memory from the stories told afterward—and I looked at the midwife's face with what she would describe to my mother as "unnatural focus." I observed the sweat beading on her forehead. The way her pupils dilated slightly in the lamplight. The tension in her jaw.
She wrapped me in cloth and handed me to my mother with visible relief, as if passing off something that had made her deeply uncomfortable.
My mother cried enough for both of us.
The first three years of my life were, by all accounts, unremarkable.
I ate when fed. Slept when tired. Grew at an appropriate rate. Reached developmental milestones within expected timeframes—sitting up, crawling, walking, speaking simple words.
But I was quiet.
Other infants wailed when hungry, shrieked when uncomfortable, babbled constantly at nothing in particular. I did none of these things. I watched. I listened. I catalogued.
The wooden beams of our ceiling had seventeen visible knots. The market vendors outside our small home in Shiganshina's southern district called out their wares in predictable patterns, their voices rising and falling like tides I could set my internal clock by. My mother hummed while she cooked—always the same melody, though I didn't know its name—and the sound had a frequency that I found neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Simply... present.
My father worked in construction. He came home as the sun set, smelling of sawdust and sweat. He would ruffle my hair—a gesture I tolerated because resistance seemed to cause concern—and ask my mother how I'd been that day.
"Quiet," she always said, and I learned that this word could be spoken with many different inflections. Sometimes it sounded like relief. Other times, worry. Occasionally, something that might have been sadness, though I had no internal reference for what sadness felt like.
I simply was.
I learned early that humans expected specific responses to specific stimuli.
When my mother smiled at me, her face would arrange itself in a particular configuration: corners of mouth lifted, eyes slightly narrowed, small creases appearing at the outer edges. If I did not mirror this expression, her smile would falter. A small line would appear between her eyebrows—concern, I catalogued. Distress.
So I learned to smile back.
It required conscious effort at first. I would watch my reflection in the basin of water my mother used for washing, practicing the movement. Lift corners of mouth. Not too much—that looked wrong, aggressive. Just enough. Hold for two to three seconds. Release naturally, not all at once.
The first time I successfully performed this approximation, my mother gasped softly and pulled me into an embrace that compressed my ribs uncomfortably. But she was making soft, happy sounds, so I had done something correct.
I added it to my understanding: Smiling produces positive responses in caregivers.
Laughter was more complex.
My father would make exaggerated faces, cross his eyes, stick out his tongue. Other children apparently found this hilarious. I found it purposeless—a waste of facial muscle energy that conveyed no useful information. But when I didn't laugh, my father's expression would dim. That same concern-line would appear between his eyebrows.
So I studied laughter. The mechanics of it. The sound. The timing.
I learned that laughter should begin approximately 0.5 to 1.5 seconds after the "funny" stimulus. That it should last between two and five seconds for mild amusement, longer for supposedly greater humor. That it should be accompanied by a smile—the genuine kind other people did automatically, not my carefully constructed version.
I couldn't quite manage the genuine smile, but I could approximate the sound. A short exhalation of breath, rhythmic, with slight vocalization. "Ha. Ha. Ha."
It sounded wrong to my ears—mechanical, like a broken music box—but my father seemed satisfied.
"There's my boy," he'd say, and ruffle my hair again.
I tolerated this too.
By age three, I had mastered basic emotional mimicry sufficient to navigate daily life without causing alarm.
Happiness: smile, possible light laugh, relaxed posture.
Sadness: downturned mouth, slower movements, sometimes tears if I could manage them (I usually couldn't).
Fear: widened eyes, quick breathing, backward movement from threat.
Excitement: faster speech, animated gestures, smile with more teeth showing.
I performed these responses when contextually appropriate, like an actor following a script I'd written through careful observation. Most of the time, it worked.
But sometimes, I would slip.
I was four years old—old enough to play with other children, according to my mother—when she brought me to the small square near the market where neighborhood children gathered.
There were perhaps eight of them that day, ranging in age from three to seven. They were engaged in some kind of game involving a cloth ball and a great deal of running and shouting. The rules were unclear. The objective seemed to be chaos itself.
"Go on," my mother encouraged, her hand gentle on my back. "Go play."
I looked at the children. Analyzed their movements. They were expending enormous amounts of energy for no measurable gain. The ball had no value. The running led nowhere. The shouting conveyed no useful information.
"Why?" I asked.
My mother laughed softly. "Because it's fun, sweetheart."
Fun. I had heard this word many times. It seemed to describe activities people engaged in despite their lack of practical purpose. I didn't understand it, but I understood that I was expected to participate.
So I walked toward the group.
A boy slightly older than me—red-faced, gap-toothed, loud—thrust the cloth ball toward me. "Here! Your turn!"
I took the ball. Examined it. Cloth wrapped around what felt like dried beans or small pebbles. Approximately spherical. Light. Designed to be thrown without causing injury.
"Well?" the boy demanded. "Throw it!"
"Where?"
He stared at me. "What?"
"Where should I throw it? What is the objective?"
The other children had stopped running. They were all looking at me now with expressions I couldn't quite categorize. Confusion, perhaps. Or that particular kind of wariness I'd seen in the midwife's eyes when I was born.
"You just... throw it," another child offered. "And then someone catches it. And then they throw it. It's a game."
"But what is the win condition?"
Silence.
Then the red-faced boy laughed—not a happy laugh, but the kind I'd learned meant someone was being mocked. "You're weird."
"That is factually accurate," I agreed. "I am statistically divergent from behavioral norms."
More staring.
"He talks like a grown-up," a small girl whispered to her companion.
"I just use precise language," I said. "It reduces misunderstanding."
The red-faced boy snatched the ball back. "Forget it. You're too weird to play with us."
They returned to their game, and I returned to my mother, who was watching with that concern-line deep between her eyebrows.
"Did you have fun?" she asked, her voice careful.
I considered lying—telling her what she wanted to hear. But lying required tracking falsehoods, maintaining consistency, remembering what I'd claimed. It was inefficient.
"No," I said. "I don't understand the purpose of their activity."
Her hand found the top of my head, fingers gentle in my hair. "Sometimes things don't need a purpose, Elias. Sometimes they're just... nice."
Elias. My name. My mother had chosen it from some old book she'd read as a girl. She said it meant something about gods and devotion, though I had no reference for what either meant. It was simply the sound people used to get my attention.
"I don't understand 'nice,'" I admitted.
My mother's eyes did something I'd seen before but never understood—they became wet at the edges, shining like glass. She pulled me against her, and I felt the warmth of her body, the rhythm of her breathing, the steady beat of her heart against my ear.
"I know, sweetheart," she whispered. "I know."
I didn't know what she knew. But I stayed still in her embrace.
Warmth. Pressure. Rhythmic sound. Adult female, caregiver designation: mother.
The contact wasn't unpleasant. My body didn't resist it. But I didn't understand why she was doing it or what purpose it served beyond temporary physical proximity.
Still, some part of my brain—the part that tracked survival patterns—noted: This woman provides resources and protection. Maintaining her positive regard is optimal for continued survival.
That was all.
That night, I lay in my small bed in the room I shared with my parents—we couldn't afford separate quarters—and reviewed the day's observations.
The other children's game had patterns I could identify upon reflection. The ball was thrown to whoever was closest. When caught, the catcher would seek the next-closest target. It was social bonding through shared activity, not competitive play. The purpose wasn't winning but participating.
I understood this intellectually.
But I still didn't understand why anyone would want to participate in something so purposeless.
Through the thin wall, I could hear my parents talking in low voices. They thought I was asleep. People often said things they wouldn't say otherwise when they believed children couldn't hear them.
"He's not like other children, Thomas." My mother's voice, worried.
"He's just quiet. Thoughtful. Some children are." My father, trying for reassurance.
"It's more than that. The way he looks at things—at people—it's like he's..." A pause. "Like he's studying specimens. Not seeing friends or family. Just... information."
Accurate, I thought.
"He's four years old, Marianne. He'll grow out of it."
"Will he?" Her voice cracked slightly. "What if there's something wrong with him? What if he can't... what if he can't feel things the way he's supposed to?"
Silence for several seconds.
Then my father: "We'll love him anyway."
"I know. I do love him. So much it hurts. But what kind of life will he have if he can't—" Her voice dropped too low for me to hear the rest.
I lay in the darkness, processing this conversation.
Something wrong with him.
Can't feel things the way he's supposed to.
I conducted an internal assessment. Did other people feel things I didn't? They cried when hurt—I felt pain but had never cried. They laughed at jokes—I understood humor structurally but had never found anything genuinely funny. They seemed to have automatic responses to situations that I had to manually calculate and perform.
Perhaps I was broken.
The thought carried no emotional weight. It was simply data. A hypothesis to consider.
If I was broken, I needed to become better at hiding it. Better at mimicking normalcy. Because being identified as wrong meant attention, intervention, potential separation from the stable environment I'd established.
I would have to study harder. Practice more. Perfect my approximations until they were indistinguishable from genuine emotion.
It was logical. Necessary.
Survival required adaptation.
I closed my eyes and began cataloguing the facial expressions I'd need to master next.