Chapter Text
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.
— John B. Watson, Behaviorism (2009) [1958], p. 82
The man got out of the car and walked straight into St. Martin Orphanage. The director placed a stack of papers in front of him. He quickly looked down and read them carefully, and then selected five sheets. The director then sent for the five children. They were all wearing the same beige shirts and plaid pants when they came, and had just washed their faces a minute ago, the hair on their foreheads still damp. The nurse grabbed them like a bunch of meowing kittens. The man nodded and took out five sheets of paper and five curiously short orange pencils from his briefcase.
The children bent over the floor and started to do the exercises.
"What is this?" asked the director.
"An IQ test." The man said nothing more.
A bird was perched on the windowsill, and the man gazed at it absentmindedly while waiting. Then he took the sheets of paper in his hand, folded his arms, and looked at them one by one.
"Will?" he called a name. The child looked up. He had a pair of hazy blue-green eyes.
"That's him," the man said, putting the tests back into his briefcase.
As he walked out of the orphanage with the child in his arms, the other children were imitating riding a bus on the lawn. They were barely taller than his knees, and they all raised their hands above their heads, and with their feet planted, swayed forward and backward.
"Do you know what they are doing?" he asked in the child's ear.
The child looked at him and didn't answer. The man stood there in the snow, holding the child and the small suitcase containing the child’s clothes in one hand and his briefcase in the other. Finally, the child shook his head.
"They're imitating riding a bus. Do you know what a bus is?"
The child shook his head again.
"It's okay." Pleased, he strode towards his black private car.
Will. Male. Five years old. Lying across the back seat of his private car. The drive home took a long time, and it started to snow when they were almost there. Through the rearview mirror, the man saw the child staring at the moving windshield wipers with wide eyes. He drove into the garage, and when he opened the backseat door, the child climbed out of the car on his own. He picked up the child and walked into the house - straight to the bathroom, where he rolled up his sleeves and drew a hot bath. While the child sat in the tub and played with a rubber duck, the man perched beside and watched.
"Will."
The child looked up.
"Can you write your name?" he asked.
The child looked down at the rubber duck. The glass wall beside the bathtub was now covered in steam. With his finger, he drew an “X” on the glass. "Write it for me," the man said. So the child leaned over and drew a “W”, followed by a vertical line and two “L”s. He then turned to look at the man. "Go on," the man said, picking up the rubber duck from the water. The child turned back to draw another “G”, and then stopped, stuck.
"Do you not remember?" the man asked, "What about mom, or dad? Do you remember anything?"
The child stayed motionless with his back to him, fingers pressed tight against the edge of the tub. Those fingers had turned white from being soaked in the water for too long.
"Look up." The man leaned over and completed the last name on the glass: “R” - “A” - “H” - “A” - “M”. His shirt was wet from the steam and stuck to his chest. "Will Graham. Look carefully, it will disappear in a minute. I'll ask you again tomorrow, so remember it."
The child tilted his head and stared until the water droplets ran down and the letters were gone.
While the man cooked, the child laid on the leather sofa. After a while, he rolled off and onto the carpet. He then stayed there on his stomach, pulling at the carpet fibers. When he talked to himself, he didn't realize that the man was quietly standing behind him and observing.
Later, the child ate with a spoon. The food was much better than what he had been eating before, and it did not take him long to finish his plate. While the man was washing the dishes, the child remained seated at the table. The table was spotless and there was not even a scratch. The child remembered the plastic bowls he had been using in the orphanage. When he held them up to the light, he could see that they were covered in fine white scratches. There was always a sour smell of orange-colored fruit in that bedroom full of small beds. Although there wasn’t any particular smell in the man's house, that sour smell still clung to him. Afterwards, the child was carried upstairs. The curtains were already drawn in the small bedroom. The blanket was very heavy, and the child felt like he was sleeping under a bed of rocks. He woke up in the middle of the night and vaguely heard the sound of pots and pans downstairs, like the sound made by suspended glass shards when the wind passed by. The child opened his eyes and almost saw the glint of light on broken glass.
The man washed the dishes again.