Inspired by Stephen Hawking

Note: Stephen Hawking has ALS. This is NOT his story. I should change the name...
In which Stephen Hawking as a young boy pays his respects to the Christian deities he will later renounce in order to succeed in his chosen profession. As a physicist by trade, his job will be to question, not to know, to seek answers, not to have faith. For this, his vocation, he will choose mind over body. It is a choice he made at age 9. When Stephen Hawking was nine years old, his parents, unsure of his future,toured an institution for the physically and mentally handicapped outside London. “Keep to the right!” an orderly barks. His obsessive mother ensures that Stephen's wheels line up exactly with the linoleum pattern on the floor. The facility's authorities assure his parents that they will be able to visit often, that he will have three meals a day, amusements, education, and companionship—in short, that he will be well cared-for and happy. He will have exercise as his condition permits and ample time in the open air of the wholesome English countryside.

His first shock is that the other inmates cannot speak. His fellow cripples and invalids moan in their wheelchairs, and their attempts at human speech are unintelligible. Some of their eyes show intelligence in their eyes, others madness, and others a bland, peaceful simplicity that fills the schoolboy with abject horror. Even worse, it seems the orderlies cannot tell the difference. The orderlies don't look into their eyes. They talk to all of them as if they were children. They say, “Do you like this music?” in the type of false-cheerful tone one uses with children. Treat them all as if they were retarded, in other words. “Do you like the view, Simon?” one of them asks as he wheels a gurgling teenager to a window. Some of them are hooked up to breathing machines. None of them look happy, but then, Stephen has never been happy. Stephen has a theory that his parents need him to be ill. He wonders, in that case, why they are foisting him off on this facility.

In panic, Stephen searches for an answer to his predicament. He recalls a sermon: Jesus healing the blind and the lame. “Your sins are forgiven,” Stephen hears the Anglican parish minister intone, while Stephen's eyes wander up to the vaulted ceiling above his wheelchair in the aisle with its vivid paintings of angels and demons. “Then Jesus said, rise up,take your mat. Your faith has healed you.” Then another thought enters Stephen's mind: an evil thought, and the smell of sulfur fills his nostrils, making him wish for fine motor control in his hands to reach up and wipe his nose. But even if he weren't confined to a wheelchair, he would consider himself too mature for such a childish gesture. Besides, his analytical mind has already deduced that the smell is not real, but symbolic, accompanying his thoughts of Another who may yet help him. He remembers sitting in another large room with vaulted ceilings, full of hushed spectators... a staging of Goethe's Faust. A high school auditorium.

FAUST: If ever your flatteries can coax me / To be pleased with myself, if ever cast
A spell of pleasure that can hoax me-- / Then let that day be my last! / That's my wager!
MEPHISTOPHELES: Done!
FAUST: Let's shake!
If ever I say to the passing moment / 'Linger a while! Thou art so fair!
Then you may cast me into fetters, / And I will gladly perish then and there!
It was a school play. His older brother had a minor part, and Stephen, because of his wheelchair, had a front-row seat. I can be Dr. Faustus, he thinks. He knows Faust is a Doctor of Philosophy, not a Doctor of Medicine. Stephen has visited many doctors of Medicine. Physical and Occupational Therapists, as well. In vain, they tried to teach him to eat with a spoon, before Mother despaired and hired attendants to feed him instead. “But, please,” he prays to whoever may be listening, though he knows he must lose his foolish superstition if Physical Science he will pursue. “Don't let me be one of these.” He has seen the exhibits of stuffed finches with different beaks, illustrating the theories of Mr. Charles Darwin, and heard the rector, the same one promising he may some day take up his mat and walk, when he cannot even hold a pencil, his dearest desire, though he willed the muscles, joints, and tendons of his fingers to be strong, even to move, condemning the falsehood of Mr. Darwin's ideas and any who would give them credence. Therefore, if he is to make anything of himself, the God and Jesus of the Rector and of Mother will not be of help. Can the Sin of Unbelief be forgiven, seventy times seven, as the Rector says Jesus says we must forgive our neighbor if he sins against us, when it is necessary for his credibility with the scientists? His dream of lecturing a crowd of students through a box that gives him a voice?

Alternately, Stephen could become a preacher, preaching from that mechanical voice box.

Mephistopheles is not your name, but I know what you're up to just the same...
As long as Dr. Faustus's intellectual curiosity was not satisfied, he would not die, and the Devil could not take his soul. Stephen feels a vigor and strength course through his palsied limbs. Yes. I have much curiosity. Mother says, “Curiosity killed the cat,” but I need to know. I may never leave this accursed chair, but I can befriend the stars, commune with the Heavens. The Universe will be my domain. Scientific historians will write that I was too young to see this future for myself. The rector will deny this corrupt bargain, for I have not yet reached the Age of Majority, the Age of Reason...