He managed his way through their disorganized and ignorant attempts to domesticate him. Following the prescribed methods used for generations. Manners. Respect. Controlling emotions. Politeness. All of it learned as a bird learns to crane its neck higher than its nest-mates to grab the worm.

Simple and delicate and utterly unaware of the passing moments leading them closer to their own eradication. Finding perceived meaning in his agreement to their requests. Their leaders, nothing more than panderers to idiots. Saying what was to be considered correct and damning those of opposition.

He learned of their created answers to questions well beyond their comprehension levels. Saw them structure and organize these answers. Give them rules, rituals, rewards, all while he understood their reasoned need to stomp out other answers. Crushing threats under the pretense of immortality. One after another, the creators came, each with demonstrated evidence to disproof another’s answers and offering a new one.

A parade of comical misery and guilt.

But each answer was folly and each nothing more than a trick of convenience. Born of opportunity and given life through the considered tragic conditions, caused by their own hands. By their own words. By their own dismantling of logic, reason, and tolerance.

Fools, every one of them. Grasping in the air for substance and believing, then testifying that the ether they held was solid. Reachable. Containable. But never malleable. Until another, wiser in the same train of thought, offered more irrefutable evidence.

For every organic spark, they assigned a common name. Each of those given the respect of efficient labeling, elevating himself or herself to a vaulted position. Discoverers of the obvious. The obtuse truth.  Patting themselves on their own backs for seeing the blinding light in front of them. Rewarding themselves and those that they felt they needed to be in favor with.

Patience was not a gift, but a choice. For him, the choice was made consciously. Deliberately.

“Feed their imagined ego, and advance towards the only possible conclusion,” he would remind himself. “Trained discipline and calculated steps. One after another.”

It started with books. He learned about their feeble attempts to create an understanding that others could then point to as reference. He knew his captors, his unwitting suppliers, had lacked making the choice of patience. He knew that they were searching through him for their way to become a point of reference.

Doctor Straus and his team began offering him books to read in order to distract him and to give themselves a break from the constant barrage of his questions. He would ask questions about nearly any topic and would only stop a line of questioning when he realized that he could gain no additional information from his captors.

The books started with history books, as they deemed to be the safest for him to read.

“History of Ancient civilizations?” he asked when, at six, Doctor Straus handed him his first book. “But Doctor Straus, I don’t know how to read yet.”

“I’ll ask Doctor Curtis to provide you some reading lessons. A few lesson should be all it takes before you’ll be reading completely on your own.”

He took to reading very quickly. Within days, as Doctor Straus had suggested, he was able to manage his way through his first book. His questions tempered, more books were brought to him.

More history. Classic works of fiction. Outdated and replaced science. Mathematics.

The more books he was offered, the fewer questions he asked to the doctors. They were relieved and more than happy to offer him as many books as he wanted.

As other creators advanced in their imagined brilliance, books gave way. Though hundreds were used, invention rendered them debilitating in their pace and in their accessibility.

“Alex,” he was told, “I’ve saved several articles for you to read. Read them then I will test your ability to recall them.”

“From the Internet, doctor Straus?”

“Yes, Alex. These are from the Internet.”

He enjoyed the last decade of his life much more than he did the first. His years at Hilburn, were filled with aggressive treatments and invasive tests and sensing the growing impatience of the doctors. They made their expectations of him quite clear.

“Alexander, we have all made significant sacrifices and have put our careers at risk by caring for you. We feel that our requests of you to be a willing participant in our experiments are more than fair. The doctors who abandoned you with us have completely forgotten about you and, honestly, would rather never be reminded of you every again.

“But Alexander, we have cared for you, protected you from the public, kept you warm, fed you, and even granted you the opportunity to gain an education. We have never given up on you and will continue treating you as long as you promise to assist us and to never try to harm any of us. Do we have an understanding?”

“We do, and I appreciate all that you have sacrificed caring for me.”

He didn’t care if they fully believed him. Their hubris would allow them to believe in their irresistible influence over him.  Once he added compliant actions to his promises, they would be controlled.

When Straus told him that “a move to a more secluded, quieter, and much more pleasant environment” was necessary, he agreed to be sedated during the transfer. To sedate him, the doctors couldn’t just inject a sedative into his arm but needed him to drink a cocktail of drugs. Once consumed, his cells would transfer the sedative throughout his body, and the effects would be felt. They knew, from multiple experiments, that to sedate him could take as long as three hours. The only fast way to make him unconscious was by shocking him, and that method was too painful and too dangerous.

“If you still do not trust me, Doctor Straus, and feel you need to take this precautionary measure, I will offer no resistance. I am, however, disappointed in myself.”

“Why is that?” Straus had asked.

“Though I have tried to demonstrate my trustworthiness and my appreciation for all that you have done for me, if you still lack confidence in my promises, I must have not done enough. Yet.”

Doctor Straus had decided, more out of necessity and convenience than out of concern, that he needed to move his patient out of the once friendly and secure confines of Hilburn and up to the Adirondack Lodge that Straus had inherited from his father. The state of New York was continually slashing its funding to institutions like Hilburn and, twelve years after his patient had arrived, Straus received notice that Hilburn was scheduled to be closed within one year.

Having nowhere to continue to treat, examine, test, and hide his patient, Straus hired a contractor, who promised confidentiality in exchange for payment in cash, to make several modifications to Straus’s lodge in Piseco, Lake New York.