There once was a boy who had a star for a brain. It was a very small star, as he was a very small boy. The boy was (of course) very smart, and being very smart, he knew what was happening to him from a very early age without anyone having to explain it to him. He did have to wait until someone explained it to him so he could learn the words to describe what he already knew, so to the grown-ups it looked like he didn’t understand it, but he really did.

He didn’t go to normal school, mainly because of his condition and partly because of what the other kids would say to him about how different he was. His parents understood this and talked about it in hushed tones at the kitchen table after the boy went to bed, and the boy knew it too but it didn’t bother him too much because he was perfectly happy with his tutors and the rotating staff of multiple-doctorate physicists who came and talked with him daily. He enjoyed their company and they seemed to enjoy his. It made him feel special.

Contrary to what you might think, the boy was very happy surrounded with all these grown-ups instead of other little boys and girls his age. The grown-ups gave him all sorts of words to use and mull over inside that luminous head of his. It was all very exciting for him, to be able to feel the pull of things on each other based merely on how much mass they had. It was even more exciting for him to know how to explain that feeling.

The only thing the boy didn’t like about his studies was the math. But all boys hate math.

As the boy grew older, he saw less and less of his parents. His mother read stories to him in frequently, as he mainly lulled himself off to sleep with textbooks resting open on his small chest. One day he moved away from home to a special school built just for him where he could concentrate. He learned a great deal there, and sooner than he thought, he grew older.

One day, many years after the little boy forgot how his mother’s hands smelled, he posed a question that he had been thinking about for a very long time. He asked everyone he knew, everyone he came in contact with in his life, everyone who could understand the question or even not understand the question. What he asked was this: “I do not know where my mother is, or even if she is still alive. I do not remember her face or what color her hair was, and I especially do not remember what her hands smelled of on summer afternoons. Why is it she pulls on me stronger than the any of you, or the entire world, or the deep well of the universe?”

No one could give the little boy with the star for a brain a straight answer.