He walked around slope-headed because he had so many ideas weighing his skull down. Beautiful, unformed, pure thoughts that he could not yet articulate in any cogent fashion. When he spoke all that came out was a stream of gibberish, a warble of spittle; it was like listening to a baritone turkey recite scripture. At first, they thought he was retarded.
Then one day, he opened his mouth and out came a packet of polysyllabic verbosity. What he said didn’t make much sense, but at least it was clearly enunciated. You could say to him, “Oh, that is clearly nonsense, and so is that and that,” instead of “Huh” and “How’s that?” It was decided that he was a misunderstood genius, that his thoughts were untimely, that he himself was ahead of his time. They could not grasp his meaning, and so they labeled him a savant.
One day, during the lunch hour, when all the quality people were mixing and mingling with the commoners, he stood in the middle of a crowd of diners, and he stretched out his arms like Christ on the cross, and he raised his head heavenward and sang. He sang in such dulcet tones, with such mellifluous passion, as if melody had declared war on his throat and won, that everyone dropped their victuals and stared with rapt eyes at the savant deep in song. They were all so enchanted, so tightly bound into his voice, as if they and the song and the singer were inextricably linked into one production. Women swayed and swooned, children sat in slack-jawed, silent awe, grown men, gruff and brusque, wept uncontrollably. The savant sang on, arms still outstretched, as if he were entranced, bound up in some unseen ecstasy. It seemed at that moment that the world was caught up in something that transcended the base, maggoty material existence that defined the lives of so many poor souls doomed to walk upon the earth. Of course, it could not last. The world would not have such a thing. And so it happened that as the savant was hanging on a single sweet soul-burrowing note, he was interrupted by the braying of a single heckler. The complaint of this malingerer was announced to all who had ears. “Good people,” he shouted, “can’t you see what’s happening? My God, you’ve all been enchanted, bedazzled by one of Satan’s servants. It’s perfectly obvious that the man you’ve been admiring is a witch. A witch! You’ve been bewitched!” The people of the town — always willing to follow the loudest voice in the room — turned on the savant, following the lead of the heckler, and denounced their enchanter. They all agreed that he was an enchanting witch, and so they tried to drown him.
Luckily, a louder voice spoke up before they were able to toss him in the river. This voice was very persuasive — and more importantly, it was ear-shatteringly loud. It said, “Stop!” It said a few other things, too, but that one word, shouted at full volume, was enough to convince them of their erroneous ways. And so they let the savant go.
And go he went, all the way to the gates of the town, to the sign that announced the exit. It was a voluntary exit, but all along the way he’d stop on occasion to denounce the townspeople with the most obscene, vulgar epithets. Terrible, vile, murderously hateful denunciations that no one on Earth had ever dared utter before.
The town preacher covered the innocent ears of his grandaughter, and offered to everyone assembled his own summation of the whole scene. “See that,” he said, “all this time we didn’t know what to make of him. Thought he was crazy at first. Then we thought he was some kind of retard. Thought he was a genius, then a songbird, then a witch. Turns out that all along he was just a common vulgarian.”
