Extreme Fabulations by Steven Shaviro

Author:Steven Shaviro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

My comparison of Greg’s petulant complaints to Edelman’s radical polemic might seem hyperbolic. But in fact, “Message in a Bottle” is literally about its narrator’s confrontation with a futurity that comes to him embodied in the form of a child. Everything in the story ultimately turns upon Greg’s fraught relationship with his friends’ daughter Kamla. The girl is unusual, to say the least. Even at a very young age, when Babette and Sunil first adopt her, Kamla has an “outsized head” that looks “strangely adult.” Indeed, “the bones in her skull are fused” already, which is something that is only supposed to happen to us “once we’ve stopped growing.” Kamla’s otherwise child-sized body is barely able to support this head, leaving her “prone to painful whiplash injuries” – not to mention that she often finds herself being ridiculed by other children as a “bobble-head.” Kamla also “speaks in oddly complete sentences” for a child, saying things that are “too grown up” and too complex for her age. And it’s not just her words; “something about Kamla’s delivery” also “makes it easy to forget” that she’s a child.

But there’s more. The rest of Kamla’s body, aside from her head, seems to develop very slowly. She looks far younger physically than her presumptive chronological age: “We figure she’s about eight,” Babette says, “but she’s not much bigger than a five-year-old.” Two years later, “at ten years old, people mistake her for six.” Eventually, Kamla is diagnosed with Delayed Growth Syndrome (DGS), a mysterious condition shared by other children around the world who came up for adoption at the same time as she did:

It’s a brand new disorder. Researchers have no clue what’s causing it, or if the bodies of the kids with it will ever achieve full adulthood. Their brains, however, are way ahead of their bodies. All the kids who’ve tested positive for DGS are scarily smart.

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