Ezra Sussman

Name:

Ezra Sussman

Age:

23

Height:

5'8"

Sex:

Male

Hair:

Black hair, in between curly and wavy, a little past the nape of his neck.

Eyes:

Dark brown

Occupation:

Graduate student in mathematics/TA/does part-time data entry for his mother/he’s in a band (but they don’t really pay him)

Personality:

Ezra doesn’t know how to be a person– and at twenty-three, he feels it’s far too late to learn. He does know how to be useful, how to nod and listen, how to keep his answers short and easy to articulate. When he was younger, he struggled with anger, hot and bright enough to fill him up and burn him out.

It’s not that he doesn’t struggle with it now, but everything he feels is more of murmur. (He feels very alone, all the time.) Defining a difference between ‘repression’ and ‘coping’ is a fool’s errand. What matters is if it works. He can come off as distant, even cold– or alternately, too intense– and he prefers to modulate towards the former.

History:

Many facets of modern medicine feel, to a lay person, miraculous– though Ezra’s mother would disapprove of that phrasing. ‘Miracle’ diminishes the reality of how knowledge is built, one laborious brick on top of another. When he looks at his baby photos though, shakes them out of the manila envelope in her file cabinet, that is the word he thinks. To construct a person out of a hole seems as implausible as forming a man out of dust.

Big dark eyes and below that, the malformation– the open flower of nose and mouth: the cleft lip and palate splitting open the place where a face should’ve been. Now there’s just a scar, pale on his brown skin, running from lip to nostril and a slight pull to his mouth, like they fell just short of conjuring enough new flesh.

Dr. Sussman didn’t perform the surgeries. Not her specialty, and perhaps a conflict of interest besides. She knew the doctor who did though, that’s why she has the pictures. Whether it was before or after she adopted him, she’s never specified. Most small children ask a lot of questions. If Ezra ever did, he doesn’t remember. From the outside, they must look estranged, look as if they had always been estranged.

If one was to read about Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments, they might judge the babies estranged from the wire mother. Observation often occludes reality.

Around the time he reached middle school, his face was mostly fixed. The speech impediment took another couple years and still lingers on certain consonants. Not that he spent any less time in hospitals– only the reason shifted. Every time he ended up back in a locked ward, he’d have to sit down a write a personal history. Therapists love a life story worksheet.

There’s no coherent narrative to be found, otherwise he would've found it. Adolescence is difficult for everyone. He was sick until he grew out of it. Not fully, of course. There’s an awful rot in his brain that will always dog him. But for a few years he wanted things he couldn’t have so badly that it almost ruined him.

College was good because it kept him busy. He doubled majored in mathematics and music for his undergraduate degree and slid immediately into getting his Master’s degree in math for lack of anything better to do. He thinks about dropping out and tries to avoid wanting too hard.

On the list of things he did not ask about: the clock on his mother’s wrist, run down to zero before he ever arrived. Dr. Sussman had a soulmate and then she had a son. No overlap. He half-expected that when he turned eighteen, he wouldn’t get a clock at all. How does he deserve a soulmate when he doesn’t know how to be around real people?

Then there’s the band. They needed a bassist. He showed up with his double bass and must’ve done something they found charming, though he’s not sure what. Joining was a slight of hand: he’s not doing it for himself, but for them. It’s not selfish if he’s being of use to someone. Liang lets him borrow her electric bass guitar when they practice some days. Delgado says he’s picking it up crazy fast. Calling them his friends feels like overstepping.

Checking the timer on his wrist feels like overstepping. It feels like wanting too much. It feels like attention-seeking, and he can’t deny that it is– still. The closer the day gets, the harder he finds it to keep himself busy enough to let the moment fully pass him by.