MCU: No Limits

"Hello, Keiji." She smiled a small smile. "I will accompany you here for a while, so it's fair that you should know my name. I am Dr. Joyce."

Keiji was shocked, for some reason, before breaking into a small smile that grew until it formed a wide grin.

"Joyce? I know the meaning of that name! Want to know what it is?"

"Of course, I would love to."

Honestly, Joyce doesn't know what her name means.

This is not something that interests her.

But that boy seemed so excited to share this harmless knowledge with her that she became interested in knowing about it.

"It means 'praise,' or 'the one who brings joy,' or 'the one who brings happiness.'"

While Joyce watches the boy close his lips and then smile a rather strange smile, Keiji soon said, with his eyes closed, in the same breath:

"That name also means 'old woman.'"

OK, that wasn't harmless knowledge.

Feeling a bit offended, she was thinking of responding to it in kind.

She would say it's an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

"And what does your name mean? Could you tell me?"

She examined the behavior he exhibited upon hearing her question, attentively.

Keiji blinked, apparently a little shocked. And he placed his hand on his jaw, looking thoughtful.

"Would you lend me a piece of paper and a pen?" Keiji asked.

Joyce opened a drawer on her side of the desk, taking out a simple notebook that she opened and tore out a blank page, which she handed to Keiji along with a blue ballpoint pen.

The boy leaned forward, placing the paper on the table and removing the pen cap with his teeth.

He begins to draw several vertical and horizontal lines until he forms the outline of a rectangular table.

Joyce looked, curious, at what Keiji was writing.

She really didn't understand anything that was written there, but she suspected it was written in kanji.

She checked the time on the watch on her wrist, quickly noticing that 5 minutes had passed since Keiji started writing.

But she would wait for him to finish.

People didn't know Joyce as someone impatient.

After another 5 minutes, Keiji handed her the sheet of paper, which was completely filled with kanji characters, divided into small rectangles in a table.

There were more than a hundred of them.

At the top of the sheet of paper, outside the rectangle, there was a title written in English with large, twisted letters.

"Meanings of My Name."

She stared at Keiji, impressed.

His brain's memorization capabilities are astonishing if he wrote all this without an external example.

And if his memorization is so great, how would his other mental abilities be?

Joyce realized that she was dealing with a child different from those she had previously worked with.

It is normal for most adults to be unable to remember experiences lived until the age of 4.

This is called childhood amnesia.

In the first years of life, a child's brain is undergoing constant structural changes and the central nervous system is not yet fully developed.

And this 5-year-old boy in front of Joyce seems bizarre.

Bizarre was the first word that came to her mind, even though there were other words to describe Keiji.

Joyce remembers having overheard a conversation once.

She heard that some children with brilliant minds have a specific habit in common.

The habit of reading the dictionary.

Basically, the dictionary is a compilation where various words, proper terms, and vocabulary are arranged in alphabetical order with their respective meanings in their version or in another language.

Most children learn to read effectively between the ages of 6 and 8.

However, the literacy process is completed around 7 and a half or 7 years and 8 months.

Some children learn to read before that, but it's not a rule, it's an exception.

A good number of children start recognizing the letters of the alphabet around 2 or 3 years old and can identify most of the letters by the age of 4 or 5.

Even though Keiji's spelling looks horrible to her eyes, Joyce really finds it impressive that Keiji can write in a different language, even if he might not be able to pronounce what he wrote. 

In the United States, children also learn languages through games, music, and repetition in an immersive environment.

There are exceptions, of course.

And Keiji seems to be one of those exceptions.

Not even Keiko, who could be the person to teach this to her brother, knows how to write these characters in this way or even pronounce correctly the little she knows.

In her session, before Keiji entered her room, Keiko said she only knows twelve ideograms.

How Keiji learned something like that is beyond Joyce's comprehension.

But there is still the possibility, however minimal, that Keiji learned this through the internet.

Joyce saw when Keiji took the phone from his sister's bag.

Joyce thinks that Keiji learning this in a short period of time is a very small possibility because, according to Keiko, Keiji never used his phone before the days leading up to the psychiatric appointment.

Is that what a genius learns in a week?

Thinking with a bit more clarity, Joyce deduced that the beginning of this conversation was only meant to distract her.

She thinks it was something meticulously premeditated.

Focusing on the center of the sheet of paper, Joyce saw that one of the kanji had what appeared to be Keiji's fingerprint.

Keiji waved his finger, dirty with ink, as soon as Joyce raised an eyebrow in his direction.

He painted his thumb with the ink from the ballpoint pen before pressing his finger on that part of the sheet, exactly in the center.

This gave Joyce the impression that these two kanji meant something really important.

"Why are there so many characters written here?"

"These are the variations of my name that I know. Depending on the kanji used, the meaning varies."

Joyce already knew that. She may have a rather superficial understanding of this matter, but it was enough to know a few things.

"And why did you put your fingerprint here, at this point?"

"Well, this isn't the way my name is written, but it has a meaning that I like. I wanted to highlight that, in some way." He explained, shyly picking up the sheet of paper.

"The kanji on the left, Kei, has 10 strokes. It is blessing, favor, and grace. This embodies compassion, generosity, calmness, wisdom, and insight." Keiji said, with his index finger pressed on the page. "The one on the right, Ji, has 13 strokes and means compassion and mercy."

Keiji placed the sheet on the table and looked at the sneakers on his feet, shyly.

"These are the qualities I aspire to have." Said Keiji, swinging his legs. "I... I have a dream, and it is big. Very big."

"How big is your dream, exactly?" Joyce asked, curious.

Keiji slowly raised his head and looked at her, without smiling.

"How big is your life, exactly?"