Chapter 1 | The Cuckoo in the Cuckoo Clock

He lives in a quiet world, where the only sound is the ringing in his ears. He comes and goes as he pleases, taking long walks alone by the waterfront. He's staring at a sheet of paper the teacher handed back to him. In red, across the top, is a ZERO. No words, no explanation. The assignment was to write a sentence using a chosen word. Moses could still smell the teacher’s alcoholic breath as he handed back the paper. “The cuckoo in the cuckoo clock says cuckoo to you!”

As he makes his way from Bridge House down Dixwell Road, Moses swallows bitter tears. Earlier, his mother, Nadia, tried to console him with a cookie and encouragement. “He's a stupid man.” Nadia never minced words. She was kind and gentle, the most loving and devoted of mothers, yet rarely would she criticize. If she said the teacher was stupid, he was stupid. “Never mind.”

Moses clutched his school books and the crumpled piece of paper as he walked, careful not to step on the cracks, counting, then not counting. He's walking quickly past the houses and shops. The streets are full of noise that he can't hear, but he can feel it in his bones and the tight muscles in his face. So many people, and the rickshaws rushing by. Always something to look at, though not always pleasant. Sometimes awful, like a dead baby in its wailing mother’s arms. Or sometimes all alone in the street.

There's a tree overlooking the ocean, easy to climb. Moses springs up like a monkey, making his way to one of the high branches, long and sturdy, with a clear shot to the sea. “To hell with you!” He can't mouth the words, and he doesn't know what they mean, but he knows they're bad, and that his father William yells them when he's angry. Nobody's yet figured out that Moses can read lips.

He rips pages from the stupid books and starts throwing them into the stupid sea, along with the stupid paper with the stupid ZERO. It seems like eternity, but it's only an extended moment, all the books and the paper are swirling in the ocean, and Moses is sitting, still bitter, in the tree. But the feeling doesn't last. He's thinking of his dad, and the day they went to see a moving picture, how he grabbed his dad’s tie in amazement! How do they do that? How do they make the pictures move? Why do I have to go to stupid school?

Moses comes down from the tree, feeling better. He can't yet put it into words, but from this day forward, he will always take a stand for justice. If something’s wrong, he'll let you know, or he'll do something about it. He's smart, sometimes crafty, always better than average.