Square: A Love Story – Beta Test Chapters 1-2
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Chapter 1: Mind Games
Let’s play a game.
Close your eyes and think of your earliest memory.
Got it?
Now, try again, but this time, go back further. Here’s the trick: think of something that arouses all five senses. Maybe it was the smell of grandpa’s coffee in the morning or the taste of mom’s world-famous chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven. Engage your other senses, too—the paint color of your childhood bedroom or the way a fuzzy baby blanket felt against your skin. Or maybe it’s a song your dad use to sing to you.
Memories are what make us who we are.
My earliest memory is Christmas Day. There is a photograph that still exists in one of my mother’s countless photo albums. It’s a four-year-old brown-headed boy playing with a Star Wars X-Wing Fighter.
I gently removed the wrapping paper exposing the full-color graphics, taking even more care to open the box. Once the toy was removed, my father proceeded to affix the stickers and four laser guns on each wing. We gently placed Luke Skywalker in his seat and closed the clear canopy.
I rarely played with it in the days and weeks that followed. Instead, I lovingly placed it on my dresser top just to stare at it. In my imagination, I was Luke Skywalker helping the rebellion defeat Darth Vader. It drove my father crazy that I wouldn’t play with it.
“Don’t touch it!” I would argue.
“Toys are meant to be played with, dinged up, and used.” He would say.
He never understood that I didn’t need to play with my X-wing to truly enjoy it. That’s when I learned the first important lesson in my life:
What I do in my mind is far more extraordinary than what I do in reality.
My second oldest memory is from preschool sitting at a U-shaped table with my classmates
The teacher is holding a picture of the sun and moon. She asks, “During the day, does the sun or moon come out?” Allowing each child a chance to respond. A child at the delicate age of four or five knows this factoid regarding astronomy and Newtonian physics. My frustration with this exercise was the rules of how to win.
It went something like this:
Teacher asks the sun/moon question. “Child one” answers, “Sun.”
She looks to the left slightly, “child two” answers, “Sun.”
Again, she glances to the left, “child three” answers, “Sun.” And so on.
Here lies my dilemma. The first child receives the most credit as they are taking the biggest risk in answering correctly. The following child plays off the success or failure of the first child with no real reward or penalty. Even if “child one” answered incorrectly, “child two” instinctively knows to answer the opposite. This is the moment I learned the second most crucial character trait about myself: I hate no-win scenarios.
“Child one” was the real winner. The rest of us were just runner-ups. That day, at the U-shaped table, I chose to loose over the choice of following my predecessors.
“Child seven” answers, “Moon.”
Lesson two:
If I can’t win, I won’t play.
The next memory still stings.
I was terrible at making friends. Social cues were a foreign language. I couldn’t grasp the intentions of others. I had severe separation anxiety, so often, I would end up in the nurse’s office. Sometimes in the middle of class, the fluorescent lights and sounds of the room would become overwhelming. I would slip into a trance-like state. It made the other children weary of me.
Halfway through first grade, I finally found a friend. We had a common passion: Battlestar Galactica. This boy seemed kind and genuine. On one particular day, we both agreed to bring our favorite action figures to school. That evening, I was so excited, I carefully chose my favorites and placed them in my backpack.
The following morning we met at recess and showed off our collections to one another. Some of the other boys joined us in admiration. When the bell sounded, we gathered our toys to return to class. Before I knew what was happening, one of the kids pushed me to the ground. My new friend grabbed my backpack full of delicate treasures and proceeded to bash them against the hard playground. I could hear them breaking into pieces. Another boy punched me in the stomach. I lost my breath wincing in pain.
A teacher helped me to the nurse’s office to await a parent. That was the day I discovered the third lesson:
I don’t need people.
Now, for one last memory. However, the truth is far different than the fiction you have seen in movies, read in magazines and books, and watched on PBS documentaries. It doesn’t begin with some fantastic plot where I’m visited by E.T. or A.L.F, or any other acronym alien. Nor was I dropped on my head jolting my consciousness into a super-human-like overdrive. No, this is far more boring and much more plausible.
It begins with an 8-track player.
I’m at Mama Jo’s house. My grandmother believed she was too young and attractive to be tabled a “grandma.” I was staying with her because I had been severely sunburned swimming a few days earlier. Back then, lifeguards at public pools required a resting break several times throughout the day. They did this to “shock” the pool with chlorine to kill the copious amounts of urine. I was four or five, but I can’t say for sure. I had fallen asleep in the hot Texas sun. I love naps. I always have and still do. When I awoke from my summer day slumber, everything seemed fine, so I continued to swim.
The following day, the damage was apparent. I was so badly sunburned that my back was covered in blisters. I was physically ill. I couldn’t keep any food in my stomach.
Both my parents had day jobs, so it was Mama Jo to the rescue! I ended up staying with her for a week to recover.
It wasn’t all bad. Mama Jo had cable TV. There was a brown box that sat on the top of the television with 12 large channel buttons. Nickelodeon was included. I watched it day and night.
As my recovery was coming along, I began to wander around the house. Mama Jo had a lot of breakable items in her home, so she kept a large box in a spare bedroom closet with child-friendly items. For some reason, an 8-Track player with the oversize cassettes were included.
I set up the 8-Track player and put on some music. I have no idea what I would have listened to, but my older wiser self hopes it was something folksy and cultured like Neil Diamond or James Taylor.
There were several old toys from my mother’s childhood. Included were Barbies, a Girl Scout sash, a slingshot hand made by Grandpa Corky, and hot wheels. A few other items were not technically toys, but something a child could play with and break without fear of repercussions.
On this particular day, there was something I had never seen before. Tucked in the corner of the box was a multi-colored square. I gently removed the cube. It was twice the size of my hand and covered with rainbow-colored stickers. It was magnificent!
I sat down next to the closet and studied the cube. I noticed it was brittle, almost breakable. So, of course, I did the only thing anyone in my position would do—I attempted to break it. However, it did something unexpected. It broke—but didn’t come apart. It was if there was a magical force binding it all together. I tried my hardest to pull it apart but to no avail. As I continued to study the colored square, I discovered that it could spin in any direction, up-down, side to side. It would turn for days if I had the time and patience.
After a few minutes, the intrigue of the mechanics behind the magical square began to wear off, and a new curiosity arose: why does this exist? Do you throw it? Is there another part of this toy that is missing? Does it make sounds like the 8-Track player? What is this thing?
I finally noticed that one of the yellow squares was beginning to peel. Again, I did what any child in my place would do—I positioned my untrimmed fingernail between the sticker and the black plastic and ripped it off. It was satisfying, so I proceeded to peel off every single colored sticker from the cube. Left behind was a dull and colorless black cube. There were dozens of colored stickers affixed to the green shag carpet and my skinny sunburned legs. It was the toy equivalent of carnage.
I began to panic. What had I done? It was in the toy box, so it was fair game, I thought to myself. Yet out of respect for the colored magical square, I felt remorse.
I came up with a plan: affix the stickers back on the cube. Sounds easy. Can you imagine what it would look like for a young child with still-developing motor skills trying to re-attach 54 tiny stickers to 54 equally small squares? I failed miserably. That’s when I had another idea: Mama Jo! If she can fix second-degree sunburns, she can most certainly repair the magical rainbow cube.
“Mama Jo!” I yelled. Not overly loud, just one of those annoyingly low pitched yells a child makes when they are multitasking. It’s that same kind of shout a child makes when they’ve been on the toilet for 15 minutes, and they need an adult to wipe their butt.
“Mama Joooooo!” I said again.
I heard glass hitting glass, which was probably the sound of her Lipton Instant Iced Tea glass.
“Coming!” she sung.
She made her way to the bedroom. “Hey, baby. What’s wrong? You need some ointment?” She asked in her thick Texas drawl. She looked down at me just in time to see this wasn’t an ointment situation.
“Can you help me?” I asked.
She chuckled and bent down. Her knees made a popping sound. “I don’t remember putting that in your box. That’s Grandpa’s.”
“Can you fix it?” I said again, slightly annoyed.
She gently took the cube out of my hands and examined it. She began placing the stickers back onto the small black squares from whence they’d come. But she did something unexpected. She put all the stickers of the same color on their own side of the cube. Red on one side, green on another, yellow on the opposite of red, then orange on its own side — white next to orange, and blue on the reverse of orange.
“How about that?” she asked me, holding the cube out.
I took the cube from her and, without skipping a beat, began to peel off one of the stickers.
“Hold on. I just fixed it!” She said bonking me on the top of my head. “It’s a puzzle. You’re supposed to spin it all around until the colors are all out of order, then you try and put all the colors back together.” She proceeded to spin the bottom section of the cube, then immediately reversed her spin, realigning the colors.
She stood up, “I can’t do it, neither can grandpa. No one can. He probably just threw it in your box. But, if you keep peeling off the stickers, I’m not going to keep fixin’ it for ya.” She forced a smile and left the room.
I sat on the floor for a few minutes starring at the magnificent magical cube. I dared not spin it and ruin the perfection of aligned colors. That didn’t last long.
I turned it, and I spun, and I spun, and I spun. I twisted it, I contorted it, I tried to pull it apart again just for the fun of it and then turned it back for good measure. In a matter of moments, it was a chaotic mess. Colors were jumbled. The uniformity was gone. There was no reason it should be this way, but it was, and I hated it. I threw it across the room against the adjacent wall.
Quietly staring at the mayhem of multi-colored squares, I felt contempt for it. It wasn’t right. That’s when some kind of deep emotion surfaced in me. I stood up and walked over to the cube lying on the green shag carpet of my grandmother’s spare bedroom. I sat down next to it with legs crossed, but I didn’t touch it. I rested my head on my hands to study it once more.
What happens next is hard to describe, which will be a continuing theme for the remainder of this memoir. This is all I know: I rearranged the colored squares without touching the cube. Just as I didn’t feel the need to hold my X-wing Fighter to play with it. I closed my eyes and moved each colored square into a uniform position.
At once, it was done. Mayhem to magnificent.
I opened my eyes to find the cube was still lying on the shag carpet, a jumbled mess. So I picked it up with my delicate hands and proceeded to move the squares into place, following the same sequence I had taken moments earlier in my mind. It felt satisfying. If it was a game, I was winning. If I had been in front of my classmates, they would have cheered me on. If my mother were here to see me, she would snap a photograph for her photo album. If my father were here, he would be proud.
I never told Mama Jo or my parents what I did that day. I put away the rainbow-colored cube, and moved onto the next thing that would occupy my time. It would be another two years until that secret resurface.
So why now? Why am I telling you what really happened? At first, I was unable to speak of the events leading to November 8, 1989. It wasn’t until years later with the election of a new president and the death of an old one that documents were officially unsealed. Plus, I never cared to talk about it. I was happy living my quiet and simple life in the northwest Texas plains with my family, the constant northward wind, and the tumbleweeds. However, the countless unauthorized biographies, films, made for TV specials and documentaries never got it right. One author summed it up saying, “He’s was the 14-year-old prodigy who single-handedly caused the fall of communism and prevented World War III.” It makes me sound like the messiah.
Hollywood would have you believe I was some kind of government experiment. Others made me out to be superhuman. They got it all wrong. They never understood why I did what I did and how I was able to do it. It wasn’t until my children were old enough to go to school and hear these stories inaccurately retold from friends and teachers that I finally decided to set the record straight.
The one thing that just about everyone agrees upon is the role of the Rubik’s Cube. It’s true. A puzzle that would go on to become the biggest selling toy in history. However, it was never just a toy. It was a tool. Erno Rubik said it was a tool to find me. So now, it is up to me to make it right. That’s something I use to say about the Rubik’s Cube. I always wanted to take it from that chaotic and jumbled state of existence to a uniform collection of colors and squares. Perfect. Square and boring, like me. The way it should be.
Chapter 2: Young Erno
My birth was a highly memorable experience for all involved. I was born on July 6th, 1974, in a small West Texas town south of Amarillo. When I finally arrived, the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. I was oxygen-deprived for an undetermined amount of time. My father described me as being gray and lifeless when they sat my limp body on my mother’s chest. I eventually regained consciousness and was placed in an incubator for two weeks in hopes that the oxygen-rich atmosphere would heal any possible adverse effects. The doctors warned my parents that I may grow to have mental or physical disabilities due to the difficult birth. They named me Simon. I am Simon Bailey.
1974 was an exciting year, to say the least. Richard Nixon was president and caught up in the Watergate scandal. Stephen King published Carrie. Ted Bundy and Charles Manson were in their prime. Evil Knievel failed at rocketing himself over the Snake River.
The ’70s are known for disco, political scandals, ineffectual presidents, the anti-war movement, folk music, economic crisis, the launching of Voyager 1 and 2, microwave ovens, the technology war between Bata-max and VHS, and the genesis of the video game era by way of Atari and PacMan.
One other thing happened in 1974. Erno Rubik, a Hungarian architect, was attempting to create a three-dimensional model to explain three-dimensional geometry for his university students. This “Magic Cube,” as he called it, would go on to become the phenomenon of its time and synonymous with 80’s pop culture.
For those of you who have been deprived of the most famous toy in the world, the Magic Cube has nine colored squares on six sides, with a total of 26 smaller cubes with 54 exposed sides. There are 43 quintillion ways to arrange the squares. It took Erno Rubik a full month before he was able to solve his own puzzle.
The Rubik’s Cube didn’t become the Rubik’s Cube immediately. It’s important to remember the period in which Rubik created his puzzle. In 1974 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (or USSR) was deep into a Cold War with the rest of the free world. The Iron Curtain, as Winston Churchhill described it in 1946, had been going strong for 30 years. Hungary was a satellite state in the USSR. These Soviet-controlled countries were known as the Eastern Bloc.
Born in 1944, the son of a poet mother and a blue-collar working father, Rubik loved sculpture and art. He would go on to study architecture at the Academy of Applied Arts and Design.
Rubik became a professor of design. This was when he created the cube. By using blocks of wood and rubber bands to bind them together, the Magic Cube allowed students to visualize geometric shapes. It wasn’t long until Rubik saw an opportunity. He hired a manufacturer in Hungary who could help him mass-produce his puzzle game. In 1979 he licensed it as the Magic Cube with Ideal Toys, a US Company. By 1980, the newly named Rubik’s Cube became a hit in the US and would go onto sell more than 350 million units worldwide. Erno Rubik became ridiculously rich and famous and lived happily ever after. Fin.
But that’s not all true.
Rubik was indeed a gifted young man who would go onto become a sculptor and architect. He was a professor of architecture at the Budapest College of Applied Arts. However, everything between his birth and official appointment as a professor at Budapest College was hidden from the public.
He was far more than just a gifted Hungarian. He was a genius by definition. His mother and father realized early on he was different from other children. He didn’t talk until the age of six. If you met him on the street, you would assume he was mentally and socially challenged. He was an introvert who found solace with books, wooden blocks for building, and clay for sculpting.
His mother, Magdolna, was brilliant in her own right. She was a poet and a highly educated woman. When Erno Sr. was at work, Magdolna would bring out her books and teach Erno Jr.
Over time, he began creating puzzles with his building blocks. He would cut out shapes with paper templates, and his father would fashion wooden blocks based on Erno’s specifications. By age five, he was designing structures of all types, and puzzles his parents could not solve.
Erno Sr. and Magdolna decided that young Erno needed to sharpen his social skills. This wasn’t because they were embarrassed of him. On the contrary, they were proud and loving parents. They lived, however, in a time and place where Erno would be shunned and even worse, labeled mentally unfit and put into a hospital to live out the remainder of his life. By age seven, Erno finally began talking. By eight, they couldn’t get him to shut up. This was when they enrolled him in the state-sponsored education system. He developed social and communication skills. There was only one problem with his entrance into the Soviet-sponsored school system. His teachers discovered the secret his parents had been keeping, and for a good reason.
The Soviet school system was one of the best in the world. Vladimir Lenin understood the best way to spread his Marxist views, and associated propaganda was to educate children early and often. Thus, he rationalized that focusing on an education system that taught Soviet principles would be the best way to accomplish his goals. Because of this, the Soviet government centralized and standardized the education system.
After World War II, tension began to escalate between former allies. The American’s had something the Soviets did not: the Atomic Bomb. More importantly, they were able to smuggle out the infamous German rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, who had developed the even more infamous V-2 rocket.
The Soviets did everything in their power to level the playing field. They adjusted their education system to focus on mathematics and science, all the while searching for the “Einsteins” and “von Brauns” of the Soviet Union. That’s how they discovered young Erno.
It didn’t take long for Erno’s teachers to see his gifts. He excelled in every subject. However, it was a science competition that the Soviet government learned the name Rubik.
While other students were building experimental airplanes and working with chemistry sets, Erno’s project involved an early version of his cubed puzzle. Rubik’s Cube wasn’t accidentally invented in 1974. A rudimentary prototype was designed and constructed in 1952.
One day he had the idea of color-coding the square cubes. It was Erno Sr.’s idea to rubber band the small cubes together, allowing them to rotate. This method was limiting and could only be used for a few cubes. So Erno Sr. used his engineering background to design and build a center mechanism that would unite and bind multiple cubes together.
Young Erno brought his homemade Magic Cube to school. At first glance, it was laughable. A toy for a science experiment! Erno tried to explain what he had built to his instructors. His brilliance would have been overlooked if not for one of the competition judges from a local polytechnic school. As he walked by, Erno explained how his puzzle functioned and the math involved in solving it.
“May I try?” the judge asked in Russian.
Erno handed the puzzle to the judge. He began to play with it, spinning it in various directions.
“You have to make all the colors match on each side,” Erno said respectfully.
The judge continued to spin it. After a few minutes, he looked back at Erno in frustration and said, “It’s impossible!” He handed the cube to Erno. “Can you solve it?”
“Let me show you,” Erno said. He began to spin the cube in multiple directions much quicker than the judge. In a matter of minutes, some of the colors started to align with other like-colored cubes. The judge stood and watched as Erno did what seemed impossible.
Erno lifted the Magic Cube that had been transformed from a chaotic state of colors to a uniformly colored cube with six distinct colors. “Done.” He said.
To young Erno Rubik, it was easy. To the judge, it was magical.
The judge bent forward and looked directly into Erno’s eyes. “Son, can I meet your parents?”
It was those words that set into motion a series of events that would forever change Erno’s life and mine too.