Work Text:
Lesson Number J:
“My mom sent me this article about dyslexia. Apparently it’s way more common in English-speaking countries than anywhere else in the world because our spelling system is so uniquely fucked up."
Matt, unperturbed by the random introduction of this topic, says, “That makes sense. Spanish is way more phonetic; I bet lots of other languages are too. How’s the spelling system in Punjabi?”
“Dude, I probably don’t remember five words in Punjabi. Don’t ask me about the language I took just for a hot girl.”
“You said it was the language of the future!” Matt teases.
“You can’t hold me accountable for shit I said before my frontal lobe fully developed. If we can get back to dyslexia for a moment, it got me thinking. I wonder if my dysgraphia would manifest differently with a different alphabet. Like Hindi, for example.”
“I have no idea what the Hindi alphabet looks like.”
“What? I thought you were supposed to be the cultured one between the two of us.”
“They don’t teach South Asian geography and culture in elementary school.”
“Oh wait, that makes sense.” Matt only could’ve seen the Hindi alphabet if he’d been exposed to it when he could still see. “Do they have Hindi braille?”
Matt shrugs. “Probably. A bunch of different languages have their own codes.”
“Anyway, back to my point. The Hindi alphabet is way more curvy than ours. If some spelling systems are better for dyslexia, I wonder if some writing systems are better for dysgraphia.”
Matt nods thoughtfully. “Are you gonna try to learn Hindi?”
“No. I don’t know anyone who speaks it, who would teach me?”
“Duolingo?”
“No way, I am not selling my soul to that owl.”
“What owl?”
“The Duolingo owl?”
Matt stares at him, clueless.
“Oh my God. Consider yourself lucky you’ve been spared the terror of the Duolingo owl. I was actually thinking about learning another alphabet that’s also very different from the English one.”
“Cyrillic?”
“No. That one’s not all that different, actually.”
“Hebrew?”
“No,” Foggy says, increasingly exasperated. He thought Matt would guess this immediately. It’s both hilarious and mildly concerning that he hasn’t gotten it yet. “It’s the one that actually gets used in this office all the time.”
Matt furrows his brows, clearly thinking hard. A few moments later, he guesses, “Arabic?”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“…no?”
Foggy shakes his head. “It’s braille, you idiot.”
“Oh.” Matt chuckles. “You don’t have to do that. You said learning a whole new alphabet would break your brain or something.”
“It might, but I want to know if it’ll break it more or less than learning the regular alphabet did. Er…not the regular alphabet, sorry, that implies yours is irregular. I mean the English print one, or whatever it’s called.”
“It’s fine; I knew what you meant. And it’s not my alphabet. I’m not Louis Braille.”
“Who’s that?”
“The guy who invented it?”
“Wait, it’s named after a guy?”
“Yeah. Where did you think the name came from?”
“I don’t know! Some Latin or Greek roots meaning ‘feel the letters’ or something. Wow, we haven’t even started yet and you’re already teaching me.”
“Wait, you want me to teach you?”
“Yeah! Who else is gonna do it? The Duolingo owl is a highly visual animal. You’d know that if you could see his big beady eyes.”
“Aren’t owls also known for their hearing?”
“I asked you to teach me braille, not owl biology.”
“I don’t know if I’m qualified. I’ve never taught anyone before.”
Foggy crosses his arms. “I know I have a learning disability, but that doesn’t mean I’m unteachable.”
“No, I know, I know! It’s not that,” Matt splutters.
“I know, I’m just messing with you.” Foggy grins. “Come on, at least give it a try. Help a friend satisfy his academic curiosity. Wait, is there a handwriting equivalent of braille? I’ve only ever seen you print it out of a computer.”
“Yeah, there is, it just requires some special tools. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s literally impossible to have bad handwriting in braille.”
Foggy cracks his knuckles. “Just wait ‘til I give it a go.”
Matt chuckles. “Okay. We’re gonna need a muffin tin and a half dozen tennis balls.”
“Best I can do is a carton of eggs.”
“Deal.”
~0~0~0~
Lesson Number A:
They buy a carton of eggs and make omelets out of the half a dozen they don’t need. Still chewing his last bite, Foggy says, “Maybe we should’ve saved one or two in case we break some.”
“We’re just moving them around the carton; not playing catch.”
“You underestimate just how bad my coordination is.”
“We could hard boil them,” Matt suggests.
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
Twenty minutes later, they finally sit down for their first lesson. “Okay, I guess we can skip all the parts about how to move your hands and which part of your finger to read with,” Matt says. “Let’s start with the layout of the cell.” He picks up the egg carton, rips it down the middle, and holds one half vertically. “Each cell is six dots. On the left side are dots one, two, and three.” He moves his hand down the side to indicate each number. “And on the right four, five, and six.”
“Why are they numbered vertically and not left to right?” Foggy asks.
“I don’t know. That’s just how they’re numbered. Now, learning the alphabet is easy. You really only have to learn the first ten letters, and every letter after that builds off of those in a specific pattern.”
“What about numbers?”
“We’ll get to numbers later. Let’s start with the first ten letters.” He grabs an egg and places it in the top left slot of the egg carton. “That’s A. Dot one.”
“Easy enough. Is B dot two?”
“No. B is one and two.” He adds another egg to the slot below.
“So C is one, two, and three?”
“No. C is one and four.” He moves the bottom egg to the top right slot.
Foggy blows a raspberry. “You said this was gonna be easy.”
“Okay, maybe I exaggerated. Do you want to stop?”
“It’s been two minutes!”
“Is that a no?”
“Of course I’m not quitting three letters in. I have a bit more tenacity than that.”
“Okay.” Matt shows him letters D through J. With the exception of G, they’re all rotated or mirrored versions of other letters. Foggy feels a familiar stress building in the back of his brain. As a kid, he used to flip letters all the time, but his teachers could at least recognize what he’d been trying to write. If he flips a letter in braille, it’ll be a completely different letter.
Matt notices his distress. “I promise it gets easier from here. The next ten letters are the same as the first ten plus a dot in the three spot.” He leaves an egg in the bottom left corner and goes through the same progression again. One. One and two. One and four. One, four, five. One and five. One, two, four. One, two, four, five. One, two, five. Two and four. Two, four, five. Foggy’s head starts to spin.
“Then the last few letters follow the pattern again, plus the six dot. So U is one, three, and six. V is one, two, three, and six. X is one, three, four, and six.”
“You skipped W.”
Matt sucks in a breath through his teeth. “Yeah, W doesn’t follow the pattern.”
“What? Why not?”
“Braille is originally French. They don’t use the letter W in French, so it was added in an afterthought.”
“Awww. Poor W.”
Matt ignores his pity and finishes out the alphabet with Y, Z, and poor lonely W.
“Okay, great,” Foggy says. “Now go over all of it again.”
They go through all twenty-six letters once again. Foggy feels zero percent more confident after round two, so Matt has him pull up a picture of the braille alphabet on his phone so he can see all the letters at once. “How do you keep D, F, H, and J straight? They’re all the same shape just flipped different ways.”
“I remember D, and then from there it flips counterclockwise ninety degrees.”
That explanation makes absolutely no sense to Foggy. “Huh?”
Matt moves to sit next to Foggy and holds out his left hand. He makes an L shape with his pointer finger and thumb then bends his wrist so that his pointer points to the left and his thumb points straight down. “That’s D.” He rotates the shape ninety degrees so his pointer now points down and his thumb points to the right. “There’s F.” Another rotation, pointer to the right and thumb up. “H.” One last flip of the hand and he’s back to the regular L shape but with his palm facing them. “And there’s J.”
Foggy tries to mirror the gesture, but gets his fingers all twisted up. Matt holds up his hands toward Foggy’s and asks, “May I?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
Matt shapes Foggy’s hand into the right shape and holds it in place. “There’s D.” He gently but firmly twists Foggy’s wrist through the same pattern he just demonstrated.
“The J kind of looks like an English J,” Foggy remarks. “It’s just less curvy at the bottom.”
“Yeah, it kinda does,” Matt agrees. “Will that help you remember it?”
“Yeah, I think so. The hand over hand thing you did also helped.”
Matt smiles. They go over the letters once more before Matt pushes the egg carton towards Foggy and announces it’s his turn. Foggy places the eggs for each letter, then lets Matt run a hand over the carton to check his work. He makes it through four whole letters before he messes up. “That’s an I, not an E,” Matt informs him.
“Dangit. They’re so similar.”
“I used to get them mixed up too. My TVI told me to remember that E comes first, so E uses the one spot.”
Foggy nods and fixes the eggs so they sit in the one and five spots. He uses the twisty hand thing to remind himself what F looks like and—shockingly—it works. “Good job,” Matt says with a grin. Foggy makes it to I, and gets that one right too thanks to Matt’s earlier advice. He fucks up M, P, T, and Y, but gets half of them right on his second go round. When he mixes up a whole different group of letters on his third try, Matt suggests they take a break.
“We covered a lot for one lesson.”
“Pretty sure most adults could learn the ABCs in an hour,” Foggy bemoans. This whole thing was his idea, but he hadn’t anticipated how stupid it would make him feel. It reminds him of the frustration he felt as a kid trying to learn the alphabet for the first time. At least this time he doesn’t have a classroom full of peers to hammer home just how slow he is.
“I’ve never taught anyone before, but I’m pretty sure that’s not true,” Matt says. “They’re just combinations of dots, there’s no easy mnemonic or anything to help you remember. I think it took me at least five lessons before I could reliably identify all the letters.”
“But you were nine.”
“I’m pretty sure research shows that kids are better at picking up new languages than adults, so comparing yourself to nine-year-old me is a complete waste of your time.”
“Fair point,” Foggy concedes.
“Same time next week?” Matt asks with a smirk.
“Yes, Professor Murdock.”
~0~0~0~
Lesson Number B:
Foggy practices for fifteen minutes every night with his own carton of eggs back home, checking his answers against the picture of the alphabet he pulled up on his phone. By the time he returns to Matt’s apartment for their second lesson, he’s roughly seventy-five percent consistent, though it takes him between ten and thirty seconds to think of the right combination of dots for each letter.
“What are we going to cover today?” he asks.
“I thought we’d start with a review and then, depending on how confident you feel, do capital letters and numbers.”
“Both?” He still hasn’t learned the first twenty-six characters; there’s no way he can learn another twenty-six plus ten digits all in one day.
“Don’t worry, it’s way easier than you’re probably thinking.”
“That’s what you said last week.”
“I’ve since reevaluated my idea of easy. This meets the new criteria.”
Though still skeptical, Foggy reserves his judgment for later when they actually tackle the new material. Matt has him make each letter in alphabetical order, and he gets all but three of them right. He mixes up F and H and does Y backwards.
“That’s pretty good for only an hour of practice,” Matt encourages.
Foggy’s too embarrassed to admit that he’s actually practiced at least two and a half hours by this point.
Matt quizzes him on letters again, only this time he goes in random order. Foggy gets F and H right this time, but still reverses the Y and switches E and I. He remembers that E goes first so E uses dot number one, but Matt asks him for I before asking for E which throws that whole system off.
“Maybe I need to remember that E slopes downward and I slopes up, if you think about moving from left to right.” He used all sorts of mnemonics and visualization techniques to learn print letters; maybe the same kind of thing will help him here.
“That could work,” Matt agrees.
“The East Village is downtown, Inwood is uptown,” Foggy decides.
Matt offers an encouraging smile. “Whatever helps you remember it.”
They go through the letters in another random order, and he gets them all right this time. He almost mixes up F and H again, but he goes through the twisting hand thing Matt showed him last week before submitting his final answer and corrects himself. Matt congratulates him on his hundred percent accuracy and holds a hand up for a high five. Foggy feels a bit ridiculous celebrating something so mundane as learning the alphabet as a fully grown adult, but he’s also genuinely proud of himself.
“I’m ready for the big letters now,” he proclaims.
“Great. Here we go.” Matt places a single egg in the number six spot. “Ta da.”
“So capital A is six instead of one. Are they all just flipped like that? Is B dots six and five?” Foggy tries to imagine what it would look like if print capital letters were upside down and backwards versions of lowercase and nearly pulls a muscle from the effort.
“No, it’s way less complicated than that. If you find one of these cells, it means the next letter is capitalized. If you find two in a row, the whole next word is capitalized. If you find three in a row, everything is capitalized until you hit a capital terminator.”
“A capital terminator? When you run your fingers over it, does it say, ‘Hasta la vista, baby?’”
Matt laughs. “That would be way more fun, but it’s just a cell like this one followed immediately by a cell with just dot three.”
“Okay, you’re right this time. That is pretty easy. What about the numbers?”
“Same kind of thing. This is a number indicator.” He puts eggs in slots three, four, five, and six, making a sort of backwards L shape. “You see this, the next letter is actually a number. A is one, B is two, and so on. I is nine and J is zero.”
“Ohh, that’s pretty cool. What about, like, fractions and stuff? How do those work?”
Matt runs a hand through his hair. “Let’s skip that for now. Or maybe forever. I don’t think you’re ready to learn Nemeth code, and I definitely don’t feel ready to teach it. I haven’t had to do math in forever.”
“You’re right, math sucks. I don’t know why I even asked. How do you know when it stops being numbers and goes back to letters?”
“There’s two ways. If there’s a space, it reverts back to letters. You have to use another number indicator if the thing after the space is also a number. But if you have both letters and numbers in one chunk…you see this on signs in big buildings that tell you the room number sometimes, like 214B for example. If that’s the case, then you need a grade one terminator. It looks almost exactly like the capital terminator except the first cell is dots five and six.”
Foggy nods along, absolutely terrified by how complicated this is proving to be. “How much more is there?”
“There’s indicators for italics and bold and stuff, plus punctuation and special symbols like dollar signs and hashtags. After that, we’d be getting into Grade Two braille which is…probably a person with a learning disability’s worst nightmare.”
“That bad, huh?”
“There’s one cell that, depending on the context around it, can mean feet, inches, an equals sign, the word ‘were,’ a double G, or that the format indicated by the previous cell applies to the entire next passage.”
“Jesus Christ. How did you have time to learn any other subject in school while also learning all this?”
Matt shrugs. “They let me skip PE and have braille lessons instead.”
“Let you skip PE? That was everyone’s favorite class. I would’ve cried if they made me skip PE to go to tutoring.”
“It’s okay; I wasn’t particularly good at dodgeball,” Matt says with a chuckle.
“I’m sure you could’ve been good at any sport if they just figured out how to accommodate you.”
Matt shrugs.
“So, when do we get to the handwriting part?”
“How about next week? I have to find my old slate and stylus.”
“Slate and stylus? What are you, a caveman?”
Matt glares at him with the most disparaging look on his face.
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” Foggy assures. “Please don’t fire me.”
“Fire you? If anything, you’re gonna be the one firing me when I show you how a slate works.”
~0~0~0~
Lesson Number C:
Foggy expects a slate to look something like the rock. Instead, Matt hands him a plastic rectangle with a bunch of tiny slots spaced evenly across the surface. Upon closer examination, the slots aren’t perfectly rectangular. They have indents on the sides that partially separate the shape into three rows. Foggy plays with it for a minute and realizes it opens up like a book, revealing a back piece with sets of six indents that line up perfectly with the slots on the front piece. The stylus is only a few inches long and looks like a sewing needle with a pear-shaped handle.
“I actually don’t have any braille paper, but regular copy paper should work fine since we don’t need the writing to last very long.”
“Wait, why is there special paper?”
“It needs to be thick enough to hold its shape even when you run your fingers over it. On regular paper, you can accidentally erase things.”
“Ohhhh.”
Foggy watches as Matt opens the slate, places the piece of paper inside, then closes it again. He picks up the stylus and explains, “Braille only works if the letters are the same distance apart every time, so the slate takes care of that for you. It won’t let you make a dot outside of the cells.”
“Wait, this kind of thing would’ve been so helpful,” Foggy says. He used to struggle with spacing his letters and keeping them in the correct line on the paper. His tutor ended up buying special paper with three dimensional lines to help him stop drifting up and down the page.
Matt holds the stylus toward the top right slot. “Now, here’s the downside. Since you’re writing on the back of the paper, you have to write everything from right to left and every cell is the mirror image of the one you’re actually trying to write.”
Foggy’s brain nearly explodes just thinking about it. “That sounds impossible.”
“It does take some getting used to,” Matt admits. He starts writing something, the stylus tapping against the slate with a sound like a knife on a cutting board. When he finishes, he opens the slate and slides the paper toward Foggy.
It takes him a minute with his rudimentary braille literacy, but he can tell it says, “Matthew Murdock.”
“Now you try,” Matt prompts.
Foggy accepts the slate and stylus with shaking hands. He clips the paper inside and focuses on the rightmost cell in the line below Matt’s name. “You said mirror image?”
“Yeah. So if you want it to be an E, you actually write an I from your perspective.”
“Just when I finally got E and I straight, you want me to switch them?”
Matt nods. “Unfortunately.”
Foggy pictures the letter F in his head. He holds out his left thumb and pointer finger the way Matt showed him to remember which way it’s supposed to face, then flips his hand around and punches those dots into the slate. While writing with a pencil requires many different strokes, the stylus merely requires him to make the same motion over and over again. He stabs downwards, the ridged edges of the slate making sure he lands in the right spot, moves his hand to the next cell, and stabs downwards again. It takes him ten to twenty seconds per letter, but eventually he writes out “Foggy Nelson.”
“I think I did it,” he says, sliding the paper over to Matt.
Matt runs his finger over Foggy’s work with one quick swipe. His mouth goes tight, like he’s trying hard not to smile.
“How’d I do?” Foggy asks.
“You got the Gs right.”
Foggy waits for further evaluation. When Matt doesn’t offer any, he asks, “...and?”
Matt has never once made eye contact with him—for obvious reasons—but he usually at least tries. Right now, however, his face is pointed somewhere between Foggy’s left elbow and the corner of the table.
“Matttttt, what did I write?”
“Howggand theeowz,” Matt informs him. “With a random curly bracket in the middle of that second part.”
“How-gand thee-oh-zee?” Foggy attempts to repeat the gibberish Matt just spouted. “I didn’t even write that many letters!”
“You accidentally used a bunch of contractions that I never taught you,” Matt explains. “I think you forgot to flip some letters. And some you flipped upside down rather than mirror image.”
“And where did the bracket come from?”
Matt slides the paper across the table and taps a spot between two cells. “These two together make a closing curvy bracket. I think you were going for an L and an S.”
Foggy looks at the cells in question. “Yeah, that’s what I was going for.” He slides the paper back towards Matt. “Welp. I guess that answers my question. Braille is even worse for dysgraphia than printing.”
“The letters might not make sense in the order you put them in, but they’re perfectly legible.”
“Damn.” Not once in his whole life has Foggy heard the phrase “perfectly legible” used in reference to him. “I’m gonna need you to repeat that in front of every teacher who ever doubted me.”
“I will gladly do that, as soon as you admit that I was right.” Matt leans back in his chair and crosses his arms.
“Right about what?”
“It’s literally impossible to have bad handwriting in braille.”
Foggy rolls his eyes. He knows Matt can’t see it, so he adds a put-upon sigh just to make sure he gets the message across. “Fine, you were right.”