“It will be the… the link between this”—I point to the blocks above—“and this.” I point to the blocks below.
“And what are they?” he asks.
Does he really not know? Or is this what the books call instructional discourse, as when teachers ask questions whose answers they know to find out if the students know? If he really doesn’t know, then whatever I say will make no sense. If he really does know, he will be angry when he finds out I think he does not.
It would be simpler if people said what they meant.
“This is the layer-three system for synthesis,” I say. That is a right answer, though it is a short one.
“Oh, I see,” he says. His voice smirks. Does he think I am lying? I can see a blurry, distorted reflection of his face in the shiny ball on my desk. It is hard to tell what its expression is.
“The layer-three system will be embedded into the production codes,” I say, trying very hard to stay calm. “This ensures that the end user will be able to define the production parameters but cannot change them to something harmful.”
“And you understand this?” he says.
Which this is this? I understand what I am doing. I do not always understand why it is to be done. I opt for the easy short answer.
Yes, I say.
“Good,” he says. It sounds as false as it did in the morning. “You started late today,” he says.
“I’m staying late tonight,” I say. “I was one hour and forty-seven minutes late. I worked through lunch; that is thirty minutes. I will stay one hour and seventeen minutes late.”
“You’re honest,” he says, clearly surprised.
“Yes,” I say. I do not turn to look at him. I do not want to see his face. After seven seconds, he turns to leave. From the door he has a last word.
“Things cannot go on like this, Lou. Change happens.”
Nine words. Nine words that make me shiver after the door is closed.
I turn on the fan, and my office fills with twinkling, whirling reflections. I work on, one hour and seventeen minutes. Tonight I am not tempted to work any longer than that. It is Wednesday night, and I have things to do.
Outside it is mild, a little humid. I am very careful driving back to my place, where I change into T-shirt and shorts and eat a slice of cold pizza.
Among the things I never tell Dr. Fornum about is my sex life. She doesn’t think I have a sex life because when she asks if I have a sex partner, a girlfriend or boyfriend, I just say no. She doesn’t ask more than that. That is fine with me, because I do not want to talk about it with her. She is not attractive to me, and my parents said the only reason to talk about sex was to find out how to please your partner and be pleased by your partner. Or if something went wrong, you would talk to a doctor.
Nothing has ever gone wrong with me. Some things were wrong from the beginning, but that’s different. I think about Marjory while I finish my pizza. Marjory is not my sex partner, but I wish she were my girlfriend. I met Marjory at fencing class, not at any of the social events for disabled people that Dr. Fornum thinks I should go to. I don’t tell Dr. Fornum about fencing because she would worry about violent tendencies. If laser tag was enough to bother her, long pointed swords would send her into a panic. I don’t tell Dr. Fornum about Marjory because she would ask questions I don’t want to answer. So that makes two big secrets, swords and Marjory.
When I’ve eaten, I drive over to my fencing class, at Tom and Lucia’s. Marjory will be there. I want to close my eyes, thinking of Marjory, but I am driving and it is not safe. I think of music instead, of the chorale of Bach’s Cantata No.39.
Tom and Lucia have a large house with a big fenced backyard. They have no children, even though they are older than I am. At first I thought this was because Lucia liked working with clients so much that she did not want to stay home with children, but I heard her tell someone else that she and Tom could not have children. They have many friends, and eight or nine usually show up for fencing practice. I don’t know if Lucia has told anyone at the hospital that she fences or that she sometimes invites clients to come learn fencing. I think the hospital would not approve. I am not the only person under psychiatric supervision who comes to Tom and Lucia’s to learn to fight with swords. I asked her once, and she just laughed and said, “What they don’t know won’t scare them.”
I have been fencing here for five years. I helped Tom put down the new surface on the fencing area, stuff that’s usually used for tennis courts. I helped Tom build the rack in the back room where we store our blades. I do not want to have my blades in my car or in my apartment, because I know that it would scare some people. Tom warned me about it. It is important not to scare people. So I leave all my fencing gear at Tom and Lucia’s, and everyone knows that the left-hand-but-two slot is mine and so is the left-hand-but-two peg on the other wall and my mask has its own pigeonhole in the mask storage.
First I do my stretches. I am careful to do all the stretches; Lucia says I am an example to the others. Don, for instance, rarely does all his stretches, and he is always putting his back out or pulling a muscle. Then he sits on the side and complains. I am not as good as he is, but I do not get hurt because I neglect the rules. I wish he would follow the rules because I am sad when a friend gets hurt.
When I have stretched my arms, my shoulders, my back, my legs, my feet, I go to the back room and put on my leather jacket with the sleeves cut off at the elbow and my steel gorget. The weight of the gorget around my neck feels good. I take down my mask, with my gloves folded inside, and put the gloves in my pocket for now. My épée and rapier are in the rack; I tuck the mask under one arm and take them out carefully.
Don comes in, rushed and sweating as usual, his face red. “Hi, Lou,” he says. I say hi and step back so he can get his blade from the rack. He is normal and could carry his épée in his car if he wanted without scaring people, but he forgets things. He was always having to borrow someone else’s, and finally Tom told him to leave his own here.
I go outside. Marjory isn’t here yet. Cindy and Lucia are lining up with epees; Max is putting on his steel helmet. I don’t think I would like the steel helmet; it would be too loud when someone hit it. Max laughed when I told him that and said I could always wear earplugs, but I hate earplugs. They make me feel as if I have a bad cold. It’s strange, because I actually like wearing a blindfold. I used to wear one a lot when I was younger, pretending I was blind. I could understand voices a little better that way. But feeling my ears stuffed up doesn’t help me see better.
Don swaggers out, épée tucked under his arm, buttoning his fancy leather doublet. Sometimes I wish I had one like that, but I think I do better with plain things.
“Did you stretch?” Lucia asks him.
He shrugs. “Enough.”
She shrugs back. “Your pain,” she says. She and Cindy start fencing. I like to watch them and try to figure out what they’re doing. It’s all so fast I have trouble following it, but so do normal people.
“Hi, Lou,” Marjory says, from behind me, I feel warm and light, as if there were less gravity. For a moment I squeeze my eyes shut. She is beautiful, but it is hard to look at her.
“Hi, Marjory,” I say, and turn around. She is smiling at me. Her face is shiny. That used to bother me, when people were very happy and their faces got shiny, because angry people also get shiny faces and I could not be sure which it was. My parents tried to show me the difference, with the position of eyebrows and so on, but I finally figured out that the best way to tell was the outside corners of the eyes. Marjory’s shiny face is a happy face. She is happy to see me, and I am happy to see her.
I worry about a lot of things, though, when I think about Marjory. Is autism contagious? Can she catch it from me? She won’t like it if she does. I know it’s not supposed to be catching, but they say if you hang around with a group of people, you’ll start thinking like them. If she hangs around me, will she think like me? I don’t want that to happen to her. If she were born like me it would be fine, but someone like her shouldn’t become like me. I don’t think it will happen, but I would feel guilty if it did. Sometimes this makes me want to stay away from her, but mostly I want to be with her more than I am.
“Hi, Marj,” Don says. His face is even shinier now. He thinks she is pretty, too. I know that what I feel is called jealousy; I read it in a book. It is a bad feeling, and it means that I am too controlling. I step back, trying not to be too controlling, and Don steps forward. Marjory is looking at me, not at Don.
“Want to play?” Don says, nudging me with his elbow. He means do I want to fence with him. I did not understand that at first. Now I do. I nod, silently, and we go to find a place where we can line up.
Don does a little flick with his wrist, the way he starts every bout, and I counter it automatically. We circle each other, feinting and parrying, and then I see his arm droop from the shoulder. Is this another feint? It’s an opening, at least, and I lunge, catching him on the chest.
“Got me,” he says. “My arm’s really sore.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. He works his shoulder, then suddenly leaps forward and strikes at my foot. He’s done this before; I move back quickly and he doesn’t get me. After I get him three more times, he heaves a great sigh and says he’s tired. That’s fine with me; I would rather talk to Marjory. Max and Tom move out to the space we were using. Lucia has stopped to rest; Cindy is lined up with Susan.
Marjory is sitting beside Lucia now; Lucia is showing her some pictures. One of Lucia’s hobbies is photography. I take off my mask and watch them. Marjory’s face is broader than Lucia’s. Don gets between me and Marjory and starts talking.
“You’re interrupting,” Lucia says.
“Oh, sorry,” Don says, but he still stands there, blocking my view.
“And you’re right in the middle,” Lucia says. “Please get out from between people.” She flicks a glance at me. I am not doing anything wrong or she would tell me. More than anyone I know who isn’t like me, she says very clearly what she wants.
Don glances back, huffs, and shifts sideways. “I didn’t see Lou,” he says.
“I did,” Lucia says. She turns back to Marjory. “Now here, this is where we stayed on the fourth night. I took this from inside—what about that view!”
“Lovely,” Marjory says. I can’t see the picture she’s looking at, but I can see the happiness on her face. I watch her instead of listening to Lucia as she talks about the rest of the pictures. Don interrupts with comments from time to time. When they’ve looked at the pictures, Lucia folds the case of the portable viewer and puts it under her chair.
“Come on, Don,” she says. “Let’s see how you do with me.” She puts her gloves and mask back on and picks up her épée. Don shrugs and follows her out to an open space.
“Have a seat,” Marjory says. I sit down, feeling the slight warmth from Lucia in the chair she just left. “How was your day?” Marjory asks.
“I almost was in a wreck,” I tell her. She doesn’t ask questions; she just lets me talk. It is hard to say it all; now it seems less acceptable that I just drove away, but I was worried about getting to work and about the police.
“That sounds scary,” she says. Her voice is warm, soothing. Not a professional soothing, but just gentle on my ears.
I want to tell her about Mr. Crenshaw, but now Tom comes back and asks me if I want to fight. I like to fight Tom. Tom is almost as tall as I am, and even though he is older, he is very fit. And he’s the best fencer in the group.
“I saw you fight Don,” he says. “You handle his tricks very well. But he’s not improving—in fact, he’s let his training slide—so be sure you fight some of the better fencers each week. Me, Lucia, Cindy, Max. At least two of us, okay?”
At least means “not less than.”
“Okay,” I say. We each have two long blades, épée and rapier. When I first tried to use a second blade, I was always banging one into the other. Then I tried to hold them parallel. That way they didn’t cross each other, but Tom could sweep them both aside. Now I know to hold them at different heights and angles.
We circle, first one way, then the other. I try to remember everything Tom has taught me: how to place my feet, how to hold the blades, which moves counter which moves. He throws a shot; my arm rises to parry it with my left blade; at the same time I throw a shot and he counters. It is like a dance: step-step-thrust-parry-step. Tom talks about the need to vary the pattern, to be unpredictable, but last time I watched him fight someone else, I thought I saw a pattern in his nonpattern. If I can just hold him off long enough, maybe I can find it again.
Suddenly I hear the music of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, the stately dance. It fills my head, and I move into that rhythm, slowing from the faster movements. Tom slows as I slow. Now I can see it, that long pattern he has devised because no one can be utterly random. Moving with it, in my personal music, I’m able to stay with him, blocking every thrust, testing his parries. And then I know what he will do, and without thought my arm swings around and I strike with apunta riversa to the side of his head. I feel the blow in my hand, in my arm.
“Good!” he says. The music stops. “Wow!” he says, shaking his head.
“It was too hard I am sorry,” I say.
“No, no, that’s fine. A good clean shot, right through my guard. I didn’t even come close to a parry on it.” He is grinning through his mask. “I told you you were getting better. Let’s go again.”
I do not want to hurt anyone. When I first started, they could not get me to actually touch anyone with the blade, not hard enough to feel. I still don’t like it. What I like is learning patterns and then remaking them so that I am in the pattern, too.
Light flashes down Tom’s blades as he lifts them both in salute. For a moment I’m struck by the dazzle, by the speed of the light’s dance.
Then I move again, in the darkness beyond the light. How fast is dark? Shadow can be no faster than what casts it, but not all darkness is shadow. Is it? This time I hear no music but see a pattern of light and shadow, shifting, twirling, arcs and helices of light against a background of dark.
I am dancing at the tip of the light, but beyond it, and suddenly feel that jarring pressure on my hand. This time I also feel the hard thump of Tom’s blade on my chest. I say, “Good,” just as he does, and we both step back, acknowledging the double kill.
“Owwww!” I look away from Tom and see Don leaning over with a hand to his back. He hobbles toward the chairs, but Lucia gets there first and sits beside Marjory again. I have a strange feeling: that I noticed and that I cared. Don has stopped, still bent over. There are no spare chairs now, as other fencers have arrived. Don lowers himself to the flagstones finally, grunting and groaning all the way.
“I’m going to have to quit this,” he says. “I’m getting too old.”
“You’re not old,” Lucia says. “You’re lazy.” I do not understand why Lucia is being so mean to Don. He is a friend; it is not nice to call friends names except in teasing. Don doesn’t like to do the stretches and he complains a lot, but that does not make him not a friend.
“Come on, Lou,” Tom says. “You killed me; we killed each other; I want a chance to get you back.” The words could be angry, but the voice is friendly and he is smiling. I lift my blades again.
This time Tom does what he never does and charges. I have no time to remember what he says is the right thing to do if someone charges; I step back and pivot, pushing his off-hand blade aside with mine and trying for a thrust to his head with the rapier. But he is moving too fast; I miss, and his rapier arm swings over his own head and gives me a whack on the top of the head.
“Gotcha!” he says.
“You did that how?” I ask, and then quickly reorder the words. “How did you do that?”
“It’s my secret tournament shot,” Tom said, pushing his mask back. “Someone did it to me twelve years ago, and I came home and practiced until I could do it to a stump… and normally I use it only in competition. But you’re ready to learn it. There’s only one trick.” He was grinning, his face streaked with sweat.
“Hey!” Don yelled across the yard. “I didn’t see that. Do it again, huh?”
“What is the trick?” I ask.
“You have to figure out how to do it for yourself. You’re welcome to my stump, but you’ve just had all the demonstration you’re going to get. I will mention that if you don’t get it exactly right, you’re dead meat to an opponent who doesn’t panic. You saw how easy it was to parry the off-hand weapon.”
“Tom, you haven’t showed me that one—do it again,” Don said.
“You’re not ready,” Tom said. “You have to earn it.” He sounds angry now, just as Lucia did. What has Don done to make them angry? He hasn’t stretched and gets tired really fast, but is that a good reason? I can’t ask now, but I will ask later.
I take my mask off and walk over to stand near Marjory. From above I can see the lights reflecting from her shiny dark hair. If I move back and forth, the lights run up and down her hair, as the light ran up and down Tom’s blades. I wonder what her hair would feel like.
“Have my seat,” Lucia says, standing up. “I’m going to fight again.”
I sit down, very conscious of Marjory beside me. “Are you going to fence tonight?” I ask.
“Not tonight. I have to leave early. My friend Karen’s coming in at the airport, and I promised to pick her up. I just stopped by to see… people.”
I want to tell her I’m glad she did, but the words stick in my mouth. I feel stiff and awkward. “Karen is coming from where?” I finally say.
“Chicago. She was visiting her parents.” Marjory stretches her legs out in front of her. “She was going to leave her car at the airport, but she had a flat the morning she left. That’s why I have to pick her up.” She turns to look at me; I glance down, unable to bear the heat of her gaze. “Are you going to stay long tonight?”
“Not that long,” I say. If Marjory is leaving and Don is staying, I will go home.
“Want to ride out to the airport with me? I could bring you back by here to pick up your car. Of course, it’ll make you late getting home; her plane won’t be in until ten-fifteen.”
Ride with Marjory? I am so surprised/happy that I can’t move for a long moment. “Yes,” I say. “Yes.” I can feel my face getting hot.
On the way to the airport, I look out the window. I feel light, as if I could float up into the air. “Being happy makes it feel like less than normal gravity,” I say.
I feel Marjory’s glance. “Light as a feather,” she says. “Is that what you mean?”
“Maybe not a feather. I feel more like a balloon,” I say.
“I know that feeling,” Marjory says. She doesn’t say she feels like that now. I don’t know how she feels. Normal people would know how she feels, but I can’t tell. The more I know her, the more things I don’t know about her. I don’t know why Tom and Lucia were being mean to Don, either.
“Tom and Lucia both sounded angry with Don,” I say. She gives me a quick sideways glance. I think I am supposed to understand it, but I don’t know what it means. It makes me want to look away; I feel funny inside.
“Don can be a real heel,” she says.
Don is not a heel; he is a person. Normal people say things like this, changing the meaning of words without warning, and they understand it. I know, because someone told me years ago, that heel is a slang word for “bad person.” But he couldn’t tell me why, and I still wonder about it. If someone is a bad person and you want to say that he is a bad person, why not just say it? Why say “heel” or “jerk” or something? And adding “real” to it only makes it worse. If you say something is real, it should be real.
But I want to know why Tom and Lucia are angry with Don more than I want to explain to Marjory about why it’s wrong to say Don is a real heel. “Is it because he doesn’t do enough stretches?”
“No.” Marjory sounds a little angry now, and I feel my stomach tightening. What have I done? “He’s just… just mean, sometimes, Lou. He makes jokes about people that aren’t funny.”
I wonder if it is the jokes or the people that aren’t funny. I know about jokes that most people don’t think are funny, because I have made some. I still don’t understand why some jokes are funny and why mine aren’t, but I know it is true.
“He made jokes about you,” Marjory says, a block later, in a low voice. “And we didn’t like it.”
I don’t know what to say. Don makes jokes about everybody, even Marjory. I didn’t like those jokes, but I didn’t do anything about it. Should I have? Marjory glances at me again. This time I think she wants me to say something. I can’t think of anything. Finally I do.
“My parents said acting mad at people didn’t make them act better.”
Marjory makes a funny noise. I don’t know what it means. “Lou, sometimes I think you’re a philosopher.”
“No,” I say. “I’m not smart enough to be a philosopher.”
Marjory makes the noise again. I look out the window; we are almost to the airport. The airport at night has different-colored lights laid out along the runways and taxiways. Amber, blue, green, red. I wish they had purple ones. Marjory parks in the short-term section of the parking garage, and we walk across the bus lanes into the terminal.
When I’m traveling alone, I like to watch the automatic doors open and close. Tonight, I walk on beside Marjory, pretending I don’t care about the doors. She stops to look at the video display of departures and arrivals. I have already spotted the flight it must be: the right airline, from Chicago, landing at 10:15 P.M., on time, Gate Seventeen. It takes her longer; it always takes normal people longer.
At the security gate for “Arrivals,” I feel my stomach tightening again. I know how to do this; my parents taught me, and I have done it before. Take everything metallic out of your pockets and put it in the little basket. Wait your turn. Walk through the arch. If nobody asks me any questions, it’s easy. But if they ask, I don’t always hear them exactly: it’s too noisy, with too many echoes off the hard surfaces. I can feel myself tensing up.
Marjory goes first: her purse onto the conveyor belt, her keys in the little basket. I see her walk through; no one asks her anything. I put my keys, my wallet, my change into the little basket and walk through. No buzz, no bleep. The man in uniform stares at me as I pick up my keys, my wallet, my change and put them back in my pockets. I turn away, toward Marjory waiting a few yards away. Then he speaks.
“May I see your ticket, please? And some ID?”
I feel cold all over. He hasn’t asked anyone else—not the man with the long braided hair who pushed past me to get his briefcase off the conveyor belt, not Marjory—and I haven’t done anything wrong. You don’t have to have a ticket to go through security for arrivals; you just have to know the flight number you’re meeting. People who are meeting people don’t have tickets because they aren’t traveling. Security for departures requires a ticket.
“I don’t have a ticket,” I say. Beyond him, I can see Marjory shift her weight, but she doesn’t come closer. I don’t think she can hear what he is saying, and I don’t want to yell in a public place.
“ID?” he says. His face is focused on me and starting to get shiny. I pull out my wallet and open it to my ID. He looks at it, then back at me. “If you don’t have a ticket, what are you doing here?” he asks.
I can feel my heart racing, sweat springing out on my neck. “I’m… I’m… I’m…
“Spit it out,” he says, frowning. “Or do you stutter like that all the time?”
I nod. I know I can’t say anything now, not for a few minutes. I reach into my shirt pocket and take out the little card I keep there. I offer it to him; he glances at it.
“Autistic, huh? But you were talking; you answered me a second ago. Who are you meeting?”
Marjory moves, coming up behind him. “Anything wrong, Lou?”
“Stand back, lady,” the man says. He doesn’t look at her.
“He’s my friend,” Marjory says. “We’re meeting a friend of mine on Flight Three-eighty-two, Gate Seventeen. I didn’t hear the buzzer go off…” There is an edge of anger to her tone.
Now the man turns his head just enough to see her. He relaxes a little. “He’s with you?”
“Yes. Was there a problem?”
“No, ma’am. He just looked a little odd. I guess this”—he still has my card in his hand—“explains it. As long as you’re with him…”
“I’m not his keeper,” Marjory says, in the same tone that she used when she said Don was a real heel. “Lou is my friend.”
The man’s eyebrows go up, then down. He hands me back my card and turns away. I walk away, beside Marjory, who is headed off in a fast walk that must be stretching her legs. We say nothing until after we arrive at the secured waiting area for Gates Fifteen through Thirty. On the other side of the glass wall, people with tickets, on the departures side, sit in rows; the seatframes are shiny metal and the seats are dark blue. We don’t have seats in arrivals because we are not supposed to come more than ten minutes before the flight’s scheduled arrival.
This is not the way it used to be. I don’t remember that, of course—I was born at the turn of the century—but my parents told me about being able to just walk right up to the gates to meet people arriving. Then after the 2001 disasters, only departing passengers could go to the gates. That was so awkward for people who needed help, and so many people asked for special passes, that the government designed these arrival lounges instead, with separate security lines. By the time my parents took me on an airplane for the first time, when I was nine, all large airports had separated arriving and departing passengers.
I look out the big windows. Lights everywhere. Red and green lights on the tips of the airplanes’ wings. Rows of dim square lights along the planes, showing where the windows are. Headlights on the little vehicles that pull baggage carts. Steady lights and blinking lights.
“Can you talk now?” Marjory asks while I’m still looking out at the lights.
“Yes.” I can feel her warmth; she is standing very close beside me. I close my eyes a moment. “I just… I can get confused.” I point to an airplane coming toward a gate. “Is that the one?”
“I think so.” She moves around me and turns to face me. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. It just… happens that way sometimes.” I am embarrassed that it happened tonight, the first time I have ever been alone with Marjory. I remember in high school wanting to talk to girls who didn’t want to talk to me. Will she go away, too? I could get a taxi back to Tom and Lucia’s, but I don’t have a lot of money with me.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Marjory says, and then the door opens and people start coming off the plane. She is watching for Karen, and I am watching her. Karen turns out to be an older woman, gray-haired. Soon we are all back outside and then on the way to Karen’s apartment. I sit quietly in the backseat, listening to Marjory and Karen talk. Their voices flow and ripple like swift water over rocks. I can’t quite follow what they’re talking about. They go too fast for me, and I don’t know the people or places they speak of. It’s all right, though, because I can watch Marjory without having to talk at the same time.
When we get back to Tom and Lucia’s, where my car is, Don has gone and the last of the fencing group are packing things in their car. I remember that I did not put my blades and mask away and go outside to collect them, but Tom has picked them up, he says. He wasn’t sure what time we would get back; he didn’t want to leave them out in the dark.
I say good-bye to Tom and Lucia and Marjory and drive home in the swift dark.
Chapter Three
“And what are they?” he asks.
Does he really not know? Or is this what the books call instructional discourse, as when teachers ask questions whose answers they know to find out if the students know? If he really doesn’t know, then whatever I say will make no sense. If he really does know, he will be angry when he finds out I think he does not.
It would be simpler if people said what they meant.
“This is the layer-three system for synthesis,” I say. That is a right answer, though it is a short one.
“Oh, I see,” he says. His voice smirks. Does he think I am lying? I can see a blurry, distorted reflection of his face in the shiny ball on my desk. It is hard to tell what its expression is.
“The layer-three system will be embedded into the production codes,” I say, trying very hard to stay calm. “This ensures that the end user will be able to define the production parameters but cannot change them to something harmful.”
“And you understand this?” he says.
Which this is this? I understand what I am doing. I do not always understand why it is to be done. I opt for the easy short answer.
Yes, I say.
“Good,” he says. It sounds as false as it did in the morning. “You started late today,” he says.
“I’m staying late tonight,” I say. “I was one hour and forty-seven minutes late. I worked through lunch; that is thirty minutes. I will stay one hour and seventeen minutes late.”
“You’re honest,” he says, clearly surprised.
“Yes,” I say. I do not turn to look at him. I do not want to see his face. After seven seconds, he turns to leave. From the door he has a last word.
“Things cannot go on like this, Lou. Change happens.”
Nine words. Nine words that make me shiver after the door is closed.
I turn on the fan, and my office fills with twinkling, whirling reflections. I work on, one hour and seventeen minutes. Tonight I am not tempted to work any longer than that. It is Wednesday night, and I have things to do.
Outside it is mild, a little humid. I am very careful driving back to my place, where I change into T-shirt and shorts and eat a slice of cold pizza.
Among the things I never tell Dr. Fornum about is my sex life. She doesn’t think I have a sex life because when she asks if I have a sex partner, a girlfriend or boyfriend, I just say no. She doesn’t ask more than that. That is fine with me, because I do not want to talk about it with her. She is not attractive to me, and my parents said the only reason to talk about sex was to find out how to please your partner and be pleased by your partner. Or if something went wrong, you would talk to a doctor.
Nothing has ever gone wrong with me. Some things were wrong from the beginning, but that’s different. I think about Marjory while I finish my pizza. Marjory is not my sex partner, but I wish she were my girlfriend. I met Marjory at fencing class, not at any of the social events for disabled people that Dr. Fornum thinks I should go to. I don’t tell Dr. Fornum about fencing because she would worry about violent tendencies. If laser tag was enough to bother her, long pointed swords would send her into a panic. I don’t tell Dr. Fornum about Marjory because she would ask questions I don’t want to answer. So that makes two big secrets, swords and Marjory.
When I’ve eaten, I drive over to my fencing class, at Tom and Lucia’s. Marjory will be there. I want to close my eyes, thinking of Marjory, but I am driving and it is not safe. I think of music instead, of the chorale of Bach’s Cantata No.39.
Tom and Lucia have a large house with a big fenced backyard. They have no children, even though they are older than I am. At first I thought this was because Lucia liked working with clients so much that she did not want to stay home with children, but I heard her tell someone else that she and Tom could not have children. They have many friends, and eight or nine usually show up for fencing practice. I don’t know if Lucia has told anyone at the hospital that she fences or that she sometimes invites clients to come learn fencing. I think the hospital would not approve. I am not the only person under psychiatric supervision who comes to Tom and Lucia’s to learn to fight with swords. I asked her once, and she just laughed and said, “What they don’t know won’t scare them.”
I have been fencing here for five years. I helped Tom put down the new surface on the fencing area, stuff that’s usually used for tennis courts. I helped Tom build the rack in the back room where we store our blades. I do not want to have my blades in my car or in my apartment, because I know that it would scare some people. Tom warned me about it. It is important not to scare people. So I leave all my fencing gear at Tom and Lucia’s, and everyone knows that the left-hand-but-two slot is mine and so is the left-hand-but-two peg on the other wall and my mask has its own pigeonhole in the mask storage.
First I do my stretches. I am careful to do all the stretches; Lucia says I am an example to the others. Don, for instance, rarely does all his stretches, and he is always putting his back out or pulling a muscle. Then he sits on the side and complains. I am not as good as he is, but I do not get hurt because I neglect the rules. I wish he would follow the rules because I am sad when a friend gets hurt.
When I have stretched my arms, my shoulders, my back, my legs, my feet, I go to the back room and put on my leather jacket with the sleeves cut off at the elbow and my steel gorget. The weight of the gorget around my neck feels good. I take down my mask, with my gloves folded inside, and put the gloves in my pocket for now. My épée and rapier are in the rack; I tuck the mask under one arm and take them out carefully.
Don comes in, rushed and sweating as usual, his face red. “Hi, Lou,” he says. I say hi and step back so he can get his blade from the rack. He is normal and could carry his épée in his car if he wanted without scaring people, but he forgets things. He was always having to borrow someone else’s, and finally Tom told him to leave his own here.
I go outside. Marjory isn’t here yet. Cindy and Lucia are lining up with epees; Max is putting on his steel helmet. I don’t think I would like the steel helmet; it would be too loud when someone hit it. Max laughed when I told him that and said I could always wear earplugs, but I hate earplugs. They make me feel as if I have a bad cold. It’s strange, because I actually like wearing a blindfold. I used to wear one a lot when I was younger, pretending I was blind. I could understand voices a little better that way. But feeling my ears stuffed up doesn’t help me see better.
Don swaggers out, épée tucked under his arm, buttoning his fancy leather doublet. Sometimes I wish I had one like that, but I think I do better with plain things.
“Did you stretch?” Lucia asks him.
He shrugs. “Enough.”
She shrugs back. “Your pain,” she says. She and Cindy start fencing. I like to watch them and try to figure out what they’re doing. It’s all so fast I have trouble following it, but so do normal people.
“Hi, Lou,” Marjory says, from behind me, I feel warm and light, as if there were less gravity. For a moment I squeeze my eyes shut. She is beautiful, but it is hard to look at her.
“Hi, Marjory,” I say, and turn around. She is smiling at me. Her face is shiny. That used to bother me, when people were very happy and their faces got shiny, because angry people also get shiny faces and I could not be sure which it was. My parents tried to show me the difference, with the position of eyebrows and so on, but I finally figured out that the best way to tell was the outside corners of the eyes. Marjory’s shiny face is a happy face. She is happy to see me, and I am happy to see her.
I worry about a lot of things, though, when I think about Marjory. Is autism contagious? Can she catch it from me? She won’t like it if she does. I know it’s not supposed to be catching, but they say if you hang around with a group of people, you’ll start thinking like them. If she hangs around me, will she think like me? I don’t want that to happen to her. If she were born like me it would be fine, but someone like her shouldn’t become like me. I don’t think it will happen, but I would feel guilty if it did. Sometimes this makes me want to stay away from her, but mostly I want to be with her more than I am.
“Hi, Marj,” Don says. His face is even shinier now. He thinks she is pretty, too. I know that what I feel is called jealousy; I read it in a book. It is a bad feeling, and it means that I am too controlling. I step back, trying not to be too controlling, and Don steps forward. Marjory is looking at me, not at Don.
“Want to play?” Don says, nudging me with his elbow. He means do I want to fence with him. I did not understand that at first. Now I do. I nod, silently, and we go to find a place where we can line up.
Don does a little flick with his wrist, the way he starts every bout, and I counter it automatically. We circle each other, feinting and parrying, and then I see his arm droop from the shoulder. Is this another feint? It’s an opening, at least, and I lunge, catching him on the chest.
“Got me,” he says. “My arm’s really sore.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. He works his shoulder, then suddenly leaps forward and strikes at my foot. He’s done this before; I move back quickly and he doesn’t get me. After I get him three more times, he heaves a great sigh and says he’s tired. That’s fine with me; I would rather talk to Marjory. Max and Tom move out to the space we were using. Lucia has stopped to rest; Cindy is lined up with Susan.
Marjory is sitting beside Lucia now; Lucia is showing her some pictures. One of Lucia’s hobbies is photography. I take off my mask and watch them. Marjory’s face is broader than Lucia’s. Don gets between me and Marjory and starts talking.
“You’re interrupting,” Lucia says.
“Oh, sorry,” Don says, but he still stands there, blocking my view.
“And you’re right in the middle,” Lucia says. “Please get out from between people.” She flicks a glance at me. I am not doing anything wrong or she would tell me. More than anyone I know who isn’t like me, she says very clearly what she wants.
Don glances back, huffs, and shifts sideways. “I didn’t see Lou,” he says.
“I did,” Lucia says. She turns back to Marjory. “Now here, this is where we stayed on the fourth night. I took this from inside—what about that view!”
“Lovely,” Marjory says. I can’t see the picture she’s looking at, but I can see the happiness on her face. I watch her instead of listening to Lucia as she talks about the rest of the pictures. Don interrupts with comments from time to time. When they’ve looked at the pictures, Lucia folds the case of the portable viewer and puts it under her chair.
“Come on, Don,” she says. “Let’s see how you do with me.” She puts her gloves and mask back on and picks up her épée. Don shrugs and follows her out to an open space.
“Have a seat,” Marjory says. I sit down, feeling the slight warmth from Lucia in the chair she just left. “How was your day?” Marjory asks.
“I almost was in a wreck,” I tell her. She doesn’t ask questions; she just lets me talk. It is hard to say it all; now it seems less acceptable that I just drove away, but I was worried about getting to work and about the police.
“That sounds scary,” she says. Her voice is warm, soothing. Not a professional soothing, but just gentle on my ears.
I want to tell her about Mr. Crenshaw, but now Tom comes back and asks me if I want to fight. I like to fight Tom. Tom is almost as tall as I am, and even though he is older, he is very fit. And he’s the best fencer in the group.
“I saw you fight Don,” he says. “You handle his tricks very well. But he’s not improving—in fact, he’s let his training slide—so be sure you fight some of the better fencers each week. Me, Lucia, Cindy, Max. At least two of us, okay?”
At least means “not less than.”
“Okay,” I say. We each have two long blades, épée and rapier. When I first tried to use a second blade, I was always banging one into the other. Then I tried to hold them parallel. That way they didn’t cross each other, but Tom could sweep them both aside. Now I know to hold them at different heights and angles.
We circle, first one way, then the other. I try to remember everything Tom has taught me: how to place my feet, how to hold the blades, which moves counter which moves. He throws a shot; my arm rises to parry it with my left blade; at the same time I throw a shot and he counters. It is like a dance: step-step-thrust-parry-step. Tom talks about the need to vary the pattern, to be unpredictable, but last time I watched him fight someone else, I thought I saw a pattern in his nonpattern. If I can just hold him off long enough, maybe I can find it again.
Suddenly I hear the music of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, the stately dance. It fills my head, and I move into that rhythm, slowing from the faster movements. Tom slows as I slow. Now I can see it, that long pattern he has devised because no one can be utterly random. Moving with it, in my personal music, I’m able to stay with him, blocking every thrust, testing his parries. And then I know what he will do, and without thought my arm swings around and I strike with apunta riversa to the side of his head. I feel the blow in my hand, in my arm.
“Good!” he says. The music stops. “Wow!” he says, shaking his head.
“It was too hard I am sorry,” I say.
“No, no, that’s fine. A good clean shot, right through my guard. I didn’t even come close to a parry on it.” He is grinning through his mask. “I told you you were getting better. Let’s go again.”
I do not want to hurt anyone. When I first started, they could not get me to actually touch anyone with the blade, not hard enough to feel. I still don’t like it. What I like is learning patterns and then remaking them so that I am in the pattern, too.
Light flashes down Tom’s blades as he lifts them both in salute. For a moment I’m struck by the dazzle, by the speed of the light’s dance.
Then I move again, in the darkness beyond the light. How fast is dark? Shadow can be no faster than what casts it, but not all darkness is shadow. Is it? This time I hear no music but see a pattern of light and shadow, shifting, twirling, arcs and helices of light against a background of dark.
I am dancing at the tip of the light, but beyond it, and suddenly feel that jarring pressure on my hand. This time I also feel the hard thump of Tom’s blade on my chest. I say, “Good,” just as he does, and we both step back, acknowledging the double kill.
“Owwww!” I look away from Tom and see Don leaning over with a hand to his back. He hobbles toward the chairs, but Lucia gets there first and sits beside Marjory again. I have a strange feeling: that I noticed and that I cared. Don has stopped, still bent over. There are no spare chairs now, as other fencers have arrived. Don lowers himself to the flagstones finally, grunting and groaning all the way.
“I’m going to have to quit this,” he says. “I’m getting too old.”
“You’re not old,” Lucia says. “You’re lazy.” I do not understand why Lucia is being so mean to Don. He is a friend; it is not nice to call friends names except in teasing. Don doesn’t like to do the stretches and he complains a lot, but that does not make him not a friend.
“Come on, Lou,” Tom says. “You killed me; we killed each other; I want a chance to get you back.” The words could be angry, but the voice is friendly and he is smiling. I lift my blades again.
This time Tom does what he never does and charges. I have no time to remember what he says is the right thing to do if someone charges; I step back and pivot, pushing his off-hand blade aside with mine and trying for a thrust to his head with the rapier. But he is moving too fast; I miss, and his rapier arm swings over his own head and gives me a whack on the top of the head.
“Gotcha!” he says.
“You did that how?” I ask, and then quickly reorder the words. “How did you do that?”
“It’s my secret tournament shot,” Tom said, pushing his mask back. “Someone did it to me twelve years ago, and I came home and practiced until I could do it to a stump… and normally I use it only in competition. But you’re ready to learn it. There’s only one trick.” He was grinning, his face streaked with sweat.
“Hey!” Don yelled across the yard. “I didn’t see that. Do it again, huh?”
“What is the trick?” I ask.
“You have to figure out how to do it for yourself. You’re welcome to my stump, but you’ve just had all the demonstration you’re going to get. I will mention that if you don’t get it exactly right, you’re dead meat to an opponent who doesn’t panic. You saw how easy it was to parry the off-hand weapon.”
“Tom, you haven’t showed me that one—do it again,” Don said.
“You’re not ready,” Tom said. “You have to earn it.” He sounds angry now, just as Lucia did. What has Don done to make them angry? He hasn’t stretched and gets tired really fast, but is that a good reason? I can’t ask now, but I will ask later.
I take my mask off and walk over to stand near Marjory. From above I can see the lights reflecting from her shiny dark hair. If I move back and forth, the lights run up and down her hair, as the light ran up and down Tom’s blades. I wonder what her hair would feel like.
“Have my seat,” Lucia says, standing up. “I’m going to fight again.”
I sit down, very conscious of Marjory beside me. “Are you going to fence tonight?” I ask.
“Not tonight. I have to leave early. My friend Karen’s coming in at the airport, and I promised to pick her up. I just stopped by to see… people.”
I want to tell her I’m glad she did, but the words stick in my mouth. I feel stiff and awkward. “Karen is coming from where?” I finally say.
“Chicago. She was visiting her parents.” Marjory stretches her legs out in front of her. “She was going to leave her car at the airport, but she had a flat the morning she left. That’s why I have to pick her up.” She turns to look at me; I glance down, unable to bear the heat of her gaze. “Are you going to stay long tonight?”
“Not that long,” I say. If Marjory is leaving and Don is staying, I will go home.
“Want to ride out to the airport with me? I could bring you back by here to pick up your car. Of course, it’ll make you late getting home; her plane won’t be in until ten-fifteen.”
Ride with Marjory? I am so surprised/happy that I can’t move for a long moment. “Yes,” I say. “Yes.” I can feel my face getting hot.
On the way to the airport, I look out the window. I feel light, as if I could float up into the air. “Being happy makes it feel like less than normal gravity,” I say.
I feel Marjory’s glance. “Light as a feather,” she says. “Is that what you mean?”
“Maybe not a feather. I feel more like a balloon,” I say.
“I know that feeling,” Marjory says. She doesn’t say she feels like that now. I don’t know how she feels. Normal people would know how she feels, but I can’t tell. The more I know her, the more things I don’t know about her. I don’t know why Tom and Lucia were being mean to Don, either.
“Tom and Lucia both sounded angry with Don,” I say. She gives me a quick sideways glance. I think I am supposed to understand it, but I don’t know what it means. It makes me want to look away; I feel funny inside.
“Don can be a real heel,” she says.
Don is not a heel; he is a person. Normal people say things like this, changing the meaning of words without warning, and they understand it. I know, because someone told me years ago, that heel is a slang word for “bad person.” But he couldn’t tell me why, and I still wonder about it. If someone is a bad person and you want to say that he is a bad person, why not just say it? Why say “heel” or “jerk” or something? And adding “real” to it only makes it worse. If you say something is real, it should be real.
But I want to know why Tom and Lucia are angry with Don more than I want to explain to Marjory about why it’s wrong to say Don is a real heel. “Is it because he doesn’t do enough stretches?”
“No.” Marjory sounds a little angry now, and I feel my stomach tightening. What have I done? “He’s just… just mean, sometimes, Lou. He makes jokes about people that aren’t funny.”
I wonder if it is the jokes or the people that aren’t funny. I know about jokes that most people don’t think are funny, because I have made some. I still don’t understand why some jokes are funny and why mine aren’t, but I know it is true.
“He made jokes about you,” Marjory says, a block later, in a low voice. “And we didn’t like it.”
I don’t know what to say. Don makes jokes about everybody, even Marjory. I didn’t like those jokes, but I didn’t do anything about it. Should I have? Marjory glances at me again. This time I think she wants me to say something. I can’t think of anything. Finally I do.
“My parents said acting mad at people didn’t make them act better.”
Marjory makes a funny noise. I don’t know what it means. “Lou, sometimes I think you’re a philosopher.”
“No,” I say. “I’m not smart enough to be a philosopher.”
Marjory makes the noise again. I look out the window; we are almost to the airport. The airport at night has different-colored lights laid out along the runways and taxiways. Amber, blue, green, red. I wish they had purple ones. Marjory parks in the short-term section of the parking garage, and we walk across the bus lanes into the terminal.
When I’m traveling alone, I like to watch the automatic doors open and close. Tonight, I walk on beside Marjory, pretending I don’t care about the doors. She stops to look at the video display of departures and arrivals. I have already spotted the flight it must be: the right airline, from Chicago, landing at 10:15 P.M., on time, Gate Seventeen. It takes her longer; it always takes normal people longer.
At the security gate for “Arrivals,” I feel my stomach tightening again. I know how to do this; my parents taught me, and I have done it before. Take everything metallic out of your pockets and put it in the little basket. Wait your turn. Walk through the arch. If nobody asks me any questions, it’s easy. But if they ask, I don’t always hear them exactly: it’s too noisy, with too many echoes off the hard surfaces. I can feel myself tensing up.
Marjory goes first: her purse onto the conveyor belt, her keys in the little basket. I see her walk through; no one asks her anything. I put my keys, my wallet, my change into the little basket and walk through. No buzz, no bleep. The man in uniform stares at me as I pick up my keys, my wallet, my change and put them back in my pockets. I turn away, toward Marjory waiting a few yards away. Then he speaks.
“May I see your ticket, please? And some ID?”
I feel cold all over. He hasn’t asked anyone else—not the man with the long braided hair who pushed past me to get his briefcase off the conveyor belt, not Marjory—and I haven’t done anything wrong. You don’t have to have a ticket to go through security for arrivals; you just have to know the flight number you’re meeting. People who are meeting people don’t have tickets because they aren’t traveling. Security for departures requires a ticket.
“I don’t have a ticket,” I say. Beyond him, I can see Marjory shift her weight, but she doesn’t come closer. I don’t think she can hear what he is saying, and I don’t want to yell in a public place.
“ID?” he says. His face is focused on me and starting to get shiny. I pull out my wallet and open it to my ID. He looks at it, then back at me. “If you don’t have a ticket, what are you doing here?” he asks.
I can feel my heart racing, sweat springing out on my neck. “I’m… I’m… I’m…
“Spit it out,” he says, frowning. “Or do you stutter like that all the time?”
I nod. I know I can’t say anything now, not for a few minutes. I reach into my shirt pocket and take out the little card I keep there. I offer it to him; he glances at it.
“Autistic, huh? But you were talking; you answered me a second ago. Who are you meeting?”
Marjory moves, coming up behind him. “Anything wrong, Lou?”
“Stand back, lady,” the man says. He doesn’t look at her.
“He’s my friend,” Marjory says. “We’re meeting a friend of mine on Flight Three-eighty-two, Gate Seventeen. I didn’t hear the buzzer go off…” There is an edge of anger to her tone.
Now the man turns his head just enough to see her. He relaxes a little. “He’s with you?”
“Yes. Was there a problem?”
“No, ma’am. He just looked a little odd. I guess this”—he still has my card in his hand—“explains it. As long as you’re with him…”
“I’m not his keeper,” Marjory says, in the same tone that she used when she said Don was a real heel. “Lou is my friend.”
The man’s eyebrows go up, then down. He hands me back my card and turns away. I walk away, beside Marjory, who is headed off in a fast walk that must be stretching her legs. We say nothing until after we arrive at the secured waiting area for Gates Fifteen through Thirty. On the other side of the glass wall, people with tickets, on the departures side, sit in rows; the seatframes are shiny metal and the seats are dark blue. We don’t have seats in arrivals because we are not supposed to come more than ten minutes before the flight’s scheduled arrival.
This is not the way it used to be. I don’t remember that, of course—I was born at the turn of the century—but my parents told me about being able to just walk right up to the gates to meet people arriving. Then after the 2001 disasters, only departing passengers could go to the gates. That was so awkward for people who needed help, and so many people asked for special passes, that the government designed these arrival lounges instead, with separate security lines. By the time my parents took me on an airplane for the first time, when I was nine, all large airports had separated arriving and departing passengers.
I look out the big windows. Lights everywhere. Red and green lights on the tips of the airplanes’ wings. Rows of dim square lights along the planes, showing where the windows are. Headlights on the little vehicles that pull baggage carts. Steady lights and blinking lights.
“Can you talk now?” Marjory asks while I’m still looking out at the lights.
“Yes.” I can feel her warmth; she is standing very close beside me. I close my eyes a moment. “I just… I can get confused.” I point to an airplane coming toward a gate. “Is that the one?”
“I think so.” She moves around me and turns to face me. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. It just… happens that way sometimes.” I am embarrassed that it happened tonight, the first time I have ever been alone with Marjory. I remember in high school wanting to talk to girls who didn’t want to talk to me. Will she go away, too? I could get a taxi back to Tom and Lucia’s, but I don’t have a lot of money with me.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Marjory says, and then the door opens and people start coming off the plane. She is watching for Karen, and I am watching her. Karen turns out to be an older woman, gray-haired. Soon we are all back outside and then on the way to Karen’s apartment. I sit quietly in the backseat, listening to Marjory and Karen talk. Their voices flow and ripple like swift water over rocks. I can’t quite follow what they’re talking about. They go too fast for me, and I don’t know the people or places they speak of. It’s all right, though, because I can watch Marjory without having to talk at the same time.
When we get back to Tom and Lucia’s, where my car is, Don has gone and the last of the fencing group are packing things in their car. I remember that I did not put my blades and mask away and go outside to collect them, but Tom has picked them up, he says. He wasn’t sure what time we would get back; he didn’t want to leave them out in the dark.
I say good-bye to Tom and Lucia and Marjory and drive home in the swift dark.
Chapter Three
My messager is blinking when I get home. It’s Lars’s code; he wants me to come on-line. It’s late. I don’t want to oversleep and be late tomorrow. But Lars knows I fence on Wednesdays, and he doesn’t usually try to contact me then. It must be important.
I sign on and find his message. He has clipped a journal article for me, research on reversal of autistic-like symptoms in adult primates. I skim it, my heart thudding. Reversing genetic autism in the infant or brain damage that resulted in autisticlike syndromes in the small child has now become common, but I had been told it was too late for me. If this is real, it is not too late. In the last sentence, the article’s author makes that connection, speculating that the research might be applicable to humans and suggesting further research.
As I read, other icons pop up on my screen. The logo of our local autistic society. Cameron’s logo and Dale’s. So they’ve heard about it, too. I ignore them for the time being and go on reading. Even though it is about brains like mine, this is not my field and I cannot quite understand how the treatment is supposed to work. The authors keep referring to other articles in which the procedures were spelled out. Those articles aren’t accessible—not to me, not tonight. I don’t know what “Ho and Delgracia’s method” is. I don’t know what all the words mean, either, and my dictionary doesn’t have them.
When I look at the clock, it is long after midnight. Bed. I must sleep. I turn everything off, set the alarm, and go to bed. In my mind, photons chase darkness but never catch up.
At work the next morning, we all stand in the hall, not quite meeting one anothers’ eyes. Everybody knows.
“I think it’s a fake,” Linda says. “It can’t possibly work.”
“But if it does,” Cameron says. “If it does, we can be normal.”
“I don’t want to be normal,” Linda says. “I am who I am. I’m happy.” She does not look happy. She looks fierce and determined.
“Me, too,” Dale says. “What if it works for monkeys—what does that mean? They’re not people; they’re simpler than we are. Monkeys don’t talk.” His eyelid twitches more than usual.
“We already communicate better than monkeys,” Linda says.
When we are together like this, just us, we can talk better than any other time. We laugh about that, about how normal people must be putting out a field that inhibits our abilities. We know that’s not true, and we know the others would think we were paranoid if we told that joke around them. They would think we were crazy in a bad way; they would not understand that it is a joke. When we do not recognize a joke, they say it is because we are literal-minded, but we know that we cannot say that about them.
“I would like to not have to see a psychiatrist every quarter,” Cameron says.
I think of not having to see Dr. Fornum. I would be much happier if I did not have to see Dr. Fornum. Would she be happy not to have to see me?
“Lou, what about you?” Linda asks. “You’re already living partly in their world.”
We all are, by working here, by living independently. But Linda doesn’t like doing anything with people who are not autistic, and she has said before she thinks I shouldn’t hang around with Tom and Lucia’s fencing group or the people at my church. If she knew how I really felt about Marjory she would say mean things.
“I get along… I don’t see why change.” I hear my voice, harsher than usual and wish it didn’t do that when I get upset. I’m not angry; I don’t want to sound angry.
“See?” Linda looks at Cameron, who looks away.
“I need to work,” I say, and head for my office, where I turn on the little fan and watch the twinkles of light. I need to bounce, but I don’t want to go in the gym, in case Mr. Crenshaw comes in. I feel like something is squeezing me. It is hard to get into the problem I’m working on.
I wonder what it would be like to be normal. I made myself quit thinking about that when I left school. When it comes up, I push the thought away. But now… what would it be like to not be worried that people think I’m crazy when I stutter or when I can’t answer at all and have to write on my little pad? What would it be like to not carry that card in my pocket? To be able to see and hear everywhere? To know what people are thinking just by looking at their faces?
The block of symbols I’m working on suddenly looks densely meaningless, as meaningless as voices used to sound.
Is that it? Is this why normal people don’t do the kind of work we do? Do I have to choose between this work I know how to do, this work I’m good at, and being normal? I look around the office. The spin spirals suddenly annoy me. All they do is turn around, the same pattern, over and over and over. I reach to turn the fan off. If this is normal, I don’t like it.
The symbols come alive again, rich with meaning, and I dive into them, submerging my mind in them so I don’t have to see the sky overhead.
When I emerge again, it is past lunchtime. I have a headache from sitting too long in one place and not eating lunch. I get up, walk around my office, trying not to think about what Lars told me. I can’t help it. I am not hungry, but I know I should eat. I go to the kitchenette in our building and get my plastic box from the refrigerator. None of us like the smell of the plastic, but it does keep our food separate, so that I don’t have to smell Linda’s tuna fish sandwich and she doesn’t have to smell my jerky and fruit.
I eat an apple and a few grapes, then nibble on the jerky. My stomach feels unsettled; I think about going into the gym, but when I check, Linda and Chuy are in there. Linda is bouncing high, her face set in a scowl; Chuy is sitting on the floor, watching colored streamers blow from the fan. Linda catches sight of me and turns around on the trampoline. She does not want to talk. I do not want to talk, either.
The afternoon seems to last forever. I leave right on time, striding out to my car in its spot. The music is all wrong, loud and pounding in my head. When I open the door of my car, superheated air puffs out. I stand by the car, wishing for autumn and cooler weather. I see the others come out, all showing tension in one way or another, and avoid their gaze. No one speaks. We get in our cars; I leave first because I came out first.
It is hard to drive safely in the hot afternoon, with the wrong music in my head. Light flashes off windshields, bumpers, trim; there are too many flashing lights. By the time I get home, my head hurts and I’m shaking. I take the pillows off my couch into the bedroom, closing all the shades tightly and then the door. I lie down, piling the pillows on top of me, then turn off the light.
This is something else I never tell Dr. Fornum about. She would make notes in my record about this; I know it. As I lie there in the dark, the gentle, soft pressure gradually eases my tension, and the wrong music in my mind empties out. I float in a soft, dark silence… at rest, at peace, uninvaded by the fast-moving photons.
Eventually I am ready to think and feel again. I am sad. I am not supposed to be sad. I tell myself what Dr. Fornum would tell me. I am healthy. I have a job that pays pretty well. I have a place to live and clothes to wear. I have a rare high-status permit for a private automobile so that I do not have to ride with anyone else or take the noisy, crowded public transit. I am lucky.
I am sad anyway. I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I’m fine, good night, please, thank you, you’re welcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them.
They do not know how hard it is. They do not care. They want me to change. They want to put things in my head, to change my brain. They would say they don’t, but they do.
I thought I was safe, living independently, living like anyone else. But I wasn’t.
Under the pillows, I’m starting to shake again. I don’t want to cry; crying might be too loud and my neighbors might notice. I am hearing the labels crowding in on me, the labels they put in my record when I was a child. Primary diagnosis Autistic Spectrum Disorder/autism. Sensory integration deficit. Auditory processing deficit. Visual processing deficit. Tactile defensiveness.
I hate the labels; they make me feel sticky, where they are stuck to me with professional glue I can’t pry off.
All babies are born autistic, one of our group said once. We laughed nervously. We agreed, but it was dangerous to say so.
It takes a neurologically normal infant years to learn to integrate the incoming sensory data into a coherent concept of the world. While it took me much longer—and I readily admit that my sensory processing is not normal even now—I went at the task much the same way as any other infant. First flooded by ungated, unedited sensory input, protecting myself from sensory overload with sleep and inattention.
You might think, reading the literature, that only neurologically damaged children do this, but in fact all infants control their exposure—by closing their eyes, averting their gaze, or simply falling asleep when the world is too much. Over time, as they make sense of this data chunk and then that, they learn what patterns of retinal excitation signal what events in the visible world, what patterns of auditory excitation signal a human voice—and then a human voice speaking their native tongue.
For me—for any autistic individual—this took much longer. My parents explained it to me, when I was old enough to understand: for some reason, my infant nerves needed a stimulus to persist longer before it would bridge the gap. They—and I—were lucky that techniques were available to provide my neurons this needed duration of signal. Instead of being labeled with an “attention deficit” (which used to be quite common), I was simply given stimuli to which I could attend.
I can remember the time before I was exposed to the computer-assisted primary language-learning program… when the sounds that came from people’s mouths seemed as random—no, more random—than a cow mooing and moaning in the field. I couldn’t hear many consonants—they didn’t last long enough. Therapy helped—a computer stretched the sounds out until I could hear them, and gradually my brain learned to capture briefer signals. But not all of them. To this day, a fast-talking speaker can lose me, no matter how I concentrate.
It used to be much worse. Before the computer-assisted language-learning programs, children like me might never learn language at all. Back in the mid-twentieth century, therapists thought autism was a mental illness, like schizophrenia. My mother had read a book by a woman who had been told she had made her child crazy. The idea that autistic people are, or become, mentally ill persisted right through the end of the twentieth century, and I even saw an article about that in a magazine a few years ago. That is why I have to visit Dr. Fornum, so that she can be sure I am not developing a mental illness.
I wonder if Mr. Crenshaw thinks I am crazy. Is that why his face gets shiny when he talks to me? Is he frightened? I don’t think Mr. Aldrin is frightened of me—of any of us. He talks to us as if we were real. But Mr. Crenshaw talks to me as if I were a stubborn animal, one he had a right to train. I am often scared, but now, after the rest under the pillows, I am not.
What I wish is that I could go out and look up at the stars. My parents took me camping in the Southwest; I remember lying there and seeing all the beautiful patterns, patterns that went on and on forever. I would like to see the stars again. They made me feel calm when I was a child; they showed me an ordered universe, a patterned universe, in which I could be a small part of a large pattern. When my parents told me how long the light had traveled to reach my eyes—hundreds, thousands, of years—I felt comforted though I could not say why.
I cannot see the stars from here. The safety lights in the parking lot next to our building are sodium vapor lights emitting a pinkish yellow light. They make the air seem fuzzy, and the stars can’t show through the blurry black lid of sky. Only the moon and a few bright stars and planets show at all.
Sometimes I used to go out in the country and try to find a spot to look at the stars. It is hard. If I park on a country road and turn off the lights of the car, someone could run into me because he can’t see me. I have tried parking beside the road or in some unused lane that leads to a barn, but someone who lives nearby may notice and call the police. Then the police will come and want to know why I’m parked there late at night. They do not understand wanting to see the stars. They say that is just an excuse. I don’t do this anymore. Instead, I try to save up enough money that I can take my vacations where there are stars.
It’s funny about the police. Some of us have more trouble than others. Jorge, who grew up in San Antonio, told me if you are anything but rich, white, and normal they think you are a criminal. He had been stopped many times when he was growing up; he didn’t learn to talk until he was twelve and even then couldn’t talk very well. They always thought he was drunk or on drugs, he said. Even when he wore a bracelet that explained who he was and that he couldn’t talk, they’d wait until they’d taken him to the station to look at it. Then they’d try to find a parent to take him home, rather than taking him back across town themselves. Both his parents worked, so he usually had to sit there for three or four hours.
That didn’t happen to me, but sometimes I’ve been stopped for no reason I can understand, like with the security man at the airport. I get very scared when someone speaks harshly to me and sometimes I have trouble answering. I practiced saying, “My name is Lou Arrendale; I am autistic; I have trouble answering questions,” in front of a mirror until I could say it no matter how scared I am. My voice sounds harsh and strained when I do it. They ask, “Do you have identification?” I know I’m supposed to say, “In my pocket.” If I try to get my own wallet out, they may be scared enough to kill me. Miss Sevier in high school told us the police think we have knives or guns in our pockets and that they have killed people who were just trying to get out their IDs.
I think that is wrong, but I read where the court decided it was all right if the police were really scared. Yet if anybody else is really scared of the police it’s not all right for the scared person to kill a policeman.
This does not make sense. There is no symmetry.
The policeman who visited our class in high school said the police were there to help us and that only people who had done wrong would be scared of them. Jen Brouchard said what I was thinking, that it was hard not to be scared of people who yelled at you and threatened you and could make you lie facedown on the ground. That even if you hadn’t done anything, having a big man waving a gun at you would scare anyone. The policeman got red in the face and said that attitude didn’t help. Neither did his, I thought, but I knew better than to say so.
I sign on and find his message. He has clipped a journal article for me, research on reversal of autistic-like symptoms in adult primates. I skim it, my heart thudding. Reversing genetic autism in the infant or brain damage that resulted in autisticlike syndromes in the small child has now become common, but I had been told it was too late for me. If this is real, it is not too late. In the last sentence, the article’s author makes that connection, speculating that the research might be applicable to humans and suggesting further research.
As I read, other icons pop up on my screen. The logo of our local autistic society. Cameron’s logo and Dale’s. So they’ve heard about it, too. I ignore them for the time being and go on reading. Even though it is about brains like mine, this is not my field and I cannot quite understand how the treatment is supposed to work. The authors keep referring to other articles in which the procedures were spelled out. Those articles aren’t accessible—not to me, not tonight. I don’t know what “Ho and Delgracia’s method” is. I don’t know what all the words mean, either, and my dictionary doesn’t have them.
When I look at the clock, it is long after midnight. Bed. I must sleep. I turn everything off, set the alarm, and go to bed. In my mind, photons chase darkness but never catch up.
At work the next morning, we all stand in the hall, not quite meeting one anothers’ eyes. Everybody knows.
“I think it’s a fake,” Linda says. “It can’t possibly work.”
“But if it does,” Cameron says. “If it does, we can be normal.”
“I don’t want to be normal,” Linda says. “I am who I am. I’m happy.” She does not look happy. She looks fierce and determined.
“Me, too,” Dale says. “What if it works for monkeys—what does that mean? They’re not people; they’re simpler than we are. Monkeys don’t talk.” His eyelid twitches more than usual.
“We already communicate better than monkeys,” Linda says.
When we are together like this, just us, we can talk better than any other time. We laugh about that, about how normal people must be putting out a field that inhibits our abilities. We know that’s not true, and we know the others would think we were paranoid if we told that joke around them. They would think we were crazy in a bad way; they would not understand that it is a joke. When we do not recognize a joke, they say it is because we are literal-minded, but we know that we cannot say that about them.
“I would like to not have to see a psychiatrist every quarter,” Cameron says.
I think of not having to see Dr. Fornum. I would be much happier if I did not have to see Dr. Fornum. Would she be happy not to have to see me?
“Lou, what about you?” Linda asks. “You’re already living partly in their world.”
We all are, by working here, by living independently. But Linda doesn’t like doing anything with people who are not autistic, and she has said before she thinks I shouldn’t hang around with Tom and Lucia’s fencing group or the people at my church. If she knew how I really felt about Marjory she would say mean things.
“I get along… I don’t see why change.” I hear my voice, harsher than usual and wish it didn’t do that when I get upset. I’m not angry; I don’t want to sound angry.
“See?” Linda looks at Cameron, who looks away.
“I need to work,” I say, and head for my office, where I turn on the little fan and watch the twinkles of light. I need to bounce, but I don’t want to go in the gym, in case Mr. Crenshaw comes in. I feel like something is squeezing me. It is hard to get into the problem I’m working on.
I wonder what it would be like to be normal. I made myself quit thinking about that when I left school. When it comes up, I push the thought away. But now… what would it be like to not be worried that people think I’m crazy when I stutter or when I can’t answer at all and have to write on my little pad? What would it be like to not carry that card in my pocket? To be able to see and hear everywhere? To know what people are thinking just by looking at their faces?
The block of symbols I’m working on suddenly looks densely meaningless, as meaningless as voices used to sound.
Is that it? Is this why normal people don’t do the kind of work we do? Do I have to choose between this work I know how to do, this work I’m good at, and being normal? I look around the office. The spin spirals suddenly annoy me. All they do is turn around, the same pattern, over and over and over. I reach to turn the fan off. If this is normal, I don’t like it.
The symbols come alive again, rich with meaning, and I dive into them, submerging my mind in them so I don’t have to see the sky overhead.
When I emerge again, it is past lunchtime. I have a headache from sitting too long in one place and not eating lunch. I get up, walk around my office, trying not to think about what Lars told me. I can’t help it. I am not hungry, but I know I should eat. I go to the kitchenette in our building and get my plastic box from the refrigerator. None of us like the smell of the plastic, but it does keep our food separate, so that I don’t have to smell Linda’s tuna fish sandwich and she doesn’t have to smell my jerky and fruit.
I eat an apple and a few grapes, then nibble on the jerky. My stomach feels unsettled; I think about going into the gym, but when I check, Linda and Chuy are in there. Linda is bouncing high, her face set in a scowl; Chuy is sitting on the floor, watching colored streamers blow from the fan. Linda catches sight of me and turns around on the trampoline. She does not want to talk. I do not want to talk, either.
The afternoon seems to last forever. I leave right on time, striding out to my car in its spot. The music is all wrong, loud and pounding in my head. When I open the door of my car, superheated air puffs out. I stand by the car, wishing for autumn and cooler weather. I see the others come out, all showing tension in one way or another, and avoid their gaze. No one speaks. We get in our cars; I leave first because I came out first.
It is hard to drive safely in the hot afternoon, with the wrong music in my head. Light flashes off windshields, bumpers, trim; there are too many flashing lights. By the time I get home, my head hurts and I’m shaking. I take the pillows off my couch into the bedroom, closing all the shades tightly and then the door. I lie down, piling the pillows on top of me, then turn off the light.
This is something else I never tell Dr. Fornum about. She would make notes in my record about this; I know it. As I lie there in the dark, the gentle, soft pressure gradually eases my tension, and the wrong music in my mind empties out. I float in a soft, dark silence… at rest, at peace, uninvaded by the fast-moving photons.
Eventually I am ready to think and feel again. I am sad. I am not supposed to be sad. I tell myself what Dr. Fornum would tell me. I am healthy. I have a job that pays pretty well. I have a place to live and clothes to wear. I have a rare high-status permit for a private automobile so that I do not have to ride with anyone else or take the noisy, crowded public transit. I am lucky.
I am sad anyway. I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I’m fine, good night, please, thank you, you’re welcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them.
They do not know how hard it is. They do not care. They want me to change. They want to put things in my head, to change my brain. They would say they don’t, but they do.
I thought I was safe, living independently, living like anyone else. But I wasn’t.
Under the pillows, I’m starting to shake again. I don’t want to cry; crying might be too loud and my neighbors might notice. I am hearing the labels crowding in on me, the labels they put in my record when I was a child. Primary diagnosis Autistic Spectrum Disorder/autism. Sensory integration deficit. Auditory processing deficit. Visual processing deficit. Tactile defensiveness.
I hate the labels; they make me feel sticky, where they are stuck to me with professional glue I can’t pry off.
All babies are born autistic, one of our group said once. We laughed nervously. We agreed, but it was dangerous to say so.
It takes a neurologically normal infant years to learn to integrate the incoming sensory data into a coherent concept of the world. While it took me much longer—and I readily admit that my sensory processing is not normal even now—I went at the task much the same way as any other infant. First flooded by ungated, unedited sensory input, protecting myself from sensory overload with sleep and inattention.
You might think, reading the literature, that only neurologically damaged children do this, but in fact all infants control their exposure—by closing their eyes, averting their gaze, or simply falling asleep when the world is too much. Over time, as they make sense of this data chunk and then that, they learn what patterns of retinal excitation signal what events in the visible world, what patterns of auditory excitation signal a human voice—and then a human voice speaking their native tongue.
For me—for any autistic individual—this took much longer. My parents explained it to me, when I was old enough to understand: for some reason, my infant nerves needed a stimulus to persist longer before it would bridge the gap. They—and I—were lucky that techniques were available to provide my neurons this needed duration of signal. Instead of being labeled with an “attention deficit” (which used to be quite common), I was simply given stimuli to which I could attend.
I can remember the time before I was exposed to the computer-assisted primary language-learning program… when the sounds that came from people’s mouths seemed as random—no, more random—than a cow mooing and moaning in the field. I couldn’t hear many consonants—they didn’t last long enough. Therapy helped—a computer stretched the sounds out until I could hear them, and gradually my brain learned to capture briefer signals. But not all of them. To this day, a fast-talking speaker can lose me, no matter how I concentrate.
It used to be much worse. Before the computer-assisted language-learning programs, children like me might never learn language at all. Back in the mid-twentieth century, therapists thought autism was a mental illness, like schizophrenia. My mother had read a book by a woman who had been told she had made her child crazy. The idea that autistic people are, or become, mentally ill persisted right through the end of the twentieth century, and I even saw an article about that in a magazine a few years ago. That is why I have to visit Dr. Fornum, so that she can be sure I am not developing a mental illness.
I wonder if Mr. Crenshaw thinks I am crazy. Is that why his face gets shiny when he talks to me? Is he frightened? I don’t think Mr. Aldrin is frightened of me—of any of us. He talks to us as if we were real. But Mr. Crenshaw talks to me as if I were a stubborn animal, one he had a right to train. I am often scared, but now, after the rest under the pillows, I am not.
What I wish is that I could go out and look up at the stars. My parents took me camping in the Southwest; I remember lying there and seeing all the beautiful patterns, patterns that went on and on forever. I would like to see the stars again. They made me feel calm when I was a child; they showed me an ordered universe, a patterned universe, in which I could be a small part of a large pattern. When my parents told me how long the light had traveled to reach my eyes—hundreds, thousands, of years—I felt comforted though I could not say why.
I cannot see the stars from here. The safety lights in the parking lot next to our building are sodium vapor lights emitting a pinkish yellow light. They make the air seem fuzzy, and the stars can’t show through the blurry black lid of sky. Only the moon and a few bright stars and planets show at all.
Sometimes I used to go out in the country and try to find a spot to look at the stars. It is hard. If I park on a country road and turn off the lights of the car, someone could run into me because he can’t see me. I have tried parking beside the road or in some unused lane that leads to a barn, but someone who lives nearby may notice and call the police. Then the police will come and want to know why I’m parked there late at night. They do not understand wanting to see the stars. They say that is just an excuse. I don’t do this anymore. Instead, I try to save up enough money that I can take my vacations where there are stars.
It’s funny about the police. Some of us have more trouble than others. Jorge, who grew up in San Antonio, told me if you are anything but rich, white, and normal they think you are a criminal. He had been stopped many times when he was growing up; he didn’t learn to talk until he was twelve and even then couldn’t talk very well. They always thought he was drunk or on drugs, he said. Even when he wore a bracelet that explained who he was and that he couldn’t talk, they’d wait until they’d taken him to the station to look at it. Then they’d try to find a parent to take him home, rather than taking him back across town themselves. Both his parents worked, so he usually had to sit there for three or four hours.
That didn’t happen to me, but sometimes I’ve been stopped for no reason I can understand, like with the security man at the airport. I get very scared when someone speaks harshly to me and sometimes I have trouble answering. I practiced saying, “My name is Lou Arrendale; I am autistic; I have trouble answering questions,” in front of a mirror until I could say it no matter how scared I am. My voice sounds harsh and strained when I do it. They ask, “Do you have identification?” I know I’m supposed to say, “In my pocket.” If I try to get my own wallet out, they may be scared enough to kill me. Miss Sevier in high school told us the police think we have knives or guns in our pockets and that they have killed people who were just trying to get out their IDs.
I think that is wrong, but I read where the court decided it was all right if the police were really scared. Yet if anybody else is really scared of the police it’s not all right for the scared person to kill a policeman.
This does not make sense. There is no symmetry.
The policeman who visited our class in high school said the police were there to help us and that only people who had done wrong would be scared of them. Jen Brouchard said what I was thinking, that it was hard not to be scared of people who yelled at you and threatened you and could make you lie facedown on the ground. That even if you hadn’t done anything, having a big man waving a gun at you would scare anyone. The policeman got red in the face and said that attitude didn’t help. Neither did his, I thought, but I knew better than to say so.