If I had not been what I am, what would I have been? I have thought about that at times. If I had found it easy to understand what people were saying, would I have wanted to listen more? Would I have learned to talk more easily? And from that, would I have had more friends, even been popular? I try to imagine myself as a child, a normal child, chattering away with family and teachers and classmates. If I had been that child, instead of myself, would I have learned math so easily? Would the great complicated constructions of classical music have been so obvious to me at first hearing? I remember the first time I heard Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor … the intensity of joy I felt. Would I have been able to do the work I do? And what other work might I have been able to do?
It is harder to imagine a different self now that I am an adult. As a child, I did imagine myself into other roles. I thought I would become normal, that someday I would be able to do what everyone else did so easily. In time, that fantasy faded. My limitations were real, immutable, thick black lines around the outline of my life. The only role I play is normal.
The one thing all the books agreed on was the permanence of the deficit, as they called it. Early intervention could ameliorate the symptoms, but the central problem remained. I felt that central problem daily, as if I had a big round stone in the middle of myself, a heavy, awkward presence that affected everything I did or tried to do.
What if it weren’t there?
I had given up reading about my own disability when I finished school. I had no training as a chemist or biochemist or geneticist… Though I work for a pharmaceutical company, I know little of drugs. I know only the patterns that flow through my computer, the ones I find and analyze, and the ones they want me to create.
I do not know how other people learn new things, but the way I learn them works for me. My parents bought me a bicycle when I was seven and tried to tell me how to start riding. They wanted me to sit and pedal first, while they steadied the bike, and then begin to steer on my own. I ignored them. It was clear that steering was the important thing and the hardest thing, so I would learn that first.
I walked the bicycle around the yard, feeling how the handlebars jiggled and twitched and jerked as the front wheel went over the grass and rocks. Then I straddled it and walked it around that way, steering it, making it fall, bringing it back up again. Finally I coasted down the slope of our driveway, steering from side to side, my feet off the ground but ready to stop. And then I pedaled and never fell again.
It is all knowing what to start with. If you start in the right place and follow all the steps, you will get to the right end.
If I want to understand what this treatment can do that will make Mr. Crenshaw rich, then I need to know how the brain works. Not the vague terms people use, but how it really works as a machine. It is like the handlebars on the bicycle — it is the way of steering the whole person. And I need to know what drugs really are and how they work.
All I remember about the brain from school is that it is gray and uses a lot of glucose and oxygen. I did not like the word glucose when I was in school. It made me think of glue, and I did not like to think of my brain using glue. I wanted my brain to be like a computer, something that worked well by itself and did not make mistakes.
The books said that the problem with autism was in the brain, and that made me feel like a faulty computer, something that should be sent back or scrapped. All the interventions, all the training, were like software designed to make a bad computer work right. It never does, and neither did I.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Too many things are happening too fast. It feels like the speed of events is faster than light, but I know that is not objectively true. Objectively true is a phrase I found in one of the texts I’ve been trying to read on-line. Subjectively true, that book said, is what things feel like to the individual. It feels to me that too many things are happening so fast that they cannot be seen. They are happening ahead of awareness, in the dark that is always faster than light because it gets there first.
I sit by the computer, trying to find a pattern in this. Finding patterns is my skill. Believing in patterns — in the existence of patterns — is apparently my creed. It is part of who I am. The book’s author writes that who a person is depends on the person’s genetics, background, and surroundings.
When I was a child, I found a book in the library that was all about scales, from the tiniest to the largest. I thought that was the best book in the building; I did not understand why other children preferred books with no structure, mere stories of messy human feelings and desires. Why was reading about an imaginary boy getting on a fictional softball team more important than knowing how starfish and stars fitted into the same pattern?
Who I was thought abstract patterns of numbers were more important than abstract patterns of relationship. Grains of sand are real. Stars are real. Knowing how they fit together gave me a warm, comfortable feeling. People around me were hard enough to figure out, impossible to figure out. People in books made even less sense.
Who I am now thinks that if people were more like numbers, they would be easier to understand. But who I am now knows that they are not like numbers. Four is not always the square root of sixteen, in human fours and sixteens. People are people, messy and mutable, combining differently with one another from day to day — even hour to hour. I am not a number, either. I am Mr. Arrendale to the police officer investigating the damage to my car and Lou to Danny, even though Danny is also a police officer. I am Lou-the-fencer to Tom and Lucia but Lou-the-employee to Mr. Aldrin and Lou-the-autistic to Emmy at the Center.
It makes me feel dizzy to think about that, because on the inside I feel like one person, not three or four or a dozen. The same Lou, bouncing on the trampoline or sitting in my office or listening to Emmy or fencing with Tom or looking at Marjory and feeling that warm feeling. The feelings move over me like light and shadow over a landscape on a windy day. The hills are the same, whether they are in the shadow of a cloud or in the sunlight.
In the time-lapse pictures of clouds blowing across the sky, I have seen patterns… clouds growing on one side and dissolving into clear air on the other, where the hills make a ridge.
I am thinking about patterns in the fencing group. It makes sense to me that whoever broke my windshield tonight knew where to find that particular windshield he wanted to break. He knew I would be there, and he knew which car was mine. He was the cloud, forming on the ridge and blowing away into the clear air. Where I am, there he is.
When I think of the people who know my car by sight and then the people who know where I go on Wednesday nights, the possibilities contract. The evidence sucks in to a point, dragging along a name. It is an impossible name. It is a friend’s name. Friends do not break windshields of friends. And he has no reason to be angry with me, even if he is angry with Tom and Lucia.
It must be someone else. Even though I am good at patterns, even though I have thought about this carefully, I cannot trust my reasoning when it comes to how people act. I do not understand normal people; they do not always fit reasonable patterns. There must be someone else, someone who is not a friend, someone who dislikes me and is angry with me. I need to find that other pattern, not the obvious one, which is impossible.
Pete Aldrin looked through the latest company directory. So far the firings were still a mere trickle, not enough to raise media awareness, but at least half the names he knew weren’t on the list anymore. Soon word would begin to spread. Betty in Human Resources… took early retirement. Shirley in Accounting…