When the police car moves away, Marjory says again, “I’ll be glad to drive you home, Lou, if you’d like.”
“I will take my car,” I say. “I will need to get it fixed. I will need to contact the insurance company again. They will not be happy with me.”
“Let’s see if there’s glass on the seat,” Tom says. He opens the car door. Light glitters on the tiny bits of glass on the dashboard, the floor, in the sheepskin pad of the seat. I feel sick. The pad should be soft and warm; now it will have sharp things in it. I untie the pad and shake it out onto the street. The bits of glass make a tiny high-pitched noise as they hit the pavement. It is an ugly sound, like some modern music. I am not sure that all the glass is gone; little bits may be in the fleece like tiny hidden knives.
“You can’t drive it like that, Lou,” Marjory says.
“He’ll have to drive it far enough to get a new windshield,” Tom says. “The headlights are all right; he could drive it, if he took it slow.”
“I can drive it home,” I say. “I will go carefully.” I put the sheepskin pad in the backseat and sit very gingerly on the front seat.
At home, later, I think about things Tom and Lucia said, playing the tape of it in my head.
“The way I look at it,” Tom said, “your Mr. Crenshaw has chosen to look at the limitations and not the possibilities. He could have considered you and the rest of your section as assets to be nurtured.”
“I am not an asset,” I said. “I am a person.”
“You’re right, Lou, but we’re talking here of a corporation. As with armies, they look at people who work for them as assets or liabilities. An employee who needs anything different from other employees can be seen as a liability — requiring more resources for the same output. That’s the easy way to look at it, and that’s why a lot of managers do look at it that way.”
“They see what is wrong,” I said.
“Yes. They may also see your worth — as an asset — but they want to get the asset without the liability.”
“What good managers do,” Lucia said, “is help people grow. If they’re good at part of their job and not so good at the rest of it, good managers help them identify and grow in those areas where they’re not as strong — but only to the point where it doesn’t impair their strengths, the reason they were hired.”
“But if a newer computer system can do it better—”
“That doesn’t matter. There’s always something. Lou, no matter if a computer or another machine or another person can do any particular task you do… do it faster or more accurately or whatever… one thing nobody can do better than you is be you.”
“But what good is that if I do not have a job?” I asked. “If I cannot get a job…”
“Lou, you’re a person — an individual like no one else. That’s what’s good, whether you have a job or not.”
“I’m an autistic person,” I said. “That is what I am. I have to have some way… If they fire me, what else can I do?”
“Lots of people lose their jobs and then get other jobs. You can do that, if you have to. If you want to. You can choose to make the change; you don’t have to let it hit you over the head. It’s like fencing — you can be the one who sets the pattern or the one who follows it.”
I play this tape several times, trying to match tones to words to expressions as I remember them. They told me several times to get a lawyer, but I am not ready to talk to anyone I do not know. It is hard to explain what I am thinking and what has happened. I want to think it out for myself.
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.