‘I’m worried, Christine.’
‘Chris. Why do you say that?’
‘Oh, sorry I’m worried, Chris. This Asperger’s condition. I —’
‘Plot or detail?’
‘Pardon?’
‘When you go to see a movie, what do you remember? The story, or weird stuff like the number the hero dials to call his mom?’
Arjun thought for a moment. ‘The story’
‘I wouldn’t worry too much. You’re doing a lot better than most of us. Anyway, you seem functional to me, on the surface at least. Would you say you were functional?’
This was a harder one. He hesitated. She threw up her hands.
‘OΚ, OK. Existential question. Uncomputable. You know, I’m kind of beginning to regret sending that thing round. Don’t get me wrong, Arjun, you seem like a nice guy and all, but some of the email I’ve been getting — Jesus, it’s a can of worms.’
‘So you think I’m all right? Though I’m also correct in saying you’re not medically qualified?’
‘Medically qualified? Dude, lighten up. I just pulled it off some website. Anyway, what’re you so worried about? Who’s to say what’s normal and what’s not? You’re happy, no?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ she said with an air of finality, ‘then shut the fuck up.’
He looked shocked. She started to laugh. After a moment, he laughed too.
Chris’s decision to take the dorky Indian guy under her wing had no rational basis. Sure, the Asperger’s thing slayed her. While every other macho idiot in AV was trying to prove how interesting he was, here was this sweet sincere guy, just worried about his health. His literalism (actually he was kind of literal — maybe he was Asperger’s) was cute. It was also a form of directness, and for Chris directness was a good thing. And though he dressed even worse than most computer guys and had a wispy moustache on his top lip, he was not totally unpresentable. He was tall, for example, and had nice skin. There was something else too: a hiddenness. He acted like he had something important going on, that on some frequency of his life beyond the visible spectrum there was great excitement. When she went to the movies, Christine tended to concentrate on detail rather than on plot, but she did enjoy a mystery. She also enjoyed tinkering with people, taking them apart and putting them back together. So as they walked back to the parking lot after the game, Chris made two decisions: to hang out with Arjun and find out his secret, and to really truly try to give up this whole AS/non-AS game, which was beginning to screw with her head. It was getting as bad as the previous year, when everyone at Virugenix had fixated on a system for classifying your personality type according to your preference for early or late Beatles.
A group of them drove downtown, and she and Arjun wound up in a bar sharing a pitcher of bad margaritas with some of her Microsoft friends. The conversation circled round the usual stuff: apartments, jobs, where people were going on vacation. She gave Arjun the executive summary of her life (family in New Jersey, college years at Stanford, always wanted to be a programmer, weird for a girl, but there you go) and found out some surface information about him. He was, as she suspected, on one of those slave visas, being paid a fraction of what it would cost Darryl to hire an American engineer. She dropped in what an asshole she thought Darryl was, with his bits of moon rock and his I-was-in-Wired Ghostbuster bullshit. Arjun seemed really uncomfortable, as if he didn’t want to say bad things about his boss. He seemed to miss his family, especially his kid sister. He had a picture of her in his wallet. His sister. Chris was not given to fits of girlie emotion, but the only available term for that was sweet. When she asked what he did when he wasn’t working, he hedged, saying something about personal projects. When ten thirty rolled around, he looked at his watch and announced he had to go.
‘Up early tomorrow?’
‘I suppose so. I have things to do.’
‘Where’s your car? Did you leave it at Microsoft?’
‘No. I don’t have a car. I’ll walk home.’
Out it came, bit by bit. He didn’t drive? Chris was actually shocked, wondered for one dumb moment whether this was a sort of Hindu religious thing, like orthodox Jews not being able to tear toilet paper on the sabbath.
‘It must be hard for you.’
‘It’s OK. I like to walk. It gives me time to think.’
‘How about a bike?’ suggested one of the other guys.
Arjun nodded uncertainly. Chris found one of those third-margarita sentences forming on her lips.
‘I’ll teach you.’
‘What?’
‘To drive. If you want, I’ll teach you. I’m a good teacher. I have strong interpersonal skills.’
His face crumpled into a huge grin. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘You mean it?’
‘Sure.’
‘Great. That’s so — so great. Fantastic! You know, Chris, you really are a very nice person.’
Out of anyone else’s mouth that would have been ironic.
He ended up getting a ride from one of the Microsoft guys, who lived near Berry Acres. Chris finished margarita número cuatro and wondered what she had gotten herself into.
‘OΚ, now turn the wheel. That’s right — no — other direction, you were OK the first time. There you go. Check for traffic. Mirror. Signal. Now move off slowly…’
Teaching Arjun to drive turned out to be — well, not the lowest stress activity Chris had ever undertaken. More than once she said a prayer for the Honda’s mirrors, and the front bumper lost a low-intensity conflict with a wooden planter in the Virugenix parking lot.
‘Slow down, Arjun. Brake… brake!’
The car was a piece of crap anyway, so Chris could be reasonably zen about the damage. From her point of view the first lesson was a qualified success, apart from the weird moment when Arjun burst into tears. Two or three sessions in, he could more or less propel the car forwards and backwards, understood the basic rules of the road and even seemed intermittently aware of other road users. After an hour of white-knuckle 15-m.p.h. progress round Redmond, Chris tended to need a drink, which was how the two of them came to be regulars at Jimmy’s Brewhouse, a snug little place with a neon Budweiser sign in the window and a selection of microbrew ales which Arjun was working through in strict alphabetical order.
Chris liked him. When he drank, his shyness evaporated and he became animated, waving his arms and laughing. He talked a lot about his extended family, which seemed to have more members than American Express, and he had a habit of comparing events in his life with scenes in Indian movies. Since Chris had never been to an Indian movie, the parallels were mostly lost on her, but it became clear that at least some of his hidden life was spent in a swashbuckling world of passionate love affairs, family feuds, epic struggles and big MGM-style production numbers.
‘You’re not gay, are you?’ she theorized one night, after one too many pints of Jimmy’s Big Bear Porter. Seeing his crestfallen face, she backtracked hurriedly. ‘Forget I said that.’ Later she caught herself flirting, wagging a finger and giving him arch smiles. ‘You know,’ she heard herself say, ‘you should shave off that moustache. You’d look much better without it.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘You think so?’
The next day at work the moustache had gone. Despite the warning bells ringing in her head, Chris decided she was pleased. He did look better.