Kuroda smiled. “Sure. Working in the sciences, you have to learn to deal with such people.” But then his face changed. “Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Caitlin. I, um…”
“It’s all right. I know he’s autistic.”
“Asperger’s, most likely, if you want my guess,” Kuroda said, swiveling his chair a bit. “And, well, you do see it all the time among scientists, especially physicists, chemists, and the like.” He paused, as if wondering if he should go on. “In fact, if I may be so bold…”
“Yes?”
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t.”
“Go ahead. It’s okay.”
She saw him hesitate a moment more. “I was just going to say — and forgive me — that you’re fortunate you’re not autistic yourself. It’s particularly common among those who are as gifted as you are mathematically.”
Caitlin lifted her shoulders a bit. “Just lucky, I guess.”
Kuroda frowned. “Well, in a way. But — I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t…”
“Don’t worry about my feelings.”
Kuroda smiled. “Ah, but I must! For, like you, I’m not autistic.” He seemed to think this was funny, so Caitlin laughed politely.
But Kuroda was on to her. “You know, I attend a lot of conferences in Japan at which Western academics speak with the aid of an interpreter. And I remember one who made a joke that I got — it was a play on words in English — but I knew wouldn’t translate. But he got a big laugh anyway. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because the translator said in Japanese, unbeknownst to the speaker, ‘The honorable professor has made a joke in English; it would be polite to laugh.’”
Caitlin did laugh, genuinely this time, then: “But you were saying…”
Kuroda took a breath, and let it out in a long, shuddering sigh. “Well, it’s just that maybe you do have the same autistic predisposition as your father, but you dodged the bullet, so to speak, because you were blind.”
“Huh?”
“A large part of the problem with socialization in autism is eye contact; many autistics have trouble making and holding eye contact. But a blind person doesn’t even try to make eye contact, and isn’t expected to.”
She remembered how her mother had sobbed when Caitlin had first looked into her eyes. Having a husband who rarely looked directly at her and a daughter who never did must have been a special sort of hell.
“Have you read Songs of the Gorilla Nation?” Kuroda asked.
“No. Is it science fiction?”
“No, no. It’s a memoir by an autistic woman who finally learned to deal with humans after having been a gorilla handler at a zoo in Seattle. See, the gorillas never looked at her and they don’t look at each other. They interacted in a way that felt natural to her.”
“My mom always told me to turn my head toward whoever was speaking.”
Kuroda’s eyebrows went up. “You didn’t do that naturally?”
“Hello! Earth to Dr. Kuroda! I was blind…”
“Yes, but many blind people do that automatically anyway. Interesting.” A pause. “Do you remember your own birth?”
“What?”
“Do you know Temple Grandin?”
“No. Where is it?”
Kuroda chuckled. “It’s not a place, it’s a person — that’s her name. She’s autistic and she claims to remember her own birth. She says lots of people with autism do.”
“How come?”
“You want my take? Many autistics, Dr. Grandin included, say they think in pictures, not in words. Well, of course, we all think in pictures originally; we don’t have sufficient language until we’re two or three years old to do otherwise — and events from when we’re two or three are the earliest most people can recall. Many neuroscientists will tell you that that’s because no memories are laid down before then. But I think, rather, that when we start thinking linguistically that method supersedes thinking in pictures, locking out our ability to retrieve memories that had been stored in the old method; it’s an information-theory issue again. But since many autistics never start thinking linguistically, they have an unbroken chain of memories right back to birth — and maybe even prenatally.”
“That would be awesome,” she said. “But, no, I don’t remember my birth.” And then she smiled. “But my mother does — remember mine, that is. Every year on my birthday she says, ‘I know exactly where I was x-number of years ago…’“ She paused. “I wonder if apes remember their births?”
Kuroda’s face did something. “That’s an interesting thought. But, well, maybe they do; they obviously think in pictures rather than words, after all.”
“Have you seen Hobo?”
“A hobo? In this neighborhood?”
“No, no. Hobo, the chimp who can paint people. It’s all over the Web.”
“No. What do you mean, ‘paint people’?”
“He did a profile of this woman. Actually, I think he’s done it twice now. Here, let me show you the clip…”
“Maybe later. You know, I’m surprised you haven’t read Temple Grandin. Most people with autistics in their families find her books—” He suddenly looked mortified. “Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe they aren’t available for the blind.”
“They probably are,” Caitlin said. “Either as Braille, ebooks, or talking books, but…” She considered what she wanted to say next; she certainly didn’t want Kuroda to think she was a bad daughter. “I, um, only just found out my father is autistic.”
“You mean after you were able to see?”
“Yes.”
Kuroda clearly felt he should say something. “Ah.” And then: “Well, there are a lot of good books about autism you should read. Some good novels, too. Try The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. You’ll love it: the main character is a maths whiz.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Well, a boy, but…”
“Maybe,” she said. “Any others?”
“There’s Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.” Caitlin lifted her eyebrows; the author she was going to be studying in English class. “One of them — Oryx or Crake, I can never remember which is which — is an autistic geneticist.”
“And the other?”
“Um, a teenage prostitute, actually.”
“You’d think it would be easy to tell them apart,” Caitlin said.
“You’d think,” Kuroda said with a nod. “Sorry, not much of an Atwood fan. I know I shouldn’t say that, this being Canada and all.”
“I’m not Canadian.”
He laughed. “Neither am I.”
“Hey, do you know how to find a Canadian in a crowded room…?”
Kuroda smiled and held up a hand. “Save your jokes for the press conference tomorrow,” he said. “You’ll need them then.”
After dinner, Caitlin went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. It was no surprise that she had acne — she’d been able to feel the pimples, of course. She remembered what that cruel Zack Starnes had said, back in Austin: “Why does a blind girl worry about acne?” But she’d known the spots were there, and, damn it all, she was entitled to the same vanity everybody else had; hell, even Helen Keller had been vain! Her left eye had looked blind, and she’d always insisted on being photographed from the right side; in middle age she’d had her useless biological eyes removed and replaced with more attractive glass ones.
Caitlin opened the medicine cabinet, took out the tube of benzoyl peroxide cream, and got to work.
I’d thought my universe crowded when there had been simply me and not me, but in this other realm there were hundreds — perhaps even thousands — of entities.