“I’m sorry,” I say.
“It’s okay,” he says. “That sounded close; did you hear it?”
“I heard something,” I say. I am trying to replay the sounds, thump-crash-tinkle-tinkle-squeal-roar, and think what it could be. Someone dropped a bowl out of their car?
“Maybe we’d better check,” Dave says.
Several of the others have gotten up to look. I follow the group to the front yard. In the light from the streetlight on the corner I can see a glitter on the pavement.
“It’s your car, Lou,” Susan says. “The windshield.”
I feel cold.
“Your tires last week… what day was that, Lou?”
“Thursday,” I say. My voice shakes a little and sounds harsh.
“Thursday. And now this…” Tom looks at the others, and they look back. I can tell that they are thinking something together, but I do not know what it is. Tom shakes his head. “I guess we’ll have to call the police. I hate to break up the practice, but—”
“I’ll drive you home, Lou,” Marjory says. She has come up behind me; I jump when I hear her voice.
Tom calls the police because, he says, it happened in front of his house. He hands the phone to me after a few minutes, and a bored voice asks my name, my address, my phone number, the license number of the car. I can hear noise in the background on the other end, and people are talking in the living room; it is hard to understand what the voice is saying. I am glad it is just routine questions; I can figure those out.
Then the voice asks something else, and the words tangle together and I cannot figure it out. “I’m sorry…” I say.
The voice is louder, the words more separated. Tom shushes the people in the living room. This time I understand.
“Do you have any idea who might have done this?” the voice asks.
“No,” I say. “But someone slashed my tires last week.”
“Oh?” Now it sounds interested. “Did you report that?”
Yes, I say.
“Do you remember who the investigating officer was?”
“I have a card; just a minute—” I put the phone down and get out my wallet. The card is still there. I read off the name, Malcolm Stacy, and the case number.
“He’s not in now; I’ll put this report on his desk. Now… are there any witnesses?”
“I heard it,” I say, “but I didn’t see it. We were in the backyard.”
“Too bad. Well, we’ll send someone out, but it’ll be a while. Just stay there.”
By the time the patrol car arrives, it is almost 10:00 P.M.; everyone is sitting around the living room tired of waiting. I feel guilty, even though it is not my fault. I did not break my own windshield or tell the police to tell people to stay. The police officer is a woman named Isaka, short and dark and very brisk. I think she thinks this is too small a reason to call the police.
She looks at my car and the other cars and street and sighs. “Well, someone broke your windshield, and someone slashed your tires a few days ago, so I’d say it’s your problem, Mr. Arrendale. You must’ve really pissed someone off, and you probably know who it is, if you’ll just think. How are you getting along at work?”
“Fine,” I say, without really thinking. Tom shifts his weight. “I have a new boss, but I do not think Mr. Crenshaw would break a windshield or cut tires.” I cannot imagine that he would, even though he gets angry.”
“Oh?” she says, making a note.
“He was angry when I was late for work after my tires were slashed,” I say. “I do not think he would break my windshield. He might fire me.”
She looks at me but says nothing more to me. She is looking now at Tom. “You were having a party?”
“A fencing club practice night,” he says.
I see the police officer’s neck tense. “Fencing? Like with weapons?”
“It’s a sport,” Tom says. I can hear the tension in his voice, too. “We had a tournament week before last; there’s another coming up in a few weeks.”
“Anyone ever get hurt?”
“Not here. We have strict safety rules.”
“Are the same people here every week?”
“Usually. People do miss a practice now and then.”
“And this week?”
“Well, Larry’s not here—he’s in Chicago on business. And I guess Don.”
“Any problems with the neighbors? Complaints about noise or anything of that sort?”
“No.” Tom runs his hand through his hair. “We get along with the neighbors; it’s a nice neighborhood. Not usually any vandalism, either.”
“But Mr. Arrendale has had two episodes of vandalism against his car in less than a week… That’s pretty significant.” She waits; no one says anything. Finally she shrugs and goes on.
“It’s like this. If the car was headed east, on the right-hand side of the road, the driver would have had to stop, get out, break the glass, run around his own car, get in, and drive off. There’s no way to break the glass while in the driver’s seat of a car going the same way your car was parked, not without a projectile weapon—and even then the angles are bad. If the car was headed west, though, the driver could reach across with something—a bat, say—or lob a rock through the windshield while still in motion. And then be gone before anyone got out to the front yard.”
“I see,” I say. Now that she has said it, I can visualize the approach, the attack, the escape. But why?
“You have to have some idea who’s upset with you,” the police officer says. She sounds angry with me.
“It does not matter how angry you are with someone; it is not all right to break things,” I say. I am thinking, but the only person I know who has been angry with me about going fencing is Emmy. Emmy does not have a car; I do not think she knows where Tom and Lucia live. I do not think Emmy would break windshields anyway. She might come inside and talk too loud and say something rude to Marjory, but she would not break anything.
“That’s true,” the officer says. “It’s not all right, but people do it anyway. Who is angry with you?”
If I tell her about Emmy, she will make trouble for Emmy and Emmy will make trouble for me. I am sure it is not Emmy. “I don’t know,” I say. I feel a stirring behind, me, almost a pressure. I think it is Tom, but I am not sure.
“Would it be all right, Officer, if the others left now?” Tom asks.
“Oh, sure. Nobody saw anything; nobody heard anything; well, you heard something, but you didn’t see anything—did anyone?”
A murmur of “no” and “not me” and “if I had only moved faster,” and the others trickle away to their cars. Marjory and Tom and Lucia stay.
“If you’re the target, and it appears you are, then whoever it is knew you would be here tonight. How many people know you come here on Wednesdays?”
Emmy does not know what night I go fencing. Mr. Crenshaw does not know I do fencing at all.
“Everyone who fences here,” Tom answers for me. “Maybe some of those from the last tournament—it was Lou’s first. Do people at your job know, Lou?”
“I don’t talk about it much,” I say. I do not explain why. “I’ve mentioned it, but I don’t remember telling anyone where the class is. I might have.”
“Well, we’re going to have to find out, Mr. Arrendale,” the officer says. “This kind of thing can escalate to physical harm. You be careful now.” She hands me a card with her name and number on it. “Call me, or Stacy, if you think of anything.”
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 i
t 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.
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.
The Speed of Dark Page 17