“Then I walked outside,” I say. “It was dusk, not completely dark, but the lights in the parking lot were bright. I had parked in the left-hand row, eleven spaces out.” I like it when I can park in prime numbers, but I did not tell him that. “I had the keys in my hand and unlocked the car. I took the sacks of groceries out of the basket and put them in the car.” I do not think he wants to hear about putting heavy things on the floor and light things on the seat. “I heard the basket move behind me and turned around. That is when Don spoke to me.”
I pause, trying to remember the exact words he used and the order. “He sounded very angry,” I say. “His voice was hoarse. He said, ‘It’s all your fault. It’s your fault Tom kicked me out.’ ” I pause again. He said a lot of words very fast, and I am not sure I remember all of them in the right order. It would not be right to say it wrong.
Mr. Stacy waits, looking at me.
“I am not sure I remember everything exactly right,” I say.
“That’s okay,” he says. “Just tell me what you do remember.”
“He said, ‘It’s your fault Marjory told me to go away.’ Tom is the person who organized the fencing group. Marjory is… I told you about Marjory last week. She was never Don’s girlfriend.” I am uncomfortable talking about Marjory. She should speak for herself. “Marjory likes me, in a way, but—” I cannot say this. I do not know how Marjory likes me, whether it is as acquaintance or friend or… or more. If I say “not as a lover” will that make it true? I do not want that to be true.
“He said, ‘Freaks should mate with freaks, if they have to mate at all.’ He was very angry. He said it is my fault there is a depression and he does not have a good job.”
“Um.” Mr. Stacy just makes that faint sound and sits there.
“He told me to get in the car. He moved the weapon toward me. It is not good to get in the car with an attacker; that was on a news program last year.”
“It’s on the news every year,” Mr. Stacy says. “But some people do it anyway. I’m glad you didn’t.”
“I could see his pattern,” I say. “So I moved—parried his weapon hand and hit him in the stomach. I know it is wrong to hit someone, but he wanted to hurt me.”
“Saw his pattern?” Mr. Stacy says. “What is that?”
“We have been in the same fencing group for years,” I say. “When he swings his right arm forward to thrust, he always moves his right foot with it, and then his left to the side, and then he swings his elbow out and his next thrust is around far to the right. That is how I knew that if I parried wide and then thrust in the middle, I would have a chance to hit him before he hurt me.”
“If he’s been fencing you for years, how come he didn’t see that coming?” Mr. Stacy asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I am good at seeing patterns in how other people move. It is how I fence. He is not as good at that. I think maybe because I did not have a blade, he did not think I would use the same countermove as in fencing.”
“Huh. I’d like to see you fence,” Mr. Stacy says. “I always thought of it as a sissy excuse for a sport, all that white suit and wires stuff, but you make it sound interesting. So—he threatened you with the weapon, you knocked it aside and hit him in the stomach, and then what?”
“Then lots of people started yelling and people jumped on him. I guess it was policemen, but I had not seen them before.” I stop. Anything else he can find out from the police who were there, I think.
“Okay. Let’s just go back over a few things…” He leads me through it again and again, and each time I remember another detail. I worry about that—am I really remembering all this, or am I filling in the blanks to make him happy? I read about this in the book. It feels real to me, but sometimes that is a lie. Lying is wrong. I do not want to lie.
He asks me again and again about the fencing group: who liked me and who didn’t. Which ones I liked and didn’t. I thought I liked everyone; I thought they liked me, or at least tolerated me, until Don. Mr. Stacy seems to want Marjory to be my girlfriend or lover; he keeps asking if we’re seeing each other. I am getting very sweaty talking about Marjory. I keep telling the truth, which is that I like her a lot and think about her, but we are not going out.
Finally he stands up. “Thank you, Mr. Arrendale; that’s all for now. I’ll have it written up; you’ll need to come down to the station and sign it, and then we’ll be in touch when this comes up for trial.”
“Trial?” I ask.
“Yes. As the victim of this assault, you’ll be a witness for the prosecution. Any problem with that?”
“Mr. Crenshaw will be angry if I take too much time off work,” I say. That is true if I still have a job by then. What if I do not?
“I’m sure he’ll understand,” Mr. Stacy says.
I am sure he will not, because he will not want to understand.
“There’s a chance that Poiteau’s lawyer will deal with the DA,” Mr. Stacy says. “Take a reduced sentence in return for not risking worse in a trial. We’ll let you know.” He walks to the door. “Take care, Mr. Arrendale. I’m glad we caught this guy and that you weren’t hurt.”
“Thank you for your help,” I say.
When he has gone, I smooth the couch where he sat and put the pillow back where it was. I feel unsettled. I do not want to think about Don and the attack anymore. I want to forget it. I want it not to have happened at all.
I fix my supper quickly, boiled noodles and vegetables, and eat it, then wash the bowl and pot. It is already 8:00 P.M. I pick up the book and start chapter 17, “Integrating Memory and Attention Control: The Lessons of PTSD and ADHD.”
By now I am finding the long sentences and complicated syntax much easier to understand. They are not linear but stacked or radial. I wish someone had taught me that in the first place.
The information the authors want to convey is organized logically. It reads like something I might have written. It is strange to think that someone like me might write a chapter in a book on brain functionality. Do I sound like a textbook when I talk? Is that what Dr. Fornum means by “stilted language”? I always imagined performers in gaudy costumes on stilts dancing above the crowd when she said that. It did not seem reasonable; I am not tall and gaudy. If she meant I sounded like a textbook, she could have said so.
By now I know that PTSD is “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” and that it produces strange alterations in memory function. It is a matter of complex control and feedback mechanisms, inhibition and disinhibition of signal transmission.
It occurs to me that I am now post-traumatic myself, that being attacked by someone who wants to kill me is what they mean by trauma, though I do not feel very stressed or excited. Maybe normal people do not sit down to read a textbook a few hours after nearly being killed, but I find it comforting. The facts are still there, still arranged in logical order, set down by someone who took care to make them clear. Just as my parents told me the stars shone on, undiminished and undamaged by anything that happened to us on this planet. I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.
What would a normal person feel? I remember a science experiment from middle school, when we planted seeds in pots set at angles. The plants grew upward to the light, no matter which way their stems had to turn. I remember wondering if someone had planted me in a sideways pot, but my teacher said it wasn’t the same thing at all.
It still feels the same. I am sideways to the world, feeling happy when other people think I should feel devastated. My brain is trying to grow toward the light, but it can’t straighten back up when its pot is tipped.
If I understand the textbook, I remember things like what percentage of cars in the parking lot are blue because I pay attention to color and number more than most people. They don’t notice, so they don’t care. I wonder what they do notice when they look at a parking lot. What else is there to see besides the rows of vehicles, so many blue and so many tan and so many red? What am I missing, as they
miss seeing the beautiful numeric relationships?
I remember color and number and pattern and ascending and descending series: that is what came most easily through the filter my sensory processing put between me and the world. These then became the parameters of my brain’s growth, so that I saw everything—from the manufacturing processes for pharmaceuticals to the moves of an opposing fencer—in the same way, as expressions of one kind of reality.
I glance around my apartment and think of my own reactions, my need for regularity, my fascination with repeating phenomena, with series and patterns. Everyone needs some regularity; everyone enjoys series and patterns to some degree. I have known that for years, but now I understand it better. We autistics are on one end of an arc of human behavior and preference, but we are connected. My feeling for Marjory is a normal feeling, not a weird feeling. Maybe I am more aware of the different colors in her hair or her eyes than someone else would be, but the desire to be close to her is a normal desire.
It is almost time for bed. When I step in the shower, I look at my perfectly ordinary body—normal skin, normal hair, normal fingernails and toenails, normal genitals. Surely there are other people who prefer unscented soap, who like the same water temperature, the same texture of washcloth.
I finish the shower, brush my teeth, and rinse out the basin. My face in the mirror looks like my face—it is the face I know best. The light rushes into the pupil of my eye, carrying with it the information that is within range of my vision, carrying with it the world, but what I see when I look at where the light goes in is blackness, deep and velvety. Light goes in and darkness looks back at me. The image is in my eye and in my brain, as well as in the mirror.
I turn off the light in the bathroom and go to bed, turning off the light beside the bed after I am sitting down. The afterimage of light burns in the darkness. I close my eyes and see the opposites balanced in space, floating across from each other. First the words, and then the images replacing the words.
Light is the opposite of dark. Heavy is the opposite of light. Memory is the opposite of forgetting. Attending is the opposite of absence. They are not quite the same: the word for the kind of light that is opposite of heavy seems lighter than the shiny balloon that comes as an image. Light gleams on the shiny sphere as it rises, recedes, vanishes…
I asked my mother once how I could have light in my dreams when my eyes were closed in sleep. Why were dreams not all dark, I asked. She did not know. The book told me a lot about visual processing in the brain, but it did not tell me that.
I wonder why. Surely someone else has asked why dreams can be full of light even in the dark. The brain generates images, yes, but where does it come from, the light in them? In deep blindness people no longer see light—or it is not thought they do, and the brain scans indicate different patterns. So is the light in dreams a memory of light or something else?
I remember someone saying, of another child, “He likes baseball so much that if you opened his head there’d be a ball field inside…” That was before I knew that much of what people said did not mean what the words meant. I wondered what would be inside my head if someone opened it. I asked my mother and she said, “Your brain, dear,” and showed me a picture of a gray wrinkled thing. I cried because I knew I did not like it enough for it to fill my head. I was sure no one else had something that ugly inside their head. They would have baseball fields or ice cream or picnics.
I know now that everybody does have a gray wrinkled brain inside their head, not ball fields or swimming pools or the people they love. Whatever is in the mind does not show in the brain. But at the time it seemed proof that I was made wrong.
What I have in my head is light and dark and gravity and space and swords and groceries and colors and numbers and people and patterns so beautiful I get shivers all over. I still do not know why I have those patterns and not others.
The book answers questions other people have thought of. I have thought of questions they have not answered. I always thought my questions were wrong questions because no one else asked them. Maybe no one thought of them. Maybe darkness got there first. Maybe I am the first light touching a gulf of ignorance.
Maybe my questions matter.
Chapter Fifteen
LIGHT. MORNING LIGHT. I REMEMBER STRANGE DREAMS, but not what they were about, only that they were strange. It is a bright, crisp day; when I touch the window glass it feels cold.
In the cooler air, I feel wide-awake, almost bouncy. The cereal flakes in the bowl have a crisp, ruffled texture; I feel them in my mouth, crunchy and then smooth.
When I come outside, the bright sun glints off pebbles in the parking lot pavement. It is a day for bright, brisk music. Possibilities surge through my mind; I settle on Bizet. I touch my car gingerly, noticing that even though Don is in jail my body is remembering that it might be dangerous. Nothing happens. The four new tires still smell new. The car starts. On the way to work, the music plays in my head, bright as the sunlight. I think of going out to the country to look at stars tonight; I should be able to see the space stations, too. Then I remember that it is Wednesday and I will go to fencing. I have not forgotten that in a long time. Did I mark the calendar this morning? I am not sure.
At work, I pull into my usual parking space. Mr. Aldrin is there standing just inside the door as if he were waiting for me.
“Lou, I saw it on the news—are you all right?”
“Yes,” I say. I think it should be obvious just from looking at me.
“If you don’t feel well, you can take the day off,” he says.
“I am fine,” I say. “I can work.”
“Well… if you’re sure.” He pauses, as if he expects me to say something, but I cannot think of anything to say. “The newscast said you disarmed the attacker, Lou—I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”
“I just did what I do in fencing,” I say. “Even though I didn’t have a blade.”
“Fencing!” His eyes widen; his brows lift up. “You do fencing? Like… with swords and things?”
“Yes. I go to fencing class once a week,” I say. I do not know how much to tell him.
“I never knew that,” he says. “I don’t know anything about fencing, except they wear those white suits and have those wires trailing behind them.”
We do not wear the white suits or use electric scoring, but I do not feel like explaining it to Mr. Aldrin. I want to get back to my project, and this afternoon we have another meeting with the medical team. Then I remember what Mr. Stacy said.
“I may have to go to the police station and sign a statement,” I say.
“That’s fine,” Mr. Aldrin says. “Whatever you need. I’m sure this must have been a terrible shock.”
My phone rings. I think it is going to be Mr. Crenshaw, so I do not hurry to answer it, but I do answer it.
“Mr. Arrendale?… This is Detective Stacy. Look, can you come down to the station this morning?”
I do not think this is a real question. I think it is like when my father said, “You pick up that end, okay?” when he meant “Pick up that end.” It may be more polite to give commands by asking questions, but it is also more confusing, because sometimes they are questions. “I will have to ask my boss,” I say.
“Police business,” Mr. Stacy says. “We need you to sign your statement, some other paperwork. Just tell them that.”
“I will call Mr. Aldrin,” I say. “I should call you back?”
“No—just come on down when you can. I’ll be here all morning.” In other words, he expects me to come down no matter what Mr. Aldrin says. It was not a real question.
I call Mr. Aldrin’s office.
“Yes, Lou,” he says. “How are you?” It is silly; he has already asked me that this morning.
“The police want me to go to the station and sign my statement and some other paperwork,” I say. “They said come now.”
“But are you all right? Do you need someone to go with you?”
/> “I am fine,” I say. “But I need to go to the police station.”
“Of course. Take the whole day.”
Outside, I wonder what the guard thinks as I drive out past the checkpoint after driving in just a short time ago. I cannot tell anything from his face.
IT IS NOISY IN THE POLICE STATION. AT A LONG, HIGH COUNTER, rows of people stand in line. I stand in line, but then Mr. Stacy comes out and sees me. “Come on,” he says. He leads me to another noisy room with five desks all covered with stuff. His desk—I think it is his desk—has a docking station for his handcomp and a large display.
“Home sweet home,” he says, waving me to a chair beside the desk.
The chair is gray metal with a thin green plastic cushion on the seat. I can feel the frame through the cushion. I smell stale coffee, cheap candy bars, chips, paper, the fried-ink smell of printers and copiers.
“Here’s the hard copy of your statement last night,” he says. “Read through it, see if there are any errors, and, if not, sign it.”
The stacked ifs slow me down, but I work through them. I read the statement quickly, though it takes me a while to grasp that “complainant” is me and “assailant” is Don. Also, I do not know why Don and I are referred to as “males” and not “men” and Marjory as a “female” and not a “woman.” I think it is rude to, say, call her “a female known to both males in a social context.” There are no actual errors, so I sign it.
Then Mr. Stacy tells me I must sign a complaint against Don. I do not know why. It is against the law to do the things Don did, and there is evidence he did them. It should not matter whether I sign or not. If that is what the law requires, though, then I will do it.
“What will happen to Don if he is found guilty?” I ask.
“Serial escalating vandalism ending in a violent assault? He’s not getting out without custodial rehab,” Mr. Stacy says. “A PPD—a programmable personality determinant brain chip. That’s when they put in a control chip—”
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