Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

by John Elder Robison

  The salesman would meet me, and after a few minutes he would invariably say, “So, I hear your sister’s some kind of champion swimmer” or some similar drivel. I would look shocked and say nothing.

  After a moment, the salesman would say, “Did I say something wrong?”

  To which I would reply, “I can’t believe you would say such a thing. My sister had polio. She’s been in a wheelchair since she was five.”

  Reactions to that statement varied, but they were always good. Sometimes I got an apology, other times shocked silence. It worked either way. After a few moments of silence, I would say, “I’ve got to be getting back to work.” The salesman was all too glad to get out of there. By that time, Vito had discreetly vanished. I would escort the embarrassed sales rep to the door.

  And that was it. No rep was a repeat visitor after that gambit.

  The technicians worked among the printing presses that printed the artwork for puzzles onto big sheets of finished cardboard. The sheets were carried over to another group of giant machines that cut each puzzle into hundreds or even thousands of pieces before it was boxed and packed and shipped to stores. The work area was a former supervisor’s office, a room about ten feet wide and fifty feet long. Windows offered a panoramic view of the puzzle manufacturing operation on one side, and a plain Sheetrock wall on the other. Everything was painted a sick pastel green, the color of fresh vomit, the kind you get from eating too many dandelions with your six-pack.

  This far from the personnel office, the usual rules for office decor, dress, language, and behavior didn’t apply. After all, we were in the factory, not the executive suite. Our technicians had gone native. There were girlie calendars on the walls, beer in the film cooler, and switchblades in the tool drawer.

  Paul, the manager with the perpetual smile, came to visit one morning. “Guys, I need you to clean up your work area. We’ve got senior management coming to visit.” Paul was very polite. He never swore or raised his voice. But we knew what he really meant: “Look, you assholes, this place is a disgrace. Get this shit off the walls and off the floors so we don’t get our asses fired when the VPs come to check us out. Now.”

  The techs started cleaning, slipping the calendars and porn into the backs of the cabinets, from whence they would pull them out again as soon as the tour passed through. Vito swept the floor, pushing the detritus over the railing. This was greeted with angry shouts from the factory floor ten feet below as the trash fluttered down onto the wet ink on a line of puzzles emerging from the press. Rolled flat and cut and boxed, Vito’s cigarette butts and trash bits might make a novel addition to someone’s Christmas present.

  He didn’t give a damn, and if they came up the stairs, he’d send them right back down at the end of a broom handle.

  While the crew was cleaning up, I looked around for something to do. I wanted to be a good corporate droid. What could I do to help out? I couldn’t sweep or wipe because I was management.

  Then I found a piece of broken mirror in the corner. We certainly didn’t want broken glass lying around. I picked it up. Eyeing the white Formica countertops, I had an idea. I asked Vito for a razor blade from the drawer and began scraping it across the countertop, shaving the Formica into a neat pile. An hour went by and the pile got bigger. The room was clean, but I was still working. The pile of fine white powder was starting to have the look of $2,000, maybe more.

  Fine white crystals, with just a hint of sparkle.

  I scraped the pile onto the mirror. Then I took a fresh razor blade and I cut some lines. Fat ones. I took a twenty from my wallet and rolled it up tight. I set it next to the lines. The tableau was complete. I slid the mirror discreetly under the corner of a workbench. Visible, but not too visible. Something anyone in a hurry to clean up could have missed.

  I hoped no one would steal my twenty. I considered substituting a cut-off straw from the cafeteria, but the twenty just looked better.

  Otherwise, the room was spotless. We were ready and, right on cue, management arrived. Our little area filled up with middle-aged men in suits, some of whom had visitors’ tags. They asked polite questions, but it was evident they didn’t understand what we were doing up there, and most didn’t care. Two of them were brazenly discussing golf in low whispers, right in front of me. Standing in the corner by the door, I noticed more than one head swivel to look at my little mirror. As I expected, no one said a word about it. The tour filed out. Because I was the ranking management representative, they all shook my hand as they departed.

  It was late, and we decided to wait till morning to redecorate the room. We talked about the mirror and the suits. How many noticed it? What would they say? We were kind of excited, thinking security was going to barge in, confiscate the mirror, cause a big scene, and send it out for testing so they could make an example of us. Frankly, we were surprised when by five o’clock nothing had happened. We headed home, careful to lock the door behind us.

  Maybe the raid will happen tomorrow, I thought. I could just imagine it. Our own rent-a-cop force, pretending to be the DEA. And after all their testing and analysis, they would find that their confiscated drugs were…a pile of plastic dust. We anxiously awaited the vigorous enforcement of the company’s antidrug policies. But security didn’t show up.

  “Is it possible they missed it?” I asked. None of us could figure it out.

  In the morning, I checked in at my office—such as it was—in the attic, then headed for the lab. I stepped through the doorway and saw the lads had been busy. The calendars were back on the wall, and we had a new Penthouse Pet over the door. But there was a problem. Almost half my coke was missing. I showed it to Vito.

  “Can’t you be more careful? I spent a long time making that shit and now you’ve lost half of it!”

  “None of us touched it. Look, your twenty is still there!” Vito insisted our techs had nothing to do with it. Maybe he was telling the truth, maybe not. We’d see. I got a fresh razor blade and made a new pile. Now I had $2,500 piled up. I put some in a plastic bag. I’d heard $35,000 bought a whole kilo, and I wasn’t sure I could get that much off our bench tops, but I had a goal. The bag was half full by the time I knocked off for lunch.

  The next day, my pile was down again. I showed Vito.

  “Someone’s fucking with us,” I said.

  Vito agreed. He had an answer. “Time for some video.”

  We had video cameras left over from our robot experiments the previous fall. We rigged one so that it sat on a table facing the workbench and the door, focused on the mirror. Then we disconnected the switch for the building’s security system, and rewired the switch to the start button for the camera through a timer that we whipped together from a 555 timer chip and a few parts. Whenever someone opened the door, the camera would come on for five minutes. With all the other electronic equipment in the room, we were sure no one would notice.

  Just in case, we left a radio and some idiot toys running all night so the noise of the camera wouldn’t be noticed. The factory made the whole area noisy anyway. It was a simple system, but it would probably work.

  We figured we’d catch one of our own crew messing with us. That’s why we rigged the recorder after they all had left for the day.

  The next morning, the bag was gone. Vito saw it first. “Someone’s fucking robbed us again!” We played the tape and we were shocked. Watching that tape was like buying porn and finding your mother as the star. Right there in front of us, one of the VPs from the visit earlier in the week came in, did a line, and stole our bag of coke. He looked around furtively, pocketed my stuff, and walked out the door. Right before our eyes. On tape.

  We were speechless. People like him were supposed to set the moral compass of a huge company. People like us were supposed to be the thieving coke fiends.

  Vito thought we should confront him. I wasn’t so sure. This executive looting wasn’t what I expected when I left the mirror lying on the bench. I was looking for some fun. I wanted to cause a ridic
ulous scandal—to be accused of illegal possession of plastic dust. I wasn’t expecting to find a vice president coming into our office after hours and robbing us of drugs. And good drugs, too, stuff I had spent hours carefully preparing using only the cleanest and finest sections of countertop. If the stuff he stole was real, and we turned him in, he’d be looking at five to ten in state prison.

  Maybe our coke problem was just the tip of the iceberg. I said to Vito, “Who knows what else this asshole is stealing from other people here.” I was afraid that if he found out about our little scheme, he’d turn us in to Personnel, or even Security, and we’d be fired. Or worse. I thought we should toss the mirror and let the matter drop.

  In the end, we decided to give it one more night. Maybe he’d have regrets. Maybe he’d return my coke.

  That night, I laid out six nice fat lines. The next morning, four were gone. What was he thinking? I know what I was thinking: This guy has been doing straight engineering lab Formica for five days, and he’s coming back for more. Maybe we can sell it. Maybe we should investigate where this Formica came from.

  Vito looked at the new evidence, and we decided to confront him. Vito was better at that sort of thing, so we agreed he’d do the talking. He had an uncle who collected delinquent loans for a local bookie, and when Vito was little, he went with his uncle to collect money on days when there was no day care. He was a five-year-old bat boy turned electronics technician.

  Vito called up to the executive offices and requested an appointment. The following afternoon he headed upstairs, entered the office, and discreetly shut the door. “I’ve got something I’d like you to see,” he said. He had the tape and a portable player. He turned it on. Both days were on that tape. It wasn’t pretty.

  There was silence afterward, but Vito could see what he was thinking.

  I can’t believe they had fucking cameras.

  “You know, you’re goddamn lucky he didn’t wire that bag to a hand grenade instead of a video switch,” Vito said casually. “My boss is crazy.” We both knew people who rigged Vietnam War surplus grenades and claymore mines to guard their pot fields in the woods. They sometimes blew up a deer, and occasionally a hiker would lose a leg. You saw it in the paper from time to time.

  Vito continued. “My boss is very upset over what you’ve done. He’d like to be paid for what you’ve taken. He wanted to take matters into his own hands, turn it over to the Guinea beaters, but I said I’d come see you and see if we can work it out. Peacefully.”

  Vito was Italian, and he could say stuff like that.

  The guy completely caved. He didn’t even threaten us. No bravado at all. Vito settled for five hundred dollars. He gave the guy the tape. We could afford it. We had more.

  Vito said, “You understand, you’ll have to buy your shit somewhere else in the future.” The guy nodded, grateful to have both legs and be off the hook so cheap.

  Vito and I had a hell of a party for the crew that weekend. They had their own drugs. I took the twenty off the bench top and spent it. But not on coke. Its brief career as a straw was over.

  From that day forward, any requests we sent to the executive offices were answered promptly, and never, ever rejected. But it didn’t last. The economy changed and sales declined. Within a few years, some of us quit and others were laid off. I read that our former VP got arrested downtown, on the street with the pimps, whores, and crack dealers.

  Why would he do that? I asked myself. I had left that life behind for good the second I got the chance, when I quit the disco sound booth for a real engineering lab. He had grown up in luxury and had a good job as a VP at a big company and had climbed into the gutter of his own volition.

  Until then, I thought people who had been born to these upscale white-collar jobs must be inherently superior to a high school dropout like me. But I was wrong.

  20

  Logic vs. Small Talk

  I’m a very logical guy. Psychologists say that’s an Aspergian trait. This can lead to trouble in common social situations, because ordinary conversation doesn’t always proceed logically. In an effort to improve my own interpersonal skills, I have studied computer programs that engage in conversation with people. The best programs follow logical pathways to arrive at suitable responses. The results, however, don’t always sound natural, and I am not sure that I do much better than the machines.

  For example, last week my friend Laurie said, “One of my girlfriends is having an affair. And the guy rides a motorcycle just like yours!”

  Laurie’s statement posed a problem. Unlike most interactions, ours had not started with a question. Should I respond with an opinion about the statement? Or should I ask a question myself? I considered what I had just heard:

  Laurie has a girlfriend. Yes, Laurie has lots of girlfriends. Which one is she talking about?

  The girlfriend’s having an affair. Why tell me? Do I know her? Do I know the guy? Is this a convoluted way of suggesting that I should have an affair, since I have a motorcycle?

  The boyfriend has a motorcycle. Well, that narrows it down. Most potential boyfriends have cars, not bikes. So this boyfriend is one of the 5 percent, as opposed to the 95 percent of the motoring public. Do I know him?

  The motorcycle is just like mine. How much does Laurie know about bikes? Does she mean he rides an Electra Glide Classic, or does she just mean his motorcycle is black?

  I was not able to deduce a suitable response to her statements. What did she mean by them? There was no logical connection between Laurie’s sentences. I stared at the floor and pondered my next move. I knew I had to think fast. If I think too long, people say, “Did you hear me?” or “Are you paying attention?”

  I knew she wanted a relevant response—something connected to what she had just said, more than just “Oh.” I also knew from experience and observation that a statement like “I went to Newport to see the Jazz Festival last weekend” would not be an appropriate answer. It occurred to me that what I needed to do was to keep gathering information until I could frame an intelligent conversation. The successful conversational computer programs did that. So I asked a question.

  “Which girlfriend is that?”

  Laurie looked surprised. “Why would you want to know that?” she said.

  I hadn’t expected a challenge. She sounded suspicious. I wiggled my ears and wondered a little at that. The fact that she had responded that way told me she had been expecting some other response. What did she expect me to say?

  Perhaps I should have answered with a made-up statement that echoed hers. I could have said, “My friend Spike is having an affair, too. And the girl he’s involved with has a motorcycle like mine, too.” But it would have been nonsense. And I never utter nonsense replies unless I’m playing a prank. I can’t help thinking there must have been some purpose to Laurie’s original statement, and a statement with a purpose calls for a meaningful response.

  Perhaps I should have just played dumb. I have observed that a drawled “Wow!” accompanied by a smile can be an acceptable response to almost anything. But I can’t smile on command, and I can’t bring myself to act like a moron. Still, a “Wow!” would probably not have disturbed Laurie.

  If I say, “One of the guys at work got into a car accident today,” I am prepared for you to say, “Who was in the wreck?” If the identity of the person were a secret, why would I bring it up in the first place?

  I could have focused on the motorcycle part of Laurie’s statement. If so, I’d have said, “What kind of bike does he ride?” Once again, I’d expect some kind of answer other than “It’s none of your business!”

  When I asked Laurie why she was suspicious, she had a couple of questions for me: “Why do you need to know? Nothing good could come of me telling you. What if it got back to her husband?”

  I figured out what I should have said by chance, observing two women talking at a restaurant a short while later:

  “Jenny in accounting is having an affair, and the guy drives
a Corvette!”

  The opening line was strikingly similar, so I paid attention.

  “How cool is that! Is he married?”

  Listening to that exchange, it was obvious that this was the correct response. When I heard them talk, I suddenly understood that Laurie’s statement had been meant to entertain or impress me, and that my response should have been an expression of admiration or excitement. However, that never occurred to me at the time. It’s clear to me that regular people have conversational capabilities far beyond mine, and their responses often have nothing at all to do with logic. I suspect normal people are hardwired to develop the ability to read social cues in a way that I am not.

  Small talk—or any kind of talk that goes beyond a simple exchange of information—has always been a challenge for me. When I was young, I learned that people would not like it when I uttered the first thought that entered my mind when they approached. Since making that discovery, I have slowly taught myself how to succeed at conversation—most of the time. I have learned to begin conversations with a question, like “How are you?” I have learned a range of questions that are socially acceptable. But my inventory of questions is limited, and it seems other people are a lot more flexible.

  I now know that my logically derived responses to statements like Laurie’s sometimes come off as intrusive or prying. That makes no sense at all to me. I framed the first relevant question that came to mind after hearing her speak. My response was friendly. So why was she disturbed? After all, she brought the whole thing up. In my opinion, people should not make statements unless they are prepared to respond to questions about the words they utter. But the world doesn’t always work that way.

  Thinking about conversations like the one I had with Laurie makes me mad. People approach me, uninvited, and make unsolicited statements. When they don’t get the response they expect, they become indignant. If I offer no response at all, they become indignant at that. So there is no way for me to win.