“Asperger’s syndrome.” Mr. Turrentine pronounced the words slowly but correctly. When most people said it, it came out sounding like “Ass-burger” (an endless source of amusement to Colin’s younger brother and—until his mother put a stop to it—Danny’s preferred nickname for Colin), but Mr. Turrentine was careful to make the “s” sound more like a buzzing “z,” an artifact of the name’s Austrian origin.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s a neurological condition related to autism,” Colin explained patiently. “It was discovered by Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger in Vienna in 1943, but not widely diagnosed until—”
“Autism,” Mr. Turrentine interrupted. “You mean like Rain Man?4 You don’t look like the Rain Man to me. Are you the Rain Man, Fischer?”
“I’m diagnosed as high functioning, but I still have poor social skills and sensory integration issues that give me serious deficits in areas of physical coordination.”
Mr. Turrentine’s mustache twitched slightly. Did he not like what he heard, or simply not understand it? Colin opted to explain it a little further. “That’s why my parents and therapy team say I should be excused from this class.”
Mr. Turrentine remained silent and impassive. It was as though the man had turned to stone. Finally, he spoke, his voice even and his words precise. “I can’t accept this note.”
Shock crept into Colin’s usually even voice, causing it to go up a register. “But it clearly explains—”
“I know what it says, Fischer,” Mr. Turrentine said. “I can read. And if I let everyone with two left feet skip out of my class, I’d be a very lonely guy. You don’t want me to be lonely, do you, Fischer?”
“You’re lonely?”
Mr. Turrentine’s mustache twitched again. “I assume you thought that little note of yours would do the trick, so you didn’t bring gym clothes.”
Colin nodded, impressed with his teacher’s powers of deduction as he turned and moved briskly toward his cramped office at the far end of the gym. “Follow me,” Mr. Turrentine said. “I’ll see what I can find for you from the lost-and-found bin.”
Colin froze. “These clothes don’t have synthetic fibers, do they?”
“Only the best here at the house of Turrentine.”
Colin wanted to feel relieved, but he suspected that Mr. Turrentine was making a joke—and at his expense to boot.
Twelve and a half minutes later, Colin marched onto the asphalt basketball courts of West Valley High, where the midday sun of the San Fernando Valley beat down on him with the relentless heat of the high desert. He had changed into his gym clothes alone in Mr. Turrentine’s office, having rummaged through the discards for anything remotely clean and mostly cotton that might fit him. To Colin’s dismay, even the best at the house of Turrentine assaulted his skin with petroleum-based fibers and his nostrils with the rancid, stale sweat of students long departed for college and the workplace.
Regardless of his current physical discomfort, Colin had a long-standing dislike of gym class and playgrounds. Putting aside the usual dangers of overly personal contact, the distasteful smells, and the unsettling, almost animal sounds of human play, Colin did not consider himself particularly coordinated. He could not throw; he could not catch. His only real physical gift, the only one that brought him joy (other than bouncing on his trampoline), was running. Colin loved to run. He learned to love it the first time he closed his eyes and felt the wind on his face, his body in motion, the sweat evaporating off his skin. Running made Colin feel alone and alive.
High school gym class seemed an altogether more threatening experience. Compared to Colin, many of the boys had sprouted into giants and seemed capable of crushing him without ever noticing he was there. For a moment, Colin hesitated. He took three deep breaths to prepare himself and continued gamely on.
The boys had formed into two lines, taking turns shooting free throws, each smoothly retrieving his ball and passing it to the next shooter before taking his place at the back of the line again. It was an infinite loop of dribbling, shooting, and jogging. The hollow, ringing thud of bouncing basketballs was punctuated by Mr. Turrentine’s barked instructions that seemed to carry effortlessly over the din of directed play.
“Both feet behind the line, Ybarra.”
“One smooth motion, McKee.”
“Stop gossiping like old ladies and get to the back of the line.”
Colin stepped across the court with robotic strides, clad in stained blue polyester sweatpants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a mouthless Japanese animated cat. As he approached, he heard familiar high-pitched laughter. It sounded like Stan, and indeed Eddie, Stan, and Cooper were waiting to shoot. Colin fixed his gaze on Eddie, trying to understand what the laughter was about, only vaguely aware it was directed at him.
Then he cast his eyes downward and focused on his breathing, trying to make each breath deep and even as he took his place with the rest of the boys.
Colin looked up as his turn came, just in time to see Eddie hurl the ball at his midsection. He batted it away rather than catch it, then, realizing his mistake, scrambled after the ball as it skittered toward an adjacent court.
“Fetch, Shortbus,” Stan said, and laughed even harder.
“Shortbus” was a reference to the small yellow bus that trundled through the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley, taking handicapped and developmentally disabled children from home to school and back again. Colin had never ridden it, but Eddie gave him the nickname in sixth grade. It had stuck to Colin ever since.
Pretending not to hear the giggles and mock cheers, Colin retrieved the ball and returned to his place in line. He dribbled it once, then tossed it overhand, sending it sailing over the backboard with at least a foot to spare. The schoolyard erupted in laughter at the spectacular miss. The noise was disagreeably loud, and now it came from all around. Mr. Turrentine whipped his head around at the sound of it and witnessed Colin lope gamely toward the baseball diamond after his lost ball.
His mustache twitched. “All right, keep it moving, people,” he said to the three lines of basketball throwers. “Five more minutes, then laps, passing, and cool down.”
For a moment, it was as if time had frozen. The laughter stopped, and so did the dribbling, the shooting, and the low buzz of conversation. Colin looked around at his classmates, wishing vaguely that he had his Notebook to record this unprecedented display of a teacher’s power over his students. Then the silence broke, and a cacophony of dribbling, shooting, shuffling, and trash-talking resumed with renewed vigor. Colin realized that Mr. Turrentine was coming toward him with his quick but easy gait and took a moment to examine the man’s feet—did they ever touch the floor?
“Fischer. Over here.” Turrentine pointed to a vacant court. Colin approached it warily, cowering slightly as his teacher held a basketball in front of his face. The ball was close enough for him to observe the bumpy, fingerprint-like patterns on its surface. Colin wondered if he could calculate the total number of bumps from a one-inch sample and interpolating based on its total surface area, and so he did.
“Is this a live grenade, Fischer? Is it going to explode in your face?”
“No,” replied Colin. Marie had spent several days over the summer trying to teach him to recognize a rhetorical question when asked, but he never got it right more than half the time. So he found it best to answer every question as if it had been sincerely asked. In this case, his answer seemed to meet with Mr. Turrentine’s approval.
“You’re a genius, Fischer. It is not a live grenade. It will not explode in your face. So don’t throw it like you think it will.”
Mr. Turrentine leaned in slightly for emphasis, looming. For the first time, Colin noticed a small constellation of raised moles on his teacher’s right cheek. He tried to imagine how the man shaved around them without cutting himself, but left the thought experiment inconclusive as Mr. Turrentine snapped his fingers to regain Colin’s full attention. “Step up to t
hat line.”
“Sir?”
“Did I misspeak, Fischer? Did I mumble, cough, or otherwise fail to articulate the fullness of my meaning? Step up to the line.”
Colin appreciated the concreteness of the clarification. He obediently stepped up to the faded white line before him, then turned to face Mr. Turrentine.
“There is one and only one thing to understand about the game of basketball,” Turrentine said. “God is a busy man. He doesn’t have the time in His ineffable schedule to appear on my court and miracle your balls into a basket nine feet in the air.”
“Mr. Turrentine?”
“Yes, Fischer?”
“I don’t believe in God.”
Colin waited for what he believed was the inevitable response. His lack of belief in a Supreme Being was longstanding, extrapolated from his third-grade deconstructions of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but he often encountered hostility when it came up in conversation.
Mr. Turrentine, however, remained impressively blank-faced. “Well, that’s just fine, Fischer. Because I believe in you.” He took a step to the side, observing Colin’s stance. “Now, square your shoulders. Relax your elbows,” he said. “Let them swing.”
His words were crisp and clear. Not simply loud, but commanding. In fact, they weren’t really loud at all—simply loud enough. Colin hypothesized Mr. Turrentine never shouted, though he allowed that future encounters could prove him wrong.
Mr. Turrentine reached to touch Colin’s elbow to correct him. Instinctively, Colin drew back with a cringe.
“Please don’t do that,” Colin said in a small voice. His teacher gave no indication of having heard him, but didn’t try to touch Colin again. Instead, he demonstrated the free throw stance himself, letting Colin observe and then try to model the posture himself.
“Like this?” asked Colin. His positioning was an exact mirror of Turrentine’s own. Eight years of occupational therapy had prepared him well to follow instructions on where and how to move.
“Just like that,” Mr. Turrentine replied. Colin detected a new tone in his voice and tried to identify it. IMPRESSED, Colin decided. Perhaps AMUSED. He couldn’t be entirely certain without a recording to review and further comparative study.
“Now, close your eyes.” Mr. Turrentine waited a moment for Colin to comply. “Now visualize the basket, and the distance between your hands and the hoop. Then visualize throwing your ball into the basket. Are you seeing it?”
Colin stood with his brows furrowed and eyes darting rapidly back and forth beneath closed lids, almost as if he were dreaming. “No, I missed that one.”
Mr. Turrentine watched Colin as he slowly dribbled the ball, his eyes closed, occasionally muttering phrases like “No” or “Not quite” and “Failure.”
Colin wrinkled his face in consternation, wishing he had his Notebook to draw the picture first. But he didn’t have his Notebook and doubted Mr. Turrentine would allow him to retrieve it. So he did the next best thing: He imagined he had his Notebook. In his Imaginary Notebook, Colin drew a schematic of the asphalt court, overlaid with a complicated force diagram depicting every variable involved in making or missing a shot. He included every conceivable factor, from the distance between himself and the hoop, to the estimated strength of the breeze he felt on his face. Satisfied that he understood the parameters of the problem, Colin extrapolated the diagram from his imaginary Notebook to a mental image of himself and the hoop in three-dimensional space. Colin threw shot after shot in his imagination, testing his calculations, finally arriving at the precise combination of angle, velocity, and spin that sent the ball careening into the basket.
“Got it,” Colin said. His eyes snapped open.
He fired the shot without hesitation, launching the ball with both hands from directly in front of his chest. It traced a parabolic arc through the air and into the basket, making a slight whooshing sound as it passed through the net without touching the rim.
Colin blinked, not sure if he had really accomplished this or was going through another mental simulation. Other students who had been waiting for him to fail simply stood and stared.
“There, Fischer,” Mr. Turrentine said. His expression was blank. “Like that. You’re a damned basketball prodigy. Now retrieve your ball and get back in line.”
Colin turned to chase after the basketball, then stopped as a thought occurred. He looked back at his teacher. “Mr. Turrentine,” he asked, “are you God?”
“No, Fischer. I’m a gym teacher. I work for a living.”
Satisfied by this answer, Colin trotted off after the ball, which had rolled to a stop at the half-court line. Colin picked it up, felt its weight in his hand, gauged the distance to the basket, and threw a one-armed shot. This, too, sailed cleanly into the basket, which Mr. Turrentine acknowledged with a nod and provoked a round of murmuring from the other students as Colin trotted past. Once was luck, twice was skill.
“Shortbus has a mean three-pointer,” said Cooper, admiration leaking into his voice. Stan narrowed his eyes and glared as Colin took his place at the back of the line.
“Shut up,” Stan said.
4 Rain Man was a famous film from 1988, which featured Dustin Hoffman playing an institutionalized autistic man with savant-like counting skills and a variety of bizarre tics and mannerisms. It had won several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Colin found this puzzling because as far as he was concerned the best movie of 1988 was Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis. Loud, but good.
CHAPTER FIVE:
PRIMATE BEHAVIOR
People make many assertions about the uniqueness of human behavior that turn out not to be true. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Ferguson, once told our class that humans are the only animals to make and use tools. I tried to point out chimpanzees use narrow sticks to fish for termites, sea otters select rocks with which to open clams and abalone shells, and New Caledonian crows even bend wires into makeshift hooks. Mrs. Ferguson made me sit at the back of the room and didn’t call on me for the rest of the school year.
What I find much more interesting than human uniqueness are the behaviors we share with our closest relatives: chimps, gorillas, and the other higher primates. For example, our response to danger. Most animals flee from the loud, the bright, and the unfamiliar; primates tend to move toward bright lights and loud noises, preferring to investigate and learn the cause of the commotion.
Humans and other primates are also the only animals to laugh when they are tickled—though I usually scream instead.
Colin sat alone at a table in the cafeteria, his back against the wall with a view of the windows and doors. This was what his father called “the gunfighter’s seat.” He called it this because he claimed that gunfighters in the Old West would always choose the spot in the saloon where they could best see danger coming.5 Colin fully endorsed this as a policy but calculated the probability he might encounter an actual gunfighter anywhere to be exciting but vanishingly small.
Although the seat had been chosen for its view, Colin kept his head down. This allowed him to tune out the cacophony of clanging tableware, shouting, and conversation that might otherwise have overwhelmed him. He focused instead on cataloging the lunch his mother had packed for him: stick pretzels speared through slices of deli ham, baby carrots, celery sticks, and a whole apple. Leaving the apple intact prevented oxidization and meant it would not turn brown over the course of the morning.
As he adjusted to the noise, Colin ventured to look up from his food and observe his peers. Over the summer, Colin’s mother had rented a series of popular movies about high school from her teenage years, ostensibly to help him navigate this social minefield. He quickly lost interest in stories of gawky girls pining for popular rich boys and students from different cliques forming unlikely friendships while defying adult authority, leaving his mother to watch alone while muttering cryptic phrases like “I wanted a Blaine but ended up with a Duckie.” However, it had given Colin enough data to formulate what he c
onsidered a working taxonomy of high school tribal groupings.
Colin watched his classmates with the detached interest of an anthropologist, recording in his Notebook the movements of the nerds, the popular girls, the jocks, the goths, the emo kids, and the most curious of all, the gangsta-wannabes. He scanned the cafeteria, and as his eyes flicked toward the double doors, he saw Melissa enter. Colin stopped writing.
Melissa was alone but smiling. She carried a worn red backpack, the same one she had carried all through middle school. Colin realized he wasn’t the only one who had seen her—many people were looking her way. Especially the boys.
12:07 P.M. Melissa Greer enters cafeteria. Other students smile and wave at her. I do not recognize all of them from eighth grade, so they must be in her morning classes. Melissa smiles and waves back as she moves to a table in the middle of the cafeteria. It is under a banner that reads “WELCOME, STUDENTS.” Melissa’s friends Emma and Abby are there. There are party favors on the table. Today is Melissa’s birthday.
Melissa beamed as Emma and Abby opened a brown grocery bag and presented her with a round white chocolate birthday cake, topped with white frosting accented by pink frosting roses. She clapped when she saw it, then looked up at her friends. As she did, she realized Colin was staring at her. Melissa smiled at him. WARM. Colin felt a sudden burning sensation course through his body. He looked away, developing a renewed interest in his carrot sticks as Melissa excused herself and headed toward him.
“Hello, Melissa, how are you today?” he said as she reached his table, trying to end each sentence on a slight up tone to convey enthusiasm and pleasure.
“I’m good,” she said. Melissa’s pale, freckled face reddened even more as the capillaries in her skin dilated and filled with blood. Colin recognized this as the “blush”6 response—it was unique to the human animal and still poorly understood by scientists. “I was wondering if you’d like to join us for some cake.”
Colin Fischer Page 4