The Secret Life of a Black Aspie

by Anand Prahlad

  In spring, the trees lining the cobblestone street leading from my house were pretty, in a gothic sort of way. Bending over University Avenue, a thick green arch, a tunnel. But they made it a haunted street. The songs they sang, when the wind blew, when something moved them, or when the minutes ticked by and nothing moved them at all, were heavy male whispers. They gave me headaches. They caved my shoulder blades in, so that I became the man with the crippled back.

  Somedays bright golden white sunlight would come, but it couldn’t rescue the brown city, it couldn’t save me where I was covered by the silver light. It couldn’t dissolve the dome of silver around the silver town. Sometimes pink light would spill from red buds and crepe myrtle. Day in and day out, golden beings would glow, in classrooms, offices, halls, hallways, unions, memorials, sidewalks, courts, triangles, quads, lawns, and plazas. Some of them would stay, while most would glow for seconds, with the luminosity of passing jelly fish or lanterns carried through fog. Some of their threads would reach out to mine. Some of their colors would rise out of their throats, along with the sounds, along with the pitches of words, the tones of sentences and paragraphs. Along with the echoes of laughter. Some of their colors would spread out from smiles, wrinkles, the corners of their eyes, while I listened, or watched, or mentored, or taught.

  The lights and colors would change me, would change my colors. They would change my tones, my complexion, my disposition. They would hold their hands out to offer me water, but I would be so skittish, like an antelope at an African watering hole. I would drink, but never stop trembling, and so I would miss any flavor of sweetness, any sense of comfort or being refreshed. I would be hearing the whir of duties, pounding against my heart. I would be feeling the weight of noises, and the explosions of psychedelic colors from all the surrounding, crowded spaces. So I wouldn’t remember that I had drank. So I would still be thirsty.

  Sometimes we would stay attached, like a runner stays connected to breath, like pigment stays a part of dye, like ringing stays bonded to a bell. And eventually, the colors would help define me, like a lamp defines a shadow. They would teach me, the teacher, new meanings of things. They would be the blessings I never imagined, or asked for. And it would feel funny, then, to want to be saved from the silver town. Sometimes, then, the breath I needed to live, the quiet I needed to keep from falling apart, the distance I needed to be happy would feel like treason.

  But nevertheless, I needed those things. Try as I may, I couldn’t keep up. The wheel would go around and around, but each time the places would be different, would have changed. Fall semester. Thanksgiving break. Christmas break. Spring semester. Spring break. Summer session. Summer break. Each time, they would have completely new faces. New colors, new dates, new courses, new classrooms, new times, new names, new scents, new tones, new moods, new paces, new windows, new weather out the windows, new desks, new tables, new chairs, new I, and new me. I collapsed after every change. I lay awake worried, before each new season. I fell off the cliff each time a routine was chopped off like a limb, and floated for days in nothingness, like a maple tree’s helicopter picked up again and again by heavy wind.

  One day, snow fell. It fell like it had when I was a child. And then, the next day, it rained. It stormed. No matter where I was, inside or outside, I was freezing or getting soaked to my bones. It thundered and tree limbs broke off in the wind. And then, the next day the sun was out and white clouds drifted in the blue sky, talking to me. It was calm, and I was standing at the clothesline with Mama. The sun’s heat purified me. And then, the next day, all the leaves were on fire, and every time I stepped on one, the crunching sound made me sick as a dog. And then, the next day, there were jonquils, and I could walk on the air the way Jesus walked on water. I could float like a kite. This kept happening, over and over, for the very first time. And then, the calendar said I had been in the silver town for ten years. But I couldn’t remember being there that long. And then, the cycle repeated, and the calendar said, now it’s been twenty years.

  I was awarded tenure after six years, and then promotion to full professor a few years after that. But there was so much hollowness inside me by then that when winter came, cold winds blew through me. I experienced belonging, for moments, in my department, being respected, at times being needed. I worked hard. I made a few friends.

  It dawned on me that being a professor was an ideal career. It’s one of the only jobs I could have survived in. People think of professors as odd and eccentric anyway, so I haven’t stood out the way I would have most other places. I’ve been able to spend most of my time alone. I’ve been around other people also obsessed, in their own ways, with organizing things. I’ve had summer and holiday breaks, as if we’re some kind of royalty. The silver town hasn’t been heaven, but it’s been safe. It’s been quiet. It’s been like another carnival in many ways. The view out of my office window has been blue skies, the waving of green leaves on tall trees, and students streaming by at all hours. They never get older. There’s laughter, and chatter, and endless promise, a window pane away.

  Someday, I’ll get to take off my copper mask, put it in a fire, melt it down, and make some bracelets and other jewelry. Already, I can’t remember key things. Of all the papers I’ve written on and filled out in my life, I can’t remember any of them. Applications. Grant proposals. Publisher’s contracts. Tenure files. When I try to remember them, I just see blank white, and then small green hills appear in my mind, and the scent of evergreens. And then I feel happy. I look at the diplomas on my wall, so that I’ll know that I really went to those schools and really graduated. As with many things, I feel like somebody else did them. Someday, the copper mask will become like all the other memories that someone else reminds me of, but I can no longer remember.

  Making Lunch

  There’s no accounting for taste.

  It’s a warm September day. I’m home and there are leftovers in the fridge. I can make lunch and sit on the comfy red sofa and eat. I can listen to the quiet. I can be with the cicadas screeching their final songs. I can feel their heat almost burning me. I can try forgetting that I have a job, because when I remember my job, I forget everything else. I’ve lived that way for the last twenty years, but now I want to live differently. I want to remember other things. I want to remember eating. I want to remember sleeping. I want to remember my dreams. I want to remember my wife and my children. What they’re doing today. Their birthdays. Their favorite songs and colors. The sounds of their laughter.

  There’s a small container of pasta. Some spicy sauce that Karen made with peppers and tomatoes. I love when Karen cooks. I love the way she tastes, in all her colors. I love the flambé of her smile. At night, when we lie in bed, it’s like drinking moon. In the morning, it’s like eating cake. I close my eyes, and the warmth of it slowly drifts over my tongue, down my throat, and into my belly.

  I love when Karen makes food. In our house, I’m usually doing it. I own the kitchen, just like my mama. I try to hold things together with scents. I try to slow things down with taste. I try saying things with food that it might take me months to say if I waited for the words. I put my red apron on and disappear into the soft sizzling of green vegetables in a skillet. In slow dancing between pans and cutting boards. In the background the kids and Karen come and go. They talk, turn faucets on and off. They laugh at somebody doing something crazy on YouTube. I try organizing us. I hunt down the food. I make the fire. I try insisting we sit down at night together. They’ll remember it later. And if it’s never going to become a memory for me, now is all I have.

  When me and Karen first met, I had just come through the portal to Missouri. I was traumatized and frightened. I was an Asperger’s poster boy, determined to hold it together, to be “professional.” I was the man in the copper mask, refusing to take it off. Karen was loving me, but I was just thinking about my work. Between now and then is twenty-five years. Two divorces and four children. And a moment, when nothing else was moving, and I was able
to see her, and when I saw her, all my love came down, and her love and mine finally met in the middle.

  But living together wasn’t easy. People don’t know it, but they are forests and cities of sounds. Of colors and scents. And each forest and each city has its own patterns. When I live with people, I have to find all of the patterns. I have to know where everything fits. Where the endings of cycles are. Where in the cycles I am at any given moment. What is coming next. What the moods of their footsteps are. What their paths are in each room. How long they stay in one place. If they shuffle or if they stand still. If their movements are smooth or if they are abrupt. If they are loud or gentle when they open and close the doors.

  These patterns are my time, like your time is clocks, hours, and minutes. Seconds and years, and decades and months. My time is the patterns the patterns make. For a long time, finding them is all I’m doing. I’m doing it so much, I’m not myself. At least, I’m not the self other people know. I’m not the self they like being around. I’m like Victor Frankenstein. The other people in the house start wondering where I went. Who is this new person who doesn’t smile, who doesn’t touch, who doesn’t even seem friendly?

  And then, people talk, and they move things. I’ll try to explain it like this. If you were living in a house with someone who was blind, what would happen if you moved the chair from where it usually sits? Or the knives and the cutting board? Or the dishes in the cabinet? The food in the refrigerator? The keys hanging on the rack? This is not a metaphor; it’s exactly like that. I see by touching the skirts of objects. I know where all of them are, all the time. I talk to them. I play with them. I listen to them whisper. That is life to me. It is beauty, order, sense, meaning, joy, and reason. At night, I like to walk through the house in the dark, with my eyes closed, so that I don’t even see the moonlight spilling in the windows. Things come alive in the dark. They move out of their forms. The main law of objects is to never let people see you moving. But at night, in the darkness with my eyes closed, objects can move about and not violate their laws. I love to walk along the hallways and feel things reaching out to touch me. Whispering and laughing. Their touches are so soft. I love to overhear their conversations.

  When someone left a cabinet open or moved dishes around, I would sometimes start crying. If a cup was touching another cup that it hated, or a smooth blue glass was up against a glass that had ridges or bumps in it, I would get depressed. The dishes were so miserable that I couldn’t stand it. They would look at me as if I had betrayed them. When I stumbled over something left in the middle of the floor, or couldn’t find the green pepper that was keeping peace in the crisper of the fridge, I had meltdowns.

  The night I couldn’t find the soy sauce was a turning point in my relationship with Karen. I was like I was as a child. I threw all of the spices from the cabinet onto the kitchen floor. I broke plates and saucers, glasses and bowls. I couldn’t help myself. I felt so lost, panicked, so overcome with hopelessness.

  But Karen had an epiphany that I might have Asperger’s. She was trying to understand the contradictions. I could be so sensitive and warm but suddenly disappear into a cold wilderness where no one else could follow. I could be the wolf at the edge of the wilderness baring its teeth. I could be loving and connected one day and not seem to recognize her the next. I could write brilliant scholarship and poetry and yet fall apart over a missing spoon. We started going to therapy and reading more about ASD. We started talking about strategies to make living together work better. Karen found a lot of examples on the Internet of how couples like us managed. One couple lived in two houses joined by a bridge. I liked that idea, but it wasn’t feasible.

  So we added on a new bedroom, and the old bedroom became my study. Our new bedroom has a skylight! It lets in just the right amount of daylight. Just the right amount of moonlight. Just the right amount of stars and dark skies. The idea of adding space has saved us. I can lie in bed and look through leaves and see the blue sky and the clouds. I can open the windows and play with the wind or leave them closed and look for spaceships. I can close the door if I need to have quiet. Or I can leave the door open and enjoy being connected to my family. I have a space to work and play music in. We have our own front door that opens onto a patio where we can sit on warm days.

  And right beside the patio is a piece of my heart—the flower garden I made. Working in the garden is part of my therapy. Nothing else calms or centers me more. Working in the garden is my granny’s spirit. Is Mama’s spirit. Is the spirits of all the generations from the plantation. The flowers in the garden have to be just right. The right bud, followed by the right stem, coming into the space at just the right speed. The blossoms have to be impeccably beautiful, quiet, and sweet. They have to be the perfect tones that hold the shadows and the light together but apart in waves that spread out like stars. Have you seen the way the lines between shadows and light move like dancers? They have to be the perfect dancers doing the perfect dances. The colors you can’t paint. The tones we can’t capture. This garden is a palace I’m building for the spirits. Jeremiah and Lizzy, Esau and Beulah can have a sanctuary, over there, between the pink rose blossoms, the wild purple sage and hibiscus. Granny is on the yellow blossoms of bell flowers, with the Buddha. Between the yellow blossoms of coreopsis, other spirits of my ancestors come and go. Grandma Betty. Octavia Butler. Grandma Addie. Daddy. Han Shan. Frida Kahlo.

  Me and Karen also worked on other things. We monitor my social energy like a diabetic monitoring blood sugar. We talk about little things before they can happen. Like when we’re going out. I used to have tearful meltdowns in restaurants if the food wasn’t just right on the plate. Or if there wasn’t enough sauce. Or if the sauce touched the rice. Or if the colors of the food weren’t arranged correctly. Or if the heat inside the food wasn’t at just the right temperature. It was like the world was ending. I felt so hurt. I felt like I had been watching the sunset and someone had suddenly yanked the plank from under my feet and I had fallen into cold water and was drowning. I’ve learned to contain myself when things are not perfect. At least some things, most of the time. It helps when Karen pats me on the arm. It also helps if we go to mostly the same restaurants. Ones where the owners know me. The waiters are familiar. They are generous, patient. The chefs put special memories in the food. Special warmth that stays, like smooth stones heated all day by the hot sun.

  I work on things at home too. Like, before I go into another room, I try to remember to be mindful. I try to remember that the room I’m going into is probably going to be too bright. I try to remember that there is probably going to be a dirty dish in the sink. I try to remember that there are going to be broken patterns in the cabinet and refrigerator. I try to remember my family’s feelings. I try to remember that they are more important than the patterns. That I can take time later and repair the patterns that are broken. I try to remember that it’s easier to fix the patterns than it is to repair the bruised feelings a meltdown could cause.

  Me and Karen have worked on moving things around, to avoid problems. Like the blue glasses that I love so much. That talk to me when I am blue. They are no longer in the kitchen cabinet. They’re happy in a closet in my study, where their dignity can be preserved. I open the closet doors, and stand there, and listen to them speak with the voices of spirits from the plantation. With the voices of blue bottles in my granny and mama’s kitchens. In the whispers of broken blue glass in the rubble of slave cabins and of fallen and burned houses back through the woods where I grew up. I stand there and me and Ruby turn to moons, turn to skies, turn to rivers. We turn to wood in vanished houses. We turn to spirits in the garden.

  There’s things in many secret places around the house. Pretty boxes, baskets, and tins filled with spirits from different times in my life. So many pretty things! So many sweet-smelling things! Seashells, pieces of wood with faces in them. Rocks, feathers, and matchboxes. Ribbons, hair, and baby teeth. Tarot cards, postcards, and greeting cards. Bones, notes, and
small bottles of scents. Coins, and oils, and essences. Pretty colored paper. Crayons and watercolors. A paintbrush and torn-out pictures from a magazine. My granny’s old thimble.

  A nutmeg. Leaves and dried flower blossoms. Rose and mango soaps. Musk and jasmine lotion. Threads, and hair, and twine. Bits of broken glass and plastic and metal. When no one is home, I open a box. I open a basket. I open a tin and shower myself with spirits.

  By and by, I learned everyone’s patterns. I became familiar with everybody’s sounds. By and by, they learned my quirks. Karen sees me. Her love sings around me like poetry. Her love sings around me like morning birds, singing through the mist. I don’t have to hide the Aspie. The repeaters can come out. They can repeat until the body is released and the ghosts are free. Ruby can moan aloud. I can treat her to soft fabrics that make her skin radiant. She can lounge on a soft bed in the suburbs and not have to worry. I can speak in tongues, as long as it’s not too late at night and Karen is trying to sleep. I can never know what day it is or what city I’m in. And it’s all right.

  Let me tell you about our wedding. It was full of magic. It was going to be outside, but it rained for days. It wouldn’t stop raining. Streams a foot deep flooded across our yard, rushed past the house, and emptied into the already flooded streets. So we had the wedding in a church. But it was too late to book a place for the reception. So we needed someone with a magic wand, and Karen had one. We put a big tent over the driveway. We cleaned out the garage and decorated it with sheets and lanterns and balloons. Together, with the tent, we had a reception hall, with sit-down tables with white tablecloths. With music and bouquets of flowers. Our families and friends came. People cried when before their eyes we became clouds on the altar and floated out of the church. But we don’t just float together. We walk on the ground. We take walks. Karen helps to keep me grounded. She reminds me of things that need attention on earth but understands that I am often in my spaceship.