The Question of the Felonious Friend

by E. J. Copperman

  Luckily, Ms. Washburn, to whom I look for many of my social cues when working, sat down behind her desk. “That’s your choice,” she told Tyler. “I hope you don’t mind if Samuel and I sit down.”

  Tyler ignored her last statement and kept looking at his shoes. “Who are you?” he asked her. “I didn’t know there would … would be two people.”

  I was about to introduce Ms. Washburn, and perhaps to suggest that Tyler be more polite toward her, but she spoke before I could. “I’m Janet Washburn,” she said. “I work here at Questions Answered too. Would you prefer to talk only to Samuel?”

  Tyler looked up, but not at either my face or Ms. Washburn’s. He seemed to focus on the pizza ovens, and he studied them with great care. “No. It’s okay if you work here.”

  “What is the nature of your question?” I asked. There was no point in discussing Tyler’s obvious difficulties. I assumed he had some support system in place. Someone had clearly driven him to our office, as he had not been standing near a vehicle when we first saw him, and the idea of Tyler driving a car was difficult to believe. He would probably stare at the gas pedal and pay no attention to the road. Or perhaps I was assuming his behavior in the office would be similar to that in a moving motor vehicle.

  “I work at the Microchip Mart,” Tyler said.

  “That is not a question,” I pointed out.

  “No. No, it isn’t.” Tyler’s hands started to flutter at his sides.

  I looked at Ms. Washburn, who was watching Tyler and looking concerned. If I were sure it wouldn’t cause him to become more agitated, I might have suggested that Tyler call the person who had brought him to our office and ask to be driven home.

  “It’s okay, Tyler,” Ms. Washburn said. She gave me a quick glance with an expression I could not interpret because it passed too quickly. “Samuel can help you if you just ask him a question.”

  I was not certain that claim was accurate. I accept questions to answer based on my own interest in the topic, since I will be less efficient researching a topic I find dull and I do not wish to give a client any less than my best effort. But now that Ms. Washburn had made the assurance to Tyler, I felt it would be unwise to contradict her before I knew what it was Tyler had to ask.

  “A question,” Tyler repeated. It is a tactic I sometimes use—repeating what has just been said in order to find a few extra seconds to think. “A question.”

  Ms. Washburn was clearly trying to signal me about my attitude toward Tyler. She turned her head toward me in a position he could not see and smiled broadly and obviously, then tilted her head in Tyler’s direction. It took me four seconds, but I realized she was indicating I should seem more avuncular or at least welcoming toward our potential client.

  “Yes, Tyler,” I said, looking at him and forcing a smile. It was a moot point, as Tyler was still staring at the pizza oven. “What is your question, please?” I often add the word please when I would prefer to simply get to the point. Mother says it makes the person I’m talking to feel less stress. I am unaware of any stress I am causing, but I take Mother at her word.

  Still, my tone or the situation itself must have caused Tyler some anxiety. His hands flapped harder and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. But he did manage to take a deep breath, which was a little comforting.

  “Is Richard Handy really my friend?” he asked.

  Two

  It took more than two minutes for Tyler Clayton to become calm enough to discuss his question, which I found a bit confusing. I understand that people whose behavior places them, in the eyes of mainstream society, on the autism spectrum sometimes have difficulty making friends. I can rely on only a very small number of people as my own friends, particularly if one excludes family members. My mother is a close friend.

  But the concept of not knowing whether a person is a friend or not is more subtle and complex. I have heard of some people with Asperger’s Syndrome and others with autism being taken in by duplicitous people posing as friends either to humiliate or defraud the person with the “handicap.” It is challenging for some of us to determine if the allegiances with which we are presented are real or feigned, since we spend so much of our time acting in the way we have been taught rather than the way we would naturally behave. Emotion is a difficult concept.

  “Who is Richard Handy?” Ms. Washburn, notepad out and in use, asked Tyler.

  Tyler seemed to collect himself; he shrugged his shoulders and inhaled deeply through his nose. He continued to stand, but averted his gaze from the pizza oven and fixed it on a point three feet above Ms. Washburn’s head. It is a tactic I was taught in social skills training when I was a teenager.

  “Richard is the assistant manager at the Quik N EZ,” Tyler answered, his voice almost a mumble. I strained to hear, but did not move my chair closer to him or urge him to speak up. I wanted to do one of those things, but saw Ms. Washburn watching me closely and believed her tension might have been in anticipation of my causing Tyler additional stress. “He calls me ‘my friend’ whenever I go in for a soda or a soft pretzel.”

  I considered the statement. People, particularly those who work in retail businesses, will often refer to customers as my friend in conversation as an honorific or as a means of creating what they hope will be a rapport with the customer that will lead to increased sales. If that was all of Tyler’s evidence, this might become an extremely easy question to answer.

  “Does he do anything else that would indicate he thinks of you in a way other than as a customer?” I asked. Ms. Washburn grimaced a bit, leading me to believe I could have phrased that question more tactfully. I had thought my wording was quite sensitive, actually.

  Any inadvertent transgression was unimportant, anyway; Tyler seemed not to have been offended. He looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Yes, of course,” he said. “If I thought that meant he was my real friend, I’d be stupid.”

  I looked at Ms. Washburn to indicate that Tyler was being less delicate about his own feelings than I had been. She did not react.

  “What other evidence is there, then?” I asked. “What made you think Richard Handy is your friend, and why do you have doubts about his friendship now?”

  “Can I still sit down?” Tyler asked.

  Ms. Washburn indicated Mother’s chair again. “Of course. Please.”

  Tyler flung himself onto the chair so heavily I winced. I did not want him to cause any damage to my mother’s chair. It creaked a bit, but otherwise seemed unharmed.

  I was about to ask Tyler about Richard Handy again when, again looking over Ms. Washburn’s head, he added, “Richard played video games at my house once. He said he was into S and S, too, but we never played together.”

  Ms. Washburn looked at me with an expression I could not read.

  “You play Swords and Sorcerers?” I asked, more to give her the information than to get any from Tyler, in case she was not aware of the term. The role-playing game and others like it are not uncommon among those on the autism spectrum. I do not play them myself, but I have spoken to a number of people like me who do. They find the possibility of taking on another identity liberating. I find the idea of being someone other than myself, even when pretending, terrifying. As a child I wanted to go trick-or-treating as myself.

  “Yeah, online. I belong to a group of five people and we play every Wednesday from five in the afternoon, Eastern Time, to eleven p.m., Eastern Time. I’m a necromancer named Skullkiller.”

  “Does Richard Handy play with you?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  “No. Richard plays with a group in person, in Somerset. I don’t do that.” Tyler made the prospect of playing a game with other people present sound like a somehow shameful act.

  “But he did come and play video games at your house,” I said, hoping to bring the conversation back to the relevant issue.

  “Uh-huh. We played Assassin’s Creed and th
e Elder Scrolls,” he said. The names held no particular significance for me, but I did not believe the specific games played were relevant.

  “Was it his idea or yours to play games together?” I asked. I saw Ms. Washburn nod; that was a question she wanted answered as well.

  “Richard suggested it,” Tyler said. “He saw I was buying video game magazines in the Quik N EZ and he asked me if I played.”

  “And you answered?” I said. It seemed odd, given Tyler’s predilection toward avoiding conversation.

  “The third time he asked, I could,” he said. “So Richard asked me what games I liked and then he said we should play together sometime.”

  “Is that the only time you saw him outside the convenience store?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  Tyler did not seem to have absorbed the question. “Then he asked did I have a PS4, and I said yeah, I had one, so he said could he come over and see it, and I said yeah, and then he came over and we played Assassin’s Creed and the Elder Scrolls.” On the armrests of Mother’s chair, his hands were balling up in fists.

  “Tyler,” Ms. Washburn said, “listen to me. Is that the only time you saw Richard outside the convenience store?” She began to type on her computer keyboard, although I could not see what she was trying to accomplish, as her screen was turned away from my vantage point.

  “We chose those games because Richard had played Assassin’s Creed and I had it, and we could both play the Elder Scrolls online at the same time,” Tyler went on. His “special interest”—an area in which he was especially well versed and could be considered “obsessive” by some—was clearly video games.

  I decided to try to penetrate his defenses by beginning with the subject he found endlessly fascinating. “Who won?” I asked.

  Tyler actually looked me in the face for a moment, then looked away, back at the pizza oven again. Perhaps he was wondering why an agency that answers client questions had two pizza ovens, and why there were not in use. “Won?” he asked.

  “The video games. When you played with Richard, who won?” If I could isolate the incident in his conversation, I might be able to steer Tyler back to information that could help me answer his question.

  “They’re not that kind of games,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “Richard was good. He could blow through a level if he wanted to or he could work at it and make it last if he thought it was interesting. Sometimes he’d play for two hours and not say a word to me at all.” Tyler’s eyes, although not trained on Ms. Washburn or myself, were bright. He clearly admired his companion’s ability to focus.

  But his continuing dissection of Richard Handy’s video game skills was not going to help me answer his question. Frankly, if Ms. Washburn (who continued to perform some task on her computer keyboard) had not prematurely promised Tyler we would accept his question, I probably would have rejected it. Human interaction is hardly my area of expertise, and I firmly believed this question could easily be answered by Tyler himself by simply asking Richard if they were friends. That would be direct and simple.

  “Tyler,” I said, “what else did you and Richard do outside the convenience store?” Perhaps asking him that way would trigger better information. On the basis of what Tyler had told me to this point, I felt I could have made a very good guess about his question—Richard Handy did not seem to value Tyler as a friend—but I had no definitive evidence.

  “Outside the Quik N EZ?” Tyler repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s just a parking lot there,” he said, obviously confused. “There’s not much you can do in a parking lot, especially if you want to play video games. You could play on your phone, I guess, but … ”

  “Tell us about other times you saw Richard when you weren’t in the Quik N EZ,” Ms. Washburn suggested.

  “Oh. That was the only time.”

  “What kind of game system does Richard own?” I asked. I was forming a theory and thought the information might help develop it.

  “Um, I don’t know,” Tyler said. His hands started moving on the arms of the chair again. “He wanted to come see mine.”

  “Do you live alone, Tyler?” Ms. Washburn asked. I assumed this was an avenue to another question, because I doubted Tyler could live on his own. I live in the house where I grew up, where my mother lives, but I could get a separate apartment if I wanted to. I was not as certain that Tyler could manage it.

  Tyler’s eyes widened a little and didn’t roll, but they did dart from side to side, as if he were looking for an escape route. “No,” he mumbled. The more uncomfortable the question seemed to be, the less audible Tyler’s speech became.

  He did not elaborate, so I asked, “Who lives with you?”

  I prepared myself for a very soft response, and that was what Tyler offered. “Mason.”

  That did not help very much.

  “Who is Mason?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  “My brother.” Tyler started to chew on his lower lip.

  “Did Mason drop you off here?” Ms. Washburn asked. She very casually hit a key on her keyboard and I heard the printer, on a table behind her, begin to operate.

  Tyler was looking at a point very near the ceiling. “The first Grand Theft Auto was released by DMA Design in 1997,” he offered. “There have been eleven stand-alone games and four expansion packs in the series so far.”

  It is not unusual among those with Asperger’s Syndrome or an autism spectrum personality to have a very strong special interest, and it is equally common in that group to speak only about that topic to the exclusion of all others. My own interests, in criminal justice, the New York Yankees, and the Beatles, are subjects I prefer to discuss ahead of most other things, but I have learned that “neurotypical” people tend to become bored when conversing about only one subject, particularly when it is not one of their own choosing. Why they would not want to hear about the history of the New York Yankees or the recording sessions that produced the music of the Beatles is a mystery to me, but observation has confirmed that it is true.

  But when Tyler shifted his topic back to that which he found most comfortable, it was hard not to conclude he did so because he desperately did not want to discuss his brother Mason at all.

  Ms. Washburn, however, either had not realized this or was determined to press on under any circumstances. As she stood up to retrieve the document in the printer, she asked, “Is there a way we can contact Mason?”

  “Nnnnnnnnnnn … ”

  Tyler had reverted to his least communicative state. His head was back on the chair and he would have been staring directly at the ceiling of the Questions Answered office if his eyes had been open. His arms were not flapping, but only because he had clasped his hands together and was holding them motionless with such force that his knuckles were white and his fingers were beet red.

  I was not capable at that moment of placating our new client. His behavior, in fact, was making me anxious enough that I felt my own hands start to move nervously, my fingers flexing as if I were playing an invisible piano. I was not so upset that I was in danger of what Mother calls a “meltdown,” but it was difficult for me to focus on the question at hand.

  I began to mentally concoct an all-time New York Yankees lineup, which was difficult because only nine players from over a hundred years of teams could be included. Surely Babe Ruth would be included, but he would not bat first. Who would be the right leadoff hitter?

  “Tyler,” I heard Ms. Washburn say, “in order to answer your question, we will need you to fill out this client intake form.” This surprised me, as I knew we had such a form on file and did not understand why Ms. Washburn had felt the need to type a new one.

  But her action had the effect she must have intended: Tyler’s eyes focused, his hands stopped moving, and he took the form, which Ms. Washburn had mounted on a clipboard. Ms. Washburn gave Tyler a ballpoin
t pen and he immediately set to work on the form.

  The action appeared to calm him; Tyler was being asked questions about himself and responding, and the medium was a cleverly chosen one. Tyler had the control over the pace and style of his answers. He worked for eleven minutes quite happily at the one-page form Ms. Washburn had composed.

  When he had completed it, he handed the clipboard back to Ms. Washburn. “Is that all I need to do?” he asked.

  I was about to mention his paying half the fee in advance, as is the standard procedure at Questions Answered, but Ms. Washburn said, “Yes, that’s all for now,” before I could bring it up. “Do you have a way to get home?”

  Tyler looked embarrassed and shook his head from side to side, but not as a negative. He was clearly just working off the energy that his emotion was generating. “I can call my sister,” he said. He reached into his pocket and produced a cellular telephone.

  It occurred to me that at a younger age than I, and with more difficulties related to his place on the autism spectrum, Tyler Clayton had obtained a cellular phone long before I had. It was a slight source of embarrassment, but I decided not to concentrate on it.

  Before Tyler could dial his phone, however, the front door opened and a woman of approximately thirty-two walked in. She had very curly hair and large brown eyes. “Tyler?” she said as soon as she entered. “I think it’s about time to go.”

  The woman walked toward Tyler and Ms. Washburn, who were standing at the center of the room. I stood and approached from my desk. “Sandy,” Tyler said, “I was just calling you.”

  Ms. Washburn extended a hand. “Are you Tyler’s sister?” she asked.

  The woman we now knew as Sandy nodded. “Sandy Clayton Webb,” she said, taking Ms. Washburn’s hand. “I hope he hasn’t bothered the two of you too much.”

  “He hasn’t bothered us at all,” Ms. Washburn said. I would have disagreed, but felt that would have been seen as an insult. “I’m Janet Washburn and this is Samuel Hoenig. Tyler has asked us to answer a question for him.”