Chapter Twelve

The others arrive in a bunch, within just a couple of minutes. We move to the backyard, then stretch and put on our gear and start fencing. Marjory sits with me between bouts. I am happy when she sits next to me. I would like to touch her hair, but I do not.

We do not talk much. I do not know what to say. She asks if I got the windshield fixed, and I say yes. I watch her fence with Lucia; she is taller than Lucia, but Lucia is the better fencer. Marjory’s brown hair bounces when she moves; Lucia wears her light hair in a ponytail. They both wear white fencing jackets tonight; soon Marjory’s has little brown smudges where Lucia has scored hits.

I am still thinking about Marjory when I fence with Tom. I am seeing Marjory’s pattern, and not Tom’s, and he kills me quickly twice.

“You’re not paying attention,” he says to me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. My eyes slide to Marjory.

Tom sighs. “I know you’ve got a lot on your mind, Lou, but one reason to do this is to get a break from it.”

“Yes… I’m sorry.” I drag my eyes back and focus on Tom and his blade. When I concentrate, I can see his pattern—a long and complicated one—and now I can parry his attacks. Low, high, high, low, reverse, low, high, low, low, reverse… he’s throwing a reverse shot every fifth and varying the setup to it. Now I can prepare for the reverse, pivoting and then making a quick diagonal step: attack obliquely, one of the old masters says, never directly. It is like chess in that way, with the knight and bishop attacking at an angle. At last I set up the series I like best and get a solid hit.

“Wow!” Tom says. “I thought I’d managed real randomness—”

“Every fifth is a reverse,” I say.

“Damn,” Tom said. “Let’s try that again—”

This time he doesn’t reverse for nine shots, the next time seven—I notice he’s always using a reverse attack on the odd numbers. I test that through longer series, just waiting. Sure enough… nine, seven, five, then back to seven. That’s when I step past on the diagonal and get him again.

“That wasn’t five,” he says. He sounds breathless.

“No… but it was an odd number,” I say.

“I can’t think fast enough,” Tom says. “I can’t fence and think. How do you do it?”

“You move, but the pattern doesn’t,” I say. “The pattern—when I see it—is still. So it is easier to hold in mind because it doesn’t wiggle around.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Tom says. “So—how do you plan your own attacks? So they aren’t patterned?”

“They are,” I say. “But I can shift from one pattern to another…” I can tell this is not getting across to him and try to think of another way of saying it. “When you drive somewhere, there are many possible routes… many patterns you might choose. If you start off on one and a road you would use for that pattern is blocked, you take another and get onto one of your other patterns, don’t you?”

“You see routes as patterns?” Lucia says. “I see them as strings—and I have real trouble shifting from one to another unless the connection is within a block.”

“I get completely lost,” Susan says. “Mass transit’s a real boon to me—I just read the sign and get on. In the old days, if I’d had to drive everywhere, I’d have been late all the time.”

“So, you can hold different fencing patterns in your head and just… jump or something… from one to another?”

“But mostly I’m reacting to the opponent’s attacks while I analyze the pattern,” I say.

“That would explain a lot about your learning style when you started fencing,” Lucia says. She looks happy. I do not understand why that would make her happy. “Those first bouts, you did not have time to learn the pattern—and you were not skilled enough to think and fence both, right?”

“I… it’s hard to remember,” I say. I am uncomfortable with this, with other people picking apart how my brain works. Or doesn’t work.

“It doesn’t matter—you’re a good fencer now—but people do learn differently.”

The rest of the evening goes by quickly. I fence with several of the others; in between I sit beside Marjory if she is not fencing. I listen for noise from the street but hear nothing. Sometimes cars drive by, but they sound normal, at least from the backyard. When I go out to my car, the windshield is not broken and the tires are not flat. The absence of damage was there before the damage occurred—if someone came to damage my car, the damage would be subsequent… very much like dark and light. The dark is there first, and then comes light.

“Did the police ever get back to you about the windshield?” Tom asks. We are all out in the front yard together.

“No,” I say. I do not want to think about the police tonight. Marjory is next to me and I can smell her hair.

“Did you think who might have done it?” he asks.

“No,” I say. I do not want to think about that, either, not with Marjory beside me.

“Lou—” He scratches his head. “You need to think about it. How likely is it that your car was vandalized twice in a row, on fencing night, by strangers?”

“It was not anyone in our group,” I say. “You are my friends.”

Tom looks down, then back at my face. “Lou, I think you need to consider—” My ears do not want to hear what he will say next.

“Here you are,” Lucia says, interrupting. Interrupting is rude, but I am glad she interrupts. She has brought the book with her. She hands it to me when I have put my duffel back in the trunk. “Let me know how you get on with it.”

In the light from the street lamp on the corner the book’s cover is a dull gray. It feels pebbly under my fingers.

“What are you reading, Lou?” Marjory asks. My stomach tightens. I do not want to talk about the research with Marjory. I do not want to find out that she already knows about it.

“Cego and Clinton,” Lucia says, as if that is a title.

“Wow,” Marjory says. “Good for you, Lou.”

I do not understand. Does she know the book just from its authors? Did they write only one book? And why does she say the book is good for me? Or did she mean “good for you” as praise? I do not understand that meaning, either. I feel trapped in this whirlpool of questions, not-knowing swirling around me, drowning me.

Light speeds toward me from the distant specks, the oldest light taking longest to arrive.

I drive home carefully, even more aware than usual of the pools and streams of light washing over me from street lamps and lighted signs. In and out of the fast dark—and it does feel faster in the dark.

Tom shook his head as lou drove away. “I don’t know—” he said, and paused.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Lucia asked.

“It’s the only real possibility,” Tom said. “I don’t like to think it, it’s hard to believe Don could be capable of anything this serious, but… who else could it be? He would know Lou’s name; he could find out his address; he certainly knows when fencing practice is and what Lou’s car looks like.”

“You didn’t tell the police,” Lucia said.

“No. I thought Lou would figure it out, and it’s his car, after all. I felt I shouldn’t horn in. But now… I wish I’d gone on and told Lou flat out to beware of Don. He still thinks of him as a friend.”

“I know.” Lucia shook her head. “He’s so—well, I don’t know if it’s really loyalty or just habit. Once a friend, always a friend? Besides—”

“It might not be Don. I know. He’s been a nuisance and a jerk at times, but he’s never done anything violent before. And nothing happened tonight.”

“The night’s not over,” Lucia said. “If we hear about anything else, we have to tell the police. For Lou’s sake.”

“You’re right, of course.” Tom yawned. “Let’s just hope nothing happens and it’s random coincidence.”

At the apartment, I carry the book and my duffel upstairs. I hear no sound from Danny’s apartment as I go past it. I put my fencing jacket in the dirty-clothes basket and take the book to my desk. In the light of the desk lamp, the cover is light blue, not gray.

I open it. Without Lucia to prompt me to skip them, I read all the pages carefully. On the page headed “Dedications,” Betsy R. Cego has put: “For Jerry and Bob, with thanks,” and Malcolm R. Clinton has put: “To my beloved wife, Celia, and in memory of my father, George.” The foreword, written by Peter J. Bartleman, M.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, includes the information that Betsy R. Cego’s R. stands for Rodham and Malcom R. Clinton’s R. stands for Richard, so the R. probably has nothing to do with their coauthorship. Peter J. Bartleman says the book is the most important compilation, of the current state of knowledge on brain function. I do not know why he wrote the foreword.

The preface answers that question. Peter J. Bartleman taught Betsy R. Cego when she was in medical school and awakened a lifelong interest in and commitment to the study of brain function. The phrasing seems awkward to me. The preface explains what the book is about, why the authors wrote it, and then thanks a lot of people and companies for their help. I am surprised to find the name of the company I work for in that list. They provided assistance with computational methods.

Computational methods are what our division develops. I look again at the copyright date. When this book was written I was not yet working there.

I wonder if any of those old programs are still around.

I turn to the glossary in back and read quickly through the definitions. I know about half of them now. When I turn to the first chapter, a review of brain structure, it makes sense. The cerebellum, amygdala, hippocampus, cerebrum… diagrammed in several ways, sectioned top to bottom and front to back and side to side. I have never seen a diagram that showed the functions of the different areas, though, and I look at it closely. I wonder why the main language center is in the left brain when there is a perfectly good auditory processing area in the right brain. Why specialize like that? I wonder if sounds coming into one ear are heard more as language than sounds coming in the other ear. The tiers of visual processing are just as hard to understand.

It is on the last page of that chapter that I find a sentence so overwhelming that I have to stop and stare at it: “Essentially, physiological functions aside, the human brain exists to analyze and generate patterns.”

My breath catches in my chest; I feel cold, then hot. That is what I do. If that is the essential function of the human brain, then I am not a freak, but normal.

This cannot be. Everything I know tells me that I am the different one, the deficient one. I read the sentence again and again, trying to make it fit with what I know.

Finally, I read past it to the rest of the paragraph: “The pattern-analysis or pattern-making may be flawed, as with some mental diseases, resulting in mistaken analysis or patterns generated on the basis of erroneous ‘data,’ but even in the most severe cognitive failure, these two activities are characteristic of the human brain—and indeed, of brains much less sophisticated than human ones. Readers interested in these functions in nonhumans should consult references below.”

So perhaps I am normal and freakish… normal in seeing and making patterns, but perhaps I make the wrong patterns?

I read on, and when I finally stop, feeling shaky and exhausted, it is almost three in the morning. I have reached chapter 6, “Computational Assessments of Visual Processing.”

I am changing already. A few months ago, I did not know that I loved Marjory. I did not know I could fence in a tournament with strangers. I did not know I could learn biology and chemistry the way I have been. I did not know I could change this much.

One of the people at the rehab center where I spent so many hours as a child used to say that disabilities were God’s way of giving people a chance to show their faith. My mother would pinch her lips together, but she did not argue. Some government program at that time funneled money through churches to provide rehab services, and that was what my parents could afford. My mother was afraid that if she argued, they might kick me out of the program. Or at least she’d have to listen to more of the sermonizing.

I do not understand God that way. I do not think God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that, my mother said. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder. I think this is true even for normal children. I have watched little children learning to walk; they all struggle and fall down many times. Their faces show that it is not easy. It would be stupid to tie bricks on them to make it harder. If that is true for learning to walk, then I think it is true for other growing and learning as well.

God is supposed to be the good parent, the Father. So I think God would not make things harder than they are. I do not think I am autistic because God thought my parents needed a challenge or I needed a challenge. I think it is like if I were a baby and a rock fell on me and broke my leg. Whatever caused it was an accident. God did not prevent the accident, but He did not cause it, either.

Accidents happen to people; my mother’s friend Celia said most accidents weren’t really accidents, they were caused by someone doing something stupid, but the person who gets hurt isn’t always the one who did something stupid. I think my autism was an accident, but what I do with it is me. That is what my mother said.

That is what I think most of the time. Sometimes I am not sure.

It is a gray morning, with low clouds. The slow light has not yet chased all the darkness away. I pack my lunch. I pick up Cego and Clinton and go downstairs. I can read during my lunch break.

My tires are all still full. My new windshield is unbroken. Perhaps the person who is not my friend is tired of hurting my car. I unlock the car, put my lunch and the book on the passenger seat, and get in. The morning music I like for driving is playing in my head.

When I turn the key, nothing happens. The car will not start. There is no sound but the little click of the turning key. I know what that means. My battery is dead.

The music in my head falters. My battery was not dead last night. The charge level indicator was normal last night.

I get out and unlatch the hood of the car. When I lift the hood, something jumps out at me; I stagger back and almost fall over the curb.

It is a child’s toy, a jack-in-the-box. It is sitting where the battery should be. The battery is gone.

I will be late for work. Mr. Crenshaw will be angry. I close the hood over the engine without touching the toy. I did not like jack-in-the-box toys when I was a child. I must call the police, the insurance company, the whole dreary list. I look at my watch. If I hurry to the transit stop, I can catch a commuter train to work and I will not be late.

I take the lunch sack and the book from the passenger seat, relock the car, and walk quickly to the transit stop. I have the cards of the police officers in my wallet. I can call them from work.

On the crowded train, people stare past one another without making eye contact. They are not all autistic; they know somehow that it is appropriate not to make eye contact on the train. Some read news faxes. Some stare at the monitor at the end of the car. I open the book and read what Cego and Clinton said about how the brain processes visual signals. At the time they wrote, industrial robots could use only simple visible input to guide movement. Binocular vision in robots hadn’t been developed yet except for the laser targeting of large weapons.

I am fascinated by the feedback loops between the layers of visual processing; I had not realized that something this interesting went on inside normal people’s heads. I thought they just looked at things and recognized them automatically. I thought my visual processing was faulty when—if I understand this correctly—it is only slow.

When I get to the campus stop, I now know which way to go, and it takes less time to walk to our building. I am three minutes and twenty seconds early. Mr. Crenshaw is in the hall again, but he does not speak to me; he moves aside without speaking, so that I can get to my office. I say, “Good morning, Mr. Crenshaw,” because that is appropriate, and he grunts something that might have been, “Morning.” If he had had my speech therapist, he would enunciate more clearly.