Chapter Sixteen

“I’m sorry,” Lucia says; she has come outside with her gear and sits beside me on my right. “I should not have blown up like that.”

“I am not upset,” I say. I am not, now that I know she knows what was wrong and is not doing it.

“Good. Look… I know that you like Marjory and she likes you. Don’t let this mess with Don ruin it for you, okay?”

“I do not know if Marjory likes me in a special way,” I say. “Don said she does, but she has not said she does.”

“I know. It’s difficult. Grownups are not as direct as preschoolers and make a lot of trouble for themselves that way.”

Marjory comes out of the house, zipping up her fencing jacket. She grins at me or at Lucia—I am not sure of the direction of her grin—as the zipper jams. “I have been eating too many doughnuts,” she says. “Or not walking enough or something.”

“Here—” Lucia holds out her hand, and Marjory comes over so that Lucia can unjam the zipper and help her. I did not know that holding out a hand was a signal for offering help. I thought holding out a hand was a signal for asking help. Maybe it only goes with “here.”

“Do you want to fence, Lou?” Marjory asks me.

“Yes,” I say. I can feel my face getting hot. I put my mask on and pick up my

“Sure,” Marjory says. She puts her mask on and I cannot see her face, only the gleam of her eyes and her teeth when she speaks. I can see the shape of her under the fencing jacket, though. I would like to touch that shape, but that is not appropriate. Only boyfriends with their girlfriends.

Marjory salutes. She has a simpler pattern than Tom’s and I could make a touch, but then it would be over. I parry, thrust short, parry again. When our blades touch, I can feel her hand through the connection; we are touching without touching. She circles, reverses, moves back and forth, and I move with her. It is like some kinds of dance, a pattern of movement, except for not having music. I sort through the music I remember, trying to find the right music for this dance. It gives me a strange feeling to match my pattern to hers, not to defeat her but just to feel that connection, that touch-and-touch of blades to hands and back.

Paganini. The First Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 6, the third movement. It is not exactly right, but it is closer than anything else I can think of. Stately but quick, with the little breaks where Marjory does not keep an exact rhythm changing directions. In my mind, I speed up or slow the music to stay with our movements.

I wonder what Marjory hears. I wonder if she can hear the music I hear. If we were both thinking of the same music, would we hear it the same way? Would we be in phase or out? I hear the sounds as color on dark; she might hear the sounds as dark lines on light, as music is printed.

If we put the two together, would they cancel out sight, dark on light and light on dark? Or…

Marjory’s touch breaks the chain of thought. “Good,” I say, and step back. She nods, and we salute again.

I read something once where thinking was described as light and not thinking as dark. I am thinking about other things while we fence, and Marjory was faster to make a touch than I was. So if she is not thinking about other things, did this not-thinking make her faster, and is that dark faster than the light of my not-thinking?

I do not know what the speed of thought is. I do not know if the speed of thought is the same for everyone. Is it thinking faster or thinking further that makes different thinking different?

The violin rises up in a spiraling pattern and Marjory’s pattern falls apart and I sweep forward in the dance that is now a solo dance and make my touch on her.

“Good,” she says, and steps back. Her body is moving with the deep breaths she’s taking. “You wore me out, Lou; that was a long one.”

“How about me?” Simon says. I would like to be with Marjory more, but I liked fencing Simon before and want to do that, too.

This time the music starts when we do, different music. Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy … perfect for the feline prowl that is Simon circling me, looking for an opening, and for my intense concentration. I never thought I could dance before—it was a social thing, and I always got stiff and clumsy. Now—with a blade in hand—it feels right to move to the internal music.

Simon is better than I am, but it does not bother me. I am eager to see what he can do, what I can do. He gets a touch, another one, but then I get another one on him. “Best of five?” he asks. I nod, breathless. This time neither of us gets a touch right away; this time we fight on and on, until I finally make another touch, more by luck than skill. We are even now. The others are quiet, watching. I can feel their interest, a warm space on my back as I circle. Forward, sideways, around, back. Simon knows and counters every move I make; I am just able to counter his. Finally he does something I do not even see—his blade reappears just where I thought I had parried it away, and he gets the final touch of the match.

I am dripping with sweat even though it is a cool night. I am sure I smell bad, and I am surprised when Marjory comes up to me and touches my arm.

“That was gorgeous, Lou,” she says. I take off my mask. Her eyes are gleaming; the smile on her face goes all the way to her hair.

“I am sweaty,” I say.

“So you should be, after that,” she says. “Wow again. I didn’t know you could fence like that.”

“Neither did I,” I say.

“Now that we know,” Tom said, “we’ve got to get you to more tournaments. What do you think, Simon?”

“He’s more than ready. The top fencers in the state can take him, but once he gets over tournament nerves, they’ll have to work at it.”

“So, would you like to come with us to another tournament, Lou?” Tom asks.

I feel cold all the way through. I think they mean to do something nice for me, but Don got mad at me because of the tournament. What if someone gets mad at me every tournament and because of me one after another have to have a PDD chip?

“It is all day Saturday,” I say.

“Yes, and sometimes all day Sunday as well,” Lucia says. “Is that a problem?”

“It—I go to church on Sunday,” I say.

Marjory looks at me. “I didn’t know you went to church, Lou,” she says. “Well, you could just go on Saturday… What’s the problem with Saturdays, Lou?”

I have no answer ready. I do not think they will understand if I tell them about Don. They are all looking at me, and I feel myself folding together inside. I do not want them to be angry.

“The next tournament nearby is after Thanksgiving,” Simon says. “No need to decide tonight.” He is looking at me curiously. “Are you worried about someone not counting hits again, Lou?”

“No…” I feel my throat closing up. I close my eyes to steady myself. “It is Don,” I say. “He was angry at the tournament. I think that is why he… got so upset. I do not want that to happen to anyone else.”

“It is not your fault,” Lucia says. But she sounds angry. This is what happens, I think. People get angry about me even when they are not angry with me. It does not have to be my fault for me to cause it.

“I see your point,” Marjory says. “You don’t want to make trouble, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“And you cannot be sure that no one will be angry with you.”

“Yes.”

“But—Lou—people get mad at other people for no reason, too. Don was angry with Tom. Other people may have been angry with Simon; I know people have been angry with me. That just happens. As long as people aren’t doing anything wrong, they can’t stop and think all the time if it is making someone else angry.”

“Maybe it does not bother you as much,” I say.

She gives me a look that I can tell is supposed to mean something, but I cannot tell what. Would I know if I were normal? How do normal people learn what these looks mean?

“Maybe it doesn’t,” she says. “I used to think it was always my fault. I used to worry about it more. But that is—” She pauses and I can tell she is searching for a polite word. I know that because so often I am slow speaking when I am searching for a polite word. “It is hard to know how much to worry about it,” she says finally.

“Yes,” I say.

“People who want you to think everything is your fault are the problem,” Lucia says. “They always blame other people for their feelings, especially anger.”

“But some anger is justified,” Marjory says. “I don’t mean with Lou and Don; Lou didn’t do anything wrong. That was all Don’s jealousy getting the better of him. But I see what Lou means, that he doesn’t want to be the cause of someone else’s getting in trouble.”

“He won’t,” Lucia says. “He’s not the type.” She gives me a look, a different look than Marjory gave me. I am not sure what this look means, either.

“Lucia, why don’t you fight Simon,” Tom says. Everyone stops and looks at him.

Lucia’s mouth is a little open. Then she closes it with a little snap. “Fine,” she says. “It’s been a long time. Simon?”

“My pleasure,” he says, smiling.

I watch Lucia and Simon. He is better than she is, but he is not making as many points as he could. I can tell that he is fighting at the edge of her level, not using everything he could. That is very polite. I am aware of Marjory beside me, of the smell of the dry leaves that have drifted against the stone edging, of the chilly breeze on the back of my neck. It feels good.

By nine it is more than chilly; it is cold. We all go inside, and Lucia fixes a kettle of hot chocolate. It is the first time this year. The others are all talking; I sit with my back against the green leather hassock and try to listen while I watch Marjory. She uses her hands a lot when she talks. A couple of times, she flaps them in the way that I was told was a sign of autism. I have seen other people do that, too, and always wondered if they were autistic or partly autistic.

They are talking about tournaments now—ones they remember from the past, who won and who lost and who was the referee and how people behaved. Nobody mentions Don. I lose track of the names; I do not know the people. I cannot understand why “Bart is such a toad” from what they say about Bart, and I am sure they do not mean that Bart is actually an amphibian with warty skin, any more than Don was an actual heel. My gaze shifts from Marjory to Simon to Tom to Lucia to Max to Susan and back, trying to keep up with who is speaking when, but I cannot anticipate when one is going to stop and another is going to start, or which. Sometimes there is a break of two or three seconds between speakers, and sometimes one starts while another is still talking.

It is fascinating, in its way. It is like watching almost-patterns in a chaotic system. Like watching molecules break apart and re-form as a solutions balance shifts this way and that. I keep feeling that I almost understand it, and then something happens I did not anticipate. I do not know how they can participate and keep track of it at the same time.

Gradually I am able to notice that everyone pauses if Simon speaks and lets him into the conversation. He does not interrupt often, but no one interrupts him. One of my teachers said that the person who is speaking indicates who he expects to speak next by glancing at them. At that time I usually could not tell where someone was looking unless they looked there a long time. Now I can follow most glances. Simon glances at different people. Max and Susan always glance first at Simon, giving him priority. Tom glances at Simon about half the time. Lucia glances at Simon about a third of the time. Simon does not always speak again when someone glances at him; that person then glances at someone else.

But it is so fast: how can they see it all? And why does Tom glance at Simon some of the time and not the rest of the time? What tells him when to glance at Simon?

I realize that Marjory is watching me and feel my face and neck go hot. The voices of the others blur; my vision clouds. I want to hide in the shadows, but there are no shadows. I look down. I listen for her voice, but she is not talking much.

Then they start on equipment: steel blades versus composites, old steel versus new steel. Everyone seems to prefer steel, but Simon talks about a recent formal match he saw in which composite blades had a chip in the grip to emit a steel-like sound when the blades touched. It was weird, he says.

Then he says he has to go and stands up. Tom stands up, too, and Max. I stand up. Simon shakes Tom’s hand and says, “It was fun—thanks for the invitation.”

Tom says, “Anytime.”

Max puts out his hand and says, “Thanks for coming; it was an honor.”

Simon shakes his hand and says, “Anytime.”

I do not know whether to put out my hand or not, but Simon quickly offers his so I shake it even though I do not like to shake hands—it seems so pointless—and then he says, “Thanks, Lou; I enjoyed it.”

“Anytime,” I say. There is a moment’s tension in the room, and I am worried that I said something inappropriate—even though I was copying Tom and Max—and then Simon taps my arm with his finger.

“I hope you change your mind about tournaments,” he says. “It was a pleasure.”

“Thank you,” I say.

While Simon goes out the door, Max says, “I have to leave, too,” and Susan uncoils from the floor. It is time to leave. I look around; all the faces look friendly, but I thought Don’s face looked friendly. If one of them is angry with me, how would I know?

On Thursday we have the first of the medical briefings where we have been able to ask the doctors questions. There are two doctors, Dr. Ransome, with the curly gray hair, and Dr. Handsel, who has straight dark hair that looks as if it had been glued onto his head.

“It is reversible?” Linda asks.

“Well… no. Whatever it does, it does.”

“So if we don’t like it, we can’t go back to being our normal selves?”

Our selves are not normal to start with, but I do not say that aloud. Linda knows it as well as I do. She is making a joke.

“Er… no, you can’t. Probably. But I don’t see why—”

“I’d want to?” Cameron says. His face is tense. “I like who I am now. I do not know if I will like who I become.”

“It shouldn’t be that different,” Dr. Ransome says.

But every difference is a difference. I am not the same person as before Don began to stalk me. Not only what he did but meeting those police officers has changed me. I know about something I didn’t know before, and knowledge changes people. I raise my hand.

“Yes, Lou,” Dr. Ransome says.

“I do not understand how it can not change us,” I say. “If it normalizes our sensory processing, that will change the rate and kind of data input, and that will change our perceptions, and our processing—”

“Yes, but you—your personality—will be the same, or much the same. You will like the same things; you will react the same—”

“Then what’s the change for?” Linda asks. She sounds angry; I know she is more worried than angry. “They tell us they want us to change, to not need the supports we need—but if we do not need them, then that means our likes and dislikes have changed… doesn’t it?”

“I’ve spent so much time learning to tolerate overload,” Dale says. “What if that means I suddenly don’t pick up on things I should?” His left eye flickers, ticcing wildly.

“We don’t think any of that will happen,” the doctor says again. “The primatologists found only positive changes in social interaction—”

“I’m not a fucking chimp!” Dale slams his hand down on the table. For a moment his left eye stays open; then it starts ticcing again.

The doctor looks shocked. Why should he be surprised that Dale is upset? Would he like to have his behavior presumed on the basis of a primatologist’s studies of chimpanzees? Or is this something normals do? Do they see themselves as just like other primates? I can’t believe that.

“No one’s suggesting you are,” the doctor says, in a slightly disapproving voice. “It’s just that… they’re the best model we have. And they had recognizable personalities after treatment, with only the social deficits changed…”

All the chimps in the world now live in protected environments, zoos, or research establishments. Once they lived wild, in the forests of Africa. I wonder if the autistic-like chimpanzees would have been that way in the wild or if the stress of living as prisoners has changed them.

A slide lights up the screen. “This is the normal brain’s activity pattern when picking a known face from a photograph of several faces,” he says. There is a gray outline of a brain, with little glowing green spots. Thanks to my reading, I recognize some of the locations… no, I recognize the slide. It is illustration 16-43.d, from chapter 16 of Brain Functionality. “And here—” The slide changes. “This is the autistic brain’s activity pattern during the same task.” Another gray outline with little glowing green spots. Illustration 16-43.C from the same chapter.

I try to remember the captions in the book. I do not think that the text said the first was normal brain activity when picking a known face from a photographed group. I think it was normal brain activity when viewing a familiar face. A composite of… yes, I remember. Nine healthy male volunteers recruited from college students according to a protocol approved by the human ethics research committee…

Another slide is already showing. Another gray outline, another set of colored splotches, these blue. The doctor’s voice drones on. This is another slide I recognize. I struggle to remember what the book said and hear what he is saying, but I cannot. The words are tangling.

I raise my hand. He stops and says, “Yes, Lou?”

“Can we have a copy of this, to look at later? It is hard to take in all at once.”

He frowns. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Lou. This is still proprietary—very confidential. If you want to know more, you can ask me or your counselor questions and you can look at the slides again, though”—he chuckles—“I don’t think they’ll mean much since you’re not a neurologist.”

“I’ve read some,” I say.

“Really…” His voice softens to a drawl. “What have you read, Lou?”

“Some books,” I say. Suddenly I do not want to tell him what book I have been reading, and I do not know why.

“About the brain?” he asks.

“Yes—I wanted to understand how it worked before you did anything with the treatment.”

“And… did you understand it?”

“It’s very complicated,” I say. “Like a parallel-processing computer, only more so.”

“You’re right; it’s very complicated,” he says. He sounds satisfied. I think he is glad I did not say I understood it. I wonder what he would say if I told him that I recognize those illustrations.

Cameron and Dale are looking at me. Even Bailey gives me a quick glance and looks away. They want to know what I know. I do not know if I should tell them, partly because I do not yet know what I know—what it means in this context.

I put aside thoughts of the book and just listen, meanwhile memorizing the slides as they come and go. I do not take in information as well this way—none of us do—but I think I can retain enough to compare it to the book later.

Eventually the slides change from gray outlines of brains with colored spots to molecules. I do not recognize them; they are not anything in the organic chemistry book. But I do recognize a hydroxy group here, an amino group there.

“This enzyme regulates gene expression of neural growth factor eleven,” the doctor says. “In normal brains, this is part of a feedback loop that interacts with attention control mechanisms to build in preferential processing of socially important signals—that’s one of the things you people have a problem with.”

He has given up any pretense that we are anything but cases.

“It’s also part of the treatment package for autistic newborns, those who weren’t identified and treated in utero, or for the children who suffer certain childhood infections that interfere with normal brain development. What our new treatment does is modify it—because it functions like this only in the first three years of development—so that it can affect the neural growth of the adult brain.“

“So—it makes us pay attention to other people?” Linda asks.

“No, no—we know you already do that. We’re not like those idiots back in the mid-twentieth century who thought autistics were just ignoring people. What it does is help you attend to social signals–facial expression, vocal tone, gesture, that kind of thing.”

Dale makes a rude gesture; the doctor does not attend to it. I wonder if he really did not see or he chose to ignore it.

“But don’t people have to be trained—like blind people were—to interpret new data?”

“Of course. That’s why there’s a training phase built into the treatment. Simulated social encounters, using computer-generated faces—” Another slide, this one of a chimpanzee with its upper lip curled and its lower lip pouted out. We all break into roars of laughter, uncontrollable. The doctor flushes angrily. “Sorry—that’s the wrong slide. Of course it’s the wrong slide. Human faces, I mean, and practice in human social interactions. We’ll do a baseline assessment and then you’ll have two to four months of post-treatment training—”

“Looking at monkey faces!” Linda says, laughing so hard she’s almost crying. We are all giggling.

“I said it was a mistake,” the doctor says. “We have trained psychotherapists to lead the intervention… It’s a serious matter.”

The chimpanzee’s face has been replaced by a picture of a group of people sitting in a circle; one is talking and the others are listening intently. Another slide, this time of someone in a clothing store talking to a salesperson. Another, of a busy office with someone on a phone. It all looks very normal and very boring. He does not show a picture of someone in a fencing tournament or someone talking to the police after a mugging in a parking lot. The only picture with a policeman in it could be titled Asking Directions. The policeman, with a stiff smile on his face, has one arm outstretched, pointing; the other person has a funny hat, a little backpack, and a book that says Tourist Guidebook on the cover.

It looks posed. All the pictures look posed, and the people may not even be real people. They could be—probably are—computer composites. We are supposed to become normal, real people, but they expect us to learn from these unreal, imaginary people in contrived, posed situations. The doctor and his associates assume they know the situations we deal with or will need to deal with and they will teach us how to deal with those. It reminds me of those therapists in the last century who thought they knew what words someone needed to know and taught an “essential” vocabulary. Some of them even told parents not to let children learn other words, lest it impede their learning of the essential vocabulary.

Such people do not know what they do not know. My mother used to recite a little verse that I did not understand until I was almost twelve, and one line of it went: “Those who know not, and know not they know not, are fools…” The doctor does not know that I needed to be able to deal with the man at the tournament who would not call hits and the jealous would-be lover in the fencing group and the various police officers who took reports on vandalism and threats.

Now the doctor is talking about the generalization of social skills. He says that after the treatment and training our social skills should generalize to all situations in everyday life. I wonder what he would have thought of Don’s social skills.

I glance at the clock. The seconds flick over, one after another; the two hours are nearly done. The doctor asks if there are any questions. I look down. The questions I want to ask are not appropriate in a meeting like this, and I do not think he will answer them anyway.

“When do you think you would start?” Cameron asks.

“We would like to start with the first subject—uh, patient—as soon as possible. We could have everything in place by next week.”

“How many at once?” asks Bailey.

“Two. We would like to do two at a time, three days apart—this ensures that the primary medical team can concentrate on those during the first few critical days.”

“What about waiting after the first two until they complete treatment to see if it works?” Bailey asks.

The doctor shakes his head. “No, it’s better to have the whole cohort close in time.”

“Makes it faster to publication,” I hear myself say.

“What?” the doctor asks.

The others are looking at me. I look at my lap.

“If we all do it fairly quickly and together, then you can write it up and get it published faster. Otherwise it would be a year or more.” I glance quickly at his face; his cheeks are red and shiny again.

“That’s not the reason,” he says, a little loudly. “It’s just that the data are more comparable if the subjects—if you—are all close in time. I mean, suppose something happened that changed things between the time the first two started and finished… something that affected the rest of you—”

“Like what, a bolt from the blue that makes us normal?” Dale asks. “You’re afraid we’ll get galloping normality and be unsuitable subjects?”

“No, no,” the doctor says. “More like something political that changes attitudes…”

I wonder what the government is thinking. Do governments think? The chapter in Brain Functionality on the politics of research protocols comes to mind. Is something about to happen, some regulation or change in policy, which would make this research impossible in a few months?

That is something I can find out when I get home. If I ask this man, I do not think he will give me an honest answer.

When we leave, we walk at angles, all out of rhythm with one another. We used to have a way of merging, accommodating one another’s peculiarities, so that we moved as a group. Now we move without harmony. I can sense the confusion, the anger. No one talks. I do not talk. I do not want to talk with them, who have been my closest associates for so long.

When we are back in our own building, we go quickly into our individual offices. I sit down and start to reach for the fan. I stop myself, and then I wonder why I stopped myself.

I do not want to work. I want to think about what it is they want to do to my brain and think about what it means. It means more than they say; everything they say means more than it says. Beyond the words is the tone; beyond the tone is the context; beyond the context is the unexplored territory of normal socialization, vast and dark as night, lit by the few pinpricks of similar experience, like stars.

Starlight, one writer said, perfuses the entire universe: the whole thing glows. The dark is an illusion, that writer said. If that is so, then Lucia was right and there is no speed of dark.

But there is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias. So I think there may be positive darkness, and I think dark can have a speed.

The books tell me that my brain works very well, even as it is, and that it is much easier to derange the functions of the brain than to repair them. If normal people really can do all the things that are claimed for them, it would be helpful to have that ability… but I am not sure they do.

They do not always understand why other people act as they do. That is obvious when they argue about their reasons, their motives. I have heard someone tell a child, “You are only doing that to annoy me,” when it is clear to me that the child was doing it because the child enjoyed the act itself… was oblivious to its effect on the adult. I have been oblivious like that, so I recognize it in others.

My phone buzzes. I pick it up. “Lou it is Cameron. Do you want to go to supper and have pizza?” His voice runs the words together, mechanically.

“It is Thursday,” I say. “Hi-I’m-Jean is there.”

“Chuy and Bailey and I are going anyway, so we can talk. And you, if you come. Linda is not coming. Dale is not coming.”