Do You Think This Is Strange? (11 page)

“This isn't a job,” I said weakly, and he hit me again with my book before throwing it to the pavement.

—

In the emergency room, a nurse examined me and concluded I wasn't so special that she could spare me any more attention. She left me sitting on the gurney in the hall. I sat for two hours. The bleeding from my nose stopped, then congealed, then crusted. A front tooth wiggled but didn't come out. My left eye swelled shut. I wondered if it would stay shut forever.

I don't like to wonder about things. I am not good at it. If you were to ask me why my eye was swollen shut, I could tell you that it was because the other boy's right fist hit me there. If you asked me why he hit me, I could tell you that it was because the other boy was angry with me. If you asked me why the other boy was angry with me, I wouldn't be able to answer.

I'm not good at subjective questions.

—

Years ago, at Excalibur House, they had warned me about this: that people may often misinterpret the things I say. But I'll never understand why people get angry with
me
when
they
fail to understand what I say. They could be angry with me if I deliberately told them a lie, but I rarely tell lies. Although I'm capable of telling them, I'm not good at it. And I'm not good at identifying lies. This makes sarcasm a minefield of misinterpretation.

If someone said, “Well, that's just great,” I used to believe the person was satisfied with the thing that was Just Great. It turns out that it can mean the opposite. This phrase gets me into trouble, especially with my father. He says “That's just great” often. It's usually not.

Once, when I was five years old, I knew I needed to go to the bathroom, but I was watching
Dora the Explorer
, and I wanted to hear her say what her Favourite Part was. I could never guess the reason beforehand. It frustrated me to no end.

“What was
your
favourite part?” Dora the Explorer asked and I became frantic.

“Crossing the Foggy Ocean!” I shouted.

“I liked that part, too,” she replied, after considering my reply. “
My
favourite part was when the Rocky Rocks sang to me!”

“Son of a BITCH!” I shouted in frustration. I learned that phrase from my father.

I peed in my pants because I was waiting for her answer, and my father got angry. He saw the wet stain on my pants and said, “Well, that's just great.”

“It's not great,” I said.

“I
know
,” he said.

I tried to spread my legs while standing, so the pants would hang from me. “I'm uncomfortable.”

“Good for you,” he answered.

“Peeing pants is not good,” I said.

“Then why the Christ did you do it?”

“I wanted to watch
Dora the Explorer
.”

He closed his eyes and his jaw muscles clenched, unclenched, clenched again. “It's a
DVD
, kid. A goddamn
DVD
. You could have asked me to pause it.”

He saw my sopping wet socks. “Look at that, it's all over the rug now. Well, that's just great.”

“It's not great,” I said. “You will have to clean it up with soap.”

“Shut the fuck up, will you?” he said.

—

At the hospital, a doctor with thick black glasses and red hair tied back in a ponytail examined me. She lifted my chin and shone a small flashlight in my eyes. “Do you know your name?”

“Yes,” I answered.

She waited for me to say more. I stared past her at the wall.

“Do you know your name?”

“Yes,” I said. “I still do.”

The doctor clicked off her flashlight and straightened up, frowning at me.

“He's not showing any symptoms,” she said to a nurse. “I think he's just a smartass.” She looked at me. “Tell me your name.”

“Freddy Wyland,” I said. “I'm here against my will.”

“Aren't we all?” she said, leaning forward and feeling under my jaw.

“Am I going to need glasses?” I asked her.

“Why would you need glasses?”

“If my eye can't be repaired, will I need to wear glasses as a result?”

She looked in my ear.

“Freddy,” she said, “you won't need to wear glasses. Do you hear a ringing?”

“I don't hear a ringing,” I said. “Not right now.”

“Did you hear a ringing before?”

“I heard it six times,” I explained. “I also heard nine sirens and two car horns.”

“In your head?”

“No,” I said.

“How old are you, Freddy?”

“I'm fourteen years old. I'm closer to fifteen years old than fourteen years old, but I'm not supposed to tell people I am fourteen-point-six years old.”

She smiled wryly. “Most people can't do math,” she said. “Do your parents know where you are?”

“If you asked, Bill would say yes, but he's wrong because he thinks I'm at home.”

“Why aren't you at home?”

“Because I'm in the emergency room of Eagle Ridge Hospital.”

“Hah, hah, you are quite the sarcastic teenie, aren't you? Okay, Danny—”

“My name is Freddy,” I corrected.

“Can you tell us your parents' phone number?”

“Yes,” I said.

She waited. I looked at the wall. Annoyed, the doctor waved a hand at me and said to the nurse, “I'll be back in a bit. Get this kid's parents, okay?”

As the doctor moved to the next patient in the hall, the nurse frowned. “Do you know where you are?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Can you tell me your phone number?”

“Yes,” I said.

She gritted her teeth. “Tell me your phone number, Freddy Wyland.”

“393-3200,” I said.

I don't know why they made it so hard.

—

Two hours, seven minutes after I arrived at the emergency room, they moved me to a bed and pulled the curtain around it. Two hours and nine minutes later, I heard the doctor say, “He's fine. A little bit beat up is all.”

She opened the curtain, and there was my father, unsmiling.

“Maybe a little bit of a smartass,” the doctor said, with a small smile.

Bill nodded. “That's Freddy, all right.” He quickly walked over to me, slowing as he reached out. He looked me over and lightly touched the side of my head.

“Champ,” he said.

“I'm not a champion,” I told him.

The nurses had cleaned the blood from my face. The eye that was swollen shut had a red and purple bruise underneath. A patch of hair was shaved away above my right ear, and the doctor sewed seven stitches. She also used three stitches to sew a tear in my lip.

“Oh, Christ,” my father said. “This is great. This is just great.”

I began to reply that it wasn't great, but stopped myself. “You know what's great?” I said instead. “These stitches are great.”

My father blinked. At first, he cocked his head sideways, as if I had spoken in a different language. “What? The stitches are
great
?”

“No,” I answered. “They're not. I was being
sarcastic
.”

For moment, he didn't speak. Having never heard me say anything sarcastic before, it took a moment before he realized I was doing it now.

He turned his head slowly to the doctor. “How bad did he hit his head?” he asked.

My mother left because of me. My father never said those words exactly, but he said all the words around them.

“Where's Mom?” I asked, the day after she was gone.

“She's out,” he told me, swirling ice cubes in his drink, with a stare focused a thousand yards away. “She needs some time alone for a bit, Freddy. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Where's Mom?”

He didn't answer.

On the second day, I asked again.

“She left us, Freddy,” he said, and I asked again the next day. Then again the next day, and for days on end, weeks on end.

“Where's Mom?” I asked, every morning, when I came downstairs and walked into the kitchen.

Every morning, he was up first, waiting for me, sitting at the breakfast table, drinking a cup of coffee, reading a book. Every morning, he waited until I sat at the table.

“She's gone, Freddy.”

“Where did she go?”

He said, “She left us, Freddy, and I don't know where she went. I don't know when she's coming back.”

I said, “Will she bring me a present when she does?”

He nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

His eyes were red.

The orchids in the living room wilted, and the soil became desiccated. One day, the orchids in the living room were gone.

I no longer went to Excalibur House. My father sold our home, and I was glad to be out of it. The place echoed like a crypt, and my father moved through it like a grave keeper.

We moved to Heritage Mountain, down the road, to a townhouse complex, still on the edge of the forest. I went to Templeton College.

Saskia Stiles was gone from my life.

“It's just too far away,” my father said of Excalibur House. “I can't get you there anymore.”

“I can walk,” I said and went to the hall to get my coat.

“It's night, Freddy,” he said. “Besides, it would take you hours to get there.”

“Mom can drive me,” I offered.

“No, she can't,” he sighed. He took my hand and led me upstairs. It was time for a bath.

—

Seven years after she left, I finally understood that the reason my mother left me was that I was not one of her Favourite Things. It wasn't that I was autistic. She didn't leave because of what I
was
. She left because of what I
did
. The things I did were driven, to some extent, by my autism, but that was just an accounting entry in the ledger of my life. In the end, it was
me
that did them. It wasn't the autism. My mother was sure of that.

“Don't say he's autistic,” she told my father weeks before she left. She yelled it, actually, loud enough that I heard them from my bedroom.

“Balls to that,” he replied, and he had been drinking. His tone was rougher, the hard consonants harder, the soft consonants softer. “He's autistic.”

“No, he is someone
with
autism,” she said. “
He
is Freddy. Dammit, Bill, it's about how people see him. Do they see him as autistic first, or as someone first?”

He slammed his glass on the kitchen table. “Holy Christ, we're the ones in control of how other people see things? All we have to do is make a couple of grammatical backflips with our sentences, and
whammo
, they see Freddy different?”

“It's about how you frame it.”

“I don't want to frame it,” he yelled. “Why do I have to accommo­­date the world? Why can't it accommodate me?”

“It's not about you!” she yelled back.

There are inflection points in my life. The slope of my personal arc changes direction, and things begin to get better, or things begin to get worse.

Arcs rule my life. The first arc was ten years ago, when the slope became negative, the day my mother left me on the train platform and was gone from my world. My life didn't get much better after that. I moved schools, I left Excalibur House, and I left Saskia Stiles.

The second arc began when four boys in thick winter jackets put me in the hospital. My life had been in descent until that moment, a litany of misspoken words, misinterpreted intents, and conversations that exploded in my face.

But the beating was the trough of my arc. It was the lowest point, the final culmination of everything I had done wrong and continued to do wrong. It was the beating that began the change, the point where things started getting better. A new arc began.

It went like this:

I opened my eyes
and I was fourteen. A cold wind blew. Four boys stood looking at me. Each one at least two inches taller than me. One, in a red hoodie under a green jacket, stepped forward, for I had been looking at him—trying to look
through
him—for almost a minute.

“Could you not stand there,” I said to him, and they stopped what they were doing. They came over. I watched the one with the hoodie.

“What are you looking at?” he said and pushed me.

“I was looking at the wall, but you were standing in the way,” I said.

“So what?” he said.

“Your jacket is fat.” I tried to step around him and stand on the other side of the bus stop.

“What is wrong with you?” He blocked my path.

There were more than a few answers to that question, but I settled for the most immediate problem.

“I'm here against my will,” I said.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“I'm not comfortable right now.”

“That's why you want me to move?”

I nodded.

“Because I make you uncomfortable?”

I nodded again.

“Because I'm
black
?”

“You're not black,” I said.

His hands dropped to his side. His eyes widened slightly. “What are you talking about
now
?”

“You're not black,” I said and immediately realized that he heard me already and therefore didn't understand what I had said. So I rephrased. “Your skin is not coloured black and your jacket is green.” I looked at his hands, then at his face. “Your skin is a shade of brown.
HTML
Colour Code #663300.”

He pushed me on my shoulder. I tried to walk around him, but he blocked my way again. “Are you serious?” He pointed to his friend, who also had a thick green jacket, but a black ball cap. “What about him? What is he?”

I was about to answer that he was a teenage male, but stopped, realizing he was asking if I knew his name. I was momentarily confused, because I had never met this boy before, and quickly searched my memory for any occurrence of a meeting with him in the past.