Somebody Somewhere (34 page)

“Hello sweetie,” she said with the same smiling freckled face. I went into the room in which she was sitting alone at a table. “I'm in trouble,” she said. “You'd better go.”

Later, I saw her outside. “Where do you live?” she asked. “Are you going out tonight?” “Are
you
going out tonight?” I asked her in reply. Each of us answered the other. I was so glad to see her here where she would at least get an education of sorts. She had so much more potential than being a human vegetable in a room full of the babysat, with no foreseeable future beyond stuffing plastic cutlery endlessly into bags. The public that would use them would probably never have given a damn about her lost potential or her wasted humanity.

I
went to say goodbye to the Mareks, then decided to stay there for my final night. Tim drove me there and after coming inside to drop off my bags and say a brief hello, we said goodbye outside.

Sleeping my last night in Australia surrounded by blue floral wallpaper, I took the liberty of amusing myself with the patterns and
lines they could create. Somehow in the back of my mind I knew I was saying goodbye to this country.

I
had one more bit of publicity to do in another Australian state before leaving for the United Kingdom. I had asked to visit a deaf/blind school. I had already visited one and had heard that my own behavior resembled that of some of these people. The way I illustrated what I was speaking about by using objects and diagrams, by touching and tracing so much I came into contact with, by using my eyes so much as my ears, and my hands as my eyes, was similar to what some of these children did. I was curious to see any similarities for myself.

Some of the children here were deaf and blind and others were one or the other. There was also a tiny handful of others who were neither. “Why are they here then?” I had asked. The principal explained that they functioned as though deaf or blind and so had been accepted at these schools. “Are they autistic?” I asked. “Well, they come in here with all sorts of labels, some ‘autistic,' some ‘retarded,' some said to have ‘autistic tendencies.' ” Some of these children, like Kathy, my autistic friend from St. Louis, were children who had contracted rubella as infants.

There were “blind” children using computers for learning and communication. There were “deaf” children answering the spoken word in picture sentences, sometimes even making up their own picture cards to form sentences in the absence of appropriate cards. I also saw deaf and blind children using objects to stand for words or experiences, as I had. Talking through objects.

I recalled my own words, “meaning-deaf” and “meaning-blind.” I reflected on Jody, who was like these children. I reflected on the possibility that a specific group of autistic people existed whose primary difficulties were sensory ones. There were those who had trouble standing the world as well as understanding it. Were children like Jody more likely to be considered hopeless and remain labeled
retarded at schools that did not specifically, as here, address sensory impairments?

I
arrived back in the United Kingdom to the pinks and whites of trees in blossom. I was immediately swept up in a swirl of publicity. Although I was living out of a suitcase, the small cottage-style English hotel gradually felt like home. The crystal birthday cake chandeliers in the hall, with their familiar rainbows and
clack-clack-clack
as their crystals clattered together (with some help), the tall antique mirror on the wall, and my own full-length cheval mirror made me feel “in company.” I had even taken to occasionally saying hello to the porters.

As a long-term resident there, the hotel had allowed me to use the staff kitchen. Olivier was one of the employees. He avoided looking at me when we passed each other there. His transient smile would come almost to the surface before disappearing behind the curtain that came down over his expression. Occasionally his voice would escape him in an almost expressionless though thoroughly genuine hello almost as staccato as my own. He was tall and willowy, his footsteps a gentle patter. It was as though he crept everywhere. He seemed hugely solitary.

Every day he had watched me leave the hotel and go into the frost of winter mornings wrapped up in my long black coat. I was now back for the spring and breezed out the door into streets lined with pink blossoms.

I stood in the foyer of the hotel thinking about going out. Olivier was knocking off after a long shift. “Why do I have to spend my life walking around in a cage?” he said out loud to himself despairingly. He looked at no one as he said it. The words were spoken into a void that, by coincidence, happened to contain people. It was like watching a ghost. It was as though the me I had been before writing the
book was now standing before me. Olivier left briskly, a vampire fleeing into the late English afternoon.

“Hello,” I said to Olivier as I came in through the foyer. Ever composed and totally in control, he would look at me with dead eyes, which day by day came a little more to life with each hello.

I had been observing Olivier and was by now almost sure he would understand me. I had overheard him address himself on the tortures of having to apply himself to the useless task of eating in order to keep his body alive. I had seen him pacing the border of the Persian rug in the foyer—around and around and around for hours. I had seen him sitting staring transfixed at the crystal he wore on a chain around his neck, turning it around and around in front of his eye, catching rainbows. When his shift was over, I asked if I could talk to him.

We met in the hall downstairs. Olivier was dressed again in civilian clothes, outfitted in black from head to toe.

“I want to ask you some things that may sound a little strange to you,” I said. Olivier stood looking poised to run. For me the most central aspect of what made a “my world” so important had been difficulty getting consistent meaning from what I saw or heard.

“What is language like for you?” I asked him, careful not to lead his answers. Olivier seemed totally oblivious to the purpose of my questions or where they were headed. “I have trouble with language,” he said. Then, as if aware of my next question, he said, “It's the same in German as in English, though.” I asked him why. “I have trouble getting the words out,” he said. “I can't find them. It's okay if I know the situation,” he explained, “if it's a practical situation where I've been taught what to say or I've rehearsed what I'm going to say, but with other kinds of talking, like conversing, I have trouble understanding what other people are saying to me and I don't work out what I am supposed to do about what they say to me.”

“Does anything strange ever happen to your hearing?” I asked. He looked at me in surprise and a faint smile appeared. “It gets louder sometimes,” he said in a whisper, shaking. “Do you think you understand better from what you see or what you hear?” I asked him. “I
have no idea what people are feeling,” he said. “I never know what they expect from me. I always get into difficulty because I haven't understood the signs people think they give me.” “Does anything strange happen with your vision?” I asked him. “Things seem suddenly closer sometimes. Sometimes things get suddenly brighter,” he replied.

I asked him about relationships and touch. “I find these things very hard,” he said. “Sometimes I am so close to someone, so close that it hurts, but I am behind a mask. Sometimes when I am close to someone, I want to be touched but then when they want to sleep with my body, they make me feel bad. They can't see me.” Olivier felt that the expectation that sex was part of a relationship was a betrayal of his closeness by the person he felt close to.

Olivier had grown up in a remote little village in the mountains. He had been extremely quiet and shy as a child and at school had slept wrapped up in his blanket in a corner well into his primary years. He had been afraid of the other children and sucked his thumb up until he was in his teens.